Colin Thubron - The Lost Heart of Asia

Chapter 1
Turkmenistan

The sea had fallen behind us, and we were flying above a desert of dream-like immensity. Its sands melted into the sky, corroding every horizon in a colourless light. Nothing suggested that we were anywhere, or even moving at all. The last solid objects in the universe were the wing-tips of the plane. Yet when I stared at the faces dozing or brooding around me, I felt that only mine did not belong in this sun-stricken wilderness. They were wide-boned faces, burnished and still. They slept.

We had turned along the forties latitude now, midway between Gibraltar and Beijing, into the worlds heart. It was a childish concept, I suppose that the world had a heart but it had proved oddly durable. As a boy I had soon lost the notion that one day I might slither down the North Pole or run my finger-tips along a red-hot Equator. But unconsciously I had gone on feeling that somewhere in the core of the greatest land-mass on earth, beyond more familiar nations, there pulsed another country, half forgotten, to which the rest were all peripheral.

Yet even on the map it was ill-defined, and in history only vaguely named: Turkestan, Central Asia, The Land beyond the River. Somewhere north of Iran and Afghanistan, west of the Chinese deserts, east of the Caspian Sea (which lay far behind us now), this enormous, secret country had turned in on itself. Its glacier-fed rivers the Oxus and Jaxartes of the ancients, the Chu and the Zerafshan never reached the ocean, but vanished in landlocked seas or died across the desert. The Himalaya cut off its mountains from any life-giving monsoon where the Pamirs rose in a naked glitter of plateaux, so high, wrote Marco Polo, that no bird flew there and fire burnt with a pale flame in which you could rest your hand.

Yet this region stretched from the Kazakh steppes to the Hindu Kush. It was larger than Western Europe and split by atrocious geographic extremes. While the Pamirs lay under permafrost, the Karakum desert beneath us could simmer for weeks at a time in 105F in the shade, and its flatlands harden to a surface like levelled stone.

Theres nothing to see down there, said the Uzbek seated beside me. Its the Turcomans country and his voice darkened in despisal. Theyre shepherds. Then, alerted by my clumsy Russian, he asked: Are you from the Baltic?

No, England.

England. He contemplated the word as if waiting for something anything to flutter into his mind. That is next door to America ....

I stared down. The planes fuselage was gliding above a wasteland where faint tracks wandered. Here and there, as in some anatomical chart, canals and arteries converged over the blank tissue of the sand, or spread into dark fields. Occasionally, too, the soil whitened to saline flats, where all shrubs had withered away, or never been. But against the deserts enormity these features looked as slight as craters on the moon. For mile upon mile the only colour was a terrible, famine-breathing platinum, less like pure sand than the pulverised clay of the empires which had petered out in its dust: Persia, Seleucia, Parthia, Macedon .... It was awesome and somehow expected: that the heart of the world was not a throbbing organ but a shifting question-mark.

People had filled it with their inner demons. In ancient times it was the domain of Cimmerian hordes who lived in perpetual mist, and of the dread Scythians with their horses and gold. It became a corridor awash with nomad nations. For centuries it would remain silent and the movements of its peoples unknown, then it would unleash its wild cavalry west and east Scythians, Huns, Turks, Mongols to unwrap the softened empires round them. It was the hinterland of Gods vengeance.

Its strangled rivers also nurtured empires of its own, muffled to Western ears by the vastness surrounding them. They left themselves behind in cities and tombs broken over the encroaching wilderness or in the river valleys. Only after the fifteenth century, when the Mongol empire fractured and the Silk Road died, did this fearful heartland sink out of history, splintered into obscure khanates and tribal pastures. Four centuries later the Russian empire easily devoured it, and its noise was heard only dimly, through Moscow, as if it were a ventriloquists dummy.

You will go to Samarkand and Tashkent, the man beside me said. It sounded more a command than a question. But you wont go to Tajikistan, there is fighting there. They are fighting everywhere now. Nobody knows what the future is ....

But my journey unravelled in my mind through six thousand miles of mountain and desert. The Soviet system of tourism had broken up, and I had secured my visa by pre-booking rooms in a chain of grim hotels, which I would often ignore. The old order all Soviet Central Asia was cracking apart, and its five republics, artificially created by Stalin, had declared their sovereignty a few months earlier. Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kirghizstan suddenly the Soviet tide had ebbed from these shadowy Moslem nations and had left them naked in their independence. What would they become? Would they hurl themselves into the Islamic furnace, I wondered, or reconvene in a Communist mass? I could conceive their future only in the light of powers which I already knew: Islam, Moscow, Turkey, the West.

To the south, for more than an hour now, the snow-peaks of the Kopet Dagh, the Dry Mountains, had guided us eastward. Adrift in a sea of haze, they drew the ancestral battle-line between the Turkic and Persian worlds. For more than two hundred miles they followed us like the first waves of an ocean poised to come crashing out of the Iranian plateaux barely thirty miles to the south.

Then we started to descend over a wide oasis. Beneath us the snake of the Karakum Canal was taking silt and water to the Caspian Sea. The collective farms looked as neat as Roman camps, bisected by pale streets where nothing moved. A voice over the Tannoy announced that in ten minutes we would be landing in Ashkhabad.

Ashkhabad: the capital of Turkmenistan evoked no feelings at all. Turkmenistan was one of the poorest and wildest of the old republics of the USSR, a desert region huger than Germany, peopled by less than four million souls. Over a century ago its inhabitants had been oasis farmers or stockbreeding nomads, whose raids had filled the markets of Bukhara and Khiva with thousands of Persian slaves. Now Turkmenistan had discovered oil, gas and minerals, and it seemed the habits of dictatorship. With the collapse of the Soviets, little had changed in its government except the formal abolition of Communism.

Watching the passengers as we came in to land, I realised that the broad Mongol visage belonged to Kazakhs and Uzbeks, who were travelling on east. But the Turcoman faces were fiercely individual and anarchic. Sometimes they showed brown hair with long jowls and slender noses. A few might have been German or English. Two seats from mine an oval-faced woman with blue eyes was breast-feeding a blue-eyed baby. In front of her lolled a turbaned mullah whose beard bifurcated down his chest from concave cheeks. As they all hunted for their luggage under the seats of the groaning Tupolev, I saw that they had scarcely a suitcase between them, but heaved out packages trussed with frayed string, bedrolls and splitting bags. They seemed like nomads still: predators and opportunists, whom history had caught in mid-migration.