Bog Myrtle & Peat

The Kazakh steppe is too big to be held in the bowl of a human skull. It runs so far and with such confidence in every direction that it doesn’t make sense, particularly to those of us who are used to forests and lochs and the shattering interruption of sea. The steppe is only level continuity and the pattern of cloudshadows forever; it can’t be filled or contained.

I found a handle on this place by looking out at it through the wooden door of a yurt. I needed that frame through which to experience the vast enormity of space as a narrow slot. Above the horizon, the clear unblinking blue of an early autumn day; below, a trembling yellow thatch of grass in mounds which diminished towards some unfathomable vanishing point. I glanced at the door-pillars and thanked them for standing on either side of my view, then I stared for the distance in layers of fly-blown, useful boredom.

There’s a kind of locust here which sports in spurty bursts of movement and repose. When he’s almost hit the ground, he flies again and jerks himself back into the air. He might travel many miles like this in blissful isolation because there are no obstacles or contour lines to distress or offend him. But every now and then, he will pass near a gathering of yurts and be heard and the fact of his existence corroborated by humanity. Perhaps in the same moment, his life will end in a single, sudden movement by the lunging snap of dogs which are often woken by the sound of papery wings. They bound up from attitudes of sleep to bite for the locusts and afterwards spit the wings like wrappers.

Long periods of my life passed during the course of that afternoon in the yurt. Microscopic details of scent and drumming insects wove themselves together in disconcerting pads of insulation to protect me from a sudden, terrifying awareness of the world’s enormity; the same shocked astonishment which overran Alexander Pushkin when he travelled across the open spaces of Eurasia two centuries ago. 

Unable to comprehend the emptiness, Pushkin populated this landscape with swirling, channering demons which drift in uninterrupted shoals like panic or the sudden stand of an old dog’s hackles. He was right. You can’t foresee the invasion of overwhelming scale, and it wouldn’t help to shut your eyes and ears and shout up interference. You can only cling to the soil and wait for the terror to pass.

In recoiling from bignesses, tiny details become ever more appealing – the sound of a quail calling in the distance can be stabilising; anchor yourself upon a spider as she lowers herself down from a strand of herb-scented grass. There’s solace in these intricacies – but they turn against you when you understand that an identical spider is performing the same act just a few feet away… and a few feet beyond that, for all the feet and quail and blades of grass in the world – and you’re suddenly poisoned by your last hope of a cure.

The Steppe is planet-bendingly vast, and do you know why a yurt is round? Because people in these endless places understand that emptiness is jarred by the unnatural meeting of two angles. Demons and shaitans are compelled towards the tight conjunction of walls which meet in a corner; their evil is stuck and accumulates in the squared-off edges of things. That’s why these old traditional tents are circular – because you can’t seal the door shut against such boundless expressions of terror – your only hope lies in allowing them to pass through and leave again.

Even the most disheartening engagement with boredom and panic will pass on the steppe; the bowls of our skulls are round for a reason.