We are northwest of Shiraz and east of Abadan, flying high above impressive and desolate mountains. There is the long wall of a range to the west, separating this mountainous land from the plains and the deserts of what I believe to be either Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. Everything appears to be dry as dust, with only one or two minor roads plying their way among ridges — some capped with snow and presenting what seem to be small patches of scrub trees. We are above Pakistan, I think, and I can’t imagine it would be a welcoming place to travel, especially as an American.
The ranges themselves are scarred and fractured, as though the earth herself had been twisted and ripped until she yielded; yielded not fruits, but more stone and dust. An entire range suffers a deep and clean gash, as though cut out with a trowel, a missing wedge of land in an otherwise unbroken line north. Here now, scattered houses can be seen following the unmistakably straight lines of irrigation channels, drawn from a dry river. Dry, or nearly dry, and filled with water the color of mud.
Two, no three columns of smoke rise in the distance: two are jet black and off in the plains to the west, apparently burn-off from oil wells; the other is nearer, a white plume which widens then dissipates into the sky, perhaps a newer well being cleared of natural gas. A small town appears, grows, then diminishes in the wake of our passage. There is some very large square structure, flanked by numerous rounded buildings — I suppose they are fuel tanks. The town rests in the bottomland between two ridges. There is a short airstrip. We are a little bit east of the midpoint between Najaf, in Iraq, and Isfahan, in Iran.
The landscape moves beneath us like a carpet being drawn slowing backward by an invisible hand; or as though we stood in static orbit, while the planet and its noise and movement and wars slowly turned its day beneath us. Another town appears in a flash of roofs or windows, glinting reflection of the morning sun; behind it on the mountainside, a bright red flame burns of another well, with sparse smoke. Now a tall mountain moves into view — much taller than the rest, it reaches up toward our craft as we slip by — from the air it looks for all the world like the desert mountains on which the Little Prince balanced, during his storybook tour of planet earth: “What a curious place this is — altogether sharp and pointed!”
A large river like a turquoise snake leaves its tail in the desert and winds its way to sink its head in an enormous reservoir. The shape of land suggests once-flat terrain — perhaps ocean bottom? — which was forced upward by irresistible pressures, its layers clearly seen leaning up toward the sky, in waves that can be followed back west into Iraq, one upon another, stone waves breaking on no shore, so slowly that no one followed their progress, so silent that no one heard their breaking… I imagine the land below mute, but certainly there is some form of bird or beast which survives, if not thrives, in whatever is found down there.
In any case, I can’t imagine that the god of this land is a benevolent one. It has not offered much ease to the men and women who call it home: not a fat and smiling Buddha, nor a beatific god of New Testament bounty. Instead, the wealthier gods turned away from the barren ridges in search of plenty, while their poorer and more demanding cousins set up residence in tents and yurts, being moved to and fro as required to find any succor from the land.
I briefly, and not entirely irrationally, entertain the thought of a hand-fired missile rising from one of these dry wrinkles in the face of an old land, rising to nearly miss or perhaps directly hit our aircraft, one god exacting some form of restitution from another as we spiral quickly into a major headline and and fall into a small collection of mourning families. Families completely unrelated but for this loss which spans borders and creeds.
Perhaps that is happening already. My name is not on those rolls, however: a multitude of Iraqi and Afghani names, as well as those of a few sons of industrial nations, whose addiction to oil has led them to an addict’s predictable violence and rashness. Hm. Can a hand-held missile reach this high? I decide it cannot, else who would fly this route…?
We’re now above the Zagnos Mountains, east of Baghdad. Snow covers much of the range below us, while a layer of low clouds has washed up from the east like a soft wave; or like a bed of unwashed, carded wool, it has filled in the peaks and ridges here and to the east, while Iraq stands under the unflinching gaze of the sun. I am grateful for this daytime flight, and for the clarity it has brought, offering a captivating and ever-changing vista of Middle-Eastern lands.
Below, there are more roads than I would have expected — having expected none. The Romans built roads to the ends of their empire, the mark of their workmanship still visible in the mountain passes of Austria and the cobbled roads of Italy; but they are nothing compared to the filament-strands of road of modern times, which draw lines of our passage into every imaginable corner of the earth. We are everywhere, even in the desolation of these mountains… if the roads don’t show our permanence in a place, they sow our regular passage.
That snow is heavy where it blankets the mountains, and the air temperature drops as we sail further north. Is that a permanent settlement tucked into a snow-locked valley below? Amazing. They must survive the long winter on the backs of their herds and the few dollars of purchased supplies which make it through these passes… certainly not surviving from any harvest of this land?
As if I could hope to understand the daily lives and political motivations of the people from this height. And how incredibly different these lives, from those I left a few hours before in bustling, high-tech Bangalore — or Manny and those living at the water’s edge, back in unhurried and sultry Goa! To make sense out of this sprawling, multi-colored planet, you must understand to some degree each of these improbable places and the hopes and sorrows of their people, so that your god is not some minor deity, whose provincial habits fail once transported beyond its protected borders; instead, the face of Spirit that is able to look equally on all faces.
But then, not even the sun is able to do that, burning some faces dry with its ferocious glare, and touching others with the caress of a lover…
Tabriz is now behind us, and we change course slightly to the south, heading toward Van and, later, Turkey and the Black Sea. Van is a city whose name I have never heard, situated on a large body of water I didn’t know existed, in a country whose name I don’t know. Where are we? Outside of my world’s map — writing notes into the margins there.
At the end of the large lake a huge crater appears, its ringed ridge must be many miles in diameter. It seems to be the remains of a long-extinct volcano, the cone blown completely away in a cataclysmic event which certainly was written into some ancient people’s oral history. Oh, yes: there is a smaller and more recent cone on the shoulder of the old one, so this wasn’t some prehistoric meteor-fall. There is recent lava flow visible on the side of this cone, a vee of black, raised rock against the white snow.
A large weather front is rising before us now. The curtain on this play is going to be pulled closed, it would seem, so this time around I won’t see the Alps from the air. That’s why one has to be attentive: how often are we fortunate enough to fly without clouds, to be up above the noise and jostling of the daily? How often is there nothing veiling the eyes? Got to keep the mind open, and allow as much Light to leak in when possible… be life’s opportunist, and fill the body now, because tomorrow the weather could be a mass of gray.
And since it now has decided to be just that, I will take some well-earned rest.
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