Colin Thubron

I sit opposite him, writhing with rebellion at first, then oddly sad.
Sasha is glowing.  But I see an old man in track-suit trousers and
threadbare socks, who has gone off the rails.  Sometimes I feel that
he is talking not to us, but to himself, and that he is very lonely.
I imagine him the victim of that self-hypnosis which sustained the
great illusion of Communism itself – where ideas and dreams hover
delusively over the wasteland of facts.

	-- Colin Thubron, In Siberia

%

The slats were dropping from the ceiling of Shushenskoe's bus station,
built for pilgrims who no longer came, and the floors were awash with
rain.  It trickled down the carved panels of Bolshevik heroes toppling
the imperial eagle, and smeared the cheeks of the embossed Lenin.  It
dribbled between the window-panes of my bus as it veered south-east,
and erased the road a hundred yards ahead.  Sometimes it would part
like mist around a stack of dark hills, where pine forests stood
bearded in parasitic lichen, or drift out of glades sodden with ferns
and moss.  We might have been underwater.

	-- Colin Thubron, In Siberia

%

A wash of cloud and stunted pines, their roots twisted about the
scree, distilled the view to a Japanese painting, where a faint moon
was printed on the sky.  Grey rock had broken loose from the forest,
and lifted to snow-lit peaks.  Soon we were easing downhill.  All
across the horizon, a curtain of fanged mountains – brilliant and
irregular – was glittering above the deepest lake on earth.

	-- Colin Thubron, In Siberia

%

Then their door burst open and in strode two police officials ... She
demanded to see my papers, then cited special laws in this province
... requiring me to register at my first hotel ... It was the old,
spurious reason for supervision: the self-fulfilling notion that
nobody, nothing, could survive without control.

	-- Colin Thubron, In Siberia

%

The path died through the camp's gates.  One of its posts had crashed
across the way, the other was reeling in a thicket of willows.  A
stream lisped in the glade below.  A mist of birch leaves covered
everything.

	-- Colin Thubron, In Siberia

%

... when an anaemic dawn stole into our carriage I thought we had
barely moved.  I gazed out of the window to see bare trees flowing
over broken waves of hills.  It was an unlovely, charred-looking land,
drifting into winter.  The larches had wasted to leaden filigree, and
the birches were ghosts.  All day the vista scarcely changed, while I
became mesmerized by the taiga.  Its snow-glazed desolation seemed
only to deepen its vastness: one fifth of the forest of the entire
earth.  Often it runs over a thousand miles deep from north to south,
and the suffocating closure of its trees, crowding out all distances,
any perspective, has driven people literally mad.  Magnetic anomalies
can doom even a sane traveller here, while his compass-point swings
uselessly.

	-- Colin Thubron, In Siberia

%

I was conscious above all of the stunned desolation which seems to
permeate these plains.  It has to do, I think, less with their actual
poverty – sandy soil, poor drainage – than with the inarticulate
vastness of which they form a part.  Without the nearness of towns or
the presence of hills, the sky takes on a terrible passive force.
Stand anywhere here, and three-quarters of your field of vision is
engulfed by it, adding a pitiless immensity to the size of the land.

	-- Colin Thubron, Where Nights Are Longest

%

I vaguely wondered what an atheist funeral was like ... They faced
grief unsupported, in the hope only that a person's memory outshine
the dissolution of death.

	-- Colin Thubron, Where Nights Are Longest

%

She seemed a living illustration of that tender, incontinent quality –
the Russians untranslateably call it umileniye – that belongs to a
world in which nothing intrudes between a feeling and its expression.

	-- Colin Thubron, Where Nights Are Longest

%


The pop band bawled out old British numbers.  It seemed as if
everything which people considered important - beliefs, systems,
ideals - were fatally divisive, and that the miracle of human unity
was performed instead by pop songs.

	-- Colin Thubron, Where Nights Are Longest

%


So she came as a shock.  She looked a classic Armenian.  In Erevan her
face was almost a type - a satin sliver of features and sable eyes,
divided by a long, sculptural nose.  Such faces were both fragile and
austere.

	-- Colin Thubron, Where Nights Are Longest

%


`"Empire",' Julian repeated later.  `"Ruthlessness".  Strong words.'
They hurt him – he was deeply patriotic – but he mulled and forgave
them.  We smoothed them away in wine until late in the night, talking
of England, and of countries where he'd never been, until I wondered
incoherently if the most useful role of governments might be to
express all their people's fear and antagonism, and so release the
people themselves into some precious and unexpected friendship.

	-- Colin Thubron, Where Nights Are Longest

%


As we said goodbye, he clasped my hand and said: ‘If in some future
time I see you in the sights of my rifle - I'll miss.' 'And I won't
fire at all.'  We laughed, but with deep emotion.  I've never felt so
brief a friendship more.  In him I loved the Russian people.  It was
my last healing.

	-- Colin Thubron, Where Nights Are Longest

%

Her gaze seemed to slowly inundate the room until it drowned us.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

A shoal of small sons and nephews circled us.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

The darkness swam with their blackcurrant eyes and wan faces.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

He turned to me with dagger-bright eyes.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

A thatch of hair overhung his forehead like a sunshade; the eyes
beneath it bulged in adolescent questing.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

Dressed like an apprentice undertaker.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

He looked sunk in a morose cynicism. His was one of those disruptive
faces which I was to meet all through my journey.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

The flamboyant dress only threw into crueller relief the sallow
plainness of her face.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

"I wore my hair down to here." She trickled her fingers down her breast.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

Fattening Uzbek traders with their jewelled wives.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

His hair dusted back from a creaseless forehead and a face which
looked idle and rather child-like.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

In the amber-skinned oval of his face the eyes and slight moustache
made an unreadable code of black dots and dashes.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

She had contracted a synthetic, Slavish charm, whose veneer had eaten
inward, like an acid, until its lilting voice seemed to become her
own.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

He was compact and stout, like a soft toy, with short arms and legs and a
crumpled face. 

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

His family affairs were rife with silences which he did not fill.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

His vodka-softened eyes flickered ...

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

His upturned eyebrows floated in airborne sadness.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

His face was a mask of polished flesh, where the features were only
sketchy afterthoughts, but humour fidgeted chronically beneath.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

Even his gait was a study in amplitude - a kind of rollicking waddle.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

One of those daughters-in-law who seem touchingly enslaved: a
thin. frightened girl in flaming silks.  

      		 -- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

She fluttered in and out, and barely raised her eyes.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

The neutrality of his face seemed capable of erupting into any nature
and I wondered vaguely what other selves might lie beneath it.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

Lumbering young men in jeans, and heavy-hipped women with hennaed hair
and worn faces.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

Korvus was an old man now. Beneath a burst of white hair his face
shone heavy and crumpled, and his eyes watered behind their
spectacles.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

Their hair curled russet or auburn above their high brows.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

Biblical patriarchs with dripping beards, who crouched still limber on
their haunches by the wayside.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

She was the perfect type of those lissom girls who chattered in flocks
along the boulevards holding hands and flaunting Atlas silks. She had
the slender face and alert eyes of her tribe, and ran barefoot along
the flat on long feet with prehensile toes, giggling and flirting a
little.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

The mountains made a frozen tumult of spires and ridges. erupting to
over 23.000 feet.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

% 

Shingly streams. A ghostly causeway of valley.  The sound of the
thistes scratching against the stones.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

Always to our south the mountains kept pace in a phantasmal
counterpoint of scarps and pyramids, where cloud shadows spread a dim
commotion, and hawks wheeled.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

The mountains engulfed us.  Their flanks crowded the track in
vertiginous gulfs and spurs. Through their flacid earth the river had
dropped sheer, opening up purple veins, and soon it was winding in a
blood-coloured trickle a thousand feet below us.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

At night when the traffic drained from the streets and a rash of stars
glittered in our windows.  The slopes reddened into angry mounds

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia

%

A sordid scrubland - a crimson river wound between mudflats.

	-- Colin Thubron, Lost Heart of Asia