Green Sunset - #1

To destination

To destination

They had hailed the pass' mouth as if it were the door of Eden, but something very different had been waiting for them there. It had happened a month before, when, at the beginning of an umpteenth meander, the nomadic guides had cut straight through the land, abandoning the bank of that last river. In recent times, they had skirted or forded several of those rivers, all of turbulent, ashen waters and it had always proven a difficult job. An endless expanse of swamps was now lying in front of them, and the guides piloted them amongst an insidious scattering of quick sands and bottomless ponds, but could not avoid the unforgiving swarming of mosquitoes by the billions. To call it a track could have seemed a joke, but that path was the only available marching ground for the throng of men and vehicles they had set into motion. Animals, above all, as an immense herd marched at their forefront: sheep, mules, horses and cattle that, besides providing the bulk of food, contributed to levelling the ground to the wagons' wheels and had provided emergency transportation in many instances. No human presence had been detected since they had set foot on the steppe.

In the distance had finally appeared the heights: high and steep on the left, low and sweetly drooping on the right. In between there were miles of the same steppe they had trodden for more than two months. Too many, those miles, and so much so that at first sight nobody would ever have believed to be watching the entrance of a pass.

Rising up on the galloping mounts, the Nomads had screamed the name of the place, guttural in their language, holding out their bows to point at it. A sigh of relief soared over the caravan, more for the riddance from the mosquitoes' nightmare than for quitting the treacherous mud. Later it was seen that it was not a true pass, because the river, now reappeared, crossed it straight on a perfect West-East direction: it was the gap between two different mountainous systems. As they entered it deeper and deeper, however, it showed to deserve that title. In fact, always high on the northern slope, a little more than hills on the South, the two massifs had come so close to one another as to force them to march into a veritable canyon for more than fifty kilometers.

The Nomads had been crucial: countless times on that last stretch they had to dismantle the bigger wagons, to carry their pieces by mule over obstacles that otherwise would have imposed the end of the journey. Not to mention how often they had made the caravan divert to paths only visible to them, thus avoiding steps they only knew to be deadly.