Read Shadow of the Silk Road Online
Authors: Colin Thubron
So Antioch, the sink of decadence, became the fount from which the Roman empire would be converted, and the evangelists of Utah were right, perhaps, to locate their roots here. Its Hellenised Christianity–a potent blend of fervour and learning–would be inherited in time by Constantinople and the long-lived Byzantine empire. In Antioch itself Constantine built one of the great churches of Christendom, the ‘Golden House’ where St John Chrysostom preached, likening the progress of the soul to the transformation of the silkworm. True to its nature, Antioch became a hotbed of schism, and from here Nestorianism took its long journey east to triumph among the Mongols and the Tang dynasty Chinese.
If you scramble more steeply eastward, where the Byzantine ramparts lurch down razor ridges to the river, you sense in their titanic ruin the city’s power into the sixth century. But its end came in brutal waves. In
AD
526 an earthquake on Ascension Day buried nearly quarter of a million inhabitants. Fourteen years later, in the teeth of Persian invasion, the Byzantine army deserted the city as indefensible. Its young men–notoriously effeminate–manned the ramparts and fought almost unarmed, but the metropolis was burnt to the ground, then swept by plague before the Persians returned and burnt it again. The grey-white fragments that lie tumbled among thickets along the summit, or loom above the pines, belong to a more fragile Christian age, and to Crusader restoration, and by the thirteenth century Antioch was lapsing towards its long decline into a village asleep among tales.
It is night. The hotel dining room remains empty, except for me, tasting a glass of wine. I feel restless, expectant, as if my journey has not yet ended, and that tomorrow the foyer doors will open on to desert…
For the last time I stand on my balcony and watch the stars sharpen above Mount Sipylus, and the Byzantine walls blacken to
silhouette. A few lights are moving above the river. It’s time to sleep, but I cannot. Instead I spill my dog-eared maps on to the double bed, and dreamily collate them with my memory. When the hotel lights fuse, I find the last of my candle-stubs, and by this yellow flicker cross again the false and absent frontiers. Even in China I had come upon the shadowline of the Uighur border far to the east, and all through Central Asia and Afghanistan–a paradise or hell of mingled ethnicities–the nations had interwoven one another. In the shaky candle-flame I remember reaching countries hundreds of miles before their official frontiers, or long after. Often I imagine that the Silk Road itself has created and left behind these blurs and fusions, like the bed of a spent river, and I picture different, ghostly maps laid over the political ones: maps of fractured races and identities.
The unaccustomed wine has gone to my head. I fumble my notes together and lie on the bed half dressed, drifting toward sleep. I wonder if Huang is still trying to reach Brazil, or if Dolkon has completed his grain-sifter, or Mahmuda met her childhood sweetheart in Namangan. I will never know. Perhaps the Labrang monk has already escaped to India, and Vahid to Canada.
So you think your journey is ending? That you’ve had enough horizon?
I can’t imagine ever…
You will. You will, yes. At first, when you’re young, each place you come to is poorer than the place ahead, which you do not yet know. This other is extraordinary, beautiful. So you go on, perhaps for many years. You go on until you realise that the trading was also good, with certain shortcomings, in the city you left behind. Soon younger men say you have lost ambition; older, that you have grown wise. Then, as you settle, there is comfort, and a kind of sadness.
You have done this?
I left my sons rich and my estate in order. My wife wore sapphire earrings, which I brought home from Bactria. What did you bring back?
[Silence.]
Why don’t you answer?
A handful of stories…
What is their profit?
[Silence.]
I think they are your religion.
[Silence.]
I curse it.
[Shrugs]:
In my world we don’t insult religions.
Why in God’s name not? I think it is because you don’t care, and have lost faith. Those who care, they fight.
I turn out the light, very tired:
Most of the time it does not matter. We go on buying and selling, like you. But then something comes in the night. And the death of those we love we cannot bear. The void embraces us. There is nowhere to look.
Maybe we’ve all been too long on the road. Too many generations. I have forgotten my tribe, even what its totem was. It is time to go back. And we cannot. I died in the desert near Khotan, too soon. We were carrying salt, and the camels were overloaded. Sometimes the wind changes the dunes overnight, and in the morning you cannot tell where you are…My friend, farewell. It is not so bad…
Twenty miles to the south, where the Orontes once carried skiffs to the sea, the ancient port of Seleucia Pierea rears a ruined acropolis above the waves. The shore stretches empty now, and the Mediterranean opens beneath me with a leap of the heart, in a plain of glinting thunder.
I circled the acropolis through dense undergrowth, wet with oleanders and young pines. Hewn blocks clung to the heights above me, or scattered the scrub-tangled earth. I mounted a stairway through a vanished gate. It was starting to rain. Within its ramparts the town had crumbled from the hill, leaving only the incision of cisterns and drains in its rock, wandering steps. A monolithic sarcophagus was filling with water.
Two thousand years ago the legionaries of Titus and Vespasian, with prisoners from their grim Judean campaign, carved out a fifteen-hundred-yard channel which split the acropolis in a precipitous ravine, to divert floodwater from the port. I entered it by a chilly rush of water. For two hundred yards it thrust clean through living rock, then opened in a defile that trailed a long, rain-misted skylight eighty feet above me. In and out of its
darkness, it made a gauntly beautiful passage now. I followed it upstream, its torrent purling beside me. I heard nothing but the drip and splash of the breaking storm, and the downward rush of water. Chisel-strokes still cross-hatched the rock. At the end, beneath a blackened inscription to the deified emperors, towered the ivy-hung dam which had guided the floodwaters in. Beside it–sudden and enigmatic in the solitude–a copse of laurel trees bloomed with votive rags.
I emerged from this twilight, close to the shore, where the port had left its wall in huge, disconnected stones. The inner harbour had been choked up long ago, and I found myself crossing an empty depression of silted earth where the portly Greek and Syrian merchant ships had carried in their Roman glass and metals, and taken west the silks of China.
The jetty had sunk to smothered stones. I tried to imagine the traffic floating here: the luxuries grown magic with distance, the wheat and hides of the unrecorded poor, the whole intricate caravan of the world. The goods were myth-bearers. They carried their own stories, their own ironies. There was a rumoured trade in unicorns. The silted harbour was noiseless under my feet.
And still the Romans did not know the land the silks came from. Somewhere edging the easternmost sea, they heard, the country of the Seres escaped the influence of the stars, and was guided only by the laws of its ancestors. Mars never drove its people to war, nor Venus to folly. They had no temples, no prostitutes, no crimes, no victims. The king’s women–seven hundred of them–rode in golden chariots drawn by oxen. But this land of Serica, by some divine spell, was impossible to reach.
Meanwhile the Chinese, in mirror-image, came to believe that in a great city to the west–Rome, Alexandria or Constantinople–the people were ruled by philosophers, peacefully elected. Their palaces rose on crystal pillars, and they travelled in little white-draped carriages, and signalled their movements by the shaking of bells.
It was as if the road between the two empires, quarter the length of the equator, had leached out in its passage all their trouble. For as they declined both China and Rome were racked by war.
I walked along the black sands to the mole. Close inshore, the water shone brilliant turquoise. It came warm to my touch. But to west and east the sky was not the blue calm of my imagined homecoming, but a troubled cloudscape that swept the sea in moving gleams and shadows.
China
Central Asia
Iran
The West
China
Central Asia
Iran
The West