Free The Lost Heart of Asia by Colin Thubron Page A

dunes, until every surface fell faintly out of focus. For mile after stricken mile the sallow crescents rolled to the skyline — not in sculptured contours, but in shuffling ridges and rotted-looking mounds.
    Across these wastes, in 329 BC, Alexander the Great had marched his 60,000-strong army to the Oxus under a scourging sun, and here, when a soldier brought him water in his helmet, he refused to drink while his army was dying of thirst, and poured the water into the sands.
    Later expeditions were drastically depleted, or vanished altogether. General Skobelev, moving against Merv in 1881, started out with a pack train of 12,000 camels, and ended with only 600 living; and the formidable General Kaufmann salvaged barely one twelfth of 20,000 camels and horses from his desert march on Khiva in 1873.
    The failing of water glares over the whole region. Tributaries of the great rivers peter out in sand-cluttered gullies, and whole lakes shrivel to beds of salt. Irrigation has both extended and thinned its resources. Even the inland seas – the Aral, the Caspian, the mountain-ringed Issyk-kul – are gradually emptying.
    The family seated beside me looked out of the window with loathing. As the void deepened, they let out a rasping ‘Eah!’ or ‘Fffft!’, and cuffed away the view with their hands. ‘It’s hopeless,’ the woman said. ‘You can’t do anything with it.’
    They were stout and old, with thick bodies and coarse necks: a Russian couple with their small granddaughter. They wore an identical look of clouded defence. In their shared face a tundra of cheeks and jowls overpowered all else, isolating their vision and squeezing their mouth to a fleshy bud. The small girl’s plaits were gathered up under frothy muslin ribbons and a Mickey Mouse hairclip, but already she reproduced her grandparents’ stolid stare.
    The old man had worked in the oil-wells at Nebit Dagh near the Caspian for forty-five years, and a Soviet work-medal drooped from his lapel. Every spring, before the heat came – ‘A wind brings the sand out of Afghanistan like a sauna,’ he said – they escaped northward to a dacha near Samara in the Russian heartland. There they lived on fruit and vegetables which the woman had grown and bottled the year before, and would return south only when the snows came.
    In the cubicles around us the Turcomans lay asleep on the railway’s flowery pillows. Their padded coats dangled decorously from every hook, but the faces coddled below were those of Hunnish destroyers. Their beards forked angrily over the clean sheets. Their young women, descendants of those Amazons who had followed their men into battle, lay fully dressed in a glitter of gold-threaded headscarves and earpendants.
    A hundred years ago the building of this Trans-Caspian railway had set the seal on their nation’s defeat. Its earthworks and cuttings were hacked out by 20,000 native and Persian labourers, while two battalions of soldiers spiked down the rails behind them. Along this thin line the trains dithered at less than fifteen miles per hour, but by 1895 it had linked Russian dominions from the Caspian to Tashkent, and hung a Damoclean sword over Persia.
    Now the train pushed through a howling wilderness towards the Uzbekistan frontier. A tempest dimmed the sky with sand and tumbled the torn-up saxaul from dune to dune. Local Turcomans say that the sand-grains in each dune cling together like tribespeople and never intermingle, but towards evening our view had liquefied into a tawny mist. Once or twice we passed impoverished villages, with camels wandering in the dust-blown streets, and the desert heaped at their walls. The sun dangled above like a tarnished coin.
    â€˜How frightful!’ chorused the family. They were dreaming of the green north, the cool winds and marshy fields round Samara.
    An hour afterwards we clanked through the sprawl of industrial Chardzhou and