Bog Myrtle & Peat

The hillforts of Khorazm are littered with broken glass. It’s hard to walk far without the sound of footsteps crunching in the sand, and four hundred miles east of the Caspian Sea at Ayaz Qala, the ancient walltops twinkle with fragments of shattered rubbish. There’s nothing old or venerable about this mess. It’s largely made up of beer and vodka bottles; the remains of campfires, fireworks and the occasional small-calibre bullet casing. It smacks of men or adolescents pissing around, but these are desert locations and little ever changes here. The rubbish might have been strewn across these places for a hundred years – or it might have been smashed last night.

There’s junk along the roads which cross the Kyzlkum desert. The tamarisk bushes are wrapped in see-through plastic – there are bin-bags which have been torn open by the wind, strewing the downstream sand with empty tins which used to contain beans or soup. And there are beer cans and umbrella fabric; gutters, bumpers and shreds of tarpaulin; strings, ropes, lace and hawsers, and always a shattering of glass to twinkle and blink back towards the passing traffic. 

It would be unfair to blame the Uzbeks for the extent of this mess because it’s probably no worse than the roadside rubbish you’d find in Galloway. The difference is that we also pick it up – and for what we miss, there’s vigorous vegetation to conceal the filth. In the fringes, wet weather sogs everything which can be rotted away into a quiet, softening ferment. But in the Kyzylkum desert, a bottle thrown away in the 1960s can be rediscovered exactly where it was left today. Perhaps the label has been shredded and blown away, but that only makes the glass shine more brightly.

If nobody ever stopped to gather our rubbish in Galloway, we’d be ashamed by the state of this place – but in Uzbekistan, every item cast-aside is permanently on display, forever. Even the carcass of a long-dead donkey was still recognisably intact on the roadside, with its hide stretched tightly across the broad Y of its pelvis. Vultures had pulled the puddings from its arse, but even in that shattered state, the animal could go no further on the road to decomposition without water. Out beyond this parched cadaver, a gas refinery shimmered like a mirage of alien spacecraft – and more shreds of plastic snagged on a bundle of wire. There’s an old-time cartoon image of deserts filled with the bones of cattle or bison, bleached and clean as museum pieces. The reality is more often a tight arrangement of skin and bone and rubbish pulled together like a painter’s canvas thrown upside down by a sudden, squalling storm. 

Archaeologists scratching in the hill forts of Khorazm have discovered tiny fragments of life from centuries before the birth of Christ. Zoroastrian fire-worshippers pressed their symbols into the mudbricks and left strange murals on the inside of these powdered buildings. There are shadowy frescoes of people with their hair heaped up like clouds and bound with crimson string – and there’s an endlessly repeated motif of a little red heart-shape which makes some of these images look more like corny valentine’s cards than serious-minded religious iconography. Certain books and bits of ancient scrolls have also been preserved, and they allow us to detect something of the lives and uncertainties of ancient occupation in the desert. The best and most valuable of these discoveries have been removed to a museum in Khiva, where they can be preserved and protected.