Pilgrim in the Palace of Words. Glenn Dixon

stops, so I was allowed to sit in the aisle. After twelve hours, however, no one got off. In the end I spread out a slab of foam in the aisle and slept comfortably.

      At seven in the morning, bleary-eyed, we got off the bus and found ourselves in the small town of Göreme, home to the famous rock churches. The place is crazy. Bizarre earthen cones rear out of the ground, huge and dotted with caves. This region is volcanic. Much of the original soil has eroded, and the cones and vents of lava are all that’s left. They’re called “fairy chimneys” and resemble giant stalagmites that soar fifteen to twenty metres into the air.

      What’s more, the material the cones are made of is known as tufa. It has the peculiar property of turning rock-hard when it’s exposed to air and moisture, though it’s as soft as Styrofoam inside. Over several millennia people living here have tunnelled into these formations and built dwellings.

      In this town Fred Flintstone’s Bedrock, albeit inhabited with strict Muslims, comes to life. The women are wrapped up modestly, and the men sport pajama pants and long, swarthy moustaches. There are goats, donkeys, and chickens, not to mention the region’s fabulous ruined church caves. They are called kilise in Turkish, and I set off immediately to see them.

      Thinking myself wise and adventurous, I rented a mountain bike from a pajama-clad entrepreneur. The landscape was dazzling, and I imagined myself scooting between the hoodoos and finding dinosaur bones and ancient pottery shards. The land was dotted with cacti, though, and my tires soon bled away their air. I fixed three flats before I gave up and threw the bike into the back of a passing truck for a lift to town. Then I set off again on foot.

      At first everything was absolutely magical. A valley near the town contains the Open Air Museum. Numerous caves are found among the conical formations, but the ones here are special. They’re the ancient churches that date from the eighth century at a time when Christianity was desperately clinging on in the face of Muslim armies from the east. In some of the caves there are still the remains of frescoes. In the Karanlik Kilise, or Dark Church, they’re well preserved because there were no windows. In the Yilanli Kilise, or Church of the Dragon, there are murals of St. George spearing a serpent.

      Walking back to town, I got lost as usual. I followed a little stream that wasn’t much more than a path. Up ahead, I encountered an old man tending his fields. I had already read in my guidebook that tourists were welcome to see the churches, but they better stay off the farmers’ lands. It was a something of a sore point. I debated strategically turning around, since he hadn’t seen me yet, then changed my mind and called out to him. I figured it would be better to announce my presence and apologize rather than risk being sprayed in the backside with buckshot.

      The farmer turned and grinned toothlessly and warmheartedly, waving for me to join him. The old man didn’t speak a word of English. He motioned for me to wait and then got his jacket, which was hanging in a nearby tree. The trees were thick with nectarines. The volcanic soil there, though it looks dry and chalky, is actually quite fertile. He returned, snatched down a nectarine, and handed it to me, then fumbled in the pocket of his jacket to withdraw a little book.

      The old man had withered hands, the nails caked in the dirt of toil, but he opened the book reverentially and flipped to the first pages. There on the paper were the names and addresses of all those travellers who, like me, had stumbled across his fields. The entries went back almost twenty-five years. He handed me the stump of a pencil and turned to a bright new page. With a nod he indicated I should add my name to the list, which I did. I also took a picture of him, promising to send it to him later.

      Then the farmer took me around his lands. I remember there were butterflies everywhere and strange fruit that resembled kiwis. The ones on the tree were sweet, but those that had dropped to the ground were like big raisins. As we strode down a narrow valley, he made drinking motions with his hand, intoning over and over the word sodah. I already knew from buying bottled water in Istanbul that the Turkish word for water was su, but when we came to a small pool squirting out of the ground, he bent to drink from it, cupping his hands. Then he pointed to me. I thought of E.coli and giardia and all the terrible fevers one can get from contaminated water. At first I shook my head, but he insisted. When I finally dipped my hands into the water, raising it to my lips, I was surprised. It was bubbly, like champagne, and fizzed across my lips. It was indeed natural soda water.

      After apple tea at the farmer’s house, we said goodbye. In Turkish goodbye is güle güle. It’s only said by the one left behind, not the one leaving, and it means, charmingly enough, “Go smiling.”

      I hiked back to the main road with the farmer’s wife, who was carting a load of apples on a donkey. She didn’t say a word to me, but when we reached the road, she pointed me in the direction of Göreme while she continued on without a backward glance the other way.

      I did send the photographs to the farmer when I finally arrived home. He had scribbled down his own address, which I still have, smudged by his earth-worn hands. I picture him now smiling at the photo, thinking of the far-off travellers who had stumbled onto his lands.

      Near Göreme is a caravanserai, an ancient stopover on the Silk Road. I took a bus to it one day and was surprised at how big it was. There were places to water camels and a cavernous area of shade where merchants whiled away the time playing simple board games and speaking about the road ahead.

      Marco Polo almost certainly would have stopped there. It was only a week’s journey out of Istanbul and the last vestiges of civilization. Polo was travelling into the truly unknown, just like me, and I wondered if he had sat by the fountain in the courtyard and watched the crescent moon rise in the east.

      The Silk Road was actually a whole thread of trails, but they did lead all the way to ancient Beijing. What we label Turkey is properly called Türkiye by its inhabitants. The name is actually believed to derive from an old Chinese word, Tu-küe, meaning simply “People of the Earth” or “People of the Soil.” Almost certainly the term was first used to describe the Mongols who rode west along the trails with the armies of Genghis Khan.

      Languages can reveal their scatterings. We can track them back to their sources, their very beginnings. What we’re really tracing, however, are semiotic systems, ways of being, and that’s not so easy. Meaning is often wrapped in metaphors and layers of connotation. It expresses relationships and traditions in ways that might be unique to that people, that place in the world. And those meanings, those ways of being, are born, flourish, and die just as we do.