The Frontier of Our True Country

From dark to dawn and dawn to dark again. At night, he wakes in dark and straining his face against the hood he believes he sees starlight. Dawn, and they have him up on his feet, walking. All day they cross a vast and awesome land. The land opens out across the plain in all directions, bare and rocky, windswept and rugged, running to the distant snow mountains that rise on each horizon. The sky above is infinite and azure, studded with huge white stratocumulus clouds, and the sky grazes the land.

In his vision, the land is the earth at the dawn of creation, back in the beginning, when light and darkness still warred over the face of the earth.

They lead him by a rope across this tectonic land, the father of the boy in the front, the mule and the two other men in the middle, he and the big man in the back. The boy runs lithely alongside the mule. They lead him toward the southwestern mountains. He is dressed in a weathered and worn out, granite-colored uniform and wears bulky beige boots.

They wear long and light white khat partoogs and loose brown and blue sleeveless jackets and warm wool cloaks across their shoulders and chests and they wear strong but light leather sandals and colorful checkered cloths wrapped turban-like around their heads.

The dazzling sun shines down. The brilliant earth blazes. Less by the muted aura of light and more by the heat on his face against the hood, and by the walking, he knows it is day. Below his boots, beneath the land, a faint stream of water courses, running down from the mountains.

The river.  

With dark, they strike camp on the high plain. The Pashtun men light a fire, burning dried dung from the mule and the little wood they find in the land. They dig a deep pit in the hard earth and warm bread in it, the bread stuffed with lamb. They roll radiantly-colored rugs out on the earth, face west, bow and pray, prostrating their bodies. In the darkness, the deserter listens. After they pray, they dig the warmed bread up from the cold earth and break the bread and pass it between them and boil cups of tea they drink from blue porcelain glasses packed in their wool blankets on the mule.

When they pull the hood off, he gasps and breathes and looks around, wild-eyed, desperately drinking in the air and the firelight, the open land, the night sky and earth. They feed him bread and tea and a drink of cool water from the waterskin. The water tastes cool and sweet. From across the fire the boy watches the soldier eat. The deserter watches the land and the earth. The boy’s eyes are dark and bright and his brilliant cap covers his radiant hair.

When he finishes eating and drinking, they put the hood back on. At the last moment, before his heart quickens and his breath comes hard and fast and his world is mantled in darkness, in night and terror again, he gazes up and strives to number the stars, but time is never enough and the nascent stars that sprent the sky far too many.

That night, the Pashtuns sleep on the open land under the stars, wrapped in their warm and heavy lambswool blankets, breathing the high cold air, chatting quietly and singing, lifting their luminous voices toward the stars.

On the edge of the camp, at the rim of the frontier and the border of the open land and the outer darkness, he cowers huddled in his uniform and ragged desert sand sleeping bag, his hands and feet bound, breathing against the hood, listening to them sing and pray and praise creation, and he believes he sees the flicker of fire, the pulse and throb of starlight, the brilliant band of the Milky Way overhead. And below his body, deep in the earth, he believes he feels water running, but he is unsure. All he knows definitively is the darkness.

Dawn, and he is up on his feet, walking.

Chapter I

The Land

مځکه

“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.”

All day they walk. With each step, they draw nearer to the southwestern mountains. The boy runs alongside the mule on the bare rocky ground, hopping on stones, leaping limberly and light-heartedly, laughing and singing, swatting the mule’s tail with a stick, walking when he is tired. The boy watches the soldier. The sun wheels overhead, bedazzling in its brightness, and the land extends before them, and it is awesome and empty and wild and filled with absolutely nothing. At the edge of the eastern horizon, above the distant snow mountains, clouds gather and darken, heat lightning flashes and thunderclaps roll in, but that is in another land, another world a world away.

This land, the land they are crossing, is magnificently monochrome, hard and harsh as wind-seared and scoured stone, a magnificent nothing land, in which nothing moves, save them. In the darkness, he shuffles on, pulled along by the rope tied around his hands. Against the hood, he feels the hard, heavy panting of his breath, damp and muggy against his face, the heat of the sun, believes he sees flashes of color, cobalt and cyan, slate gray and gunmetal, obsidian and white, men walking as trees, but nothing more.

In the days since they have been out here on the plateau and in the days since they came across the foreign deserter and picked him up, the Pashtuns have passed nearly nothing. A bird squatting at the edge of the plain, hunched under its enormous grayblue wings against the sun, watching them as they passed.

The parched and ruined and half-decayed corpse of a yak still thawing out from the winter and from the spring snows, a wisp of radiant orange cloth tied to its thick matted fur fluttering in the wind and in the plain and in the light. A sole Kyrgyz nomad with bright red wind-razed cheeks and a mustache and a thick olive-drab wool hat with a red star patched on it and huge smoky quartz sunglasses and a heavy sheepswool robe passing on a horse.

A blind man walking across the desert who when they stopped and questioned him where he was going and from where he had come said he had come to hear the silence toll. A lone ragged wolf one dusk on the fringe of the steppe, its ears and eyes alert, its lean brawny body held arrested as they passed. A raised and wind-weathered mound in the earth, a sky burial tomb. And one azure afternoon, in the midst of the plain, three stones set on top of each other.

Farther back, in the beginning,
in the early days of his flight, after he’d
stepped off their remote army outpost
that night in the astral light and began
walking north and east toward the
Wakhan Corridor, but before the
Pashtun warriors seized him, he had
seen everything in the land and earth
and taken into himself every foot of
country he journeyed through.

But he the apostate has seen none of this and has beheld nearly nothing since the Pashtun tribesmen came across him when he lay near death at the miraculous pool of water and bound his hands and put the hood over his head and picked him up and took him with them on their way to the southwest.

He heard only the voice of the blind man, whose words he heard but knew not, and who he never could have imagined walked the earth in darkness like himself, and he has beheld only the muted aura of sunlight and dim goldenblue glimpses of the sky, the open land and the earth when they take the hood off those few hours each day to let him eat and drink and wash, breathe and pray.

Farther back, in the beginning, in the early days of his flight when he was on his own, after he’d stepped off their remote outpost that night in the astral light and began walking north and east toward the Wakhan Corridor, but before the Pashtun warriors seized him, he had seen everything in the land and earth and taken into himself every foot of country he journeyed through.

The wilderness and the forests, the villages, the farms and the fields. The fertile valleys, ripe with rapeseed and blooming with lavender and poppy on their hills in the height of summer, and the almond trees and the pistachios and the wild hazelnuts and the poplars in their groves, valleys cut deep and dark green between the Pamirs rising up to the north and the Hindu Kush to the south. The long miles of nothing, rock, sand, shale and stone, and finally the grasslands that marked the beginning of the Big and Little Pamir in the highland heart of the legendary Wakhan Corridor.

But those lands are long past and that country behind him and those days only recollection now, brown and green, pewter and white, raw-umber, luminous orange, amber, deep purple and bright, vivid red in his memory.

A Sojourn at the Salt Lake

Late in the morning, the Pashtuns glimpse a huge white hill rising from the plain, strange and surreal and dazzling in the light. They walk and they walk. Midday, they reach the glacial salt lake.

The men go down to the lake’s shore and unwrap the indigo and blue, the orange and white and umber checkered scarves from their heads. They cup pools of water in their hands and wash their hair, beards and faces. The boy runs down and plays at the lake’s edge, skipping a flat, smooth stone across the sparkling water. The mule wanders down and lolls her head over the lake, but she does not drink from it. Across the lake, on the far shore, a giant ivory-white pillar blazes in the sunlight, a salt mountain.

After they have finished washing, the Pashtuns bring the foreigner down to the lakeshore and they unbind his hands and remove the hood from his head. He gasps and breathes, in and out, and stares eagerly around, shielding his eyes against the blatant, violent light. The Pashtuns push him toward the water and retreat with the mule up the bank.

Alone, he stands on the shore and lowers his arms from his aching eyes and looks around, squinting against the glare of sun and earth, land and light, seeing, smelling, tasting, listening, feeling, taking the world in, everything fresh and radiant to his naked and awakened senses.

The cerulean mirror of the glacial lake reflects the azure desert of the sky above in its dazzling glasslike waters, the hill of salt shimmers on the other shore, and the land opens out in all directions around him toward the distant mountains that rim each horizon, their bare jagged peaks capped in snow.

The luminescence of the land is stunning and the effulgence is breathtaking, bordering on the sublime. It is a magnificent nothing land. But one mountain, straight before him, to the southwest, is growing closer. Behind him, farther up the bank, the big man stands, watching him, his hand resting on the handle of the knife sheathed in the leather rawhide belt at his hip.

In the last moment, before the sky
and the earth, the land and the light
are blotted out and the heat
and the stifling darkness close in again,
he glimpses the boy, crouching on the
shore, away from the lake’s edge
and the edge of the water, trembling
and breathing hard, watching him back
with his radiant green eyes and his
cropped fire-red hair bristling out from
under his small round cap with the
golden suns and the silver moons
and stars and the emerald minarets
perched in a resplendent midnight blue sky.

With ease, the deserter lowers himself to his knees. The water is clear and exquisitely blue, though the lake is deep, and the ledge drops off steeply, he sees. He kneels at the lake’s shore and puts his hands into the water. It is breathtakingly cold, and he draws them out again.

Gently, he eases them back into the water. He cups his hands and lets the water pool into them. He bows his head and brings the cupped water to his face lips to wash himself, but as he leans over the lake he glimpses his reflection in the surface and again his breath is taken away.

His hair has grown back. His skin is tanned and dark. His cheeks are a bright and fierce red, burned by sun and blistered by sand and scoured by wind. His beard that was stubble when he walked off the Army outpost one night weeks ago and began walking toward China is now fully grown, thick and dark and coarse and shaggy. Except for his tattered uniform and his eyes, piercingly blue as they look back at him from his ruddy cheeks in the miraculous mirror-blue waters, he looks like them.

He is a foreigner. He is his enemy.  

Farther down the shore, the boy plays on the lake’s edge. The boy hops along the bank, jumping from rock to rock, skipping stones, leaping limberly, when suddenly he stumbles and falls toward the water. He springs to his feet and starts toward the boy, but the big man on the bank behind him, the one who wears the knife and always watches him, cries out and starts forward, too.

At once, the boy’s father and the two other men, drying their hair and brown beards in the sunlight and their turbans on the bank, turn, as the mule brays and thrashes her tail, and in the uproar that ensues, he stops and holds up his bare hands. The big man and the two other men rush down at him and roughly seize his arms and bind his hands and put the hood over his head. From the bank, the father of the boy watches in silence.

In the last moment, before the sky and the earth, the land and the light are blotted out and the heat and the stifling darkness close in again, he glimpses the boy, crouching on the shore, away from the lake’s edge and the edge of the water, trembling and breathing hard, watching him back with his radiant green eyes and his cropped fire-red hair bristling out from under his small round cap with the golden suns and the silver moons and stars and the emerald minarets perched in a resplendent midnight blue sky.

The boy had caught himself.

Midnight Tea on the High Plateau

That night, the men camp on the high desert. They dig a pit and heat their bread, wash, pray, eat, drink tea and talk quietly. At the edge of the light, over the crackle of the fire, his world swathed in darkness and his ears straining against the hood, he listens.

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.

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 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.

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.

Chapter II

The River

سيند

“He lies on the bank of the river,
shivering and breathing hard, feeling
his heart beat deep inside of him, staring
up at the sky, and in that moment
he feels he is no longer an outsider
and a foreigner upon the earth,
but that he has entered into the dream
of the earth, the poem and prayer
and deep song of the earth, and into the
holy heart of the earth and the force of
life that pervades all things holy upon it,
the force which cannot be named or
fully grasped or understood, but only
praised.

He has entered into the river.”

Though he sees nothing, he knows the land has changed. A sudden cool beat in the breeze, the pulsation of moisture in the air, a sense of something monumental before him. As he strains his ears against the hood, he hears a deep soughing that is at once foreign and familiar, that is unbelievable, but unequivocal and clear as the pealing of a bell—the sound of wind in trees. Training his ears in upon the sound, listening closer, he believes he hears behind the soughing a distant roaring, an echo, a wild trilling, the resonance of what can only be running water.

As he stands with the Pashtuns at the foot of the mountain, resting and letting his ears tune into the sounds, he knows in his heart that the country they have been traveling through all these days and nights out on the high plateau is passed and that the place they have been journeying toward is here and that the hour he has been waiting for is come, when he will be handed over and delivered up and executed, a foreign invader and an enemy, a deserter and an unbeliever, an infidel.

Whether he will meet this moment with calm or with terror in his heart is what he does not know. In the dark of predawn he has prayed for grace, but grace he now knows is cold and hard as a sky sprent with pitiless stars and as a land shorn out of silence and stone.

Into the Mountain Gorge

They start up the footpath into the mountains, leaving the plain and plateau and high desert behind and ascending into a new country. Dry stony beds, sandy ravines, rocky slopes strewn with shale and shingles. Boulders, silt, salt grass, camel thorn, restharrow, wormwood, sparse pine and trim fir, juniper and willow, birch and yew and deodar cedar. And all around the foothills of the mountain and running up its alpine slopes, grassland.

The boy rides the mule with delight and the big man leads the foreigner by the rope, who struggles on blindly over the grit and gravel and over the hard rough ground and the tough rugged way. They go.

They climb for a long time. The air grows cooler and moister, imbued with the scents of pine needles and flowers and with wild rapeseed and burdock and sodden earth that come to him muted but markedly through the veil of the hood. His lungs ache and his heart and temples pound. He breathes harder, his breathing stifled by the hood and by the air he feels growing thinner as they climb higher.

Around him, magnificent vistas and wild terrains and whole new awesome landscapes open, though he can see none of them. Somewhere, far ahead of the men, lies the pass through the mountains, the pass they are seeking, the passage into Pakistan and the long track back to the Swat Valley, though neither does he know this. He knows only the heat on his face against the hood, the dim aura of light and the dark impression of the blackhole sun, the hour somewhere past midday, though still far from nightfall, and that he is ascending the mountain.

These are his sole markers for the passage of space and time.

A Dispute among the Pashtuns
at a Crossroads in their Journey

The ground grows barer as they climb higher, passing through a series of switchbacks, and soon the grasses and the wildflowers, the sagebrush and the fir trees give way, and only the rocks and the rugged earth remain, as they ascend from the foothills into a high and deep mountain gorge.

In his ears, the muffled roaring has grown louder. Then, as they traverse a turn in the trail, a turn he cannot see but which he feels, the roar emerges unbridled, deep and clear and full of resonance. He breathes hard through the hood and tastes the hint of it on the air and feels the taunt of it in the sudden updraft of wind, a cool and damp freshness against his skin, which he registers on the backs of his hands and against the nape of his neck—the narrow opening between the collar of his blouse and the hood, his only exposed flesh—fresh running water. They stop walking.

In the stifling dark, he hears the Pashtuns talking, first quietly, then louder, disputing.

“Burki dur kardan.”

“Na.”

“Harakat daadan!”

He watches the big man and breathes,
squinting against the glare of the
aortal light. Their eyes meet. The big
man’s eyes are dark and bright,
full of intensity, black and brilliant,
and he sees that the Pashtun is also
breathing hard in the rarefied air,
his right hand no longer gripped
but only resting now on the handle
of the knife at his hip, and he imagines
reaching out and seizing the knife
and cutting the big man’s throat out
and being rid of all this rage,
this darkness and terror, but with
the blistering ache of his wrists
he remembers his hands are bound
and that he has given up killing.

He listens to them and to the roar of the river, straining his ears and mouth against the hood, trying to breathe in the cool damp air, his lungs throbbing and his wrists aching, as he labors against the rope that binds his hands. He feels himself slowly growing desperate, wild with the desire to breathe and with the strain of breathing against the hood. Then he feels two huge hands seize his head and push his neck down. They’re the rough callused palms of the big man’s hands, those hands he’s come to know well.

At once, with their touch, he imagines and almost feels the knife tearing into his neck and sawing through his skin, jugular and carotid artery to his hyoid bone and through the bone to his blood and flesh and life. Before he can protest, though, before he can rebel and cry out with the wild force of his life growing within him, there is a loud whooshing sound by his ears, and he is struck and blinded by light. Aortal light.

He stands shielding his face with his arms, his heart pounding, breath coming hard. Light and air encompass him. His heart and breath ease their feral beat. He opens his eyes and lowers his arms from his face. Before him, the big man stands, his right hand on the knife, his left holding the hood loosely in his fist.

He watches the big man and breathes, squinting against the bright light. Their eyes meet. The big man’s eyes are dark and brilliant, full of intensity, and he sees that the Pashtun is also breathing hard from the strain of the altitude and the long climb, his right hand no longer gripped but only resting now on the handle of the knife at his hip, and he imagines reaching out and seizing the knife and cutting the big man’s throat out and being rid of all this rage, this darkness and terror, but with the blistering ache of his wrists he remembers his hands are bound and that he has given up killing.

Then, lifting his gaze and looking past the big Pashtun, he sees it ribboning below and beyond. The river.

Spindles of Mist
& Mandrels of Vapor

They are high up in a mountain gorge. Steep granite walls rise on each side, sheer and precipitous, while below through the gorge the river runs over rock and shingle through sharp curves and bends, turning up white foam and whirling in deep pools, moving swiftly and strong.

The river roars in his ears and resounds off the canyon’s walls. He looks ahead. A narrow dirt track winds along the upper rim of the gorge under a hanging cliff and descends toward the river. Far in the distance and high above the gorge, titanic crags and colossal mountain peaks rise, their summits capped in snow and ringed with cloud and ribboned with glaciers, the massifs exuding spindles of mist and mandrels of vapor that stream in unearthly spires up, up, up into the azure sky.

From up ahead on the track, the boy’s father calls back to the big man. The big man turns and tosses the hood to the two other Pashtuns who stand holding the reins of the mule. The hood hits one of the men in the chest and falls to the ground. The man stoops and picks it up, muttering beneath his breath, and hands it to the other man who puts the hood over the mule’s head.

He watches in silence.

Then the big man tugs at the rope tied around his wrists and grunts something, pointing toward the narrow trail along the cliffside. He follows the big man’s hand and understands that they are going to descend through the gorge along this path.

From atop the mule the boy looks at him, his tangled fire red hair bristling out from under his celestial cap and tumbling around his gleaming green eyes. Then the boy’s father comes back down the track and lifts the boy from the mule, and the man who put the hood over her head unstraps the saddlebags from her side, as the other man takes the boy’s hand and passes the reins to the boy’s father, who leads her ahead, and the big man tugs him along by the rope, and together they start down the dirt track along the edge of the cliffside through the gorge.

Through the Precipice

They walk in single file. The boy’s father goes first, leading the mule, who brays and swishes her tail and walks warily, rolling her head in the hood. The boy’s father coos and whispers in her ear and strokes her muzzle beneath the hood. Behind the father and the mule, the other man walks with the boy just ahead of him, holding the child’s hand, and behind them the big man leads him by the rope, his free hand gripped around the handle of the knife.

He glances back over his shoulder and sees the fourth Pashtun coming up the rear, carrying the saddlebags slung over his shoulders and his own desert sand, sage green and urban gray Army rucksack on his back.

They pass along the slender track under the rock face. Beneath them the sheer cliff falls away ninety feet to the river, toward which they are descending. They hug the wall, taking each step carefully, with thought and attention, and against the left sleeve of his blouse he feels a cool dampness and looks up to see that the cliff face is beaded with water, welling up deep from within the rock.

Across the gorge, a bird darts, wheeling
in its flight, a white-billed Raam Chokor,
crossing the long conduit of the sky.

He closes his eyes and feels the warmth
of the sunlight on his face and eyelids.
He breathes deeply, taking in the air
and the sounds of the river, the smells
of damp earth and wet feldspar,
cold rock, rough shale and hard stone.

High up, the Raam Chokor screeches
and cries, its call echoing through the
gorge above the deep roar of the river.
He feels his senses being filled to their
brim and his heart being ravished by
the raw beauty and wild wonder of
the world.

The mule brays and thrashes her tail, and the boy’s father leads her on, cooing softly, speaking, or singing to her, now, it seems to him, what is either a lullaby or a prayer. As he traverses the ledge behind the big man, he has the fleeting thought he could jump into the river.

As they reach the end of the track along the cliffside, just before the trail widens and opens up again, they pass an area so narrow they have to keep their backs to the wall and edge along, sidestepping on their heels. He inches along behind the big man, his back pressed against the cool stone wall, bits of shale and feldspar shifting under his boots, as he deftly lifts and steps with his left foot, before sliding his right foot up to meet it.

Beside him, the big man walks with his left hand extended before him, grasping the cliff face, his right hand clenched around the rope, thick fingers trembling. He feels the shudder of the rope and the big man’s fear, sees the sweat on his brow, but he does not let it disrupt his own step.

Silent, his eyes trained on the river, he passes.

Flight of the Raam Chokor

When they have all made it through the passage, past the precipitous ledge and safely to the other side, the men stop, let out their breaths, breathe a sigh of relief, laugh and smile. Before them the trail widens, sloping gently down toward the river, before it rises again up the mountainside toward the snowy crags rimming in the stunted horizon.

Above, the sky arches in an immaculate blue conduit over the gorge, broken only by the pinnacles of rock and the chiseled cliff face aspiring toward it and by the huge white stratocumulus clouds that are piling up one on top of the other in the sky.

Through the clouds, the late afternoon sun shines down and fills the gorge and deep canyon with a lenient copper light. In the light, the men hug and kiss each other and intone prayers and speak quietly their praise to God. The mule stamps her feet and swishes her tail, neighing softly. The boy walks to her and reaches up and strokes her muzzle through the hood.

From a distance, he watches the Pashtuns with a quiet respect and a raw visceral regard, delighting in their delight. He. The outsider. The foreigner.

Across the gorge, a bird darts, wheeling in its flight, a white-billed Raam Chokor, crossing the long conduit of the sky. He closes his eyes and feels the warmth of the sunlight on his face and eyelids. He breathes deeply, taking in the air and the sounds of the river, the smells of damp earth and wet feldspar, cold rock, rough shale and hard stone.

High up, the Raam Chokor screeches and cries, its call echoing through the gorge above the deep roar of the river. He feels his senses being filled to their brim and his heart being ravished by the raw beauty and wild wonder of the world. Then he hears a voice, hard and fierce in its sound, saying something about Allah and freedom and the deserter, followed by the scurry of leather sandals over dirt and gravel. He opens his eyes.  

Mercy:
or A Curious Encounter with the Enemy

The big man is pulling the hood off the mule and shouting at his tribesmen. His face is furious. With the hood in hand, the big man comes at him, his right hand clenched on the knife at his hip, his left hand swinging the hood.

He holds up his bare hands. “Mercy. Please, God, Allah. No more.”

The big man stops, arrested. He stares at the deserter. He does not understand his ugly foreign words, yet he feels the force and weight and desperate beauty of them, the anguish and yearning, feels he knows their meaning, as if through all languages the one word of God tolls.

The men, who had been running toward
the boy, stop and let out their breaths
and laugh. The boy, with his heels
teetering on the ledge, looks at the
foreigner. He takes off his cap with the
golden stars and green crescent moons
and dazzling black domes and minarets
and holds it out before him and bows.

He steps forward, heeding his father’s
admonishing call, starting back down
the rise, his topi cap in his hand,
but as he steps forward, the earthen
ledge under his feet goes out and,
without a sound and with no cry,
he disappears over the cliffside.

Above the bank of the river, through the gorge and canyon’s deep green and copper walls, the late afternoon sunlight is pouring in in long shafts and dazzling beams and burnished rays all around them, swathing them and the chasm in an unearthly radiance. Through the aortal radiance, high above, the white-billed Raam Chokor wheels on wings of golden light.

They stand in the light staring at each other, the two enemies and men, stunned into silence, and in stillness their eyes joined, one pair brilliant and black, the other ardent and achingly blue. Neither man moves and neither one knows what on earth to do.

The Boy’s Play,
A Harrowing Fall

Meanwhile, the boy, playing on the trail above the river, runs and shouts, leaps and jumps, thrashing the air with his stick. His father calls to him and the two other men watch, smiling, as they strap the saddlebags back onto the mule and ready her to go on.

The boy, encouraged by their smiles, drops the stick and sprints fifteen yards up a rise in the trail toward a small earthen bluff that reaches out over the river. His father calls out and the men start forward, fear in their eyes, but at the last second the boy skids to a stop. Dirt and gravel fly out from under his feet and disappear over the cliffside. He stands at the edge, thirty feet above the river, and faces them, beaming.

The men, who had been running toward the boy, stop and let out their breaths and laugh. The boy, with his heels teetering on the ledge, looks at the foreigner. He takes off his cap with the golden stars and green crescent moons and dazzling black domes and minarets and holds it out before him and bows.

The men break into full laugher, their laughter deep and resounding and full of delight. The boy’s father steps forward. No laughter fills his face. He speaks roughly to the boy, scolding him, admonishing his play, calling him back to his place.

From the end of the cliff, the boy watches his father. His smile fades. He lowers his head and casts down his eyes. He steps forward, heeding his father’s call, starting back down the rise, his topi cap in his hand, but as he steps forward, the earthen ledge under his feet goes out and, without a sound and with no cry, he disappears over the cliffside.

Beyond Their Reach

The boy’s father and the two other men rush forward. They scramble up to the edge of the cliff and peer down. Thirty feet below, the river rushes past, swirling in eddies and white breakers. The boy breaches. His father cries out in joy and praise. The boy, his head just above the surface of the water, flails and thrashes as the current pulls him swiftly downstream.

Finally, when he is about to go under and be swept away, the boy latches onto a rock in the river. His father cries out again, though now his joy is punctured with fear, his praise pierced with distress. He cups his hands around his mouth and calls out to his son and tries to climb down the cliff to the river, but the gradient is too steep and the gravel perilous, on the brink of cascading away in a landslide.

The two other Pashtuns pull a rope out of the right saddlebag on the mule and hurry down the trail toward the bank of the river. When they make it down, the men approach the edge with caution and cast the rope out into the river. The current bears it downstream toward the boy, but the rope is not long enough and the boy is beyond their reach.

Up on the cliff, the deserter stands alone with the big man and with the boy’s father. For the second time, he marks the men’s fear of the water, and for the first time since this all began he sees that the father is afraid. The father’s calm is broken and he is growing desperate as, together, they watch the boy, his head just above the white rushing water, cling to the rock in the river.

Sound and sunlight fill the canyon, and somewhere high up in the rarefied air, in the pinnacles and peaks of the Karakorum, the Raam Chokor screeches and cries, its majestic call echoing again through the gorge.

“I…I can swim.”

The deserter closes his eyes and bows
his head and breathes deeply, readying
himself. He has never prayed before,
but he wonders if the thing in his heart
now, round and carved and deep,
full of cold grace and pure silence, is a
prayer.

Against his eyelids he feels the sunlight
and the breath of the boy’s father.
He feels the blade of the knife descending,
but the stroke that is delivered comes
not to his neck but to…

The words come hard. Speaking has become a rare thing for him, and for a moment the sound of his own voice and native language startle him and his words sound foreign in his ears as when he spoke the word “mercy” to the big man. The big man and the father of the boy face him. 

He holds up his hands, bound at the wrists with the rope. “I…I can swim.” 

The big man shouts and steps toward him, his right hand poised above the knife at his hip. The boy’s father puts his arm out, and the big man stops dead where he stands. 

The father of the boy looks at him. Their eyes meet, and for the first time he sees that the father’s eyes are green and striking as his son’s and that his face is fiercely beautiful. “Suhbat.”

He lifts his bound hands higher. “I…can swim.”

The boy’s father stares at him. The two other men, farther down the trail at the bank of the river, stop casting the rope and look up toward them. He steps toward the father. The big man shouts again and threatens him back, his right hand clenched on the knife handle now.

The boy’s father turns to the big man. “Na.”

For a moment the two Pashtun men stare at each other. The silence is audible and the tension visceral. In a deft movement that exudes skill and tells of long hours of practice, the father of the boy parries the big man’s hand aside and seizes the knife from the sheath at his hip.

With the knife in his hand, now, he comes at him. The deserter.

He holds up his hands. “I…I can swim.”

A Leap of Faith

The boy’s father stops a breath away. The knife is gripped in his left hand and held low at his side and the bright blade glints in the sunlight that is pouring in long shafts into the gorge, harbingering the day’s end and the coming night.

The foreigner closes his eyes and bows his head and breathes deeply, readying himself. He has never prayed before, but he wonders if the thing in his heart now, round and carved and deep, full of cold grace and pure silence, is a prayer. Against his eyelids he feels the sunlight and the breath of the father. He feels the blade of the knife descending, but the stroke that is delivered comes not to his neck but to his hands.

He opens his eyes. He is face to face with the father. He looks down at his hands. The severed rope dangles from his raw and lacerated wrists, and his hands, now unbound and free, though empty, feel full of something for which he has no word to speak.

He looks back up at the boy’s father. Their eyes meet, and in the father’s eyes he sees the very thing that only a moment before was in his own heart and that he understands he now holds in his hands, alongside that other unspeakable mystery. Prayer.

This whole time his hands were tied together they were joined as in prayer.

The father of the boy reaches out and touches his hand. “Allah is ma`anta inshallah.”

The deserter kneels. He unties his boots and takes them off. He pulls off his blouse and takes off his trousers. In his tattered brown t-shirt and black boxer briefs, he walks up to the cliff. He jumps into the river.

Into the River

The wild rush of cold mountain water hits him hard, and he plunges through the surface, deep into the river. The blue band of the sky and the white stratocumulus clouds and the copper sunlight vanish as the waters pour over him and his world becomes swathed in darkness again.

Already, he feels the current, like a long forceful arm, drawing him swiftly downstream and down below the waters. It would be nothing now to let himself go, to be borne away on the river toward that other earth of his dreams, that country and kingdom of his heart’s imagination, and that land he has perhaps been seeking since the night he walked out in the astral light and set out east. It would be nothing to escape now. He could be free.

But straining his eyes upward, he glimpses again through the tumbling water the world of light, and remembering the boy, and his mission, and summoning his soul, he fights and swims toward the surface with all the strength and with all the life that is in him.

The wild rush of cold mountain water
hits him hard, and he plunges through
the surface, deep into the river.
The blue band of the sky and the white
stratocumulus clouds and the copper
sunlight vanish as the waters pour over
him and his world becomes swathed
in darkness again.

He breaches the river, gasping. From upstream, on the cliff above the river and from the bank on its shore, comes a cry from the father of the boy which he hears, even above the roar and tumult of the river, as a cry of joy. Straightway, he begins swimming.

For an instant his instinct is to swim hard to shore, but he overcomes this impulse as the river awakens fully the mysterious force of life within him. He sets his eyes downstream on the boy and swims hard toward him. Upstream, the father of the boy, the big man, the two other Pashtun men and the mule watch them, their breaths stunned into silence and their bodies tense with suspense.

The current carries him swiftly, and he lets it. The boy comes fully into sight. He strikes out and swims hard toward the far bank, fighting the strong swift waters, even as he lets them bear him on, aligning himself with the rock and with the boy. The white-clad waters, flecked with foam, surge around him, whirling in eddies, fiercely cold from the high altitude and from the glaciers and snow mountains in whose heights they originate. His heart races. He breathes and each breath is a stunning blow. But he swims.

He swims hard and strong, holding his course, his sights trained on the rock and the boy. At the last moment, when the current is poised to bear him past, he strikes out with a final breaststroke and throws out his arms and grasps onto the rock, catching it.

For His Own Life and For the Life of the Boy:
or The Life You Save May Be Your Own

Though tears stream down his cheeks and he holds to the rock for his life, the boy makes no sound and he does not cry. The boy looks at the soldier, now clinging to the rock beside him. He looks at the man his father calls the foreigner and the outsider, the conqueror and the trespasser, the infidel and the criminal. The man’s eyes are blue. Brilliantly blue. His own eyes are green and smarting with water, but he has no hands to wipe away the shameful tears.

The foreigner looks back at the boy. He speaks to him.

It takes time for the boy to let go of the rock, but at last he does. He loosens his grip gently, one arm at a time, and he reaches out and wraps his arms around the soldier’s chest. The deserter speaks again to the boy, and the boy nods and speaks back, but their words are lost to us over the roar of the river and the wild din of the waters. The boy looks upstream. His father has climbed down to the bank of the river and is calling to him, shouting commands and waving from the shore. He can see his father and hear the echo of his voice and his words.

The foreigner sets his gaze back upstream and across the river, where the current is calmer. He closes his eyes and breathes deeply and speaks again over his shoulder to the boy, who nods his head. Then, opening his eyes, he pushes off hard from the rock and strikes out into the heart of the river and swims with all that is in him, for his own life and for the life of the boy.

The end of day light pours down in
long shafts that fill the gorge and strike
the river, setting the dazzling waters
ablaze and shimmering with the quartz
and mica and feldspar in their bed
and filling the deep canyon with
glittering motes of dust that stream
in sheaths and rivulet in the air
and whirl in the sunlight, pirouetting
like planets around a star that is itself
spinning in a galaxy cycling like a vessel
through a universe of mystery plunging
headlong on its oceanic odyssey
through time and space, the creation,
journeying deeper and deeper
into the heart of mystery.

When they make it across, out of the force of the current and to the other shore, the men upstream cry out and join their palms in prayer and praise. The men skirt the rocks and the bank of the river and trek farther down the shore to meet them, as he swims up along the bank through the calmer waters and through the shallows, the boy holding onto his back as if onto the back of a whale or great turtle.

When the men reach them, the boy’s father and the two other men pull him out of the river and onto the bank. The big man and the mule stand back, watching. The father lifts the boy shivering and dripping from his back and wraps the boy up in a heavy lambswool blanket. The father’s eyes, once fierce and green, are now filled with tears. The relief in his face is visible and his joy is palpable.

With the boy off his back, the deserter collapses onto the bank, panting.

A Moment of Radiance and Transcendence
on the Bank of the River

As he lies on his back on the bank of the river, feeling the air fill his lungs with each heave of his chest and listening to his own wild breathing, his hair and beard and body soaked, he looks up at the sky.

Straight before him, high above the gorge, the sky is radiant and clear and achingly blue, stretching in a luminous arc over the chasm, broken only by the ragged cumulus clouds now tinged with copper and golden billowing up toward the end of the day in wondrous white plumes. The air is cold and sharp and piercingly clear. It stuns his lungs with each breath he breathes and burns his teeth as he gulps whole mouthfuls of the air in.

The end of day light pours down in long shafts that fill the gorge and strike the river, setting the dazzling waters ablaze and shimmering with the quartz and mica and feldspar in their bed and filling the deep canyon with glittering motes of dust that stream in sheaths and rivulet in the air and whirl in the sunlight, pirouetting like planets around a star that is itself spinning in a galaxy cycling like a vessel through a universe of mystery plunging headlong on its oceanic odyssey through time and space, the creation, journeying deeper and deeper into the heart of mystery.

The Raam Chokor screeches and passes overhead, its wings opened wide, its wild shadow flashing down the rock face of the canyon wall. The clouds balloon and billow higher up the sky, which is already slowly wheeling on its axis above the gorge, deepening in its hue, revealing a few faint and distant stars.

The vast clarity of the sky is stunning.

Into the Poem and Prayer
& Deep Dream-Song of the Earth:
or World Mantled in Darkness Again

He lies there on the bank of the river, shivering and breathing hard, feeling his heart beat deep inside of him, staring up at the immortal sky, and in that moment he feels he is no longer an outsider and a foreigner upon the earth, but that he has entered into the dream of the earth, the poem and prayer and deep song of the earth, and into the holy heart of the earth and the force of life that pervades all things holy upon it, the force which cannot be named or fully grasped or understood, but only praised.

“Lā ʾilāha ʾillā-llāh, and God is great. God is sublime.” 

He has entered into the river.

At that moment the sky, which had filled his eyes and all his vision, and which he did not have to strain his face to see, is obscured and replaced with men. With a big man with fierce and brilliant black eyes and a brown beard and a turbaned head standing over him, a thick wool hood in his left hand and a knife in the other.

Behind the big man, another man stands with a child at his side, a boy wrapped in a heavy lambswool blanket. Atop his head the boy wears a small round cap with moons and stars and minarets emblazoned on it, all perched in a resplendent midnight sky. The boy has radiant clear green eyes and with those eyes he is watching him, but it is the man with the knife and the hood who ultimately arrests his sight.

And like that, the long shafts of sunlight fade and the sublime light in the gorge dims, and the clouds and the sky and the glittering motes of cosmic dust and the white-billed wild-winged Raam Chokor, and even the nascent stars, are blotted out, and his world is mantled in darkness again.

Chapter III

The Frontier

سرحد

“He stands on the plain at the edge
of the open land, taking in all the foreign
earth that reaches out before him, as in
the beginning, when light and darkness
were still moving over the face of
the earth, and he looks up at the stars
that even now are falling across the sky
and across the plain and plateau and
desert and over the high dark snowy
mountain passes, somewhere in whose
heart the river runs, and from where
all rivers originate.

He stands and looks out at the open land
and at the earth before him, and though
he feels a profound and deep fear,
he feels also he stands before
the frontier of his true country.”

Light and darkness, day and night, the sun and stars wheel
in the heavens, the earth and firmament turn. Dark passes
to dawn and dawn to dark again on the face of the earth.

One night, after a long day of walking, they camp on the plain and build a fire under the stars. The Pashtuns eat silently, without speaking, with no song and no prayer, and they do not remove the hood to feed the soldier or to let him read or pray. Both his hands and feet are bound again, and in the dark he lies awake, listening to the crackle of the fire and the men eating and the mule breathing and swishing her tail and the silence of the plain and plateau and high desert and the open land beyond.

He is wrapped in a thick wool blanket, and he feels warm and feels no hunger and no thirst and no desperation, though he has eaten nothing since morning. He lies in the dark, breathing against the hood, meditating, and whether he sees the orange flutes of the flickering fire whinnying into the dark or the slow swish of the mule’s tail from side to side as she lolls her head and eats from a tuft of grass, or the intermittent gleam of the bright blade of the knife as the big man sharpens it by the firelight, he cannot be sure.

Though with perfect conviction, he feels the boy watching him, and with a kind of mysterious faith that is still novel to him he knows that the coursing he feels beneath his body, deep in the earth, is not his imagination or a dream or even a memory of that radiant-sky and sunlight-ravished afternoon days ago now when his life was salvaged, but the living river.
The river.

And so, alone on the cold plain in the outer darkness, beneath the ancient sky pulsing with its astral light, he huddles in the lambswool blanket and breathes the high cold air and awaits the wayward coming grace of God and of the earth.

Out to the Open Land

Sometime late in the night, but before the dawn, he wakes in dark.

He wakes not to the memory and dream of starlight, but to blackness and to sound and movement and to the fevered beating of his own heart. He wakes, gasping, breathing hard, and he feels hands seize his body—his arms and legs, his back, neck and throat—and then he is up on his feet, walking. He strains his face against the hood, but something is wrong. There is no heat and no aura of sunlight, now, only the rarefied air and the cold bare dark, darkness absolute and supreme and consummate.

Darkness without light and without end is life in outer darkness and life at war in a foreign country. But Afghanistan, in the end, has proven for him to be a country not of darkness but of light. A strange land of sublime light and haunting beauty.

His heart beats harder, a fierce and desperate, harried pounding in his breast. His breath echoes in his ears and presses against his face, warm, dank, clammy, frantic, stifled by the hood. The moment he has known was coming, the hour that he has long imagined and that has filled his waking dreams and his nighttime terrors through all these days and nights out on the Pamir Plateau and the Wakhan Corridor, in the far northeastern hinterlands of Afghanistan, is come.

It is the hour he’s been waiting for. He can feel it. The hot, saw-toothed slice of the serrated knife across his tender white throat. It is the sole word he has spoken aloud to himself at night as he lay in the dark straining against the hood that he hears himself speak now.

“Koshtan mekosham.” Execution.

With the word his terror is reawakened.

And as he feels their hands grip his neck and their fingers lock around his throat, he cries out suddenly from somewhere deep within himself, cries out in his fear and in his terror and in rage and desperation, cries out in revolt, cries out a man and a soldier, a father and a human being, straining with all his muddled and muscled heart and with all the force of his life against death, fighting to live.

They lead him on, pulling him by the rope, as he struggles against them and cries out deeper and deeper from within himself, until he no longer knows from where his voice is coming or who or what within him is sounding the cry, until they are no longer leading him by the rope, but dragging him by his arms and shoulders across the ground, his feet trailing behind him, kicking in the dirt and dark.

They haul him out, away from the camp and fire. Finally, they come to rest.

An Odyssey, a Country
and an Earth Without End

He lies in darkness, sweating, panting, breathing hard, feeling and listening to the fierceness of his own breath against the hood. The earth beneath him is hard and rugged, silent and still, save a faint pulse beat too calm, steady and distant to be his own, which he knows can only be the call of that other kingdom. All at once, he feels a great rush past his head and hears a whooshing in his ears. When he opens his eyes, stars fill his gaze.

He is lying on his back on an immense and empty plain, looking up at the night sky. The moon is risen, full and majestic, magnificent, an alabaster beacon alighted above the land, and the sky opens out unto a celestial cosmos, a stunning pageant of scope and placidity and cold grace.

In it, a billion stars blaze and the long bright river of the Milky Way runs its timeless course across the heavens. The luminescence of the night is breathtaking and beautiful beyond telling and the immaculate, vast clarity of the cosmos is astounding, as is the ancient astral light of the sky. He watches as one ecstatic star shoots across the galaxy and falls in a long burning arc down the domed sky, trailing torrents of fire in its wake, tolling down the dark, and for the first time since he was a child he feels the weight of his soul.

He watches as one ecstatic star shoots
across the galaxy and falls in a long
burning arc down the domed sky,
trailing torrents of fire in its wake,
tolling down the dark, and for the first
time since he was a child he feels
the weight of his soul.

And so he breathes the high cold air
and huddles in the astral dark
and awaits the wayward coming grace
of God and of the earth.

Then a man steps into his vision, eclipsing his view of the sky and drawing his gaze to the earth, awakening him from his reverie and grounding him again to the dust and dirt of the plain. The big man. Dressed in a dark khat partoog and a heavy sleeveless jacket and with his turban wrapped around both his head and face now, he stands over him and stares down at him. His eyes, bold, black and brilliant, full of a fierce light, are all that are visible in the dark, and his right hand rests on the handle of the knife sheathed at his hip, while his left hand holds the hood.

The big man and the two other men who have stepped forward reach down and lift him to his feet. On his feet, with the hood off, he sees clearly now that they are out of the mountains and off the trail and back on the plain. Before him, the vast expanse of the high desert and the Pamir Plateau open out in the darkness, lit only by the full moon and the stars.

Across the plain, on the distant eastern horizon, the dark ridge of snow mountains is silhouetted against the sky. He gazes out at the land, and he understands now that the mountain and the river were not their destination or their end, but it was a pass through the mountains they were seeking, and that they are still out here in this land, nowhere, everywhere, and that this is both the beginning and the end and merely another passage in his journey, and that they still have much farther to go than he had ever imagined to cross this epic land.

An odyssey, a country and an earth without end.

Man In His Eternal Essence

The big man steps up to him and withdraws the knife from its sheath. Though he is still breathing hard and feels his heart beating and his chest pounding, and though something in him craves to cry out again, he makes no sound and speaks nothing.

He stares at the big man, and the big man stares at him, the knife gripped in his right hand and held low at his side, and whether they are enemies or men and compatriots of the same country, of the same land and native earth, brothers, tribesmen, fellow homo sapiens and sentient beings, each struggling to find his own way through the world and his rightful place in the creation, or some other relationship for which there is no name and no word, neither man can wholly know, anymore than any man on earth can know his destiny and glean his fate from the glimmering stars all those light-ages away across the cold black tolling dark of galactic space.

They stand and face each other on the cold plain in the dark. No wind tolls.

The big man kneels before the soldier. With the knife, he cuts the rope that binds his ankles. The big man rises again. He takes the soldier’s hands in his own and turns them over, so that his palms face up, and cuts the rope that binds his wrists. The rope severs and falls free, the cut ends dangling from his wrists.

The big man looks up at him, and they stand facing each other again. Each man sees the other as he is in his eternal essence. Then the big man turns and walks away, thrusting the knife into the ground between them as he goes, planting it upright by the blade, a strange sterling silver tree glinting in the dark, before he walks back through the dark toward the camp and the fire.

He stands beneath the star-sprent sky and watches the big man go silently.

A Gift is Given
Before Thou Goes

From behind the two other men, the father of the boy steps forward.

He walks up to him and puts in his arms a heavy wool blanket. Inside the blanket is bread and lamb and fire and a skin filled with cool water and the book and a brick of dried dung and a blue porcelain cup and a pouch of tea. Kahwa. He stands on the plain and looks at these things and holds the heavy wool blanket bundled in his arms.

The boy’s father steps back and points out toward the open land. “Go.” 

He looks down first at the knife rooted between his feet, then up at the father of the boy.

The boy’s father waves toward the land. “Go. Get out of here. Be gone.”

He turns and looks out across the land, opening out toward the dark snow mountains on the still-distant northeastern horizon. He turns back to the boy’s father. Already, the two other men are walking away in the opposite direction back toward the camp and the fire.

As he stares the black-barreled gun down,
he remembers that these are the people
who fought against Alexander
and Omar, Genghis and Tamerlane,
against the English and the rest, and that
this is their country and their land
they fought for and that he is just
another nameless one in a long and
barbaric line of invaders come to their
luminous land to intrude upon it,
to trespass and wage war.

And he sees now, with a breathtaking clarity,
it is not he but they who are the true
and rightful warriors in this land.

Fifty yards across the plain, within the dying sphere of firelight, in the small camp carved out of the darkness and out of the plain and the night, he sees the mule down on her belly resting, the saddlebags on the ground at her side, ready to go, her tail softly swishing in the dim flickering orange light that is still whinnying into the dark.

Then, beside the fire, up on his feet, now, a heavy lambswool blanket wrapped around him and the cap with the moons and suns and stars and minarets on his head, barely visible in the dark, he sees the boy watching him, his eyes radiant in the firelight.

At the boy’s side, the big man stands, and he remembers now, just before the boy fell into the river, the cap fluttering free from his small hand and landing on the ledge of the cliff, where the big man bowed and picked it up when he and the boy’s father rushed forward.

Salam Allah,
Inshallah

When he turns from the fire and looks back at the boy’s father, now, he finds him holding a Russian pistol, some ancient relic from another age’s war, leveling it at his chest. The father’s eyes are cold but clear and calm. There is no empathy in his face, but no anger and no hate, either. His face is simply placid as the sky. The father cocks the pistol and trains the blackhole barrel at his head.

 As he stares the gun down, he remembers that these are the people who fought against Alexander and Omar, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, against the English and the rest, and that this is their country and their land they fought for and that he is just another nameless one in a long and barbaric line of invaders come to their luminous land to intrude upon it, to trespass and wage war. And he sees now, with a clarity that stuns him, it is not he but they who are the true and rightful warriors in this land.

The boy’s father raises his free hand and points again toward the open land. “Go your way. You’re with God now. Only God can deliver you, now.”

The father of the boy and the soldier stare at each other. Then the boy’s father reaches out and touches his hand. He feels the warmth and weight and the gentle force of it. “Ilah is ma`kullu. Salam Alaykum, Salam Allah.”

God is with all and God’s peace be with you. Inshallah.

The boy’s father uncocks and lowers the pistol, cloaking it again in his heavy jacket, and he turns and walks away through the outer dark back toward the camp and the fire.

The Frontier of Our True Country

He watches the boy’s father go. He feels the cold weight of his absent hand. In the camp, the two other men have already put the saddlebags on the mule and raised her to her feet and stand with the big man and with the boy by the dying fire, waiting to depart. When the father of the boy reaches them, he picks up his son, the child.

As he watches father and son in the failing firelight from across the plain at the edge of the darkness, he remembers how when he and the boy emerged from the river and collapsed breathing on the bank of the shore, he heard the boy’s father call out, “Afzal,” though he was unsure in that moment if this was a name for the boy or a word for grace, and he still doesn’t know now.

A cold wind blows, tolling out of the dark and raking the ragged ashes of the fire, gleaning the rough remains of the burnt-up dung like gleaners gather chaff strewn across a field in the wake of an archangelic harvest, but swiftly as it rises the wind dips and soughs and dies, purling off into the divine dark.

The father puts the boy on the mule and walks out in the lead, and the two other men whip the mule on her way and walk after him, and the big man trails in the rear, and in a line they walk off across the plain toward the dark shadows of the distant snow mountains on the southwestern horizon, and toward the radiant land beyond those mountains, and soon they pass beyond the sphere of the dying firelight and trail away and disappear into the dark.

In the vast moonlight and starlight,
the oceanic plain is immaculately clear
and strangely placid and magnificently
pure and perfectly quiet.

Alone now, he turns from the dying fire and from the vanished men and faces the plain. Before him, the land opens out in all directions, vast and silent under the stars, stretching across the plateau and the high desert and steppe as far as he can see, a land without end, eternal and elemental and fiercely beautiful, lit only by the moon and the stars and the faint light in the east, and broken by nothing save the dark silhouettes of the distant snow mountains on the northeastern horizon. Muztagh Ata and Kongur Tagh Shan brooding blackly above the rest.

He stands on the plain at the border of this land, taking in all the foreign earth that reaches out before him, as in the beginning, when light and darkness were still ranging over the face of the earth, and he looks up at the stars that even now are falling across the sky and across the plain and plateau and desert and over the high dark snowy mountain passes, somewhere in whose heart the river runs, and from where all rivers originate. He stands and looks out at the land and at the earth before him, and though he feels a profound and deep fear, he feels also he stands before the frontier of his true country.

Peoples of the Pamirs:
Portraits from Pakistan & Tajikistan
-Part of Portraits of Asia Collection-

The End

خاتمه
土

“The earth is my country.”

An Anoynoums Traveler

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