The diary entry for 24th May reads:
"Left Kashgar in morning - drive to Yarkand to look @ Mosque but not able to go in as prayer time. Lunch went down well - Group liked the salad and salad dressing. (I seem to remember a tomato and mushroom salad with a garlic salad dressing) Then more driving - found camp in Taklamakan desert - meal cook - success - lots of fruit. But the dust. Fortunately had meal before the dust storm - watched it come in the tent in clouds - settled everywhere. Very hot all the night - sweated so much." Followed by a diary entry for 25th which reads "Decided I do not like desert camping - when I awoke @ 0530 the clock was covered in sand. Everything was so gritty - Worked all the way through from 0600-0800 cooking - prep - etc..........."
Just reading that now brings back the journey. I took an executive decision not to take my camera out while in the desert, except for a few taken through the window while going along in Archie so I don't have many pictures of the Taklamakan desert. I did not want sand in my camera. When I was little on holiday at Wells next the Sea, on the north Norfolk coast, where there are huge expanses of sand when the tide has gone out I have the memory of walking back to the beach from the sea across this seemingly endless sand and crying as the wind blew the sand against my legs. It stung like 1000s of simultaneous pin pricks. And if I put my towel around my waist to cover my legs then my shoulders got cold, we are talking about an English summer in the 1950s here! It was misery. I have often revisited this memory when I walk across wide expanses of sand with a sharp wind blowing; laughing to myself about the delicate juvenile skin on my legs that suffered so much and saying to myself that how, now I am adult (?) I can take it .......... or that was until I visited the Taklamakan! And all of a sudden I was back into that child state with exactly the same sensations of sand whipping up against my now adult skinned legs and it still felt as though I was being stung by 1000s of simultaneous pin pricks! And as to the grit - I remember my grandmother on one of these Norfolk holidays saying how the sand always got in the sandwiches and even got in the tomato juice (of the bottled variety). And if sand can get in a closed bottle of tomato juice it can certainly get in a camera! So imagine the morning cook with sand blowing. It was early morning when we started getting the tables and chairs out, it was barely light, trying to be as quiet as possible so as not to wake the "happy campers"! We were still stumbling around wearing head torches. It was grey, though I must admit I cannot remember if there was a pre-dawn cold I have a feeling it was a pre-dawn mugginess- as I refer to being "very hot all night" but what I do remember is the greyness and the sun coming up through a haze of sand. And trying to keep the breakfast we prepared from having a layer of sand deposited on it before we had a chance to eat it! I think this campsite might have been the one where apparently lorries passed by all night right by the tents - but if they did I did not hear them despite my remarks about being hot and sweaty in the night! Interestingly enough it seemed that we would arrive in a seemingly sandless spot only to find that as soon as we got the cooking equipment out we were in a sandstorm! When we got to Khotan we found - not the rather racketty and run down Khotan with a rebel army described by Ella Maillart and Peter Fleming some 75 years before - but a rather disappointingly slick modern city with high rise building, streetlights, pavements and tarmac roads.
The Silk Factory in Khotan
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| Spinning the threads is women's work |
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| but dyeing the silk is men's work, |
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| as is tying the dyed threads into the pattern. |
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| Weaving is done by women or men |
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| using a technology that has proved good for maybe 1000s of years, |
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| with results as sophisticated as any |
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| modern machine woven fabric. |
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