On the Trail of Genghis Khan

by Tim Cope

  As this hot, algae-filled water now flushed out the dry bed of my throat, the stench of dry manure rose through my nostrils. It was a smell that would have been a comforting symbol of family and togetherness in the winter and early spring when there might have been hundreds of cattle, sheep, and horses milling about this tree, the only one I’d seen in two days. Now, though, the lingering fragrance of livestock was a sharp reminder that the people had moved away to the safety of summer pastures and I was alone under the tree.

  The sickly feeling that I was traveling against the grain of the seasons had, in truth, been building ever since I’d met the nomads of the Betpak Dala some weeks ago. I’d tried to ignore it, but in recent days it had become unavoidable. Since I’d left the aul of Karatau, the land had been dotted with empty huts with boarded-up windows and abandoned yards. Horizons had crawled with nothing but heat mirage and billowing clouds of fine manure particles. The only people I had seen were a family who had just migrated from the Moiynkum Desert and were headed for the high pastures of the Karatau Mountains. They’d invited me to watch the final spring ritual for the year, camel shearing, and looked at me gravely when they understood my route. “Soon the flies will be here,” they told me. “Down on the Syr Darya, where you are going, they will be even worse. If you leave your horse tied up for half an hour there, it will be dead.”

  The flies hadn’t yet come, but although it was still only late April the temperature was reaching 30°C by nine o’clock in the morning and what pasture I could find was sun-fried and hollow. To avoid the heat—and decrease the risk of saddle sores that it posed—I had begun breaking the riding into two sessions, leaving before sunrise, then riding until mid-morning before unsaddling and finding shade, then doing more distance close to dusk. The conditions might have felt endurable had relief been in sight within days or even weeks, but everything I was now experiencing—the heat, isolation, and lack of water and grass—were merely precursors of what I could expect in coming months.

  The ultimate goal of this leg of my journey was to navigate about 2,000 km through Kazakhstan’s arid center and west to the Caspian Sea—a vast, sparsely populated region of open deserts and salt flats that lies midway between Mongolia and Hungary at the heart of the Eurasian steppe. It was here that Friar Carpini recorded the most harrowing leg of his journey from Europe to Mongolia, writing that it was so dry “many men die from thirst,” and that he “found many skulls and bones about in heaps over the ground.”

  My original plan had been to make this traverse in the winter and spring, when the slightly warmer winter temperatures (at least slightly warmer than those found in the north) and a thin layer of snow would have been an advantage over a more northerly route. The holdups in Akbakai, however, had left me on course for one of the driest parts of the country at the hottest time of year—a prospect that any nomad, and certainly Genghis Khan, surely would have done all he could to avoid.

  The big consolation in all of this—and one that would become my motivation in the months ahead—was that beyond the fiery core of the Eurasian steppe lay the relatively mild climate of the Caspian region and geographical Europe, where water and pasture promised to become progressively more abundant. In the short term, I simply had to accept that things were only going to get harder.

  Late in the afternoon, when the sun’s heat waned, I lifted from slumber under the tree and rode on, determined to remain positive.

  To tackle the trek ahead, I had broken my planned route into three stages, each of which I estimated would take a month. The first—and I reasoned the easiest—would be to drop south to the Syr Darya River and follow it about 500 km to the point where it spills into the Aral Sea. From there I would break away and track northwest around the northeast tip of the Aral Sea’s old shoreline and continue as far as the Zhem River (known in Russia as the Emba). The final phase would be southwest along this minor—and partly seasonal—watercourse, which I hoped would see me through the western deserts to within range of the Caspian Sea. It was a very indirect route, at the mercy of where water lay, but if all went according to plan, I would cross the Ural River—into geographical Europe—and be entering Russia come autumn.

  It took several more days of riding through abandoned pasturage before I crossed through the Karatau ridge and began my descent to the Syr Darya. Viewed from a distance, the river appeared just as it did on my map: an improbable belt of water and leathery green vegetation that flows some 2,212 km from the Tien Shan down through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, snaking its way northwest through mustard-yellow desert toward the Aral Sea. In an otherwise inhospitable landscape, it was a fabled artery dotted with ancient towns and cities that have played theater to the aspirations of conquerors ranging from Alexander the Great to Genghis Khan and later Tamerlane.2 In more recent times the Soviets had harnessed the Syr Darya—in tandem with its sister river, the Amu Darya—to fuel a massive expansion of the cotton industry in Uzbekistan. The consequence of these developments was that while irrigated crops in the desert of the upper reaches had bloomed, further downstream both the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya had slowed to a relative dribble. As predicted in 1959 when the water was diverted, the Aral Sea, which relies on the two rivers as its primary feeders, had now shrunk to around 10–20 percent of its original size—and was still receding.

  It was not far west of the town of Shieli—about 100 km west of the ruins of Otrar—that I reached the riverbank and began the long journey west.

  Initially the river environment offered reprieve. For the first two days I waded through a cluster of crop-farming communities where irrigation canals—predominantly for rice, corn, and cabbage—brought plentiful water and greenery. When navigating through the labyrinth of canals slowed my progress, I crossed to the less populated southern banks via a makeshift pontoon bridge—the last 15 m of which could be crossed only by laying down horse blankets and felt pads on a narrow ramp made from a grid of reinforcement wire welded to pipes.

  Once on the far side I moved with a hint of rhythm along desert tracks. A typical day involved rising at 4:00 A.M., at which hour there were the whispers of a cool breeze. In the early morning the horses moved with purpose, their hooves shuffling quietly through sand. As the sky grew from purple to shades of crimson, I could see the glassy surface of canals and auls nestled among sand dunes with yurts set up outside permanent mud-brick homes. The Syr Darya forms both the eastern and northern boundary of the Kyzylkum Desert, and now and then I caught glimpses of this undulating landscape of tired-looking shrubbery and sand that angles away endlessly southward into the heart of Central Asia.

  During the day it was suffocatingly hot, and I did my best to retreat to the shade of bushes and wait it out. The evenings, by contrast, were pleasant, particularly in the dusty, sun-baked auls. At dusk young children—already with dark summer tans—played about on the sandy streets, and old women sat on benches, chatting in their long, colorful gowns and scarves. Outdoor, dung-fired stoves and traditional samovars came to life, the bittersweet aroma of the smoke mingling with the smell of camels, which, naked and gray-skinned after recently being clipped, wandered freely through the streets. On my way through I was often offered fermented drinking yogurt, airan, which left a tangy flavor that lingered well into the next day.

  In the scheme of things, this relatively smooth passage was nonetheless a fleeting one. After little more than a week, canals became less frequent and vegetation along the banks gave way to shadeless plains of clay and sand. Simultaneously, auls became rare, the days longer and hotter, and then, as I had been warned, the flies came.

  My first encounter was one stifling morning as I attempted to descend the muddy banks of the river. The sludge was so thick there was a risk of the horses becoming bogged and so I had improvised a new bucket for carrying water to and fro. No sooner had I dismounted, tied the horses, and returned with the first pail, than a swarm descended. These weren’t light, pesky mosquitoes, but meaty, gray, large-winged critters, and within minutes,
each horse had trickles of blood running from their spines, down their rumps, ribs, and necks. I went about swatting as many as I could, but as numbers steadily built, I abandoned the river and rode out as quickly as possible. The river that brought life into the desert was, from now on, also to be a curse for me.

  For the next three weeks—the time it took me to reach the old Russian fort of Kazalinsk (which Kazakh-speakers called Kazaly), near the river mouth—the trend of harshening conditions continued. Returning to the northern bank, I watched the silty brown water grow sluggish and the land fade to pale yellow. I adjusted my routine, starting earlier—usually by 3:00 A.M.—and spent more of the day attempting to escape the sun.

  Every day during this period was different yet also somehow the same—a characteristic I found to be true everywhere in the desert during summer, when there were no crisp edges to the horizon, to days, or even to thoughts. It was also true, however, that there were two or three standout exceptions that punctuated the course of my journey along the Syr Darya.

  Already by the time we had reached the Syr Darya, Zhamba, the fifteen-year-old horse that I had acquired in the foothills of the Altai, was looking underweight and weary. He had worked most of his years as a carthorse and his spirit was broken. Externally he exhibited large scars from all the haulage, and through his sad, submissive eyes emanated a melancholy soul. I’d known that sooner or later I would have to retire him.

  While camped on the outskirts of the city of Kyzylorda I arranged to sell Zhamba to a man who agreed to keep him as a riding horse for his grandchildren. At dawn the next morning I went to the local livestock market to find a replacement. Among the hundred or so mounts brought in by herders from afar, I chose a rather gangling but strong-looking bay stallion. He was not an ideal choice given that it was still spring (and stallions were still in a very aggressive mood), but that was the only option in a region where castrations were apparently seldom practiced.

  Three days’ ride from Kyzylorda I left Zhamba with the buyer’s relatives in an aul called Akkum and rode on racked with guilt. I felt like I had betrayed Zhamba by abandoning him in a place where the intensity of heat would have been foreign to him, a horse from the mountains and steppe of eastern Kazakhstan. Yet to take him further into summer would have been a death sentence for him.

  In the scheme of my trip, it was not the first or last time I would be haunted by the decision to leave a horse behind, and although Taskonir and Ogonyok proved reliable, the new stallion was just one of several trades before I happened upon a good long-term third mount.

  Apart from Kyzylorda, there was one other large center I passed along the Syr Darya: the city of Baikonur. A fenced-off cluster of apartment blocks on the northern banks, it lay in the same anonymous desert country that I was becoming accustomed to, although it had long risen from obscurity to international renown. In the 1950s, the featureless desert just north of the Syr Darya, about 200 km east of the Aral Sea, had been chosen as the launch site for the Soviet Union’s space program. From here in 1961, the young Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was sent into orbit, becoming the first man in space. Today, the cosmodrome remained the nucleus of Russia’s space program, catering to an array of scientific, military, and, increasingly, commercial missions. With the impending retirement of the U.S. space shuttle fleet, it also had a crucial role in servicing the International Space Station.

  The city of Baikonur itself—built exclusively to service the cosmodrome—lay on territory leased to the Russian government. A permit was required to enter the city, and inside, it was said, Russian roubles were the official currency.

  Unable to ride through Baikonur, I took a northern route between the cosmodrome and the city. I began early but got caught out in the heat navigating through vast stretches of junk metal, some of which consisted of hundreds of thousands of empty steel cans. I passed satellite dish installations and crossed the northbound rails that are still used to transport the rockets to the launch pad. Above, a large, unusually shaped plane circled. There was something surreal about it all.

  It was a matter of national pride that Kazakhstan continued to play an important role in the history of space exploration. In fact, the large map of Kazakhstan I consulted daily was emblazoned with a picture of the rocket launch pad. I had come to think of it as a symbol of a world ever more interconnected via satellite and Internet—an unlikely icon in a country of almost inconceivable open wilderness.

  I took shelter that night with a herding family on the periphery of Baikonur. The young man who hosted me in his simple mud hut explained that in Soviet times no one had been informed about the rocket launches. His parents had apparently watched in terror from their yurts as the first rockets were shot skyward. Nowadays rockets had become a routine sight but remained part of an unfathomable, incongruous world of little relevance to most herders.

  Just shy of Kazalinsk I broke away from the Syr Darya and began the trek northwest around the northern tip of the remnants of the Aral Sea.

  It was the end of May, and even as prospects of fresh water promised to be fewer and farther between, the temperatures were on the climb. To beat the heat and avoid dehydration I began saddling the horses at sunset with the aim of riding through the night and finding shelter by sunup. This routine, which would see me through the next two months of my journey, was fraught with its own difficulties and risks.

  During my final camp along the banks of the Syr Darya, it became clear that one of the main issues of night riding was that getting rest during the day was virtually impossible. Although I had learned to insulate the tent with horse blankets and pads, laying them over the top, the interior still became so baking hot that it left me in a state of semi-delirium, feeling as if my blood were cooking in my veins. Keeping an eye on the horses was crucial, and at this particular camp a stallion that had pursued us earlier in the morning remained on the attack. Every time I felt a hint of sleep pulling me under, I found myself having to reach for the nearest stick and go charging off again.3

  When the sun went down, my spirits lifted and I set out with conviction, but the lack of sleep soon took its toll and my body surrendered to weariness. In the hours that followed it was only the constant task of keeping a lookout for Tigon that kept me awake. He spent his time roaming far and wide, only homing back in every half hour or so. His black coat was nearly invisible in the night and kept me guessing.

  When gray-blue light did bleed back into the landscape I was nevertheless half asleep and only vaguely aware of my surroundings. It was a dangerous state of mind to be in, especially this morning, as I found myself crossing empty canals via crude bridges made with parallel ramps of narrow, wheel-width steel.

  Faced with such obstacles, I would have ordinarily led each horse individually on foot, but in my somewhat detached state I tried to cross without dismounting. Halfway across the bridge, I felt Taskonir’s lead rope pull out of my hand. As I turned from my perch on the new stallion, Ogonyok—who was tied to Taskonir from behind—reared up, then planted his front hooves wide apart in an effort to reverse away from the bridge. Taskonir was pulled off balance, and I heard the scuffle of hooves on steel, then a visceral crunch as he fell between the two bridge ramps. Fortunately, the plastic pack boxes were wide enough to prevent him falling all the way through, but now he was wedged between the ramps, one leg caught up on the bridge, the other three dangling over the drop to the empty canal below. Ogonyok, still tied to Taskonir’s pack saddle, was pulled forward by the short lead rope and now teetered on the edge of the bank, theatening to fall in on top of Taskonir at any moment.

  I rushed back to untie Ogonyok, then cut Taskonir’s girth strap and ropes. As 450 kg of horse went tumbling down, I shut my eyes. No sooner had I reopened them, however, than Taskonir darted out of the canal—saved by the soft canal bed. I couldn’t believe how foolish I’d been, or lucky I was to escape with little more than some scratches and bruising on Taskonir’s back left leg.

  When I left the bridge my littl
e caravan was shaken up and facing the kind of predicament I had endeavored to avoid. Although I had managed 38 km as the crow flies that night—a very good distance—the delay meant I was marooned in the open in temperatures pushing 40°C. It took another two or three hours to reach water and shade in the next aul, by which time the horses were caked in salt stains from all the sweat and looking shriveled and strung out. Come nightfall, when the whole cycle of night riding began again, I had once again barely rested. At this rate, it was difficult to see how I might make it as far as the Caspian Sea without coming to grief. And yet finding a more sustainable routine was a conundrum—it was dangerous to ride sleep-deprived at night, but suicide to move through the heat of day.

  Three more hard but less eventful night rides brought me to Aralkum, a small community that lay just east of the Aral Sea’s original shoreline and one day south of the former fishing port of Aralsk. Invited in by Dauletbas, a retired train station manager who now made a living rearing camels, I accepted—it was an opportunity to take stock for a couple of days, while also coming to learn more about the Aral Sea.

  Due to the diversion of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya for irrigation, the Aral Sea was a “sea” in name only. What had once been the fourth-largest inland sea of its kind, providing one-sixth of the Soviet Union’s fish supplies, was now a series of deserts and unconnected lakes—one in the north fed by the Syr Darya, and a puddle in the south fed by the Amu Darya that was said to have split into three different lakes, the largest of which was already fast evaporating into a saline swamp.

  During an excursion to Aralsk, Dauletbas accompanied me to the old waterfront where as children he and his friends used to jump into the cooling waters from the pier. Nowadays the harbor was nothing more than a graveyard of rusting ships sinking in the sand. The shoreline had receded by as much as 100 km, leaving most of the fishing fleet stranded in the desert and many of the forty thousand people who had once worked in the fishing industry unemployed.4