![]() (He had rationalized his decision to stumble around Soviet Central Asia barefoot by pointing out that he was destined for the podiatrist's office anyway because of his absurdly swollen big toe.) Now, he swigged the hot vodka and probed his foot with the knife, slicing away at the bulbous flesh that had swollen up around his nail. Barnett, the hulking, barefoot University of Alabama graduate who had recently gone off the wagon, slipped a liter of hot vodka from his duffel and unfolded a brand new pocket knife to gouge at his ingrown toenail. Legend had it that Tamerlane had led his horde through this desert and been so bored by the ubiquitous sameness of the treeless, topographically challenged wasteland that in retribution he had slaughtered the entire population of the next unlucky village he came across.Ī few of us listened to our cassette players, others flipped through out-of-date magazines or new collections of the complete works of Maxim Gorky or Anton Chekov - vast, multi-volume sets printed on cheap paper that retailed for a few cents here in the Soviet Union. ![]() We sat for a while in our stuffy compartments, staring from the windows for as long as we could tolerate, before impatiently pacing the passenger and baggage cars, stepping off the train and padding for a few moments through the hot sand until the oppressive midday sun, coupled with the unyielding monotony of the landscape, forced us all to clamber back inside the train to sit fanning ourselves in our compartments. Our train had set out near dawn from Tashkent, belching its way from the station at an anemic 6 miles per hour, leaving the immense fortresses, brilliant minarets and dilapidated Stalin-era tractor factories behind to enter a stretch of vacant anti-terrain where, about 20 miles out of the city, the train came to an inexplicable two-hour halt.
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