Tall Walls

But its misty fingers couldn’t really encapsulate the shear expanses it sought to subjugate. The snow capped mountains of Muztag Ata and Kongur Tagh, the desert drifts with their crumbling tombs, the glass blue lakes.

Sprinkled into the landscape, the Uighur people smiled, eyed the visitors, and bartered their survival everywhere. In their yurts beside Kala Kule, behind brick walls in Kashgar, in old mosques, running through the fountains. Like sands in a timer in the clutches of that dark mist.