We were walking across the belly of Asia. Two ruts unspooled west and east.
It was a shepherds’ track. It cleaved the sun-given world in half: a million miles of grasslands to the right, a million miles of grasslands to the left.
Along its ruts traveled: hissing tortoises, dung beetles rolling their cargoes, sprinting lizards with yellow heads, columns of shiny black ants carrying grass seeds aloft like banners, darkling beetles mating in miles-long orgies. Some of these creatures inched toward China, others crawled in the direction of the Caspian Sea. We three humans tottered, hot and dusty, to the end of Kazakhstan, to the beginning of Uzbekistan, to the border. The Eurasian Plate slid beneath us all. It pulled us north at the rate of three-quarters of an inch a year.
