The winters iral Asia are pierg and bleak, while the sweating, foetid summers bring cholera, dysentery and mosquitoes, but, in April, the air caresses like the touch of the inner skin of the thigh and the st of all the fl trees douses the citys throat-catg whiff of cesspits.
Every city has its own internal logic. Imagine a city drawn in straightfeometric shapes with crayons from a childs c box, in ochre, in white, in pale terracotta. Low, bloerraces of houses seem to rise out of the whitish, pinkish earth as if born from it, not built out of it. There is a faint, gritty dust over everything, like the dust those pastel crayons leave on your fingers.
Against these bleached pallors, the iridest crusts of ceramic tiles that cover the a mausoleums ensorcellate the eye. The throbbing blue of Islam transforms itself to green while you look at it. Beh a bulbous dome alternately lapis lazuli and veridian, the bones of Tamburlaihe sce of Asia, lie in a jade tomb. We are visiting an authentically fabulous city. We are in Samarkand.
The Revolution promised the Uzbek peasant women clothes of silk and on this promise, at least, did not welch. They wear tunics of flimsy satin, pink and yellow, red and white, blad white, red, green and white, in blotched stripes of brilliant colours that dazzle like an optical illusion, and they bedeck themselves with much jewellery made lass.
They always seem to be frowning because they paint a thick, black liraight across their foreheads that takes their eyebrows from one side of the face to the other without a break. They rim their eyes with kohl. They look startling. They fasten their long hair in two or three dozen whirling plaits. Young girls wear little velvet caps embroidered with metallic thread and beadwork. Older women cover their heads with a couple of scarves of flower-printed wool, one bound tight over the forehead, the other hanging loosely on the shoulders. Nobody has worn a veil for sixty years.
They walk as purposefully as if they did not live in an imaginary city. They do not know that they themselves and their turbanned, sheepskin-jacketed, booted menfolk are creatures as extraordinary to the fn eye as a uni. They exist, in all their glittering and i exoticism, in direct tradi to history. They do not know what I know about them. They do not know that this city is not the entire world. All they know of the world is this city, beautiful as an illusion, where irises grow iters. Ieahouse a green parrot he bars of its wicker cage.
The market has a sharp, green smell. A girl with black-barred brows sprinkles water from a glass over radishes. In this early part of the year you buy only last summers dried fruit -- apricots, peaches, raisins -- except for a few, precious, wrinkled pomegranates, stored in sawdust through the winter and now split open oall to shoet of gars remains within. A local speciality of Samarkand is salted apricot kernels, more delicious, even, than pistachios.
An old woman sells arum lilies. This m, she came from the mountains, where wild tulips have put out flowers like blown bubbles of blood, and the wheedling turtle-doves are ing among the rocks. This old woman dips bread into a cup of buttermilk for her lund eats slowly. When she has sold her lilies, she will go back to the place where they are growing.
She scarcely seems to inhabit time. Or, it is as if she were waiting for Scheherazade to perceive a final dawn had e and, the l