The ancients of Kongur - Chapter 1 - Part 4

Chapter 1: Part 4: In Kashgar, the guardians who move through portals in time.  

Inside the inner city of Kashgar, amidst the ancient narrow lanes of the old city, are settlements of houses that lead to an old world. This is the Kashgar that has not changed in about a thousand years or thereabouts. The ancient neighbourhood is referred to as Kashi. The residents would proudly refer to themselves as the residents of the real Kashi, not the Kashi of Kashgar or the Kashgar of Kashi. The inner city would probably have been built upon, layer upon layer, from sometime around 300 BC or earlier. This much, we know. It could be much older, and that story can be left to those who know.

They were different communities, inside this ancient neighbourhood. The older inner city of Kashgar was more typical of the outer areas. The ancient community of Kashi did not seem to be similar to the Uighurs, the Han or the Tibetan groups. They did not seem to be Kirghiz and certainly were not similar to the various nomad tribes of the northwest and west of Kashgar. Nobody knew of them, and nobody bothered about these people. They did not matter. They were too few and did not seem to amount to any sense of relevance, economy or productivity. They lived their lives, though they did not seem to work at anything.

Nobody noticed them. The local police would not even be able to describe anything about them. The traders and local businesses and markets knew that they would purchase regularly from the local shops and markets. That was all. They never seemed to be selling anything. Their children attended a school inside the inner city. The strange aspect of the inner city was that nobody prevented anyone from entering the area. But, nobody did so.

Their neighbours were a community of ancient Uighurs. They called themselves the Manichaean Uighurs. The Han Chinese government officers did not worry about these distinctions between these communities. To the Uighurs, it mattered. You need to know who you were. An Uighur saying went, “You needed to know who you were, and where you came from, for you need to know where you will go to, for you carry the strength of your people with you.”

The Manichaean Uighurs maintained that the ancient community living inside the old settlements of Kashi were similar to themselves, but were also unlike their people who had moved through history from pre-Buddhist followings, to different schools of Buddhist thought and later, as Moslem Uighur and Buddhist Uighur. Strangely, nobody had seen the ancient community visiting any local mosque or any monastery. They did not seem to pray or follow a religion like the others living in the region.

In one of these ancient houses, Sangra Ma, sat at the windows on the higher storeys, looking out at the skyline of the outer city of Kashgar. He could see the distant hill ranges outside the city, to its South, and he could see the smog and dust-filled clouds hanging above various areas. What could he do? On some days, looking at the new Kashgar, he could feel his age. His thoughts went out to the open lands of Kongur, and to his brother, Mirabhe, and their village, high up on the slopes of the great mountain. Their father had bestowed upon Sangra Ma, the responsibility to stay at the ancient settlement at Kashi, and keep the community together.

They lived peacefully, and tried to avoid any conflict or convergence with the other people in the inner city of Kashi within Kashgar. To all the other people in the city, and to the government, an inner city concept had never been established. The city of Kashgar was Kashi, and it was the same to the people who came from different regions and settled here, and sought their future.

The world was changing forever, thought Sangra Ma. He had seen the changes over the more than four hundred years that he had lived. For Sangra Ma and his father, the long life-periods did not seem to be important. It was the ancient city of Kashi, and this ancient settlement and old houses that were more important. Sangra Ma’s father had thought it necessary for his elder son to travel out of Kongur and enter the mofussil small settlement, four hundred years ago, to take over as custodian of this group of houses and lands inside the place, known as Kashi.

Sangra Ma walked down the stairs of his house to the inner courtyard. It was not like any inner courtyard that you would have known from the house designs and dimensions from places that you would have visited. This inner courtyard was huge. The house had been constructed all around the courtyard. The other houses had been constructed around the central house. The architecture was representative of the nearly thousand years of construction and re-construction, add-ons and changes that had happened in the narrow lanes between these four perimeters of settlements around Sangra Ma’s house.

The inner courtyard had gardens, a small forest, and a sort-of-hillock, stone remnants of ancient houses, stables, wells and cobbled streets. The house was constructed around it, comprising three to four storeys in different corners, and depending upon the slope of the inner courtyard. Even the old settlements of the Uighurs nearby could never locate the courtyard. Sangra Ma’s great grandson, Kuju La, had taken on the contemporary Han Chinese and Uighur name, and called himself, Kuiu Lan Chao, had learnt modern sciences and gained expertise in understanding modern nations.

Kuju La was waiting for Sangra Ma at the inner courtyard. Sangra Ma’s father and grandfather had said that it had been called Sa-may-daa-rae, the Gates of Time. Sangra Ma walked with his great grandson, as part of his daily ritual, through the remnant cobbled path towards the small forest and hillock. As they walked, they looked about at the inner side of the house, and they could see the thousands of years of construction that had taken place upon earlier construction levels. The lowermost plinth had been laid in large blocks of local stone, each one larger than a yak. The stone had been dug out of the land from the neighbourhood.

They walked through the forested path, beyond the hillock and entered the large house at the other end of the courtyard. This house seemed to have been constructed around an earlier, much ancient, stone building. They climbed a flight of stairs to reach the porch at the plinth level. The porch ran around most of the building, and to the outer areas, towards the other houses inside the inner courtyard. Sangra Ma and Kuju La entered the premises from the porch. Here, a flight of stairs ran downward, much deeper than the level of the inner courtyard. These premises were well lit, with modern electricity, and helped them move faster than they would have done so, about a hundred years earlier.

Deep underground, they arrived at a flowing stream of water, as wide as a small river, and they walked along this riverbank. They must have walked through for about 500 metres or somewhat, and reached a properly constructed stone-cut platform, with brickwork for prayer fires, burning at four corners. These fires had been burning without any interruption, deep here, underground, for more than a thousand years or so. Sangra Ma and Kuju La bowed in reverence at each corner, and moved to the center of the platform.

Here, in the center of the platform, with the thousand-year old fires at the four corners, was a stone structure, in shining black granite. It was a smooth circular column of stone, more than five metres in diameter, and going deeper and deeper inside the platform. Sangra Ma and Kuju La could only see the column at the stone platform, and the portion that rose above it, for about ten metres in height. Within the confined underground perspective, they knew that the portion that they saw was only a minor portion of the rest of the column that disappeared deeper within the platform. Sangra Ma had never known of the depth of the column and he had never asked.

The river stream poured out from a stone ledge, and streamed on to the granite column at its top. Around the column, at the location where it went underground and disappeared, there was a black granite grip-like designed stone, established flat over the stone platform. The black granite grip design was all around the stone column, except for allowing an opening that permitted the falling water to drip out to flow away as the river that Sangra Ma and Kuju La had walked along. This was the most sacred of all places, Sangra Ma’s father had told him, for it was in this location that one could move through the portals of time, and this was where the ancient gods had come, when they had first come to the most sacred of all lands, where the first river had emerged.