The two main rivers of Central Asia, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, originate in the mountains near China’s western border and run into the Aral Sea—or at least they used to, before the Soviets diverted them to irrigate cotton fields. The Greeks knew the two rivers as the Oxus and the Jaxartes. An Islamic hadith holds that they are two of the four rivers that flow into Paradise. “Two Rivers” is Carolyn Drake’s photographic record of many visits to this region over the past five years. Drake’s Central Asia is a place where political allegiances, ethnic bonds, national borders, and even physical geography are in such flux as to seem, at times, like fictions. Following the two rivers, she traces a vast ecosystem of stories, nature, money, and history. The rivers have been dammed, which has caused bushes to spring up in deserts. The head of a Lenin monument appears in a dark stairwell, surrounded by houseplants; a headless Lenin monument duly stands guard outside what is now a Chinese factory. Wild geese vanish from former wetlands, only to reappear, stuffed, in a local history museum. Covered women, rarely seen in Soviet times, turn up in courtyards and at barbecues. Veils real and metaphorical—car windows, darkness, time, dust, distance, bushes, snow—simultaneously obscure our vision and show us new meanings.