Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road

by Kate Harris

  After a week of biking through Oz, I would’ve been content with marginally potable water, but even that was scarce. We pedalled slowly in the gangrenous light of late afternoon, which gave the landscape the look of sunburnt, peeling skin. The profound silence of the desert didn’t invite equally profound thoughts, but only drew my attention to the lack of sloshing in our water bottles and drom bags, now as empty as the Aral Sea. Mel became convinced she saw a building ahead, and I was equally convinced she was delusional until we biked right up to it.

  Outside was a cot with no mattress, all wire and coiled springs, not unlike the gaunt man sprawled upon it. He blinked when we asked for su, or water, perhaps unconvinced we weren’t mirages ourselves, then led us to some blue barrels that were bone dry. He seemed mildly surprised by this and beckoned for us to follow him to a rusty pipe that was dribbling water—and with it the smell of rotten eggs. We filled our bottles and drom bags as he watched, though we had no intention of drinking the gassy liquid unless truly desperate.

  As Mel and I were preparing to bike away, a transport truck pulled into the driveway and an obese man slid out of the driver’s seat, quivering wetly with perspiration. The thin man invited him in for a meal and extended the invitation to us as well. We followed him into a dark, airless room where more heavy-set, slack-eyed men, presumably truck drivers, sat at a table and tore gristly meat from bones plucked from a communal bowl. Their fingers left greasy smudges on the shot glasses from which they tossed back what I presume was vodka. Mel and I sat down in the chairs they pulled out for us, glanced uneasily at each other, excused ourselves, then fled.

  Nothing like a room reeking of mutton fat and vodka fumes to make an oasis of the burning desert. We counted off the miles to Nukus, the westernmost city of any size in Uzbekistan, by coining neologisms for thirst, among them aghh, wagh, grak, and mrwak. “All our words sound like croaks,” I pointed out to Mel. “It’s a tonal language,” she said.

  Clearly they should’ve sent poets down the Silk Road, though I doubt even Don Domanski could have articulated the sweetness of the tea we drank at a roadside restaurant on the outskirts of the city. The tea’s volcanic temperature had a paradoxical cooling effect, and the breeze peeled the sweat off our skin as it sent the poplars swaying. The trees lined the road in orderly ranks, their lower trunks painted white with some kind of insecticide. Next to them were irrigation ditches gagged with algae. The viscous, emerald sheen of the water was dimpled in places by the noses of frogs, looking like a slightly darker shade of algae, only the kind that croaks, so that even as I sipped tea all I heard was thirst, thirst, thirst.

  The mother of four who ran the restaurant invited Mel and me to spend the night and even offered to wash our hair. By hand. With a bucket. Hair that hadn’t seen anything but dust and sweat and the inside of a helmet for more than a week. Of all the hospitable gestures we were met with along the Silk Road, and there were multitudes, this woman whistling softly to herself as mud streamed off our scalps ranks among the most generous and loving. It felt so good to be taken care of, to let our guard down completely and be mothered like that. Mel and I were shocked to learn she was younger than us by a few years.

  Before sunrise the next morning the broad avenues into Nukus bustled with people. Women strolled into the city wearing bright pyjama-patterned robes that clashed charmingly with their headscarves, and children skipped at their sides. Teenage boys in crisp blue jeans rode creaking bicycles past ours. Leather-faced men led donkeys whose soft noses almost scraped the ground as they hauled carts loaded with hay, tree branches, and in one case, three cows. In the dusty, slanted half-light of dawn the busy scene looked surreal and ghostly, a world of afterimages, as though I’d been staring into the sun too long.

  Then again, I always felt this way re-entering the so-called civilized world. Many praise the courage and endurance of explorers, but what they don’t realize is that some oddballs find routine far more terrifying than risk. How else to explain why Ernest Shackleton planned a human traverse of Antarctica, lost his ship to pack ice, spent years eating seal blubber while waiting to be rescued, and finally was rescued only to return a few years later to Antarctica? Or why Meriwether Lewis suffered all kinds of hardship as he and William Clark followed Sacajawea across the American continent to the Pacific Ocean and back, but when he was appointed governor of Louisiana Territory as reward for his achievement, he found civilized life so insufferable that he reportedly committed suicide? Or why Thesiger was drawn back to the Arabian desert over and over again, “for this cruel land,” he said, “casts a spell no temperate clime can match”?

  Far more torturous than melting on a bike in the desert, in our case, was shopping for instant noodles in Nukus. It didn’t help that our clothes were hung out to dry after being laundered, leaving us with no sartorial options but to baste in fleece pants and long-sleeved wool shirts. I felt nostalgic for the air-conditioned supermarkets of America, where Mel and I had sought refuge from the simpering heat of our cross-country bike ride by filling shopping carts with all the groceries we dreamed of buying—watermelons and frozen pizzas, six-packs of Coca-Cola, diapers to cushion our saddle sores. This was a ploy to look busy long enough to cool down, at which point we unloaded the cart and walked out empty-handed. Shops in Nukus lacked air conditioning, but at least the hotel had cold showers and a manager easily bribed into back-dating OVIR receipts for us. On paper, Mel and I had stayed in the city every night since crossing the border into Uzbekistan. In truth, twenty-four hours in Nukus was more than enough.

  The next morning we hit the road again: such meaningless penance, such profound relief. “All explorers must die of heartbreak,” claimed the poet Charles Wright, but this mostly seemed true of those who tried to resume a normal life. The key, apparently, is to never stop exploring. Just ask nineteenth-century British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently stumbled on natural selection as the mechanism for evolution before Darwin published his findings. But where Darwin retreated to his countryside cottage and never travelled anywhere ever again, Wallace never really settled down, either geographically or intellectually, and never lost his sense of wonder.

  In his youth Wallace read The Voyage of the Beagle and took to heart Darwin’s concluding message that “nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist than a journey in distant countries.” But unlike Darwin, Wallace was the eighth of nine children born to relatively impecunious British parents who couldn’t afford to subsidize his expeditions. Undaunted, Wallace struck out on the more entrepreneurial path of a freelance explorer, funding trips abroad by collecting exotic specimens from the Amazon and selling them to museums. Although he was no merchant like Marco Polo, this business model similarly gave Wallace the means and excuse to see the world, a way of life that suited him perfectly. To a letter from friends imploring him to return to England, he cheerfully responded, “Your ingenious arguments to persuade me to come home are quite unconvincing. I have much to do yet before I can return with satisfaction of mind. Were I to leave now I should be ever regretful and unhappy.” When Wallace finally set course for home after four years in the Amazon, the ship he sailed out of Brazil on sank, and he was rescued by another vessel that barely avoided shipwreck itself. “Fifty times since I left Pará have I vowed, if I once reached England, never to trust myself more on the oceans,” he confessed to a friend. “But good resolutions soon fade.” Soon after landing ashore, Wallace was already dreaming up his next expedition, this time to the constellation of islands in what is today Malaysia and Indonesia, where he would conceive of natural selection in the flush of a malarial fever.

  Wallace was no landed gentleman, so he faced the mundane exigency of making financial ends meet. This no doubt played some part in luring him back to sea, for he had to recover the catastrophic losses of his specimen collections to shipwreck. But if money was Wallace’s sole imperative, there are far simpler, safer ways to earn a living than as a freelance explorer. And if fame and glory were
among his ambitions, he could’ve insisted on far more of the evolutionary spotlight for his co-discovery of natural selection. Yet it is Darwin who earned himself eponymy with evolution, who stars in high school biology textbooks in which Wallace is hardly a footnote if he’s mentioned at all.

  Some might pre-emptively extract the moral for this evolutionary parable here: Wallace fatally lacked focus, you could argue; he wanted for direction. He dissipated the heft and genius of his life with ten thousand dilettante tacks of his ship, and ultimately sailed nowhere in particular (though just about everywhere in general, covering six of seven continents before he died at ninety-one). But since when is the measure of a life immortal fame? The more I’d learned about Wallace at Oxford, the more he’d seemed the explorer worth admiring. Where Darwin’s quietly despairing Autobiography describes his growing indifference to the landscapes and works of art that once brought him “exquisite delight,” Wallace’s own memoir, My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions, relates how his passion for wild species and places grew year after year “as ever new and beautiful, strange and even mysterious forms [were] continually met with.” If the highest goal humans can achieve is amazement, as Goethe attested, then Wallace led the more enlightened life.

  His generative sense of wonder seemed to come from a refusal to specialize, to cultivate singular expertise at the expense of soul. When Wallace looked at the world, I suspect he didn’t see fences at all. Over the years his writings on social and economic matters outnumbered those on natural history, and he openly stated that he saw the fight for personal freedoms as more important than the study of science. In a lecture, Wallace argued that every member of society deserved “all the essentials of a healthy and happy life.” And what were those essentials? Everything of which the depressed elder Darwin was deprived: “ample relaxation, adequate change of occupation, the means of enjoying the beauty and solace of nature on the one hand, and art and literature on the other.”

  I don’t mean to blindly apotheosize Wallace, who also penned anti-vaccination polemics. Nobody is perfect, not even explorers, which doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy of a selective kind of worship. What impressed me most about Wallace was his conviction that science and technology aren’t sufficient, that we need a system of ethics as strong as our curiosity, a sense of restraint equal to our restlessness. In 1909, not long after the Wright brothers’ pioneering heavier-than-air flight, Wallace sensed the vulnerability of the world to weapons from above and advocated for an international treaty prohibiting flying machines from carrying instruments of destruction. “Surely, for this great and holy purpose,” Wallace pleaded in a newspaper editorial, “the whole body of true womanhood and true manhood will unite.” The sky is not the limit, as the saying goes, but Wallace implied that perhaps it should be. After all, the history of science and exploration is a stirring adventure narrative about mountains conquered, birds envied and mimicked, limits of all kinds left behind in the dust. The history of science and exploration is also an argument for holding back.

  So is the dying, drying Aral Sea, but like the rivers that used to fill it—the Syr and Amu Darya, or the Jaxartes and Oxus to the ancient Greeks—Mel and I wouldn’t quite get there. With less than a month on our Uzbek tourist visas, we barely had time to bike across the country at the gruelling rate of sixty miles a day, never mind detour hundreds more to ecological disasters. I’d regret this later, for when would I ever be closer to that sea, or what was left of it? But we were too short on time to bike there and too broke to go by other means. Instead we settled for a brief side trip to Khiva, an oasis city and Silk Road trading hub that formerly specialized in slaves.

  To get there we crossed the Amu Darya, whose polluted shores were as foamy as the necks of donkeys straining to pull loads over the floating bridge that spanned it. What impressed me the most in Khiva weren’t the baked-mud walls, thick as houses, or the exquisite shades of the turquoise-tiled madrassas (medieval colleges for Islamic instruction), or the sense of history rising in waves of heat from the rammed earth. I was captivated by the Nature Museum, whose sign featured a sliced-up watermelon, a dinosaur, and a tabby cat.

  Inside a cramped room next to one of Khiva’s more nondescript courtyards were neat arrays of pickled snakes and frogs in jars. Spiders and beetles were impaled on corkboard displays, though several had slipped off or broken apart, reminding me of Wallace. Even as he collected individual specimens for museum display, he rebelled against a reductionist approach to understanding the world, one that severs mechanics from meaning, ideas from implications, our heads from our hearts. We’re all encouraged to become, like Darwin, a kind of machine for grinding out one specific purpose—basically the antithesis of the sort of roving, generalist explorer I longed to be. But there’s more at stake here than the elder naturalist’s quiet despair or my loud unhappiness in the laboratory. This sort of blinkered specialization enables Soviet engineers to build canals to irrigate a desert and also lets them shrug off the consequences of their constructions. Ecological collapse in the Aral Sea? Social collapse in seaside communities? “Sorry,” they can say, “that’s not my jurisdiction.”

  What can we learn about anything in isolation? Only that labels leave out more than they let on. By calling something “marginal” we make it so, when in truth weed is just another word for wildflower, wasteland is another word for wilderness, and slave, in ancient Khiva, referred to a person like you or me. All through the city’s mud-walled labyrinths were niches where slaves were showcased as recently as a century ago, and the displays of creatures in the museum didn’t strike me as so different in terms of isolating and objectifying life, reducing a coherent living whole to components or exotic curiosities. Which meant I wasn’t sure what to make of a large jar in the Nature Museum containing a human fetus in a bath of formaldehyde. A label identified the specimen as a “brianless [sic], bornless child.”

  All across Uzbekistan Mel and I christened the places we pitched our tent: Camp Sore Ass, Camp Sweat Stain, Camp Desert Rain, Camp Can’t Eat Oatmeal Anymore. Mel managed to choke down the nutritious gruel, but one day I woke up unable to stomach it. After five months of mornings that began with the slimy, lumpish paste, no amount of sugar, milk powder, or hunger could salvage oatmeal for me. Instead I drank instant coffee and set off hungry, which made me particularly prone to crankiness when passing cars and trucks blared their horns at us, and every road worker or person we biked by whistled or cheered. They were just being friendly, so I gamely smiled and waved until the requests for acknowledgement grew so frequent, and the road so rough due to construction work, that I didn’t dare risk releasing my death grip on the handlebars.

  “We can’t wave in response to every honk, whistle or shout,” I grumbled to Mel on a rest break, expecting her righteous solidarity.

  “Yes, we can,” she said sullenly.

  I stared at my friend. Her face was a froth of dust and sunscreen. Sweat beaded her skin as though she were being boiled alive. We sat in truculent silence as cars and trucks drove by honking excitedly. Neither of us waved. I tried to prop my arms on my bare knees but they slid off, frictionless with sunscreen and sweat.

  “Well, why don’t you then? Wave at everyone?” I finally asked, at a loss for what else to say.

  A long, defiant pause. “Because I get tired.”

  Central Asia, where everything was fried: the land, the two of us, and also, thank god, the food. What saved our sanity, appetites, and possibly friendship were the roadside truck stops with deliciously greasy menus, which appeared more frequently the farther east we travelled in Uzbekistan. Instead of melting in a tent every afternoon, we napped on raised eating platforms that Mel fondly dubbed “playpens.” I tried not to think about how many people had sweated into the faux velvet pillows and blankets covering them, even as I sweated into them myself. We assuaged our guilt over squatting there all day by ordering plate after plate of fried eggs or tomato-and-cucumber salads, each of which came with a cyclonic, buzzing sid
e of flies. I wished I could twitch isolated precincts of my skin to flick them off, as horses do. Mel dodged them by doing post-meal yoga in the playpen. “Gymnastics!” one older man declared approvingly as he passed.

  Despite the flies, the breezy shade sure beat the Glow-worm. I lay on my back and admired the upside-down world. Clouds traced ideograms of loneliness in the sky. Light was rerouted through the trees, their branches sharp detours for sunshine. Some birds tried to build a nest but the wind stole blades of grass from their beaks before they could place them. To pass the time I listened to “The Swimmer” by John Cheever as read on The New Yorker fiction podcast, not realizing its descriptions of a man on a swimming pool pilgrimage would be as torturous as biking into headwinds across Uzbekistan. “The day was lovely, and that he lived in a world so generously supplied with water seemed like a clemency, a beneficence.” I almost wept.

  Only in Bukhara, a few days later, did I encounter anything like the pale green pool fed by an artesian well in which Cheever’s protagonist begins his quest. Pools throughout that museum of a Silk Road city looked similar at night, though not from algae, or a high iron content, but green spotlights inexplicably set up around the Old Town, giving its ancient mud walls a brash new vitality. At dusk the swifts reeled through those beams and turned briefly jade, and small boys on enviably unburdened bicycles cast little green shadow puppets on walls that mirrored and distorted their wheelies and skid-stop turns. One kid narrowly avoided riding into a canal that glowed as though radioactive, reminding me of the “arteries of sustenance” that Percival Lowell thought he saw on Mars early in the twentieth century. The American astronomer confused a skein of long, straight lines on the red planet (which don’t actually exist) for an elaborate system of canals built by Martians to shunt water from the frozen poles to equatorial cities. Lowell even summoned Darwinian theory to support the existence of aliens on the red planet, arguing that intelligent beings had evolved once on Earth, so why not on neighbouring Mars? Wallace disagreed, so much so that he wrote a book refuting Lowell’s claims, titled Is Mars Habitable? He argued that Mars was too cold, dry, and inhospitable to host an advanced civilization, and even if little green men (and women) somehow did exist there, why would they build such an impractical canal system in which vast volumes of water are lost to evaporation? The same could be asked of irrigation in Uzbekistan. Why, indeed, would sentient beings build such an impractical canal system to drain a living sea and grow one of the world’s thirstiest crops in a desert?