What Am I Doing Here? (26 page)

His book
The Ancient Na-Khi
Kingdom of South-West China,
with its eye-aching genealogies and dazzling asides, must be one of the most eccentric publications ever produced by the Harvard University Press.

Here is a stretch of his embattled prose: ‘A short distance beyond, at a tiny temple, the trail ascends the red hills covered with oaks, pines,
Pinus Armandi, P
.
yunnanensis, Alnus
,
Castanopsis Delavayi,
rhododendrons, roses, Berberis, etc., up over limestone mountains, through oak forest, to a pass with a few houses called Ch'ou-shui-ching (Stinking water well). At this place many hold-ups and murders were committed by the bandit hordes of Chang Chiehpa. He strung up his victims by the thumbs to the branches of high trees, and tied rocks to their feet; lighting a fire beneath he left them to their fate. It was always a dreaded pass for caravans. At the summit there are large groves of oaks
(Quercus Delavayi)
. . . '

No wonder Ezra Pound adored it!

Pound appears to have got hold of Rock's
Na-Khi Kingdom
in 1956, at a time when he was locked up as a lunatic in St Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington; from it, he extrapolated the upland paradise that was to be, in effect, his lifeline.

Over the last week we have been walking the roads of Lijiang country and finding, to our delight, that the world Rock ‘saved us for memory' – to say nothing of Ezra Pound's borrowings – is very far from dead.

At Rock's former lodgings in Lijiang town, we have seen his bookcase, his pigeonhole desk, his wide chair (‘because he was so fat!') and the remains of his garden beside the Jade Stream.

At Nuluko (the name means ‘the foot of the silver cliffs') his country house is almost as he left it, except that, instead of herbarium specimens, the porch is spread with drying turnip tops. The present occupant, Li Wen Biao, was one of Rock's muleteers; he showed us the master's camp-bed and the washhouse where he would set up a canvas bath from Abercrombie & Fitch.

We have been to Tiger Leaping Gorge and seen the cliff-line plummeting 11,000 feet into the Yangtze. We have watched the Nakhi women coming down from the Snow Range, with their bundles of pine and artemisia; and one old woman with a bamboo winnowing basket on her back, and the sun's rays passing through it:

The wild pear trees are scarlet in the foothills, the larches like golden pagodas; the north slopes ‘blue-green with juniper'. The last of the gentians are in flower, and the flocks of black sheep brindle the plain.

One evening, walking back to town across the fields, I came on a boy and girl reading aloud beside the embers of a fire. Their book was a traditional Chinese romance and, on its open page, there was a picture of Kuan Yin, goddess of mercy.

The Nakhi are a passionate people and, even today, rather than submit to a hated marriage, young lovers may poison or drown themselves, or jump to their death from the mountain.

At the Nakhi Institute in Lijiang, we were shown a pair of pine saplings, adorned like Christmas trees, commemorating two people who killed themselves for love. Rock wrote that such suicides become ‘wind-spirits', reminding Pound of Dante's Paolo and Francesca, whose shades were ‘so light on the wind', and who, readers of the
Inferno
will remember, fell in love while reading a romance of chivalry.

At Shigu, where the Yangtze takes a hairpin bend, we have seen the Stone Drum:

The drum is a cylinder of marble in a pavilion by the willows. The ‘aces' refer to two Chinese generals – one lost in legend, the other of the Ming dynasty, whose victory is recorded on the drum itself. Our friend Tsong-Zong raised his hand to the surface and rattled off the characters:

Rock wrote of a tradition that, should the Stone Drum split, a catastrophe will fall on the country. About fifteen years ago, some Red Guards did indeed split it. (It has since been stuck together.) We wondered if, secretly, the iconoclasts had seen the foxes and jackals in themselves.

We have listened to a Nakhi orchestra that in the bad years would practise in secret: on a stringless lute, a muffled drum and a flute turned at a right angle to the mouthpiece.

In the hills above Rock's village is the Jade Dragon Monastery, Yufeng Si, where we have sat with the lama hearing him tell how he would sneak into the monastery at night, on pain of prison or worse, to save the five-hundred-year-old camellia that stretches, trained in a trellis, around the temple court.

Of all the places we have seen, the monastery seems the loveliest. But this is what Rock had to say of it: ‘It is the home of rats, whose excrements lie inches deep . . . dangerous to visit . . . books wrapped in dusty silks . . . the most forlorn and forsaken lamasery I know of.'

Also paying his respects to the lama was the Regional Commissioner for Monuments. I asked him about the horribly battered temple, dating from the Tang dynasty, which we could see in the valley below. It is dedicated to the mountain god, Saddo, lord of the Snow Range and protector from calamities.

The Commissioner answered, emphatically: ‘The restoration will begin next month,' as if also to say that the world's oldest, subtlest, most intelligent civilisation has now returned to the sources of its ancient wisdom.

In the village of Beisha, around the corner from the Doctor's house, there is another, smaller temple, its garden desolate, its cypresses fallen, its balustrades smeared with graffiti: ‘Confess and we will be lenient!'

Here, under Taoist symbols of the Eternal Return, the Red Guards set up their so-called courts. Yet it occurred to us that these ill-tempered scrawls were not, after all, so distant from the spirit of the ‘Tao-te-ching' of Lao-tze:

The sun goes down behind the mountain, and we must, finally, say goodbye to the Doctor. He is anxious to give me from his pharmacy a plant with the windblown name of
Saussurea gossipiphora,
which only grows on the snow-line. Soon, he hopes to leave his practice in the care of his son and be free to gather herbs in the mountains. He lifts his eyes to Jade Dragon Peak and, suddenly, in his silver greatcoat, becomes the living image of my favourite upland traveller, the poet Li Po:

 

D
uring the Spring of 376 AD the Roman garrisons on the Danube frontier learned Nomads were on the move. Over the steppe lands that stretched to the east came news that the Gothic kingdom of Ermanarich in the Crimea had fallen to the Huns, an unknown people of mounted archers, bestial in appearance, whose home lay close to the ice-bound ocean. ‘No one ever ploughs a field in their country,' wrote the contemporary historian Ammianus Marcellinus, ‘or touches a plough handle. They are ignorant of home, law or settled existence, and they keep roaming from places in their wagons. If you ask one of their children where he comes from, he was conceived in one place, born far away and brought up still farther off.' Gothic refugees implored the Roman government for asylum within the imperial frontiers. And, putting themselves under the protection of the Emperor, they were allowed to cross the Danube in their thousands ‘like the rain of ashes from an eruption of Etna'. But their hosts failed in the basic obligations of hospitality, and within two years the Goths had revolted and killed the Emperor Valens himself at the Battle of Adrianople. Thereafter the Empire was doomed to further barbarian inroads.

However momentous the fall of the Roman Empire may seem in retrospect, it was merely an episode in a conflict between two incompatible, yet complementary, systems – nomadism and settled agriculture. The arrival of the Huns on their stocky ponies was no new event. The ‘unharvested steppe' forms a continuous strip of grazing from Hungary to Manchuria. It was a reservoir of nomad peoples – Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, and later Avars, Magyars, and Mongols – who migrated up and down it and periodically overflowed on to the sown lands of civilisation. Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt faced the same problem from the men of the fringe, whose mercurial shiftings in the encircling deserts and mountains were a source of anxiety in times of national ascendancy, of terror in times of collapse. As the Hungarian historian Andreas Alfoldi wrote, there existed along the Rhine and Danube a ‘moral barrier' between the barbarian and civilised worlds. The grandiose Roman fortifications, like the Great Wall of China, were simply ‘the secondary consequences and the reflection of that moral isolation'. In a modified form the confrontation continues as the barrier of incomprehension between the revolutionary insurgent and established authority.

The quarrel of nomad and settler is, of course, the same as that of Abel the shepherd and Cain the planter and founder of the first city. As befitted a Bedouin people, the Hebrews sided with Abel. Jehovah found his offering of a ‘firstling of the flock' more acceptable than Cain's ‘fruit of the ground'. Cain's act of fratricide is judged a typical crime of settlement, and as punishment Jehovah sterilises the soil and forces him to wander on a penitential pilgrimage, ‘a fugitive and a vagabond'.

True nomads are sons of Ishmael, the wild man, whose ‘hand shall be against every man, and every man's hand against him', activated by what Gibbon called ‘the spirit of emigration and conquest'. The Book of Joshua, for example, is a paean of praise for the ideal of nomadic insurgency. As the nineteenth-century traveller James Morier wrote of the I‘lyats, or wandering tribes of Persia, they ‘look down on the
Shehrnishins
(or dwellers in cities) as degenerate, applauding the hardihood and simplicity of manners of those who have no other dwelling place than the tent, and reviling those who recur to the luxuries of a house and the protection of a city.'

In turn the citizen reviled the nomad as a savage wrecker of progress. And, since literature itself is the invention of settlers, the nomadic record looks black in writing. Thus an ancient Egyptian official would write of the Bedouin Hebrews, ‘Their name reeks more than the stink of bird droppings', or a Chinese Imperial Secretary of the Eastern Huns,' . . . in their breasts beat the hearts of beasts . . . from the most ancient times they have never been regarded as a part of humanity'. Roman authorities treated the citizens of the Empire as men, outsiders as animals, and their historians could calmly compare the annihilation of a Germanic people to a medical cure
(salubria medicamenta).
Elsewhere, nomad invaders, who migrated onto sown lands, were compared to plagues of locusts and swarms of snakes.

Faced with the acceleration of world population-growth, some modern biologists have diagnosed that the human species is rapidly approaching the ‘swarming stage',
¹
thus refining Malthus's ‘dismal theorem‘ that human populations breed up to the level of their food supply, a proliferation that can only lead to global starvation unless checked by mass mortality. Animal species reach the ‘swarming stage' when some pressure of natural selection, to which they have been subjected during their evolution, is removed. The result is a population outburst, followed by a neurosis from overcrowding and panic in the face of starvation. Random migrations ensue.

The suicidal march of the Scandinavian lemming to death in the sea is thought by some to shed light on the tragic refugee problems of our day, and a global situation of wandering refugees is predicted. But the apocalyptic idea of total destruction at the hands of migrating hordes is again nothing new. At the time of the Mongol holocaust in the thirteenth century, observers confidently announced the end of the world. The Mongol Khan was Antichrist himself, his armies of mounted nomads the Legions of Gog and Magog. The Mongol military machine generated the same sort of anxiety as the nuclear bomb, and for this reason alone the mechanics of a nomadic invasion are of more than passing interest.

The word nomad derives from the Greek
nomos —
a pasture. A nomad proper is a mobile pastoralist, the owner and breeder of domesticated animals. To call a wandering hunter ‘nomadic' is to misunderstand the meaning of the word. Hunting is a technique for killing animals, nomadism for keeping them alive. The psychology of the hunter is as different from the nomad's as the nomad's from that of the planter. Nomadism is born of wide expanses, ground too barren for the farmer to cultivate economically – savannah, steppe, desert and tundra, all of which will support an animal population providing that it moves. For the nomad, movement is morality. Without movement, his animals would die. But the planter is chained to his field; if he leaves, his plants wither.

Nomads never roam aimlessly from place to place, as one dictionary would have it. A nomadic migration is a guided tour of animals around a predictable sequence of pastures. It has the same inflexible character as the migrations of wild game, since the same ecological factors determine it. But domestication blunts an animal's innate sense of time and space. The herdsman replaces this loss with his own acquired skill, plotting his annual orbit to suit the needs of his own particular livestock.