Sojourner in Islamic Lands

10: The Return of the Mongols

10 The Return of the Mongols My next venue is Mary, a small industrial city to the east in Turkmenistan. The limo driver who takes me out to the airport is a talker like cabbies everywhere . “Famous men of Islam,” he says, as we pass a pair of worthies aloft on their pedestals. “Famous men” gets me thinking. What did they do to boost our fortunes? In fact, did they make any real difference? When I was growing up, my teachers wanted me to think that the great man defines his context. Today’s conventional wisdom supposes, on the contrary , that the common man in the aggregate counts more than the man whose like “we shall not see again.” Dante counts less than the weightier Guelphs and Ghibellines who made his gorge rise, and Shakespeare less than his audience. Fashionable critics and historians put their money on the audience. Some, promoting the “death of the author,” deny that he or she exists at all. The flight for Mary doesn’t leave until well after midnight, giving me plenty of time to sort this out. On my mind are the great Russians of the twentieth century—Osip Mandelstam and Nadezhda, his wife; Anna Akhmatova; Boris Pasternak—men and women who raised our stature a cubit. But others, notably Lenin and Stalin, their contemporaries, dreamed a perverted dream that wreaked havoc, and whose legacy remains with us. Their footprints are still visible on the sands of time. I am about to find them. A glance at the map shows you the Aral Sea in relation to Ashkabad, a straight line to the northwest. I am aware of this since a branch of the Silk Road went in that direction, crossing the Kyzyl-Kum Desert. Soviet planners, The Return of the Mongols 155 looking at the desert, saw in their mind’s eye fields of blooming cotton. The Aral Sea, actually a lake, the world’s fourth largest, was there for the taking, and they tapped its waters to irrigate the dry land. It was understood that the waters might drain away and disappear into the desert, and they have. This destroyed the ecology of a huge region, bringing misery to thousands of people. Perhaps their masters knew this would happen and didn’t care. Central Asia’s two great rivers fed the Aral Sea, flowing west from the Pamirs and the Heavenly Mountains that separate China and the Stans. Their deltas, fecund with life, made a complex skein of smaller rivers and lakes, marshes, reed beds, and forests. The sea itself extended two hundred miles from north to south, more than a hundred from east to west. Passenger ferries plied its waters, clear enough to see through a long way down. Its swimming beaches drew crowds in summer, and the fishing never failed, yielding twenty thousand tons per annum. But as cotton production rose, the waters fell. By the 1990s they had fallen better than five feet. The eastern and southern shores receded like a rolled-up carpet, and rusting hulks of fishing boats lay keeled over on sand dunes, sixty miles from the water. The fish died from pesticides and fertilizers and the disappearance of their spawning grounds. The two seaports that depended on the fishing industry died with them. Sixteen thousand fishermen lost their jobs, and almost four times that number of canners, fish mongers, distributors, and the like. The weather, everyone’s standard topic for small talk, became a burning issue. Winters got colder and longer, summers got hotter. Dust and sandstorms , their teeth sharpened by salt and the residue of chemicals from the cultivated fields, blew across the blighted land. Toxic defoliants, finding their way into the Amu-Darya and Syr-Darya, begot cancer, respiratory disease, a long list of ailments. In the region called Karakalpakstan (far west Uzbekistan ), fewer than one baby in ten lived beyond infancy. The Soviets, until their empire crumbled, aggravated this horror, using an island in the Aral Sea for testing biological weapons. Uzbeki Air, taking off on time, banks to right itself, and the ground below comes up at us, sparkling with light. In minutes, however, absolute blackness replaces it. We are over the desert. The lights are off above the passenger seats, and my seatmates, like most on this late flight, are dozing. I sit with eyes open, thinking about the evil done by Stalin and the USSR. I needn’t be [18.118.9.146] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...