The Lost Heart of Asia (32 page)

But the town seemed deceptively at peace. I saw no sign even of the earthquake whose epicentre had trembled here two weeks before (and had rattled the crockery in Tashkent). The cracks in our hotel walls had been there for years.

On the western outskirts a rocky spine of mountain, named the Throne of Solomon, must have given the town birth. Here, pilgrims believe, the king viewed the city which he founded, and on its summit descended into the grave. Solomon's tomb became a haunt of Sufis, of course, and for decades the Russians tried to halt the secret pilgrimages there. Officials railed against the ‘sectarian underground' and ‘reactionary Muslim clergy' with paranoiac anxiety, and in 1987 tried to neutralise the site by encouraging tour-groups of East Europeans there.

Now the spur hovered open above me, tufted in shrubs and grasses. At its foot a stone plinth still trumpeted the dictums of Lenin. Nobody had bothered to remove it. On a municipal hoarding superscribed ‘The Best People in Osh', the empty boards were dropping apart. Crowds of local sightseers were climbing the path in funfair mood: boisterous youths, and schoolgirls in white-aproned smocks, like truant parlour-maids.

I trudged up after them. Concrete steps zigzagged askew along the mountain's rim. Bushes and trees were speckled with telltale rags. But all zealotry – Moslem or Communist – seemed past. It had gone under the trampling feet of sweaty weekend vacationers slung with cheap cameras. Flocks of sturdy women had kicked off their high heels to grip the steps barefoot, and seemed to wear their silks not as a national statement but a pretty fashion. On the crest, the Sufis, shorn of their bogey status, remained as they had probably always been: a handful of elderly men in search of peace.

A light wind brushed the summit. The tomb of Solomon was a rebuilt chapel facing Mecca. An old man dispensed blessings, assisted by his son in an Adidas tracksuit. Some say that Solomon was murdered here, and that his black dogs still lurk in the fissures of the rocks, where they lapped his blood and ate his body. In the last century, invalids would press their heads into the crevices as a cure. But now the tomb was screened off by the coarse, flushed smiles of Kirghiz families lined up to photograph themselves, their women's faces dashed in sweat and rouge. Below us, Osh curled among its trees in a foetal crescent, while beyond surged the nakedness of the Pamirs, whose cloud-coloured peaks infiltrated the sky, then vanished.

I yearned to travel these mountains, but Oman was losing his nerve. On my descent he reported that the road I had chosen into Tajikistan was snowbound. He had been talking to lorry-drivers. He had heard of passes over 10,000 feet, he said. He did not want to go near Tajikistan at all. The country was in civil war. On our hotel television he came upon a blurred news bulletin which reported shooting on the roads around the capital. When I remained obstinate, he started to look miserable and to tramp about with a boyish, hurt air. But he spent the afternoon locating bread, mineral water and soggy strawberries. He made a few bargains. And soon the buoyancy and slight fatalism which I liked in him resurrected, and he cried: ‘Then we'll go! Let's try it! We'll know when we arrive!'

My wanderings in Osh, meanwhile, came to an end in the upper room of a defunct cinema. I had noticed young men loping furtively through a door labelled ‘Cosmos Video Hall', and had followed them up a dank stairway. At the top I paid five roubles and entered a curtained room. Some fifty men were seated on plastic chairs, leering in rapt stillness at a television hoisted on to the wall in front. As I came in, the screen flashed and up came
Blondie
, produced by ‘Svetlana' and filmed by ‘Mr Ed'. It was a hard-porn movie purveying clichés of fantasy sex – multiple, oral, underwater – between four tireless studs and a stable of dyed blondes. Its stock American dialogue had been dubbed slackly into Russian, and its garnish of sports cars, yachts and private swimming-pools suggested a synthetic paradise somewhere in the idle West. From the darkness the men gaped up expressionlessly. Their hands strayed to their crotches. The gulf between their reality and the profligacy on screen yawned so hopelessly that they might have been watching science fiction. They huddled before it like impotent conspirators. How would it seem, I wondered, when they returned to their plain suburbs, to the swarthy, unpampered bodies of their own women?

An hour later they slunk out, shielding their eyes against the sun or the world, where the Throne of Solomon thrust against the sky. I asked one youth what he thought, and he said the film was OK, but expensive at five roubles. Already its gross, depersonalised dream seemed to have dimmed out of his face, and he was returning to other cares and to the qualifying daylight.

The day before we crossed into the Pamirs, Oman and I drove north through poor Kirghiz hamlets to the little town of Uzgen. At roadside police barriers brutal-looking officers flagged down anything that passed, but viewed me with hospitable surprise, and let us go unsearched.

Uzgen clustered below a pass of the Tienshan in a green valley; and here, beside a field damp with poppies and clover, all that was left of an early capital of Mavarannahr lay mouldering in the sun. Three mausoleums and a minaret, raised in the confi-dent simplicity of patterned brick, marked the site of a city whose empire had straddled Central Asia. For a century and a half, between the year they overran the Samanids in 999 and the time they vanished under Mongolian invaders, the obscure Karakhanids ruled here in unreachable splendour at the antipodes of the world. Who they were, I scarcely knew: a Turkic people, I had read, whose loose-knit federation was constantly in flux. Yet their dominions spread huger than India.

I waded through grass to the mausoleums. They appeared to have been restored, and then abandoned. Their portals were scooped from a single façade: tall frames of decorative brick flanked by engaged pillars. Within them, the doorways to the chambers were encrusted with bands of terracotta foliage and colonnettes, from which the colour had long ago been washed away. Columns, friezes, vase-shaped capitals – all were covered with the same perforated blanket of relief work: dry, subtle, exquisite.

One doorway, in particular, stood almost free of restoration, and in that desolateness shone with a honeycomb intricacy. Under a whole gallery of geometric patterns carved foliage oozed and crept, and a sensuous wriggle of calligraphy overswept half the gateway. But the arches led from nothing to nothing. Their dead had gone. Outside, from the ruin's height above the valley, I imagined the capital poised schizophrenically between cultivation and wilderness. For the Karakhanids were the first of the Turkic dynasties in Central Asia – hesitant precursors of the waves to come – and their site looked pastoral and impermanent even now, cramped on its hill beside the graves of their nomad kings.

The first foothills folded round us under a cloudy sky. Horsemen overflowed the road with flocks of mud-clogged sheep and goats, descending to drink at a distant tributary of the Syr Dariya which meandered beside us. We were entering a half-pagan country of summer nomads. Once or twice we passed a wayside grave speared with horsetail banners and rams' horns, and here and there a herdsman's yurt crouched like a dirty igloo on slopes spotted with cattle.

Then the valley narrowed. The earth-built cowsheds of winter villages appeared, deserted now. The river cut through the earth in a silty torrent, and flash-floods spinning down the gulleys had torn off chunks of tarmac and dropped them into its valley. Thunder-clouds rolled from every defile and rose from the summits as if they were steaming. The lowland heat had gone. Ahead of us arteries of snow trickled down the mountain-flanks, and the earth darkened to a sooty shale where wind had broken the ridges into blackened spikes. Oman let out bleak noises of foreboding. The snows had withdrawn late this year, he'd heard, or not at all.

Then our road mounted into a stadium of white peaks which shook out black streamers of cloud thousands of feet above us. Crows flew in the valleys like blown ash. The river turned green. Wherever the road had torn a cutting, it exposed a stark magenta earth, which sometimes splashed bloodily to the snow-line. Below us I glimpsed red and white crags tossed up through the clouds. Then the road turned to dirt and for an hour no vehicle passed us. The police posts were all deserted. As we spiralled above the snowline, clouds plunged across our track and we entered a monochrome void. A harsh, blurred light refracted from the snowfields. The road hung in disconnecting whiteness. Once we brushed past a gang of shepherds – black-faced men with forked Mongol beards – and the headlights of a solitary lorry glowed out of the pall. Then we emerged from the clouds into a planetary upland without sun or shadow or colour. The rounded hills and mountains looked exhausted and disembodied, as if the land had grown ill, and flowed before us unbroken into a white sky.

The Alai range – the northern bastion of the Pamir – was behind us now, and soon we were descending into a wide valley. Here, at over 10,000 feet, the headwaters of the Kizylsu, the Red River, gathered to slide westward 400 miles, until they had swollen to a raging force which deluged into the Amu Dariya on the edge of Afghanistan. But in the silent valley the river was only a shallow twine of streams. Herds of chestnut horses cropped their banks. As we turned west, the mainstream, crimson with silt, was wreathed about with ice-green tributaries, running side by side. The grass twittered with invisible birds. Their sound – and the weak patter of the rivulets – deepened the silence.

But we had crossed some indefinable divide. The air was utterly still, and the whole sky transfigured to a vivid, artificial blue. The snow-peaks to our west stood in Tajikistan; those to our east were glittering out of China. In front of us, in a glacial palisade which shadowed the valley for a hundred miles, the Transalai mountains – the Pamir heart – shone in the sky as if formed from some rarer element than ours.

We stopped by the shingly streams, and gazed. Along our whole horizon the mountains made a frozen tumult of spires and ridges, erupting to over 23,000 feet. Seven centuries ago Marco Polo recalled that even birds did not survive here. The plateaux are sprinkled with frozen lakes and lie under so intense a cold that their stones crumble away and the earth unlocks its plants for only a few summer weeks. The impact of the Indian subcontinent, pressing into Asia's underbelly, still squeezes up the Pamir at a rate of two-and-a-half inches a year; but the ranges to the south-east are rising even faster, and over the millennia the monsoons have dwindled away. They have left a region of mummified emptiness. In the permafrost of its high valleys even the snow is only a dust and the wind blows not in storms but as a nagging, sandpaper restlessness in the starved air. Against this awesome cold, some of the bulkiest mammals on earth have developed: the yak, the Marco Polo sheep, and
Ursus Torquatus,
the world's weightiest bear. Even now, in late May, icicles fringed the river banks, and when a west wind sprang up it cut like a scythe.

A young shepherd, riding up on a brindled colt, shared our bread with us, resting in the saddle. Winter kept its snows for the valleys, he said. Sometimes they reached above his shoulders – he raised his hand eloquently to his neck – then his people coralled away their herds and fed them by hand. They called this valley paradise, yet suffered the highest proportion of still-births in the world, I'd read. He glanced along the road where we were going. Two days earlier, he said, it had been severed by a torrent of red mud For an hour we drove west along the ghostly causeway of the valley, arrow-straight down a gravel track. Once we passed a faded hoarding which still read: ‘Glory to the Defenders of the Soviet frontiers!' Beyond it a cemetery streamed with horsetail standards. And always to our south the mountains kept pace in a phantasmal counterpoint of scarps and pyramids, where cloud-shadows spread a dim commotion, and hawks wheeled.

Less than thirty miles from the Tajik border we reached the village of Darvat Kurgan, and found a lorry depot where we downed a meal of noodles and cold soup. It was from here that in 1871 the Russian explorer Fedchenko had looked across with longing at the Transalai, and had given his watch to the Kokandi garrison commander as a bribe to let him proceed. But at once the watch stopped – the commander had childishly wound it to death – and permission was withdrawn. Only later did Fedchenko return and discover the glacier – almost the largest in the world – which sprawled out of sight for fifty miles in the massif across our valley. Now the Kokandi fort had become a warehouse and was crumbling away, its towers half collapsed and its loopholes blocked with mud.

Three miles farther, in the impoverished village of Chak, our track disappeared among mud alleys. They looked abandoned. A few bald-headed Bactrian camels stood among the hovels, and did not stir as we nosed our way through. We splashed over a gulley, and found the only path out of the village. Ahead of us hung a wooden bridge whose struts stood thin as sticks in the river. My heart sank. It was the only way west. I thought we might edge on to it and test its strength. Then suddenly Oman shouted ‘We'll see!' and set the car at it headlong.

For a second it crackled like dry biscuits under us. Then we were over and charging up a precipitous bank.

I yelled: ‘Weren't you afraid?'

‘Of course I was!' he yelled back.

Now the mountains engulfed us. Their flanks crowded the track in vertiginous gulfs and spurs. Through their flaccid earth the river had dropped sheer, opening up purple veins, and soon it was winding in a blood-coloured trickle a thousand feet below us. Our route was a maze of ruts and stones, and we went in clouds of reddish dust which clogged our hair and eyes.

Oman settled at the wheel with a strange, sombre glee. I had misjudged him. It was not hardship or challenge which turned him morose, but the emptiness of ordinary living. But now crisis freed him into near-recklessness. His only sign of nerves was a dangerous urge to smoke, and once, glimpsing the track fringing the precipices in front of us, he blessed himself. He never paused before a new wave of congealed mud or stones, simply drove his twelve-year-old Lada at it full tilt, and bullied us through or over.

But we had entered a deepening wilderness. Beneath us the river plunged unseen through a corridor of chasms and gulfs barely forty feet wide, while we wandered along its rim high above. Across our track the snowfields poured down shale and melted ice, turning it to a sepia rink. And it was these mud-slides which most threatened us. Set loose by shifting glaciers or rains, they descended in noiseless slicks which sometimes engulfed whole villages, leaving nothing behind. A few days earlier, unknown to us, a Tajik hamlet of a hundred souls had simply vanished from sight under an avalanche of liquid earth.

All afternoon we laboured on. Once only the liver-coloured slopes which walled us in burst open on a white gallery of mountains, brilliant and untouched, peak piled on peak, and desolately beautiful as they shone down on the wastes through which we blundered. At last a landslide turned our path to quagmire. Oman set the car at it again and again, but we dropped axle-deep into an ocean of red mud. We clambered out and piled stones round the wheels, but nothing moved. Bit by bit, we were sinking. I imagined enduring the night here, our doors locked against wolves, while we waited for any help. But after an hour a truck-full of Kirghiz shepherds arrived from the other direction, their bedding and chattels mounded about them – wild men with flayed cheekbones, who heaved us clear with a rope.

We pushed on through fallen rocks and snow, and somehow we never stuck again for long, but wove and charged our way out, with no man or vehicle in sight, and the light failing. At sunset we came to a stream under an alpine meadow, where cattle grazed, and we washed, exhausted, and Oman eased the car into its ford and swabbed it tenderly down. In the ageing light above us an eagle circled. There was no sound but the boiling of the distant river in its canyon.

Somewhere we had crossed unnoticed into Tajikistan. No military or police post marked the border. ‘They think there's no road through,' said Oman, with a glint of pride.

But this was a country in civil war. It was the poorest and least urbanised of all the republics of the old Soviet Union. It endured the highest birth-rate, but its population was barely five million. Alone in Central Asia, its people were not of Turkic but Iranian stock and language, and some made common cause with their fellow-Tajik
mujahedin
over the Afghan border. Now, in the capital, an incongruous alliance of Moslems and democratic liberals was confronting the ex-Communist government. Their schism was heated by clan rivalries and by the dichotomy between an industrialised north and an impoverished south; and within a year war was to claim some 20,000 dead, and set loose a torrent of refugees.

But this evening, at sunset, nothing disturbed the mountains which circled our sky. As we eased west into the night the crowding slopes receded, and we descended into a broad valley. My map disclosed a few villages on the north bank of the river, and in the first starlight we crossed a bridge over a tributary among apple and cherry orchards. As Oman negotiated a room in a bleak inn, curious faces multiplied round us. In this region, at least, a tenuous peace prevailed. But nobody believed we had come from the east. The track was impassable even to horses until May, they said, although a heavy lorry might get through. Who were we really, they seemed to be asking? And from where had we actually come: an Uzbek and an Englishman?

As we sat in our room, opening a celebratory tin of tuna fish, we were joined by a Tajik and an Uzbek who owned a bus for transporting village wedding-parties. Sherali was a copybook Tajik. His fierce, Iranic features were drenched in a silky black beard and set with rapier eyes. Yet often he looked indefinably bewildered, and his suave courtesies seemed to have been borrowed from somebody else. His Uzbek partner was a near-dwarf named Sadik, who proffered a curved arm in handshake, as if he had suffered a stroke.

In the cool night we huddled round a table and exchanged road and war news, and a little food, and dim philosophies. The villagers here were still quiet, Sherali said. It was the mountains that should be feared. ‘People don't understand them. The mountains can be very sensitive, very terrible. A man may go hunting and fire off a shot and it sets the whole valley moving, or people shout to one another, and even the reverberation of their voices is dangerous, and finishes them.'

‘We've seen those avalanches.' Oman had swelled like a bull-frog. ‘We crossed six or seven.'

‘Last year,' Sherali went on, ‘in those mountains where you were, forty-two climbers disappeared. They were caught in a mud-slick and buried. Only one was separate from the rest, and got back to tell us.'

The dwarfish Sadik, meanwhile, was insinuating his lit cigarette between the others' dangling fingers, allowing each a puff before he retrieved it. From time to time he stared into my face with the half-evolved eyes of a lizard, then nudged me with a question. But his voice came always in a venal near-whisper as if everything he said must be secret or ugly. I at first thought him a little imbecile. ‘Who are the most famous footballers with you?'

My mind went blank. I'd been cut off from England too long. A few months earlier, I was sure, I could have named several.

Sherali continued with a kind of fiery sadness: ‘Those mountains have claimed more lives than any war . . . .'

But Sadik's saurian gaze was still on mine. Perhaps he was doubting if I were English. He said resentfully: ‘England is the birthplace of football . . .'

Then, in a fit of recall, I said: ‘Gazza!'

He had not heard of him. ‘He must be young,' he said, and went on questioning me. ‘I knew an Englishman once who gave me a coat. What clothes do you have?' He reached through my jacket flaps and fingered my pullover.

But Sherali broke in: ‘Look! We're just back from a party!' He delved into his bag and lifted out something wrapped in newspaper. ‘We drove two soldiers back to their village after service in Siberia. Their family killed a sheep and gave us some!' Jubilantly he unwrapped a steamed head, complete in its skin. ‘I've never met an Englishman before! We'll celebrate!' The skull had been sliced laterally, shearing off its mandible and exposing the meat inside the cranium and upper jaw. He dangled it in front of me. ‘Delicious!'

I stared at it uneasily. Its eyes were closed under dark lashes half steamed away. Its ears stuck out delicately, like a deer's.

Sadik said: ‘This Englishman gave me a suit . . . .What will you give me?'

But Sherali had stripped away the sheep's skin in a flash. Its yellow skull ogled the ceiling. ‘Eat!'