Free The Lost Heart of Asia by Colin Thubron

long after his right hand had plucked one, his left darted up and down the lute’s stem, while the notes faded.
    Far away on the horizon, billowing black into the sky, an enormous column of smoke was ascending, where some oil installation had gone up in flames.
    The sun dropped into the dunes. The last of the shashlik, ignored, had charred to a line of basalt pebbles, and a postprandial weariness descended. The last song left the old man’s lips, and he eased the dutah back into its velvet sheath. Our picnic had shrunk to husks and rinds. Flies were glued to every abandoned scrap. We groped to our feet and began to clear up. The old man was slapping his head against the flies. He cleaned the skewers by stabbing them into the sand, as the Romans had cleaned their armour. Nobody seemed to notice the long trail of dung-beetles on a gastronomic pilgrimage to the bush behind me.
    The vodka had vanished too, and all the way back to Mari my head was separating from my body. I glimpsed it swaying in the lorry’s mirror. Whenever I opened my mouth my missing tooth struck me with a seedy shock. It had not so much dropped out as disintegrated, and had left a stunted fang dangling above the gap like a yellow stalactite. But by the time we reached Murad’s house in a village on Mari’s outskirts, I had ceased to care. My legs dropped from the lorry independently, and embarked on a wavering half-life of their own.
    I remember his home only as a series of vodka-sickened lantern-slides which light up in my memory even now with a tinge of shame. Two women in native dresses are standing near the doorway. They are Murad’s wife and eldest sister. His wife comforts her small son over something as he sobs against her breast. I greet them feebly. The half-light from the door, or an overhanging vine, seems to turn them biblical. I imagine I am back in Syria. The starlight shows a private vegetable patch, and two cows standing under a byre. A puppy wags a disfigured rump. To save it from being mauled by other dogs, its ears and tail have been sliced off with a razor.
    My legs carried me weightlessly into the bare interior. In its reception room a dresser shone with cheap ornaments, and a television stood mute. Murad was drunk too, strutting and shouting. The women looked at us with the indulgence accorded to hopeless children.
    The drink-haze lifted a little on a mild-faced schoolmaster who was invited in to speak English with me. He did so in a doggerel monologue of Dickensian sentences, once or twice beginning ‘It is painful to reflect . . . .’ or ‘As is my wont . . . .’ Meanwhile I propped myself on a cushion like an indolent sultan, and tried not to sink into catalepsy. A young musician, too, was summoned from the village to amuse me. In the middle of his improvised concert, I watched through dulled eyes as he slapped two batteries into his dutah – ‘It makes a bigger noise like this!’ – before launching into new arpeggios.
    The music tinkled far away. A great tide of blackness was lap-ping up behind my eyes. I remember hoping, as they thudded shut, that this would be construed as ecstasy at the dutah music rather than a bursting headache. Whatever happens, I thought, I mustn’t sleep.
    Then I slept.

Chapter 3
Bukhara
    For 800 miles the Karakum desert ripples towards Afghanistan in pale yellow waves. Bordered to the south by the Kopet Dagh and the Hindu Kush, and to the north by the long hypotenuse of the Oxus river, this shifting, fine-grained wilderness throws up no landmark, no distinctive feature at all, but is fringed by choked wells and salinated fields. A Roman historian remarked in astonishment that its people could travel only by the stars, like sailors.
    From my train window it guttered through a triple haze. Misted by my hangover and by the smeared glass, the whole wasteland was dimly in motion. Almost unnoticeably, a light wind was lifting the feathery grains off the