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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