The Lost Heart of Asia by Colin Thubron Page A

its wreckage dripping from every barb.
    As I loitered in the arches’ shade, a crocodile of eight young women came winding up a track from nowhere. I watched them with the apprehension of a hunter, in case they might dart away. But instead they dropped their shoes and bags at the shrine’s vanished entrance – as if shedding their modernity – and crowded into a narrow, vaulted chamber, where I could hear them praying. Then, barefoot, in a shimmer of magenta and ultramarine dresses, they circled the graves three times in silence, stopping to touch their temples to its stone. They smoothed their palms over its grille then over their faces, kissing the iron. They seemed at once stately and humble, lost in a contrite love-making. As they finished, they gathered up pebbles and dust close to the graves, and the eldest – a dark, angry-looking Amazon – tied a white scarf to the fence. Five minutes later, scenting another grave to petition, they had trailed away over the wilderness in a brilliant caterpillar, and I heard their laughter chirruping over the dunes.
    Gingerly I approached the room where they had prayed. I had imagined it empty. But I eased open the door on a cave cluttered with fantastical bric-à-brac. From its walls dangled out-size wooden pots and ladles, with curling posters of Mecca and the holy places of Bukhara, and the shelves were crammed with candle-stubs and a litter of cloudy bottles. A wooden platform, smothered with soiled quilts, almost filled the floorspace, and on this, under the dim light shed by a dome, an old woman was sitting. She looked huge and sorcerous in the gloom. Her body was swathed in stained and ragged crimson, and a massive silver frontlet, littered with perforated coins and semi-precious stones, cascaded over her breast. On a ledge behind her, his mouth level with her ear, perched a shaven-headed boy. As I entered, the woman’s creased hands lifted automatically in prayer, but in her face everything – all vitality, insight, emotion – had vanished long ago, and the eyes which wandered over mine were mute and undreaming.
    I asked about the two graves. But the boy only glared back at me beneath fierce brows, and the woman went on rasping her inscrutable prayer. I crouched down on my haunches in involuntary deference. The boy watched me unblinking, like a black Ariel. Hesitantly I pushed some money over the quilt, imagining that the woman was praying for me. But after she had stopped she did not take it, or even notice me. Drenched in jewellery like an ancient bride, she seemed to be waiting for something, and I could not rid myself of the impression that this vaulted chamber was her chosen tomb, where her posthumous sanctity would grow unimpeded, until it too became a place of pilgrimage.
    I got up and crossed into sunlight, where swallows were dipping between the arches of the ruined mosque. Broken scaffolding clung to them, and a winch had congealed beneath to a mass of rust and snapped wires. After a while a faint, rhythmic pinging sounded from a ruined-looking dwelling. I had assumed it too squalid for habitation, but when I peered inside I saw an old man touching an elfin hammer to a little anvil. In front of him lay a miniature lathe and a box of gouging and chipping tools – all as intricate and fragile-looking as he – and with these he was creating miniature jewellery and the unearthly, silvery music whenever his hammer struck.
    He lived here, I discovered, with the old woman among a muddle of chipped dishes and indecipherable effects, and he carved Islamic crescent moons out of wood or ivory, which he sold to pilgrims. As I came in, he asked me to sit by him. Tentatively I enquired after the saints buried here, and wondered if he was their guardian.
    His voice came thin and musical: ‘They were soldiers, martyrs. When? I don’t know, but in the century of the great sultans. Their history is written in Arabic and Persian. You