The Silk Road

Beyond the Great Wall is nothing.Death.

The barbarous wilderness with its monsters.

The banished who die there,what hell shall befall them!

Demons shall tear them from their graves.

And any Buddhst who perishes on that side

Shall be damned eternally,reborn in the lowliest forms.


Wind-besieged bastion of Jiayuguan,

Last tower looking out on death.

Exiles,passing through the tunnel,

Leave life and hope behind them,

Never to hear their mother tongue again,

Scratching despairing poems and messages

Into the bricks as they go.


Westward to Dunhuang spins the thread.

Once-great cities,teeming,dreaming,building,

Now are vanished into the sand,

Crawled over by lizards and scorpions.

Fabulous mirages visit the wide horizons,

Lakes and rivers misted in their own reflections,

Ghosts of trees and houses hover beyond.


In the Mogao caves of the Mingsha Hills,

Images extrude from the walls,

Vivid in the gloom,-Hindu gymnosophists

Pa,vermilion faces oxidized to black,

White eyes glaring with preternatural fervour.

Frescoed Buddhas and bodhisattvas

Multiply,sanctified by endless reproduction,

Hallucinations of Maya,

Styled into truth by human hands.

Thus one makes one’s way across

The swaying ropebridge of time.


Through shades of barren blue landscape

Northward to Turfan, warehouse of winds,

Where a sand-buried egg will boil in a minute.

Strangely,in this rainless nowhere,

Cold water channels emerge from the ground

And in autumn courtyard trellises sag

With dusky grapes,apricots and lemons.


Uighur oases:all shrewdness and swagger,

The horse-people canter,neigh and capriole,

Lemon-bright eyes and ebullient gestures,

Horses dancing over the sands.

Voluptuous music ripples in veils

And the women dressed in colour-fanfares

Are a torchlight procession in the dark.

Beyond,dead cities shiver in the wind,

Battlements and palaces all rubbed away,

Spires looming stupendous and forlorn.

Compacted earth rasps underfoot,

And perhaps an apparition will silently rise

And show you a lifetime in an instant.


Eight hundred miles to Kashgar:

On one side hazy snowcrests shine like madness,

On the other stretch the Taklamakan sands,

Flood-smoothed stone and gravel glaze,

And here and there a mountain-suckled

Orchard or arable field.

Demons lead travellers astray with noises,

Sandstorms open onto unearthly hush,

Voices and ghosts lull the heart past caring.

There,no,over there,somewhere,near and far,

Comes the hum of a non-existent caravan

And musical instruments ensorcelling

With melodies that are and are not.


Outside Kashgar,in dust by the roadside,

Huddle the graves of Chinese labourers,

Facing east,back towards their motherland.

In the city,the Fragrant Concubine has her tomb,

An Uighur princess given in tribute

To the Chinese emperor,sold into despair.

He,entranced by this beautiful savage,

Ran long-nailed fingers over her skin,

But she drew back,rejecting his desire,

And,fleeing his angry eyes,strangled herself.