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JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD
INTRODUCTION
to a twelve-part magazine series on Genghis Khan's Silk Route
THERE ARE two mystic destinations, on different continents, which are the same place. But only in your mind. They are identical in that they are both filled with desert sands, the life-giving shade of palms, and crumbling isolation around polluted oases. Sheiks, Sultanas, silken veils and wild horses - they may be found in both places - places which together form part of a single, other-world.
Be careful, if you ever reach there, for if you look too hard, all your dreams could turn to dust.
You must be able to close your eyes and let your imagination fly. Samarkand and Timbuctoo are the two ultimate destinations of the romantic adventurer. Timbuctoo has slipped beneath the Saharan sands of Mali, leaving a lesser place named Tombouctou. But, like the old Samarkand in new Uzbekistan, Timbuctoo is there in the mists of the imagining. To reach these romantic destinations, you must ask questions, yes - but, more important, you must believe what you see and hear.
Joseph Wolff was a believer. For him, everything came true. He set off for Timbucktoo to convert to the Anglican faith any Jews he could find in the African desert. Before there was time for this unlikely mission to fail, however, he was diverted from the tracks of Timbucktoo onto another continent... onto the road to Samarkand.
Wolff's life journey began in Bohemia where he was born, son of a Jewish rabbi. He converted to Lutherism, then Catholicism to be trained as a priest in Rome. Later - perhaps because the English encouraged eccentrics - he went to London and became an Anglican missionary. At a dinner party in England he met Lady Georgina Walpole, daughter of the Earl of Orford, a woman of beauty, independent means and impeccable connections. She fell in love with the romantic, slightly manic, religious fanatic. A highly improbable - but lasting - marriage partnership developed.
Wolff's mission, he decided, was to persuade Jews to become Christians and to join Georgina's church.. He looked for his converts in unlikely places, such as the Saharan desert, and right across Asia where he thought he might find the fabled Lost Tribes.
The elegant and eccentric Lady Georgina, was seldom far behind him.
He was reckless of danger, believing God was his personal protector - and he was sustained many times in this belief. For instance, in 1824, after receiving a 200-lashes bastinado in Baghdad, he was saved from death, by the timely arrival of a British soldier. Three years later Wolff was rescued by a British officer from shipwreck near Salonica, and two years after that he was saved again by the British navy from pirates. On another occasion he was rescued from slavers after he had been tied to a horse's tail and dragged through the desert.
In 1830 his belief protected him from being "sewn up in a dead donkey, burned alive, and made into sausages" by a local Afghan chief. Wolf refused to recant or accept Islam in order to save his life. Instead he sat down and wrote a letter of farewell to Lady Georgina.
But the Afghan chief who had threatened to sew him into a dead donkey was so impressed by the ardour of Wolff's faith that he merely robbed him of all he possessed and left him to continue his journey, "naked like Adam and Eve, without even an apron of leaves". Wolff was making for the sacred city of Bukhara on a self-imposed secular mission to rescue, singlehanded, two British officers. The prisoners, languishing in a vermin-infested deep hole in the Emir's palace, were victims of what one of them called the "Great Game", played on a global scale by nineteenth century James Bond-style spies. Wolff wasn't interested in spying, or in the contest between the British and Russian empires. He was interested in God, and the fate of his friends. We shall meet these larger-than-life adventurers in Bukhara, on our journey to Samarkand.
Suffice to say, at this point, that Wolff walked, naked and alone, for six weeks. He travelled a thousand kilometres without a stitch of clothing, climbing the high passes of the Hindu Kush and "tumbling into snow drifts and running from the icy wind". Finally he reached the hot deserts that led to Samarkand and Bukhara.
We follow him on this latter part of his journey.
Next: 1st in the 12-part magazine series: Journey to the Centre of World |
