Van Floor Liners

Valley of the lost scrolls

Deep in the Gobi Desert, Joyce Morgan tracks a Silk Road pioneer and his remarkable discovery.

The camel man drops to his knees. Until now Mr Liu has shown no sign of tiring. Indeed he has belted out song after song as he has walked ahead of me through the towering dunes of the Gobi Desert.

And then he begins burrowing. There's nothing to mark this spot other than a solitary bush a few metres away. But minutes later he uncovers from the sand a black plastic bin liner. He pulls out of it a camp chair. Then another.

After just a few hours, I'm relieved to have something more forgiving to sit on than a saddle lashed between the twin hairy humps of a Bactrian camel. In the desert, where there's rarely even a scrubby bush to lean on, a battered folding chair is a luxury.

I realise how the loss of a camp chair must have irked the trailblazing desert traveller Aurel Stein, the British-Hungarian explorer and archaeologist whose footsteps I'm tracing, when he dropped it in this region a century ago. An honest local found the chair and sent it across the desert to a friend who forwarded it to Britain. It eventually reached the explorer, by then ensconced at Oxford University, and he continued to sit in it.

The well-travelled chair would have reminded Stein of the 30 months he spent digging in the desert, during which time he stumbled on the Silk Road's most precious gem - a hidden library in a Buddhist cave a few kilometres from where my camel has just deposited me.

On a late autumn day, Mr Liu has my camel packed when I arrive at his village on the edge of Dunhuang. The oasis in Gansu Province, in China's far west, was once one of the Silk Road's most vital lifelines. We wander through shady lanes where corn ripens and cotton is ready for picking. Mounted on the camel, I dodge most of the apples that hang heavily from the trees. The fertile, irrigated strip abruptly ends. The desert looms - and creeps closer every year.

To reach it Mr Liu leads us through the village cemetery. Spread across a couple of kilometres, the graves are marked by brick cones about a metre tall. Some are surrounded by elaborate walls, all built on sand. This reminder of fleeting existence seems especially resonant in the face of an enduring, advancing desert.

Mr Liu is unfazed by this amble through the dead centre of Dunhuang, although my other companion on our overnight desert trek, a young Chinese-Dutch woman, is uneasy. Her grandmother would not approve of traversing a graveyard for fear of attracting evil spirits, she explains.

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