Bog Myrtle & Peat

Even before the river could be seen or smelt from the road, the verges were falling away and the bridge rose in a low, continuous mound. Then it lay beneath me – the Amu Darya writ-large in a swirl of chalky brown water, sprawling around a braided span of islands and counter-currents which flickered between rivets and cantilevered steel. The light was clean and blue in the morning, and here was the world itself.

A man was driving three cows to graze on a bank of sand in the river-middle. New trees had started to grow there, and the animals would find enough to make the trip worthwhile. The man was wading only to the depth of his waist in the washed-out, turbid flow which rises in Afghanistan and sweeps depletingly northwest towards the Aral Sea. The cows sent threads of foam downstream in their wake, and then they had vanished behind a blur of girders.

The Amu Darya was famous as the Oxus crossed by Alexander the Great during his conquest of Central Asia – now it’s more likely to be known as the river which runs out steam. Commercial, agricultural and industrial abstraction mean that these waters peter out and fall to dryness long before they’re able to swell into the glory of a sea. The shrivelling flow is less of an obstacle to foreign invaders these days, but a greater existential threat to the people of this reclaimed desert region is growing.

Here in the heights of Karakalpakstan, the Amu Darya is still vast enough to make an impression. Swallows swept urgently through the riverlands, and I took sudden views of trembling, backlit reeds, the height and density of houses. Compared to the terrible shifting greyness of the Kyzylkum, this place is positively lush – but even the richest greens are willowed down to an oat-grey sheen and the edges trailed with powder and windblown salt from the ancient dried-up seascape in the north. It’s both alive and dying; woven into complexity, then sucking itself and gagged with its own damn bridges.

Through a parting in trees which stood on the far side of the river, I saw a team of men working scythes in a little field of something like alfalfa. They were stripped to the waist, wearing squat, boxy hats which offered no protection from the sun. They swung in endless, rhythmic sweeps and the crop drooped before them. Women pulled the forage back and the drier stuff was heaped and mounded onto carts pulled by donkeys. All this work had stirred insects into the air, much as cows provoke an outswell of flies when they walk through bolted summer grass in Galloway. These insects had drawn attention from the telephone wires nearby; the snapshot of this work was overthrown by a brilliance of birds – bottle-green bee-eaters, sooty-black drongos and cerulean rollers fell to the opportunity, seizing each insect one-by-one. The people worked, birds burst like fireworks overhead – and if this takes me twenty minutes to write and you perhaps a minute or two to read, it was drawn from an impression of no more than eight seconds.  

Then we vanished again into avenues of poplar trees and mulberries; stray dogs and mounds of melons offered for sale in the sun.