 don't like the sound of raised voices, or music, or the smell of perfume, tobacco, or menstruating women. In the first week of life, they're so sensitive and fussy that only one expert in the village hatches them out on a bed in a room with carefully controlled temperature and humidity. I'm in the desert oasis of Khorozem in Uzbekistan. For seven years, the oasis was my home. Each rural roadside around here is flanked by pollarded white mulberry trees, grown for their leaves, not their fruit.