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Foreign News: The Great Caravan

4 minute read
TIME

“The Kazak’s life is to go skimming over the plains on his steed, rounding up horses or collecting stray cattle. His tent is warm, his clothing ample, his belly full, and he lives a free and untrammeled existence with religion sitting lightly on him.”

Ten years ago a British traveler who visited the Kazak nation on the plains of Central Asia came away with this idyllic description of an easy Asiatic cowboy’s life. Since then part of this Moslem nation has made one of the most amazing journeys of modern times.

The Kazaks of Qomul lived their nomadic life in China’s far western province of Sinkiang until the busy Russians came in 1934. The Chinese Governor had asked their help in subduing a Moslem revolt, and after the revolt they stayed. Also they sent brisk emissaries to “civilize” the Kazaks.

The nomads did not want towns and farms. They liked the freedom of the plains and mountainsides and their own felt tents—the life they had lived since the times of Genghis Khan. To keep their freedom and to live as they had lived for centuries, the Kazaks decided to move out of Sinkiang.

Sinkiang is cut and laced by towering mountains. One of the oldest traditional ways out is the flat, salty waste of the Gobi Desert. This way the great caravan of Kazaks started. There were 20,000 people, with huge herds of sheep, camels and squat Mongolian ponies.

No one will ever know how many of the Kazaks and their animals died in the desert, but the caravan finally came into the long panhandle of Kansu Province. Kansu was not better than Sinkiang. The Chinese Moslems did not welcome their coreligionists from the west, and for two years the Kazaks fought a constant guerrilla war. Desperately they decided to move on, as Tartar tribes have done since time immemorial.

Somewhere along the bleak caravan routes the Kazak leaders had heard of a fabulous, rich and peaceful land to the south. In a place called India, the rumor ran, they could live quietly, with plenty of grass for their flocks. Turning his back on China, the Kazak’s sturdy, 40-year-old chieftain Ali Yas Khan led the remnants of the tribe south.

Their road led across the highest tableland in the world, the Karakoram plateau of northern Tibet. The Kazaks set their faces toward the blue, snowcapped 20,000-foot wall of the Himalayas, worked their painful way through steep narrow gorges, over wind-filled passes like knife cuts in the rock.

Four hundred miles northeast of Lhasa, Tibetan soldiers stopped the caravan. Finally it was allowed to go on. Many a Kazak was killed by bandits; many of their animals died in sudden storms.

At Demchok, on the border of Kashmir, the caravan met a band of soldiers, wearily prepared to fight yet another battle. Then, at a parley, they learned they were facing British border troops from Kashmir. All the Kazaks wanted, they told the Kashmir officials, was a place to graze, land where they could live. To reach their final camp the Kazaks had a last ordeal—to lead their camels and herd their sheep over the 11,300-foot Zoji-la Pass. When the great caravan pitched its tattered tents at Muzaffarabad, only 3,500 Kazaks were left.

Last week the Kazaks were still waiting contentedly in their camp. They watched delightedly as the little ambulance of the Kashmir Animal Welfare Association chugged into camp to doctor the sore feet of their camels. The black-eyed, round-faced children played cheerfully after so many months strapped to high, silver-mounted saddles on the swaying backs of camels.

Less contented was the British Raj. Neither in Kashmir nor in the rest of India are there free grazing lands to match the optimistic rumors which the Kazaks had heard.

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