The moving map with the little airplane icon doesn’t show political borders, just a low-resolution image of satellite terrain. Where am I? I check the route map in the back of the airline magazine. Are we flying over Armenia or Turkey? I’m beginning to realize that my high-school geography is totally inadequate when confronted by the real world. Maybe that’s the Republic of Georgia in the distance to the north? Could it be Russia?
The ride is smooth; the roars, rumbles and hisses of an airliner in flight have merged into an acoustic lullaby. Everyone else is asleep, but I find myself glued to the window, trying not to smudge the cold plastic with my noseprint. It’s after midnight and the full moon is behind us, revealing a soft, snow-covered landscape of wrinkles and folds. Above, the stars are harsh blue perforations in a cold steel sky, arranged in strange patterns like an indecipherable blueprint of creation.
We’re flying over some of the most beautiful and exotic lands on Earth. How can it be that nobody else is enthralled by the view? Why isn’t every nose stuck to the glass, watching the wonders of the planet scroll slowly below us in the ethereal moonlight? How is it that nobody cares?
The pale mountains are getting taller, craggier, a lonely but utterly compelling alien terrain. I scowl at the moving map on the seat-back in front of me, looking for something that might give me a clue as to what I am seeing out the window. It’s an unsettling feeling, not knowing my place on the planet. If the plane crashes here, and I survive, not only will I not know what country I’m in, I won’t even know what continent I’m on. We’ve been over Europe for hours since departing London, but it’s entirely possible that we’ve already crossed into Asia.
Asia! Exotic Asia! A whole new continent! The mythical Orient, land of silk and spice and great walls and elephants and palaces and lost jungle temples. All clichés, I know, a world that probably no longer exists, and indeed might never have actually existed except in the imaginations of romantic European authors of the Victorian era. Nonetheless my heart quickens, fueled by the books and stories I read as a boy. Tomorrow morning when we land in India I will discover the true reality of modern Asia, but at this moment in the moonlight the stories of Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster and Sir Richard Burton inspire my imagination.
My fellow passengers are oblivious to the fact that we have achieved a grand milestone in our voyage. While their indifference baffles me, it comes as no surprise. In recent years our entire society has lost something important. I suppose it’s a casualty of the GPS age. With GPS, we know with great precision where we’re going, but we’ve lost the understanding of where we are. We no longer track our way on a paper map, aware at every moment of our location and progress, instead we blindly follow the blue arrow on the GPS screen, oblivious to our actual situation. Our sense of imminent place is gone. We no longer care where we are; the time spent between departure and arrival has become a numbing annoyance, a wasted, empty space that we try to fill with music playlists and audiobooks. By focusing entirely on the destination, we have forgotten the joy of the journey.
Out the window there are no signs of roads, only a few scattered little grape-clusters of radiance, each consisting of a dozen tiny lights huddled together for warmth. Villages? Family compounds? They don’t look like the sharp pinpricks of streetlights you normally see from a plane, and they aren’t arranged geometrically like streets. They’re softer, more organic, tiny islands of light separated from each other by dozens or hundreds of miles of emptiness. If these are electric lights, where does the power come from? Are they powered by generators? Could they be campfires? I imagine families asleep in their remote homes. Maybe somebody is awake. Maybe somebody glances up to see a jetliner passing overhead against the stars.
The plane is heading east and I’m sitting on the left side, so my view is to the north. I finally decide I’m seeing the southern flanks of the Caucasus Mountains. If I’m right, below me is the Republic of Georgia, ahead is Armenia and Azerbaijan. In the far distance beyond the mountains is dark, cold Russia. I’ve never been to any of these places; I’m seeing them with my own eyes for the first time. In a very real sense I am now connected to them. Those exotic mountains below me have now moved into my reality. They’re no longer ideas, they are now hard stone and ice. I feel sorry for my sleeping fellow passengers. They may be rested when we arrive, but they will have completely missed the majesty of the Caucasus in the moonlight.
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We’re moving fast, a thousand kilometers an hour if the seat-back display is to be believed. At this rate we’re crossing over entire countries in just minutes. My neck hurts from craning toward the window, but I don’t want to miss anything. Call me old-fashioned, but the idea of speeding at the edge of space over exotic alien landscapes is completely thrilling. Staring out that window I am a kid; everything I see is wondrous and exciting. I want to point and shout: “Look how that rift gorge has split the mountain range in half!” or “Why are those lights shaped like a swan?” but I know that my fellow passengers will think I’m insane.
On the seat-back map the little plane icon moves across a city name, and indeed out the window I see a small cluster of lights. I cross-check with the magazine’s route map. Aha! We have definitely crossed into the Republic of Iran. Long gorges and ghostly canyons carve the mountains into ranges. This place must be beautiful from the ground, but due to the insanity of religion and politics this is probably as close as I’ll ever get. Eight miles, straight down. Still, at this moment, I am here. I am mindful. I am seeing, and appreciating, a unique convergence of circumstances I will never experience again. It is a precious one-time-only gift, just for me, from the universe. Behold, Persia!
I study the seat-back map. Our projected path shows us crossing the full width of the nation of Iran from west-to-east. Out the window in the distance a curved blade of light slices between a range of snow-covered mountains and a perfect, seemingly infinite blackness. It looks like the edge of the universe, but now that I have my bearings I know the lights are the city of Rasht, and the blackness beyond is the fabled Caspian Sea.
A few minutes later and again the landscape is empty, a flood of moonlight over peace and serenity. Here and there tiny villages speckle the bottom of canyons and gorges along the seaside. As the miles slide away, the isolated clusters of lights begin to spread and connect. Far ahead, a solid web of light slides into view. Soon it is directly beneath the jet, a broad metropolis separated from the Caspian Sea by a narrow but significant mountain range. The city is much larger than I anticipated, spreading for miles south of the mountain range into the alluvial plains.
I never imagined I’d be just eight miles from Tehran. So much of our modern political history has been defined by the city below me. In antiquity, Persia was a major world power. Today, Tehran continues to influence the course of history by defying the will of the Western powers. I vividly remember the American hostage crisis of the late 1970’s, an event that sparked America’s ongoing conflict in the Middle East. I was in high school at the time, terrified that I and all my male friends would soon be drafted and called to war in the Middle East. Forty years later, the government of Iran is still a major source of international conflict, supporting terrorist activity all over the world as they allegedly attempt to develop nuclear weapons.
The city falls behind as the plane banks to the right. The triangular shadow of the high tail fin moves across the wing. We move into the desolation of central Iran. A massive desert unfolds beneath me, with not a single light to indicate human habitation. The plane is rushing across the deserts toward the dawn. We should meet sunrise about the time we cross out of Iran into either Pakistan or Afghanistan.
A transparent line of the palest blue begins to define the horizon ahead. We make another sweeping right turn. The airline is based in India, so no doubt we are turning south to avoid entering Pakistani airspace. A single, tiny and dim light below, the only evidence of life all the way to the horizon. A campfire? Headlights of a car? Whatever it is, somebody down there will soon experience a remote and lonely sunrise.
Suddenly, towering black mountains, like shards of obsidian. A massive river gorge. I realize I am looking into Afghanistan. From this vantage point it is breathtaking in its misty morning glory. The mountains melt into a broad plain streaked with agricultural fields. We pass over dry lake beds and what looks like a massive dry river. The sun is up enough for me to begin to make out smaller details. This is big, bold country. It has the same rugged feel as the American west. I am still glued to the window when we speed out into the Gulf of Oman and the sun breaks the horizon. The cabin lights brighten and my fellow passengers stir. The flight attendants announce that we will soon be landing in Mumbai.
I look around at the sleepy faces. Everyone seems relieved that the long ordeal is over. I stretch and smile. I am happy, too, but for a different reason. I accomplished so much while my fellow passengers slept. By shifting my attention from the destination to the journey, an uneventful red-eye flight from London to Mumbai became an unforgettable moonlit exploration of the Persian landscape. I will be tired tomorrow, but I have no regrets, for during the night a whole new part of the world entered my reality, in a most beautiful and memorable way.
To see all the posts in this series (Seven Weeks in India), click here and scroll through the post listings.
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