The Chapel Under the Chalk: Beket-Ata

There is a door in the rock at the edge of a cliff. Around it there is nothing but wind and white dust. This is the Ustyurt plateau, in western Kazakhstan. You duck your head and go down a few steps. Then it goes quiet.

Outside, the midday sun of Mangystau beats down. Inside, it is cool and dim, and the air smells of chalk. This is the mosque of Beket-Ata, in a place called Oglandy.

Your first thought is probably the same as everyone's. People were hiding. Raiders, wars, patrols: they dug in like a fox. But look up. The mosque has an open dome with a window for light. Its prayer niche points toward Mecca. Nobody hides like that. That's a lit fire in an ambush. The reason was something else.

Mangystau is a plateau of chalk and limestone, as white as sugar. The stone cuts almost like cheese, and over the years it hardens and holds a dome. Sufi teachers came here looking for solitude. The Arabic word is khalwa: a chosen retreat for prayer and thought. A small cave with one window in the ceiling suits that well. Chalk keeps the heat out in summer and in during winter. And it swallows every sound except your own breathing.

So a whole chain of underground retreats appeared. Shopan-Ata. Shakpak-Ata. Karaman-Ata. Sultan-epe. People here call their land the country of three hundred and sixty-two saints. Each Sufi cut his own cell into the rock. Some stayed for forty days at a time, with a clay bowl and a Koran, and no bread and no fire.

There is a practical side too. Up top, summer heat reaches forty-five degrees. Winter brings blizzards full of salt, and a wind that pins a yurt, the felt tent of the herders, flat to the ground. Under the chalk the temperature barely changes. It's a cellar. A shepherd who wandered in by chance could wait out a storm, drink from the well, say a prayer and go.

Beket came late to this tradition, and became its best-known name. He was born in seventeen fifty, near today's town of Kulsary, to a poor nomad family. As a boy he talked about stars and books as if he had been there. At fourteen he set off on foot for Khiva. That is a thousand kilometres, across desert. He studied there for seven years under a teacher named Pakyrzhan-khadzhi.

He came home knowing the Koran by heart. He knew astronomy as well as he knew cattle. He was also a fearless batyr, a warrior. The story goes that he could stop a Dzungar raid with a single word. Even the enemy knew this was the Beket whose prayers came true.

Then comes the unusual turn. Beket did not settle down to preach in one place. He cut four mosques, one for each side of his steppe homeland. The first was at Kulsary, in white stone. The second was in the chalk cliffs near Beineu. The third was at Baishatyr, on the Ustyurt. And the fourth, the last, was here at Oglandy.

He carved this one at seventy, with the hands of his students. It has seven rooms and remarkable acoustics. A whisper at the prayer niche can be heard in the farthest room. High up there is a round opening. At noon a beam of sunlight falls through it and crawls across the floor like the hand of a clock. Archaeologists think this was more than a mosque. It may also have been a small observatory.

Beket stayed here. He was buried in a niche in the northern room in eighteen thirteen. Since then Oglandy has been, for Kazakhs, the second most important place of pilgrimage. Only the mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi ranks higher. His portrait is printed on the five-hundred-tenge banknote, the Kazakh currency. And more recently, five of the chalk mosques of Mangystau were added to the UNESCO World Heritage list.

The cliff is still white and quiet, just as it was the day an old man chose it for his last retreat.

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