On the way back to Erbil the following day, the passengers of the bus are a lot more subdued. It is the end of a journey, and so many are tired and fall asleep, and the few who stay awake stare, mesmerized, out the window as the enormous slabs and dimpled protrusions of the Earth roll by like infinite waves, baked solid and brown under the sun. Sometimes, small villages crop up, their brown shanties and shacks blending chameleon-like into the hills. Sometimes a cemetery crops up (I counted around a dozen), though none as colorful as the one in Sully; on the contrary, they, like the shanties and shacks, are of the simplest earth-tone, and seem almost a natural outcrop of the landscape.
When we see people at all, they are lone men wearing the potato sack outfit and holding tesbieh (prayer) beads, which they carry around like a third arm around these parts. They look to me like men on the moon, sitting alone atop the barren brown mountains and not giving a shit, as if the only time he gives a shit, it becomes a part of the earth, and then he goes back to herding his sheep, or watching the clouds and toying with his tesbieh beads until the sun goes down.
Sometimes, miles of mountain would pass with no sign of human life, and then at the very top of the next approaching peak, would lay a stacked pile of gray stones, and then you would know that a human had been there. Perhaps hundreds or thousands of years ago, or perhaps just last year- who knew when? In this part of the good Earth, such a time range was entirely reasonable. One could only know for sure that a human had wandered through that space at some point in time, and he had made his mark, simple, but telling.
When we see people at all, they are lone men wearing the potato sack outfit and holding tesbieh (prayer) beads, which they carry around like a third arm around these parts. They look to me like men on the moon, sitting alone atop the barren brown mountains and not giving a shit, as if the only time he gives a shit, it becomes a part of the earth, and then he goes back to herding his sheep, or watching the clouds and toying with his tesbieh beads until the sun goes down.
Sometimes, miles of mountain would pass with no sign of human life, and then at the very top of the next approaching peak, would lay a stacked pile of gray stones, and then you would know that a human had been there. Perhaps hundreds or thousands of years ago, or perhaps just last year- who knew when? In this part of the good Earth, such a time range was entirely reasonable. One could only know for sure that a human had wandered through that space at some point in time, and he had made his mark, simple, but telling.
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