The Kizil Kum (or Qizil Qum, if you want to be pedantic or highbrow) - meaning red sand - desert spans roughly 300,000 sq. km. of what used to be Russian Central Asia, and is shared today by the republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, the lion’s share falling within the second of these. If you’re driving from Samarkand to Bukhara you will be skirting its outliers, and from Bukhara to Khiva you will be smack in its middle: an 8-hour 480 kilometer panorama of sand and clumps of saxaul brush and stunted thorny desert vegetation on either side of the road all the way to the horizon, nearly thirty kilometers distant in the clear pollution-free visibility of early October. Unlike conventional copybook deserts there are very few dunes here: its defining feature is a pocked pancake flatness. The only breaks in the hypnotic, glazing monotony are the power pylons in the far distance, and the natural gas pipeline running right across Uzbekistan to Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. There is an underground pipeline too, whose existence is given away by numbered markers every two hundred yards or so like sunken telegraph poles. Occasionally one will see a derelict crane, or a water bowser filling up for some remote oil terminal at one of the innumerable artesian wells dotting the desert - reminders of Uzbekistan’s oil bounty and the industry thriving on it. Significantly, most if not all heavy machinery is Chinese or, in some cases Korean. The highways are Chinese built, and the Navoi International Airport in Navoi prefecture - an exclusively cargo terminal - was built by the Koreans. The Kizil Kum is, oddly, hemmed in between two rivers, the Syr Darya (Jaxartes of the ancients) in the east and the Amu Darya (Oxus) in the west. Virtually every conqueror in history starting with Alexander in the 3rd century BC, to Genghis in the 12th century and down to the Tsarist generals in the 19th has left his footprints in these relentlessly windblown sands. Alexander - of whom legends, not surprisingly, are legion - once famously drained a helmetful of water brought to him by a soldier into the sand somewhere here, saying (loftily, one imagines) he couldn’t drink while his army was dying of thirst. And dying was a common hazard. If the Kizil Kum hosted the bones of conquering armies it was impartially receiving of lesser remains as well: there is no count of the number of caravans which perished here over the ages. It was that kind of desert. Of course the snug interior of a Mitsubishi minibus is no place to see a desert from. But step out and cross the road at some meal stop, and walk off the tarmac some distance into the wind and sand. Walk far enough. Out there in the blue-and-dun receding spaces you might still hear a ghost or two, flapping out of history’s pages. ***
Posted on: Sat, 22 Nov 2014 18:07:14 +0000
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