Chapter Eight
One of Belgi’s uncles told me how, in the mid-1930’s, when their grandfather was arrested, his brothers and their father decided to make their escape through the Alai Passes to Kashgar, and the Kyrgyz people of Alai, who knew all the paths that bypassed the border guards and the frontier posts, helped them make the journey, how they walked through gorges with deadly rivers roaring down below, along ledges only four times the width of a man’s foot, where the horses, freed of their bales and even their saddles, chafed their sides until they bled. Belgi could never have imagined that someday he would also have to make treks like that.
In the late summer of 1997 a terrible event occurred that changed Belgi’s life irrevocably. At that time he was friendly with two young men, Ali
