Scene-57

In this scene Drekk sets out with the monk Chen Hu in search of Nala. Their path leads them to the edge of the dread Taklamakan Desert. The scene opens with a brief thematic narrative and then presents the characters in the heart of the desert. Drekk has a strange moment of ephifany there as he stares out at the endless ocean of shifting sand dunes. - JS

Taklamakan

There is a still point in the center of every circle, the most distant and remote place from any point along its edge, but yet the single point that is equidistant to all others that surround it. From here all places on the circle may be seen with ‘equal eyes,’ and the effort to reach any of the myriad points along the edge may be achieved by only the slightest turn in any direction. Like the hub of a wheel, the center is possessed of a certain calm and every movement there is one of slow deliberation, unhurried and sublime. A thin thread trails away from it in every direction, and is fixed fast upon any of the thousand, thousand points of that circle, a sure connection to that one place in the center of innermost calm.

All things are eventually drawn back again to the sanctified stillness of this unmoving center. Such is the way of things, and it can be seen in the movement of water within a stream, in the movement of clouds in the skies, and in the sure, steady navigation of the stars themselves. All things are bound by this center, and therefore destined to return to it in time. The fate of a man’ s life is also tethered to this center, though the effort of his desire would pull him always in the opposite direction, straining away with the centrifugal labor of his aspiration. Some men spend their whole lives wrenching against the sure, steady cord that binds them to the hub of the center. They think that their freedom might be gained by force of determined will, or sheer effort alone. Others reach for some imagined vision that they perceive to be just beyond the edge of the circle of their life, longing, yearning and yet ever unfulfilled.

One man, having witnessed all the struggle, and turmoil and pain and suffering in this circle of life, came to a moment of rest and undoing. Instead of reaching and striving, he released his self to the inevitable flow of things, and soon found himself drifting effortlessly inward, pulled back to the center with a natural and unerring certainty. There he sat, unmoving, unreaching, empty, and without any effort or concern. There he sat, a singular point, sanctified by the transcendent stillness. Opening his eyes from the heart of the circle, he could look out upon every edge of his life, every place, every moment, and every memory with ‘equal eyes.’ It suddenly seemed to him that everything he had done or experienced before that moment was but a vision or a dream, and that had he only just awakened from this dream in a moment of holy awareness. The name he took upon himself after that single moment in the still and unmoving center of all things, was ‘Buddha,’ the awakened one, and his insight changed the world.

The heart of the desert was just such a place of stillness and sublime certainty, long hidden from the eyes of men who walked on the roads of life that traced its edges. All the feverish energy of their lives, was played out on the circle, all trade, and commerce, and flight and striving; all coming and going and every fair return was the province of the rim of that great wheel. But the desert in the center of it all sat unmoved, unconcerned, and forever indifferent to the fervent desires of men. No road could be made there, for the desert would shift and move until it had blotted the trail away. No river would carry water there for long, even at the height of the rich spring melt and the abundant monsoonal rains of the summer. And if no road could be made, and no water found, men would forsake the desert as a place to be feared and shunned; peopled only with the vagrant spirits of the dead—the nameless ghosts and devils of unseen worlds. If a man walked there, they said, he could not return. Thus the name of the desert was given in fear, and shaped as a warning—Taklamakan, the land of no return.

In every man’s life, however, there comes a time when his desire drives him to face even the greatest of his fears. There is a time where he suddenly comes to feel that the ceaseless distraction in the circle he walks, that the endless mind-numbing chanting of his voice and prayer must be stilled. A man could spend his life walking in circles, like the pilgrims circumambulating some hidden truth at the center of a shrine, but there comes to each and every one a moment of pause, when they stop, and bow, and face the center with only the promise of faith to guide them, or perhaps the unreasoning abandon of love.

For Drekk, this was just such a moment, a time of turning inward from the edge of his life, and pushing forward to the center. Many would die with the effort, he knew, but some might live. As he stood on the northern banks of the Tarim River, staring south to the desert beyond, he was possessed with an inner sense of foreboding. He knew well the tales that had been told of that place, distant, remote, unfeeling and full of dread. Still, he felt himself pulled there, and drawn inward by the sure, certain knowledge that his time had come at last. It was here. It was now. He stood at last on the edge of the circle, and prepared to step forward, his eyes sweeping along the wide, wandering bed of Old Man Tarim.

“This is the edge,” he said to himself as much to the monk who stood beside him. “The river marks the boundary, Chen Hu. Beyond there is only the desert. How far it goes, I cannot say, for I have never met a man who crossed safely to the south. Oh, it is rumored that a way may be found, but no man can point to it. Still, I must go this way, understand? If you wish to leave and turn back to the safety of the cities and towns to the north, now is the time.”

Chen Hu looked at him, squinting up at the tall brawny man and smiling. “You are a priest now?” He poked at him in his characteristic way. “You sound too holy. The desert is desert. Only sand. If you must go there, then Chen Hu will follow you as well. The cities and towns will wait.”

“Yes, the desert is only sand, Chen Hu, but you cannot eat sand or drink it. This will be a very hard trek. It will be long, and cold, and if the winds rise on the open desert as they did some days past, it could be fatal. I beg you to consider now, and turn back while you can. You may go just there, along this northern bank and you will come to a trail that will lead you up to the village of Chimen south of Shahyar. From there you can head north to Kucha and live out your days as you see fit. I have silver for you, if that is your worry. You may buy and sell all the incense and prayer scrolls you wish. You can visit the shrines and walk your hundred circles, and sit in the inns at night for your ‘right eating,’ as you call it.”

“Tired of buying and selling,” Chen Hu replied fervently. “Tired of scrolls, and walking circles. All done. Stomach full now, and I am ready to walk straight.” He pointed off across the wide river bed to the desert. The setting sun was glowing on the flowing dunes at the edge of his sight, beckoning with their mystery and beauty.

“Your stomach may be full now,” Drekk warned, “but if you follow me it may be empty again very soon. We have rations for a week, or perhaps ten days. If we are lost, or beset by a storm, or if the desert is wider than a man can walk, then we will die out there. You understand?”

“Better to be lost there than here,” Chen Hu clasped his breast to his heart. “Something tells Chen Hu that you are not lost yet. You are the scout man, yes? Chen Hu will follow.”

Drekk had tried his best to discourage the monk, but it was clear to him that he would not turn back. He could get angry, and cast the man away, but what good would that do? He knew Chen Hu would be stubborn enough to follow him, even if he did forsake him in anger. In truth, he was secretly glad of the monk’s company, though he felt weighted now with the responsibility for his life. He made one last argument, and it almost seemed a confession as he spoke.

“Yes, I am a scout man. Still, I have often led men astray, and some have died because of the error of my ways. I do not wish to be responsible for the death of another who follows me in good faith, ever again.”

Chen Hu pursed his lips, with a look on his face that seemed he was about to start a lecture. “See that pack on your back?”

“What of it?” Drekk craned his neck to look back over his shoulder, thinking his bindings had come loose.

“That is yours. You carry it. See this bundle at the end of my walking stick? That is mine. I will carry it. Same with a man’s life. Each one carries his own.”

Drekk could not help but smile. “Look who sounds like a priest now!”

“Not a priest,” Chen Hu corrected him. “Only a monk now. But time to grow, yes?”

They set out together, heading down the slopes of low dunes that fringed the wide bed of the river. Though the year was old and the water in the river was low, the bed took them nearly an hour to cross, a testament to the great flood of water that had come to this region in years past. When they finally made it to the black mud of the far bank they were cold and wet. Thankfully, Drekk found a well shielded nook between three high tamarisk cones and allowed a fire so they could dry off their clothing. He told Chen Hu to rest for a while for he needed some time to scour the southern bank for signs of his quarry. He had been able to track them unerringly for many li as their path led south past the farms and sheep runs west of Kucha. He knew that the river was their first and best chance to mask their trail. He promised to return soon, and then set off on his own, his eyes scouring the reedy southern banks of the river.

Some hours later he was struggling along a rocky section of the ground when he noticed a telltale sign. It was another small pearl, gleaming at him with a faint sheen of opalescent white from a bed of moss and decayed weeds. He snatched it up, scrutinizing the ground very closely before he found the sure mark of foot falls as they made their way through a scatter of rocks and stones. The maker of the prints had been using the rocks as a way of further masking the trail. Drekk saw obvious signs when a small foot had slipped from the edge of a stone and left a mark in the ground. Elated, he stooped to create a small arrangement of stones, appearing very natural, but one he would be sure to recognize again when he saw it. Then he turned back toward Chen Hu, counting each footfall along the way in the dark.

They rested for a brief time before he urged the monk out from under his warm blankets to begin the long trek back along the river to find the starting point of the trail. Two hours later they reached the place, and started south into the sparse scrubland. Drekk knew that he had been right in his guess, for the second pearl was ample evidence that someone was deliberately leaving tokens of their passing to be found. He knew in his heart that it was Nala.

Through Drekk’s great skill, they were able to follow the trail for another three days to the south, moving always at night, and traveling very slowly so as not to miss any turn or doubling back. The farther they went, the less his adversaries seemed to take any care to mask their passing. In the beginning they would keep to rocky soil, or track through thick reed beds here and there as a way of hiding their tracks. This cost Drekk much time to locate the other end of their trail and take up the hunt again. Now the trail was more obvious to see, moving between these obstacles for the sake of speed or comfort, and always moving south.

Soon the kumush reeds and desert scrub gave way altogether, and the sands began to array themselves in ridges of low dunes, perhaps some twenty feet high, with occasional clusters of Sag Sag plants here and there. These proved quite an obstacle at first, for Drekk had to move carefully, taking care that they would not be spied out by watching eyes in the night. In time the dunes seemed to be made of finer grains of sand, and became more oriented to the south, making it possible to scale a long, yellow sand dawan and march along its ridge top. If more stealth was needed they could navigate the deep troughs between these great waves of flowing sand. On the fifth day, Drekk was forced to spend the last few hours of each march for the digging of a well in the sandy soil. All but one small bag of the water they had carried with them was exhausted. Using his knowledge of the land, he was able to find low depressions where the soil between two sand ridges seemed to droop a bit. There he dug shallow wells, sometimes the height of a man deep before he would encounter wet clay and eventually find a trickle of salty, underground water that would fill up the bottom of his hole. In some places the water was much sweeter, and on these occasions he would fill as many lamb skin bags as possible. Each night the desert grew colder, and they soon found that all their water was freezing to ice, forcing them to huddle with a water bag close to their bodies at night.

Thankfully, the winds were nearly a dead calm. In fact, that had been the one saving grace that had allowed him to maintain a steady hold on the trail they had been following. If any more pearls were dropped, Drekk never saw them. Still, his uncanny skill in reading the slightest change in the smoothness of the land allowed him to hold fast to the track.

They struggled on, the sand dawans climbing ever higher, as though the waves in a storm tossed sea had been frozen in place. Soon the dunes towered nearly a hundred feet in height, and a cold wind began to blow, shearing off eddies of sand from the tops of the ridges around them. It began to filter down into the trough where they had been careful to mask their advance, and their eyes became soiled and bleary with dust.

“This is no good,” Drekk paused, exhausted, and wondering how in the world Chen Hu was able to keep up with him. The monk came ambling up from behind, murmuring something to himself, his head turned downward as if watching his own quiet footfalls. “We must rest and use some of our water to clean our face and eyes,” said Drekk. “My vision is blurred, and I may miss something. In fact I think I will have to risk climbing to the ridge tops tonight to see if I can spy out the trail from above. We have been loosing the moon, and …” Chen Hu nearly walked right passed him as he spoke, and Drekk reached out to the man, spinning him gently around to look in his face. The monk’s cheeks and lips were quivering and Drekk perceived the subtle tremor of the man’s body as he shivered in the cold.

“Chen Hu!” He whispered as loud as he could. “You are too cold. Here, sit and take shelter under my cape, and I will risk a fire.” They had gone without fire for two nights now, as Drekk was afraid the smoke would be seen or smelled. Now he took out the last few branches that he had been carrying on the top of his pack, and set about building a deep fire pit. I’ll just have to risk it, he thought. I think they are many hours ahead, in any case. There is no way they could see the flame down here beneath these towering dunes, and when the smoke rises, the wind will disperse it quickly. It will be enough to break his chill, but unless I find some sign of tree growth or tamarisk, this will be the last fire for a time. Let me get some hot mutton tea into him, and stuff him with the last of the nann bread. Then we’ll have to consider traveling by day. Certainly my quarry is doing this by now. The nights are too cold. No doubt they are fast asleep somewhere by now. There are only a few hours of moonlight left tonight. We will eat and sleep, and then leave mid-day tomorrow when the sun is high.

They slept the remainder of the night, and Drekk heard the ominous swelling of the wind as it coursed through the high ridges of sand around them. The fire and mutton tea had been a saving balm to Chen Hu, warming both his spirits and body against the dark empty chill of the night. The next morning Drekk awoke just before the dawn, and re-lit the last embers of their fire to brew hot tea. This time he added some of Tando’s special herbs and forced Chen Hu to sit quietly, sipping the brew and warming himself by the last fleeing remnants of the fire. Then he set off to climb a nearby sand dawan, scaling to the top of a great ridge that wound a sinuous, wind-sculpted path to the south.

When he reached the crest he was rewarded by the vision of an endless sea of sand, stretching away from him to the horizon and bathed in the most lovely shades of red and gold he had ever seen with the coming of the dawn. The ocher crests of sand were crowned in tawny swathes of glittering gold as the sunlight washed over the landscape. The dunes rose and fell in a series of undulating waves, deepening at the troughs to shades of amethyst purple before descending into shadow. They extended in all directions, for as far as his eye could see and he gaped at the scene, enchanted with the majestic stillness and serene majesty of the desert.

All of the stories were wrong, he thought. All of the tales of horror and hungry ghosts and demons that would claw their way up from ancient lost cities hidden beneath the sands were wrong! As he looked at the land now, he sensed the tranquil silence of the place, the vast natural beauty that was as varied and random as the blue-white clouds above, yet possessed of an inner rhythm that shaped and contoured the sculpted dunes as though they had been fashioned by the hand of some unseen artist. The serenity of the desert seemed to reach into his very soul, quieting and comforting. These sands had all once been part of the massive ridges of mountain that surrounded the Tarim Basin. As millennia passed, the steady hand of wind and water had slowly eroded the rocks, breaking them into boulders and stones and piles of bare gravel that tumbled down from the heights above, carried by a thousand streams and rivers that found their way into the basin with the turning of each season. As the eons passed, the stones and gravel were ground and eroded to smaller and smaller particles, until they were light enough to be scooped up on the tireless winds and gathered here in this immense ocean of sand that formed the very heart of the Taklamakan.

Looking on the dunes, he was struck with a vital awareness of the endless connection of all things. Here were the sands that had once held forth on the high majestic peaks of the Tien Shan, the Celestial Mountains to the north, or the purple shrouded mystery of the Pamirs to the west, or again the ragged heights of the Kunlun Shan south, or the great Himalayas beyond. And look how the soul of the mountains remains in them, he thought! The sands had arrayed themselves once more in vast ridges, mirroring the stony ranges on every side, as though they yearned to recover the grandeur they once knew in the mountains. Here they slept, a silent echo of the ancestral stone they were born from, and Drekk found a resonance with them, reaching back through the ages to take the barest hold on something old, and ancient and holy that was the very source of his own being.

Here in this immeasurable, vacant expanse of rolling sands he seemed the only living thing on earth, a solitary, sentient being that had been brought here to bear witness to all of this, and know the subtle but sure connection that joined all things to a certainty. He breathed in deeply, smelling the tang of the desert sands and the barest tinge of salt in the air. At once he imagined the great oceans beyond the mountains south—measureless, swells of water that flowed in jade green waves with crests of foam and brine, the liquid, living counterpart to the silent waves of sand about him. The hand of the artist was seen in all things, he concluded, in the great oceans, and high mountains, and here in this boundless sea of sand that seemed to blend the essential qualities of each. The desert appeared as a silent shadow of the mountains, but yet it was alive with the same movement and life of the sea. To look upon it all was the most humbling experience of his life, for he seemed to know himself now on another level, and suddenly felt himself to be ancient beyond his ken, and connected as well to everything around him.

Then the wind swelled up in the distance and stirred the caps of the highest dunes, sending a stream of golden sand fleeing west before the rising sun. As he watched it he was struck with the realization that the scene around him, vast and still, was actually alive, a fluid and ever changing motion as the winds played over the dunes, shifting their course and scale and texture over time. In that moment he knew the ceaseless and eternal rhythm of his own life, blown this way and that on the winds of circumstance, re-shaped by his experience, and contoured by the hearts and minds of every other person he had ever known. He was so much more than he seemed, or ever thought himself to be! The sense of himself as a single entity, a lone man struggling through the desolation of an endless desert was suddenly gone. Now he seemed a gilded voyager, gazing with wonder and awe upon a newly discovered land, and seeing there the image of his own soul for the first time.

The sun blazoned up over the horizon, chasing the hues of amber and orange from the scene, and then a sudden rake of clouds sailed across the sky, driven by an unseen river of air and wind that he could not yet feel. They cast a veil across the sun, and in an instant, the rich shades of color faded to pale yellow and sallow gray. His hold on that tenuous cord that seemed to bind him to the land, and join the desert itself to the oceans and mountains of the earth, now slipped from his grasp, and fled from him. He was shaken from his reverie, a simple man again, alone in the desert and reaching south with searching eyes for any sign of life or movement. As the vision faded, he felt his own inner longing again, magnified now in the great emptiness about him, a hollowness of spirit and a loneliness that yearned for fulfillment. He cast about him, as though desperate to recapture the insight the vision of the desert had fired in his mind. It was gone. He was here again, human, tired and hungry—just a small and insignificant creature crawling on the back of an enormous dawan of sand. And he was lost.

How would he ever hope to find another living soul in all this bleak, vacant land about him? The winds were rising up now, and the eddies of blowing sand that had streamed like holy pennants a moment ago now seemed like portents of doom to him. The shifting sands would blot out every trace of the trail he had been following. The long, still reprieve the desert had given him thus far was coming to an end. He could sense the wind turning, swinging around to the north, and gathering strength. How would he follow her now? She could drop a thousand pearls behind her and the desert would swallow them in a single heartbeat. How would he find her now?

The futility of his situation suddenly fell upon him like a great weight. He cast himself down on the crest of the ridge, and wept. His body trembled as he struggled to hold back the emotion, unwilling to relinquish something so precious as the water of his teardrops to the dry hunger of the desert. But he could not restrain the immensity of the sorrow that welled in him now. He had not cried tears like this for many years. He now doubted everything in his life that had brought him to this forsaken place. What was he doing here? Why had he come? He felt empty, and lost and alone.

Then a strange voice came to him behind the quiet drone of the wind. The voice was calling him, thin and indistinct, as though the wind itself was struggling to fashion the words. He struggled up onto his hands and knees, instinctively looking for the sound. The voice wavered on the wind, formless but yet insistent. It was calling him, he was certain of that, and he looked about him to try and locate the source of the sound, his heart beating faster as he remembered the tales of naga spirits and windy ghouls who would call to a man in the desert. Tears streaked his cheeks and his vision suddenly cleared. There was something there, far below, a smear of color in the shadow of the high ridge of sand. It was moving, waving, calling to him. Then his sight resolved into focus and he saw Chen Hu. The spirits fled from his mind. The monk was beckoning to him from the base of the ridge, a hundred feet or more below him. In a moment of calm he heard the familiar voice calling up to him on the cool morning air.

“What will you do there? Pray to the Buddha? You pray too long! Time to walk now.”

Drekk raised an arm, waving acknowledgement, and sighed heavily. Yes, he was tired, and hungry, and perhaps even lost now in the heart of the desert. But he was not alone, and it was time to walk.

There are a total of 73 scenes in Taklamakan, though I am not presenting sample scenes beyond 67 as they reveal too much of the novel’s plot resolution. Thanks for reading! I hope you will look forward to getting the book when it comes out later this year. -JS