The Lost Heart of Asia (5 page)

Yet the city itself had died. My feet fell disembodied in its dust. Here and there courses of hefty baked brick still showed clear in the walls, only to be engulfed again. I was wandering a monochrome maze. An east wind beat in my ears, but seemed to touch nothing else. Once only, on a distant battlement, I glimpsed the uncanny, red-haired boy, watching.

We approached Geok-Tepe at dusk. Safar was neither bitter nor reverent at reaching his people's Calvary, but chattered on with a hardy brightness. Southward, the mountains lifted to grassy plateaux rolling with thunder-clouds. We crossed a lonely railway-line.

‘That was why we went to war with the Russians,' Safar said. ‘They wanted to bring the railway here, but we Turcomans hated it.' Unconsciously he was peddling a Soviet version of the conflict, I suspected: an interpretation of czarist imperialism which made the Turcomans look backward. As for the Russians, a confusion of motives – the greed for trade and raw materials, a hunt for secure borders, outrage at the slave-traffic in Slavs – drove the czarist empire piecemeal to the walls of Geok-Tepe. In the end the void and weakness of all this land – a simple power-vacuum – sucked the Russians in.

At first we glimpsed nothing but a small town scattered in the distance, and the quiet railway. Then we were driving beside the concrete enclosure of a collective farm, which masked other, older walls. Intentionally, perhaps, it had been sited here to lay the past to sleep. It was called ‘Peace'. But after a while its vineyards petered out, and there moved over the pastureland a low switchback of earth ramparts, like the spine of a serpent buried in the scrub.

We scrambled up it. Beside us a crenellated outwork had disintegrated to a stump, bristling with artemisia. A drift of barbed wire crowned the summit. As I reached it, I stopped in amazement. Below me, as far as I could see in the dusk, there fell open an immense quadrangle of ramparts almost three miles in circumference. It glimmered over the plain and was utterly deserted. Here 35,000 Tekke tribespeople, with 10,000 mounted warriors, had assembled in a teeming tent-city. Some of the battlements stood only twelve feet high now – after the siege their upper courses had been stripped away to cover the slain – but for hundreds of yards they rose eerily intact. Their double parapet ran in a worn corridor where the loopholes and rifle-pits had eroded to cracks or wholesale breaches. In those embrasures, after the battle, many men were found still sitting where they had been shot, some of them dead for days, their heads slumped between their knees.

We came to where a new tomb was being built. Its foundations enclosed a stone marker with the name of the dead leader and the fatal date, 1881. Safar dropped to the earth, whispering prayers, then we circled the grave together. I asked if it had been accurately remembered. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘Local people remember these things. And they paid for the tomb.'

For a while, in the thickening twilight, we stumbled along those haunted ramparts. They ran before us in hillocks of connected earth, slashed by floodwaters and artillery. Beyond the mound where the Turcomans had set up a battery and observation-post, the southern walls had melted into twilight and the fatal breach was subsumed beneath the collective farm. Somewhere nearby the Russians' redoubt had pushed to within seventy yards of the fortifications as they mined beneath them, so that their soldiers could hear the Turcoman sentinels chatting together, wondering why the infidels were drilling their snouts into the ground like pigs. After the mines exploded and the breaches were stormed, panic had swept through the Turcoman camp. Most of the fighting men took to their horses and streamed out through rents in the walls where we now walked, and hordes of terrified civilians followed them. For more than ten miles the Russians pursued them over the plains, scything them down in their thousands: old men, women and children.

Now, as we strayed inside the enceinte, I realised that all around us the earth was rumpled into mounds. They lapped to our feet in a pitiful ocean. It was impossible not to tread on them, they were so many, spiked with camel-thorn and all unmarked. The morning after the battle, 6500 corpses had been counted inside the fort, with 8000 more who had been massacred in flight.

‘Nobody knows who lies there,' Safar said. ‘It was the Russians who buried them.'

I gazed numbly. They had simply been covered with earth where they fell.

By the time Safar and I returned to the car it was dark, and we had both gone silent. Our headlights wavered bleakly over the road. Opposite the main breach, I had read, the Russians raised a memorial to their fallen. ‘I saw it three months ago,' Safar said. ‘It's nothing much.'

But guiltily I asked to visit it. The tolerance which had left it standing touched me with bemused warmth.

Yet as we circled along the railway Safar grew bewildered. ‘I thought it was here,' he said, ‘I'm sure it was.' Three or four times we traversed the same road, but he recognised nothing. Around us the town had become a warren of underpowered lights in blank windows.

Suddenly he lifted his hands in perplexity. ‘There it is!'

I craned forward. ‘Where?'

‘There!'

Wanly, as if throwing a tenuous halo round an object of dubious sanctity, our headlamps had alighted on a hillock of dust and rubble. Safar wrenched the car away from it. ‘They made a job of that!'

We asked a passer-by what had happened.

‘I don't know,' the man answered. ‘It just disappeared.'

‘How?'

The man's face puckered into a laugh, then he said with grave matter-of-factness: ‘They say God did it in the night!'

Eastward from Ashkhabad my train lumbered across a region of oases where rivers dropped out of Iran to die in the Turcoman desert. In one window the Kopet Dagh mountains lurched darkly out of haze, and repeated themselves in thinning colours far into the sky. Beyond the other rolled a grey-green savannah, gashed with poppies. Over this immensity the sky curved like a frescoed ceiling, where flotillas of white and grey clouds floated on separate winds.

Once or twice under the foothills I glimpsed the mound of a
kurgan,
broken open like the lips of a volcano – the burial-place of a tribal chief, perhaps, or the milestone of some lost nomad advance. Along this narrow littoral, a century ago, the Tekke Turcomans had grazed their camels and tough Argamak horses, and tilled the soil around forty-three earthen fortresses. Now the Karakum Canal ran down from the Oxus through villages with old, despairing names such as ‘Dead-End' and ‘Cursed-by-God', and fed collective farms of wheat and cotton.

The train was like a town on the move. In its cubicles the close-tiered bunks were stacked with Russian factory workers and gangs of gossiping Turcomans. Grimy windows soured the world outside with their own fog, and a stench of urine rose from the washrooms. But a boisterous freedom was in the air. Everyone was in passage, lightly uprooted. They gobbled salads and tore at scraggy chicken, played cards raucously together and pampered each other's children, until the afternoon lunch-break lulled them into sleep. Then the stained railway mattresses were deployed over the bunks, and the corridor became a tangle of arms and projecting feet in frayed socks. From a tundra of sheets poked the beards of Turcoman farmers, and the weathered heads of soldiers resting on their caps. Matriarchs on their way to visit relatives in the next oasis lay mounded under blankets or quilted coats, and young women curled up with their children in their arms and their scarves swept over their faces.

Two hundred miles east of Ashkhabad, where the soil shelved into ridges of scrub-speckled sand, a harsh wind sprang up. It whined against our windows and liquefied the plain and sky to a single, yellowed light. Suddenly ploughed tracts and irrigation channels appeared, and the glisten of flooded rice-fields; and soon afterwards a withered forest of telegraph-poles, pylons and cranes preceded the suburbs of Mari. I had time for a spy's glimpse into back yards – a view of cherished private plots and straggling geese – before we jolted to a halt.

Mari was a scrawl over the oasis, built piecemeal in a pallid, dead brick. Between flat-blocks and bungalows I tramped towards a heart which was not there. I found a bleak hotel. Towards evening, sitting in its hall before a black-and-white television, I heard that Najibullah had been deposed in Afghanistan. But there was nobody in the lobby with whom to share this; and the news went on. With a dim dissociation, as if I were receiving reports from a distant planet, I heard that the Danes had rejected the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and that there was to be a memorial concert for Freddie Mercury at Wembley.

But nothing from the outlandish present seemed real that night. It was the past which impinged. Somewhere on the fringe of this unlovely town lay the ruined caravan-city of Merv, lodestar of the Silk Road for two thousand years, and capital of the gifted and tragic Seljuk Turks: a rich city, sometimes cultivated and benignly powerful, which had nurtured its heterogeneous citizens in a common passion for trade.

I wandered out into the warm night of Mari. The few street-lamps shed down squalor. The only open restaurant served coarse vegetable soups, with lumps of mutton and goat in sticky rice. I padded down unlit alleys towards a thread of music, and emerged beneath flat-blocks to see a floodlit wedding feast. The guests were sitting at long trestle tables under a ceiling of vines, or dancing in a clearing of beaten earth. I watched them from the darkness. They seemed to be celebrating with an isolated fragility. They danced all together with their arms dangled above their heads. They might have been actors on a faraway stage. Nothing seemed solid. Distance muted the gorging and tippling at the tables to an elfin conviviality. The speeches and the clash of toasts dwindled to murmuring and tinkling. The women shimmered in claret-coloured velvets and harlequin headscarves, and the young men flaunted black bomber-jackets and flared jeans.

Adding to the strangeness, there were Russians among them: big, blond men who danced, and affectionate young women kissing their Turcoman friends. They swayed and sang faintly to the plangent music – Turc and Slav together – in a tableau of fairytale unity.

I wanted to believe in this unity. The material divide between conqueror and conquered had always been slim here, so that the poorer people, I thought, might painlessly integrate. But the Russians' conviction of their cultural superiority, and the Turcomans' deep conservatism, played havoc with this hope. Safar had told me that it was almost unknown for a Turcoman family to yield its daughter to a Russian man. So, as I watched, the feasting and dancing assumed the make-believe of an advertisement, and I was not surprised when the Russian guests departed early, their presence a fleeting token, while the Turcomans danced on into the night.

The taxi-driver had scrutinous eyes in a harsh face. For twenty miles we travelled towards Merv through a thin dawn light and a flotsam of houses and factories. Two centuries ago the oasis had been laid waste by the emir of Bukhara who destroyed its irrigation systems and resettled its inhabitants. It seemed never to have recovered. After the Russian conquest it became a place of exile for disgraced army officers, and its native inhabitants gained a reputation for perfidy. ‘If you meet a viper and a Mervi,' said other Turcomans, ‘kill the Mervi first and the viper afterwards.'

The driver kept patting his hair and moustache in the cracked mirror. He conformed disturbingly to the Mervi cliché, and nothing softened the narrow distrust in his face. What was I doing here, he demanded? Why did I want to see this old place? ‘In England, the cities are all beautiful.'

‘No . . . .'

‘In England the roads are all good.' We were crashing over potholes. ‘How is the food situation in England? Do you have camels and deserts?'

‘No.'

‘So it's mountains.' He looked at me with the sharp, frustrated violence of his incomprehension. He spoke Russian only in a rasped assembly of fragmented words. ‘Will you exchange your watch for mine? . . . How much does a car like this cost in England?' It was a clapped-out Lada, in which a jungle of wires poured beneath the dashboard. Every few minutes he stopped to take on or drop off other passengers. They looked as poor and hard as he. I asked about a nearby mosque, but nobody knew where it was. There was a mosque in the centre of town somewhere, they said, but no, they didn't know its name. They scarcely spoke Russian.

Soon afterwards the driver stopped on the edge of a wilderness ruffled into heaps and ridges, and said with mystified contempt: ‘This is it.'

I got out and started to walk. The land looked violently unnatural, almost featureless. For a long time only the curious quality of the earth – a terrible, powdery deadness – betrayed that I was treading through the entrails of a city. It might have been sieved through the bodies of insects, so fine was it: the two-thousand-year detritus of pulverised brick, cloth, bone. It spirted beneath every footstep with a tiny, breathy explosion. Everywhere it was heaped into obscure shapes which might once have been walls, pathways, rooms, or nothing. They were bearded with grey goosefoot and camel-thorn, and seamed with a rubbled earth which had disintegrated beyond meaning, but was not virgin.

For hours I stumbled in ignorance across the wasteland. I had expected to meet a few other travellers, but there was none – I had seen no Westerner since entering Turkmenistan. Once, in the lee of buried ramparts, I came upon a herd of auburn-coated camels grazing on nothing: prehistoric-looking beasts with undernourished humps. And once a pair of fishing-eagles rose in silence from a reed-choked canal.

This hint of biblical nemesis, and the hugeness of the city's dereliction, started to take on a cruel glamour. No ruined city I had ever seen – not Balkh nor Nineveh nor Ctesiphon – had delivered quite such a shock of desolation as this. It measured fifteen miles from end to end. Even in April the sun flailed down (and the temperature can reach 160°F, the hottest in the old Soviet Union). A line of battlements rose and glimmered across the wilderness for mile after broken mile. Here and there, out of their wind-smoothed walls, a ghostly tower erupted; but more often they broke into separated chunks and seemed only to emphasise, by their vast and futile compass, the void inside them. Once or twice a fortified hill stood up naked and sudden, as if a great levelling tempest had burst across the oasis and inexplicably missed it.

Everything seemed of equal age, or none. But in fact Merv was many cities. It may have been founded by the dynasty of Alexander the Great, but in 250 BC it passed to Parthia, and here the 10,000 Roman legionaries captured in the defeat of Crassus were brought exhausted into slavery. An apocryphal story sites
The Thousand and One Nights
in Merv, and in the late eighth century Muqanna, the Veiled Prophet of Khorasan, kindled schism here against the occupying Arabs.

In the heart of its lush oasis, where the Silk Road between China and the Mediterranean gathered and disgorged its luxuries and ideas, it became, after Baghdad, the second city of the Islamic world. Home to Hindu traders and Persian artisans, it swelled to a mighty cosmopolis of races and interests, with rich libraries and a celebrated observatory, and was the seat of a Christian bishopric as early as the fifth century.

But it reached its zenith under the Seljuk Turks, who filtered southwards from the Aral Sea late in the tenth century, established their capital here in 1043, and pushed their empire deep across western Asia. Under the prodigious sultan Alp Arslan their dominion stretched from Afghanistan to Egypt, and in 1071 they advanced into Asia Minor, crushed a vast and motley Byzantine army at the battle of Manzikert, and captured the emperor. Alp Arslan, ‘the valiant lion', became a paradigm for his people. High-minded, generous and austere, he redeemed himself from sainthood by some bursts of intemperance and exorbitant quirks of dress. He accentuated his enormous height with a towering hat, and his moustaches were so long that he knotted them behind his head before hunting. On his return to the capital, at the head of a 200,000-strong army, he was about to pass judgement on a captive commander at his feet, when the man plunged a knife into his heart. ‘You who have witnessed the glory of Alp Arslan exalted to the heavens,' ran his epitaph, ‘come to Merv, and you will see it buried in the dust.'

But the tomb, and the inscription, have gone. In 1221 the Mongols of Genghiz Khan overswept the whole country. The terror they inspired quakes in the descriptions of Moslem writers still. The barbarians were as many as grasshoppers, they wrote: squat, foul-smelling men whose skin was tough as shoe-leather and pitted with lice. Their arrows turned the sky to a sea of reeds, and their horses' neighing shut the ears of heaven.

The sack of Merv was one of the most atrocious in history. Toloi, the Khan's youngest son, granted its inhabitants their lives if they surrendered, so they opened their gates, and were driven out on to the plain. Then each Mongol soldier, it is fantastically recorded, was ordered to decapitate between 300 and 400 citizens, and within a few hours they had slaughtered over half a million. Systematically they wrecked and fired the city: irrigation works, mosques, tombs. Then they vanished with the same phantom speed as they had come. It was a frequent Mongol ruse. They did not go far. Timidly the runaway survivors crept back into their ruins, and must have wandered them in stunned hopelessness. Then, suddenly, the Mongols returned, and completed their massacre.

More than a century later, the city still lay in ruins, and the sands were flowing over it. Now the remains of the later town destroyed by the Bukhariots had flopped into dust alongside. Tramping across the debris between them, I came upon the graves of half-remembered holy men. Cemeteries covered the dunes all around in a chaotic counterpane of humped earth spiked with poles and rotting flags. The whine of flies and the slap of stiffened cloth in the wind seemed to accentuate the silence. Far from any town, people had returned here in their thousands to be buried, drawn by some atavistic memory. Many tombs had been newly restored, ringed with walls or railings, freshly confident in their faith.

I reached a mound where a building survived in twin arches, half restored. It abutted a pair of graves under little cupolas, and the signs of worship were all about. The tombs, the perimeter fence, even the bushes around it, had been knotted with thousands of rags torn from pilgrims' clothes in token of prayer. It was as if a great gale of rubbish had blown through, and left its wreckage dripping from every barb.

As I loitered in the arches' shade, a crocodile of eight young women came winding up a track from nowhere. I watched them with the apprehension of a hunter, in case they might dart away. But instead they dropped their shoes and bags at the shrine's vanished entrance – as if shedding their modernity – and crowded into a narrow, vaulted chamber, where I could hear them praying. Then, barefoot, in a shimmer of magenta and ultramarine dresses, they circled the graves three times in silence, stopping to touch their temples to its stone. They smoothed their palms over its grille then over their faces, kissing the iron. They seemed at once stately and humble, lost in a contrite love-making. As they finished, they gathered up pebbles and dust close to the graves, and the eldest – a dark, angry-looking Amazon – tied a white scarf to the fence. Five minutes later, scenting another grave to petition, they had trailed away over the wilderness in a brilliant caterpillar, and I heard their laughter chirruping over the dunes.