Right of Thirst by Frank Huyler Read Free Book Online Page B

lanterns flowed out of the windows of the mud homes, and sometimes I’d catch a whiff of smoke in the air. But the lanterns didn’t burn for long, and a few minutes after sunset the village went quiet and disappeared into the darkness.
    For the first few days I had a headache. My pulse pounded in my temples, and when I bent forward to put on my boots I could see the afterimage of my retina, in black and white—blood vessels pulsing in my own eye. A distortion of the globe, perhaps, due to the lower pressure at altitude. That, and dehydration—the dry air sucked the moisture out of us, even without exertion, and it was an effort to drink glass after glass of cold, iodinated water from the river, although I got used to that as well.
    At night, when I woke up, I’d listen to the wind rustle against my tent, warm in my sleeping bag, watching my breath enter the air. I soon gave up on the effort of going outside to urinate; whenthe urge came I made do with a bottle I kept for the purpose, screwed tight, in a pocket sewn to the wall. Despite the cold, I often kept the door partly unzipped, so I could look up from where I lay into the night sky, which seemed active and alive. The sky was entirely unlike the skies I knew—the skies of green trees and cornfields and thunderstorms. I saw shooting star after shooting star, and what appeared to be satellites—silver points crossing rapidly from east to west, or west to east. The Milky Way, also, white as a brushstroke when the moon was down, and then the moon itself, rising over the ridges like a perfect circle of ash. It looked entirely cold and inanimate to me, with none of the tenderness it had in the lowlands to the south. The people here lived at the edges of what was possible—only a few places had such high permanent towns, though the village below us was hardly a town. It was more a rough collection of hardship and unwritten history, and the villagers themselves seemed like visitors as well despite all their centuries of presence. When they left the confines of their village it was with a singular purpose in mind—the gathering of wood, the collection of wandering animals.
    That tiny cluster of tents on the windswept field of stones, the altitude, the ridges, the sky overhead, the knowledge that I was as far away from anything I knew as I could possibly be, out beyond the edge of the modern world—it filled me with unease, but also, at first, with a profound sense of relief. For a little while I was gone, and had another role entirely to assume, in a place where no one knew me, where I might be anyone, or anything, like an anonymous traveler in a foreign city.
    If ever there was a place for the imagining of ghosts, that was it. I’ve never been superstitious, but up there, on the wide high reaches, with so many thousands buried alive only a few miles to the north and only a few months ago, absorbed into the ground as if they’d never been there at all—I thought about them, ortried to. It was difficult to imagine them. What I felt instead was a nameless sense of presence, of clarity and empty space.
    Sometimes I’d try to read by a tiny light on a wand clipped to the fire-warning tag on the wall of the tent. I hadn’t brought many books, and had gone for density and small type as a result. A History of the British Raj, 1800 to 1900 . Islam, an Introduction . Birds of West Asia . But the books bored me, and I’d wished I’d been more honest in my choices. All that talk of pig grease on cartridge cases, all that dry commentary on the Black Hole of Calcutta, all those steam locomotives and transformative institutions (bureaucracies, universities)—it seemed almost entirely irrelevant. But Genghis Khan was only thirty generations away, as Elise, the German geneticist, had told me at dinner. Only thirty men and women separated his time from ours.
    I could only wonder what the villagers talked about as they lay down