At Rock’s former lodgings in Lijiang town, we have seen his bookcase, his pigeonhole desk, his wide chair (‘because he was so fat!’) and the remains of his garden beside the Jade Stream.
At Nuluko (the name means ‘the foot of the silver cliffs’) his country house is almost as he left it, except that, instead of herbarium specimens, the porch is spread with drying turnip tops. The present occupant, Li Wen Biao, was one of Rock’s muleteers; he showed us the master’s camp-bed and the washhouse where he would set up a canvas bath from Abercrombie & Fitch.
We have been to Tiger Leaping Gorge and seen the cliff-line plummeting 11,000 feet into the Yangtze. We have watched the Nakhi women coming down from the Snow Range, with their bundles of pine and artemisia; and one old woman with a bamboo winnowing basket on her back, and the sun’s rays passing through it:Artemisia
Arundinaria
Winnowed in fate’s tray . . .
Canto CXII
The wild pear trees are scarlet in the foothills, the larches like golden pagodas; the north slopes ‘blue-green with juniper’. The last of the gentians are in flower, and the flocks of black sheep brindle the plain.
When the stag drinks at the salt spring and sheep come down with the gentian sprout . . .
Canto CX
One evening, walking back to town across the fields, I came on a boy and girl reading aloud beside the embers of a fire. Their book was a traditional Chinese romance and, on its open page, there was a picture of Kuan Yin, goddess of mercy.
The Nakhi are a passionate people and, even today, rather than submit to a hated marriage, young lovers may poison or drown themselves, or jump to their death from the mountain.
At the Nakhi Institute in Lijiang, we were shown a pair of pine saplings, adorned like Christmas trees, commemorating two people who killed themselves for love. Rock wrote that such suicides become ‘wind-spirits’, reminding Pound of Dante’s Paolo and Francesca, whose shades were ‘so light on the wind’, and who, readers of the Inferno will remember, fell in love while reading a romance of chivalry.
At Shigu, where the Yangtze takes a hairpin bend, we have seen the Stone Drum:by the waters of Stone Drum,
the two aces . . .
Canto CI
The drum is a cylinder of marble in a pavilion by the willows. The ‘aces’ refer to two Chinese generals – one lost in legend, the other of the Ming dynasty, whose victory is recorded on the drum itself. Our friend Tsong-Zong raised his hand to the surface and rattled off the characters:Snowflakes the size of a hand
Rain joining sunset to sunset
The wind quick as arrows . . .
Commands quick as lightning
And the bandits loose their gall . . .
Their black flag falls to the earth . . .
They run for their lives . . .
Heads heaped like grave mounds
Blood like rain . . .
The dikes choked with armour and rattan shields
The trail of foxes and the trail of jackals
Have vanished from the battle field . . .
Rock wrote of a tradition that, should the Stone Drum split, a catastrophe will fall on the country. About fifteen years ago, some Red Guards did indeed split it. (It has since been stuck together.) We wondered if, secretly, the iconoclasts had seen the foxes and jackals in themselves.
We have listened to a Nakhi orchestra that in the bad years would practise in secret: on a stringless lute, a muffled drum and a flute turned at a right angle to the mouthpiece.
In the hills above Rock’s village is the Jade Dragon Monastery, Yufeng Si, where we have sat with the lama hearing him tell how he would sneak into the monastery at night, on pain of prison or worse, to save the five-hundred-year-old camellia that stretches, trained in a trellis, around the temple court.
Of all the places we have seen, the monastery seems the loveliest. But this is what Rock had to say of it: ‘It is the home of rats, whose excrements lie inches deep . . . dangerous to visit . . . books wrapped in dusty silks . . . the most forlorn and forsaken lamasery I know of.’
Also paying his respects to the lama was the Regional Commissioner for Monuments. I asked him about the horribly battered temple, dating from the Tang dynasty, which we could see in the valley below. It is dedicated to the mountain god, Saddo, lord of the Snow Range and protector from calamities.
The Commissioner answered, emphatically: ‘The restoration will begin next month,’ as if also to say that the world’s oldest, subtlest, most intelligent civilisation has now returned to the sources of its ancient wisdom.
In the village of Beisha, around the corner from the Doctor’s house, there is another, smaller temple, its garden desolate, its cypresses fallen, its balustrades smeared with graffiti: ‘Confess and we will be lenient!’
Here, under Taoist symbols of the Eternal Return, the Red Guards set up their so-called courts. Yet it occurred to us that these ill-tempered scrawls were not, after all, so distant from the spirit of the ‘Tao-te-ching’ of Lao-tze:How did the great rivers and seas gain dominion over the hundred lesser streams?
By being lower than they.
The sun goes down behind the mountain, and we must, finally, say goodbye to the Doctor. He is anxious to give me from his pharmacy a plant with the windblown name of Saussurea gossipiphora, which only grows on the snow-line. Soon, he hopes to leave his practice in the care of his son and be free to gather herbs in the mountains. He lifts his eyes to Jade Dragon Peak and, suddenly, in his silver greatcoat, becomes the living image of my favourite upland traveller, the poet Li Po:You ask me why I live in the grey hills.
I smile but do not answer, for my thoughts are elsewhere.
Like peach petals carried by the stream, they have gone
To other climates, to countries other than the world of men.
1986
NOMAD INVASIONS
During the Spring of 376 AD the Roman garrisons on the Danube frontier learned Nomads were on the move. Over the steppe lands that stretched to the east came news that the Gothic kingdom of Ermanarich in the Crimea had fallen to the Huns, an unknown people of mounted archers, bestial in appearance, whose home lay close to the ice-bound ocean. ‘No one ever ploughs a field in their country,’ wrote the contemporary historian Ammianus Marcellinus, ‘or touches a plough handle. They are ignorant of home, law or settled existence, and they keep roaming from places in their wagons. If you ask one of their children where he comes from, he was conceived in one place, born far away and brought up still farther off.’ Gothic refugees implored the Roman government for asylum within the imperial frontiers. And, putting themselves under the protection of the Emperor, they were allowed to cross the Danube in their thousands ‘like the rain of ashes from an eruption of Etna’. But their hosts failed in the basic obligations of hospitality, and within two years the Goths had revolted and killed the Emperor Valens himself at the Battle of Adrianople. Thereafter the Empire was doomed to further barbarian inroads.
However momentous the fall of the Roman Empire may seem in retrospect, it was merely an episode in a conflict between two incompatible, yet complementary, systems – nomadism and settled agriculture. The arrival of the Huns on their stocky ponies was no new event. The ‘unharvested steppe’ forms a continuous strip of grazing from Hungary to Manchuria. It was a reservoir of nomad peoples – Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, and later Avars, Magyars, and Mongols – who migrated up and down it and periodically overflowed on to the sown lands of civilisation. Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt faced the same problem from the men of the fringe, whose mercurial shiftings in the encircling deserts and mountains were a source of anxiety in times of national ascendancy, of terror in times of collapse. As the Hungarian historian Andreas Alfoldi wrote, there existed along the Rhine and Danube a ‘moral barrier’ between the barbarian and civilised worlds. The grandiose Roman fortifications, like the Great Wall of China, were simply ‘the secondary consequences and the reflection of that moral isolation’. In a modifie
d form the confrontation continues as the barrier of incomprehension between the revolutionary insurgent and established authority.
The quarrel of nomad and settler is, of course, the same as that of Abel the shepherd and Cain the planter and founder of the first city. As befitted a Bedouin people, the Hebrews sided with Abel. Jehovah found his offering of a ‘firstling of the flock’ more acceptable than Cain’s ‘fruit of the ground’. Cain’s act of fratricide is judged a typical crime of settlement, and as punishment Jehovah sterilises the soil and forces him to wander on a penitential pilgrimage, ‘a fugitive and a vagabond’.
True nomads are sons of Ishmael, the wild man, whose ‘hand shall be against every man, and every man’s hand against him’, activated by what Gibbon called ‘the spirit of emigration and conquest’. The Book of Joshua, for example, is a paean of praise for the ideal of nomadic insurgency. As the nineteenth-century traveller James Morier wrote of the I‘lyats, or wandering tribes of Persia, they ‘look down on the Shehrnishins (or dwellers in cities) as degenerate, applauding the hardihood and simplicity of manners of those who have no other dwelling place than the tent, and reviling those who recur to the luxuries of a house and the protection of a city.’
In turn the citizen reviled the nomad as a savage wrecker of progress. And, since literature itself is the invention of settlers, the nomadic record looks black in writing. Thus an ancient Egyptian official would write of the Bedouin Hebrews, ‘Their name reeks more than the stink of bird droppings’, or a Chinese Imperial Secretary of the Eastern Huns,’ . . . in their breasts beat the hearts of beasts . . . from the most ancient times they have never been regarded as a part of humanity’. Roman authorities treated the citizens of the Empire as men, outsiders as animals, and their historians could calmly compare the annihilation of a Germanic people to a medical cure (salubria medicamenta). Elsewhere, nomad invaders, who migrated onto sown lands, were compared to plagues of locusts and swarms of snakes.
Faced with the acceleration of world population-growth, some modern biologists have diagnosed that the human species is rapidly approaching the ‘swarming stage’,1 thus refining Malthus’s ‘dismal theorem‘ that human populations breed up to the level of their food supply, a proliferation that can only lead to global starvation unless checked by mass mortality. Animal species reach the ‘swarming stage’ when some pressure of natural selection, to which they have been subjected during their evolution, is removed. The result is a population outburst, followed by a neurosis from overcrowding and panic in the face of starvation. Random migrations ensue.
The suicidal march of the Scandinavian lemming to death in the sea is thought by some to shed light on the tragic refugee problems of our day, and a global situation of wandering refugees is predicted. But the apocalyptic idea of total destruction at the hands of migrating hordes is again nothing new. At the time of the Mongol holocaust in the thirteenth century, observers confidently announced the end of the world. The Mongol Khan was Antichrist himself, his armies of mounted nomads the Legions of Gog and Magog. The Mongol military machine generated the same sort of anxiety as the nuclear bomb, and for this reason alone the mechanics of a nomadic invasion are of more than passing interest.
The word nomad derives from the Greek nomos — a pasture. A nomad proper is a mobile pastoralist, the owner and breeder of domesticated animals. To call a wandering hunter ‘nomadic’ is to misunderstand the meaning of the word. Hunting is a technique for killing animals, nomadism for keeping them alive. The psychology of the hunter is as different from the nomad’s as the nomad’s from that of the planter. Nomadism is born of wide expanses, ground too barren for the farmer to cultivate economically – savannah, steppe, desert and tundra, all of which will support an animal population providing that it moves. For the nomad, movement is morality. Without movement, his animals would die. But the planter is chained to his field; if he leaves, his plants wither.
Nomads never roam aimlessly from place to place, as one dictionary would have it. A nomadic migration is a guided tour of animals around a predictable sequence of pastures. It has the same inflexible character as the migrations of wild game, since the same ecological factors determine it. But domestication blunts an animal’s innate sense of time and space. The herdsman replaces this loss with his own acquired skill, plotting his annual orbit to suit the needs of his own particular livestock.
A nomad’s territory is the path linking his seasonal pastures. The tent-dweller invests this path with the emotional attachment a settler reserves for his houses and fields. Iranian nomads call the path II-Rah, The Way. The ‘way’ of one tribe intersects with the ‘ways’ of others, and ill-timed movements lead to conflicts of interest. Herdsmen claim to own their ‘ways’ as their inalienable property; but in practice all they ask is the right of passage through a given stretch of territory at a fixed time of the year. The land holds no interest for them once they have moved on. Thus for a nomad, political frontiers are a form of insanity, based as they are on the aggregation of farmlands.
Today’s nomads, whether they be Quashgais in Iran or Masai in Kenya, are facing their ultimate crisis at the hands of settled administrations. Their way of life is considered an anachronism in a modern state. Nomads are resentful of, and resistant to, change. The ‘problem of the tribes’ is as much an issue to many a modern government as it was to the rulers of an ancient near-eastern city-state. For life in the black tents has not significantly changed since Abraham, the Bedouin sheikh, moved his flock on his ‘journeys from the south even unto Bethel, where his tent had been at the beginning’ (Genesis 13:3).
The automatic discipline of pastoralism encourages a high standard of loyalty among close kin. In most nomad cultures the definition of a human being is ‘he who goes on migrations’. The word arab means a ‘dweller in the tents’ as opposed to hazar, a ‘house dweller’. Again, the latter is less than human.
Yet nomads are notoriously irreligious. They show little interest in ceremonial or protestations of faith. For the migration is of itself a ritual performance, a ‘religious’ catharsis, revolutionary in the strictest sense in that each pitching and breaking of camp represents a new beginning.2 This will account for the violence of a nomad’s reaction when his migration is blocked. Furthermore, if we assume that religion is a response to anxiety, then nomadism must satisfy some basic human aspiration, which settlement does not. It is paradoxical, but not surprising, that the great religions – Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Zoroastrian and Buddhist – were preached among settled peoples who had been nomads. Their ceremonial is saturated with pastoral metaphor, their processions and pilgrimages perform the activities of a pastoral migration in mime. The Hadj, or holy journey to Mecca, is but an artificial migration for settlers to detach them from their profane homes. What then has given the nomad his bad reputation?
The least helpful view suggests that the ‘spirit of emigration and conquest’ is a genetically inherited behavioural trait, which, through the pressures of natural selection, is highly developed in the nomad. In his Evolution of Man and Society Professor C.D. Darlington maintained that the instincts of a gipsy, like the palaeolithic hunter, were adjusted to a life of wandering, and seriously suggested that the royal families of Europe, as well as the Mongols, had a genetic adaptation to the horse. This had enabled their ancestors to win wars, but on mechanised battlefields had brought them ‘headlong to disaster’. But so far the genetic approach to history has been either misleading or malign. The innate superiority of the wandering Nordic Volk was a fantasy. And it is not possible to explain Mongol militancy in genetic terms. The Mongols were a people of hunters who broke out onto the steppe, learned the arts of equitation and pastoralism, and left behind their closely related cousins, the Tungus and Samoyed, who were – and are – among the least violent people in the world; ‘deformed and diminutive savages’, as Gibbon called them, ‘who tremble at the sound of arms’.
Others have suggested that the piles of skulls that marked the passage of a Geng
hiz Khan or the fearsome slave-markets of Bokhara were proof of a primary instinct in man to attack, dominate and kill his own kind, an instinct often suppressed by the institutions of civilised life, but encouraged under the more ‘natural’ conditions of nomadic barbarism. Again this view is unhelpful. Instead, we should perhaps allow human nature an appetitive drive for movement in the widest sense. The act of journeying contributes towards a sense of physical and mental well-being, while the monotony of prolonged settlement or regular work weaves patterns in the brain that engender fatigue and a sense of personal inadequacy. Much of what the ethologists have designated ‘aggression’ is simply an angered response to the frustrations of confinement.
A primary need for movement is borne out by recent studies of human evolution. Professor John Napier3 has shown that the long-striding walk is an adaptation, unique among the primates, for covering distances over open savannahs. The bipedal walk made possible the development of the manufactory hand, and this led to the enlarged brain of our species. Any human baby also demonstrates its instinctive appetite for movement. Babies often scream for the simple reason they cannot bear to lie still. A crying child is a very rare sight on a nomad caravan, and the tenacity with which nomads cling to their way of life, as well as their quick-witted alertness, reflects the satisfaction to be found in perpetual movement. As settlers, we walk off our frustrations. The medieval Church instituted pilgrimage on foot as a cure for homicidal spleen.
The mainsprings of nomadic insurgency must be found within the precarious character of nomadism itself. Arnold Toynbee, following the lead of the fourteenth-century Arab historian, Ibn Khaldun, could never be accused of underestimating the importance of nomad invasions on the course of history. But in A Study of History he favoured the mechanical agency of climatic change to account for the periodic eruptions of nomads from their customary pastures. Travellers in Central Asia, like Sven Hedin or Sir Aurel Stein, had observed that the cities of the Tarim Basin were flourishing in the tenth and eleventh centuries, but two hundred years later lay abandoned after a shift of climate had desiccated the land. This onset of aridity had coincided with the Mongol outburst, and it inspired the American geographer Ellsworth Huntington to plot a sequence of climatic oscillations that would account for every nomad eruption. The idea that the nomads had responded to a climatic challenge admirably commended itself to Toynbee’s scheme and was further reinforced by the story of Jacob and his sons coming down to Egypt ‘when the famine was sore in the land’. But Jacob came as a suppliant, not a conqueror. Whether or not the insurgents would swamp the civilisation depended on its political state at the time. For Toynbee the nomads were either ‘pushed off the steppe or desert or ‘pulled out’ of it as if by suction when internal chaos invited them to raid.