From the most powerful emirate an emmisary was dispatched every week to visit Yumk and ensure that treaty obligations were been fulfilled. A man of exquisite laziness he soon tired of the weelky rides to Yumk through sub zero temperatues, encumbered by multiple layers of clothing at an altitude where oxygen is a luxury. With employment ensured he began to spin a web of lies about the good people of Yumk. His reports suggested they had slipped in their reverence fr the Imam, a direct descedent of Mohammad, they were attempting yet another split in Persian Shia, they thought the monobrow was beautiful, they had a mosque without a building, an azan without sound and namaz without prayer. The Emir of the most powerful village was enraged with the traversties been committed in Yumk and dispatched an army to finish off those who did not respect the beauty of the monobrow. News spread fast via the e-o-or of a donkey to the mother of a four year old boy named Sole. She told her son to escape over the mountains to the saftey of distant relaties. Following the worn paths of goats, marco polo sheep, donkey, cows he ascended the barren range. Looking back to his village of micro compounds surrounding mud houses where the position of town planner had never been filled, the winding river of the Amu Dari in a basin of silt and onto the Hindu Kush and what would be the slither of Afghanistan that seperated the future Tajikistan from Pakistan, Russian troops from British, he saw the sun rise and fall behind the same mountain. He smelt cow shit burn and heat the homes, he saw Sufi's in caves, men barter cows for wheat, men and women dance in a circle, feet stamping, hands and arm twisting, shoulders jumping. He looked across snow covered mountains lit by the moon, he heard the bread break and a meal started. He looked into the future and saw two tourists, an Australian with ice on his beard and a Japanese walking from village to village, staying at a distant future relatives home, hitchhiking on top of trucks filled with fire wood. They were six but the Pakistani-American CIA agent posing as a gem stone collecting black hip hop gangsta from New York, complete with shuffling toothpick, clockwise rotating baseball hat and a one year old son was left in Dushanbe with an Englishman who wanted to be loved. The Englishman was in search of an ex-Soviet wife introduced via the internet, collected over priced prostitutes, carried a film canister of curry, talked in his sleep, had his ears removed, drank three bottles of vodka and could not wake up. Sole was climbing a 5000 metre peak when he turned to watch every resident of Yumk murdered, their livestock dog walked away, their one room houses built with five pillars to represent Mohammad, Fatima, Ali, Hassan and Hussein destroyed. He passed a fort built by Alexander the Great. At the peak he felt the earth shudder and watched an earthquake topple a mountain to create a dam five hundred metres deep. The next earthquake, in the time of your grand children will destroy the dam and the biggest flood since the Caspian Sea broke its banks and flooded into the Bible will wash away Uzbekistan into the defunct plutonium basin that was once the Aral Sea. He crawled across a plateua where NASA would film Neil Armstrong's moon landing and saw an Australian tourist shver at -29 degrees. Then he looked down to the valley below, he skated down a river of ice into a delta of saftey and a village of Shognan's. The journey took a month, every village and house he was stopped by people with faces prematurely wrinkled by the cold and invited to drink to tea, eat marco polo sheep and yak. He had seen a hundred different faces from the hundred different races that had passed through the Pamirs. He was raised by relatives in a village descended from the Macedonians where he grew into a goat herder with a famed stick. He learned to count in his language where 100 was the highest possible number formed from 10 possible numbers. To say 14 was to say 10 4, to say 40 was 4 10, to say 45 was 4 10 5 and 100 was 10 10. He garnered a rudimentary understanding of their Ismali belief. The Imam's were descended from Mohammad, half Pope, half King, half God and pretty close to Jesus. Where the Iranians had stopped at the 12th in the hereditary line from Mohammad the Ismali's had continued on. They worshipped their Imam as a God and were condenmned as heretics by the rest of the Muslim faithful. Each Imam reinterpreted the Koran for the moder age, for the culture and the climate. As the veil, robes and beard protect in the sand, the heat and the cold it is only valid in these conditions. The Koran decrees that one must enter battle with a horse and sword, would the future Taliban follow this decree? Jihad is the war against the enemy within our souls. Men and women are equal but eat at different tables and alcohol is an individual choice. The five Sunni prayers reduced to three by Shia and two by the Ismali. It is the Islam that has been modernized without modernity, without the enlightenment or industrialisation. It is the Islam from pre-history when people worshipped men not omnipotent faceless Gods. Today the 49th Imam lives in France and keeps the people of the Pamirs alive. Sole married a Shognan girl and had three sons, three brothers with a thirst for their grandparents land. On the night of their marriage five women from the village had watched them consumate their marriage and had checked the sheets afterwards. The three sons were born on the New Years day, the 21st of March, the Zoroastrian New Year when they all jumped over a fire. The three brothers went over the mountains and crossed the Amu Dari and saw the faint outlines of a future where a Japanese and Australian would bribe a border guard to cross into Afghanistan, sit in a market sipping tea and have offers of fist sized blocks of opium, gems and clothes from an age that fashion would never reach. The brothers went to Jallalabad and collected the titles to their grandparents home and their claim to the village Emirate. On their way back they walked along the Amu Dari and were passed by a van from the future containing two bewildered tourists, a policeman and his goat. They saw the tourists get stopped at their 52nd checkpoint. They returned to the deserted land that once contained a village named Yumk. From the three brothers the village was reborn into a people who fondly remember the economic security of the Soviet system, the electricity and the graveyard of industrialisation that had not yet started. A people who rose up to try and split the modern state and when the failed created an unofficial time zone, one hour different from the rest of the country that some followed and some didn't. The young dreamed of moving to Moscow, the giant busts of Lenin were yet to be removed, the KGB renamed, uniforms rebranded. The government proclaimd it the year of the Aryan, the men elected their leader, the women theirs. They never heard the government decree that headscarves were banned from school or the Mullah in the capital proclaim "I believe all the troubles of the modern world can be attributed to women showing their hair". The village of Yumk was reborn and greeted two tourists, a Japanese and an Australian walking from village to village. The Japanese with backpack on a trolley, a laptop, 2 cameras, 6 lenses, one weighing 1.8 kg, 1 tripod, 20 gigabyte digital camera storage, 100 rolls of undeveloped film, 3 books about Alaska written in English, an English Japanese dictionary to read them, 1kg of cheese, 1 kg of salt, 1kg of rice, 30 packets of 2 minute noodles, 15 bars of chocolate, 5 loave of bread, 16 persemon, 1kg of dried apricots, 15 rolls of toilet paper, 9 bottles of water, 4 cartons of cigareets, a Rusian-Japanese dictionary, 4 jackets, 2 themometers, 5 cross referenced notebooks, 17 pairs of socks, 140,000 Kyrgyz sum in Tajikistan, 4 jackets, 1 pair of pants and no torch or lighter. Click here for Tajikistan photos

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