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IN 1918, a year after the Russian Revolution, Lenin signed a decree “On the Allocation of 50 Million Roubles for Irrigation Development Works in Turkestan and on the Organization of these Works.” As in Xinjiang, national self-sufficiency in cotton was the aspiration, but while cotton thrives in heat, its thirst is such that 750 millimetres of water per year is necessary to keep it alive; this, in the Aral Basin, where annual precipitation is at most 350 millimetres, and usually much less, even in the slough of Aralsk. A decree signed by Lenin was not to be ignored. It was those rivers identified by Voeikov, futilely debouching into the Aral Sea, that would be caused to furnish the required water. Decree after decree followed. In 1927 the Soviet Union imported 41 per cent of its cotton; six years later the figure was 3 per cent. President Nazarbayev maintained in a recent interview that “nobody thought to calculate what would happen to the Aral Sea.” But the calculation was done, profit set against loss—the continued existence of the world’s fourth largest lake and the sixty thousand livelihoods it supported vs. national self-sufficiency in cotton—by Voeikov, by Lenin, by Khrushchev and Brezhnev. These so-called “virgin lands,” steppe and desert alike, must satisfy the national need, just as the Aral Sea and its labour had been called upon in 1921 to feed the starving of the Volga. In 1968 an engineer said shruggingly: “It is obvious to everyone that the evaporation of the Aral Sea is inevitable.”
In Kazakhstan and its southern neighbour, Uzbekistan, 32,000 kilometres of irrigation canals were dug to supply water for cotton and wheat. In the early 1960s the first centimetres of the sea’s recession were recorded. Over the following decade the level continued to fall, by on average twenty centimetres per year; during the 1970s it was fifty centimetres per year; between 1980 and 2000, eighty centimetres per year. It was as if a breach in a dyke were widening itself. By 1982 the Amu Darya had been so heavily diverted that it ceased, for a time, to reach the Aral Sea at all, while the Syr Darya’s flow had been reduced to 10 per cent of its former volume. The vast mass of that diverted water was squandered—soaking into the deserts from unlined canals (trenches shovelled in the sand) or evaporating from undrained fields. In 1989 the Aral became two separate bodies of water, the Large Aral to the south and the Small Aral to the north, divided by the now dry Berg Strait. By 2004 the sea’s former area of 67,000 square kilometres was reduced to a combined 17,000 square kilometres. Today it is smaller still, and south of the Berg Strait the water has all but gone.
But it was not that the fish were left gasping on the exposed sands, like guppies in a cracked aquarium. Reduced to a third of its original area, the water became correspondingly saltier. The fishes’ coastal spawning areas were the first to be affected. Algae, zooplankton, phytoplankton perished. Fish like the barbel and the sturgeon, which can tolerate only low levels of salt, migrated to the interior and its remaining enclaves of fresh water, until even these were contaminated. Of the twenty edible species in 1960, thirty years later, in 1990, there were only four, all saltwater-dwellers: bullhead, sprat, stickleback, atherina, plus the introduced flounder.
Serik was standing under the Toktarev, smoking and checking his phone. He barely registered the absurdity of it any more: visitor after visitor gazing into the vacancy, trying to understood what it meant, reluctant to concede that it meant only what they’d known it to mean even before they got off the train. An eyeless socket—but the organ gouged out not by accident or malice, but by its owner.
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THE FOLLOWING DAY we drove towards what had once been the sea, south along a ten-kilometre dirt road that served a “fish-receiving station,” as Serik called it, where the day’s catch was landed and weighed before being transported to Aralsk for gutting, freezing and canning. As we passed under the white steel archway that marked Aralsk’s boundary, the surfaced roads coarsened to rubble and mud. Serik stopped for a smoke beside a field of rubbish: kitchen waste, construction waste, broken furniture, clothes, bones, the ubiquitous, uncountable vodka bottles of Central Asia. It was the town’s tip, and of course it was where the desert began—the desert that itself was viewed as little more than one giant tip. And this was a description that might be extended: to the oblast of Kyzylorda, of which Aralsk was a part; but beyond that, in the Kremlin mind, to Kazakhstan itself. There were the deportees of the Second World War—the mistrusted millions of Greeks, Volga Germans, Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks, Turks, Tartars and Koreans, dispersed across the republic. There was Solzhenitsyn, banished to Ekibastuz in the north-east; Trotsky to Almaty; and Dostoevsky to Semipalatinsk (then Semey) in Kazakh Siberia, a thousand kilometres north of Almaty. And there was the steppe close to Dostoevsky’s exile, the so-called Polygon, where between 1949 and 1990 Moscow carried out six hundred nuclear explosions—detonations that made those at Maralinga and Lop Nor seem like firecrackers. For days after each aboveground test steppe eagles would be seen standing motionless on their telegraph poles, blinded.
With the appropriation of the sea’s water came a drop in the volume available for evaporation. Rainfall decreased, and the lowering of the Aral waters accelerated. The restraining effect of the sea on the local climate diminished. Summers became hotter and longer, winters shorter and colder. Humidity declined, drought-days multiplied. The powdery seabed became a repository for dust storms. Millions of tonnes of matter each year are whipped from the surface and taken up in towering plumes to be broadcast across the Aral Basin as far as Lithuania and Afghanistan. Unlike the burans of the Taklamakan, these dust storms are tainted, containing not only sediment but the sea’s residual salt, which, settling on the already sickly land, has caused it to sicken further. Sometimes water itself causes desertification. Excessive irrigation, especially in areas of high evaporation, causes dissolved salts to accumulate in the soil until nothing will grow. Poorly managed and improperly drained, Kazakhstan’s new cottonlands became tepid swamps. The water, standing vainly on the surface, evaporated, leaving only a rime of salt on the cotton and in the soil. As the Aral Sea shrank, the crops that its waters had been diverted to sustain failed. Thus the new desert that has emerged on the onetime bed of the Aral Sea is itself surrounded by desertified land. And meanwhile the toxins of that same failing agronomy—those mountains of fertiliser, defoliants, herbicides and pesticides that were required merely to maintain crop yields—have seeped into watercourses and into the land, their residues filtering into the Syr Darya’s delta lakes and contributing to the dust-load swept into the atmosphere from the dry seabed. The blood of Kazakhstan’s children contains DDT at levels twenty times higher than their European counterparts. Oesophageal cancer, congenital deformities, jaundice, anaemia, impaired immune function, gastritis, heart disease, hepatitis—all have burgeoned locally since the 1960s. Average life-expectancy in Central Asia’s cottonlands is twenty years below that of the former Soviet Union as a whole.
Troops of swaying Bactrian camels hung about at the roadside, the colour of old bronze. For Serik there was little distinction between steppe—dala—and desert, shōl. You can seldom step across the desert’s edge as you might from land to sea, let alone from one political jurisdiction to another. Say you’re driving across steppe dense with succulent grass, perhaps blooming with tulips—then, look around, and it has become something else, you are somewhere new: drier, the vegetation sparer, the birds gone. This is how the desert tends to come upon you.
As we sped towards the sea the camels at the trackside bucked and galloped briefly like dead leaves thrown up by a passing gust, before settling—becoming still as only a Bactrian can be still, displaying the same immense imperiousness with which, you suspect, they would watch an onrushing tidal wave—and surveyed us, fixedly. These were the “undomesticated and savage animals” William Palgrave described. The farmers would no more ride one than they would a cow; they were everything but pets and steeds—haulage; meat and milk; hide and hair. You would follow wit
h your eyes a branch line of telegraph poles to a low cluster of shacks that was a camel farm—a smouldering scribble on the pale land, as if scratched in by a splint of charcoal—and tracing the line of poles to or from the farm would be a parade of thirty camels. Lost in snow or heat, the best advice, Serik said, was to follow the wires: they’ll take you eventually to a farm, a village, a camel man’s bivouac, sure as river to sea.
Even far from the original shore, where it had been above water for a million years, the land resembled a former lakebed: not only the sand and the alluvial grit, but the flatness and the occasional knolls like islands. On the summit of each one was the spiked formation of a family cemetery. The fish-receiving station stood at the end of a narrow spit branching from the track where the land shelved off to the south. For the first time the vast drained depression was comprehensible rolling out ahead; thirty kilometres off, the soaring cliffs of the Aral Sea’s onetime shores. The station today resembled a naval fortification shelled and overrun; it was impossible to rebuild it in the imagination: only a slumped stack of concrete slabs bristling with exposed reinforcement rods. Why, I wondered, had it been demolished? Serik didn’t know. Where once water had lapped a loading wharf, now the tumble of concrete stood three storeys above a salt lake no bigger than half a hectare and no deeper than a puddle. Only thirty years ago on any unfrozen afternoon boats would be discharging their day’s catch here, the place glad with the clamour of the day’s end. Edging down the embankment, I stood, finally, on the dry seabed. In the distance was a shimmering rank of saltpans. I left Serik and walked south.
The seabed expanded before me, a plain of grey porridge, of doused ashes, and within ten minutes the horizon on all sides had pulled back to no more than a paler or darker line battening land to sky. The first kilometre was strewn with scalloped off-white shells little bigger than a thumbnail (you could scoop them up in handfuls) and hummocks of low vegetation, near-perfect circles of glasswort and smotherweed. Step by step these hummocks and the shells became fewer, as if the plain had been swept from its centre to its edges, until nothing was left but the frailest driftwood twig, rolled across the surface by the wind; or a rusted enamel mug, half-buried and packed with shell-shards; or a wedge of glass from a bottle dropped into the blue waters fifty years before. And then nothing, no appeal to the eye.
My boots got leaden as a deep-sea diver’s. Every few minutes it was necessary to stop and scrape the mud from my soles with the piece of glass, kept in one hand as I walked. When the fish-receiving station had been left behind there was nothing to advise you of your progress. If desert evokes thoughts of the sea, it is no coincidence—after all, often you will be walking on an ancient lakebed. But this was different: in terms of the sea’s lifespan, the water had gone in an instant; and in that abruptness was a terrifying violence. Standing in a place where water has once been, you are alert to the threat of its rushing back, like an unparting Red Sea, no matter how improbable its return. I looked back and there were my footprints, a darker procession backing away; there was the rain-dimpled lakebed, the sky with its cruising clouds.
Under the horizon shimmered those plaques of white—salt—that I had wanted to reach before turning back (dusk was coming). It was a reassurance to have a destination in sight, even if the saltpans appeared no closer than when I had seen them on setting out half an hour ago. As I went on, pausing to pare the scurf of mud from my boots, the broken white line seemed to recede correspondingly. A place devoid of landmarks or way-markers can be as confounding as any maze. I walked for another half-hour, mud-shackled, and still the salt flats seemed to be no closer, and when I turned to look back again, the derelict fish-receiving station, and Serik and the Land Cruiser, were no longer visible on the horizon, and thus the line of my footprints, like a caver’s safety-twine, was the only way of knowing where I’d come from and how to get back. The sky was darkening; I turned around, tracing my own footprints, so that to one coming across the double rank it would look like someone had been to harvest something beyond the horizon.
As I neared the fish-receiving station, I noticed again those low circular hummocks that had encroached, over the years, spot by spot, from the shores of the former seabed; this was how life retook a place divested of it. “Primary succession”—the commencement of biology on a slate wiped clean: a cooled lava field, or the rasped track left by a glacier, or a drained seabed…There are few places so antibiotic that seed and substrate will be permanently put off. One place becomes another. These button-shaped islands of vegetation had been populated by pioneers. I stepped onto one to scrape my soles. Around the plants’ stems a new soil was trapped, windblown sandy soil, loess, and in turn the young humus laid down as the first generations died. These isolated discs—each no more than a pace across—would multiply and coalesce further, just as they had at the plain’s edge, as raindrops on dust multiply and coalesce. Small bands of birds treated these discs as islands, flitting from one to the next. When I was two hundred metres from the fish-receiving station a dull slap carried across the sediment, then another—Serik, in a cloud of dust, holding a rubber floor-mat from the Land Cruiser, beating the dried mud from it. Seeing me, he raised his hand, as if hailing a returning trawler.
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THE FOLLOWING MORNING we drove out to Zalanash, one of the old fishing villages, sixty kilometres south-east of Aralsk. The village was signposted from far across the plain by twin conical hills plastered with snow and called locally “the tits.” Again, those bristling cemeteries raised on their hills, assemblages that sometimes had the appearance of an encamped army—the panorama afforded by their station; their defensibility. You felt surveilled. Alongside the track, at every bend and crossroads and junction and blind hill, a monument or several monuments had been erected to the road-dead. Usually these were slender pyramidal towers of rusted sheet steel and not much taller than myself. The appearance they had of rudimentary rockets did not seem inappropriate, and not only because the cosmodrome was nearby. Scarcely so much as a metre of verge, I noticed, was clear of empty vodka bottles thrown from passing vehicles. There was a connection between the glass and those steel towers.
It was a coastal landscape, and the skies were coastal; cloudless, not blue but powdery white like fired lead. Along the road were the endless telegraph poles, and at the base of each pole a heap of spoil. And alongside the road, where drains had been dug, further heaps of spoil a metre high, one after another, kilometre after kilometre. And this repetition—the telegraph poles with their spoil heaps, then the closer unbroken line of spoil heaps—became hypnotic, and in their repetition was a sense that the road might go on like this for ever. The spell was broken by a large bird perching on one of the roadside heaps, a steppe eagle, Serik said, the same hard burnished bronze colour as the camels. It was watching, but seemed to watch nothing in particular, neither us nor any special point on the steppe, but everything, as if its alertness were universal.
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ZALANASH MEANS “NAKED,” and naked it was, as a person raised by wolves. In the distance was a rise of rocky land beyond which, Serik said, lay the waterless sea.
Under the steel arch that heralded every village, and down the hard-packed earth of Zalanash’s broad main thoroughfare we drove, white housing compounds hunkered on either side. On the edge of the street were more billboards hailing the president. We drove on, the roadway tipping down towards the sea and Zalanash’s onetime landing berths and slipways—and then the wind slamming against the vehicle’s flank, and once more the colossal dry crater.
I climbed out of the Land Cruiser. A cliff-face, perhaps twenty metres high, a couple of kilometres away to my right; another, snow-topped, ten kilometres away to my left; and ahead nothing but the dry lakebed corrugated by spits and sandbars. But not lunar or stripped, not a saltscape or sandscape: camels had been put out to graze on the carpet of halophytes that had developed sin
ce the great reversal of thirty years ago. The track, deep-cut into the surface, as if a monolith had been dragged across the desert, was leading me towards a dark mechanical constellation in the distance, eerie as the abandoned craft of a failed invasion.
Serik, as usual, stayed in the warm Land Cruiser. I walked until I could no longer hear the radio. Apart from the scattered camels, swaying on their splint legs, there was the shrilling of the pale finches that skimmed in mobs between denser patches of vegetation, the same birds I had seen near the fish-receiving station, less like things flying, flap-flap-glide, than projectiles collectively blasted from one point to the next. More abundantly there were the “great gerbils” (thousands per hectare, there must have been), tawny rattish things whose burrow-holes cratered and honeycombed certain plots so densely that all vegetation was discouraged, and to inadvertently walk across one meant collapsing the animals’ tunnels and sinking ankle-deep into the sediment. Occasionally one of them would sight the intruder from a dozen metres and, rather than ducking instantly into its burrow, would pause in scrutiny—neither eagle nor fox nor wolf, but predator, predator; and—blink—vanish, into its subterrain of fishbones and clamshells. As so often in the desert, there was a sense of being watched: the birds, the gerbils, the camels, not one of them was unaware of you.
The Immeasurable World Page 19