Against the Day, Chapter Five: Siberia, the Scenic Route!

This one is basically just Kit and his traveling companions traversing (ho ho) Siberia. There's not that much concrete action per se. This entry may be even more impressionistic than usual.

Who is the Doosra's master? Kit wonders. Shall I speak to him? "You spoke to him," Hassan replies, enigmatically.

They're traveling through the wilderness, and through difficult and improbable geography: "The great stone Arch known as the Tushuk Tash was considered impossible actually to get to even by the local folks" (769). Kit has a dream where he becomes this Arch.

They go through this Prophet's Gate, and: "this space the Gate had opened to them was less geographic than to be measured along axes of sorrow and loss" (771). Yeah, same old same old. There's endless poverty here, but a utopian past, if such a thing is possible:

Up until about 800 or 900 A.D., [Prance] went on to explain, this had been the metropolis of the ancient kingdom of Khocho. Some scholars, in fact, believed this to be the historical Shambhala. For four hundred years, Turfan had been the most civilized place in Central Asia, a convergence of gardens, silks, music--fertile, tolerant, and compassionate. No one went hungry, all shared in the blessings of an oasis that would never run dry. Imperial Chinese journeyed thousands of hard miles here to see what real sophistication looked like. "Then the Mahommedans swept in," said Prance, "and next came Genghis Khan, and after him the desert." (772)

There are other Europeans wandering around here too, it should be noted, with their own goals. There's a wild ass stampede, of which Kit notes "Holy Toledo, that's sure some wild ass stampede" (772), and I can't quite tell whether this is meant to be word play: a stampede of wild asses, or a wild-ass stampede?

Also, more anthropomorphism: "The wind, which was alive, conscious, and not kindly disposed to travelers, had a practice of coming up in the middle of the night." This business with anthropomorphized natural features is really something I'm only noticing on this reading. What does it mean?

They reach Irkutsk, "the Paris of Siberia," which to Kit is "like Saturday night in the San Juans all over again," "a peculiar combination of rip-roaring and respectable" (773). They're supposed to meet up with a Brit named Swithin Poundstock, who, it turns out, is involved with counterfeiting British currency, some of which he sets Kit & Co up with. Their new goal is to find another shaman, the Doosra's superior, apparently, named Magyakan. "Like the Taiga, he was everywhere, and mysterious--a heroic being with unearthly gifts" (776).

The chapter ends with what I guess you could call a theological debate between Prance and Kit. Kit argues that the US's colonial excesses have just been about "practical" things--getting land and whatnot--whereas per Prance,

it was about the fear of medicine men and strange practices, dancing and drug-taking, that allow humans to be in touch with the powerful gods hiding in the landscape, with no need of any official church to mediate it for them. The only drug you've ever been comfortable with is alcohol, so you went in and poisoned the tribes with that. Your whole history in America has been one long religious war, secret crusades, disguised under false names. You tried to exterminate African shamanism by kidnapping half the continent into slavery, giving them Christian names, and shoving your peculiar versions of the Bible down their throats, and look what happened. (777--lucky!).

I have to say, I will criticize the US as much as the next America-hater, but I don't think we need ulterior motives to do horrible things, and if we have them, they're so deeply sublimated that I don't know if it's even useful to think about them.

Whatevs. Anyway, "in view of what was nearly upon them, however--as he would understand later--the shelter of the trivial would prove a blessing an a step toward salvation." (778)