The Lost Heart of Asia (17 page)

The mullah peered round at a man sitting quietly nearby. ‘Kakajan', he said, ‘knows the desert.'

It was the first time I had noticed him. A man of fifty, perhaps, he squatted behind us, self-effacing or dejected, listening. His burnished face was lit by eyes like black searchlights, and his cheekbones bulged raw and high, the flesh beneath them sunk to stark cavities. He nodded faintly at the mullah. A short moustache made a white punctuation-mark under his nose. ‘We should go before night,' he said.

The driver drained his tea and we prepared to leave. Opposite the door the most lubricious of the calendar lovelies postured for the month of May. The mullah glanced at her indulgently and caught my eye. ‘That is Miss Luxe,' he explained. She simmered back at him.

He left us at his compound gate, his hand lifted to the antelope over his heart; and Kakajan, Manet and I drove west into emptiness. To either side of the potholed road the saxaul filled the distance with a spinach-green ocean. Only after an hour did it start to shrink and the sand spread a pinkish film as far as we could see. It was bitterly cold. Vertically above us the sky was bruised with storm-clouds, but to the south, along a clear horizon, a wind was chafing the sand into a sunlit smoke, and processions of dust-devils were spinning through a yellow, mortuary light.

Manet drove in silence, but Kakajan hunched behind us, watching. He was dressed for action, chipper and trim in polished boots and a white anorak. On his head perched an old trilby hat which gleamed like dented metal. He looked at once alert, detached and sad. The desert was potentially fertile, he said, it needed only water. After the spring rain it came alive with mushrooms, snakes and orchids. ‘This is a golden earth!' He talked in a compressed, fast Russian, sucked back in his teeth where he chewed
nass,
a foul-smelling blend of tobacco, saxaul sap, lime and ash. ‘There used to be people out there, centuries ago. There were twenty million in the Khorezm alone, it's said, and now look . . .'

The humps of camels, apparently wild, were moving above the shrubs in slow motion, Bactrian and dromedary together. Kakajan remembered their herds from childhood. In Kruschev's day, he said, you were only allowed one camel, ten sheep and a donkey of your own, so the camels started to vanish. Yet there was a time when caravans had criss-crossed the whole desert. ‘You could go from Kunia Urgench to Ashkhabad just following the wells – and they're still there.' He pointed to a ruffle of hillocks in the sands. ‘A three-sided bank means a well; a single bank means an open pool, where you can bring the camels down. That's how they went then. From water to water. Yes, right across the Black Sands!'

He himself had no settled home. He exuded a gypsy hardi-hood. He represented some factory in Krasnodar, he said, and did a small trade taking vegetables from Kunia Urgench to the Caspian by train. His melancholy detachment made me wonder about him. ‘You could travel where you wanted in the old days,' he said; then came the familiar bitterness: ‘The borders were created by the Russians.'

Manet asked sceptically: ‘But now the borders are here, how will you remove them?'

‘The people will remove them,' said Kakajan. He looked suddenly naïve under his curious hat. ‘Nobody wants them. We'll make a Turkish Commonwealth!'

Manet's lips twitched. ‘And where will be the capital?'

Kakajan looked at him as if he were a simpleton. ‘Kunia Urgench, of course!'

‘Why?'

He thought. ‘In the old days there were only two capitals for Islam. Mecca in the west and Kunia Urgench in the east. Everybody was here.' His mind now brimmed with hearsay and fantasy. ‘Omar Khayyám was here! Navoi was here. They invented everything here! It was all right then.'

Manet only repeated: ‘Then.'

‘And look at the roads!' sighed Kakajan. ‘The Russians didn't like us driving, so they kept them bad.' We were crashing across a minefield of craters and corrugations. He turned to me. ‘Will you write about our roads? Write that this is a Soviet road, that is why it's so rotten. Now that we're independent, there will only be Turcoman roads and it'll be all right.' He tapped my hand. ‘Make sure you write that.'

The car bucked like a stallion at every pothole, while Manet fretted about his chassis and tyres. But Kakajan urged him on with petulant cries, enticing him with the legend of Dev Kesken. It was a place of wild splendour, he said, where a demon had once fought with God . . . .

For a long time, far to our west, a grey line had crept across the horizon, barely noticeable at first, but gradually rising. I was more than a hundred miles from any place where foreigners were meant to be, but the police had vanished, and the rules with them. We veered off the tarmac and made across virgin sand. The distant pencil-stroke had hardened into a cliff which overspread our whole skyline. Where it turned west, it reared up sheer 200 feet above the sand, crowned by a broken watch-tower and a domed tomb. At its foot stood a mullah's hut. While Manet smoked and groaned at the sky, Kakajan went inside to pray. He wanted the mullah's blessing on our journey, he said. Dev Kesken was only a few miles away now, but it was a savage place. ‘There was this demon . . .'

While he prayed, I climbed the winding cliff-path alone. Desiccated wooden poles stood stiff in the hard earth, and their prayer-rags streamed in the wind. Across the storm-racked summit, where the way levelled to a plateau of shining sand, pilgrims had covered the ground with thousands of small stones leant delicately against one another as memorials to their passage. They surrounded the mausoleum like a fakir's bed.

I stepped hesitantly through its breached enclosure. Beneath the dome was interred an obscure dervish named Sultan Ibrahim, and the wind-blasted graves of three other saints huddled in its fold. Even Kakajan had known nothing of them. It was enough that they were old, and holy, and had performed miracles. Long-extinguished candles and lamps clustered around them. Charred tea-jugs stood in votive rows, and pots stuffed with rags. I walked there in chilled wonder. It seemed a violent, shamanistic place, where Islam had never been. My footsteps crackled in its silence. One grave was inscribed ‘The Living Princess'. She lay under a naked mound. The stark light and dry air turned it immortal: the dreaming epitaph and contradictory dust. I felt I was standing at the origins of faith. The wind set me shivering uncontrollably. I stared over the cliff-edge at the desert stretching eastward. Beneath me, in a precipitous curtain, the escarpment zigzagged out of sight through its own shadows and the lowering sun. Its shorn immensity suggested some divide across the map of the world. Beyond here, it seemed to say, everything changes. Far below, the matchstick figure of Kakajan was waving at me to hurry down.

Half an hour later we were weaving under the cliffs in the dying light. They rose like a man-made wall beside us. Far into the distance their veins streamed smooth until the whole escarpment resembled some layered and preposterous cake. Its strata descended through flamingo and coral pink to marmorial white and green, and a procession of caves was scooped along its softer veins. But its summit hung slaty with rocks, like a flaking roof, which had sometimes crashed into the abyss where we drove, split into shale and dust.

At first I could not guess what had created this. Then I glanced at my map and with a shock I realised where we were. We were driving along the abandoned bed of the Oxus river. Three times within historical memory its enormous flood has wavered between the Caspian and Aral seas. No wonder the cliffside strata flowed like water! Above us the Usturt plateau was set in clay for hundreds of miles, while invisible to our south a mosaic of lakes and marshes, some below sea level, traced the dead river almost to the Caspian. As recently as the sixteenth century the Oxus was flowing along the titanic ravine where we now drove, ebbing into distant marshes and leaving the Aral to wither away. Already we had travelled for miles along its floor, while the phantom boats of ancient Khorezm sailed thirty feet over our heads.

Kakajan pointed ahead. ‘There it is. Dev Kesken.'

Some way from the scarp, on the edge of the lost river, a line of walls had come into view. Even the driver exclaimed and touched his face in blessing. ‘You see, there is a God! If we hadn't had tea with the mullah, we'd never have found this place!'

But a minute later he shrank from the cold with a world-weary grimace, and remained in the car nibbling cubes of toast, while Kakajan and I walked towards the ruin. At first we could see nothing beyond its long outer rampart, which crossed our vision in a ribbon of etiolated yellow under the fading sun. Kakajan had gone quiet. He knew nothing of the place but its name, and his head was full of demons. Our attenuated shadows wrinkled beside us. If this was the place he said it was, it had been linked with a clifftop castle to the north, and had once been a city named Vezir, where the first Uzbek ruler of Khorezm, the sultan Ilbars, was proclaimed khan in 1512. The last Englishman to have seen it was perhaps Jenkinson, who arrived in 1558 to find the river already bending its course back towards the Aral Sea, and threatening the land with wilderness.

Now it was hard to imagine it ever peopled. Dusk was turning the land to amber. The wall looked paltry at our approach. The wind cried faintly in its fissures. I walked through its gate without expectation, and the outer vallum fell behind us. Then, in one of those moments which snare the unguarded traveller, there unfurled before us the ramparts of a phantasmal inner city, whose towers bulged from their battlements, eight to each side, between chalk-white walls. It stood stupendous in its solitude, far from anywhere now habitable. A stricken beauty touched it. Its clay bricks had been smoothed into one substance by the compacting rain and wind, so that all decoration had been rubbed away from them, leaving abstract bones.

We entered between towers over a choked ditch, and found ourselves in wasteland. The rectangle of walls stretched some 400 yards square, but enclosed only tamarisk and camel dung. Yet around them the parapets and walkways rose almost untouched and the loopholes still glared into desert.

Only the melancholy hooting of the driver's horn wrenched me away. He was frightened of the long road back, and refused point-blank to continue to the clifftop castle. It was night long before we reached Kunia Urgench. In the oasis outskirts, Kakajan said, his brother ran a state farm where we could sleep; so the driver started back alone while we trudged there under an icy blaze of stars.

There was no one else about. On the hoardings which flanked the farm gateway, dimly visible in the dark, stately youths and landgirls looked upward to a Marxist sunrise, their arms heaped with fruit and cornsheaves. But beyond, the track petered out among a cluster of mud cottages. It was heart-rendingly poor. All around us in the starlight the salinated earth glimmered like snowfields. Broken wooden steps led into the yard of the director's home, a little bigger than the rest. Some ghostly cattle lifted their heads as we passed, and a tiny donkey stirred.

I had imagined the directors of such places to be heartless engineers of statistics, beleaguered by quotas and corruption. But instead, a bespectacled peasant with a long, gentle face emerged to greet us in his pyjamas. His hair fell lank over a narrow forehead, and gold teeth gleamed in his smile. He did not believe, at first, that I was British. ‘I think my brother is joking,' he said. ‘Perhaps you're an Estonian.' But thereafter, from time to time, he would gaze at me with a distant, amazed affection at my visit, and murmured ‘English, English . . .' and shook his long head, and said: ‘I'm sorry for the poverty here. We have nothing. Everything's very hard. I'm so sorry.'

We had surprised him supping on hardened bread and green tea. A naked bulb dangled from the reed thatch, leaking shadow round walls of mud and straw, which he could not afford to whitewash. Against one wall was a clay stove that only gave out smoke, he said, it was useless even in this cold; and fifteen years before, his wife had brought with her two painted marriage chests, which stood in one corner.

As we settled on the felt carpets, his eldest son came in with a basin, towel and ewer, and knelt while I washed my hands; and little by little the whole family assembled round in biblical formality. Two daughters fluttered in, then vanished, and a row of small sons squatted before me and gaped.

‘They've never seen a foreigner before,' the director said.

At once I had an attack of ambassadorial nerves. The boys scrutinised my every movement with bright or stunned eyes. I clamped my lips over my gap-tooth, and offered them sweets. Their fingers wrenched together or plucked at their toes. I became as jittery as they. I was suddenly embodying not only Britain, but the whole Western world. Whatever I did – if I scowled or dribbled or picked my teeth – that was what the West did.

Their mother darted in barefoot and arranged quilts and cushions. She was dark-eyed and handsome, but life had spun her fine. From her flowery dress poked out wafer-thin ankles and long, sinewy hands. Her husband teased her as she worked: ‘She's old, she's slow, she can't do a thing any more', and she bustled and laughed at him, banking cushions round us.

Kakajan, meanwhile, sat beside me dismantling and repairing their tiny cooker, which looked rusted away. He had fallen into a quiet, solitary place as elder brother, respected and indefinably sad. Only now did he take off his trilby from flattened hair, which caressed his mahogany face in a shock of premature whiteness. After a long time the woman carried in a stew of apples, marrows and a little mutton, scalding in its oil. This had taken two hours to prepare, its ingredients gathered in panic from other houses. The children filtered away, one by one, and we three men ate alone – but it was bitter to eat what they could not afford.

Hospitality here could blind the traveller. Lulled by its traditional language, I used often to forget the squalor – sometimes the brutality – of my hosts' lives, and think: these are a good and happy people. But in this desolate farm the signs were of a benign unity. They examined my passport incredulously, running their blackened fingernails along its crest.
‘Dieu et mon Droit
Her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State requires ‘ The director gaped dumbly at its visas. ‘And I thought my brother was joking.'