and what we carry will come to carry us.

The box had spent hundreds of years migrating up and down the silk road, bartered over on mongolian steppes and back alleys of close in cities, carried over narrow mountain paths in late spring snows and pelting rains, strapped to dromedary humps in crushing sun, taken blood crusted by moonlight, wrested from fingers still and stiff, traded, stolen, singed and soaked, back and forth over hundreds of years, thousands of miles, uncounted lives, rubbed with sweat, blood, musk and hair of camels, donkeys, horses, men, carries of burdens all these long years. This box has held gold, sapphires, silk, pepper, pupae, a man's shaving kit, a man's ear, the toil of a lifetime lost with a broken strap on a high mountain pass, cryptic unknowable notes found ages later after a spring thaw, papers rotten and crumbling, inked in foreign hand, turned over by thick trail dirty fingers and dumped into the mud and reeds, the box now nestling in the folded robes of the next carrier, his treasure tightly held therein.