The Silk Road conjures images of deserts, steppes, and mountains, and most of all caravans that journeyed along this formidable highway through the heart of the Asian continent. It was the importance of its trade and its role as a vital avenue of communication which kept the Silk Road, one of the most inhospitable routes on this earth, open for thousands of years.
In the course of its history only a few people have ever been able to complete a nearly 10,000 miles round trip on the Silk Road. During the late 13th and early 14th centuries, the Mongols ruled most of Asia and the Silk Road was then such a safe and secure route that many traveled just for the joy of it. Ibn Battuta, a native of Tunisia, recalls how he met the brother of a man he had known in North Africa on the border of China. With the break-up of the Mongol Empire ended the last golden days of the Silk Road.
The interest in the legendary Silk Road was revived some five centuries later by explorers and treasure-seekers like Sven Hedin and Marc Aurel Stein. Travelers have been coming ever since, carried away by the romance of the Silk Road. The latest is the prize-winning novelist Colin Thubron who has distinguished himself in travel writing. His latest book “Shadow of the Silk Road” recounts his ordeal during a grueling eight months travel along this legendary highway from Xian in China to the Mediterranean port of Antakya (the old Antioch) in Syria.
The author tells us that until a German geographer Friedrich von Richthofen coined the term in the nineteenth-century nobody spoke of the Silk Road. Historians claim that the Silk Road originated in the second century BC but the traffic started long before accounts of it were written. “In the third millennium BC, before any official Silk Road existed, a Jade Road foreshadowed the same path, carrying the stone westward to Mesopotamia and eastward to China, whose emperors all but worshipped it,” writes Thubron.
Furthermore, strands of silk have been discovered in the hair of a tenth-century BC Egyptian mummy. For many centuries, silk was considered a rare luxury as the secret of its making was unknown but it was mainly sought after because of its ultimate resilience. A silk rope is not only stronger than a steel cable of the same diameter but it is also rot-proof. Along with bone and wood, silk became the first surface to be written on.
Colin Thubron is well aware that his voyage has little in common with the experience of past camelback travelers who covered an average of two miles an hour! But from the very beginning of his trip, he knows that many others have passed this way and left their mark. Although much has changed, the memory of the Silk Road remains. Colin Thubron has attempted to highlight the beautiful vestiges of bygone civilizations in a contemporary context. The author is known for his gift for talking to people and getting them to talk to him but most of the people he meets along this fabulous pathway are unfortunately not particularly interesting and the reader is left with clichés or platitudes.
Thubron is definitely at his best when he shares his feelings about the ever changing present and when he describes the awesome Taklaman desertscape, the plains of Iran and Turkey and the mountains of Central Asia. His prose is beautiful and suggestive. His colorful writing draws us into an ancient world searching for its future in the harsh reality of the modern world.
No where has change been more visible than in China. The author speaks of “a hallucinatory change... I recognized almost nothing... Already the shops and hoardings are persuading you that everywhere is here: Paris, New York, London. The supermarkets are stacked with goods inaccessible even five years ago... On this transforming city, old people gazed as if at some heartless pageant. Dressed in their leftover Mao caps and frayed cloth slippers, they would settle by a roundabout or park and stare for hours as the changed world unfolded. It was hard to look at them unmoved.”
It is when he objectively tries to understand the heart of the people he meets that Colin Thubron’s writing is at its best. During his stay in Mazar-e-Sharif in Afghanistan he says that he felt “that lifting of the heart which early travelers recorded, of moving among a fiercely separate people. Despite a million dead and half the population displaced, despite the beggars lining the shrine gates — mine victims thrusting their prosthetic legs in front of them — I sensed some heritage inviolate in these people, refusing piety.”
Shadow of the Silk Road is another attempt to understand how the advantages and disadvantages of the market economy are affecting the countries along the legendary Silk Route. Despite its poetic connotation, this great human pathway was, for most of its history, feared for its constant unforeseen dangers. History repeats itself even in our modern era. In an author’s note, Thubron tells us that his journey was broken by fighting in northern Afghanistan, but the section delayed was traveled the following year, in the same season.
Colin Thubron’s journey ends in the old city of Antakya. He touches the Mediterranean water with its unique turquoise blue color then looks up. “But to west and east the sky was not the blue calm of my imagined homecoming, but a troubled cloudscape that swept the sea in moving gleams and shadows,” he concludes in the final lines of a most entertaining travelogue.
