The Geographer's Library

Jon Fasman
Though lost to the wider world, the Cages in fact passed into the ownership
of a single clan, whose name is unpronounceable in any language but
whose lineage can be verifiably and directly traced back to Oghuz Khan, the
conquering Turk who ruled an empire stretching from the Arabian Sea to the
Irtysh River and who, according to legend, planned his battles with the aid of
a lone gray wolf. The women of that clan remained doctors of sorts, “cunning
men,” as Robert Burton would almost have called them: psychiatrists
and charlatans who possessed a trove of folksy mythical stories and
grandiose-sounding remedies of little or no value beyond suggestion. The
last of these Legend Sellers held Soviet papers identifying her as Yomtuz
Muramasov: she and her nephews Murat and Mahmut, along with three
unidentified Tajik nationals, were found slaughtered in a yurt just beyond the
boundaries of Tolkuchka bazaar in August 1985.
Estimated value: Inestimable. Yomtuz may have traded them for a
nearly dead Lada; she may have demanded the Kremlin itself. Determining a
price requires examining comparable goods; no such goods exist.
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