Fleming - News from Tartary: an epic journey across Central Asia

Simon Winchester

NEWS FROM TARTARY

An Epic JourneyAcross Central Asia

Peter Fleming

T here is not much to say about this book by way of introduction.It describes an undeservedly successful attempt to traveloverland from Peking in China to Kashmir in India. Thejourney took seven months and covered about 3500 miles.

Anyone familiar, even vicariously, with the regionswhich we traversed will recognize the inadequacy of mydescription of them. For much of the time we were incountry very little known country where even the collatedwisdom represented by our maps was sometimes at fault andseldom comprehensive; and although at almost no point onour route could we have regarded ourselves as pioneers,there was hardly a stretch of it which did not offer greatopportunities to specialists opportunities to amplify, confirm,or contradict the findings of their rare and distinguishedpredecessors.

We did not avail ourselves of these opportunities; we wereno specialists. The worlds stock of knowledge geographical,ethnological, meteorological, what you will gained nothingfrom our journey. Nor did we mean that it should. Much as weshould have liked to justify our existence by bringing backmaterial which would have set the hive of learned men buzzingwith confusion or complacency, we were not qualified todo so. We measured no skulls, we took no readings; wewould not have known how. We travelled for two reasonsonly.

One is implicit in the title of this book. We wanted (it waspart of our job, even if it had not been part of our natures) tofind out what was happening in Sinkiang, or Chinese Turkistan.It was eight years since a traveller had crossed this remote andturbulent province and reached India across country fromPeking. In the interim a civil war had flared up and had (atleast we hoped that it had) burnt itself out. There were darkrumours that a Foreign Power was making this area, the size ofFrance, its own. Nobody could get in. Nobody could get out.In 1935 Sinkiang, if you substitute political for physicaldifficulties, shared with the peak of Everest the blue riband ofinaccessibility.

The trouble about journeys nowadays is that they are easyto make but difficult to justify. The earth, which once dancedand spun before us as alluringly as a celluloid ball on top of afountain in a rifle-range, is now a dull and vulnerabletarget; nor do we get, for hitting it in the right place, themanicure set or the packet of Edinburgh rock which formerlyrewarded good marksmanship. All along the line we have beenforestalled, and forestalled by better men than we. Only theborn tourist happy, goggling ruminant can follow intheir tracks with the conviction that he is not wasting histime.

But Sinkiang was, in 1935, a special case; and the seeminglyimpossible journey through it could, at a pinch, qualify aspolitical if not as geographical exploration. To the outsideworld the situation in the Province was as dark as DarkestAfrica in the days when that Victorian superlative wascurrent. So, although we brought back only News fromTartarywhen we might have brought back Knowledge, we at least hadsome excuse for going there; our selfishness was in partdisguised, our amateurishness in part condoned.

Our selfishness was of course the operative factor. I havesaid that we travelled for two reasons only, and I have tried toexplain one of them. The second, which was far more cogentthan the first, was because we wanted to travel because webelieved, in the light of previous experience, that we shouldenjoy it. It turned out that we were right. We enjoyed it verymuch indeed.

There is only one other thing. You will find in this book, ifyou stay the course, a good many statements which hadthey not reference to a part of Asia which is almost asremote from the headlines as it is from the sea would beclassed as revelations. The majority of these show theGovernment of the Soviet Union in what will probablyseem to most a discreditable light. All these statementsare based on what is, at its flimsiest, good second-handevidence i.e. the evidence of reliable people who havethemselves witnessed the events or tendencies recorded.I should perhaps add that these statements are madeobjectively. I know nothing, and care less, about politicaltheory; knavery, oppression and ineptitude, as perpetrated bygovernments, interest me only in their concrete manifestations,in their impact on mankind: not in their nebulous doctrinalorigins.