In Xanadu (55 page)

The light was fading. I turned heel and headed back along the damp paths towards the hotel. The following morning we rose early, pulled on our 'disguises' and caught the dawn bus to Duolon.

The journey into Inner Mongolia proved surprisingly easy. We got onto the bus without problems and found the border checkpoint unmanned.

It was a lovely chill Sunday morning. The water meadows were edged by windbreaks of silver birch and the peasants had left sunflower heads on the thatched roofs of their huts to dry in the autumn sun. The trees had turned gold and auburn and the light picked out the colours and reflected them onto the water in the flooded fields. In the streets there were Mongol dogs with curling, upturned tails and gaggles of Canada geese. It was cold and there was a high wind.

We rose up from the Manchurian valleys onto the tableland of the Mongolian steppe. It grew colder and the light faded. The hills flattened out and there was thunder in the distance. By lunch we had reached Banjieta; the others got out and bought some food but we were afraid of the police and stayed where we were. It began to rain and the bus leaked.

Waiting in the bus, Lou looked at the map and compared it with the diagrams attached to Bushell's article. According to the modem map there was a small hamlet called Zheng Lan Qi about thirty miles west of Duolon. There was no sign of it on Bushell's sketch, but if the modern map was accurately plotted, she calculated that it should be much nearer Xanadu than Duolon. More importantly, the map showed that Zheng Lan Qi was built on a river, unnamed on the modem map, but apparently the same as that marked 'Shang tu R' on Bushell's sketch. The river Shang-tu was Coleridge's Alph; it was the river that once watered Xanadu. She had found our guide. All we had to do was to get to Zheng Lan Qi that night; the following morning we could follow the river upstream, until, sooner or later, it brought us to the court of Kubla Khan.

Our decision was confirmed when, that evening, we saw Duolon. When Bushell visited it, the town was bustling, dirty and prosperous thanks to its monopoly on the manufacture of 'idols, bells and other ecclesiastical paraphernalia of Buddhism'. Now it was still dirty, but was very far from either prosperous or bustling. The town had suffered from the decline of Buddhism. A pair of stocky Mongol horses chaffed at their bits beneath the pagoda of a ruined temple; a pockmarked Mongol tried to sell us horrible-looking toffee apples (a Mongol speciality). The people looked tired and weather-beaten; the place had that same sense of chill desolation that I have only ever experienced before in Glencoe or some of the clearance villages in the Highlands. It was damp, dreich and brooding. We skirted the town and caught a lift from a truck across the steppe to Zheng Lan Qi.

We arrived just as darkness was falling. Zheng Lan Qi was small and new. It was made up of a handful of grey shacks of pre-stressed concrete and corrugated iron; the caravanserai was the one stone building. Like Duolon, the town was damp, cold and exposed. It sat incongruously in the middle of the steppe and the wind whistled straight through it. If our calculations were right we were now less than five miles from Xanadu, but anything less like Coleridge's vision - of gardens bright with sinuous rills, forests ancient as the hills and sunny spots of greenery - was hard to imagine.

The Mongols were ugly and inquisitive. They had narrow, high-set eyes and tight, dark skin. When we sat in the caravanserai kitchen that night, forty of them gathered to watch us eat. It was difficult to see where they all came from; there were barely ten houses in the town. Lou suggested that they were all cousins and had interbred: that, certainly, would explain both their unusual stupidity and how so many of them managed to live in so few houses. We wolfed down our supper of mutton soup and mutton omelette then fled to our rooms, terrified of attracting more attention.

The next morning the alarm went off, as usual, at five-thirty. Thousands of miles away in East Anglia the Cambridge term was about to begin. Everyone would be rushing off to Heffer's to buy their textbooks, Lever-Arch files and file paper. We should have been there too; instead we were in the middle of Mongolia and had twelve hours to find Xanadu. Looking outside we could see that it was about to rain: ahead of us was the prospect of a long, cold, wet walk. But we were in good spirits; while we got dressed, I remember Lou describing a dream she had just had - some tale about eating scrambled egg with Edward in a cave beneath Easter Island. She had just set about interpreting this story for me when there was a knock at the door. Without waiting for us to answer, two Mongol Public Security guards burst in.

To begin with, everything moved too quickly for the full implication of what was happening to hit us. The policemen shouted at us in Mongol and gestured that they wanted to see our passports. It was only when we handed them over, and the policemen took them away and locked us in our room that we realized what this meant. The idea of travelling twelve thousand miles, only to be detained and deported five miles from our destination was too much to bear. I sank onto my bed. When planning the expedition. I had never for a moment imagined that we would get this far. But having arrived in Zheng Lan Qi, I had ceased to think anything could stop us finally completing the mission. Now there was nothing to be done. I lay on my bed; Lou lay on hers. Neither of us spoke. We waited.

The security guards returned half an hour later. This time they brought with them two teachers - a husband and wife - to act as interpreters. Neither spoke English with any great facility; both were terrified of the security guards. We tried to explain what we were doing. We were following Marco Polo. We wanted to get to Shang tu. We had come twelve thousand miles to see it. We had to get there today. The teachers passed this on. The security guards were uninterested. Have you a permit? they asked. No. Have you a special endorsement on your passports? No. The interview was brought to a swift conclusion: 'These men say you must go Peking. You no allow here.' We protested, but it had no effect. The teachers simply repeated what they had said before. 'Vey soy. Vey soy. You must go Peking. You no 'low here.' With that the guards and the teachers left us; the door was locked shut. There was nothing we could do. I sank back onto the bed. I felt like bursting into tears.

We waited for three hours. Outside it was as dark as evening; a storm was brewing and the air was heavy. The door was unlocked late in the morning. This time the teachers were accompanied by a middle-aged man in a black Mao jacket, presumably some sort of Party cadre. He spoke halting English and asked us to explain what we wanted. We did so, this time with the aid of the maps and plans in
The Travels.
Lou drew her finger along the dots, dashes and crosses of the Grand Master Map drawing to a halt just before Shang tu. The court of Kubla Khan,' she said. The cadre nodded: 'Hoobilay Han, Hoobilay Han.' This was more encouraging, but our spirits began to flag again when nothing happened for a further three hours. It would be dark shortly. Time was running out.

It was after four o'clock when the security guards and the teachers returned. There was no sign of the man in the black Mao suit and the security guards were just as brusque as before. 'You have money?' they asked through the teachers. Lou opened her wallet and counted out all that remained of her money, ninety yuan, about eighteen pounds. The guards took all of it, counted it again and smiled at each other. It was unclear whether we had just paid a fine, an inflated taxi fare or a bribe. The teachers did not make it any clearer. 'Jeep, jeep,' they said. We were ordered to pack our rucksack and were marched outside. A police Jeep was waiting; the cadre was inside. The security guards motioned for us to get into the back seat.

We set off: an incongruous party of two Cambridge undergraduates, two security officers and one Mongol Communist Party official. The teachers waved us goodbye. In the distance we could hear the sound of thunder; it began to pour. One of the guards turned on the tape player and drowned out the sound of the storm with some wailing Mongol music. At the main road we turned right, back towards Duolon. It was still unclear where we were being taken.

We drove for two miles along the road, before I became convinced that we were being sent back to Peking.

They're deporting us,' I said to Louisa. 'They're bloody well deporting us.'

One of the security guards turned around, smiled, and for the first time indicated that he knew some English.

'Mongol music: good, good,' he said. 'Fuck,' I said, quietly and to no one in particular. 'Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.'

Then the Jeep swung left off the road and jolted off across the heathland. We passed two mounted Mongols leading a third pony; they were making slow progress in the pelting rain. We splashed past them, spraying liquid mud in the air. The storm was now raging fiercely like some scene from a Gothic novel, and the steppe was illuminated by flashes of lightning. We were heading north across a plain bounded on either side by a range of hills. On either horizon, Louisa noticed that the mountain peaks were topped by cairns. The cadre saw her pointing it out to me and scribbled something on a sheet of paper. He handed it to her. He had written the numeral 108. According to Bushell the Mongols called the ruins of Xanadu,
Chao Naiman Sume Khotan;
in English it means The City of 108 Temples'. It was only then that we knew for sure that we were finally on the threshold of our destination.

We came down over
a
range of shallow hills and suddenly in front of us we saw a vast rampart stretching across the plain. We crossed the river Alph and headed towards it; gradually the shape resolved itself. It was one side of
a
square earthen bank, twenty-five feet high, enclosing an area of about four square miles. As we drew alongside we saw that originally it had been
a
double wall with a ditch in the middle. They were built out of rubble and mud and shaped steeply on the inside, with a lower angle facing out. The second wall was now very denuded. At the top of the taller bank stood a Mongol shepherd covered in animal skins; around him were a few wet and bedraggled sheep.

We drove into the ruined city and headed for the inner enclosure, the Jeep slipping in the mud. Our vision of Xanadu was nearer the heath scene in
Lear
than the exotic pleasure garden described by Polo. There was no sign of the marble palace, the gilt rooms or the lovely murals 'that you regard with delight and astonishment'. Nor was there anything left of the 'perfect arch twenty feet high, twelve feet wide' which in

Bushell's day still stood over the South Gate of the Inner City. Instead, through the pelting rain we saw the shattered foundations of pavilions and temples, with column bases, capitals, roof tiles and pottery fragments littering the ground. The enclosure was crisscrossed with earthworks, ditches and craters. In the centre, raised on an earth platform, were the remains of the main palace. All that still stood to any height was the back wall, a mud-brick structure with timber lacing. It was centred on a deep fireplace in which some sheep had taken shelter. The jeep pulled to a halt below the throne dais.

Only one artefact remained still intact. In front of the dais stood a three-foot-tall statue cut in flat relief, portraying a figure holding a cup. It was pockmarked and had a narrow beard and a malevolent expression. There was nothing remotely Chinese about it. It was a dark and brooding image, more like a pagan Celtic fertility statue from a northern hill fort than any-thing you might expect to find in the court of the Khan.

The worst of the storm had passed and we all got out. The Mongols leant on the roof of the Jeep, lit cigarettes and began chattering. Louisa and I were more reverent. We had travelled twelve thousand miles to get to this spot. We stood at the base of the ramp leading up to the throne dais. Here seven hundred and eleven years before, Marco Polo had also stood at the end of his outward journey.

 When the Two Brothers and Mark arrived at that great city, they went to the Imperial Palace, and there they found the Sovereign attended by a great company of Barons. So they bent the knee before him, and paid their respects to him, with all possible reverence, prostrating themselves on the ground. Then the Lord bade them stand up, and treated them with great honour, showing great pleasure at their coming, and asked many questions as to their welfare, and how they had sped. They replied that they had in verity sped well, seeing that they found the Khan well and safe. Then they presented the credentials and the letters which they had received from the Pope, which pleased him right well; and after that they produced the Oil from the Sepulchre, and at that also he was very glad for he set great store thereby