Riding the Iron Rooster

The peaks beyond Hami and farther up the line had patches of snow on their ridges that lay like saddle blankets, squarish and flat. But down here in the train and on the desert it was very hot—over one hundred degrees in the train and hotter outside. The sun burned down on the sand and stones. There were a few gullies, and in the oldest and deepest ones, which were sheltered, perhaps a dead wu-tong tree, and here and there clumps of camel thorn, the only identifiable weed, apart from the spikes of gray lichens. We were heading towards a dusty range of hills that was surmounted by a blue range of mountains, and rising up beyond were more mountains, which were bright with snow patches and ice slides—long streaks that might have been glaciers.

They were the first sight I had of the Bogda Shan, The Mountains of God. They were very rugged and very high, but their snow was the only lively feature of this place. Beneath those mountains there was nothing but desert, "the howling wilderness," which this afternoon was too bright to stare at. Rainfall is unknown here, and most of those mountains seemed little more than a vast, poisoned massif—a lifeless pack of rock. This is the dead center of Asia.

The Iron Rooster moved along at about thirty miles per hour, as it had done for two and a half days; moving slowly as the landscape grew ever stranger. That was a good thing. If the train had been moving any faster it would have been impossible for me to comprehend the changes in the landscape, from the rice fields and little hills to the great bare mountains. A plane ride from Lanzhou to here would have resulted in shock, and from Peking, in total bewilderment. Arriving here by plane from anywhere else would have been like space travel—some interplanetary mind-bender.

I paced up and down in my pajamas, among slumbering Uighurs, and occasionally had a beer. They were half a liter and cost 15 cents. Because we were on Peking time, the hottest part of the day was 4:30 in the afternoon, and it remained light enough to read by until almost midnight.

In this oddly lighted world of snow and sand, the stone mountains reddened and rushed up to the train. In the distance was a green basin, 500 feet below sea level, the lowest place in China, and one of the hottest. Another oasis, the town of Turfan. Round about there was nothing else but a hundred miles of blackish gravel, and Turfan itself was twenty miles from the station. I got off the train here.

Turfan ("one of the hottest places on the face of the earth") was an extremely popular oasis about 400 years ago. Before then it had been a desert town overrun by successive waves of nomads, Chinese, Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongols. The Silk Road established it as a great oasis and bazaar, but after that—from about the sixteenth century—it was all downhill. And after it was finally left alone by the warlords and the Manchus, new marauders appeared in the shape of enterprising archeologists, and the few frescoes and statues that remained after more than 2000 years of continuous civilization were snatched and carried away to places like Tokyo, Berlin, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Such a place seemed to me unmissable. The station was at the edge of the depression. All I could see were telephone poles in the stony desert, and the huge purply-red range called The Flaming Mountains. The town of Turfan did not reveal itself until I was almost on top of it, and even then it seemed less like a Chinese town than a Middle Eastern one—it was straight out of the Bible, with donkeys and grape arbors and mosques, and people who looked Lebanese, with brown faces and gray eyes.

The desert was almost unbelievably horrible looking—bouldery and black, without a single green thing in it. And it seemed as though if you walked on those stones you would cut your feet. In some spots it looked like an immensity of coal ashes, with scatterings of clinkers and scorched stones. In other places it was dust, with rounded mounds piled here and there. The mounds I discovered were part of the irrigation system called the karez, a network of underground canals and boreholes that had been used successfully since the Western Han Dynasty, about 2000 years ago. There were also parts of this desert surrounding Turfan that had an undersea look, as of an ocean floor after the tide went out for good. Everyone called it the gobi\ the waterless place. Rainfall is unknown in Turfan.