Accountant of the Lost Ark
William Dalrymple
AUREL STEIN: PIONEER OF THE SILK ROAD by Annabel Walker John Murray, £25, pp. 393 The oddest thing about Aurel Stein was that, despite living the life of a Rider Hag- gard hero — leading trails of Bactrian camels across the billowing desert sands, uncovering lost civilisations, losing toes to Himalayan frostbite — he remained an intriguingly boring man: neat, reticent and retiring, with all the temperamental exu- berance of an Edwardian chartered accountant. If great explorers are supposed to fit the Sir Richard Burton stereotype — wild, restless, driven characters, tortured by a volcanic sexuality — Sir Aurel Stein failed in a quite spectacular manner. That said, after all the fuss made about the likes of Burton and Lawrence, there is some- thing strangely refreshing about finding a great explorer who never dressed up as an Arab, who fussed continually about his pension plans, and whose emotional life was dominated by nothing more raunchy than a succession of fox terriers (all named with characteristic brain-dead lack of imag- ination, Dash).
Some are born dull; others actively aspire to dullness. Despite coming from a lively and exotic Middle-European Jewish background, Stein's innate greyness soon marked him out from his friends and rela- tives; indeed his own brother wrote that he found Aurel so boring that he 'could hardly bear to listen to him'. Having graduated and gained a safe post as Registrar of the Punjab University, Aurel set off for Lahore where he fitted easily into the tweed-topi- and-gundog straitjacket of the club-going Raj clerk. Soon he had achieved a reputa- tion as 'not at all the sort who would think twice of any girl he met' (in those days, apparently, a compliment).
What saved Stein from the chaste sterili- ty of a life in minor academe was a child- hood fascination with Alexander the Great. In the Lahore Museum, then run by Rud- yard Kipling's father, Stein saw superb stat- ues of the Buddha wearing a toga. These sculptures were relics of the newly discov- ered civilisation of Gadhara which emerged in Afghanistan and north-west India in the early centuries AD when the descendants of the Greek soldiers left behind by Alexander the Great converted to Bud- dhism. The fusion of East and West that resulted from this mixture created an astonishingly rich and attractive culture, grafting the mystical imagination of early India onto the cultural sophistication of high Hellenism.
Intrigued by this exotic hybrid culture, Stein was soon walking the hills above Lahore trying to find the surviving relics of this unlikely Graeco-Buddhist civilisation. He was in the right place at the right time. At the very end of the 19th century, rumours were circulating in the bazaars of northern India about very early Sanskrit manuscripts said to be emerging from the sands of Chinese Central Asia. From his reading of Hiuen Tsang (a Chinese pilgrim who ventured across the Gobi desert to visit the Buddhist shrines of Northern India) Stein knew that the oasis towns of the Silk Road had once been sophisticated outposts of Buddhist civilisation, but no one had suspected that anything had sur- vived the twin onslaught of Islam and the ever-encroaching sands of the desert.
Stein put two and two together and, overcoming his innate caution, jumped at the opportunity. He heard that the French and Germans were planning to send out caravans of scholars to dig the dunes, and using the ever-potent weapon of Euro- phobia, managed to persuade the Raj authorities to finance an expedition to beat the French and Germans to it.
He more than succeeded; indeed what Sir Aurel Stein found along the Silk Road surpassed anyone's wildest expectations.
'If you don't like the heat of the garden, get back in the oven!' The sands of the desert perfectly preserved every detail of the life that had once been lived in the cities that had thrived along the edge of the desert: 'In this ever-dry ground,' wrote Stein, 'time seems to have lost all power of destruction.' Although this was not always an unmitigated blessing (at one point he found himself digging through mountains of perfectly preserved turds left by generations of Chinese frontier guards), manuscripts, frescoes and painted silk ban- ners soon began to emerge from the ground as if newly painted; and even the most perishable of grave-goods — such as fancy pastries dating from the time of Christ — emerged quite intact after 2,000 years in the ground.
Most remarkable of all were the achieve- ments of Stein's second expedition. Beating his German rival, Albert Von le Coq, to the legendary Cave of a Thousand Bud- dhas at Dunhuang, Stein persuaded a Taoist monk to part with the contents of a recently discovered library which had been bricked up in the wall of an ancient temple. Only when he got the hoard safely back to the British Museum did it become appar- ent that the bundle of documents included the earliest printed book in the world, the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, and that the importance of the manuscripts as a whole equalled anything to be discovered until the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Stein's reputation has not shown the same ability to survive the passage of time as the objects he brought back from the Silk Road. Although he was once as famous as Howard Carter, the lack of any glittering Tutankhamen-style death-masks meant that the British Museum quickly consigned his archaeologically important (but visually relatively unexciting) collec- tions to their basements and that, outside academia, his name was soon forgotten. Annabel Walker has done an excellent job completing the process of Stein's rehabili- tation begun by Peter Hopkirk in his (now classic) Foreign Devils on the Silk Road. It is a thrilling tale, and if her account of it sometimes lacks Hopkirk's remarkable nar- rative drive, she compensates for this with a Stein-like persistence which has led her to dig up many previously unknown chap- ters of her subject's life.
The only real irritation in this otherwise superb biography is Walker's obsession with dogs. In her acknowledgements she accords a prominent place to 'my faithful dog Sam who has kept me company throughout the writing' and this doggy- fetish colours much of the book. Indeed she homes in so persistently on the seven different incarnations of Dash (Dash 1, Sir Dash, Dash the Great, etc) that after pages of the different Dashes swinging in and out of camel bags and going in and out of quar- antine, the reader, wearying of this Central Asian Crufts, is allowed a sneaking smile of satisfaction when a speeding Oxford motor-bus ends this canine litany once and for all.
Previous page
