Tulips by the Vakshu

One spring afternoon several years ago, I found myself running helter-skelter down a wide slope to the banks of a broad, silver-grey river. We were at a bend in the water, with mud banks on both sides, washed in shades of ochre and pale rust. My friend was two paces ahead, both of us laughing like loons. To be at the banks of the great Amu-Darya river was simply unbelievable. This was that long wiggly line in my atlas at school, in the middle of vast and mysterious Central Asia. Also called Oxus in Latin and Vakshu in Sanskrit. I could almost see the horsemen ranged on the other bank, the sun glinting off their helmets. Were they Greek, perhaps Alexander’s men on their way to India? Or were they the Changezi tumen waiting for night to cross the stream?  This site was one of history’s great junctures, a place that had seen so much action, and somehow, today, I was going to stand there too.

By the muddy banks of the mighty Amu-Darya in Uzbekistan.

The wind whipped around us, blowing our words away. I turned back and saw the bus driver up on the slope, gesturing wildly and shouting something. Who knew, who cared?

Turning back, my eye was caught by a small tulip bloom, soft cream with a blush of pink.  Focusing a little, I saw lots of the little plants here and there, swaying but standing firm in the desert soil.

My friend reached the water and then yelled out in sudden panic. Her feet were sinking deep into the slushy mud. “It’s quicksand!” she shouted, falling backwards flat. “I can’t get out!”

So that’s what the bus driver was shouting. Help came barrelling down the slope and she was pulled out of the squelchy mire, but sans her shoes.

“Well,” she said, all muddy and beaming, “at least I can say I left some part of me

by the Amu- Darya.”

Tulipa clusiana?