Chapter 1. First Entry

First Entry

I've been waiting way too long to have the time to write this story. Now I want to start. My fictional name is Ginger and the entries you'll find here are also fictional -- excepting everything I'll quote from my wonderful, wonderful old books (most of them found in used bookstores throughthe years and now found on that blessing from heaven, The Internet) about the amazing ancient trade route, The Silk Road.

I have no idea why I am so in love with this region of the world, but there you are. It has fascinated me for many years. Reading about it is like sitting down to talk with a fascinating and learned person. Turning the pages of these books and imagining myself somewhere in the world of their maps is delicious. And so, in a haphazard way, I continue to do it.

You'll find a more organized, respectable body of information in other sites. I'll list them for you (and give you my opinion of them) as we go along.

But my descriptions are for amateurs like me who read the accounts of travelers of long ago and long to see the places they wrote about--until we remember when those accounts were written and remember that those places have changed and we can no longer find what we seek.

So every morning I take my coffee into a little room in my home where I sit down at a small desk piled high with books about the geology and geography and history of that part of the world, and I am transported back into the world I long for, just by reading at a small desk in the mornings.

I've been doing this for many years and have enjoyed myself, but I find that this kind of pastime is like playing tennis without a net: I open my beautiful old books in no order at all, go over the same tracks and think, 'Oh, yes, this is wonderful. I should go more deeply into this one place, this time in history, this particular traveler instead of wandering so randomly from one book to another!' But I never do that. Life intrudes.

But I'm so happy when I read about this area that I just keep doing it. And I make great discoveries. For instance, I had never heard of the Pamir Mountains when I started many years ago, long before that part of the world was in the headlines, back when no one knew where Afghanistan was and Pakistan was still a new country. But I was so intrigued each time I’d find them mentioned here and there, in different texts but without any clear maps, no explanations, just a teasing hint of unknown worlds, that I made it a sort of hobby to find them.

I searched every book I could find for fragments of information. I haunted used bookstores wherever I was for books about the mountains of Central Asia..

And then I found a website that listed the books of hundreds, thousands of used book stores, all over the globe, and I sent for one book after another. I made a tiny clay model of the topography from Xian in China through the Taklamakan Desert to Central Asia, piecing it together from odd little maps and snippets in the books.

[Note: I've found this little model, and as soon as I take a photo of it, I'll put it right here in this entry. That's a promise. In case you're curious, of course, which you very well might not be.]



I'm always trying to understand why people followed this route and not that one. I love finding and copying the precious little bits I find, like the monks and scholars in the dark ages trying to piece together the lost masterpieces of the Greeks and Romans that they found mentioned in this scroll or that. I used to wish I could have been one of those scribes and scholars of the middle ages. I envied what I imagined were their heavenly lives until one day I realized that now, with my life as it has become, I can do exactly the same thing in my own room.

There's such joy in it. I stumble across a brief description about a mountain pass or the source of a river and suddenly a light falls on something I had never been able to figure out: Why does the Indus start on the wrong side of the Himalayas? Do rivers actually disappear suddenly and show up somewhere else? Why would Silk Road travelers go from one place to another along ‘corridors’ no map would show me?

Then, I’d be reading in one of the books I had bought, not looking for an answer, in fact, having forgotten the question, and suddenly, while describing something completely different, the author would reveal the source of the mystery! Every time that happens, I'm as excited as if I had discovered the source of the Nile.

Now, you might ask why I bother with these books now that the Internet has gotten so rich and filled-out that I could find the answer in no time at all. The answer is: the writing. Grateful as I am to wikipedia, you won’t find writing like this in it:

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Geologists are agreed that [in the Jurassic] …land masses, with one exception, …drifted slowly into the positions they occupy today. The exception was India, whose movement was neither slow nor localized. For in the space of less than 50 million years India drifted clean across the Sea of Tethys, from the southern hemisphere to the northern, until it crashed into the underbelly of Asia.

The result was spectacular. For India was like a battering-ram. During its voyage north across the Sea of Tethys, it had passed over one of the hot spots in the earth’s crust so that a vast sheet of basaltic magma had been excreted on to it, so that by the time it collided with Asia it consisted almost entirely of rocks where were volcanic and hard…

The underbelly of Asia, in contrast, consisted of rocks which were sedimentary and soft. For the sea bed of Tethys had been rolled up ahead of the advancing mass of India…and it was these folds of sedimentary rock which, as the continents crashed together, were squeezed upward and ever upward – like toothpaste between the contracting walls of a vice – to form the mountains of central Asia…

The Himalayan rivers are an anachronism, for they were there before the mountains (!) …This has led to a very unusual situation. In most ranges, the watershed lies along the line of its highest peaks: that is, if a range runs east-to-west, the rivers on its northern face flow down to the north, and the rivers on ths southern face flow down to the south. This isn’t the case with the Himalaya. Because the rivers were there first (!); and as the mountains welled up around them, they simply kept to their original courses, cutting deep gorges through the soft upthrusting rock.

Some of these, like the Kali Gandaki, a sheer 18,000 feet from riverbed to mountain peak, are the most spectacular on earth. That is why the watershed of the Himalaya is not where one would expect it to be – along the line of the great peaks Nanga Parbat…Annapurna…Everest…but some 100 miles to the north (!!) and 10,000 feet lower. (!!!)
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He goes on to say that the great rivers of India – the Sutlej, the Indus and the Brahmaputra – all have their source not on the near side of the high mountains where you find them fon the maps flowing south down to the sea, but on the north side of those peaks, the wrong side of the mountains! Look at those names: Everest, Nanga Parbat – yes, the highest mountains on earth, but the rivers were not stopped.

Well, when I read that I lost my breath. I’ve seen it described since, but not well; you could almost miss the explanation in the text. Lovely Mr. Ian Cameron turned one of the slowest motions a human can imagine into a crashing drama, and he explained what I had seen on the map.

I wanted to celebrate. Let the specialists scorn us hobbyists, let them love the more arcane discoveries of their learned fields, no one can feel the joy of the ignorant person who longs to understand when she discovers something so astonishing.

And the language of the greatest specialists, the ones who I call ‘Popularizers,’ those who aren't content to talk only to each other but who want to talk to us, people like me, because they have kept their passion for their work, their language breaks open barriers of incomprehensible details and offers us, the outsiders, the hidden meaning we long for.

So I love Ian Cameron, and if he is still alive and needs something, I would be very happy to try to get it for him, just because he told me – in the way that he told me – why the great Indus starts on the wrong side of the mountains.

I bet I've lost you, haven't I? You’ve probably moved to some other weblog paragraphs ago. How I have wanted to share this with others. But it's not possible, I understand that now. When I try, I see their eyes glaze over. It's hard to understand that not everyone is thrilled to discover that the major rivers that rise north of the Himalayas -- including even the mighty Indus -- flow south, right through the Himalayas because they were there first!

And, think of this, the sub-continent of India is still slamming (in slow motion, of course) into Asia and driving the mountains higher, creating a rain shadow on the far side, creating one of the driest places on earth. A desert called "You go in and you can't come out." A desert that didn't used to be there! Now, think of this: that desert was rainy and full of trees at the same time that the New Testament was being written! That's like yesterday!

Ah, that's so wonderful.

And this is what a trader from China had to push through to sell his wares and buy others from traders who had come from Rome. And it came to be called The Silk Road.

And along this Silk Road were these amazing cultures in Central Asia, nations, empires even, and traveling nuns and scholars, idealists and assassins, Buddhist artists who left caves full of devotional art 1000 years ago, even 2000 -- paintings of the Buddha dressed in classical Greek drapery! That's got what I call a 'Wow factor' of ...I don't know, a big one. And traders. In caravans. Who carried many things, but the most special stuff, the stuff that made it all the way to Rome (although the traders who started out in China weren't even sure Rome existed, they just handed things off to the next trader) -- was silk.

Silk of many colors that flowed over the shameless bodies of wealthy Roman women, making them look naked. Better than naked. And it was so desireable that gold flowed out of the empire back to China diminishing the coffers of gold hard won by conquest until the senators cried to the emperors, Let them buy no more!

Of course, the emperor didn't dare say any such thing.

Well, you may not be reading anymore, but if you've hung on, if you're still here, maybe I can interest you in this thing I love so much. Maybe I can pull you in with a story or two. With the help of my books, I will take myself on fictional journeys into the past to places that are real to me, even though they no longer exist.

So, let me introduce myself. My name is Ginger. My story starts in reality, just a year ago on the day I unexpectedly lost my dreary job at the Miserable Import-Export Company, a small, dark place where I worked like a zombie, unable to extricate myself or do much of anything for way too many years. Never mind why, for now. Maybe I'll talk about it later. It has very little to do with what happened next.

Somehow, like a miracle, the day came that I was free. To celebrate this bright moment, I decided to use my last bit of money to go on a trip to that lost world I loved to read about, even though I knew it was gone. But somehow, for a moment here and there, I discovered a new kind of hope, and I had nothing better to do, anyway.

**Ian Cameron, Mountains of the Gods, 1984
(I haven't learned how to put a link in a blog yet, I'm ashamed to say, but go to abebooks.com and look for the book. They've got a lot of copies!!!)