Then the God might be a gold ikon,

Or a page in a paper book.

But It comes as the Kirghiz Light—

There is no other way to know It.

The roar of Its voice is deafness,

The flash of Its light is blindness.

The floor of the desert rumbles,

And Its face cannot be borne.

And a man cannot be the same,

After seeing the Kirghiz Light.

For I tell you that I have seen It

In a place which is older than darkness,

Where even Allah cannot reach.

As you see, my beard is an ice-field,

I walk with a stick to support me,

But this light must change us to children.

And now I cannot walk far,

For a baby must learn to walk.

And my words are reaching your ears

As the meaningless sounds of a baby.

For the Kirghiz Light took my eyes,

Now I sense all Earth like a baby.

It is north, for a six-day ride,

Through the steep and death-gray canyons,

Then across the stony desert

To the mountain whose peak is a white džurt.

And if you have passed without danger,

The place of the black rock will find you.

But if you would not be born,

Then stay with your warm red fire,

And stay with your wife, in your tent,

And the Light will never find you,

And your heart will grow heavy with age,

And your eyes will shut only to sleep.

“Got it,” sez Tchitcherine. “Let’s ride, comrade.” Off again, the fires dying at their backs, the sounds of string music, of village carousing, presently swallowed behind the wind.

And on into the canyons. Far away to the north, a white mountain-top winks in the last sunlight. Down here, it is already shadowed evening.

Tchitcherine will reach the Kirghiz Light, but not his birth. He is no aqyn, and his heart was never ready. He will see It just before dawn. He will spend 12 hours then, face-up on the desert, a prehistoric city greater than Babylon lying in stifled mineral sleep a kilometer below his back, as the shadow of the tall rock, rising to a point, dances west to east and Džaqyp Qulan tends him, anxious as child and doll, and drying foam laces the necks of the two horses. But someday, like the mountains, like the young exiled women in their certain love, in their innocence of him, like the morning earthquakes and the cloud-driving wind, a purge, a war, and millions after millions of souls gone behind him, he will hardly be able to remember It.

But in the Zone, hidden inside the summer Zone, the Rocket is waiting. He will be drawn the same way again….

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