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Authors: Joyce Morgan
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perfect mount for Stein and for Dash II, who taught himself to leap to the stirrup and then up to the saddle, where he would sit on the pommel. Badakhshi was hardy and unsociable, not unlike his master.
Stein was at last doing exactly what he loved. He was on the move in Turkestan, where he felt more at home than almost anywhere; certainly more so than in India—despite living almost twenty years there—with its caste rules and stultifying bureaucracy. As his camels, his ponies and his men moved steadily along, in the same way travelers had done for centuries, he could forget for a while the modern world with its bustle of speeding trains and alienating cities. “To peep into every house & hut along the road is better than to see towns in electric illumination flit past like fireflies,” he wrote.
He loved the sense of being transported to an earlier era. And that feeling recurred when he encountered a caravan of traders heading over the mountains to Ladakh. He entrusted their jovial leader with a letter to a friend there and felt cheered to be reminded that long-distance communication was possible well before the existence of a postal service. The traders’ cargo was likely to transport in an altogether different way; it consisted of “that precious but mischievous” drug charas, or hashish.
Only his relationship with the elder Ram Singh intruded on the joy of returning to his Turkestan. The surveyor had become unaccountably sullen. This reached a peak when, as the caravan was readying to depart one morning before dawn, the surveyor sent a message to say he was not prepared to move unless he was given a couple of assistants of his own. When Stein went to see him, the surveyor had other complaints. Among them, he did not want to start at such an early hour, even though it was when Stein often broke camp. Stein did not know what precipitated the surveyor’s demands and was not about to acquiesce to them. Instead, he criticized Ram Singh for setting a bad example.
Stein was impatient with delays. When a rare late start was made, he grumbled about his men’s reluctance to tear themselves away from the “fleshpots” of a local oasis. For Stein it was the desert, not the oases, that attracted him. One night during his first expedition, he became entranced watching the full moon ascend over the desert.
She looked as if rising from the sea when first emerging from the haze of dust that hid the plains, and her light shimmered on the surface. But when she climbed high up in the sky it was no longer a meek reflection that lit up the plain below. It seemed as if I were looking at the lights of a vast city lying below me in the endless plains. Could it really be that terrible desert where there was no life and no hope of human existence? I knew that I should never see it again in this alluring splendour.
Now, six years on and under another full moon, he was back in the desert whose terrifying beauty haunted him. He camped amid the rolling dunes beside a Muslim shrine inhabited by thousands of sacred pigeons to whom grateful travelers made offerings. The shrine was near what Stein called “my kingdom” of Khotan, once the center of a Buddhist civilization. He was intrigued by its legend. Locals said the birds were the descendants of a pair of doves that had sprung from the heart of a Muslim martyr killed as his army battled Khotan’s Buddhist infidels. But to Stein, the tale recalled a similar, though much older legend encountered by Xuanzang as he journeyed through the kingdom. In this version, the sacred animals weren’t birds but rats—giant rodents the size of hedgehogs with hair of gold and silver—and they had saved Khotan’s Buddhist king from invading Huns by chewing through the enemy’s leather armor and harnesses in the night. Stein suspected that with the spread of Islam through the region, the Buddhist rats had evolved into Muslim birds. The legend had been appropriated rather than eliminated. It was
Stein was at last doing exactly what he loved. He was on the move in Turkestan, where he felt more at home than almost anywhere; certainly more so than in India—despite living almost twenty years there—with its caste rules and stultifying bureaucracy. As his camels, his ponies and his men moved steadily along, in the same way travelers had done for centuries, he could forget for a while the modern world with its bustle of speeding trains and alienating cities. “To peep into every house & hut along the road is better than to see towns in electric illumination flit past like fireflies,” he wrote.
He loved the sense of being transported to an earlier era. And that feeling recurred when he encountered a caravan of traders heading over the mountains to Ladakh. He entrusted their jovial leader with a letter to a friend there and felt cheered to be reminded that long-distance communication was possible well before the existence of a postal service. The traders’ cargo was likely to transport in an altogether different way; it consisted of “that precious but mischievous” drug charas, or hashish.
Only his relationship with the elder Ram Singh intruded on the joy of returning to his Turkestan. The surveyor had become unaccountably sullen. This reached a peak when, as the caravan was readying to depart one morning before dawn, the surveyor sent a message to say he was not prepared to move unless he was given a couple of assistants of his own. When Stein went to see him, the surveyor had other complaints. Among them, he did not want to start at such an early hour, even though it was when Stein often broke camp. Stein did not know what precipitated the surveyor’s demands and was not about to acquiesce to them. Instead, he criticized Ram Singh for setting a bad example.
Stein was impatient with delays. When a rare late start was made, he grumbled about his men’s reluctance to tear themselves away from the “fleshpots” of a local oasis. For Stein it was the desert, not the oases, that attracted him. One night during his first expedition, he became entranced watching the full moon ascend over the desert.
She looked as if rising from the sea when first emerging from the haze of dust that hid the plains, and her light shimmered on the surface. But when she climbed high up in the sky it was no longer a meek reflection that lit up the plain below. It seemed as if I were looking at the lights of a vast city lying below me in the endless plains. Could it really be that terrible desert where there was no life and no hope of human existence? I knew that I should never see it again in this alluring splendour.
Now, six years on and under another full moon, he was back in the desert whose terrifying beauty haunted him. He camped amid the rolling dunes beside a Muslim shrine inhabited by thousands of sacred pigeons to whom grateful travelers made offerings. The shrine was near what Stein called “my kingdom” of Khotan, once the center of a Buddhist civilization. He was intrigued by its legend. Locals said the birds were the descendants of a pair of doves that had sprung from the heart of a Muslim martyr killed as his army battled Khotan’s Buddhist infidels. But to Stein, the tale recalled a similar, though much older legend encountered by Xuanzang as he journeyed through the kingdom. In this version, the sacred animals weren’t birds but rats—giant rodents the size of hedgehogs with hair of gold and silver—and they had saved Khotan’s Buddhist king from invading Huns by chewing through the enemy’s leather armor and harnesses in the night. Stein suspected that with the spread of Islam through the region, the Buddhist rats had evolved into Muslim birds. The legend had been appropriated rather than eliminated. It was
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