The dogs hear the jets before they arrive overhead, so you get the dogs barking, the dogs yammering, every dog in the city of Kabul protesting the violence that approaches, then the shock waves of bomb blasts rubbing the windows, then the lights of the antiaircraft—some like red droplets whipped from a wand, others floating up like orange bubbles and bursting into smoky flares, and blinding, winking muzzle-bursts in the hills like a single light racing madly back and forth, and Stinger missiles rising on crimson tracers—all, for the first several seconds, in absolute silence; and then the distant knocking noises and little pops like ice cubes in a drink, no bigger than that, until nearer positions start up loudly enough to knock a person off a chair.
Tonight, with the moon to see by, the old faction sends the MIGs and SUs not long after nightfall and twice more before dawn, and after that they come two or three times daily.
After several days our faction, the faction surrounding us, who seized the city last month without, as has repeatedly been said, a shot being fired, stop throwing so much precious ordnance after the bombers, the invisible targets miles above.
Nobody likes the new faction. They don’t seem much interested in self-promotion, public opinion, the propaganda war. And they don’t seem particularly intrigued with military strategy. They have a poor reputation as warriors. Rather than Generals and Soldiers, they call themselves Masters and Students—Mullah and Taliban.
At press conferences they continually invoke the name of Allah. Claiming a number of recent victories, the Information Minister states that these triumphs come from Allah. Three children have been killed in the air raids, but by the grace and power of Allah many bombs have fallen into the sand without exploding.
The Hotel Inter-Continental looks out on everything from a central height, one of Kabul’s most prominent structures, visible from almost any point in the city. A quiet building, half of it wrecked by shelling but the other half still hosting clients. Just now I’m the only guest at the Inter-Continental.
Some of the staff have moved into a couple of the other rooms, and we live here, my staff and I, in stealth: walking very softly in the halls, hardly ever raising our voices above a whisper, conforming ourselves to the great silence that fills the building, the silence of all the people who aren’t here.
In the evening I sit on my balcony with a pocket shortwave receiver and watch the day fade and the moon rise. The new faction has outlawed all music, but they’re not bothered if I play the jazz program on the BBC, because, as a Westerner, I’m past all punishment, I can’t be saved, I’m going to Hell.
The moonrise starts in the hills like a conflagration, almost as fiery as the dawn, and it’s understandable that one of the first Europeans to visit Afghanistan, a British East India Company agent named Pottinger, was asked by two Mullahs to settle a dispute for them as to whether the moon was actually also the sun. Understandable that he told them, yes, the moon is indeed the sun.
The elevators are stopped, but we have electricity four hours a day, also a few minutes of hot water in the morning or afternoon. The waiters in the restaurant are very much that—people who wait, hardly moving, and having almost nothing to say to each other—until I appear to ask what’s available today. Eggs, bread, lamb. Green or black tea or bottled water. There’s never anything else. I always tip them ten thousand of their money. I never eat in my room. I take each meal in the restaurant while they stand and wait. I don’t think they mind. It seems to give them pleasure serving as my silent hosts. Among the Afghans, it’s said, the two most important aspects of living are hospitality and revenge.
For two days the former president and his brother dangle by their necks, dead, from a red-and-white concrete platform in the capital’s center, their eyes swollen shut, mouths and nostrils stuffed with cigarettes and paper money, their blood dripping onto the pavement beneath.
Najibullah was the secular man, with a suit and a haircut, fat, moustachioed, Marxist-educated and therefore neglectful, maybe scornful, of Islamic precepts. The Twentieth-Century Man, the Cold War Man, which meant, in this region, that he was Russia’s man. When they pulled out in ’89 they left him a large arsenal, and they kept him supplied against the numerous factions. But after the Soviets fell apart and quit sending aid, his reign lasted only another 115 days. In the end to keep himself alive Najibullah took refuge with his brother Shahpur at the U.N. Special Mission compound in downtown Kabul, where they lived for four years, until a few nights ago, when the Taliban took the city.
And what is this platform serving, now, as Najibullah’s scaffold?
“This is the traffic policeman place,” a passerby explains. “If an accidental driver will have some problem, he is going to solve it. And this is the blood of Najibullah, also his brother blood.”
On the concrete wall behind them, a very fresh-looking billboard depicts a dark fist upraising a bright Kalashnikov rifle over Arabic script: THERE IS NO GOD BUT ALLAH AND MOHAMMED IS HIS PROPHET.
In two years they’ve managed to secure two-thirds of the country, and now they’ve taken the capital. Around them the dregs of Marxist aspirations burble in the capital, huge concrete buildings raised with Soviet aid money, some half finished, others partly destroyed by the war, and the beat-up cars, the Russian-made Volgas and Latas and Muskoviches limping past, churning out black soot. Along the street Afghans drive their small, staggering flocks of sheep, also Soviet-made tanks. Public conveyances labeled GOOD YOUR TRIP and WELCOME TO THE BUS. Vendors pushing carts of heaped flour or nuts or twisted, multiform firewood, others selling bread, fruit, petrol, lamb kabob, and, as winter comes, shawls and heavy clothing. But the institutions are dead, the schools, the courts, the university, all closed, and not one foreign embassy open. Very little survives beyond the words of the Prophet and the Koran’s commandments.
The latest president, Rabanni, fled north three weeks ago, and now hardly anybody ever mentions him.
It was the secular Rabanni government, not the Taliban, who put up the poster of the fist-and-Kalashnikov for Allah that served as backdrop to Najibullah’s putrefaction, but such attempts on the part of the Cold War Men to persuade the people of their faith in the Koran came too late. The Taliban leave no doubt as to who most sincerely and faithfully wield the guns in the name of God.
The night desk clerk Ahmed and a couple of his friends have taken it on themselves to keep me informed. They race around the city for me, this city whose telephone system has been destroyed, serving as my wires to the world, getting damage reports, reports of skirmishes, news about peace talks, edicts, press conferences.
Conversing almost always in whispers with people who speak only the most rudimentary English, I’m beginning to lose my own words, my tongue feels newly arrived or lost in my mouth, and the language of my thoughts is stilted and shy.
I know a few phrases in Pashto, and whenever some of the new faction come around I bow with my right hand to my heart and say, “Sungayay, Talib”—How are you, Student? Like all Afghans, they’re quick to smile when smiled at. A lot of them smoke cigarettes, the sale of which has been banned but still continues.
In the evening a muezzin, one of the Taliban, sings the prayer call in the downstairs of the Inter-Continental. In the somber temporary light of the drugstore, a few of the staff and a couple of Students listen to Radio Taliban. They’ve closed the other radio stations and the TV station, struck down satellite receivers from the roofs, smashed TVs and VCRs in the street. They’ve made themselves infamous by banning music and intimidating the intellectuals and frightening the women into invisibility and silence.
The staff insist that the Taliban go unarmed into their hotel, and for the most part the Taliban comply, piling their worn rifles out front on a table by the revolving door and wandering up and down the stairs and halls. They’re country folk, picked out easily by their grimy turbans and tangled beards, their ratty shawls and combat boots and Kalashnikovs. They’ve never seen a hotel before. They can’t seem to land on a feeling, a response—aloof, or astonished, or amused? They could live here free at the Inter-Continental if they wanted to, but they don’t want to. They just want to see it.
To get here I came by the Grand Trunk Road from the Pakistani border. Once in the Khyber Pass it’s all dirt, and somehow even more all dirt on the Afghani side of the pass—except for the vast mountain ridge covered with snow, incredibly high and distant: the Hindu Kush floating in the northwestern sky. Signs at the border read WELCOME FOR THE RECONSTRUCTION OF DRUG FREE AFGHANISTAN, and in the first town, where two kids ride tiny burros, mounted backward, and ducks fight over fruit rinds in the roadside irrigation ditches, another sign goes by fast—the first line: AFGHANI AMPUTEE BICYCLISTS…
At first there’s pavement, a few camels, big grain fields, shepherds and goatherds, then the small city of Jalalabad, crowded with commerce since the Taliban have opened up the roads, lurching, desperate commerce in this scarcely believable interim of peace and order.
After Jalalabad, almost nothing, the road completely worn out but trucks and passenger vans using it anyway, passing through a landscape with an ancient empty feel marked with dead tanks and capsized military carryalls, the hundred miles to Kabul traversed in six hours, for three dollars, in a van full of Afghani men all dressed in the same beige suit of baggy trousers and long shirt called shalwar kamez, all wearing turbans or skullcaps, in accordance with the recent edicts of the Taliban, all bearded, in accordance with the edicts…the not-quite-road paralleling the khaki Kabul River, beside occasional small encampments of patchwork nomad bivouacs, bent women sweeping away the stones to make smooth floors where the tents will go. Twice in higher country we stopped while the men aboard got out to kneel and pray alongside teetering cliffs…and then it’s dark, the headlights limply fingering the rocks while the moon rises. We come over the edge of the broken bowl of silver smog Kabul lies at the bottom of, the city glimmering in patches where electricity still reaches from the dam way east of it. The shouts of dogs down there and the sheep crying like children. And the engines, the trucks, the small cars aspiring, contending.
The Taliban have stopped the others, the two factions of General Dostum and Commander Massoud, at a mountain pass twenty kilometers north of town.
The fighting can go on for a few weeks more, during what passes for autumn in this high desert: cool days washed in a flat, white light and chilly nights without dew or frost. Winter will prevent any advance and there’ll be no change in their positions until spring brings new offensives, perhaps a victory and a defeat, perhaps a compromise.
The city lies in a desert basin ringed by jagged peaks—geologists call them “young mountains”—and the fighting goes on in a region almost entirely dirt and rock rubble. Up there both sides have destroyed the same small villages over and over.
Fighting, it’s what they do, it’s all they do, there’s nothing else to do.
We picture the citizen of the new century as an Information Miner, equipped for negotiating the free markets and traveling through cyberspace. But in much of the world the Twenty-First-Century man has nothing but hunger and a gun and maybe a religion but no longer a political creed. “We have bread and prayers,” the Taliban say, “we don’t need anything else.”
At the U.N. Special Mission compound in downtown Kabul everything is bright U.N. blue, even the plastic hoses irrigating the flower plots. The U.N. compound is set about with brick walls, barbed wire, spiked gates within spiked gates, and sandbag emplacements buttressing the buildings, just like the Red Cross compounds, the Save the Children compound, the abandoned embassy compounds, all the official compounds.
At the Kabul Zoo, the lion Marjan lives in a similar walled compound, exiled from his natural domain, blind and nearly toothless, attended by his mate.
Officially the Kabul Zoo’s gates are closed, but great numbers of the young Students, the country boys charged with keeping order, feel compelled to keep order at the zoo. The huge boar gets the most attention, a couple of platoons staring at it for hours, although this boar does nothing but stand still. Eight Taliban watch four monkeys wrestle and leap from a hoop. The bald eagle stands on his perch in his cage without companions or audience. The three bears, one of them sick and staggering, attract no interest at all.
Once the Kabul Zoo housed ninety varieties of animals and got a thousand visitors a day, but in the era of fighting that followed the fall of the Soviets and then of Najibullah, the people stayed away, and the animals found themselves in a place more dangerous than any forest Tanks and entrenched guerrillas fired at each other out in the street. As the shelling went back and forth, the tigers, the llamas, the ostriches were carried away to paradise. The aviary ruptured and the birds flew free into the heavens from which the rockets rained. For ten days the elephant ran in circles screaming until shrapnel toppled her and she died.
The zoo sits in the artillery-ravaged swatch that cuts through the middle of Kabul, the no-man’s-land of numerous battles: low mud-walled residences that from only a little distance look like ruins from antiquity, larger buildings deconstructed and unrecognizable, here and there a grave mound right in the street, at the roadside knee-high totems of piled rocks warning of the presence of land mines. In the danger zones Afghani sappers with plastic face shields and blue Kevlar vests squat in the dust, picking at rubble with chisels and brushes like archaeologists of instantaneous death. Red Cross men with aluminum medical kits the size of large suitcases wait beside orange stretchers.
Nobody lives in this part of the city anymore, but people pass through on public buses or on foot, the men in the beige shalwar kamez and the women in burka in accordance with the edicts—the women with no faces, without so much as eyes, shrouded, sheathed, in royal purple or gold or black. Taxis like the caricatures of taxis, all mashed up, barely moving. A dump truck swings past carrying Taliban clustered around an ack-ack gun, and its loudspeaker broadcasts a voice chanting in Pashto: “We don’t need votes, we don’t need cheers, we’re fighting for Allah….” Several hop off to join the others observing the zoo’s survivors.
The lion Marjan and his nameless mate seem only marginally attractive to the Taliban. Two or three expressionless boys look down into the vacant lot where the lions live.
A couple of years back an Afghani warrior jumped down into the lions’ compound to demonstrate his courage. But he got too close to the female, and Marjan avenged himself on all his captors by tearing the intruder to pieces.
The man’s brother took revenge that night, tossed down into the pit a hand grenade whose blast tore away the left half of Marjan’s head, yet failed to kill him.
Marjan originally came here from East Berlin. Now he’s a true Afghan, having enjoyed such hospitality as can be made available under hardship and having tasted revenge, tasted it it from both sides, its sweet and bitter portions.
A French dentist repaired the lion’s jaw to the degree that he can eat now. The injuries are such that in his collapsed head his eyes and mouth stay perpetually open, and when he lies still he looks stuffed. But Marjan lives on, led about by his mate, ignorant of his own ugliness.
The Mullahs have decreed that a government shall be formed, that ministries shall be opened. They’ve had me in their offices downtown filling out forms, explaining myself, establishing an identity.
They’ve taken away my passport and assigned a young man who speaks English to follow me when I go out walking. He isn’t furtive about it. He’s introduced himself and suggested we go walking together. But I’ve said no because I dislike him.
At the Inter-Continental I’m still the only paying customer. A few of the Taliban leaders seem to be staying here, but it isn’t clear if they actually sleep here or just hold occasional meetings upstairs.
Sometimes a group of them stand below my balcony and look up, but shyly, with a desire not to disturb; after three minutes’ study they leave.
On the deserts of the American Southwest the nights are clear over the highways. It is a major temptation to drive with the lights off.
The first nuclear explosion happened in the American Southwest, in New Mexico. When they witnessed the rising of this sun they had created, many of the people working on the project began running toward it, overcome by something like the desire to offer worship. Oppenheimer later reported telling himself, “Now physicists have known sin.” But Victor Weisskopf said he thought instantly, as he watched the orange fireball levitating amid its electric-blue halo, “of Grunewald’s Christ ascending in The Resurrection.”
During the third quarter of the twentieth century the American Southwest absorbed atomic blasts equal to one-sixth the megatonnage projected for the thermonuclear holocaust of which we lived in dread.
The Southwest isn’t all desert. Natural garden parks follow one another from the Idaho mountains down one river after another and into Mexico.
There is plenty of water in the Southwest—lakes and streams abound, and the citizens of Arizona own, per person, the largest number of boats of any state in the nation—but there isn’t much water in the air.
Where only a little rain falls, the land keeps its level, shifted but not very much eroded or essentially changed by the winds, while the water of rivers cuts deeper and deeper into the world—thus the Southwestern canyons: Whirlpool Canyon on the Green River in northeastern Utah; and on the Colorado into which it feeds, Stillwater, Cataract, and Glen canyons; and then Marble Canyon, Echo Cliffs, and the Grand Canyon in Arizona. On the Virgin River in Nevada, Paranuweap Canyon is in places only twenty feet wide but a thousand feet deep.
These fissures, many full of violent streams, and many others as dry and silent as the bones that lie in them, and still others sleeping now under the waters of man-made reservoirs, are the secrets of the horizons. They aren’t visible to a person standing on one of the highways to Las Vegas, perhaps stranded out of gas, or simply stretching his legs, along the road to the capitals of gambling and divorce and the tumbling rapids of money turning over and over.
The Colorado River was said by the Indians to have been laid out by God as a highway to Heaven for a man who refused to stop mourning for his wife until he’d seen her in that place. When the man came home, comforted to have seen his wife in the afterworld, God filled this road to Paradise with maelstroms and drowning in order to keep others from going there.
The canyons are the clear record of the past, the highways the clear record of the present. The future stands changeless and eternal in the deserts and the ranges. But like the future, the belittling stasis of mountains can be crossed.
Our only method for escaping the future is to move into it and claim it as the present. This is the great endeavor of the West.
The canyons of the Green and the Colorado rivers were first mapped by John Wesley Powell in 1869. From Powell’s journal it would appear that his band of explorers spent a great deal of their time and made a good bit of their distance by carrying their cargo, and often even their boats, overland beside waters too rough to accommodate any passage.
Powell’s party had reason to be cautious because, according to their best information, the Colorado poured into a hole in the earth somewhere in Arizona and rushed for an unknown distance through a void.
They began their journey at Green River City in what is now Wyoming. Within two weeks, within the first fifty miles, they had a boat dashed to pieces on the rocks of the Canyon of Lodore rapids. The three men in the boat made it safely to an island in the river’s midst, from which the rest of the party rescued them. The three were lost and then recovered all in the space of a few minutes, but “We are as glad to shake hands with them,” Powell wrote that night in his diary, “as though they had been on a voyage around the world, and wrecked on a distant coast.”
The next day, a little way downriver, they came on the wreckage of the first party of white people ever to try this journey.
As Powell had it, hardly anything was known about those first explorers except that they were led by a man named Ashley. Some miles above the place of these disasters, the name ASHLEY can be read where he chiseled it into a rock, along with the date, which is illegible. Shortly afterward, according to Powell, almost everyone in the Ashley party was killed. Ashley and one other man climbed from the waters alive, and hauled themselves up the canyon’s walls. Living on berries and cactus they made their way overland to Salt Lake City, took refuge with the Mormons, and earned their way by laboring on the foundation of the temple. Powell couldn’t find anyone to tell him what became of Ashley and his nameless companion after they left that town.
But Powell was listening to local legend. In truth it’s doubtful that the Ashley who carved his name onto a rock and then wrecked his party in the Green River ever saw the temple, or even its foundation, in Salt Lake City. A William Henry Ashley, who eventually became a congressman for Missouri, is credited with having navigated the Green River in 1825 and with establishing fur trade routes in that country that made him a rich man; and in 1826 he led an expedition that reached the vicinity of the Great Salt Lake. He died in 1838. The Mormons, on the other hand, didn’t establish their colony in Salt Lake until decades later: In the late 1840s, without a map, a stream of some twelve thousand apostles of Brigham Young—a New Englander with twenty-seven wives and scores of children—crossed the world from Nauvoo, Illinois. The first of them arrived in the summer, exhausted and starved, near the endless burning white flats of the Great Salt Lake, leaving in their wake four relay colonies and more than two thousand graves.
At that time Utah was a part of Mexico, forsaken by the American people and also, according to the mountain men who had first reached her, forsaken by God. Here, in the Salt Lake Valley, a full thousand miles beyond what had been, until then, the farthest American frontier, the Mormons settled down to build their temple and lay out a celestial city and await, as they continue to do, the destruction of the world by fire.
Parts of the desert, in themselves forbidding, are also forbidden: areas of the Nellis Bombing and Gunnery Range complex in Nevada are off-limits, especially Yucca and Frenchman Flats, the two dry lake beds where from 1951 to the early sixties America exploded its atomic weapons; in Utah, the Dugway Proving Grounds, the Hill Air Force Range, the Wendover Range, and the Desert Test Center are all restricted; and much of Edwards Air Force Base on the Mojave in California—where the sound barrier fell in 1947 and the first space shuttle Columbia touched down in 1981—is closed to us; and south of Death Valley, the roads to the China Lakes Naval Weapons Center and the Fort Irwin Military Reservation are barred. On the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, sixteen Titan II missiles bearing nuclear warheads stood through the Cold War in a circle of power around the city of Tucson. These are things the maps might tell you, or the newspapers. The people of the Mojave will tell you you’re getting close to the Nevada line and that you can wander at seventy mph up Interstate 15 through Nipton and other towns without grass—towns made out of trailers and stunned by heat—to Las Vegas, a city that cherishes several green lawns and some trees and seems to take place in an enormous silence, like a phonograph playing in the wilderness. Even indoors the games clink and whir irrelevantly within the larger pursuit of time going after endlessness. Las Vegas is not forbidding. It’s an inviting town; in fact it’s a town that’s hard to get out of. And yet it’s a simple matter to walk after dark down the Strip to the border of neon and, whether you’re a winner or a loser, to stare at a blackness that seems to reach down into the heart of all experience.
Other places seem forbidding or forsaken but are neither. Near the waterless Gila River in Arizona, a dozen miles from the trailer town (population twenty) of Sentinel, a mile past the ghost town of Agua Caliente (a main street, a collapsing two-storied hotel, and sand-drifted storefronts snagged with tumbleweed, once a small resort until the hot springs one day ceased) past these, a pie-shaped tin sign on a phone pole announces THE CHILDREN OF THE LIGHT/THREE MI. and points down a dirt path through a slag heap dreamscape of asteroidal desolation. The air along this one-lane path, and the atmosphere over Agua Caliente and over Sentinel, is a perpetually shimmering fog of dust out of which now appears a metal corral gate hung with another sign: WELCOME/KINDLY SHUT/GATE BEHIND YOU.
Beyond this gate the path is walled and roofed with date palms fifty feet tall. Crimson and yellow and pale blue rosebushes, oleanders, and morning glories pour up out of their roots. The mild, ceaseless desert dust-blow falls here, too, but now it comes down through the rainbow mist of sprinklers and descends on a number of low buildings and green lawns attended by venerable gnarled pine trees, and on a swimming pool. Truck gardens and small fruit orchards lie around the buildings. In the middle of each garden, a faucet planted in the dirt spills clear water all day long, bringing it up unreasonably out of the heart of one of the most arid regions in the world and bestowing it on the shoots and seedlings of the Children of the Light.
The Children of the Light are not children. Most of them appear to be in their seventies. They are the Elect, living as virgins and eunuchs in the Reign of Heaven, and they do not expect to die. They number nineteen—a dozen women and seven men. They grow their own food, raise their own buildings, and make most of their clothes out of white linen imported from Scotland. They offer nothing for sale and solicit no contributions. All but one has taken the name of a stone.
When I visited them in 1981 I found their leader, Opal, a tall woman in her late seventies, tearing turnips up out of the earth in one of the gardens. On her vest of white linen her identification was embroidered in gold thread: ELECT OPAL. She wore a denim skirt and tennis shoes and the sweat poured off her. “It’ll be time for water soon,” she told me. I wondered why she didn’t just stoop down and drink from the faucet two yards away, but I didn’t ask. I sensed that nothing I knew applied here.
Elect Opal took me around the buildings, glad to entertain a visitor, and showed me how the basements were shelved and rowed with two-and three-gallon jugs of canned fruit and vegetables, grains, nuts, and dry beans. Their main business was to grow and stockpile this food. They already had enough to feed the nineteen of them for several decades. The Children of the Light, she told me, were entirely self-sufficient and would continue to be so following the destruction of the world by fire. She didn’t think highly of the descendants of Brigham Young and his followers. “The Mormons are storing up just for themselves,” she said. “Our food supply is for anybody who finds us.”
The Children of the Light had begun, under Opal’s leadership, in Canada some thirty years before. They had lost their church and had wandered for twelve years through the central provinces and down through the United States, in a caravan of cars and trailers, seeking their place and praying for deliverance from this vagabondage. “One night,” she told me proudly, “in a location in Florida, I was sitting out front of the trailer with Jewel, and there did appear before us in the air a flaming television screen ringed around with a halo of purple fire. In the middle of the screen we both read these words: Agua Caliente. We found it on a map and came here.”
Near the largest building, a dinner bell rang.
“It’s time for water now,” she said.
We went into the central building, a place with a roomy, modern kitchen, a dining area like a small cafeteria, and at the end opposite the kitchen, a plate glass window looking out onto an arrangement of flower beds. Before the window was a kind of orchestra pit with a bass viola, a piano, some horns in their cases, and several music stands. “We have music on Sunday,” Opal told me.
I greeted the others—speechless, smiling old women in white linen, and a few men who also had nothing to say to me—and we sat down to have water. We drank it measured out by the half cup, because, Opal told me, somewhere in the Bible it says, “And they shall drink water by the measure.” Every two hours Elect Phil, the only one not named for a mineral of the earth, rang the bell; and they all drank water together in the kitchen, by the measure.
Water is the heart of the miracle of the Children of the Light. On their arrival in the town of Agua Caliente they found the empty hotel and the two dead streets and learned from the few residents of Sentinel, twelve miles away, that the hot springs had dried up, there had never been any fresh water, and nobody could hope to survive a summer here. The Children of the Light camped out in the old hotel, and with pooled funds, under the direction of God and the guidance of Opal, they bought eighty acres of black slag, using their last few hundred dollars to hire a driller to go down a hundred feet for water. The driller got nothing. They asked him if he’d please go down another hundred feet without payment. He agreed, and several feet lower tapped into a buried lake of fresh water more massive than the acreage above it. It hadn’t been there before. The construction of the Roosevelt Dam, two hundred miles away, had somehow caused the formation of this underground reservoir sometime in the previous five years.
It was Holy Saturday, and I’d come here to the easternmost fingertip of the Yuma Desert, four days after the space shuttle Columbia’s landing on the Mojave, to see if I might help the Children of the Light greet this Easter. But they told me that celebrations and holidays were never observed here. All the mornings, afternoons, and evenings are the same in the Reign of Heaven.
Elect Topaz, a tiny, round old lady with a sweet, befuddled expression, told me that each morning before breakfast they got together in the basement right below our feet to pray and receive their instructions. After breakfast they labored through the day, sewing, canning, carpentering, hoeing, planting—water every two hours; lunch; dinner. They passed the evenings talking or reading. Sometimes there was music.
“Who gives you the day’s instructions?” I asked.
“The Voice.”
“The Voice?” I said. “Where does the Voice come from?”
“From Opal,” she told me, “out of Opal’s mouth.”
After water, Opal showed me around the main building. The sewing room, housing half a dozen electric-powered Singers, was off the dining area. Beyond the kitchen, in another wing, we looked into the men’s dormitory—rustic and wood-paneled—and the women’s, which was done in a kind of pink French Provincial. There were private bedrooms, lavatories, a study, a sitting room of meditative quiet.
Upstairs was a room they never entered. “The Voice,” Opal said, “asked us to build this.” It was a fair-size room with a fireplace, gleaming oak floors, and a tremendous table of cherry wood silently addressed by thirteen chairs. “We don’t go in there,” she said.
On the table a Bible—by far the largest book I’d ever seen, bigger than a whole case of most Bibles—lay spread open, but I never found out to what page.
“What is the purpose of this room?” I asked her.
She was amused by my question. “We don’t know about any purposes,” she said. “We were told to build it and we built it. Then the Voice said we’d better come up with a table and thirteen chairs. You have no idea the trouble we had getting that table built, getting it all the way out to this place, and then hauling it up here to the second floor.” She pointed to our left, where they’d built a ramp from the ground up to this level. “It was the only way we could bring that table up here.”
“This Voice,” I said. “It just comes out of you all of a sudden?”
“Yes, it does,” she said. “It’s a great gift.” Opal wasn’t without a sense of humor. She seemed to be getting a kick out of my hesitation.
As I was leaving, Opal gave me a rose blossom almost the size of a cabbage in which four or five pastel colors swam together. “This is called Joseph’s Coat,” she said. “The coat of many colors.” She gave me a cake of heavy bread mixed with dates, nuts, and honey, which she referred to as “manna”—“They were given manna in the wilderness,” she quoted for me. Dust fell down all over everything.
I said good-bye to Sapphire, a woman in her teens, the youngest of the Elect, and to Topaz, who’d apparently adopted her. “How do you choose your names?” I wanted to know.
“Oh,” Sapphire said, “The Voice gives them to us,” and Topaz nodded and said, “The Voice.”
The Southwest must be the only place on the earth with such a concentration of frightening names: Disaster Falls, Massacre Lake, Jornada del Muerto, Sangre de Cristo, Death Valley, Skull Valley, Bloody Basin, Tombstone, Deadman Wash…
Many of the landmarks along the Green and Colorado rivers were christened by John Wesley Powell. Some have kept their Indian names, and others have become what the Spanish priests or early settlers called them. A few have been officially redesignated: Toompin Tuweap (Land of Rock) is now Canyonlands National Park, Utah; Gunnison’s Crossing has disappeared from the maps; and in Cataract Canyon, originally named by Powell, there are no more cataracts—at present it lies under the man-made body of water named for him, Lake Powell.
In his explorations, Powell learned that the Ute Indians weren’t the first to live along the Green River. He located the foundations of ancient buildings and unearthed shards of pottery. The Utes knew of rocks, farther up the mountains, covered with pictures, but they had no idea who had made these things.
In Arizona, too, the dwellers first encountered by white explorers weren’t themselves the first to dwell there. Some other civilization had preceded them, faded, and left no history. Its most extensive bequest to us is a great adobe structure surrounded by the remains of outbuildings, a sacred complex that stands within sight of the two water towers of the Arizona State Prison complex in Florence. The huge adobe ruins facing the prison are called Casa Grande, the Big House, named without irony by the Papago Indians who discovered it centuries ago, the phrase later translated by the Spanish fathers. The people who erected the Big House are called Hohokam, “Those Who Are Gone.” The name they gave to themselves, the name they had every reason to believe was their name, is forgotten.
Something under the desert speaks to the yearning spirit, chiefly by refusing to speak at all. In the immenseness of sand that goes on communing with itself in a terrifying way, ignoring everything, answering itself with itself while the sky overhead wears out, the soul feels the same insignificance as the soul of the lost sailor.
Its look has been compared to the moon’s, and the similarity is more than a visual one. Like the moon, the desert can’t possibly be survived—but it has been. Like the moon, the desert is the place of distance, light, and dreams.
To a man or woman trying to get across it, it isn’t a landscape but a hostile medium, a dusty and sometimes steamy glare of fortnights to the west, a hopeless waste very like the top of the sea, a place not so much to be looked at as lived through. Part of its beauty is this hard fact, that while we’re seeing it, we’re also surviving it; and the sight arouses in us the humble gratitude of refugees.
A guy rolls into the men’s john at the Dhahran International Hotel complaining, “Hell, how do they expect to have a war without a bar?” This is a virtually intoxicant-free conflict, no weird concoctions circulating in these parts other than those brewed by a few enterprising GIs, or by Saddam’s mad scientists. Maybe that’s why in these first few days it’s been a ticktock war, everything going off like clockwork, nobody driving backward over the latrine or dropping ordnance on a hallucination. The closest thing to a party punch was the wild adrenaline camaraderie that manifested itself during what has come to be referred to in Dhahran as K Day, which hit around three o’clock in the morning, Saudi time. In the basement of the Dhahran International, where the Joint Information Bureau tried to keep track of and somehow assist more than one hundred mostly terrified journalists in gas masks, the overwhelming impression was that of a demented Halloween party to which everyone had come dressed as the same monster, a sort of ant-eyed elephant with an amputated trunk. The pilot of a grounded commercial helicopter reveals he’s just been processed out of the Marines, waving his military photo ID: “I’m going upstairs the minute this air raid’s over,” he shouts, “and I’m gonna sign right back up.” An infantrywoman slaps her sidearm and says she’s got a name scratched on every bullet. How does she know what the names will be? “Hell,” she says, “they all start with Al.”
At the Carlton Hotel nearby, we’d heard the planes taking off at midnight. At 3:00 A.M. the civilian support personnel suddenly spilled into the halls, shouting instructions to one another and hopping from door to door with their legs jammed halfway into MOPP suits, waking up their comrades. “Ron! Ron! Ron!” somebody shouted through my door. “Come on, man, it’s happening!” I opened the door to confront a figure in a MOPP suit who said, “Steve! Steve! Get your gear on!” “But I’m not Steve,” I told him, and a German reporter standing in his doorway in his undershorts said to me, “Yes. The war is started.” My next-door neighbor, a computer operator named Dave, seized a brief silence to utter what will always be, for me, the first pronouncement by an American about this conflict: “The son of a bitch,” he said, “was warned.”
The war is started, yes. But which war? Isn’t this a world war? And isn’t it, as a matter of fact, the third? The question came up among writers watching CNN at the Dhahran International during the next exhausted day. Most say it’s not a world war, it’s just multinational. But how many countries have to join before you call it global? Aren’t these several enough? Well, it’s not a matter of quantity, it’s the presence of major powers that makes a world war. How many major powers? France, England, and the United States aren’t enough? Well, no, you need more: You need Russia. Russia, the country that for decades had been expected to start it, has neglected to show up for World War III.
During breakfast on K Day at the Carlton, one of the PX workers stands up in the dining room and screams, “How can I face the world when I’m not blow-dried?” We’ve been rifling through the kitchen for cereal and coffee because the hotel staff have all gone into hiding somewhere. CNN blasts over the hotel’s public address, and we know by these reports what has happened before we manage to experience it. Isn’t there any such thing as real life anymore? We end the night watching the news of ourselves and others in the region: tapes of the 82nd Airborne eating French toast made with white bread and swallowing nerve gas immunity pills.
At five o’clock the next morning, the chanters take up the morning prayer of Islam over the biggest loudspeakers in town, the first long syllable sounding precisely like the start of an air-raid siren: One by one by one, the voices raised to Allah drown everything out.
It’s Sunday, January 20, 1991. We’re heading toward the front. The coast of the oil-rich Gulf resembles Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, and has the same atmosphere of irrigated desert meeting the blue sea. The highway north out of Dhahran burns straight through a historical emptiness, away from white beaches, toward the town of Khafji and the border with Kuwait. This part of the world looks like northern Nevada without the gas-stop casinos, without the beat-up trailer parks, though an occasional Bedouin encampment of tents and shanties serves as well, and then those are gone and the world resembles Nevada without even Nevada, a vast dirt Arctic on top of which nobody ever lived and nothing ever happened, while underneath, the minerals burbled. And now two armies of more than a million people have assembled in this region, which seems to have been created only to provide an arena for this battle.
Every four seconds another two-story military transport moves north over this road. Farther north is a shut-down restaurant with about eight hundred cars parked outside it—this is the place where Arab soldiers leave their private vehicles and head for their emplacements.
At the intersection of the Dhahran-Khafji highway and what is now called Dodge MSR (main supply route) by the military, three boys man a machine gun behind a stack of cinder blocks on which they’ve spray-painted PINK FLOYD/THE WALL. Their purpose is to give directions to lost transports. “I always forget what day it is,” the sergeant from Colorado says. “Then I have to wait till Country Countdown comes on Armed Forces Radio. Then you know it’s Sunday.” “Hey, buddy, hold this for me,” the Puerto Rican private from Manhattan says, and tosses me a grenade. Four kilometers to the northeast, a lake of fire burns on the desert floor—something to do with an oil refinery—burning so brightly it lights the entire sky as the night comes down, but the boys have no idea why it’s burning. It just does; it burns and burns. I myself begin to tremble. It’s the deep, primitive terror of History’s devouring darkness. The boys see themselves as having finally found something more enormous than their own deaths. As I stand in the middle of this desert, I begin to suspect that this war’s origins reach far back in time, to the recession of the first waters that left this land empty and waiting to be filled with conflagration.
It’s been ten days since the bombing started north of the Iraqi border. The plume from the burning refineries in Kuwait has grown to a cloud and then to a general stink over the entire region. History’s most massive oil slick is drifting down the Gulf. The troops on both sides, a million people with dust in their mouths, expect something terrible to begin any minute. The war is really on. The blood-carnival speechifying of Saddam Hussein has trailed off, and he now says he prays for the American parents, that their sons not be injured. The Veg-o-Matic apocalyptese of his rhetoric—the allies “swimming in their own blood,” “the Mother of All Wars”—is reduced to a murmur as predictions give way to events, and reality seems ready to replace all our pitiful words.
And yet the Middle East’s pipeline to rhythm—studios one, two, and three of the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service—keep on filling the desert nights with a certain military teenage bopalula that must be the only power on earth as wrenchingly American as these soldiers themselves. You get more for your music here. Everything has a double meaning, an import deeper than any intended by the composers—the chorus I will survive, from the Grateful Dead; a new version of Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”; “We’ve Gotta Get Out of this Place,” the Animals’ tune from the sixties; and “Wanted Dead or Alive,” a song by Bon Jovi with the refrain Goin’ down in a blaze of glory.
Meanwhile, in the Hotel Carlton’s restaurant, officers of the armed forces of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, many of them guests of this hotel, linger over their meals of mutabal, lamb curry, calmly chatting, wearing uniforms of unwrinkled camouflage. There are no women—Western or otherwise—in the restaurant. It is a universe of men. The Saudi women, in fact, don’t exist at all—they’re small voids hidden completely under their vestments. A black-cloaked woman moving down a pale, sunstruck alley seems a shimmering, absent darkness headed out on some unfathomable, maybe fatal, errand. Outside, on the street, Saudi businessmen seem to move about with a calm assurance. Aren’t they worried about this war? It’s as if the war is taking place on another continent, some unholy environment far from Mecca.
Along the two main military supply routes, code-named Dodge and Audi, convoys crawl west and north—hundreds of miles of armaments and armored vehicles, and the ammunition and fuel they’ll consume, also the men and women who will use them, hauled mostly by eighteen-wheelers. And coming back south and east on the same routes, the same eighteen-wheelers, empty, no longer hauling the vehicles needed to smash through defensive earthworks, the vehicles for plowing up mines, for hurling strings of dynamite across concertina wire—empty of the hinged steel spans needed to bridge defensive ditches, empty of the tanks and BFVs expected to cross them, of the men expecting to follow in bulky chemical-proof suits and gas masks, of the artillery that will light up the world ahead if they attack.
From in among the huge transport trucks, when a clear space opens for half a mile or so ahead on the straight, two-way desert road, suddenly a dozen or more small civilian vehicles pull out to pass—Honda Accords, Toyota Landcruisers, and little Nissan pickups carrying Saudi shepherds, piloted serenely by the citizens of Nariya or Hafr al Baten, the towns on the westward supply route—a kind of miniature convoy swinging out in unison from the obscurity of the larger one, racing ahead a few spaces and disappearing as it merges again with the monstrous vehicles of the military alliance. In the north of the kingdom it’s like that now, the Arab lives moving in the shadows of these machines. They careen insouciantly in and out of this armada. Their fate is in the hands of Allah; the Westerners, by contrast, rely on heavy machinery.
They stream in and and out. All night and day, small personnel carriers pull up in front of the Carlton Hotel, and uniformed men and women toting M-16 rifles fan out into the lobby, as if ordered there to perform some unusual form of sentry duty, to stand at this bank of telephones, shouting “I love you, I love you, tell my boys, my little girl, tell her, tell him, tell them…” The ground offensive against Iraq is only days away, they believe, and they voice these feelings loudly and without embarrassment, some of them weeping, oblivious to the guests and other soldiers around them.
A young American woman in a jogging outfit leans against the same bank of telephones, shouting halfway across the world in a Southern accent: “No, she’s not with me! I’m in Saudi Arabia, remember?”—very slowly—“Sow-dy Arabia! How are you doing? No, I’m in Saudi Arabia, remember? With the Army. How are things? Has it snowed? Has it snowed. Snowed. No, it doesn’t snow in Saudi Arabia! It’s hot! It’s like a desert here!”