'What Are You Looking For?' By Mike Tidwell Special to The Washington Post Sunday, September 14, 1997; Page E01

My guide, whose name is Ishen, gestures across the meadow. "I can become that fir tree over there," he says, "and view the world entirely the way that tree does." He can also become an ant crawling along the ground, he says. Or a smooth stone at the bottom of a river, gazing up through the cold, rushing water at the mountain sky.

Ishen, in his mid-thirties, has long hair and vaguely Mongolian features. That he is turning out to be a mystic of sorts is just one more surprise I encounter in this mysterious and obscure corner of the former Soviet Union. We are in Kyrgyzstan, the tiny new nation in the mountainous heart of Central Asia, slightly north of Pakistan, bordering western China. For several days now, Ishen's horses have been carrying us through a land few foreigners have ever seen. Hermetically sealed for decades courtesy of Soviet border paranoia, the region cradles a landscape of wild yaks, snow leopards, 20,000-foot peaks and the ancient customs of migrating Kyrgyz shepherds.

I am particularly interested in the latter, and Ishen is my conduit to them. There are no roads where we travel, just mountain trails winding up and over narrow passes. We descend into valleys of heart-stopping greenery streaked with roaring snowmelt rivers. We pitch our tents each night next to a different camp of welcoming shepherds, feasting with them atop shyrdak carpets, drinking mare's milk and sharing stories in the orange flicker of kerosene lamps.

It is enough that these scattered mountain tribes, largely ignored by time, dine on sheep's eyeballs and cure altitude sickness by bathing in the smoke of juniper branches. But before this trip is over, Ishen will carry things further, changing my life in a small way by working a bit of honest-to-goodness . . . well . . . um . . . magic.

There, I said it.

The old Soviet Union is dead, thank you, and travel there has never been more alive. Yet 90 percent of all visitors still tour Moscow and St. Petersburg and little else -- places easily called upon even when the Iron Curtain was firmly riveted into place. The whole fascination of the Soviet Union was its stature as a sprawling empire, a fact that now leaves utterly unbeaten paths strewn across 11 time zones and countless ethnic groups. Why not visit the reindeer herdsmen of upper Siberia? Or the winemakers of southern Georgia? Or the yurt-dwelling shepherds of unpronounceable Kyrgyzstan? For the latter, direct flights from Istanbul now make the country a bold, eye-opening add-on to any foray into Turkey or Greece.

For centuries, Kyrgyz shepherds have broken winter quarters in lowland valleys and headed for the rich summer meadows of the Tian Shan range edging China. Roughly a fifth of the Kyrgyz people still make the annual trip today, herding cattle and flocks of sheep by horseback into a dream world of thin air and no fences. My search for a guide has turned up Ishen Obolbekov, himself the son of traditional shepherds. My friend Phil, an American artist, has joined me and together we constitute Ishen's very first customers in what he hopes will become a thriving business of guiding Western travelers through this unexplored land.

We all meet in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan's capital, where a wheezing Soviet-made bus takes us east to Ishen's village of Barskoon, five hours away on shimmering Lake Ysyk-Kol. Along the way, Ishen says very little. I, meanwhile, can't stop staring at him. He is the only Kyrgyz man I've met with hair flowing down to his shoulders. His face has a brooding, almost Native American look, inviting yet inscrutable, with eyes implying something very deep. He later tells me he is the grandson of a Kyrgyz traditional healer. His father hunts with falcons and cures illnesses with long fasts that purify body and soul. Ishen's son is named Tinstyck, the Kyrgyz word for peace.

In Barskoon the next morning, we eat dried apricots to combat altitude sickness -- we're starting at around 5,000 feet and will go as high as 13,000. Then we set off for the Tian Shan foothills on horseback, toting our gear in traditional woolen Kyrgyz saddle bags. The goal is to circumnavigate an entire range of fairy-tale peaks in six days, covering 130 miles. Joining our party are Ishen's brother Rosh (the expedition cook) and Ishen's dog, a German shepherd named Dingo.

Early into the steady, switchbacking climb into the mountains, I grow awed by the monumental scale of things -- huge peaks, titanic sky, colossal shadows. Rivers rush past us, crashing over boulders. A Eurasian sparrowhawk circles overhead, a distant glacier glistens in the sun, a meadow of wild strawberries spreads out below us.

Soon something odd happens. A shepherd, our first, spots us from a distance and spurs his horse toward us. After a gentle-spirited greeting using the Muslim salam aleykum (peace be with you), the shepherd looks at Ishen while gesturing toward Phil and me. "What are they looking for?" he asks.

Ishen laughs. "Nothing," he says. "These men are just travelers. They just want to see the mountains." Ishen translates the shepherd's Kyrgyz into English for us.

The shepherd doesn't believe this. "What are they looking for?" he asks again. "Gold? Horses? Wives? No one has ever come to these mountains for no reason at all."

Ishen repeats his answer, followed by a smiling farewell. We move on, but the question follows us throughout this trip like a peculiar shadow: "What are they looking for?"

We come upon the remains of an ancient Silk Road fort built by Chinese merchants. For centuries, one branch of the fabled spice route brought caravans of Bactrian camels through this narrow valley headed west. Yet like so many jewels of this isolated ex-Soviet region, there are no markers heralding the clay fort's historical wonder, leaving us to feel like its discoverers. Ditto for the ancient Tibetan petroglyphs -- hawks, wild goats -- we find just beyond the fort.

After lunch, Ishen decides we should bolster our acclimatization by climbing -- sans horses -- to a waterfall 1,000 feet up a stout mountainside. By the time Phil and I reach the top, heaving and blowing, Ishen is already there, at the waterfall's edge, gesturing down to the gorgeous tumult of falling water. "Drink a handful of this," Ishen says, "and we Kyrgyz believe you will gain 10 more years of life." We follow his example, quaffing the sparkling cold elixir, while Ishen beams with delight at having shared a gift decade with us.

Shuffling back down to my horse, I feel a strange sensation grow inside me. It isn't the water. I don't believe the legend. But I've traveled the world, and this trip is starting to feel different. Ishen seems to be taking us somewhere we hadn't quite reckoned on. When the next shepherd rides up and asks, "What are these men looking for?" Ishen shrugs and turns to me as if to say, "Well? What should I tell them?"

We make camp that night with an old widow shepherd and her daughters, all wearing brilliantly colored Kyrgyz scarves. The cows around this camp are so fat and happy from the rich mountain grass that they actually try to cajole our dog Dingo into a game of tag of sorts. I never would have believed cows could funhouse in such a preposterous way had I not seen it myself. That night, after a meal of mutton stew, Ishen and I lie on our backs in the grass and watch from 9,000 feet as a downpour of shooting stars festoons the Central Asian sky.

At the start of our trip, Ishen had given Phil and me just one explicit instruction: "Don't lose the whip for your horse," he said. "It's very bad luck in these mountains to lose your whip."

"Right," we said, gripping our whip handles a bit tighter. "Don't lose them. Got it."

The rest of our mountain education comes simply by watching Ishen. We watch how he maneuvers his horse skillfully through violently swollen rivers, how he gives sweets to the children in isolated camps, how he takes off his boots before entering a shepherd's tent. "What are they looking for?" each shepherd asks Ishen, on cue, as we enter.

After a few days, Ishen explains how he can metamorphose into things strewn across the landscape. Through a self-styled meditation, his whole being can leave his body and enter the other object -- rock, cloud, tree. It is his way of seeing more of the world, he says, of gaining knowledge of how things fit together. Later, rocking on my horse, I try the technique myself without success. I don't entirely reject the possibility that Ishen can do this, however. In a rugged, shut-off society like this, free from Western logic, one perhaps could find less pedestrian ways to move through the world.

We push on, immersed in Kyrgyz culture at every turn. Shepherds show us how to prepare mare's milk, their summer staple. A shepherd pulls a suckling foal away from its mother just as the milk emerges, then milks the mare not unlike a cow. A day of fermentation in a hand-carved wooden barrel gives the drink a tart, smoky, pleasant taste.

These summer months are the happiest time of year for the Kyrgyz. The high-altitude weather, bursting with sunshine, is springlike in feel, adding to the sense of renewal and well-being permeating the lush meadow valleys. A similar feeling prevails in the camps where, passing through, we regularly find a heart-melting youth riot of fertility -- foals, calves, kittens, puppies, baby goats, lambs and, somewhere, inevitably, a bundled-up Kyrgyz baby blissfully working at a mother's breast.

A scare comes midweek when Phil does the unthinkable: He loses his whip. We turn our camp upside down to avoid the bad luck that supposedly will follow. At last Phil notices the whip lying in the grass where he was napping earlier.

We begin an ascent toward the highest pass of the trip, 13,000-foot Howling Pass. The going is steep, and Ishen keeps reminding us to be kind to our horses, letting them switchback as much as they want, easing their terrible task. It is colder up here, the wind stronger, life a bit harder for the shepherds. Ishen is particularly generous giving out candy to children at this altitude, their cheeks burned dark red by wind and sun.

It's embarrassing to admit, but Phil and I begin fighting on this trip. It's perhaps not the best mix of temperaments, putting an artist and a writer in the same small tent for a week. When I shoot photos one day without film in my camera, I somehow blame it on Phil. When he discovers he's brought insufficient pencil lead for sketching, he turns cranky, especially toward me. We even fight over whose horse would carry our tent. It's all quite ridiculous.

Ishen can't help but see all this, though he says nothing -- at least not directly. We later come to a valley featuring a particularly old and interesting yurt, and Ishen explains the tent's ingenious design. Round, made of felt and sewn together with camelhair thread, the Kyrgyz yurt is made for the migrating life. It can be taken down in just one hour by one person and placed entirely atop one horse, Ishen tells us. It takes six people several hours to put it back up, he adds. Then, in a suddenly serious voice, Ishen says, "It always takes less time to destroy things in life than to build them up." He says this as if to no one in particular, but I swear he is speaking to Phil and me. I swear.

The next morning I pull Phil aside and we both do a lot of apologizing. It feels good to make peace. We might not know the answer each time a shepherd asks us what we are looking for, but fighting surely isn't it. We might not be able to leave our bodies like Ishen, but -- like him -- we can at least act decently toward the people around us.

On the last full day of our trip, making our descent out of the mountains, something disturbing happens. We come upon a forested slope so steep we have to lead our horses down carefully on foot. Making matters worse, the fir trees are particularly thick and a deep carpet of slippery needles lies underfoot. For perhaps half a mile, men and horses are slipping and sliding and glancing off branches in a confusion of meandering, criss-crossing descents. At last, we stumble out of the forest and into a meadow, everyone safe.

But there is a problem.

"Where's your whip?" Ishen asks me.

I can't find it. I search my saddle furiously, then the grass around my horse. Nothing. I panic. I remember having the whip at the top of the slope. Clearly, on the way down, I've lost it. Ishen tells me not to go back up the slope searching for it. Ten thousand men could comb that vast mountainside for days for something so small in such a tangle of trees and pine needles.

Desperate, I try anyway, but soon give up when I can't even discern our horses' tracks. I've really lost my whip.

"How much bad luck will I have?" I ask Ishen.

"It's just a superstition," he says, trying to console me.

"How much?"

"I don't know," he finally admits. "I have never lost a whip before." Nor, it turns out, has anyone he knows -- no family members, no friends, no one. "We are so afraid of what will happen," he says, "we keep very careful guard of our whips."

This is horrifying news, of course. We pitch camp next to the forest and I go to sleep in a foul mood. Two years living in Africa have taught me to take superstitions seriously. I am full of self-pity the next morning, rambling on to Phil about my impending bad luck. Ishen disappears for his morning bath, meanwhile, and to check on the horses. He is gone a long time.

He returns for breakfast announcing he is giving most of our leftover food to nearby shepherds now that the trip is ending. He is also allowing our horses extra grazing time after yesterday's hard work. My whip problems are all I can think about while Ishen, as usual, is looking after others. He is making it hard for me to sulk. For a moment, I almost resent his nonstop kindness.

"Who are you?" I finally blurt out to him, on impulse.

"What?" he says, confused. He is pulling his hair into a long, thick ponytail.

"Who are you? You just seem so unusually . . . good. What do you know that helps you be this way? It's like you know something."

He is immediately embarrassed by the questions and wants to change the subject. I press on, asking if he's devoted to some special philosophy or religion. And what about the business of leaving his body? Does he see himself as a shaman? A healer? A seer?

"No, no, no," he says, then shrugs. "I am who I am. I respect children and old people and animals. I help anyone who's poor. These instructions are found in Islam, Christianity and Buddhism. This is not special Kyrgyz behavior. This is normal behavior. The goal in life is to learn something each day and to be good. This is normal."

His words are so matter of fact, so devoid of drama, that I suddenly feel foolish. I've been transferring extra baggage to him all along, I realize, expecting him to deliver some transcendent message. It is, no doubt, little more than a schlocky Western hankering for a Casteneda-esque experience. But Ishen is just a nice guy. He is normal. Nothing supernatural. And he is tired of talking about it. Period. I drop the subject. We finish breakfast and stand to leave the tent.

And that's when Ishen hands me my whip.

It has been hidden at his side throughout breakfast. "I didn't want you to have bad luck," he says, placing the small leather handle in my palm.

Chills run up my legs. "How . . .?"

"This morning," he says. "I was away. I thought you noticed."

"You couldn't have," I say. I think of the thick forest, the terrible half-mile slope, the obscuring needles.

"I found it near the top," he says, "under some branches. I didn't want bad things to happen to you."

Some things in life become less understandable the more you discuss them. I only know this: There's virtually no way Ishen -- or anyone else -- could have located that whip. But there it was. I hold it tightly and stare at Ishen with a mix of shock and awe. My feet eventually take me out of the tent and back to my horse. For the rest of the day, I grip my whip as if it were a magical thing. Everything around me seems slightly altered. My world seems bigger. I feel rearranged inside.

Fine weather guides us out of the mountains and back to Ishen's village that day, finally ending a trip I now keep filed away in a wholly separate category in my mind. On the fringe of an empire long thought of as spiritually dead, even evil, I had found simple goodness, and something more I cannot explain. "What are you looking for?" the shepherds had asked us time and again. I never knew, not for sure, until Ishen finally showed me what it was.

He made it a gift. From another world.

Mike Tidwell is the author of "The Ponds of Kalambayi: An African Sojourn" (Lyons and Burford, 1996). His last story for the Travel section was about getting haircuts around the world.

DETAILS: KYRGYZSTAN

The U.S. State Department recommends that Americans visiting Kyrgyzstan register with the U.S. Embassy in Bishkek upon arrival to obtain updated information on travel and security precautions. For information on entry requirements, contact the Embassy of Kyrgyzstan (see below).

GETTING THERE: Probably the best way to get to Bishkek -- Kyrgyzstan's capital -- is on Turkish Airlines from New York via Istanbul. The twice-weeklyflights aren't exactly cheap ($1,300 round trip), but this is the safest andmost direct route to this out-of-the-way country. Other options includetaking Lufthansa from Frankfurt to Almaty, Kazakstan, then renting a car for thefour-hour drive to Bishkek.

GUIDES: Ishen Obolbekov's Shepherd's Way Trekking (Gogol St. 111, Apt. 150, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, fax 011-996-3312-620655, e-mail tienshan@itmc.bishkek.su.) charges $75 a day for horses, food, camping equipment, guide, cook and interpreter.

WHEN TO GO: Optimum visiting time is early June to late September when the mountain weather warms and the traditional Kyrgyz shepherds establish their highland summer camps.

WHERE TO STAY: In Bishkek, clean and spacious rooms can be had at the Bishkek International School of Management and Business (237 Panfilov St.). More deluxe rooms are found at the Hotel Dostuk (429-B Frunze St.) for around $100 per night. Plastic hasn't caught on yet in Kyrgyzstan, so bring cash and traveler's checks.

INFORMATION: Embassy of Kyrgyzstan, 1732 Wisconsin Ave. NW, Washington, D.C. 20007, 202-338-5141.

-- Mike Tidwell