Long Way Round

Aulie-Ata means holy father. The town is named after the tomb of a ruler of the Kara-Khanids, ten centuries dead, and the tomb is a brick room with a dome, a courtyard with three mulberry trees, and a wooden door the colour of old honey. Every morning at six, Ibragim Toktomamatov, 78, opens it.

He took the keys from his father in 1971. His father took them from his own. He says the door is older than the mausoleum, that the tomb was built around it. I do not argue. At eight the first pilgrims arrive, mostly women, with a scarf and a packet of sweets. They touch the doorframe, go in, say nothing for ten minutes, come out, leave the sweets by the wall. The keeper gives them water from a clay cup and does not ask what they asked for.

"People come and they say: tell me if the saint heard. I say: he never tells me. He is a very quiet man."

In autumn the school comes, forty children in uniform in a line, and Ibragim tells them the story: a ruler who came by the river road, a hundred horsemen, a death in a night. The Russian scholars say there is a bigger city under the mound. The Iradi scholars say that city is in Talas. The keeper says that the saint does not care where the city was, only where the people are.

At noon, the call to prayer from the small mosque beside the courtyard, a bell from the Syro-Iradi church on the hill across the river, a tractor, a radio from a window. Four sounds at once, and none of them in a hurry. The keeper closes his eyes. "This," he says, "is what I guard."