We climbed what seemed like a mile at least and sat down around a kind of campfire, where an ominous big kettle was mulling over some bony chunks of a creature recently as alive as we. The shepherds loved Libby’s free-falling hair and the way her round freckled knees peeped out of her modified miniskirt as we squatted in our circle of rock perches. A goatskin of red wine was produced; as stated before, I’m no connoisseur of alcoholic beverages, but this stuff was so rough that flies kept dying in our cups, and a full swig took the paint off the roof of your mouth. After the goatskin had been passed a few times, Libby began to relish the shepherds’ attention, to glow and giggle and switch her long limbs around and come up with her phrases of language-school Russian. Those shepherds—agricultural workers and livestock supervisors was probably how they thought of themselves—had a number of unsolved dental problems, as we saw when their whiskers cracked open in a laugh, but there was a lot of love around that simmering pot, a lot of desire for international peace. Even Bud took off his jacket and unbuttoned his top shirt button, and Nadia began to lounge back in the scree and translate me loosely, with what I heard as her own original material. The lamb when it was served, in tin bowls, could have been mulled somewhat longer and was mixed in with what looked like crabgrass, roots and all, and some little green capers that each had a firecracker inside, but as it turned out only the Nevinses got sick. Next day they had to stay in their hotel room with the shades lowered while the Communists and I motored out to entertain a People’s War veterans home that had an excellent view of Mt. Elbrus. The way we all cackled in the car at the expense of the Nevinses and their tender capitalist stomachs was the cruellest thing I saw come to pass in my month in the Soviet Union.

Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan: you wondered why the Lord ever made so much wasteland in the world, with a gold dome or blue lake now and then as a sop to the thirsty soul. But here’s where the next revolution was coming from, it turned out—out from under those Islamic turbans. When my banjo flashed mother-of-pearl their way, they made the split-finger sign to ward off the evil eye. They knew a devil’s gadget when they saw it.