Tim & Tigon, page 12
I had often wondered why babies I had seen in Kazakhstan and also Mongolia had black dots, usually from charcoal, on their forehead. My host explained, ‘We make those dots to draw the attention of onlookers away from the baby’s eyes. You would not even know yourself if you had the evil eye – don’t be offended.’
Traditionally, Kazakhs used many techniques to keep bad spirits from harming the young. One involved giving the baby an unpleasant name that would make people laugh and therefore distract evil spirits. An amulet called a tumar was also worn, traditionally filled with a sample of the baby’s own poo, although more commonly the tumar holds a prayer from the Koran nowadays.
From Tasty there remained just 40 kilometres of riding along the Chu River to the town of Zhuantobe. During the two days it took me to get there, I never quite found my rhythm again.
Leaving Tasty was awkward after I discovered that my headlamp and watch were missing – it turned out they had been stolen by Serik’s children.
Then, just half a day from the aul, Tigon’s life very nearly came to an abrupt end.
It all happened in the blink of an eye. Floodwaters had forced us up onto the edge of the deserted dirt road that ran to Zhuantobe, and it was there that Tigon caught sight of a car for one of the first times in his short life. It began as a dot, hurtling in from the west, and quickly grew into a large approaching missile. Tigon stood in the middle of the road, transfixed, eyes narrowed into the sun, cocking his head to one side, then the other. Only as the car began to bear down on us did I realise that Tigon was not going to move.
‘Tigon!!’
I closed my eyes. There was a sickening thump.
When I opened my eyes Tigon lay bleeding and unconscious, tongue out and sprawled. The car was long gone.
I was sure he would not survive, but we were in luck.
I waved down the very next vehicle, a motorbike with a sidecart.
‘Is there a vet in the next village?’ I asked in panic.
‘I am the vet from the next village!’ he replied, switching the engine off and coming to my aid.
It was at that point that Tigon regained consciousness, rolled over onto his back and demanded a pat on his belly, one eye slightly open.
Tigon had a broken rib and concussion. The vet arranged for him to be taken to Zhuantobe, where he would be looked after until my arrival.
When I reached the town two days later I was greeted by a throng of barefoot children eager to lead the way to Tigon. I found him lying like a prince in the shade of an outhouse. He had been dining on bowls of fresh milk, meat scraps, and his favourite, eggs.
After two days Tigon was on his feet again, but it was clear that both spring and the respite of the Chu were over.
The heat had arrived, and not far west of Zhuantobe the river came to a finish, spilling into a series of salt lakes and swamps. In what would prove a taste of the conditions in coming months, we covered the next 120 kilometres in two long, hot days. At first I was guided by a local man and his friend on a motorcycle, but halfway across their fuel ran low, and we ran out of water.
The last 60 kilometres to the next aul, which I rode alone, were unbearably thirsty and hot. I pushed the horses across the shadeless steppe and desert until finally the olive-green ridge of the Karatau Mountains emerged from the dusty horizon. Beyond them lay the Syr Darya – one of Kazkhstan’s biggest and most important waterways – which I hoped would be my next lifeline, carrying me deep into central Kazakhstan.
Not long ago I had dreamed of the sun and its life-giving rays. Before long, however, I would be living in fear of it.
12
Ships of the Desert
In the late autumn of 1219, Genghis Khan rode along the freezing banks of the Syr Darya, leading somewhere between 90,000 and 200,000 men and probably at least twice as many horses. In Genghis’s sights was the city of Otrar, which lay on the northern banks of the river.
A year earlier, the governor of Otrar, Inalchuk, had enraged the Mongol leader by executing a 450-man merchant caravan from Mongolia. This was more than enough to invite the wrath of Genghis, and he set forth with a carefully planned campaign to conquer all of Central Asia. As a nomad, Genghis was well aware that the success of any campaign depended on timing with the seasons. Travelling in autumn and fighting through winter was a crucial part of his strategy. That way he could avoid the heat of summer, and because there would be dew on the ground there’d be more pasture and less need to find water. As rivers froze over in late autumn and winter, his army could also cross them at will.
When the scorching heat of summer arrived in 1220, Genghis Khan’s timing was proved nothing short of genius. Otrar had been destroyed and its governor, Inalchuk, executed by having molten silver poured in his eyes and ears. Following a trek across the Kyzlkum Desert, a section of Genghis’s army had also surprised the holy city of Bukhara, where Genghis proclaimed that he had been sent by God to punish the city’s rulers for their sins. Samarkand was the next to fall before Genghis and his army retreated to the hills to rest and graze their animals for the summer.
At the age of fifty-seven, Genghis was now the ruler of an empire that stretched from Persia to Peking.
In contrast with Genghis Khan’s first major foray into Central Asia, my approach to the Syr Darya was not going well. Two days west of the aul of Karatau I woke at midday, slumped against a twisted tree root, and listened to blood throbbing through my ears.
The sun burned through my eyelids and pressed down on my cheeks like an iron. During my snooze the sliver of shade under the poplar tree had moved, and the horses likewise had shifted, their heads propped forward in the shade. Tigon had dug himself into a fresh hole and lay panting with his tongue out on the dirt and his eyes reduced to slits.
I felt lethargic and dizzy, so it took me some time to pull myself away from the tree trunk and reach for the battered plastic soft drink bottle that held my drinking water. Earlier, I’d been lucky to find a well next to an abandoned winter hut and managed to lower my collapsible bucket to the water using tether ropes. As I pulled the bucket up it had broken away from the ropes, but I had managed to lower this drink bottle, and I had watered the horses from my cooking pots.
As this hot, algae-filled water now flushed out my throat, the stench of dry manure rose through my nostrils. The smell would have been a comforting symbol of family and togetherness in the winter and early spring, when there might have been hundreds of cattle, sheep and horses milling about this tree, the only one I’d seen in two days. Now, though, the lingering fragrance of livestock was a sharp reminder that the people had moved away to the safety of summer pastures and I was alone.
The sickly feeling that I was travelling against the grain of the seasons had been building. In recent days the land had been dotted with empty huts with boarded-up windows and abandoned yards. The only people I had seen were a family who had just migrated from the Moiynkum Desert. They had looked at me gravely. ‘Soon the flies will be here,’ they told me. ‘Down on the Syr Darya River, where you are going, they will be even worse. If you leave your horse tied up for half an hour there, it will be dead. And don’t forget, here in Central Kazakhstan we never go a summer without forty days in a row above forty degrees!’
Neither flies nor forty degrees had yet come, but it was only April and the temperature was reaching 30°C by nine am. I’d been riding as much as I could in the cool of the early hours and resting through the heat of the day, then plodding on when the sun had backed off. It was terrifying to think that summer was yet to even officially begin.
The goal of this leg of my journey was to navigate about 2000 kilometres through Kazakhstan’s arid centre – a vast, sparsely populated region of deserts that lie midway between Mongolia and Hungary – and then west to the Caspian Sea. It was here that Friar Carpini, who had travelled to Mongolia from Europe around 800 years earlier, recorded the most harrowing leg of his journey. He wrote that it was so dry ‘many men die from thirst’, and that he had ‘found many skulls and bones about in heaps over the ground’.
My original plan had been to make this traverse in the winter, when the slightly warmer temperatures and a thin layer of snow would have been an advantage. The hold-ups in Akbakai, however, had left me on course for one of the driest parts of the country at the hottest time of year – a prospect that any nomad, and certainly Genghis Khan, surely would have done all they could to avoid.
Late in the afternoon, when the sun’s heat waned, I rode on. I had broken my planned route into three stages, each of which I estimated would take a month. The first and easiest would be to drop south to the Syr Darya River and follow it about 500 kilometres to the point where it spills into the Aral Sea. From there I would break away towards the river Zhem. The final phase would be southwest along this river, which I hoped would see me through the western deserts to within range of the Caspian Sea. If all went according to plan, I would be entering Russia come autumn.
A few days later, when the Syr Darya finally came into sight, it appeared just as it did on my map: an improbable artery lined with banks of leathery green flowing through mustard-yellow desert towards the Aral Sea. It was a fabled river dotted with ancient towns and cities, but equally known for environmental catastrophe. In the 1950s waters from the Syr Darya had been diverted to feed the cotton industry. While irrigated crops in the desert had bloomed, further downstream the Syr Darya had slowed to a dribble. As a result the Aral Sea – into which the river flowed – had shrunk to a puddle, leaving whole fleets of fishing boats and ships stranded in the sands.
For the first week or so the river offered reprieve. I moved with rhythm, watering the horses regularly in irrigation canals. In the early morning the horses moved swiftly, their hooves shuffling quietly through sand. Tigon was enlivened, sniffing, digging, ears up and alert, and taking regular dips in the canals whenever he got too hot. As the sky grew from purple to shades of crimson, I could see the glassy surface of the river, and yurts nestled among sand dunes.
During the day it was hot and suffocating, but there was shade to be found, and evenings were pleasant, particularly in the dusty, sun-baked auls. At dusk young children – already with dark summer tans – played on the sandy streets, and old women sat on benches, chatting in their long, colourful gowns and scarves. Dung-fired stoves came to life, the bittersweet aroma of the smoke mingling with the smell of camels, which, naked and grey-skinned after recently being clipped, wandered freely through the streets. I was offered fermented drinking yoghurt, airan, which had a tangy flavour that lingered well into the next day.
But this smooth passage was fleeting. After little more than a week, vegetation gave way to shadeless plains of clay and sand. The canals dried up, auls became rare, and the days longer and hotter. And then, as I had been warned, the flies came.
The first swarm descended on me one stifling morning as I attempted to descend the muddy banks of the river. The sludge was so thick there was a risk of the horses becoming bogged, so I had improvised a new bucket for carrying water to and fro. No sooner had I dismounted, tied the horses and returned with the first pail, than the sound of a thousand little race engines filled my ears. As Tigon dived into the water to escape the hordes – only his ears and nose rising above the water line – the poor horses bucked this way and that, swished their tails and shuddered intensely. Within minutes, each horse had streams of blood running from their spines, down their rumps, ribs and necks. I raced about swatting as many as I could, but as numbers built I abandoned the river and rode out as quickly as possible. The river that brought life into the desert would, from now on, also be a curse.
For the next three weeks – the time it took me to reach the river mouth – I watched the silty brown water grow sluggish and the land fade to pale yellow. There were no crisp edges to the horizon anymore, or even to days, or thoughts. Everything wobbled, frayed and melted in surrender to the heat.
Then, just as I broke away from the Syr Darya, things really started to get tough.
Temperatures were now hitting 40°C daily, and when the sun came up there was simply nowhere to hide. The horses’ sweat dried off as quickly as it beaded, and my saddle was hot to touch. But it was poor Tigon with his black coat who was hit the hardest. He would sprint ahead, searching for even the frailest desert plants, where he would dig furiously to find cooler sand and soil. No sooner had he dropped into it, tongue flopping lifelessly onto the ground, than we would catch up and pass him. He would watch us go past with a look of dread, and wait until we were nearly out of sight before making another dash. When there was no shade at all, he would stand there desperately thirsty, his black coat as hot as melting tar, feet burning on the sand, crying. All I could do was fill my hat with water for him to drink from and sprinkle some of the precious supplies over his back. Every now and then we were lucky enough to find a drinking trough, and he would always be the first to leap in – a bone of contention for the horses, who would nip at him until he leapt out and away.
The only way to survive the summer from here on was to ride at night. And so began a routine of saddling up the horses at sunset and riding through those shallow, life-giving hours – the aim being to find water and some kind of shelter before sun-up. It was a routine that would see us through the remainder of summer alive, but which also had its dangers.
A couple of days in, it became clear that getting sleep during the daylight hours would be near impossible. Despite covering the tent with horse blankets and pads for shade, inside it was still so baking hot that it felt as if my blood were cooking in my veins. Sweat pooled in puddles inside the tent beneath me. Keeping an eye on the horses was crucial, and at this particular camp a stallion that had pursued us earlier in the morning remained on the attack. Every time I felt a hint of sleep pulling me under, I found myself having to reach for the nearest stick or rock and go charging off again.
When the sun went down my spirits lifted, but all my body wanted to do was sleep. In the hours that followed it was only the constant task of keeping a lookout for Tigon that kept me awake. He spent his time roaming far and wide, his black coat impossibly hard to spot in the night.
When grey-blue light bled back into the landscape I was half asleep, and only vaguely aware of my surroundings. It was a dangerous state of mind to be in, particularly when I found myself crossing some old dry and empty canals via crude bridges made of ramps with narrow, wheel-width steel.
In my delirious state I tried to cross without doing the safe thing and dismounting first. Halfway across the bridge, I felt Taskonir’s lead rope pull out of my hand. As I turned from my perch, Ogonyok – who was tied to Taskonir from behind – reared up, then planted his front hooves wide in an effort to reverse off the bridge. Taskonir was pulled off balance. I heard the scuffle of hooves on steel, then a crunch as he fell off the bridge and between the two ramps. The plastic pack boxes kept him from falling all the way through, but now he was wedged between the ramps, his legs dangling over the drop to the empty canal below! Ogonyok, still tied to Taskonir’s pack saddle, was pulled forward by the short lead rope and now teetered on the edge of the bank, threatening to fall on top of Taskonir at any moment.
I rushed back to untie Ogonyok, then cut Taskonir’s girth strap and ropes. As half a tonne of horse went tumbling down, I shut my eyes. No sooner had I reopened them, however, than Taskonir darted out of the canal, saved by the soft canal bed. I couldn’t believe how foolish I’d been, or how lucky – Taskonir came away with little more than scratching and bruising.
When I left the bridge my little caravan was shaken up, and the temperature was pushing 40°C. It took another two or three hours to reach water and shade in the next aul, by which time the horses were stained with sweat and looking shrivelled. Come nightfall, when it was time to ride again, I had once again barely rested. And there lay the conundrum – it was dangerous to ride sleep-deprived at night, but suicide to move through the heat of the day.
*
By the time I reached what would once have been the shores of the old Aral Sea I had begun to develop some semblance of a routine, but it was here one afternoon that Tigon nearly reached the end of his tether.
We hadn’t found shade that morning and had trudged on under the blazing sun in search of refuge. We had been going nearly twenty-four hours, much of it trudging through sandy dunes. With each climb came the hope of an oasis of shade, water, and pasture. But when the dunes finally gave way to plains all that lay in front of us was the endless, thirsty seabed. Fifty years earlier one might have been able to dive into cooling waters, but the shoreline had retreated by 100 kilometres and now the land was better known for its windstorms, which frequently whipped up clouds of salt, sand and toxic dust.
Tigon, as always, had taken the lead to the top of the rise. But even before I reached him, I saw his spirits crumble. His tail dipped between his legs, his ears, normally so tall and proud, flopped down to the sides listlessly, and his eyes looked sad and glazed. There was a hint of defeat.
‘C’mon, Tigon,’ I said, dismounting. Kneeling, I lay him backwards across me and stroked his long snout and his floppy, worn-looking paws. He closed his eyes, and for a time I did too. His head flopped over my thigh. The feel of his whiskers, and those little bumps where they came out around his chin, felt so familiar in my hands, as did those giant ears. It wasn’t that long ago that I’d watched the tips of those ears covered in white frost, and he had growled at me for touching them. Now I stroked them, and I gave his chest a scratch and he didn’t move a muscle. If anything, his body went even limper.
Beyond this little bit of comfort there was nothing I could do but get back on the horse. But when we did move on, Tigon refused to budge. He watched us sail away, believing perhaps that he could not go on. I couldn’t look any more, so turned my back and kept riding. When I looked again, he was a mere black speck in a landscape that was impossibly huge. But that speck was now moving – he had begun a slow march on our trail.
