On the Silk Road, across the Takla Makan:
The Takla Makan is the Godforsaken heart of an area called the Tarim Basin. Barricaded by colossal mountains to the south, west and north, and blocked to the east by the Gobi Desert, the Takla Makan seems cursed and banished from the living world, satanic in its exile, so hostile that cliches of fatality come to life here and hyperbole is impossible: an unearthly, inhuman, unimaginable monster of a place that will broil you by day and freeze your corpse at night. The new two-lane across the north-south center of it, 420 miles from Luntai to Mingfen, is literally a road through death. The desert’s name describes it best: Takla Makan is Turkic for “go in and you don’t come out.”
The mountains created the desert, enclosing it in a vast rain shadow, forcing any moisture from south, west, north to rise over their frozen summits and precipitate as snow feeding glaciers. Virtually no rain has fallen in the Takla Makan since the Ice Ages ended 40,000 years ago. Year by year, the glaciers grow down to where they melt into rivers sustaining oases around the desert – Indian monsoons and Russian winters from the past, arriving as ice water in hell.
The mountains are responsible for its climate, but the Takla Makan exists because the underlying rock of the Tarim Basin is harder than the mountains and has withstood the tectonic creep of the Indian subcontinent. 40 or 50 million years ago, India was an island moving north at 30 feet per century when it rammed into Asia. The collision slowed its speed by half, and since then, while the Himalayas have buckled and crumbled and inched up five and almost six miles high, the solid block of the Takla Makan has remained intact and sunk – as though doomed by its unyielding geological personality – shoving north to raise the Tien Shans and complete its arid seclusion.
At its lowest point near Turfan, the Takla Makan is more than 500 feet below sea level. Rivers of melted ice course down out of the mountains into this desolate sink and, if unmanaged, disappear. 2,000 years ago Gaochang was a major oasis stop here along the northern route of what the Chinese called ¨the camel road.¨ Today it is a ghost town of dirt walls, a roofless maze where every corner, every edge has been rounded by the eroding wind. Gaochang looks as though one good rain would liquify it back to mud. Nearby Turfan remains as a manmade oasis, sustained by an elaborate and centuries-old system of underground irrigation channels called a kerez. Using gravity, the channels are fed by miles of caves dug from the city into the mountains.
The sand of the Takla Makan is soft and powdery, pulverized by centuries of wind, so loose that the ground is never still. Becalmed, a shallow rushing current of sand blurs the dunes, disconcerting the eyes with an apparent inability to focus. At its most violent, the ground rises into a blinding cyclonic avalanche filled with flying rocks. The camels of the silk caravans, in addition to being able to smell underground water, could foretell worsening wind conditions and warned humans by refusing to proceed. Horses panicked and often carried their riders away, hopelessly lost, their corpses never found.
Whole caravans were lost even at the edge of the shifting, wind-driven dunes. The largest dunes advance looming as high as 300 feet, rippled behemoths that caused the Chinese to describe the desert as a devouring yellow dragon. Men heard voices shrieking in the wind, and the dust swirled with vicious invisible creatures and evil spirits. Some travelers went mad with fear. Making camp always before dark, the caravans marked their direction so as not to lose it in the morning’s new landscape.
By day the wind blows the desert into the sky, blasting the dunes into spindrift, filling the air with an infinite glaring haze in which any color but sand dies. The most striking phenomenon is the complete disappearance of atmospheric blue – the blue of sky and distance – as the lofting particles densify and suffuse to shift the diffraction of sunlight. Visibility can be anywhere from zero to unlimited, but always indistinct, filtered through the monochrome glare, without horizon. Even today, encapsulated at highway speed, the monotony of earth and sky induces a near motionless sense of crawling along the bottom of an ocean of dust. The occasional tangle of deadwood becomes a sighting event, buried treetops of a long gone oasis. The flash of a hoopoe is momentous, surreal in its garish pink-orange-brown and dark stripes, more like a sudden tropical fish than a bird of the desert. Workgangs travel the new road, bundled up and masked like ragged bandits against the wind, covered with dust, constantly shoveling and sweeping the pavement clear of drifting sand. At night the wind drops and dust rains out of the sky, so thick that headlights are useless and it is impossible to drive.
At the desert’s edge the mountainous dunes flatten to endless gravel pan. Bactrian camels roam wild here, along the highways that follow the old caravan routes. These east-west roads go on forever, dead straight, vanishing into the shimmering haze ahead and behind, into a future identical to the past. Today’s traveler can count the infinity of telephone poles – 20 per kilometer = 33 per mile = 11 per li, the old Chinese unit of distance – while the numbed mind wanders and eyes search, craving color. Now and then a scraggly tamarisk offers its anemic pink clusters of tiny flowers. Up ahead the pavement melts and widens into a blinding lake of mercury; over it the heat dances into faint shapes, a mirage that may or may not become poplars marking the next oasis town. Among the poplars the road will enter its beautiful high tunnel of shade, identical to the last town and the next. The mind is already there, but the body must wait, uncertain. Ghostly, disorienting without the blue of closing distance turning them green, the tall trees enlarge without seeming to get any nearer. Often they disappear in the sudden whirling dark of sandstorms – the kara-burans, “black hurricanes” – which would have buried a caravan in minutes.
And the devouring yellow dragon has grown. Over the last 2,000 years warmer climates have shrunk the glaciers into higher, colder elevations in the surrounding mountains. Less ice melts; rivers have dried up or changed course, no longer flowing as far as they used to into the desert. Archeologists have discovered that the southern edge of the Takla Makan now stretches 30 miles beyond ruins of the ancient oasis stops along the caravan route.
The Takla Makan is the Godforsaken heart of an area called the Tarim Basin. Barricaded by colossal mountains to the south, west and north, and blocked to the east by the Gobi Desert, the Takla Makan seems cursed and banished from the living world, satanic in its exile, so hostile that cliches of fatality come to life here and hyperbole is impossible: an unearthly, inhuman, unimaginable monster of a place that will broil you by day and freeze your corpse at night. The new two-lane across the north-south center of it, 420 miles from Luntai to Mingfen, is literally a road through death. The desert’s name describes it best: Takla Makan is Turkic for “go in and you don’t come out.”
The mountains created the desert, enclosing it in a vast rain shadow, forcing any moisture from south, west, north to rise over their frozen summits and precipitate as snow feeding glaciers. Virtually no rain has fallen in the Takla Makan since the Ice Ages ended 40,000 years ago. Year by year, the glaciers grow down to where they melt into rivers sustaining oases around the desert – Indian monsoons and Russian winters from the past, arriving as ice water in hell.
The mountains are responsible for its climate, but the Takla Makan exists because the underlying rock of the Tarim Basin is harder than the mountains and has withstood the tectonic creep of the Indian subcontinent. 40 or 50 million years ago, India was an island moving north at 30 feet per century when it rammed into Asia. The collision slowed its speed by half, and since then, while the Himalayas have buckled and crumbled and inched up five and almost six miles high, the solid block of the Takla Makan has remained intact and sunk – as though doomed by its unyielding geological personality – shoving north to raise the Tien Shans and complete its arid seclusion.
At its lowest point near Turfan, the Takla Makan is more than 500 feet below sea level. Rivers of melted ice course down out of the mountains into this desolate sink and, if unmanaged, disappear. 2,000 years ago Gaochang was a major oasis stop here along the northern route of what the Chinese called ¨the camel road.¨ Today it is a ghost town of dirt walls, a roofless maze where every corner, every edge has been rounded by the eroding wind. Gaochang looks as though one good rain would liquify it back to mud. Nearby Turfan remains as a manmade oasis, sustained by an elaborate and centuries-old system of underground irrigation channels called a kerez. Using gravity, the channels are fed by miles of caves dug from the city into the mountains.
The sand of the Takla Makan is soft and powdery, pulverized by centuries of wind, so loose that the ground is never still. Becalmed, a shallow rushing current of sand blurs the dunes, disconcerting the eyes with an apparent inability to focus. At its most violent, the ground rises into a blinding cyclonic avalanche filled with flying rocks. The camels of the silk caravans, in addition to being able to smell underground water, could foretell worsening wind conditions and warned humans by refusing to proceed. Horses panicked and often carried their riders away, hopelessly lost, their corpses never found.
Whole caravans were lost even at the edge of the shifting, wind-driven dunes. The largest dunes advance looming as high as 300 feet, rippled behemoths that caused the Chinese to describe the desert as a devouring yellow dragon. Men heard voices shrieking in the wind, and the dust swirled with vicious invisible creatures and evil spirits. Some travelers went mad with fear. Making camp always before dark, the caravans marked their direction so as not to lose it in the morning’s new landscape.
By day the wind blows the desert into the sky, blasting the dunes into spindrift, filling the air with an infinite glaring haze in which any color but sand dies. The most striking phenomenon is the complete disappearance of atmospheric blue – the blue of sky and distance – as the lofting particles densify and suffuse to shift the diffraction of sunlight. Visibility can be anywhere from zero to unlimited, but always indistinct, filtered through the monochrome glare, without horizon. Even today, encapsulated at highway speed, the monotony of earth and sky induces a near motionless sense of crawling along the bottom of an ocean of dust. The occasional tangle of deadwood becomes a sighting event, buried treetops of a long gone oasis. The flash of a hoopoe is momentous, surreal in its garish pink-orange-brown and dark stripes, more like a sudden tropical fish than a bird of the desert. Workgangs travel the new road, bundled up and masked like ragged bandits against the wind, covered with dust, constantly shoveling and sweeping the pavement clear of drifting sand. At night the wind drops and dust rains out of the sky, so thick that headlights are useless and it is impossible to drive.
At the desert’s edge the mountainous dunes flatten to endless gravel pan. Bactrian camels roam wild here, along the highways that follow the old caravan routes. These east-west roads go on forever, dead straight, vanishing into the shimmering haze ahead and behind, into a future identical to the past. Today’s traveler can count the infinity of telephone poles – 20 per kilometer = 33 per mile = 11 per li, the old Chinese unit of distance – while the numbed mind wanders and eyes search, craving color. Now and then a scraggly tamarisk offers its anemic pink clusters of tiny flowers. Up ahead the pavement melts and widens into a blinding lake of mercury; over it the heat dances into faint shapes, a mirage that may or may not become poplars marking the next oasis town. Among the poplars the road will enter its beautiful high tunnel of shade, identical to the last town and the next. The mind is already there, but the body must wait, uncertain. Ghostly, disorienting without the blue of closing distance turning them green, the tall trees enlarge without seeming to get any nearer. Often they disappear in the sudden whirling dark of sandstorms – the kara-burans, “black hurricanes” – which would have buried a caravan in minutes.
And the devouring yellow dragon has grown. Over the last 2,000 years warmer climates have shrunk the glaciers into higher, colder elevations in the surrounding mountains. Less ice melts; rivers have dried up or changed course, no longer flowing as far as they used to into the desert. Archeologists have discovered that the southern edge of the Takla Makan now stretches 30 miles beyond ruins of the ancient oasis stops along the caravan route.
posted by Zarafa at 7:42 PM
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