ABSTRACT

At the actual frontier there is a "turnstile" through which one passes into "No Man's Land." That turnstile looks unimportant. Into this land of mystery the author passed through the insignificant turnstile. Beyond that there were the beginnings of descriptions of what it's like to be "beyond the turnstile." An insignificant turnstile, not something massive, leads into the land of mystery. Louis Palmer, a traveler who visited Afghanistan several generations after Morag Murray Abdullah, seems from his writings to have been frequently escorted by companions he met along the road to almost wildly improbable and quite unguessable locations. The tiles Louis Palmer walked along on his way to immense and beautiful rooms were decorated with fish and flowers; they could just as easily have been engraved with the reminder, "I don't really know what this is".