The mine that started it

Thirty kilometres southwest of Osh the road runs past a hill with grey fans of spoil down one side, and you can see them from the bus if you know which window to take, which I did not until a man on the Nookat line told me where to sit. The mountain is called Akademicheskaya. The cave inside it carries a mineralogist's name. Nothing on the road says any of this. I went in January because the manuscript is due in March.

This was the only uranium mine of the Russian empire and the first one of the Soviet Union. Private hands worked it from 1907 to 1913, the state from 1922 to 1954, and then it was finished: exhausted, more than two hundred and twenty metres deep, and worth nothing to anybody. A mineral is named after the place. The ore that came out of here fed the shop where the first Soviet radium was obtained in 1931, which is where my book begins, and it is also the point at which my sources stop agreeing with one another about the route the sacks actually took.

I stayed above the heaps and did not go in. One field report says the adits stand open, a reference work says they were sealed in the fifties. I was not going to settle that. The readings over the heaps run between eighty and one hundred and fifty microroentgen an hour, higher on loose ore. A country can begin an atomic age here and never put up a sign. I picked up nothing and washed my boots twice.