I and the two ponies that carried my impedimenta.
We had traversed mountain roads which had echoed to the marching feet of the hosts of Darius, to the hordes of the Satraps. The highways of the Achaemenids — yes, and which before them had trembled to the tramplings of the myriads of the godlike Dravidian conquerors.
We had slipped over ancient Iranian trails; over paths which the warriors of conquering Alexander had traversed; dust of bones of Macedons, of Greeks, of Romans, beat about us; ashes of the flaming ambitions of the Sassanidae whimpered beneath our feet — the feet of an American botanist, a Chinaman, two Tibetan ponies. We had crept through clefts whose walls had sent back the howlings of the Ephthalites, the White Huns who had sapped the strength of these same proud Męskie Vans Stripes LP Slip Sassanids until at last both fell before the Turks.
Over the highways and byways of Persia’s glory, Persia’s shame and Persia’s death we four — two men, two Women Hoodies beasts Damskie Vans Love — had passed. For a fortnight we had met no human soul, seen no sign of human habitation.
Game had been plentiful — green things Chiu-Ming might lack for his Men Backpacks cooking, but meat never. About us was a welter of mighty summits. We were, I knew, somewhere within the blending of the Hindu-Kush with the Trans-Himalayas.
That morning we had come out of a ragged defile into this valley of enchantment, and here, though it had been so early, I had pitched my tent, determining to go no farther till the morrow.
It was a Phocean vale; a gigantic Off White x Adidas cup filled with tranquillity. A spirit brooded over it, serene, majestic, immutable — like the untroubled calm which rests, the Burmese believe, over every place which has guarded the Buddha, sleeping.
At its eastern end towered the colossal scarp of the unnamed peak through Dame one of whose gorges we had crept. On his head was a cap of silver set with pale emeralds — the snow fields and glaciers that crowned him. Far to the west another gray and ochreous giant reared its bulk, closing the vale. North and south, the horizon Men Track & Running Shorts was a chaotic sky land of pinnacles, spired and minareted, steepled and turreted and domed, each diademed with its green and argent of eternal ice and snow.
And all the valley was carpeted with the blue poppies in wide, unbroken Adidas Superstar Metal fields, luminous as Adidas ZX750 the morning skies of mid-June; they rippled mile after mile over the path we had followed, over the still untrodden Dame path which we must take. They nodded, they leaned toward each other, they seemed to whisper — then to lift their heads and look up like crowding swarms of little azure fays, half impudently, wholly trustfully, into the faces of the jeweled giants standing guard Women Straight-Leg Jeans over them. And when the little breeze walked upon them it was as though they bent beneath the soft tread and were brushed by the sweeping skirts of unseen, hastening Presences.
Like a vast prayer-rug, sapphire and silken, the poppies stretched to the gray feet of the mountain. Between their southern edge and the clustering summits a row Converse American Flag of faded brown, low hills knelt — liklinks:
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