by Tim Cope
West of Aralkum we drove over the old seabed, which was little more than a shell-encrusted plain, and visited an aul where mud huts and corrals were under siege by wind-driven banks of sand. In a region where pasture was already very thin on the ground and life particularly marginal, the retreat of the sea had led to creeping desertification and more extreme summers and winters. Compounding these problems, the ever-dropping sea level had caused a dramatic increase in salinity in the remaining waters, which had killed off much of the lake’s vegetation and aquatic life. Frequent windstorms, which once had brought a moderating sea breeze in summer, now whipped up clouds of salt, sand, and toxic chemicals—largely pesticide and fertilizer runoff from the cotton fields of Uzbekistan that had collected on the seabed. These toxic clouds, according to many I spoke to, had caused an epidemic of respiratory, liver, and kidney disease.5
It had been a calculated decision by Soviet authorities to doom the Aral Sea, and the upshot was that while the Kazakhs of the Aral Sea region had watched their health decline and their livelihoods disintegrate in the space of a generation, Uzbekistan had become one of the world’s largest exporters of cotton. And if the Soviet authorities could not have cared less that up to 75 percent of the diverted water was lost to evaporation and seepage in open and largely unlined canals, there was perhaps even less political will from the now independent Uzbekistan to invest in solving the problem.6
It took two days of travel from Aralkum before the northern tip of the old Aral Sea passed behind. Ahead lay around 400 km of steppe and desert to the river Zhem. It was a stretch of particularly arid terrain renowned for claiming the lives of Russian and Cossack soldiers in what had gone down in history as one of imperial Russia’s most humiliating military failures in Central Asia.
The campaign in question—still spoken about by Kazakhs of the region—was an 1839 expedition of five thousand men, untold numbers of horses, and some ten thousand camels that had set out from Orenburg in southern Russia with a mission to free Russian slaves from Khiva, deep in Turkestan.7 The army general charged with leading the campaign, Alexander Perovsky, had planned a route through the Kazakh steppes to the Aral Sea, from where he would carry on through the Kyzylkum Desert. Before departure he was said to have proclaimed that “in two months with God’s help we shall be in Khiva!”
Perovsky led his troops out in early winter, wisely choosing to avoid summer because of the heat and scarcity of water—there were limited wells right across the region, some possibly more than a day’s march apart. Not long into the expedition, however, it became clear he had underestimated the Kazakh steppe (then known as the Kirghiz steppe). The expedition was hit by repeated snowstorms, and come February 1840 the column was forced to retreat, having barely made it halfway to Khiva. During the return, wolves attacked the column—attracted by the rotting flesh of camels that had succumbed to the harsh conditions—and soldiers fell victim to exposure, scurvy, and even snow blindness. By the time the expedition hobbled back into Orenburg, seven months after departure, fewer than fifteen hundred camels remained alive and more than a thousand men had perished, all without the army having reached enemy territory.
To me the tragedy said less about the nature of the landscape or even the incompetence of the Russian soldiers than it did about the skills and hardiness of the nomads who had carved out a livelihood in the region, not to mention the Mongols, who six centuries earlier than Perovsky had used the same region as part of a thoroughfare to Europe. The fact that Carpini, a portly friar from Europe, and later William of Rubruck had traveled through these regions so quickly and made it out alive points to the efficiency and skill of their Mongolian entourage.
In the present day the Moscow–Tashkent train line blazes a trail northwest from Aralsk to Orenburg over some of the very terrain where Perovsky had failed. In the absence of nomads and the desert wells they once maintained, I had the luxury of relying on remote railway auls and sidings along its path for water. Even so, it proved a particularly challenging stretch of terrain.
During a month of travel that took me through to July, I would pass through a landscape of sand dunes, clay flats, and barren uplands with negligible shade. Unlike the Syr Darya, with its army of flies, such were the heat and the dryness that the pale, bleached clay and white sandy earth appeared sterilized of life. I rode exclusively at night, and learned that it was crucial to find water and shade by 8:30 A.M., at which time the great molten orb had well and truly returned over the horizon. When I did get caught out, my long-sleeved shirt, and my saddle became hot to the touch, and the horses’ sweat dried off as quickly as it beaded. Tigon began a routine that would endure for the rest of the summer—sprinting ahead and furiously digging holes in which he would lie for a few minutes until I caught up. When this didn’t help he whined endlessly, his paws burning on the sand and his tongue out, forever wanting water.
Since the only water to be found was in auls, I stayed with families and did not camp, although, somewhat ironically, I did not come to know the people very well. Typically I would stumble into a community feeling spaced-out and groggy and ask for somewhere to rest. My arrival was usually greeted with fanfare, but I could rarely last more than a cup of tea before passing out. The horses would be set free to find whatever grass was available in the vicinity of the aul. Sometimes I would be woken up by the family to be told that the horses had come to the front door of the house looking for their owner. The heat was so oppressive that the horses could do nothing but search out the slightest sliver of shade.
Then, just as everyone was preparing to roll out their mattresses on the floor of the mud huts—or, as was the case in many places, simply out under the stars—I would reemerge, saddle up, and ride on. It was a feeling of acute isolation that I knew would never leave me—moving while the rest of the world slept.
There was, on the other hand, a kind of dreamlike quality to this period of my journey that a part of me truly enjoyed. Although I was following the same path as the railway, I rode far away from it for most of the time, navigating by matching my compass bearing with star formations and following them until the sky faded to blue. At times I rode through auls under the rising moon, discreetly pushing the horses through the sand, disturbing little more than a few camels and dogs. It wasn’t possible to remain awake right through the night; I regularly napped in the saddle, and woke to discover that the horses had taken me astray. At other times I dismounted and slept on the earth. Even rocks could appear as a comfortable mattress when weariness had gotten the better of me. Sunrise was a sublime time of the day, when it felt as if I were riding the waves across the steppe. Once the sun was up, however, the long hours of the doldrums would begin.
Despite being very much immersed in the landscape and occupied by the challenges of summer, I was by no means impervious to goings-on beyond the scheme of my journey. At some point during the past few weeks Kathrin had discovered that she was suffering from Cushing’s syndrome, a deadly disease caused by a brain tumor that produces an elevated release of cortisol into the body. For months Kathrin had been suffering from horrendous symptoms, including rapid weight gain, back pain, and unusual mood swings. It had taken some time before a doctor had discovered the tumor, but he had told her that if it was left untreated, it would be fatal. Just as I was heading through this hottest part of the Kazakh desert, Kathrin was preparing to undergo brain surgery in Germany. I knew that in this region to leave the horses and dog would almost guarantee I would never see them again, and so I did not consider it an option to abandon the journey and travel to Germany. Kathrin did not try to persuade me to leave my journey behind, either, and was very understanding, although I imagine it must have been hurtful that I did not offer to come.
At the same time that Kathrin was preparing for surgery, on the other side of the world, in Cairns, Australia, my longtime friend Cordell Scaife and his partner, Cara Poulton, were readying to fly to Kazakhstan to join me for the month-long trek along the Zhem River. I had often spoken w
ith Cordell—whom I had met at age of nineteen during my six-month stint at Australian National University—about the idea of his coming for one stage of the journey or another, and I was thrilled he could join me. Ironically, though, it meant that while I could look forward to the closeness of a friend during a stint of galling isolation, Kathrin was alone to deal with a far greater struggle.
Fortunately, Kathrin’s surgery, which she underwent not long after Cordell and Cara’s arrival, would prove successful, and she would be on the road to recovery by the time I was nearing the Caspian Sea.
Cordell and Cara joined me at the railway siding of Kopmula, little more than a week’s journey short of the Zhem River. There we went about purchasing two extra horses and a pack camel that I hoped would reduce the burden on my mounts.
Two weeks later we were camped above the meandering Zhem. It was a shallow band of ale-brown water carving out a sunken gorge through wind-whipped hills dotted with dust-coated bushes and wormwood. Farther on, the river split into multiple channels among the curves and ripples of sand dunes.
From where we were, a day’s ride from the junction of the river and the Moscow–Tashkent railway, the Zhem flowed some 600 km southwest through desert country to the Caspian Sea. At various points downstream it apparently dried up and went underground—particularly during the summer. I had also been warned that it was so brackish that only livestock could drink its waters. It had been a wet spring with heavy snowmelt farther north, though, and some had also suggested the river would keep flowing till August. My aim was to follow the river for a month as far as the oil town of Kulsary, 100 km from the Caspian.
Although we set out along the Zhem with the same night-riding routine I had followed since departing the Syr Darya, with water close at hand, we were not reliant on auls and could make camp along the riverbank to see out the heat of day. During the hottest hours, when the temperature breached 40°C, we rolled out of the tents and lay in the river’s shallows. While the sun beat from above, I kept my head down, entranced by multicolored pebbles that shifted beneath the current and minnows that nibbled at my toes. Running as it did through the desert, the Zhem was a miraculous watercourse that the camel and horses also relished. They spent hours in the middle of the river, taking swipes at fresh green reeds and overhanging bushes. Even Tigon joined in, curling up in the water with only his nose and two tall ears poking skyward above the waterline.
When darkness fell, we became accustomed to feeling our way up the bank and onto the open plains, where the horses were adept at tapping into animal tracks that took us on efficient, direct routes, sometimes far away from the wide, arcing bends of the river but ultimately leading back to water. Harvette, as we had named our camel, brought a welcome new cadence and character to these long hours of riding. A seven-year-old female sporting the distinctive double humps of the Bactrian breed, she had a stoic rhythm and a sense of labored care to her every movement that made her very unlike the moody, short-tempered horses.8 In camp, she was always in the mix, forever foraging around my kit bags. It was not uncommon to see her sucking on my sauce bottle or getting into other food—on one occasion she devoured an entire watermelon. When we slept, she often wandered a fair distance from camp, and it was quite some task to locate her and bring her back.
There was another shift in the nature of the journey that was evident in the early days along the Zhem. For two months I had been absorbed with the task of surviving summer. There had been precious little opportunity to get a real feel for the people, particularly while following the railway. Now, however, far from the economy of any main thoroughfare, and more accustomed to the rigors of summer travel (and greatly helped by Cara and Cordell), I could turn my attention to the nomad heritage of the region.
For some weeks I had been in the lands of the Kishi Juz, or the Junior Horde, a group of Kazakh tribes renowned as a hardened warrior people of the desert. Their territory stretches from the Aral Sea to the Caspian Sea, and from Russia’s southern border as far south as Turkmenistan. In the past, tribes of the Kishi Juz had wintered over in the deep south between the Caspian and the Aral, then migrated north to cooler climes for the summer.
For the first week and a half we passed typical examples of Soviet-era collectives that had brought together former nomads into settled communities. There were also permanent summer stations where families ran large herds of camel and sheep. At such a station beyond an aul called Szharkamys I inadvertently stumbled on an intriguing clue as to the fate of nomadic culture in the region.
While I lay in the family’s mud hut nibbling on boiled lamb scalp, my eyes caught sight of a familiar curved piece of timber among a row of slats laid into the ceiling. It was a roof pole from the frame of a yurt—and an old one at that. I mentioned this to the herder of the house, and he looked at me sadly.
In this region of Aktubinsk Oblast, he explained, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many herders, believing that independence and capitalism would usher in a new era of modernity, had hacked up their yurts—mostly family heirlooms from before collectivization—and used the frames for everything from firewood to building corrals. By the time they realized they would not be liberated from a life on the land, they were without yurts or the skills to make them. Now many herders who moved between seasonal camps made do in summer with rusty old wagons that were like tinderboxes in the heat.
It was hard to know how credible the herder’s story was, but just two days downstream from the family’s station—nearing the border between Aktubinsk Oblast and Western Kazakhstan Oblast—we entered remote country where the rhythms of nomadic life had certainly not faded.
At sunrise we rode out onto an elevated plain of powder-dry steppe looking for water. Long before we saw the river, there came a billowing plume of dust and the distinctive rumble of sheep and goats. After some time, the unmistakable figure of a man on the back of a camel came into view. Sitting wedged between the two humps, he wore a long scarf under his hat, and with a whip in hand, he rocked back and forth, pushing a sea of goats and sheep out to pasture. The gap between us rapidly shrank until the man was leaning down from his giant animal with a handshake, imploring us to return with him to his home.
The summer camp from which the herder had appeared was a sight to behold. We were led through a huddle of around two hundred camels in various states of leisure. Some sat on their haunches asleep, while babies frolicked on shaky stick-like legs and two or three bulls sauntered about, their front thighs thick as tree trunks, and humps the size of small refrigerators swaying to and fro. There was something dinosaur-like about their power and grace.
In the center of the huddle lay the camp itself—animal pens, a rusty old wagon, and an underground hut dug into the top of the riverbank. The camp overlooked the shallow waters of the Zhem and, beyond it, sweeping sand dunes and crusty plains. As I would witness during the remainder of the journey to Kulsary, many Kazakhs of the region spent summer squirreled away underground during the day, and the cooler nights sleeping in a yurt or simply on mattresses under the stars. All the work, which primarily involved milking camels, was done at dawn and dusk.
After unsaddling, we were led to a young woman who stood barely as high as the camel’s back legs, her own right leg bent up to support a milk bucket on her thigh. While she milked, her infant daughter, who had barely learned to walk, stumbled about among the camels, unfazed as a couple of particularly gigantic specimens edged closer and gently sniffed at her hair.
When the milking was done, the full pails were whisked away for the production of cream, yogurt, dried curd, and fermented camel milk, known as shubat. Two teenage boys who had been lying in wait for the last camel to be freed mounted their horses and roused the herd with shouts and whistles.
As the boys and their horses worked like a tugboat, pushing and pulling at the vast herd, the camels rose reluctantly to their feet, then moved to the edge of the riverbank—a precipice where the steppe dropped away in a rather dramatic bank of eroding cl
ay and sand. Only when the animals were bunched up did the first camels take the plunge. It began as a trickle—a few camels clambering down to the water—but soon became a torrent. Legs flew, saggy lips wobbled, the earth trembled, the sky filled with dust, and one by one they leaped into the river.
The boys continued after them, whistling and charging, urging on the lazier ones at the rear. From back up on the bank I watched as the herd crossed the river to the far side, where they rapidly shrank to nothing more than faint specks in a land of empty horizons.
Back at camp, the temperature was cranking toward 40°C, and what had been a hive of activity was now a picture of desolation. Hot wind gusted from the west, picking up dried dung from the empty pens and tossing it viciously through the air. A couple of dogs lay under the rusty wagon. Nothing moved. Tigon stuck close to my horses, which were standing still in the river below.
We were invited down some clay steps into the underground hut, where the glare and exposure gave way to darkness and intimacy. For some time we sat propped up on cushions, gulping down fresh bowls of fatty camel milk in the dark. But then our host, a man named Murat Guanshbai, lit a candle and the world reexpanded a little, revealing a room padded with felt mats and wall hangings and featuring shelves cut into the clay for the display of ornaments.
Murat was as exotic as his surrounds. He had a square, open face with a short flat nose, and his almond eyes were protected by bushy, overhanging eyebrows. Unlike most Kazakhs’ hair, his was thick and curly as steel wool, and his jaw was masked with stubble. Murat and his family were Kozha, one of the tribes that composed the Kishi Juz. The Kozha were known as the descendants of Bedouin missionaries to Kazakhstan some thousand years ago.