Enkh and the Salt Lake Mirror

About this story

The fourth song's tale rides with a young herder named Enkh to the white salt lake that turns to a mirror at dusk. He comes to water his horse and finds the whole evening sky lying still on the ground. His quest is only to stand quiet long enough for the ripples to finish. When they do, the stillness follows him and his horse all the way back to camp.

Meeting stillness face to face.

When the water goes still, so can you.

Read the beginning

It was the still blue hour after the sun had gone, out at the great salt lake, where the water lay so flat it had stopped being water and become a mirror of the whole evening sky. A small boy named Enkh knelt at the white shore, and standing quiet and close at his shoulder was a wild dun khulan, a Mongolian wild ass with a coat the colour of sandy gold. He called her Sharga, for that colour, and she was the only wild thing on all the wide steppe that would come near a boy, and only here, and only at this hour, to lick the good salt at the water's edge. Enkh leaned far out over the still, still water to look at his own face looking back at him, and his breath caught hard in his throat, because something down in the water was wrong.

High over the darkening grass a glossy black raven crossed the sky, slow and level and calm, and in the mirror lake beneath it a second raven crossed upside down, wing for wing, the two of them joined by nothing and moving as one. The raven turned one wide circle above the boy and the khulan on the pale shore, the way it does when a story is about to begin.

Enkh came out to the salt lake every dusk, ever since the first evening Sharga had let him stand beside her. His grandmother, back in the round felt gers where the tea was warm, had told him once, "The salt lake is a mirror, little one. Whatever you carry to its edge, it shows you right back. So carry quiet eyes." He had not quite understood her. But he loved the flat gold water and the huge hushed sky, and he loved that the shy wild mare trusted him alone, and so every night he came to look.

But tonight, when he leaned out to find his own reflection, a dark shape was tangled up inside it. Right where his own face should have been, deep down in the water, something twisted and thrashed and would not hold still, a black wavering thing caught inside his reflection and fighting to get free. Enkh went cold all over. In all his quiet evenings at this water, he had never once seen anything like it.

He scrambled back from the shore, his heart banging like a small drum. A spirit, he thought, a water-spirit trapped in the mirror. Or worse, something wrong and dark down inside himself, that the honest water had finally gone and shown him. Behind him Sharga tossed her head and stamped one hard hoof on the salt, and she would not settle, and she kept swinging her long ears toward the pale cracked flats behind them.

Enkh wanted to run all the way home to the warm gers and never look in the water again as long as he lived. But he made himself creep back and peek, and the shape was still there in his reflection, still twisting, still afraid. And the harder he stared at it, the more frightened he grew, until he could scarcely breathe.

The story goes on in the video.