There is a memory that I dearly wish I could show to you, by
telepathy or by technology, though I fear that the moment will die with those of us who were there.
The sun was lumbering down the backside of the mountains
out West, seeming to take longer in its final fifteen degrees of sky than it had in the last ninety, a tennis ball sized lump of
glowing iron smashing down through the countless crags and draws of these
ancient peaks, and bringing a last
ray onto the paths of how many home-bound
shepherds, how many women bringing in the scattered children, how many sleepy
mujahidin?
We sat out under the plywood awning, burning one last nail before heading inside to start loading magazines and
cracking jokes about dying in a nighttime helicopter mishap. And suddenly- - -
The sky was magnificent.
This was no
television sky, this was no Heavens-like-a-hotel-wall that you could be surrounded by in your moments of boredom and ecstasy both and still ignore.
Cigarettes burned down to
filters, frost collected in beards, and the smoke pit was quiet. Angels hovered under the eaves, grateful for a moment of respite from the noise of
ten young killers.
The largest peak, the one we called
Musharraf's Middle Finger, wasn't just a great place for the muj to put a
mortar tube anymore. It was
haloed with the last moments that we might ever see of the sun, a mellow golden-
sepia that warmed us with spectacle in lieu of
radiant heat.
The sun dragged its color behind it like a pack of dogs, up into the clouds that always seemed to brew on the Pak side of
Af-
Pak, vaulting up and up and up into a magnificent orange-crimson-rust gradient that is impossible to recreate with
pigment - I've tried a thousand times to paint it and
never will. Rust gave way to a razorthin line of
verdance, an almost imperceptible, impossible, incredible border of emerald green that took the sky into the color of a tropical ocean, crystal blue darkening, darkening, now the indigo of a perfect sapphire on your lover's neck, now
Ahab's seas, and fading into the blackest black, what the
Pashtuns call "tor-ta-lub", darker than midnight, the Void. The color of outer space from the Earth, when no stars yet gleam.
And all around, as far as the eye could see in any direction from our terrible valley, the mountains were like the many-toothed jaws of a
shark, the sky now our last glimpse of anything other than the cold and wet and dark of a predator's belly. The country was finally swallowing us up, obscenely literal, the peaks flashing with
mica reflections of the petering efforts of the star
Sol, the mountains grey, blue, brown, gripped in shadow and
fading light, but never green, not in this land of dust and hunger.
The sun
banked downwards and the wonder followed, the Void expanding ominously, an oil-drop ever thinner but no less pitch, no more translucent, replacing color with the carbon buildup of burnt powder and then
the wings that perched on Pallas, the line of green pressed evermore dense and soon it too was gone, replaced with the uneven glimmer of stars and galaxies, the
Milky Way, the
lights of a hundred thousand suns all that was left to remind us that we hadn't, yet, been consumed.