Bog Myrtle & Peat

There’s no such thing as uniformity in Uzbekistan’s Kyzyl-Kum desert. The sand is too complex and textured to form pools of continuity, and what seems to be a dirty labrador yellow is more like grey and citric sulphur in a million overlapping shades and shifts of light. 

From the top of an ancient fortress at Ayaz-Kala, the view is only relentlessness and the broken back of space and fallen stars. There’s no before and after this place; distant clouds write shadowed lies on the landscape – the flossiness of tamarisk fronds conceals a deeper root of thorns. And looking out across seventy miles of sand, it’s suddenly possible to imagine the distant shape of a lone approaching figure in the halflight of dawn, visible only now and then in shifting dunes and beds of glasswort which churn like kelp in the cold shreds of dying night.

As the stranger approaches, sentries on these ancient walls would have shifted uneasily in the frost as cockerels crowed from the shacks which huddle beneath the low-browed, mud-built walls. Far off to the furthest southern horizon, mountains would have risen in stacks and heightened heaps like bolts of ripped-up cloth. These are Himalayan foothills and mighty mountain forests which hang in the stillness like palls of heavy breath. And in the foreground, that solitary man is coming in through the endlessness; a vertical slit in the world’s enormity, black and inscrutable as a cat’s iris.

Zarathustra walked down from the mountains on a morning like this with the watchfires smouldering on the walls. He came simply; as nothing more than a blink against the sand. After years in exile, he was re-entering the company of men.

—

As the sun set across a crumbled madrassah in Khiva, two figures ascended to the high wire. For the sake of their safety, they had spread a moth-eaten carpet on the cobbled stones below. They had something like clips to catch them from the wires if they fell, but it was hard to see how these would do anything more than draw out death in the event of a mishap. And sure enough, they took the assembled crowd playfully close to the moment of outrageous destruction. In moves calculated to terrify and bamboozle, they stretched our ability to believe their feats, balancing not only upon various points of themselves but on each other too. They hobbled themselves and wore blindfolds, upping the ante in an overlapping tit-for-tat to a point of nerve-wracking horror.

We laughed and cheered for them, even when a child was enlisted to stand on the shoulder of a man who stood on the shoulders of another – and together they walked along that tightrope in a stacked up column like the Musicians of Bremen. But wasn’t it always in my mind that the most famous tight-rope walker of Central Asia is known for his death in just such circumstances? He was kicked from his balance by a jester in motley, and I could almost hear the splat and shatter of fracturing bones in that moment of disaster when the crowd turned away and the broken acrobat was left alone to whimper. Later, he was carried from the square by a distrait, inhuman prophet called Zarathustra. Despite promising to bury the dying man, he stuffed the body inside a hollow tree and left it there.

–

Hooked on books, I had anticipated these moments from a lifetime of reading and rereading stories of Persia and Central Asia. It was a gamble to try them for real, because what if truth failed or fell short of expectation? But there’s a padding of safety here, because nobody knows where Zarathustra came down from the mountains. It might have been anywhere from Lebanon to Nepal, and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra isn’t real anyway – he’s just a philosophical device. In that sense, I couldn’t go wrong; the stories I knew were vast only for the sake of their symbolism, and I had nothing to lose by trying to flesh them out with a few lumps of generalised context.

It turned out that I was blown away by the truth of seeing, but it was nothing taller or more impressive than the act of imagining. If I had worried that reality would crush or smudge the hoped-for dream, both survived and ran together in amplifying loops. It seems that real and imagined landscapes can coexist; each angle working to heighten and intensify the other.