The amber of time in the folds of the westward journey
The vibration of the motorcycle engine penetrates thirty layers of geological rings, and the sand of the Taklimakan Desert knocks out the code of the ancient Shule Kingdom on the mask. The gradually collapsing Kunlun snow line in the rearview mirror is the scale left behind when Pangu created the world. I rode along the folds on the western edge of the Tarim Basin, and the breathing of the steel mount gradually overlapped with the rhythm of the ebb tide of the ancient sea - this is a solitary journey to the Han and Tang dynasties in the 21st century, and the postmodern machinery carrying the unopened silk book in the West Market of Chang'an is crashing into the amber of time on the Pamir Plateau.
The morning light in Kashgar drips from the dome of the Id Kah Mosque. The light blue skylight spreads over the new moon, kneading the shadows of forty carved pillars into Persian miniature paintings all over the ground. My motorcycle leans against the century-old mulberry tree, and the dashboard and the copper pot reflect the first ray of sunlight at the same time. An old man wearing a flowered hat walks across the asphalt road, his leather boots and tires crushing the remaining coolness of last night, and the aroma of baked buns and figs rises from the debris. The way this city wakes up is so contradictory: the electronic loudspeaker of the minaret and the copper bell on the donkey's neck resonate in the same octave.
The alleys in the old city are overturned hourglasses. In the cracks of the rammed earth walls, the horseshoes of the Karakhanid Khanate in the 10th century and the optical cables of the 21st century share the same ditch. When the motorcycle tank brushed past the brick-carved archway, the arrowhead of a certain Oghuz Khan was falling from the crack in the wall. The hem of the Uyghur girl's edras silk skirt swept across the ruts, instantly dyeing the steel mount into a flowing peacock river. At the corner of Wustangboyi Street, my helmet and the donkey cart full of Hami melons reached a delicate balance - modern traffic rules are just a shy intruder in the melody of the Twelve Muqams.
The archaeological team of light lives on the ruins of the high-rise residential buildings. The scorching sun at noon splits the earthen buildings into two realms of light and dark. The collapsed cave dwellings are like scriptures with pages removed, and the exposed wheat straw layer shows the fingerprints of rammed earth in the 15th century. I have a German-made hygrometer in the pocket of my motorcycle clothes, but at this moment I am more willing to believe the salt frost seeping out of the cracks in the wall - these condensed sweat beads come from the cracked palms of the potters of Shule State. On a dangerous wall somewhere, the satellite antenna and the mulberry paper window lattice form a strange symbiosis, as if I can see Ban Chao's envoys debugging the 5G signal.
Dongbaza at dusk is the fallen Milky Way. The headlights of the motorcycle cut through the nebula of mutton-fat jade and Hetian carpets, and the Persian fragments of the Sogdian caravan float in the sound waves of the bronze shop. When my goggles reflected the cold arc of the Yingjisha knife, the abacus beads of the Tang Dynasty merchants suddenly resurrected at a certain latitude. The old man selling eagle flutes quoted prices in three languages, and his wrinkles contained the altitude data of seven ancient roads. The moment when the tricycle loaded with Central Asian preserves ran parallel to the motorcycle, the scene of Xuanzang drying the scriptures curled slightly in the heat wave.
The road leading to the tomb of Xiangfei is a yellowed "Great Dictionary of Turkic Languages". The shadows of poplar trees write variant Sogdian on the asphalt road, and the roar of the exhaust pipe wakes up the sleeping verb conjugation in the dictionary. Under the blue-green glazed dome of the tomb, my motorcycle key is quantum entangled with the porcelain pieces from the Qianlong period. In the tea bowl handed by the gravekeeper, the mirage of Lop Nur is having a philosophical debate with the smell of gasoline. The sunset projects the motorcycle into a huge sundial pointer, and the legend of Xiangfei is just an unmelted bubble in the amber of time.
The old teahouse at midnight is like a shipwreck on the seabed. The body temperature of the motorcycle gradually cools down in the mist of brick tea, and the spider webs between the beams and columns are stuck with twelve centuries of dialects. When the strings of the dutar vibrated to produce the incomplete score of Shule music, the bonfire of the Saka people's sacrifice suddenly appeared on the surface of the fuel tank. The Daolang artist at the next table used the alcohol content to calculate the number of times the Tarim River changed its course. His dombra case contained the sighs of the entire Taklimakan Desert. I left a spark plug here, which may be displayed together with Ban Chao's arrowheads in a certain civilization fault line a thousand years later.
The Pamir Plateau at dawn is like an opened sutra. The locomotive traveled through the folds of the Gaizi Gorge, and the altitude numbers on the dashboard beat the drum of the Congling Shouzhuo City. Baisha Lake suddenly rose from the cracks in the rock layer, and the bronze arrowheads of Gao Xianzhi's expeditionary force floated on the water. In the rearview mirror, the outline of the old city of Kashgar was being rebound by the morning mist into a footnote on a page of "Illustrated Records of the Western Regions". When Muztagh Ata refracted the morning sun into seven historical spectra, I suddenly understood: this city is a rider in the long river of time, and we are all fleeting grains of sand in her rearview mirror.