Chapter 36: Haunted Sea of Sand
At night, Mishinian sat drinking with the band of retainers. He noticed Li Wei sitting off to the side, absently fingering a wineskin. Patting his shoulder, he came over and sat beside him. “Tomorrow, the Sabao’s heading back to Yumen Pass. Damn those Turkic bastards, look at the chaos they’ve stirred up. We even lost a few brothers for nothing.”
Mishinian let out a sigh and tipped his head back to drink, gazing up at the dark sky, feeling somewhat depressed. Though he and his retainers had followed Kang Dolu in and out of the Western Regions for many years, making their living by licking blood off the blade’s edge. Though they were used to the blood-and-blade life of the Western Regions, this incident still left a bitter taste.
“All the bodies brought back?” Li Wei asked. “Take them back and bury them properly.”
“Burned them,” Mishinian shrugged, tone flat. “Guts were already torn out by wolves. Couldn’t bear to look. Better to turn them to ash, it sits easier with the living.”
Li Wei nodded. “Send some extra silver to their families. At least that shows we did our part.”
After the group dispersed and the wine was finished, Li Wei turned to take his leave. But Mishinian stopped him, pressing two water skins into his hands with a grin and a wink. “Stay safe out there.”
Li Wei smiled back. “Until we meet again. Take care. “If fate allows, we’ll see each other again.”
Most of the caravan was already asleep. The night was deep and dark, the stars dim overhead. On a sudden impulse, Li Wei woke Chun Tian.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Go where?” she asked, scrambling out of her blanket bundle.
Chasing Thunder and her horse had wandered off some time ago, grazing idly in the open, to no one knows where. Li Wei hushed her, then quietly led her around the watchfires atop the post walls, slipping into the vast, shadowy wilderness.
“We can’t follow the beacon and post station-route any longer,” he murmured. “The Yiwu Route isn’t safe anymore. Until Yumen Pass sends more troops, every cutthroat and bandit is going to take advantage of the disturbance caused by the Lengquan Post incident to rob merchants and travelers. The checkpoints will only get stricter.”
Chun Tian frowned, fixing him with a steady gaze. “But Da-ye has a plan, right?”
“We don’t know how long we will have to wait, no point dragging this out any longer. Time to move fast.” Li Wei made up his mind, “We’re crossing the Moheyan Desert1. We’ll bypass the remaining eight beacon stations and head straight for Yiwu.”
“Moheyan Desert? Is that the same Moheyan Desert mentioned in books–the one where ‘no birds fly above, no beasts tread below, no water nor grass, a ghost-haunted sea of sand’? That desert spans eight hundred li, all drifting sands, and ghost-lights flicker at night.” Chun Tian asked in astonishment.
“You actually know of it.” The corner of his lips lifted, turned to look at her, and asked, “You, dare to go?”
She parted her lips slightly.
He gazed out toward the silent wilderness. “Moheyan is also called the Haunted Desert–heat, wind, sand, the restless dead… the five chief demons of pestilence2 roam freely. It’s even more frightening than all we’ve endured these past few days. At any moment, we could lose our lives here.”
But her eyes lit up, even sparkling with a trace of excitement. “Of course I dare. Besides, with Da-ye here, there’s nothing to fear.”
Li Wei let out a helpless laugh. What an utterly reckless little lady who didn’t know how high the sky was and how deep the earth was.
Chasing Thunder was already waiting with Chun Tian’s horse not far off. Seeing their owners approach, it neighed sharply and trotted forward.
Her heart was pounding. “Da-ye, which way do we go?”
“There is a hidden path through the Moheyan Desert. It’s the fastest route from Yumen to Yiwu. We call it the Great Sea Trail through the Desert. Ordinary caravans don’t take it, and few even know of its existence. But it’s often used in military dispatch.”
He mounted his horse and beckoned her. “Follow me.”
Chun Tian swung into her saddle. Li Wei handed her a water skin. “Moheyan Desert is extremely arid. We will not reach another water source for six or seven days. The heat will only grow worse. The sands burn under the noonday sun, it’s grueling and tormenting. We travel by night, rest by day. When drawing water in the sand dunes, sip water slowly, never drink your fill at once. Let it linger in your mouth. Ration it, and drink at set intervals. As for food, never eat till full, eat just enough to stay light, about three-quarters full. Understand?”
“Mm.” She nodded vigorously.
As the sky grew pale with the first hints of dawn, Chun Tian glanced back. Only then did she realize they had already left Lengquan Post dozens of li behind.
She no longer knew where she was. All she could see were undulating hills of barren earth and broken yellow stone, stretching to the horizon–like the view along the Yellow River she once passed. It was during flood season then, the river a vast, churning expanse, rolling in golden waves. The stiff hyacinth orchid atop the slope looked just like floating reeds or driftwood carried by that murky current.
Crossing a stretch of jagged stone and climbing a high mound of compacted yellow earth, they were once again met with a boundless expanse of barren hills. A few tufts of pale green sese grass stood stiffly amidst the desolation. Scattered everywhere were the bones of mules, horses, and camels, bleached and gray under the relentless sun, a scene full of bleakness, full of deathly stillness.
The horses’ hooves clattered sharply as they stepped over bones. From beneath the shattered remains, a few thin, shriveled black scorpions scurried out in panic, dragging faint trails behind them before vanishing who knew where. The wind had nearly fallen silent. Li Wei raised his whip and said,
“These are the remains of those–man and beast–who died here. We follow the path traced by their bones.”
Chun Tian slowly let out a breath. Seeing the steady calm in his expression, she nodded and cautiously guided her horse to avoid the scattered remains, following him forward.
Her father had once written about crossing the Moheyan Desert with fellow soldiers. They’d seen a mirage there, tall cities, bustling townsfolk, a place teeming with life.
At the time, she had asked her uncle what a mirage was. Later, as she read widely, she gradually came to understand the weight behind the name Moheyan Desert.
Eight hundred li of vast sand sea. Man-eating quicksands. Wandering phantoms. It was the most terrifying place of all. She had once regarded it only as a curiosity, never had she imagined she would one day walk into it herself.
And now, walking in her father’s footsteps, she felt a flicker of excitement stir in her heart.
Father, I’m one step closer to you now.
They had not traveled long, barely half an hour, when they spotted several black dots moving slowly in the distance. The soft chime of camel bells drifted on the wind.
An old Hu man, white-bearded and blue-eyed, with a deeply lined face, was leading a group of seven or eight Hu people and a dozen camels and mules. The travelers varied in appearance–tall, short, stout, thin–not of one tribe. The camels carried bulging white bundles and sacks of fodder, and even from afar, the breeze carried a faint fragrance of tea from their packs.
This caravan, upon seeing two figures standing in their path, was visibly startled. As they approached and realized it was a young man with a teenage girl–both black-haired and black-eyed, unmistakably Han Chinese in appearance–they grew all the more uneasy, but could only greet them with cautious smiles.
After a round of greetings, it became clear that both parties were planning to bypass the Ten Beacons and travel the Great Sea Desert Route to reach Yiwu.
One of the Hu merchants beamed with a broad smile. “What a coincidence! We’ve just come out of Yumen Pass. There’s urgent business at home, so we had no choice but to take this dangerous shortcut around the Ten Beacons. We’ve heard how perilous the Great Sea Desert Route can be and were worried, not knowing what to do. Now that we’ve run into companions, this is excellent news.”
Li Wei spoke truthfully as well: “We were at Lengquan Post, but ran into a band of Turkic raiders and lost our travel documents. So we’re thinking of taking this route to Yiwu.”
“Then why don’t we travel together? We can look out for one another.”
Though the conversation was cordial, the Hu merchants’ smiles were slightly stiff. But seeing that Li Wei’s gaze was calm and his tone courteous, asking no probing questions about their backgrounds, their guarded expressions slowly eased.
Behind the Hu guide stood a fair-skinned, blue-eyed youth of about fifteen or sixteen, strikingly handsome, with features so delicate one could hardly tell if he were boy or girl. Only when he grinned and revealed two small, sharp canine teeth did his youthful vigor show through. He was now grinning and eyeing the person beside Li Wei with unabashed curiosity.
Chun Tian wore a suit of Uyghur-style riding garb, a windhood draped over her head, revealing only half her youthful face. The clothes were a dusky teal with floral medallions, the color slightly muted but making her fair complexion seem all the paler. The close-fitted waist, narrow sleeves, and leather boots outlined her slender figure, leaving no doubt to any sharp-eyed observer that she was a young maiden in disguise.
Noticing the youth’s lingering gaze, Chun Tian turned her face slightly, trying to avoid his eyes. Li Wei, seeing the youth’s eyes fixed so boldly on her, sighed inwardly. He shifted to block Chun Tian from view, raising an eyebrow at the boy.
“Oi!” the blue-eyed youth yelped as his grandfather whacked him on the head with a tobacco pipe.
Startled, he cried out, “Grandpa! What was that for?”
“You shameless brat, do you stare at people like that? Go and apologize to the young lady!”
“She really is a girl?” the youth muttered with a sly glint in his eye, lips twitching. “I thought she was a little brother, I was just about to go strike up a conversation.”
“Little Kouyan, you really must fix this bad habit of yours, just a few days ago at Yumen Pass, you mistook a young man for a girl, now you’re mistaking a young lady for a boy! Hahaha.”
A few of the group chuckled at the blue-eyed youth. “Your eyes may be pretty, but they sure don’t work too well!”
The youth scratched his head sheepishly, letting out an embarrassed laugh. He stepped forward and gave a polite bow to Chun Tian, his voice as clear as a mountain spring: “Young lady, I apologize for earlier. I meant no offense–please forgive my unintentional rudeness.”
Then he added, “I am Kouyan Ying. May I have the honor of the lady’s name?”
Chun Tian’s cheeks flushed faintly. She understood that frontier customs were more open, and her own attire was indeed unusual, so she didn’t take it to heart. With composure, she gave her name.
With names exchanged, the atmosphere grew warmer, and the two groups continued on their journey together.
The old Hu guide’s name was Kouyan Tianfu, a seasoned desert guide with nearly fifty years of experience crossing the sands. He had been hired by the caravan for this journey and had brought his grandson, Kouyan Ying, along to gain experience.
“Are you from the Kouyan family of the Yumi State3?” Li Wei asked respectfully after hearing his name. “The Kouyan family known for asking the heavens and treading the earth?”
Old Kouyan nodded with a gentle smile. “Indeed, I am a descendant of the Tian-generation of the Kouyan family.”
The Kouyan clan of Yumi City, with their blue eyes and fair skin, were famed throughout the Western Regions. The men of the family were versed in astronomy and geography, skilled at crossing dunes and braving deserts. They were walking maps of the region and often hired as guides to lead caravans across the shifting sands or to seek out ancient ruins lost to time.
Li Wei dismounted and cupped his fists with solemn respect. “I never expected to meet someone from the family of my benefactor. When I was young, Grandfather Haizhou once saved my life. A few years ago, I passed through the Yumi State hoping to pay my respects, but was told he had gone to the Loulan ruins4 with a caravan. I never had the chance to see him again. May I ask if he is well?”
Kouyan Tianfu had not expected to meet someone tied to his family and gently stroked his beard. “So, you are a friend of Uncle Haizhou. After returning from Loulan, he spent his final years in peace at home. He passed away two years ago at the age of eighty, his death was calm and without pain.”
Li Wei was visibly moved at the news. Though only a few words were exchanged, they carried a long and distant connection between him and the Kouyan family.
He was around eight or nine at the time, accompanying Old Li on a route from Dunhuang to Qiemo when he accidentally got lost in the Mamitutan region near Dunhuang. Mamitutan, also known as Ghost City, was a maze of jagged wind-carved rock formations–twisting and deceptive terrain that often sheltered horse bandits and mountain thieves. The young Li Wei wandered there for seven or eight days, barely clinging to life, when Kouyan Haizhou found him and led him out of that forsaken place, returning him safely to Old Li.
Since then, every time he passed through Yumi City, Li Wei would stop by the Kouyan residence to pay his respects. But Kouyan Haizhou was often away on expeditions, and though twenty years had passed, the two never met again.
Kouyan Tianfu listened to the story with deep feeling, nodding repeatedly. “The sons of the Kouyan clan live their lives scattered across distant lands. It’s no surprise, friends become strangers, even family grow unfamiliar. Many of us return to find our wives no longer recognize us, our children are like those of others.”
Chun Tian said nothing, quietly listening to the two men talk. Kouyan Ying, uninterested in his grandfather’s reminiscence, urged his horse to trot up beside her. His sharp little tiger teeth peeked out with his grin as he said cheerfully, “Chun Tian, your riding whip is so sleek and elegant. Can I have a look?”
The whip had been a gift from Hu Xiangnan. In just a few short days, she’d passed through cold steel and bloodshed at Lengquan Post, separated from familiar faces and the peace of Stone Trough Village–a place that now seemed like a dream.
Chun Tian handed the whip over. Kouyan Ying gave it a playful snap through the air and examined it admiringly. “The whip is soft at the tip and solid at the end, the tail’s supple and tightly braided, very fine craftsmanship. Where did meimei buy it?”
“It was a gift,” she replied. “From a Hu-gege, in a mountain village called Stone Trough Village.”
“Oh?” Kouyan Ying twirled the whip in his fingers. “I was hoping to buy one just like yours. But now I see, it’s not something you can buy. Someone made it for meimei himself.”
The two groups had gone no more than half a li when, even before the sun had fully risen, the desert heat had already grown oppressive. Just as the party began looking for a place to rest, they heard the clamor of hooves behind them. Two Han Chinese men caught up–one stout, one lean. The stout man had a kindly face; the lean one looked refined and handsome. Both were soaked with sweat and their clothing was disheveled. They raised their hands and called out toward Li Wei’s group:
“Friends, friends, please wait!”
These two, it turned out, were also merchants who had been caught in the Lengquan Post raid by the Turks. The stout one was named Huang Sanding; the lean one, Guo Pan. Both were merchants from Jinzhong. After escaping the Turkish onslaught, they lost their travel papers and, unwilling to return to Yumen Pass, had gambled on cutting through the Moheyan Desert via the so-called Great Road. By luck, they now ran into Li Wei and the Hu traders. Overjoyed, they bowed again and again, earnestly requesting to travel with the caravan.
It was an unspoken rule of the road: if one met fellow travelers, especially in a desolate place like this, it would be heartless to turn them away. But upon seeing the two men arrive in such haste, carrying little food and barely any water, the rest hesitated. The path ahead was arid and perilous.
Just as everyone was wavering, Huang Sanding pulled a lustrous sese bead from within his robes and offered it to the Hu merchants with a wry smile. “My brother and I had intended to replenish food and water at the next post, but now find ourselves trapped in this situation. We’re men of resolve, we’d rather die going forward than crawl back. We’ve heard that crossing the Moheyan Desert will take ten days. We’re short on provisions. Gentlemen, we humbly ask for a little aid.”
The bead was about the size of a thumb, smooth and translucent with a rich jade-green hue when placed on one’s palm, clearly of great value. The merchants hesitated, then consulted briefly in low Hu dialect with the old guide, Kouyan Tianfu.
After some deliberation, the Hu merchants relented. They handed over a water pouch, a few flatbread cakes, and two felt blankets. “We’re not being stingy,” they explained. “Out here in the Ghost Sands, water is dearer than gold. We have many people and animals to care for, so we truly cannot spare more. This pouch should last you one or two days. On the sixth day, we’ll reach Wild Horse Spring, where we can refill our water.”
The two men expressed their gratitude repeatedly. With that, they were accepted into the caravan. Upon learning that Li Wei and Chun Tian had also escaped the Turkish raid at Lengquan Post, they commiserated, sighing to Li Wei, “All ten-plus of our pack mules were taken by those devils. We lost everything. Now we’re thinking of heading to Beiting, try our hand at fortune there.”
Li Wei, his gaze straight ahead, replied, “With courage like xiongtai’s, Heaven will surely reward you. But be cautious, Beiting is a tangle of city-states, where every tribe guards its own. Thieves and bandits roam between them. Tread carefully.”
This remote stretch of desert, rarely crossed by man, now found itself unexpectedly busy with travelers.
Under the boundless sky, camel bells echoed faintly, melodious. It was already the start of summer, and the heavens hung like a steaming lid over the parched land, baking the wilderness in sweltering light. Every corner was painted in a burnt color. Hot winds swept across the earth, stirring suffocating waves of dust.
At first, there were still clusters of short saxaul trees and dusty gray orchid grass. Here and there one might spot stalks of ephedra or oily, sweet celery wormwood. Scorpions and insects skittered across the sands. Even a lone desert wolf could be seen in the distance, standing motionless and wary, watching the travelers with sharp, feral eyes.
The deeper they went into the Moheyan Desert, the more the world seemed stripped to its barest elements: the boundless azure sky above, a few solitary clouds like tufts of white silk, and beneath them, a desolate expanse of pale gray wilderness–endless yellow earth, scattered gravel, crumbling deadwood, and stark white bones. The sun blazed mercilessly, and the hot wind clung to them like a fever. Everyone was swathed in headscarves and face coverings, revealing only their eyes, yet still drenched in sweat and worn down by the oppressive heat.
By day, they sought shade beneath rocky outcrops and in narrow ravines to rest, but even then the wind carried heat, and sweat poured like water from their bodies. Chun Tian was stewing in the heat like a boiled shrimp, her face flushed crimson. Her whole body reeked of salt and sweat, and it felt as though ants and insects were crawling across her skin. At the peak of her discomfort, she could scarcely resist the urge to grab her water pouch and gulp it dry. But Li Wei watched her closely and forbade such indulgence, he even confiscated her water pouch entirely.
They traveled by night. Under the vast silence of the desert sky, the moonlight spread like water and the Milky Way shimmered overhead. The sand sea beneath them glittered like sparkling waves, and the shifting dunes blurred the boundary between the blue heavens and yellow earth. The cold wind howled through the silence, laced with grit and dust, at times like haunting music, at times like distant mountainous roars or thunder. Between the dunes, insects, serpents, and scorpions emerged to travel, weaving through the sand. Unafraid of human presence, they scaled the hooves of pack animals and even crept up people’s legs into their clothes, some climbing all the way to their shoulders.
At first, Chun Tian had recoiled in alarm. By the second day, she could flick a spider from her sleeve without so much as a blink or change in expression.
Between day and night lay the dawn and dusk.
That was when the clouds swelling like waves, layered like snowdrifts, close enough to be plucked from the sky, elegant or imposing in form, shifting from moment to moment, always transient. At dawn, the horizon bloomed with radiance, clouds steaming and glowing in color; by evening, golden light pierced through the sky, splitting the clouds like a sword. A lone star and the silver moon accompanied the warm round sun at opposite edges of the sky, casting a rare gentleness over the desolate landscape.
Footnotes:
- Moheyan Desert or Hashun Gobi Desert, refers to a region within the broader Gobi Deserts, situated between the Lop Nur basin and the ancient Yumen Pass in northwestern China. Historically, this area was known as Moheyan Desert and was infamous for its harsh, arid conditions. It was a significant obstacle along the Silk Road, particularly noted in the travels of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who described it as a perilous expanse devoid of water and vegetation. ↩︎
- Five chief demons of pestilence: this is folklore in which the five chief demons personifying pestilence ↩︎
- The State of Yumi: also called Jumi or Ningmi, was a city state on the southern route of the Silk Road, located in the region of the River Keriya, near modern Yutian, Xinjiang. ↩︎
- Loulan Ruins: Ancient kingdom based around an important oasis city along the Silk Road on the edge of the Lop Desert. ↩︎
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