Free The Lost Heart of Asia by Colin Thubron Page B

minutes later, as the last suburbs disappeared, we were crossing the Oxus. It moved in a huge question-mark over the barren earth: less like a natural river than an act of fate. Both its source and its end were far away. In the past, before irrigation depleted it, it flooded to a diameter of five miles, and even now, confined to its banks, it measured over half a mile across. It flowed with a soft, muscular ease. Silt-mounds glistened on its surface like the backs of drowned whales, or were smoothed into temporary islands, so that it appeared to be entering its estuary four hundred miles too soon.
    For a precious minute the train crossed its bridge. I stared at it with boyish excitement – few Westerners had ever seen it – and with a faint sickness of nostalgia which I could not identify. This was the immemorial divide between the Persian and Turkic worlds, and in its 1500-mile flow from the Pamirs to the lifeless Aral Sea, I fancied that it scarcely belonged to the present at all. Turkic peoples call it Amu Dariya, ‘the River-sea’, so vast does it seem, and Arab geographers long considered it the earth’s mightiest river. In Persian legend (and the epic of Matthew Arnold) Rustam had killed his son Sohrab on its banks. Alexander’s army steered itself across in five days on inflated tent-skins stuffed with brushwood, and seventeen centuries later the Mongol emperor Tamerlane crossed it the other way to conquer the world.
    I had time to glimpse two or three antiquated ferries churning between the mud-flats, and the span of a new lorry bridge. Then the desert circled us again, and we were riding into the night across the unmarked frontier of Uzbekistan towards Bukhara.
    As if emboldened, an Uzbek youth perched on our bunk and started to ask questions. His skull-cap was faded green, and his shoes scuffed. The Russians watched him with furious suspicion. The old man answered him only by thin smiles, and the woman was violently silent. But the youth affected not to notice. When he offered the woman a drink from his bottle of lemon juice, she almost screamed her refusal, and glowered in disbelief when he passed it to their granddaughter. ‘No, no, no!’ And the little girl, infected by the nervousness all around her, echoed: ‘No, I don’t want it, no . . . .’
    The youth turned to me. ‘Where are you from?’
    â€˜He’s Ukrainian!’ the woman barged in. ‘He’s a teacher! He’s just going to a hotel in Bukhara.’
    The Uzbek’s eyes glided over me. He looked delicate, amused, harmless. It was impossible to tell what he wanted. He murmured: ‘Ukrainian . . . .’ and moved away.
    The woman said: ‘You be careful. It’s dollars they want. They’ll kill you for them.’ She pointed her fingers to her head and pulled an imaginary trigger. ‘They’re shooting foreigners for their dollars now. Pff! . . . Pff! . . . Pff!’
    â€˜It’s worse in Russia,’ the man said. ‘There it’s got terrible.’
    â€˜But it’s coming here too,’ the woman said. ‘There won’t be travellers here much longer.’
    I sank into an uneasy quiet. Outside, the train’s headlamps wobbled myopically over the same mutilated-looking desert. Nothing betrayed that we were entering the most ancient and populous country of Central Asia, its settled heart, or that the nomad wastes would soon give way to the watered valleys of Transoxiana, ‘the Land beyond the River’.
    Across this region, for some two thousand years, the Silk Road had nourished caravan-towns – Samarkand, Bukhara, Margilan – whose populace had spoken an Iranian tongue. The Uzbeks were latecomers, migrating south at the end of the fifteenth century. They took their name from a khan of the Golden Horde, for their origins were Turkic, but already their blood was mixed with Iranians’, and they added only the last layer to a