The Hill That Burns

North of Baku a hillside has been on fire for as long as living memory agrees to go back: Yanar Dag, natural gas seeping through fractured rock and burning off in a modest, eternal row of flames. No priest, no pump, no off switch. The peninsula is upholstered in hydrocarbons and this is the one seam that shows.

I came at dusk when the flames get their color back and held a hand out toward the warmth, which every visitor does, because a fire that predates you by centuries triggers an old instinct to check that it is real. It is real. It smells faintly of the underworld's kitchen and it hisses very softly, a sound with no beginning in it.

Fire worship organized itself around seeps like this once, and standing there in the dark blue hour you understand the theology completely: here is a fact that does not need you, and warms you anyway. I stayed until the tour vans left and had the hill's opinion to myself.