HIDDEN ASIA

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 137, 6 December 1935, Page 8

HIDDEN ASIA

V.-THREE MONTHS FROM PEKING

PATIENCE ONCE MOKE

(By Peter Fleming.)

(World Copyright Reserved.)

In the first week in April the Princ of Dzun's caravan crossed the mountains south of the Koko Nor Lake skirted a marshy, salt-caked plain and began to work its way down through the .hills into the eastern extremity of the Tsaidam. It was during this stage of the journey that we saw our first wild asses. These animals—known to Tibet and Ladakh as kyang, to th» Turkis of Sinkiang as kulan, to China (always charmingly vague about natural history) as "wild horses," and to science as Equus onager—were the only decoration of the naked and unfriendly landscape. The size of a mule, dark brown in colour with pale bellies' they wheeled and galloped in the middle distance with heads up and short tails flying. They range in herds of anything up to 15, and in their manoeuvres achieve that uncanny unanimity of movement whicn you see sometimes in a covey of partridges or a flock of teal. An old Chinese shot one of them, but we found that the meat hardly deserved its high reputation. South of the mountains we came on a small settlement of Tibetans, living in tents and iri Chinese-style mud houses, and cultivating a little barley; a road, rather aimlessly built by the Chinese and said to be practicable for lorries, reaches this place from near Sining.

The marches so far had been uneventful. Once Maillart's horse had got bogged while drinking and dropped her into an icy river; mine, "a demoniacal creature, had taken advantage of a broken girth to dance on on? of my legs; and twice the camp had been threatened by fire when the wind, catching a spark from a cooking fire, had sent a sheet of flame licking madly through the dry grass between the tents. But things in general were going well, and we felt that we had shown a clean pair of heels to Chinese officialdom; we still, however, maintained a discreet silence about our designs on Sinkiang. THE END OF THE WORLD. On April 10 we came to a kind of little pass at the end of a valley which was decorated with festoons of jaw and shoulder bones, mostly of sheep and hares. Prayer-flags fluttered in the wind. A string of small yak and camel caravans, carrying Tibetans with their goods and tents, was coming up by another road from the south, a road whose ultimate terminus was Lhasa. Huge shells and heavy embossed , ornaments of silver decorated the long plaits of hair which hung down the women's backs. Our own caravan continued a little south, of west, leaving the mountains for the dunes which fringe the Tsaidam marshThe Tsaidam, though its eastern end has been crossed from north to soutfi by Hue, Rockhill, Filchner, and other travellers, has, so far as I know, previously been traversed from end to end only twice by foreigners: by Sven Hedin, in 1897, and by Dr. Norm, of theSvan He-"- Expeuition, in 1933. It is a long marshy basin of which the floor is nearly 9000 ft above sea level. Politically it forms (on paper) part of the Chinese province of Chinghai; but no Chinese reside there, arid only a few merchants visit it during the summer months. Its Mongol inhabitants are divided into four hoshuns, or tribes, and Chinese control of them is asserted by economic rather than administrative means. . Very roughly speaking, most of the Mongols are in debt, to the Chinese, who, since they control the Mongols' only accessible market, may be said to have achieved a form of paramountey which is as effective as it is characteristic. Unlike Inner Mongolia, the Tsaidam is not suffering from the effects of Chinese colonisation.

On entering the Tsaidam the Prince of Dzun quickened the pace of his caravan. On the first day after a short halt in the afternoon, we continued our march by night, the camels shuffling silently through the dunes in an aura of dust which the moon made soft and silver. No tents were pitched when we halted, for it was much warmer here. After a few hours' sleep we pressed on, because the animals had had no water since early the day before, crossed a small river called the Bayan, and before dusk floundered into camp along a slippery road skirting the marsh. We were now in Dzun territory, and the caravan had already begun to break up. On the next day, April 12, the squat, fort-like outline of a lamasery broke the monotony of an empty horizon. This was Dzunchia, as the Chinese call th» Prince of Dzun's headquarters. The caravan had reached it's " destination. Henceforth we should have to make other transport arrangements. •

At Dzunchia, where we, spent three days, a warren of mud huts had sprung up round a decrepit lamasery; these huts were used as a trading post by Chinese merchants in the summer months. The place, situated in the middle of a naked, marshy plain, bounded on the south by the formidable mountains of the main Tibetan plateau, looked, smelt, and felt like the end of the world. While we awaited the arrival of fresh camels,- which Li had managed to hire from a Mongol, there was little to do. An aged and gigantic lama, with a booming voice and a Johnsonian manner, sat in our quarters, twirling his prayer-wheel and marvelling at us. In the evening rare [ caravans crawled up out- of the horizon. The only elements of variety in our lives were provided by an occasional dust-storm and a dog which bit Maillart. •

But the camels did not keep us wait- ; ing long, and on April 16 we were rid- j ing west again, in sunlight warm"" enough to bring mosquitoes out of the marsh. Our next "bound" should ] have been Teijinar, but Li depressed : us by announcing that our new camels j and their owner would go no farther than Nomo Khantara, a mere two : marches further on. This place was a kind of. boundary between the Mon- '' gols of Dzun and those of Teijinar. : * GOLD SEEKERS. . ! At Nomo Khantara we found one of ■ Li's brothers, also an agent of the merchant Ma Shin-teh, installed in a yurt. i We pitched our tent next door in a state i of some despondency. A party of ten : Chinese Moslems on a gold-prospecting < expedition, whom we had perforce ac- ; cepted as travelling companions, had . arrived the day before and reported ■ that the local Mongols were "very bad me/h," and could not be induced to hire < their camels: witness (they said) the : fact that two particularly holy lamas from Tibet had been encamped there i for a fortnight and had now abandoned i all.hopes of reaching Teijinar. The i chief lama, a fat, merry man who look- ] ed exactly like a Frenchman in a ; farce, confirmed this bitter news. We ; sent Li to open negotiations with the : Mongols, and settled down to endure < an unforeseen delay.

In acute boredom and some anxiety we passed at Nomo Khantara what subsequently turned out to have been the Easter holiday. We were encamped in the middle of a huge tract of tamarisk. The little trees, although they made the place less unfriendly in appearance than Dzunchia, effectually limited our activities. In that featureless and untracked scrub it was not

wise lo venture out of sight of camp without a compass. On the first day one of the gold-seekers got lost and, in spite of bonfires by night, search parlies by day, and fairly intensive clairvoyance by the lamas, never reappeared; he must have died of hunger and thirst. So for six days we spent most of the time playing patience in the tent. This was varied by periodic descents on the Mongols, who turned out to be one of the very few agricultural communities in the Tsaidam, cultivating a little barley. Li's diplomacy, backed by a flourishing of passports which none of them could read, gradually produced its effect, and it soon became clear that both we and the gold-seekers would get our animals eventually, though at a stiff price. Meanwhile I shot one or i two pheasants and a good many hares, ' some of which Maillart boiled against '. a potentially meatless future: a piece of foresight rendered to a large extent nugatory by a thieving cat. About a mile to the north of our camp we discovered two ancient mud forts in an excellent state of preservation, , thanks presumably to the tamarisks ' protecting them from " wind-driven sand. The bigger was some 300 yards square, with crenellated walls about ; 30ft high by 10ft thick. Neither Mongols nor Chinese could tell us any- ; thing of their history.

At last, on April 23, the camels turned up, tea and cloth were dealt out to the Mongol headmen, and we took the road again. The next stages were monotonous. Marsh flats, slimy or caked with salt, alternated with tamarisk and sand dunes; constant detours to the south were necessary to avoid boggy ground. Progress was unnecessarily slow, because the goldseekers' camels were overloaded. The days got steadily warmer, and we were only intermittently . troubled by the wind; but at night water still froze inside the tent. At Gorumu, on the Naichi River, six marches from Nomo Khantara, we were again delayed for three days by the necessity of changing camels; but here we were able to shake off the gold-seekers and thereafter to make faster going: They gave us a parting present of red pepper and yak's meat, and we set forth into the too familiar desolation for Teijinar, a further six days west. BORODISHIrr. The journey had become tedious. Its chief interest (an interest which can hardly, now, be communicated to the reader) lay in the extreme uncertainty of our future. Teijinar loomed large in our plans, for from Teijinar we hoped to launch our attempt to cross the frontier of Sinkiang. But that attempt, if successful, would bring us into a part of the province controlled by the Tungans—rebel armies of Moslems from the north-west of China; and of the Tungans we knew nothing save their bloody reputation. Were they still at war with the Provincial Government at Urumchi? Were they still in the southern oases? Were they as anti-foreign as they sounded? Without advance information on these and other points it would be unwise to proceed any further in the direction of India. At Teijinar we hoped to find two sources for this information. One was a friend of our original Russian guides, a Cossack called Borodishin, who had been there two years ago and might be there still; the other was Turki merchants, who up till two years ago had plied regularly between Teijinar and the southern oases of Sinkiang.

On May 7 we sighted the scattered tents of Teijinar and rode on beyond them to two yurts, where we were told, to our great delight, that we should find the Cossack. We put our ! tired horses into a canter. Before the door of one yurt stood a bearded figure with an incredulous look on his face. It was Borodishin. We were the first white people he had seen for two years. Switching .with -relief to bad Russian from very much worse Chinese, we went inside .the yurt and asked for news of Sinkiang. Borodishin had none. Since the civil war started in 1933 no merchants had come through. We were as far from being able to estimate our chances of reaching India as we had been in Peking, nearly three months ago. But by now we were in no mood to turn back; we decided, after a brief consultation, that there was nothing for it but to go on taking our fences blind.

(To be' Continued.)