A Trip to Toyuq

This green-domed mosque is where the ceremony Dan describes began. A tunnel goes into the facing hillside.

October 25, 1999
Web posted at: 4:09 p.m. EDT (2009 GMT)

By Dan Buettner

We've traveled great distances since my last report. From the Taklamakan's southern rim we turned northwards on a road that darts across the desert, then east to Turpan. After the desert, the countryside became bleak and littered. Cities of broad avenues and shoddy high-rises replaced the charming oasis towns.

This, along with sickness, fatigue, and our inability to eat China's greasy food has slumped team morale. Things hit a low for Deborah (a vegetarian) last night when, with great anticipation, we had our first Chinese dessert; something called "dragon eyes rice". It turned out to be peanuts wrapped with pig fat (the "eyes") over sweetened rice.

	VIDEO
Asia Quest - Report: Day 16

Uighur people still dominate the small villages around Turpan, many of which look medieval. Today for example we visited Toyuq at the foot of the Flaming Mountains. The surrounding countryside heaves with barren, time-scared buttes and ridges. They make South Dakota's Badlands look like a botanical garden. But the miracle of underground irrigation, which routes glacial waters from distant peaks and has for millennia, makes Toyuq verdant and fertile.

We rolled into town and were immediately stopped by an old Uighur man in a wool tunic, wearing a wispy goatee and a white skullcap. He led us through a maze of canopied, mud-walled streets to his house. Inside, his daughters and grandkids share a courtyard and many rooms with sheep, chickens, and goats. Baskets containing potatoes, melon seeds, and sheep fat hung from the ceiling; a single shaft of hard, afternoon sunlight angled through a hole in the roof.

As guests in a Uighur house, the AsiaQuest team feasts on raisins, watermelon, and biblical bread

The man sat us down on carpets and served us a very satisfactory lunch of sweet green raisins, watermelon, tea and the unleavened, (shall I say biblical?) bread. I had the feeling that this was the standard Toyuq lunch though, with a slitting motion across his neck, he offered to prepare a goat for us, which we could hear braying in the next room.

After lunch, I saw the strangest sight in all my travels. In a courtyard lay a sheep with its throat cut. Three men began butchering it with a dull knife. Off to the side a boy looked on, delirious. His skin was fiery red, like he'd been severely burned. Then I realized: he was drenched with the goat's blood! Congealed clumps of it dangled from his hair-ends like scabby tassels. His father told us that he had gone insane and doctors couldn't cure him. Now they resorted to folk remedies.

A congregation of 20 villagers then led the boy up a windy path, through a gaited mud wall in the hills. An old, slightly hunch-backed man beckoned me to follow. I did, though I felt like an intruder.

We ended up in a cool, domed mosque removed our shoes and knelt down. A Muslim priest began incanting prayers. He'd stop only to consult celestial charts. Meanwhile, the blood-drenched kid bobbed his head and occasionally collapsed into a heap, only to be propped up by his father.

The group then rose and moved to the back of the chapel and one by one, disappeared into a hole in the wall! I joined in, crawling on all fours into a narrow tunnel. Inside, it was pitch black; the heavy air smelled of death and sweat. Where would it end? Finally, a match flared up. A lady, looking witch-like in the candlelight, started wailing a haunting chant. The sound gave me the willies. It made me realize I was in too deep, as it were.

Suddenly the match went out but the chanting continued, getting louder and more urgent. The air became thick and hard to breathe. At one point I saw the kid, glaze-eyed, try to escape only to be gently pulled back into the darkness.

It all reminded me of a similar ritual I had witnessed a few years ago on MayaQuest. There, in a Mexican Maya village, I had seen a shaman cure a man's ear disease using candles, chanting and a sacrificed chicken. I didn't understand that ritual either. But it worked. Belief and faith can be powerful healers.

They finally let the boy go. The congregation crawled out backwards into the Mosque then dispersed. The whole think seemed awfully bizarre to me. But who am I to judge? Who's to say one religion is stranger than another?

I stepped back outside the sun was setting in a big, gauzy ball. I started back down the dusty path where I had parked my bike, then unwrapped a Cinnamon-Apple PowerBar and took a bite.

Pedals Up!
Dan Buettner