In his book, Riding the Iron Rooster, his account of travelling through China by train in the mid-1980s, the American travel writer Paul Theroux quotes Milgrid Cable’s book, The Gobi Desert, as saying, “The desert between Anxi and Hami is a howling wilderness, its uniform, black, pebble-strewn surface.” If this is the case, then I have to take his (and her) word for it, as uniform darkness shrouds our passage of this stretch of Xinjiang.
Time is plentiful aboard the Iron Rooster, and as the day draws out, I sit gazing upon the virtually featureless desert passing by, like one of the endless backdrops used in 1920s silent movie car chases. I have several extracts from Riding the Iron Rooster, which I copied down at home, especially for this particular section of our journey. “JIAYUGUAN – a Chinese town lay glowing in the sand, and rising above it, ten stories high, was the last gate in the Great Wall, a crumpled pile of mud bricks and ruined turrets that the wind had simplified and sucked smooth. Hours later, in an immense and stony desert, I saw a man in a faded blue suit bumping over the stones on his bike.”
Leafing through my little grey PGG Farmer’s notebook, surely the only one of its kind to have ever crossed the Gobi Desert, I come across the description Theroux applied to yaks. I had intended to use it when we were in the Khunjerab Pass, but I forgot. It reads, “The yak is a lovely long-haired animal, like a cow on its way to the opera.” Although this is a rather fanciful description, I think having seen yaks, that I’ll allow it.
One hundred and twenty years before Vikram Seth wrote this, Henry David Thoreau wrote a similar passage in his book, Walden. “The pure, sea-green Walden water there, reflecting the clouds and the trees, and sending up its evaporations in solitude. Thus it appears that the sweltering inhalations of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. I lay down my book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra. I meet his servant, come to draw water for his master, and our buckets, as it were, grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favouring winds, it has wafted past the sight of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore in the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.”
It seems somewhat inappropriate to read these descriptions of water while passing through this expanse of utter dryness. But still, it causes me to wonder: does the water lying now in the occasional salty pool contain atoms of water that have drifted from New Zealand? Evaporating perhaps from a South Island river, blown across the Pacific past islands and atolls, caught up in the monsoon where they carried northwards over India to fall as snow upon the Himalaya, and then evaporate again to journey as invisible vapour to the deserts of Central Asia?
Or maybe within these pools of international water molecules lie some particles whose origin lies in the Thames. After all, Conrad himself proposed that the waters of the Thames flow out into the uttermost ends of the earth. Perhaps some of the water evaporated as it passed the Houses of Parliament or the Isle of Dogs. Perhaps the summer sun lifted it from the river as it flowed over Maplin sands, or took it as it passed “Erith way.” Or maybe on a cold winter afternoon, as London huddled behind shuttered windows, some water was shed to the sky where it joined sullen and black clouds as they ranged across Europe, overflying the Balkans and out into the desert wastes.
These thoughts put me into a pensive and melancholy mood as I think of England, now so very far away. It will be lunchtime in the realm, perhaps a cold day in London, where traffic jostles around Trafalgar Square, and pubs are full of business people taking a hot meal and a pint before the rigours of the afternoon begin. On cold days like this, the grey facade of County Hall glowers down on the Thames, as the wind chops into the high tide water. In Hyde Park, the leaves will be falling, a glorious pageant of colour, gold, brown, green, and red. Squirrels will be busy stashing acorns away in secret places ready for winter. The tourists will be all but gone.
And perhaps it is fine in Wiltshire, the trees of Five Ash Lane and the Great Ridge Wood resplendent in their autumn colours. All over the Wiltshire Downs, the fields will be empty, harvest long over, the stubble ploughed in. I imagine Richard and Robin Witt stacking away the last of the summer’s straw against the hardships of the coming winter. In Corton, the quiet lane will be growing shadowy and damp as less and less sun penetrates each day, while up on the Salisbury Plain, where the monolith of Stonehenge stands, the A303 still roars with traffic.
The train comes to a jolting stop, bringing me out of my reverie. Outside the grimy window, the desert still stretches away, boundless and bare. A gargling voice from the tannoy announces something incomprehensible (I NEED A BABELFISH!) then the train moves off again, coming to a halt in a drab and depressing-looking town. On its outskirts, rusted factories pump grey smoke into a grey sky from smokestacks rising above convoluted networks of pipes and conduits. The station’s marshalling yard contains several steam locomotives, looking black and oily and very grand. Although they are an anachronism in the West, here in the People’s Republic of China, they still make up a sizeable part of China Railway’s rolling stock.
It is bitterly cold on the platform, and a few flurries of snow are borne on the freezing wind. I buy a sort of beer sausage from a vendor, who also sells a range of other foods, boiled egg, cooked chicken, pot noodles, fruits and nuts, and packages of nasty-looking pickled things. Back on board the train, I find my berth has become a seat for some new arrivals. My Chinese counterparts tell them to move along, then offer me a beer, which I drink while eating the sausage with a boiled egg.
It is 6.30PM, presumably drinks time as all through the carriage people are sharing bottles of beer and talking. Cigarette smoke clogs the air once again as we roll out into the desert. As darkness falls, the sound system in the carriage erupts with the sound of Jason Donovan singing Rhythm of the Rain. It is the previously mentioned Golden Disc, and over the next half an hour we are treated with songs by Richard Marx, George Michael, Linda Ronstadt and Robbie Neville, Phil Collins, and (THE HORROR, THE HORROR!) Rick Astley. The darkness which envelops the desert is complete, and after an evening of making conversation with our travelling companions and sundry other passers-by, we go to sleep, secure in the knowledge that morning will find us at journey’s end.
CurseOfTheTraveller 