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1 Because he travels without a camera, Thubron never compares snapshots, only memories.

In this, he is more poetic than his predecessors; the passage of time is his books most interesting feature. Today policemen looking for drugs and bureaucrats protecting borders have replaced the Sogdian traders who once plied these roadways. As Thubron and a busload of Afghans cross into Iran: We were stood against a wall, as if to be shot, with our baggage at our feet. The Afghans looked bitter and depleted. Many of their passports had been signed by the illiterate with a thumbprint. When an officer realized I was a Westerner, I was motioned aside, guiltily exempt, with women and mewling children, while the men were ordered to take off their shoes, then sharply frisked. The bags were emptied again into the dust, spilling out their intimacies: spangled shoes and bras and family photographs. The few goods people were carrying for sale, the small exchanges of the Silk Road pistachio nuts, woolen coats were fingered, questioned, valued, then at last, mostly, returned. The heinous is not confined to relatively recent times. Thubron recounts stories about the great butchers of the Central Asian past about Tamerlanes pyramids of skulls and the Mongols destruction of Balkh, Tus, Nishapur, Merv and Rey. They were not just laid in ruins; they were all but extinguished. The Mongols herded their inhabitants outside the gates men, women, children and massacred them, even dogs and cats, then ploughed every dwelling into the ground. At first, Thubron explains, the Silk Road had a gentle decline, but then, in the mid-15th century, as Central Asia splintered into belligerent Turkic and Mongol khanates, China closed itself away. In an astonishing act of self-isolation, the Ming dynasty unrigged its entire heavy merchant fleet of 3,500 ships, and abandoned trade contacts by both land and sea. Spain and Portugal built their empires. Columbuss voyage for the Orient resulted in an entirely different discovery, while the Portuguese pioneered the sea routes around Africa. The weight of the world shifted. Yet Thubron locates the beginning of this change not in Europe but in China, where, back in the 10th century, an unknown inventor discovered the maritime compass. With its elegiac tone, Shadow of the Silk Road is moving in a way thats rare in travel literature, sidestepping nostalgia even as it notes its pull. Thubron goes to places most other sojourners cant because theyre not so much geographic locations as states of mind, formed from the lifelong accretion of intriguing facts, mistaken hopes, mysteries. Here, on civilizations oldest and longest road, which isnt quite a road, he has found his way into that kingdom and brought it into focus for us.

Its themes include different Islams (oppressed in China; fervent in Afghanistan and Iran; cautiously monitored in Uzbekistan); contrast (no cities could be more different than ancient Samarkand and modern Teheran); and the way that today's borders are meaningless because the true boundaries are made by tribe, ethnicity, language and religion. One of the trademarks of Colin Thubron's travel writing is the beauty of his prose; another is his gift for talking to people and getting them to talk to him. Shadow of the Silk Road encounters Islamic countries in many forms. It is about changes in China, transformed since the Cultural Revolution. It is about false nationalisms and the world's discontented margins, where the true boundaries are not political borders but the frontiers of tribe, ethnicity, language and religion. It is a magnificent and important account of an ancient world in modern ferment.

Joanne Van

Travellers Tales

At-Home Essay

2 Significance of the past mixes reflections on the experience with the retelling to help the reader see the importance of the experience. It is fortunate that Thubron's itinerary leaves him plenty of room for arcane detours. One of his outings deep in the deserts of Xinjiang brings him to a site where the "dessicating sands and salts have yielded an astonishing people." Looking down into dusty pits, he finds himself contemplating ranks of mummies, entire families perfectly preserved by the dry air for two millen-nia. Intriguingly, as he writes, "these corpses are not Mongoloid, but Western giants with blond and reddish hair, high-bridged noses and heavy beards." In a museum in the nearby city of Kashgar he gets a closer look: His face is pale and fiercely aquiline. Long, reddish-brown hair tumbles about it, with a short beard, and sunbursts of yellow ochre cover his temples and Roman nose in an enigmatic half-mask. He stood almost six foot tall, and was buried with ten hats -- including a beret and a cap with white felt horns -- and the matted wool of his leggings has burst through his deerskin boots in dashing layers of scarlet and eggshell blue. At any moment, it seems, he may lurch up and give orders. These are the Tocharians, a people whose origins have yet to be conclusively explained, but who probably emerged from Indo-European migrations out of the Siberian steppes sometime in the third millennium BC. Many of the mummies are clothed in "Celtic-looking tartans, others in witches' hats." Thubron writes that the local Uighurs, some of whom are engaged in a struggle to shield their own culture and language from encroachment by the Han Chinese who now rule them, have seized upon the light-haired mummies as ancestors, declaring one of them (naturally the most beautiful of the group) the "mother of the nation." Thubron writes that, for the Uighurs, "the Tocharians seem to lend them an ancient right of possession." The Chinese have their own investment in this peculiar past. The authorities in Beijing, mindful of the Uighurs' subversive sentiments, have at times attempted to prevent closer scientific examination of the mummies out of the fear that genetic testing would confirm their Indo-European origins. In short, as Thubron points out, The corpses are not at rest. Their outlandish preservation lifts them out of prehistory into the political present, more potent than a skeleton or a fragment of DNA. They wait like a solemn family. There seems something conditional about their postures -- their knees tilted askew, their tentatively furled hands -- as if one day they will get up and take their baby into the streets. Thubron is not interested in celebrating the Tocharians as a basis for either side's ethnic or historical claims. What intrigues him, to the contrary, is precisely the way these mysterious people's autonomy resists the pretensions of the present. His imagery offers an added element -- those mummies poised to stand up and quit the arena of the present day's competing interests. Farther down the trail we find him contemplating the caves of Dunhuang near Mongolia in China, the place where, in 1900, Aurel Stein uncovered a treasure trove of ancient manuscripts ranging from Buddhist religious tracts to legal documents to chance scribblings. The languages of these texts are Chinese, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Uighur, Sogdian, Khotanese, Turki, all written The chamber where this wealth was once stored is empty today; Stein and other foreign archaeologists spirited away many of the manuscripts, to the enduring anger of their Chinese colleagues. Still, Thubron concludes, when you consider this legacy, "language and identity become as shifting as the sands."

Joanne Van

Travellers Tales

At-Home Essay

3 Thubron may be a minimalist when it comes to logistics, but linguistically he is all zeal. His prose is at once plastic and precise, deftly conjuring an almost Elizabethan surfeit of effect: "Outside, feathers of snow were still falling. In the whitened sky the mountains left only the tracery of their stone, like stencils hung in nothing." Or this, on the city of Antioch, the endpoint of his journey: The jetty had sunk to smothered stones. I tried to imagine the traffic floating here: the luxuries grown magic with distance, the wheat and hides of the unrecorded poor, the whole intricate caravan of the world. The goods were myth-bearers. They carried their own stories, their own ironies. There was a rumoured trade in unicorns. The silted harbour was noiseless under my feet. For all its lushness, though, this writing never lapses into self-indulgence. Thubron's stinginess about material things also applies to his own authorial presence; this is not travel writing in the style of, say, Bruce Chatwin, always so eager to thrust himself into the forefront of the narrative. Thubron is endearingly willing to question his own motives, to rein himself in, to let even his most irritating interlocutors have their say. "With an outsider's boorishness, I found myself probing his allegiances, as if identity were not a slippery, partial thing, but something whole and graspable." Some writers are all too eager to smooth out the wrinkles in what people tell them. Thubron, instead, exults in the varying sediments of stories that have evolved through time, or in the baroque mistranslations that ensue whenever alien cultures interact. This sense of restraint derives in part from simple respect for the people he meets; but it also has its source in the palpable sense of resignation that lingers among Thubron's celebrations of human inventiveness. Fascinated by the dreams of redemption embodied by the great religions, Thubron wistfully acknowledges his own faithlessness. His surprisingly ardent search for magical jade ends in wry failure: "There would be no flying, no immortality." And just as the growing closeness of the world's competing cultures sometimes melts away diversity, so too the forces of passing time, abetting the human capacity to forget, ceaselessly erode the achievements of the past. Thubron is aware that sometimes this leveling process is intentionally promoted by the powers-that-be, as when he spots a group of forced laborers under the supervision of Chinese guards: When I approach, a soldier raises his arm and waves me away. It is the gesture of somebody wiping a pane of glass. It washes the air clear of anything I have witnessed. This does not exist, it says, this you will not remember. Even with the best of wills there's only so much you can do to stop the progress of oblivion: "Every few years, it seemed, the sand sucked down all surface things, and they were replaced by ever more faded wood and memory." The investigation of another ancient place yields a particularly unnerving realization: Suddenly I came on a heap of skeletons. Their skulls gleamed among scattered shin-bones and ribcages. Bamboo was growing through their eye-sockets. Soon I was labouring up over a blackened litter of legs and arms and pates. My feet sent up spurts of anonymous dust. The entire slope, I realised, was man-made: I was ascending a hill of compacted corpses. At its summit a tower of baked brick had worn smooth and hollow. The hard grasses pierced its floor. ...So the place opened in my journey like a dark space, awaiting explanation, which never came. Similar blanks abound along the route. At another site, so remote that it has been largely neglected by tourists and explorers, a local guide predicts that it will soon be lost forever: "'The sand is coming in. Always. So you will be the last to see it. It will be gone.'" It would be hard to imagine the human condition without loss.

Joanne Van

Travellers Tales

At-Home Essay

Setting plays as much of an important role in literature as characters or plot. Setting, which includes scenery, time period and moral or intellectual environment, creates the stage on which characters move and act. Why an author chooses a particular setting for her novel, poem or play tells a great deal about her literary intent. Therefore analyzing the setting in a piece of literature can produce a lot of information about its themes.

Instructions
1. 1 Read the text. Take notes of the settings and how they are presented. Also pay close attention to how each setting is described and how the description relates to the piece or the context under which it is presented. 2. 2 Examine the use of language and literary tropes. Determine the author's intent in using certain words or tropes to describe the settings. For instance, a war-torn country might be compared to a thorny flower. The atmosphere at an ivy-league college is described as being "self-contained and claustrophobic." Analyze what these descriptions say about the settings and/or the characters who inhabit them. 3. 3 Determine how the settings reflect the plot. For instance, in a story or play that takes place in a war-torn country, the plot might center around a family struggling to survive in a dangerous place. Examine how the setting(s) affect the plot or how it might push the plot forward. 4. 4 Analyze any imagery that is related to the setting in the text. Focus on what is repeated in the story or poem, such as a child's shoe buried beneath the rubble of a collapsed building. Examine the author's intent in presenting this image and extrapolate what it might mean. For instance, the author might be commenting on the true costs of war. 5. 5 Analyze the time period and atmosphere of the story or poem. For instance, how does time period reflect its general atmosphere. A story that takes place in the 1950s is going to reflect specific attitudes, places, or things that will differ from other time periods. Examine how that is reflected in the tone and/or characters in the piece. 6. 6 Analyze how descriptions of setting based on the author's use of language and imagery define the story or the poem's theme or meaning. The description of a war-

Joanne Van

Travellers Tales

At-Home Essay

torn country as a thorny flower and the image of a child's shoe suggest a thematic emphasis on beauty and innocence and death and destruction

Joanne Van

Travellers Tales

At-Home Essay

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