The Desert Road to Turkestan, by Owen Lattimore
In early August the little market gardens that fringe the mile of road between Old City and New bloomed with the noble splendor of opium poppies, and it seemed that we might live forever bone-idle among the languorous white and luxuriant pink and purple colors, and the sweet heavy scents that permeated with Oriental indifference the sour stink of Oriental backyards.
-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan
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As I was dozing … I caught the drift of a whispered conversation … I was being set down as a Soviet officer in the service of the Christian Army, making an early get-away to Urga. It annoyed me, but it was not worth denial, since denial would only strengthen conviction. But how silly! Didn’t I have enough worries, what with leaving my wife in a silly place like Kuei-hua and starting off for a silly place like Mongolia, with a lot of silly camels, without being taken for a spy or a soldier of fortune or something fantastic of a kind that is found more often in the newspapers than on a journey?
-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan
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There is nothing a camel man likes better than to score off one of the officials who pop out at awkward corners of the road, where there is no dodging, to ask him questions that must be answered with money.
-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan
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I had yet to learn the knack of wandering through a labyrinth of dreams and memories and lazy half-thoughts, through the endless but sedately witching marching hours. The mingled ache and eagerness of final departure, mixed with the thrill of being free of houses and wheeled things, died slowly in me. I could see the ground shifting vaguely beneath me, and hear the soft impact of the camel’s feet on the coarse sandy soil. All about was the whispering hush of a night of ceaseless rain. Now and again, far away to the side, Mongol dogs clamored at our passing. Once the dim shape of a wolf crossed fifteen yards in front of us, and my camel, which was in the lead, snorted with fear. The smell of the grasslands was damp and sweet. The night was not so much an interval of time as an overflow of eternity, which did not bother one with beginning or end.
-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan
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When the Christian Army took over the northwest, they also took over the troops of Ma Fu-hsiang. Weighing their exchequer and their principles in a balance of expediency, the exchequer was found too light, so that a few principles had to be dropped.
-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan
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The rest of the time I spent in reading Yule’s Marco Polo and making a catalogue of my deficiencies from the Hints to Travellers of the Royal Geographical Society. I think I had bought it with the idea that it would be something in the same sort as a fascinating book, Galton’s Art of Travel, frequently referred to in Shaw’s High Tartary and Yarkand, which seems to have been full of Swiss Family Robinson tricks. I was sure that the Hints would at least tell me how to find the north from the hands of a watch, like a Boy Scout, and perhaps, like Galton, how to make gunpowder and such graver marvels. Instead, I found Isobaric Maps and the Minimum Requirements for Weather Observation. I learned also with chagrin that my cameras were inadequate and my armory of all the wrong calibres.
-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan
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Sometimes, I think, what draws me more than anything else to travel is the melancholy of it, a winelike melancholy, tenuous but soft, like the delicate, plangent, muted syllables of Verlaine, fortuitously remembered in a Mongolian sunset.
-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan
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…Pei-tai Ho, that shoddy Simla-cum-Kendal-Revival by the Gulf of Pei Chih-li. There Ministers of Legation from Peking hoist their flags for the summer, and the Diplomatic Body in partibus infidelium resting from the strict routine of dancing, scandal, and gambling, refreshes itself with swimming, gambling, and scandal.
-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan
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They began to accept me without reserve as an understandable person of their own kind. This was in part because I had smoothed out my own awkwardnesses. I had fallen into the way of gossiping with them, instead of asking questions point-blank about things I did not understand. There is nothing that shuts off the speech of simple men like the suspicion that they are being pumped for information; while if they get over the feeling of strangeness they will yarn as they do among themselves. Then in their talk there comes out the rich rough ore of what they themselves accept as the truth about their lives and beliefs, not spoiled in trying to refine it unskillfully by suiting the words to the listener.
-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan
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The mixture of superstition, reverence, and mocking blasphemy with which they treat this little makeshift tabernacle of tamarisk and camp wreckage, made by themselves and tended by no priest, is delightful. There is a spirit about their observances that has been almost lost to Europe since the Middle Ages – the free and adventuring spirit that got a stunning whack on the head at the Reformation, when a desolate and cranky kind of prophet rose up, thinking to ensure salvation by unfettering dogma and shackling emotion instead; a spirit in which there is a fine realization, without any articulate opinion, that piety has nothing to do with sinlessness. And now, I wonder – did I discover a Great Truth in the Desert and Make a Note of it in my Journal? How like a Traveler!
-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan
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Soon there will be little trace … to stand for a monument of one of the strangest episodes of that period, so recent and yet so remote, when history was swiftly acted and never written down.
-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan
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In No Man’s Land your law is in your own right hand. Elsewhere in Mongolia a man does not ride armed as a matter of course unless he is hunting. Here no man who has arms would think of riding without them.
-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan
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Also all the folk, when they heard that I made no charge, began to court me for my medicines; but as there was nothing in the world wrong with most of them except opium (that, the usual boils and bowel troubles, and a tendency to tuberculosis and secondary venereal disease) I did little good. It is poor practice putting drugs into a man the whole tone of whose system is set by opium. Both men and women were notable smokers; but then, as Moses put it, “What amusements do they have all winter in a place like this, except opium and women? And look at the women!” – for they were a skinny lot of shrews, the young with the old.
-- Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan
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