The Merket bazar was one of the poorest and most squalid I had seen in the course of my travels, and was in curious contrast to the apparent prosperity of the large oasis. The inhabitants, who hovered about our camp all day long, were certainly of a lower type than the ordinary villagers of Chinese Turkestan, but as far as I could judge they did not merit the scathing condemnation of one writer, who says: “These people are in the most backward state of human intelligence that it is possible to imagine human beings to be capable of. In physical strength and stature they are perhaps the most miserable objects on the face of the earth, but their social position is still more deplorable ...”
DULANI MUSICIANS.
Page 224.
When we left Merket we plunged into sand covered with low tamarisk scrub and the toghrak tree, populus heterophyllus, peculiar, I understand, to Chinese Turkestan, which looks like a cross between the willow and the poplar. When this tree is quite young all the leaves are pinnated, like those of the willow; at an older stage the upper part has the poplar leaf, and when it is full-grown there is no trace of the narrow willow-like leaf, which has dropped off. It was now mid-October and the foliage was a brilliant gold, bright as the trees in a Canadian fall, but without the flaming scarlets of the maple and oak of the Dominion.
We and our belongings had to cross the Yarkand River again in one of the clumsy ferry-boats, and the vigorous-looking boatman was obliged to make such Herculean efforts to pole his unwieldy craft round that I was not surprised to learn that men of his calling contract heart complaint from the strain.
The ferryman’s wife, a handsome young woman, charmingly clad in a rainbow-striped coat and a green velvet gold-embroidered cap, watched her husband’s progress, and I was told that she was a Dulani. Certainly she looked a credit to her tribe, as she strolled about unconcernedly among the men, with many of whom she exchanged greetings. Her bare feet were thrust into the overshoes that all wear over the long riding-boots, and her big silver earrings added to the picturesqueness of her appearance. I was seated on a felt beside a table heaped with grapes and melons, and smiled at her as she gradually edged up to me on pretence of flicking the flies off the fruit. She held her pretty little boy by the hand, the child all too warmly clad in a padded red coat and fur cap, and a small gift unsealed her lips, putting us on such friendly terms that she was delighted to be photographed by the first European woman she had ever seen.
And now we turned our backs on the Yarkand River and were piloted across sandy tracks and rode through barren spaces dotted with tamarisk, towards the dunes of a strip of desert, the loose sand of which made the going heavy for our horses. The sun sank at half-past five and, as is usual in the East, there was hardly any twilight, but by the waning moonlight we could see the track as we plodded along, our horses snorting suspiciously and starting at isolated tamarisk bushes or stunted toghrak trees. At last we surmounted a dune and saw below us a deserted mud building and the gleam of a pool of water, indicating the goal of our march. To me there was something curiously eerie in the scene; for the moonlight cast strange shadows, and the desert seemed as if it were listening for I knew not what, reminding me of Meredith’s lines:
I neighbour the invisible
So close that my consent