'In the steppe near Tashkent they came upon a never-ending ladder with wooden rungs and iron rails and that stretched across the earth from horizon to horizon . Whistling and thundering, a snake-like wonder hurtled past them, packed both on the inside and on top with infidels shouting and waving their hands. "The End of the World!" thought both Mahmud-Hodja the Sunni and Djebral the Shiite.' Set mainly in Uzbekistan between 1900 and 1980, THE RAILWAY introduces to us the inhabitants of the small town of Gilas on the ancient Silk Route. Among those whose stories we hear are Mefody-Jurisprudence... continue