The Taklamakan From A Satellite
“I and Ahoon then passed through indeed very unusual places, unusual even for the general nature of this peculiar planet, certain parts of which, by the way, only became so because before that period this ill-fated planet had already undergone two what are called Transapalnian-perturbations, almost unprecedented in the Universe.
“From the first day we had to pass exclusively through a region of various ‘terra-firma-projections’ of unusual forms, which had conglomerations of all kinds of ‘intra- planetary-minerals.’
“And only after a month’s travel, according to their time- calculation, did our caravan from Arguenia come to places where in the soil the possibility had not yet been quite de- stroyed of Nature’s forming surplanetary formations and creating corresponding conditions for the arising and existing of various one-brained and two-brained beings.
West of the Gobi
The part of the world that Gurdjieff is referring to is not his literary invention, it is real. It lies west of the Gobi, on the long approach toward Afghanistan, and it is among the most desolate ground anywhere on the planet.
Here is one traveller’s description…
“Gobi” itself is said to mean waterless gravel — not the rolling sand of our imagination but a hard, stony floor swept clean by wind. And the Gobi is only the threshold. Travel west and the country grows stranger still.
It opens to the great basin of the Tarim, and at its heart the Taklamakan, a sand sea ringed on every side by mountains — the Tien Shan to the north, the Kunlun to the south, the Pamirs barring the way west. Its name is said to carry a warning: “go in and you do not come out.”
Caravans never crossed it. They crept along its rim, oasis to oasis, hugging the thin line where meltwater off the peaks sank into the soil before the desert could swallow it. It is a land that looks twice-ruined, as though one old catastrophe had scoured it and a second had finished the work.
The floor is strewn with mineral — salt crusts, gravel pavements, beds of clay turned to stone. Wind has cut long ridges and hollows, the yardangs, into shapes that seem manufactured rather than worn. At Lop Nor a lake once stood, diminishing for centuries, and finally dried, leaving a white waste of salt where nothing whatever grows. For days a traveller sees only these projections of bare earth, conglomerations of rock and dust, and not one living thing.
What unsettles about such country is not merely that it is empty. It is that Nature herself seems to have nearly lost the power to work there — to assemble the ordinary conditions under which living forms arise and hold on. The machinery of life has been switched off, or very nearly. Only at the margins, where the snowfields feed thin rivers down into the basin, does the possibility return: a green thread of poplar and reed, a walled oasis, a planted field.
So the journey toward Afghanistan becomes a slow climb back toward the living world — up over the Pamirs, the so-called roof of the world, and down at last into the old river valleys where men have farmed and built for thousands of years. The barren stretch is a crossing between worlds, and no one who passed through it ever forgot it.