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It took years of scheming and planning and dithering and wondering. But just more than a decade ago, China National Railways (an organization so immense some say it has more employees than the population of England) formed an epochal partnership with what was then the Soviet Railway Authority—for the specific purpose of forging a rail link between China and faraway Europe. The two partners jackhammered and pinioned and smelted a 480-kilometer line that ran from an ugly western Chinese city called Urümqi to a smaller but equally ugly city called Aktogay in what is today Kazakhstan. It had long been the greatest gap in a 13,000-kilometer potential transcontinental railway—and now, at last, the gap was closed. I was living in Hong Kong and decided to try the journey with an old friend of mine named George, who like me seemed to have much time on his hands. We flew one autumn weekend from Guangzhou to Urümqi. Here, for a small sum, we bought ourselves two one-way, first-class sleeping-car tickets, to the Kazakh capital of Almaty.
The train ran only twice a week, the next departure being the following morning at 10. We arrived at 9 (Chinese railway stations being notoriously trying places), and we found the express with unanticipated ease. Unlike all the other trains drawn up in the station, which were painted a drab olive, ours had a dozen carriages adorned with exotic patterns in umber and ocher, and these were hauled by a gray-blue-and-scarlet-trimmed diesel monster. Our compartment was similarly exotic—a soufflé of white lace cushions and small, beaded chandeliers. There was a restaurant car, serving Kazakh curries. Beer was available, and sweet, sparkling Georgian wine.
We left, on schedule, at 10. At first we went slowly, rattling west through the factories and suburbs of Urümqi, past a scattering of yurts in the meadows—home to migrant Uighurs who had come to the city to trade. Within the hour, though, we had picked up speed, and soon we were scything noisily through the mountains and across a hundred bridges in that rarely visited range known as the Tian Shan. To our north, limitless and white, were the sands of Junggar; to the south, when the lines of hills parted, we caught glimpses of the immense expanse of dunes of the Taklimakan Desert—the trackless and blinding yellow fastness from which, as the name in translation so starkly warns, "you may go in, but you'll never make it out."
After a while the hills flattened, and the train beat steadily and tediously across a wide and sandy plain. A cold and pitiless sun threw such scenery as there was into sharp relief. And then there was really nothing to see—no cities, no nomad camps, no livestock, no people. Just sand, scrub, the occasional outcrop of gray rock—and livid in the distance, the horizon, razor-sharp. An hour or so of this and suddenly, without warning, the brakes caught hold, there was a screeching from beneath the carriages, and the train slid to a stop.
I looked outside, to see a tiny, ramshackle station halt—a small platform, a siding, a water tower, an oily road with a single truck, a camel cart with a ragged-looking Bactrian, and a pair of bicycles. The name "Kuytun," written in Chinese, Uighur and English, was the only indication of any reason for our stop; and my map did indeed show a settlement of that name, though some kilometers north of the path of the railway. There was no other sign of habitation: no house, no tent, no campfire.
George was dozing on his lace cushion. I clambered down from the train, breathing in the cold, still air—just a hint of cooking fire and the unmistakable smell of the camel, which grunted disagreeably in its harness 50 meters away. The guard was the only other person on the platform. The train would stop here for 30 minutes, he said. He didn't explain why. I mooched over to the engine, and tried to have a conversation with the driver—a friendly enough man, but with a Sichuan accent so thick I could only make out one word in five.
And then, from behind me, so unexpectedly that I jumped, came a woman's voice. "Excuse me, please," she said. "Do you by any chance speak English?" I turned around, to see a young Chinese woman of the most astonishing loveliness, smiling at me. She was 30 or so, tall, with a long mane of black hair; she was wearing a brilliant red sweater and a long, tartan skirt. She had a scarf to keep off the cold. She looked radiant, dignified, intelligent. I spluttered something about how yes, why of course, naturally, yes I speak English, and how could I help her? Her smile broadened for a moment—then she stopped to look down at her wristwatch. She frowned a little, then spoke again. "This train stops here for another, let me see—for another 24 minutes. We have little time, so let me ask you this right away: Do you know anything about the writer Anthony Trollope?"
This wasn't happening, I said to myself. It can't be. I'm deep in China, far from everywhere. I'm at a miserable little halt, on the edge of one of the world's most notoriously dangerous deserts. And here is a beautiful Chinese woman, asking me in English if I know anything about Trollope. I wanted to dash back to George, so contentedly unhaunted by whatever demon it was that was now assailing me, and I wanted like him to lie back on the lace cushions and snore gently under last week's copy of the South China Morning Post, and only then be awakened gently from this extraordinarily realistic dream.
But then the woman smiled up at me, and asked once more: "Do you know of him? Please." And then I realized that this was all too real, and however bizarre it may be, I might as well keep going. So I replied that yes, of course I know, and that he is a writer I read whenever I can, one whose books and stories (I was spluttering now) are part of my own assembly of joy, always there to offer comforting pleasure. Yes indeed, I know of Anthony Trollope. She smiled again, and then put on a more serious face. "Good," she said, now rather matter-of-fact. "I would like to discuss"—she looked at her wrist again—"the plot of The Eustace Diamonds, and in particular the character of Lady Glencora. Is this fine with you?"
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