Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road by Kate Harris

Author:Kate Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dey Street Books
Published: 2018-08-21T07:00:00+00:00

Part Three

I would like to do whatever it is that presses the essence from the hour.

ELLEN MELOY, THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF TURQUOISE

8.

Wilderness/Wasteland

Ustyurt Plateau and Aral Sea Basin

Getting off the train in Kazakhstan felt like starting the Silk Road afresh, only properly this time, because we didn’t miss our stop. People mobbed the platform in Beyneu, little more than a stretch of bare dirt bordering the rails, which vanished in a hot blur in both directions. We unloaded our gear and bikes in the only empty space we could find, against a whitewashed building flanked by poplars, then Mel went off in search of water. Only when the wind changed direction did I realize why such an enticing, shady spot had been vacant, and why those trees were flourishing in a desert: we’d parked ourselves next to the public restroom.

The stench didn’t stop an ample-waisted Kazakh woman from shuffling over to me. The red velour bathrobe she wore gave her a dishevelled but oddly glamorous look, like an opera singer who’d just woken up. The woman gestured at my bike and made pedalling motions with her hands. I shrugged and smiled, offering her the bike. Below her head scarf a huge grin swallowed her eyes, two dimples in rising dough, then she sped off with alarming speed. Men in pit-stained tank tops and dusty suits stepped aside to let the bike pass, then the crowds closed behind her.

“Velocipede, BYE BYE!” someone said, laughing.

My bike was vagabond, Mel was who-knows-where with our water bottles, and the toilet fumes could’ve knocked the train off its tracks, so why did I feel like singing an aria? Because just beyond Beyneu was the Ustyurt Plateau, a desert stretching from Kazakhstan into Uzbekistan, and after a month in the bureaucratic doldrums, including 144 hours on a train, we finally had permission to go there. I was prepared to walk the sixty waterless miles to the Uzbek border, if that’s what it took. Fortunately the lady in red returned my bicycle, Mel struggled back with several camel humps’ worth of water in aptly named dromedary bags, and we set off spinning into the desert’s immaculate yawn.

Even in April the heat was scorching. With no buildings or trees or clouds to block the sun, it blazed down on us with undiluted intensity. The road was less a feature of the desert than its erasure, a bare strip of land in a land itself mostly bare, except for a six o’clock shadow of grasses and herbs. Salt frosted the dirt in a cruel illusion of coolness, the result of brackish water evaporating in the millennia since the Ustyurt Plateau lay at the bottom of the Paratethys Sea, a breakaway remnant of the Tethys Ocean. The Paratethys drained away as the Tethys slipped under the Eurasian continent, uplifting Central Asia in the process. Now the sloshing of the drom bag on my bike was the only echo of the ancient shorelines I could just make out on the horizon, where the putty-coloured desert flared up into ridges of clay and gypsum.

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