The only glow in the room was the blue light from my Kindle. As I read, a tingle went up my spine. As I traveled up the Tekes Valley, I had watched the signs from the front seat of the small van. Now, I read the same names in the book I was reading. I was following in the footsteps of the authors, Theodore and Kermit Roosevelt. They had made the journey in the summer of 1926, I was there slightly less than 100 years later, in the early summer of 2018. I had planned to stay in a Kazakh yurt, but because it was not yet June, the season was not upon us, so I opted to stay in the Kazakh family’s house in a large room that seemed only to be used for guests. I had tucked myself in after dinner, but did not feel sleepy, as I am not one to waken with the sun. At least I had entertainment.
The book was East of the Sun, West of the Moon, copyright 1926. The brothers, sons of Theodore Roosevelt, had written alternate chapters. The title comes from a Norwegian fairy story and refers to a place that is so far away as to be unknowable. I think it is a lovely name for a story of adventure to a place that, even today, seems to be far away and largely unknown. The brothers had undertaken the trip to hunt for animals to be displayed in a Central Asian part of the Chicago Natural History Museum. They wanted to take back horns and hides from a variety of sheep and antelope from the region. They were middle-aged men who wanted to play at being explorers like their famous father. Theodore had run for Governor of New York and had been defeated, and so, was at loose ends and able to take an extended vacation. He had recruited his brother and approached the Museum for funding and sponsorship. He also persuaded a couple of friends to join them as collectors of birds and smaller animals. They sailed in April from the US to England, onto Paris for last minute shopping, and then from Marseille to India. By the middle of May they were in Srinagar and on their way over the Zoji La. By now, they had run out of wheeled transport and were on foot with pack ponies or occasionally riding. They decided to take the path through Leh and over five monumental passes to the Takla Makan desert at Yarkand. Even though these passes were all over 16,000 feet, the highest being the Karakoram at over 18,000 feet, this route was at least well-travelled and there were campsites and other travelers. Having been to Leh and trekked through these mountains, and also penetrated a few miles into the Himalayas further east to Pulu just up from Keriya, I have great respect for anyone willing to push forward through these mountains. They were well supplied, including four hunting hounds.
This route has been traversed for many years as it is part of the Silk Road. It is perhaps the most direct route from India to China, even though wild and difficult. As the Roosevelts went higher into the mountains, they passed dead animals and carcasses all along the route. They also stumbled upon bales of goods that had been abandoned the year before as ponies had died and the rest couldn’t carry the loads. There was apparently a code of honor among the merchants on this age-old route. The loads were not to be touched and were left for collection the next time the traders came this way. As many of these bundles were dried marijuana, the temptation must have been great to wriggle a few joints worth of weed out of a bundle. Who would notice?
By July, they were at the Takla Makan and journeyed to Kashgar via Yarkand. They had, among their supplies, top hats and cutaway coats, and they donned these when visiting dignitaries along the route. There is a photo of the brothers, mounted on horses, bow ties, white shirts, top hats and heavily bearded, latter day Abraham Lincolns. From Kashgar they headed north to Aksu On the first of August, they left the desert behind and headed to the Tian Shan where they expected to do most of their hunting. The Muzart River flows south out of the great Muzart Glacier and caused them many problems in the numerous fords. They had some local camels to help them cross the river as the camels had longer legs and could take heavier loads. Numerous stories of men and ponies being washed away sprinkle the accounts of crossing rivers. The Muzart, like the Karakorum Pass, has been used for centuries and at this point of time, the Chinese had organized a couple of outposts staffed with helpers. These helpers cut ice steps on the southern side of the pass, through the glacier. On the other side, they organized ponies and campsites. Again, the accounts of carcasses lining the route must have given all pause.
This route has been abandoned now. Longer routes that cut through lower passes bypass this treacherous glacier. But in the past, the maintenance of the pass was hit or miss, depending on the political climate. Another explorer in Chinese Turkistan was Baron Mannerheim, who crossed this way in 1906 on his way from Kashgar to the Ili Valley. Carl Mannerheim was a Finnish aristocrat who served in the Russian military. He maintained that the most exciting event of his life was to take part in the coronation of Emperor Nicholas II in 1896. By the first decade of the twentieth century, he had separated from his wife and was at loose ends. He undertook a mission from the czar to become a spy in China, to seek out possible routes for an invasion and to judge the local tribes’ sentiment towards the Han Chinese, their current overlords. He traveled from Turkestan to Beijing for two years, posing as an ethnographic collector. He teamed up with the French archeologist Paul Pelliot, but they were unsuitable companions and split up when Pelliot found lucrative digging in abandoned Buddhist ruins. He must have been an excellent spy as Macartney, the British consul in Kashgar, never mentioned the Baron as being anything other than what he outwardly pretended to be. Macartney had a reputation as being a very astute judge of character and a long history of being at the center of the Great Game between Britain and Russia. Mannerheim traveled through the Tian Shan with a small team of locals, camping out at local camping spots, and occasionally stopping to do a bit of shooting of the local fauna. He described the snow, the locals and the exhaustion that he and his fellow travelers endured crossing the pass.
One hundred years after Mannerheim made his trip, a Canadian-Finn, Eric Enno Tamm, attempted to retrace his journey. One part which he was unable to do was to go over the Muzart Pass, which by the late twentieth century, had been abandoned. Tamm reluctantly went by comfortable transport around the Tian Shan.
One year after the Roosevelts crossed the mountains where I spent the night, another intrepid couple came this way. Owen Lattimore was an American who had grown up in China, where his parents had business. He was shipped off to England during the First World War where he attended school. At the end of his time, he qualified for a place at university, but his parents were unable to afford the fees, so he returned to China. He had learned Chinese from his parents’ servants and now began to study the language and culture in a more systematic way as a traveling businessman. If there was a long, dangerous journey to be made with the company he worked for, he volunteered to undertake it. By the mid 1920’s, he had determined to one day travel along the Silk Road. Eleanor Holgate, avid hiker and Rocky Mountain explorer, world traveler and teacher in China, met Owen in Peking and they married in 1925. They had planned a honeymoon that would take them from Peking to Delhi through Chinese Turkestan. However, they did not plan on the ‘warlords’ of China in the 1920’s and 30’s. After months of waiting, Owen finally found a place on a camel train, one of the last of its kind, traveling to Urumqi through Mongolia. It was a rough trip and he knew that it would be dangerous for Eleanor, as a woman, to go this way. They made plans to meet in Russia, near the border in a few months’ time. (This is a story for another time.)
By the summer of 1927, they were in the Tian Shan mountains, making their way south to Kashgar. They followed the Tekes River up from Gulja, and then entered the mountains, wandering for weeks in the wilderness. They were always accompanied by local guides, often ones foisted upon them by the local Han Chinese. All through their travels, the locals were impressed by Lattimore’s ability in Chinese, and the fact that he had brought his wife with him. His real wife, not a ‘traveling wife’. But the Kirghiz and Kazaks of the mountains were less impressed with the Lattimores’ status as wealthy Western travelers. They followed the same route as the Roosevelts and encountered many who had met the “Dukes of America.” As there was no way of describing the American lack of titles for someone so important as the sons of a president, the locals called them “Dukes”. The dukes had better tents, more ponies, more food, wine in bottles, and they brought their own servants, including special servants for their dogs! They spread around bigger tips. But as Owen noted in his book High Tartary, “The appearance of our typewriters caused much chatter in the yurts of the High Tian Shan, and a slight fall in the ducal reputation. It seemed a pity that dukes should have had to write their books by hand.”
They approached the Muzart Pass with only slight trepidation, as by this point in their travels, they were weary and not inclined to worry much about the difficulty or the danger. After all, people had crossed this way for centuries. Mist, rain and snow marked their crossing. Lattimore noted that the pass was a gateway and they were leaving the world of horse-riding nomads behind. Avalanches could be heard all around them as they warmed themselves by a small fire in a cave. He noted the government-imposed helpers on either side of the pass. Within days, they were down from the mountains and faced the Takla Makan.
The night I spent in the Tekes Valley was one of restlessness due to the wind and my own thoughts. I got up as soon as I heard the door being unlocked in the dim light of dawn, and scurried off to the outhouse. As I opened the door to the outside, I was met with silence, the profound silence of snow. A few inches of soft white new snow lay over everything. I had hoped to make another trip to the Nalata Highlands, where I had been the day before. I wanted another chance to see the wide green meadows, the high mountains, and maybe get another photo of the eagle. But the snow would make the winding road dangerous. It had been scary the day before, but now with snow, water and mud, I knew the driver would not chance it. My photo with the Kirghiz eagle would be the last I would see of these highlands.
Notes:
Lattimore, Owen. 1930, High Tartary, Kodansha International
Lattimore, Eleanor Holgate. 1934, Turkestan Reunion, Kodansha International
Roosevelt, Theodore and Kermit. 1926, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, Charles Scribner’s Sons
Tamm, Eric Enno. 2011, The Horse That Leaps though Clouds, Counterpoint
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