Bog Myrtle & Peat

From Samarkand, the train flew east into farmed-out flatlands where the overhead wires were clipped with rollers and doves like pegs on a clothesline. Some of these rollers were ludicrous blue, but many were silhouetted black against a setting sun and the dull enormity of mountains which crowd around the rich Fergana Valley. These peaks are little more than babies on the northern fringes of the Himalayas, but they rose to the dusk in tall and muscular ways.

Closer at hand, there were cotton fields and maize crops, orchards and vineyards watered by deep and gobbling ditches. Some of this land was being worked or dried by steady teams of men and children who cut and swept and plaited the year’s crop into storage. Melons were being passed into the wooden beds of ex-soviet ZIL trucks; battered Ladas in every colour of the rainbow were parked with their boots gaping, offering tools, consuming loads or simply because they no longer shut. From a thousand angles, this could be Northern India – but it’s grounded in a calmer Eurasian aesthetic of poplar trees, crumbled tarmac and white storks which cruise onto the newly worked land like folded sheets of paper. 

Many of these storks have been extirpated from their traditional nesting sites by development and a growing requirement for tidiness. They have been replaced in city centres by concrete statues of storks on several of the tallest and finest buildings, and imitation birds stand on roundabouts and street corners across Uzbekistan. Like storks which nest and crackle on chimneys and cupolas from here to Extremadura, the reality of these birds is often close to inconvenience in a modern cityscape – so having sent them away, they’ve returned to Samarkand as nostalgic effigies.

A flock of two hundred black sheep stood in the bend of a branched and confusing stream which ran through a mess of rubble. They’re bred for their fat arses, and in butchers’ shops it’s hard to tell which way up the carcasses have been hung because their tails are thicker than their necks. These animals seemed lost in a cleft between two high-sided riverbanks, and then a queue of rusted railway carriages obscured the view. The sheep were exchanged for a cluster of dogs which lay sleeping in the dust beneath this defunct rolling stock, catastrophically sprawled in every expression of painful finality. Perhaps they were actually dead, but it was already too late for a second look. 

Then with a growing chaos of ditches and irrigation channels, trees clattered around the train. A fluttering shoal of laughing doves passed just inches away from the heavy glass window, and all vibration abruptly switched to a sighing exhalation of calm as the railway line leaned into the bridge across the rich chocolatine span of the Syr Darya. If the Amu Darya represents the southernmost boundary of the area formerly known as Oxiana, here is its northern limit – a river known to antiquity as the Jaxartes. The current is deep and dark and sinister here – a swim would certainly kill you, and the banks are slippily greased with mud as if to beckon a fall. There must be fish in there, because darters plopped beneath the current as we overshot the leaden, northbound drag. Casting a long shadow in the sunset, a man leant on his stick and cracked sunflower seeds between his teeth.

This river is the outermost limit of the lands which Alexander the Great was able to gather, though even he could only hold this place briefly. And if that is all I knew of the Syr Darya before I came, old stories felt painfully slender on leaving Samarkand when I looked out onto a fragment of the ancient city walls which were built in an Alexandrian, Grecian style. Those walls stood for fourteen centuries before they were obliterated by Genghis Khan in 1220. They’ve been muddy ruins for eight hundred years, and the new city is only loosely bound to the original.

Like a fool, I had brought a collection of poems by James Elroy Flecker to read on this journey, but he’s so out-of-date and the reality of this place is so enthralling that I never looked away from my window. Flecker’s Samarkand is filthy with superimposed mysticism – so paved with pantomime exclamations of “Bismillah!” and “Eywallah!” that it feels like a story for children. Before I came, it made sense to pack those poems – but as the sun set in the west, even my train ticket made for more engaging reading. It explained that my journey was from CAMAPKAHД to TAШKEHT – cyrillicism to complicate and obscure an already baffling mix.

I’ll never get to the bottom of it here. For now, all I can do is say what I see.