In Xanadu (50 page)

Hours later, bored, caked in coal dust, smelling of urine, we pulled into the oasis of Keriya. The sun was setting. We had been driving, literally, from dawn until dusk, and in that time we had covered thirty-five miles.

But Keriya proved full of surprises.

The lorry dropped us off in a side street and we scuttled off to find the
han
before the Public Security guards found us. In the caravanserai compound we were confronted with a most unexpected sight. There, facing us, were not the usual burned-out beaten-up haulage trucks, but a row of gleaming, new Toyota Land Cruisers. More unexpected still was the boy we found cleaning them. He was dressed in a Japanese tracksuit and welcomed us in good English, which he spoke with a slight American accent. The boy, we discovered, was from Hong Kong, as were the Land Cruisers. They belonged to a party of German geomorphologists who were cooperating with the Chinese in a geological survey of the Tarim basin. The party consisted of twenty academics from Germany and China; the expedition had taken a decade to plan and was the first to be given permission to enter the area since the proclamation of the People's Republic in 1949. Slightly annoyed at having been beaten down the road, but looking forward to meeting the geomorphologists, we took a room and set about cleaning ourselves up before joining the Germans for supper.

Half an hour later, sweet-smelling, and wearing a marginally fresher set of clothes than those in which we had arrived, we crossed the compound to the
han
refectory. The air was full of smoke and the buzz of conversation. Fifty men and one or two fat German women were sitting at five large, round tables. In the middle of the tables were great heaps of food, the likes of which we had not seen since leaving the Begum's table in Lahore. There were plates of meat covered in delicious sauces, kebabs, mountains of noodles, exotic Chinese vegetables, small batter envelopes filled with fascinating spicy confections, water chestnuts, great drifts of pilau rice. The seating had been arranged so that the Germans were alternated with orientals, and the latter were busy trying to teach the Germans to use chopsticks in a civilized manner. Their efforts met with only limited success and the conversation was punctuated with louds guffaws of hearty Teutonic laughter.

Having broken in on this feast unexpected and uninvited, we thought it best to keep a low profile. We quietly took our seats in a corner and waited to be served. No one came to take our orders, nor did any of the Germans invite us to join them. After ten minutes, slightly embarrassed at not having done it sooner, I got up and went over to the senior German. I introduced myself, and held out my hand for him to shake. The German professor was struggling with a hundred-year-old egg as I approached, and he looked up, outraged that I should butt in at such a rare moment of pleasure. His moustache bristled. Leaving my hand unshaken, he looked me up and down, frowned and said; 'Who are you and what are you doing here?' Before I had time to answer, the professor turned to his left and consulted with a small Mao-jacketed Uigur. The conversation hushed. I stood beside the professor, hand still outstretched, grinning inanely. After what seemed like half an hour, but what could not in fact have been longer than thirty seconds, the professor turned around and addressed me again.

The District Governor,' (he motioned to the Uigur), 'says that he did not expect two extra foreigners at his banquet. Go back to your seat. You will be served.'

I went back to my seat. Lou looked at me and shook her held. A waiter brought us some leftovers. The game was up. Attempting to outwit the police, we had stumbled across a gathering of the entire local Party officialdom. We picked at our supper in gloomy silence. The following morning we would be sent back to Kashgar and maybe deported to Pakistan. It was the end of the expedition.

Meanwhile the noise level rose. Unworried by the intrusion of the two renegades, the Party cadres drank and laughed freely. The Germans downed the remaining bottles of Chinese pilsen, wiped their plates, burped, then began singing. The cadres countered by playing a noisy drinking game. It was a kind of human snap. Two cadres faced each other, and on the count of three
(yi. er. san!)
slammed their fists on the table, extending as they did so a certain number of fingers. The
rules
were simple. If both parties extended the same number of fingers, both had to drink a large glass of
mao tai,
the fierce rice wine which the Chinese love and which Westerners find difficult to distinguish from methylated spirits.

Soon everyone was very drunk. The Germans rolled from side to side, cried, laughed, bawled out guttural drinking songs and slapped the Chinese on the back. The governor stood up and started to make a speech. After a few sentences everyone began clapping and the governor gave up. He had anyway forgotten what he was going to say. He sat down, waited for everyone to shut up, then stood up again. This time he proposed a toast. The professor followed suit. Minor party officials proposed further toasts and were followed by minor academics. More bottles of
mao tai
were brought and quickly emptied. A kind waiter brought a half-glass to each of us.

The evening wore on. Germans began to slump forward onto the table tops. The songs got slower and increasingly emotional. The cadres stumbled off to bed. The governor got up, held himself steady and then, to our surprise, tottered over to our table, propped up by his two interpreters. He clasped us both to his chest and wished us good night. We were welcome in Keriya, he said. He was the friend of all enlightened foreigners. He poured us both glasses of
mao tai,
then politely inquired how we had got here. We explained our story to him, and told him that we had come to Keriya by coal waggon. He expressed horror at the danger and discomfort we had exposed ourselves to, and offered to arrange bus tickets to Charchan for us. Tomorrow, he said, we were to be his guests at a dancing display. Then, the following morning, we could catch our bus. So saying, he poured three last glasses
of
mao tai,
drank our health and staggered off to bed.

We assumed that the governor's pleasantries had been the drunken ravings of a man unstudied by too much rice wine. We were proved wrong, however, when two bus tickets to Charchan were delivered to our door at ten o'clock the next day. The bus was not scheduled to leave until five a.m. the following morning but with the governor as out protector we considered ourselves safe from the attentions of the Public Security guards, and celebrated our new-found freedom by breakfasting out of doors. Then we went back to bed.

Late that afternoon we ventured out of the compound to explore. It did not take us long to appreciate that we had been stranded in one of the most beautiful places that either of us had ever seen. We roamed along mud-walled alleyways, past a set of perfect mediaeval street scenes: blacksmith's hammering, children playing in broken donkey carts, old ladies in smocks sitting beside the road, nuts and dried apricots laid out in front of them. Men bent under the weight of shoulder poles staggered home carrying water from irrigation runnels; a boy squatted on his hams drawing in the dust with a bent stick.

Aksakal,
the white-beards, set out in groups of three to take the evening air. They were dressed in flowing robes of khaki serge, tied loosely at the waist. On their heads they wore mountainous white turbans. Some had Caucasian features. When they greeted other
aksakal
coming in the opposite direction they would clasp each other's hands, shake firmly, then stroke their beards with their right hands and conclude the ritual by touching themselves on the back of the neck.

Most of the houses we passed were of mud brick, but a few had walls built from bundles of pampas grass tied together to form thatched fences. The fences were broken with rickety wickets. They reminded me of English cottage gardens. Over the walls we could see Uigurs sitting under the shade of vine trellising, sipping
cay
from clay bowls. Others tended their sunflowers and climbing roses. There were poplar trees and apricot trees, mulberries and ash. There were sparrows in the branches and the leaves rustled in the breeze. After two days of desert it seemed nothing short of paradise.

At one place in the main street a crowd had gathered in a ring. We pushed forward and found an acrobat in the middle. His daughter was his assistant and together they performed a series of age-old circus tricks: fire-breathing, balancing acts, and sword-eating. The girl concluded the show with a display of simple cartwheels. The crowd clapped enthusiastically then tried to make off before the acrobat passed the hat around. Not knowing the proper tactics we hung around and ended up paying for all of the Uigurs,

In another part of the oasis we visited the new mosque, as yet still unroofed. While Lou sketched the mullah, the
muezzin
drove away the inevitable urchin escort with a six-foot-long knobkerry. Built of wood by the villagers themselves, the mosque was simple and lovely-an open-air wooden pavilion, giving onto a wooden basilica. It was similar to the Id Gah mosque but spared the clumsy
ivan
and dome of the Kashgar model. It was cheering to know that the traditional crafts still survive here; in other parts of Islam the concrete mosques erected by 'progressive' governments rival the worst modernist horrors in Europe. The Iranians are the worst offenders, followed closely by the Jordanians and the Turks.

Hence, by the back door of the mosque, into open countryside reminiscent of an eighteenth-century Dutch painting: long, sinuous lines of poplars set in a flat, green, fecund landscape. The ground was soft and springy and there were hens and white ducks picking around the irrigation channels. Sitting on the banks of a brook a Uigur peasant came up to us. He was wearing a bell-shaped skullcap edged in sable and he asked us if we were from Hindustan. Taking the remark as a compliment to her healthy suntan, Lou replied that we were.

We returned to our rooms to learn that we had had two visitors in our absence. The first was the governor who had called in person to deliver tickets to his dancing display. The second was an officer from the Public Security Bureau who wanted to see our permits. Hoping that our first visitor would protect us from the second, we adjourned to supper where we found the Germans slightly more friendly since our adoption by the governor. The German professor was in a great state of excitement. The reason for this was explained to us by a young expert in glaciation from Hamburg. Apparently the governor, after delivering our tickets, had gone straight to the professor and asked him whether he would be so good as to sleep with his (i.e. the governor's} new and very attractive young wife. This offer had been made two years previously when the professor had first visited Keriya to prepare the ground for the current expedition. Then he had refused saying that he was too old for such pleasures. It seems the governor had misunderstood him and thought that the professor meant the proffered wife was too old. Far from being put out by this observation, the governor had instantly divorced his wife and married his current belle, a renowned Uigur beauty from Khotan. When the professor had refused a second time the governor was mortified: 'I want some noble, enlightened blood in my family,' he had begged. 'Are you sure. Professor, that your loins are too tired?'

The strange thing is that a similar offer may have been made to Marco Polo when he came here. It is the origin of one of his few saucy anecdotes. The people of Pein {Keriya) have a custom,' he writes, 'which I must relate. If the husband of any woman goes away upon a journey and remains away for more than twenty days, as soon as that term is passed the woman may marry another man, and the husband may also marry whoever he pleases.'