Read Online The Lost Heart of Asia by Colin Thubron - Free Book Online

their hands.
    He must have seen my expression. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘My life is over now. My children are all grown up. They don’t need my help any more.’ He retrieved the Koran from my lap. ‘I can die now.’
    His manner refused all pity, but I took up one of his crescent moons before I left, and handed him a fifty-rouble note.
    He looked at it without interest. ‘Do you have kopeks in England?’
    â€˜We have coins.’
    â€˜Next time you come, bring me some of those. I work them into ornaments. Afghan pilgrims give me coins.’ I remembered the perforated coppers which flowed over the old woman’s breast, stamped with Afghan lions. I realised too now why he kept asking her to do simple things around him, just out of his reach. ‘Metal and ivory are all right. Paper is useless.’
    Living among graves, and surrounded by the wreckage of centuries, the huge woman and her pigmy consort touched me with irrational sadness. But there was nothing real I could give them.
    Towards dusk I reached a seventh-century citadel crumbling on its mound. Its battlements resembled a rectangle of vast clay logs upended side by side, and I wondered why this petrified stockade had not been manned against the Mongols. But perhaps the human heart, in the old man’s words, had not been right, and now the crenellations had worn away and the entrance-ramp was blurred into the sand.
    I waded across stagnant ditches, and skirted a seasonal pond where a flock of black-winged stilts was tiptoeing through the shallows. Ahead of me, a giant mausoleum reared out of nothing above the littered plain. For forty feet into the air its cube of walls loomed blank. It had been heavily restored, and only a pair of high doors broke its austerity. But near its summit it opened on an ornamental portico, and above its drum, from which all decoration had gone, a great dome hovered.
    This was the tomb of the much-loved Seljuk sultan Sanjar, grandson of Alp Arslan, whose rule vacillated for fifty years across the eastern provinces of the disintegrating empire. At first his triumphs over Turkic enemies shored up his delicate realm, but in middle age disasters made his name a byword for humiliation. In 1156, at the age of seventy, he died in a half-ruined city and was entombed in the mausoleum which he had built himself, and called ‘The Abode of Eternity’.
    He was succeeded by chaos, in which his memory glittered. The form of his tomb – its walls closed against the earth but open to heaven – signalled to his people that he was perhaps alive, and might return to resurrect his empire. But inside I found an echoing emptiness. The whitewashed walls lifted to an octagon from whose pendentives floated a cavernous inner dome. It moaned with the beat of pigeon wings. Decorative strapwork, still painted blue, radiated over its surface and meshed at its apex in an eight-pointed star. But vertically beneath it, in the centre of the floor, a plain grave, protected by a sheet against pigeon droppings, subverted the glory of the ruler with the platitude of death.
    â€˜You watch out in those ruins,’ said Murad the lorry-driver. ‘They’re haunted.’
    â€˜Who by?’
    â€˜I don’t know. People have been heard crying there.’ He was trying to dissuade me from returning. He was jaunty and impetuous, and wanted me to join him on a picnic in the desert. ‘And that castle you saw,’ he went on, ‘there’s gold buried all round, but nobody can find any. Its sultan kept a harem of forty women there and a tunnel leads from it underground to the other end of the city. It’s dangerous.’
    These fables of gold and tunnels attend ruins all across the Islamic world, so I agreed to the picnic instead, and the next moment we were crashing through the side-alleys of Mari recruiting his friends. He blasted his horn and bawled his invitation beneath half a