You hear? The camels are being driven to the Gate of the Moon.
At midnight starts the great summer caravan for the cities
of the Far North East, divine Bokhara and happy Samarkand.
It is a desert path as yellow as the bright sea-shore:
therefore the Pilgrims call it The Golden Journey.

We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further: it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow,
Across that angry or that glimmering sea,

White on a throne or guarded in a cave
There lives a prophet who can understand
Why men were born: but surely we are brave,
Who take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells
When shadows pass gigantic on the sand,
And softly through the silence beat the bells
Along the Golden Road to Samarkand.

We travel not for trafficking alone;
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
For lust of knowing what should not be known
We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.

From: Hassan : the story of Hassan of Bagdad, and how he came to make the golden journey to Samarkand : a play in five acts by James Elroy Flecker (1922)
[The Project Gutenberg]

Photo: Stork nests on the Ulugh Beg Madrasa in Samarkand. Photo by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii ca. 1912. This work is from the collections of the United States Library of Congress. No information on copyright protection or usage restrictions has been given for this particular work, thus it is presumed to be in the public domain in the United States.