The Fabled Land of the Three Frontiers

-I-

Midnight Tea on the High Plateau

With dark, the Pashtuns camp on the high desert. They dig a deep pit and heat their lamb bread, wash, pray, eat, drink tea and talk quietly. At the edge of the light, over the whinnying of the fire, his world swathed in darkness and his ears straining against the hood, he listens. The deserter. The soldier in flight.

Though he knows something of the language they pray in, he knows little of the language they speak in, and nothing of their dialect. But there is a word he knows. A word he learned in his previous life back on the outpost when he was still a killer filled with vitriol in his country’s army who yearned to wreak rage on the heathen and on the inhuman savage. It is this word he believes he hears them speak each night by the fire.

“Koshtan mekosham.”

The big man, with the dark brown beard and the fierce and brilliant black eyes, the one who stands behind him when they take off the hood to let him wash or drink, eat or pray, who always has his hand on the knife, who is always watching him, he will be the one to cut off his head, he knows.

He wonders only, when the hour comes, when they finally reach the mountains, if they will take off the hood or if they will keep it on, and he realizes that the most evil thing about execution is the anticipation. It is here that the true terror of the act lies.

After they feed the deserter that night, the men put the hood back on him and climb under their thick wool blankets, colored even as myriadly as the rugs on which they pray, and fall asleep beneath the stars.

On the outer edge of their circle, where the aura of firelight meets the plain of darkness, he lies awake next to the mule, listening to her pant, bray and swish her tail, breathing the rarefied air, struggling to steady his blood and breath and striving to gaze through the hood and through the depths of mystery that shroud his sight and veil his vision and leave his traitorous heart aching with a latent, violent yearning in this bewitching land of barbarous beauty.

If he closes his eyes, he can see again the firmament, the dark glimmering canopy of stars, the constellations and the planets wheeling in their orbits, and the long bright band of the galaxy, cutting its swath across the deep indigo sky.

He cradled the small and smooth blue
porcelain cup in his wind-worn hands
and sipped the hot tea slowly, savoring
the rich spices and the scrumptious
flavor, healing and healthy, wholesome
as a whole meal, fragrant in aroma
and delectable in taste, and he marveled
at the bands of sapphire and alabaster
and turquoise and at the Persian
calligraphy wrought around the rim
of the tiny but exquisite porcelain cup.

Earlier that night, when they took the hood off to let him eat, he’d sat on their thick wool blankets by the fire, a cup of green tea warming his hands, and gazed up at the stars. The tea was delicious. A clean and clear green chai spiced with cinnamon and cardamom, radiant red strands of saffron and crushed white almonds.

He cradled the small and smooth blue porcelain cup in his hands and sipped the hot tea slowly, savoring the rich spices and the scrumptious flavor, healing and healthy, wholesome as a whole meal, fragrant in aroma and delectable in taste, and he marveled at the bands of sapphire and alabaster and turquoise and at the Persian calligraphy wrought around the rim of the tiny but exquisite porcelain cup. Across the fire, he’d felt the boy watching him, but when he turned, the boy looked away and hid his face in his father’s shoulder.

Now, lying awake in the darkness, shivering, striving to see again the stars, he wonders if it will snow again tonight and if the big man sleeps at all, or if at night he lies awake, watching him watch the stars.

Whether he sleeps himself or not most nights, and for how long, he rarely knows for sure, but often he believes he can see the sky pale and the stars wash out and fade away toward dawn, falling one by one out of the heavens, and that he can feel a current of water running beneath him, coursing deep through the earth, growing stronger each day and each night. And he wonders what tectonic forces carved out of night and out of the earth this elemental land, and if they are the same forces that wrought the firmament.

Finally, he wonders what it would take for him to get his left hand on that knife and slit the big man’s throat in his sleep, the big Pashtun with the brown beard and the barbarously beautiful black eyes whose body broods a latent violence, much like his own, and if he could do it with the hood on.

There was a time early on in the beginning when he may have imagined killing them all in their sleep, even the boy, but that time is passed in his life, and the thought of killing is even more heinous to him now than the monstruous thought of getting his own head cut off.

Either way, whether he marks it or not, the dawn comes. He knows this for sure because soon, again, he is up on his feet, walking. All day, they cross the land. From the rising of the sun, even unto the going down of the same, they walk.

-II-

Reading, Dreaming
& Stargazing in the Pamirs

Some nights, after they eat, before the Pashtuns put the hood back on, they let him pray. Rolling one of their rugs out on the earth and sitting him down near the fire, they unbind his hands and put the book in them, before retreating to the edge of the plain, where the firelight and the darkness meet, to recline on their blankets, smoke hashish, drink kahwa and gaze up at the starry sky.

Alone, he sits by the fire, opens the book to the beginning, and reads. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. He stops reading and looks up.

Over his head a million stars fill the night sky, shimmering like mica in a swift-running river, delivering light from origins and worlds away and from worlds and origins now dark and onyx and unknown, enfolded in night and in time.

He sits on the prayer rug by the spellbinding fire that flickers and flares with its forked tongue and its blue flutes of carnelian flames and reads from the book and listens to the wind toll and the silence knell and the stars peal cold and clear as they fall flashing down the sky and across the plain, iridescent streaks of cobalt and violet and magenta that finally burn out into pewter and into ivory white and vanish into obsidian and oblivion beyond the dark silhouettes of the distant snow mountains.

After he has read for awhile, he closes the book and holds it in his hands. He touches the cover, smoothing the frayed corners and running his fingers along the torn binding and the deckle edges. He opens the cover and reads the name and the words written there. PFC Lee West, US Army. He touches the name and the name of the nation that was once familiar to him, but which now seem strange and foreign as this country, as this land and sky, and he imagines who this boy Lee was.

Over his head, a million stars fill the
night sky, shimmering like mica in
a swift-running river, delivering light
from origins and worlds away and from
worlds and origins now dark and onyx
and unknown, enfolded in night and in time.

He sits on the prayer rug by the
spellbinding fire that flickers and flares
with its forked tongue and its blue flutes
of carnelian flames and reads from the
book and listens to the wind toll and
the silence knell and the stars peal cold
and clear as they fall flashing down
the sky and across the plain, iridescent
streaks of cobalt and violet and magenta
that finally burn out into pewter
and into ivory white and vanish into
obsidian and oblivion beyond the dark
silhouettes of the distant snow mountains
that stand sentinel on the frontiers
of even farther-flung foreign lands.

He wonders what they did to him, or into whose hands they delivered him, and for what price. He wonders if what they did to this boy Lee will be the same thing they’ll do to him when they reach the mountains. Will they hand him over and sell him to others for ransom or cut off his head themselves?

And will there be another one coming after him, some other deserter like himself or like Lee, who one night hence in his own captivity will sleep in his desert sand and sage green sleeping bag under the stars, or read his name by firelight on something that had belonged to him, and wonder who he was and what they did to him?

Maybe his blouse, or boots, or canteen will be all that are left of him, the sole markers for some other desperate soul seeking a way out of war, the only evidence left of his life, of his odyssey and his execution.

Other times, in the flaring light of the fire, he is forced to reckon with himself and to wonder if his fear is imagined, if he himself has wrought his own terror and dredged up his terrible dread from some sick cellar of his soul or some sensationalized report he’d heard from his compatriots back on the outpost long ago. The truth is what evidence does he have that they conspire to cut off his head? Perhaps they are no killers. Maybe they are no more or less evil than he.

As he looks out now across the fire toward the frontier of darkness and the open land beyond, he sees the boy, huddled against his father’s arm, watching him. That is when the big man, his right hand on the knife at his hip, comes and takes away the book and drags him off the prayer rug and binds his hands and puts the hood over his head again, blotting out the land and the earth, the night sky and the stars, and the boy, too, and swathing his world in darkness again.

Dawn, a light dusting of snow mantles the plain and sheathes his sleeping bag with rime, and he’s up on his feet, walking. All that day, they cross the land.

-III-

The Fabled Land
of the Three Frontiers

At night, they take him far out from the fire and from the circle of firelight, out to the plain at the borderland of the darkness, to urinate. They untie his hands and take the hood off. He gasps and breathes and looks around, nostrils flaring, lungs burning cold, as he inhales hard and deeply, drinking in the arid air and the desert land and the last of the day’s light in the long west.

How long it has been since he walked out of the outpost that night in the celestial light well before dawn when he felt himself violently lurching on a moral threshold with nothing but a small rucksack and his sleeping bag and began walking north and east toward the Wakhan Corridor and toward the mountains and the pass he’d heard of perched somewhere in their midst in their high snowy peaks and in their cold arid ends, following the river, he is no longer wholly sure.

And how long it has been since the Pashtuns came upon him and picked him up and put over his head the hood when he passed out or fell asleep in the midst of kneeling at that pool of water he bowed before and cupped his hands to drink from and that he understood not where the water came from but which seemed to well up from deep within the earth, he no longer knows, either.

Like the river and the land, he has entered into deep time, into dream time.

Time and space, day and night, darkness and light, have wed and married and become one, have become something strange and new in this land and in this country, and with each passing day and night his tether to his old country and to the other world back beyond the Corridor and to the old wars of fire and lead, phosphorus and stone, and the old ways of measuring and defining, living and being, grow weaker and more tenuous and distant and faint and dim.

All his life since he has become a man, he has believed in nothing, no country, no god, no faith, no spirit and no soul, nothing mysterious, nothing sublime and nothing holy, nothing beyond his power of understanding, nothing he couldn’t kill with a machinegun or dispatch with a knife, and for his atheism and for his belief he has remained a foreigner to the earth and a stranger to himself, an alien to his country and an outcast from his own heart.

But since he has come to this country and to this land and since that morning he walked out in the dark and in the light of the hour before dawn and since these nights, standing on the plain under the stars before he urinates or lying awake in the darkness with the hood over his head, believing he was seeing the stars, listening to the Pashtuns sing and pray and give praise to earth and Allah in word and song and silence, he has felt something wholly new taking form within him, something original and novel he has never experienced in his life up to now, since he was a boy, something vast and awesome and inexpressible and full of majesty and cold grace as Afghanistan itself and something for which he has no name and no word to speak.

Time and space, day and night,
darkness and light, have wed and
married and become one, have become
something strange and new in this land
and in this country, and with each
passing day and night his tether to his
old country and to the other world back
beyond the Corridor and to the old wars
of fire and lead, phosphorus and stone,
and the old ways of measuring
and defining, living and being, grow
weaker and more tenuous and
distant and faint and dim.

He stands on the plain at the boundary of the dark and gazes out across the land, watching the stars mount on the eastern horizon and imagining the lands beyond—Pakistan, Tajikistan, Gilgit-Baltistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Chitral, Hunza, Swat, Kashmir, Sinkiang, Tibet, Qinghai, Gansu, China. He has studied maps and long dreamed of these lands, he knows these are the countries beyond Badakhshan Province and the Wakhan Corridor and the Wakhjir Pass, beyond Muztagh Ata and Kongur Tagh, the lands beyond the river.

But as he stands on the plain looking out across the vast expanse of high desert steppe, the far-flung fringes of the Pamir Plateau, he cannot envision those lands or speak their strange names. He feels only, dimly, he is standing at the edge of the earth, a new frontier before him, a frontier foreign and immense and ineffable, for which he again has no name and no words to brand it with, a frontier which fills him with fear, with a feeling of the eternal and the elemental, but which also calls to him, stronger and stronger, beckoning with greater exigency, deeper force and with a more consummate vision, bordering on the sublime and brushing up against the divine, each passing day and night out here on the great Pamir Plateau.

The frontier may be death or it may not be, and maybe it is something greater than death and possibly beyond it, though to walk out into its plain and into its heart and come face to face with its country may mean facing his own death. This he knows in his blood and bones.

The big man jostles him. He awakes from his reverie and returns to himself. He unbuttons his trousers and passes his water to the earth, his urine grown sour and darker each day for so long, as he trekked through the desert alone, a pained reeking trickle, but now clearer and brighter again, sweet-smelling, coming hard and clean and swift with an audible hiss against the earth and a warm wafting steam afterward, since the Pashtuns found him and fed him and took him up.

Indeed, each day he feels himself growing stronger and sounder, his body sturdier and his vision clearer, as if the exalted altitude and the rarified air and the elemental earth, stripped of all adornments save rock and shale, stone and rime, have sloughed off all lard and raiment from his body and bones, and from the marrow of his bones and the muscle of his heart, leaving him lean, hale and graceful as a snow leopard, though his terror and his anguish about how all of this will end endures.

He finishes, shakes off, stretches, buttons his trousers back up, and the big man binds his hands and puts the hood on and leads him back to the fire, their only source of warmth and light and refuge in this land carved out of the earth and out of the night, save the stars.

Dawn, and he’s up on his feet, walking. Finally, on that afternoon, they reach the foot of the snow mountains. The fabled land of the three frontiers, where the Pamirs and the Karakorum meet the Hindu Kush at the westernmost end of the Himalaya on the roof of the world and the mightiest mountain ranges on earth wed and become one.

Their journey has ended, though his odyssey has only begun.