In the Empire of Genghis Khan: A Journey Among Nomads. Stanley Stewart
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of earth like pale raw-looking skin. Beyond Celkar the sand started to take over, and the grass was reduced to tufts in the drifting dunes. Bactrian camels strayed listlessly into the middle distance, their humps still sagging after the long winter. Crusted eddies of salt now wound across the baked sand, and the air seemed to have acquired a bitter acrid taste.
‘Salt from the Aral Sea,’ Father Bear announced, tasting his lips. ‘It is dying.’
At midday we passed through Aralsk, once an important fishing port on the Aral Sea. We gazed out at an emaciated town. Many of its bleaker buildings were boarded up and whole districts were abandoned. In the drifts of sand at the far end of empty streets we could see the rusting hulks of fishing boats tipped on their sides beneath the skeletal forms of cranes where the docks had once been.
A monument to the folly of centralized planning, the death of the Aral Sea is one of the great ecological disasters of our age. Like so many Soviet tragedies, it began with Stalin who decreed in the 1920s that the Soviet Union must become self-sufficient in cotton. The vast spaces of Central Asia were to be the arena for this grand project, and in particular the basins of the two great rivers which fed the landlocked Aral Sea, the Amu Dariya and the Syr Dariya, the ancient Oxus and Jaxartes. Vast irrigation networks, constructed to feed King Cotton, bled the rivers into the surrounding desert, and the level of the Aral Sea, the fourth largest lake in the world, began to fall. The problem was compounded as the population of Central Asia grew and the thirst for water increased with modern facilities. The Karakum Canal was constructed, carrying off almost a fifth of the waters of the Amu Dariya, so that southern Turkmenistan could be brought into the cotton belt.
By the 1980s the inflow into the Aral was one tenth of the rate of the 1950s; by 1993 the sea had shrunk to half its original size. It largest port, Muynak in Uzbekistan, was now almost sixty miles from the shore, and the dunes around the town, like those at Aralsk, are littered with the carcasses of dead ships. By 2020, a sea the size of Ireland may have disappeared altogether.
The dying sea has blighted the entire region. The fish stocks have disappeared and an industry that once supported 60,000 people is now dead. The climate of the area has changed dramatically with rainless days multiplying four-fold. Winds have carried the thick salt deposits left on the dry lake-bed hundreds of miles into the surrounding country, devastating agriculture and causing a litany of health problems from respiratory illness to throat cancers. The irrigation methods in the cotton fields, with high levels of evaporation, have led to further salination, while the chemical fertilizers used on the fields have been washed back into the two rivers, the chief source of drinking water for the region.
For millennia the Kazakhs were a nomadic people, moving with their flocks according to the waxing and waning of the thin pastures of their vast land, following a lifestyle perfectly suited to its marginal vegetation and arid climate. The arrival of the Russians spelt the end of pastoralism. The railway brought hordes of settlers, towns were built, and farms disrupted the pasture lands and the delicate patterns of migration. Gradually the Kazakhs abandoned the nomadic life for the lure of cash incomes and permanent houses. The grandsons of herders became employees on state farms, and the proud world of the Kazakh Hordes withered to an unnecessary eccentricity. The ecological disaster of the Aral Sea has been the vengeance of nature on a system of sedentary agriculture that ignored geographical realities.
But Father Bear didn’t see it that way. To him the death of the Aral Sea was simply the fault of the Communists. When I mentioned the nomadic traditions of these regions he frowned, and misunderstood my comment as another example of the difficulties Kazakhstan had endured.
‘Nomads,’ he shrugged. ‘People without education. They cannot plan for the future.’
‘Perhaps they are satisfied with the present,’ I said.
‘Where are they now?’ he asked, gazing out at the empty prairie, as if the lack of horsemen and sheep out the train window was an argument in itself.
I mentioned Mongolia and the fact that the most of the population there still adhered to a nomadic lifestyle.
‘Mongolia,’ he snorted. ‘Why speak of barbarians?’
Chapter Four A DETESTABLE NATION OF SATAN
In 1238 the bottom fell out of the herring market in Yarmouth. Ships from the Baltic ports, which normally converged on the port to buy fish, never arrived and the sudden glut sent prices tumbling. Fishermen and merchants went bankrupt, and even in the Midlands you could buy fifty pickled herrings for as little as a shilling.
In the same year a strange mission appeared at the court of Louis IX of France; later they came on to London where they were received by Henry III. They declared themselves the envoys of a mysterious eastern potentate, known to Crusaders as the Old Man of the Mountains. From a fortress in the Elburz Mountains of northern Persia, this reclusive figure dispatched young fanatical disciples to kill his political enemies. The disciples were known as hashashin, or hashish eaters, from which our word assassin is derived. With their cloak and dagger methods the Ismaili Assassins had wielded considerable political power throughout the Middle East for almost two centuries. But now suddenly a new threat had arisen, from a people whose leaders were too distant and too unpredictable for assassination squads. The Ismailis had come to Europe to seek alliances against the advancing threat of the Mongols.
It is a measure of the narrowness of European horizons in the early decades of the thirteenth century that they remained in almost total ignorance of the cataclysmic events then unfolding in Asia. Under the charismatic leadership of Genghis Khan, the Mongols had embarked upon a series of conquests that were taking them across the breadth of the continent. Ancient dynasties collapsed, empires crumbled, great cities were levelled and their inhabitants butchered while Europe slumbered on, unaware that the Mongol horsemen were advancing ever westward.
In a reverse of the usual historical pattern, the history of the Mongol campaigns was written by the vanquished not by the victors. The apocalyptic language that has come down to us reflects the terror and the prejudices of the defeated. Invariably the Mongols are forces of darkness, barbarian hordes, the scourge of God, a pestilence that was destroying civilization. It is this tradition, the stories told by his enemies, that has cast Genghis Khan as one of history’s great villains.
To Mongols Genghis was a great and sophisticated leader, disciplined, incorruptible, politically astute. A lawgiver of considerable wisdom and foresight, an efficient administrator and a master of military strategy, he managed to unite the Mongol tribes for the first time in generations. It was this rare unity that allowed them to turn their eyes outward to the rich but degenerate cities that lay beyond their grassy homelands. Early conquests came with surprising ease, and in the terrible momentum that began to build, the Mongol Empire was born.
Genghis Khan could hardly be expected to respect cities or their inhabitants. He was a man of the steppes, a nomad who viewed settled societies from a position of cultural and moral superiority, with suspicion, with horror, and ultimately with pity. To nomads, men and women who lived in cities suffered a kind of debasement, while farmers who spent their lives on their knees tilling the soil were hardly of more regard than a flock of sheep. Their destruction did not bother the Mongols any more than the slaughter of the Incas bothered the Conquistadors, or the fate of Africans troubled the early slave traders. By the standards of medieval Asian warfare Genghis’ methods were not especially brutal. His terrible reputation is a measure of his success, and of the monopoly that the vanquished cities have enjoyed over the historical sources.
The tone was set with the siege and destruction of Bukhara. ‘They came, they uprooted, they burned, they slew, they despoiled, they departed,’ a historian of the period wrote. Yakut, the famous Arab geographer, who fled from the city of Merv as the Mongols advanced, reported that its noble buildings ‘were effaced from the earth as lines of writing are effaced from paper’. Pausing only to water and pasture their horses, the Mongols swept onward and one by one the great cities of Transcaspia and Oxiana, of Afghanistan and northern Persia were sacked: Samarkand, Khiva, Balkh, Merv, Herat, Kandahar,