The scene within Zora's head was both surreal and horrible. Surreal, because despite how real it felt I knew the basis for all this imagery had happened long since and wasn't occurring in real time. Horrible, because such a scene of utter destruction and death had ever occurred, especially because the one I loved had lived through this.
The heat of the fires consuming the buildings of the town was blistering hot, but I continued to make my way down the bloodstained street unmindful of it. At the end of the village was a church now wreathed in flames. In front of it in the street lay a mangled body of what had once been a man.
He had been whipped to death and was beyond any recognition, but intuitively I knew this man was Zora's father. Torn up hymnals and Bibles lay strewn on the ground fluttering and curling from the heat of the nearby flames. I continued on.
I walked out of the deserted village following the trail of many feet. Here and there a dead body lay off to the side of the forced march.
The miles seemed to disappear quickly and in the dreamlike setting I was suddenly at a larger town. It wasn't burning. Indeed some people were going about their business as if nothing had happened. Not so for others.
Some parts of the town were vacant. Their owners ripped from their lands and homes.
At the one end of the town was a stockade. Here countless people had been kept like a herd of beef cows at a slaughterhouse. The pen once filled with its human cargo was empty now and I followed the trail onward through my beloved's memory.
The terrain turned more desert like and the heat of the hot sun overhead became more intense. The desertscape started giving up its victims.
At first they were in the hundreds and then the bodies lying sightless in the sand mounted into the thousands.
Buzzards, crows , and desert jackals tore at the naked bodies, as I walked through the scene of so many people's tortured end. I knew where I was now.
I was walking along the lane of one of the worst unsung ethnic cleansings in history. Everything I was seeing and experiencing was the evidence of a genocide whose perpetrators said had never happened. This was the Armenian Genocide, which had taken place around the time period of World War I.
Armenia had been an old country with very early Christian roots that dated back to the early days of the Christian church. At some point it had ceased to be a country and was assimilated into the boundaries of Turkey. Muslims and Christians had coexisted in an uneasy truce within the same border of a nation.