Nick Hunt is the author of three travel books about walking in different parts of Europe, two of which were finalists for the Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year.
All photography by Hassan Kurbanbaev for Noema Magazine.
MIZDARKHAN, Uzbekistan — On a hill at the edge of the desert stands a wooden edifice above a simple tomb. It consists of four slanting poles that come together in a frame, inside of which are bundled sticks that resemble kindling. It seems a puzzling marker for a grave until you learn the legend of whose body lies inside: Gayōmart, the first human, neither woman nor man, who was created from mud by the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda. Zoroastrians venerate fire, so the structure makes sense. It is a symbolic beacon waiting for its flame.
Not far away, past crumbling graves and cairns of mud bricks stacked in sevens — an auspicious number in the comparatively recent religion of Islam — stands another monument, a ruined mausoleum. Its roof long ago collapsed, and only three slumped walls remain. According to tradition, one brick falls from it every year. It is dedicated to Khalif Erejep, a medieval Sufi saint, but pious Muslims believe it is built on top of Adam’s grave, a cosmological rival to the tomb of Gayōmart.
The mausoleum itself, meanwhile, is known as the Apocalypse Clock. When its last brick falls, the end of the world will come.
Pilgrims in their thousands bring bricks to pile around the walls of this sprawling necropolis in the west of Uzbekistan, a superstitious hack to forestall the end of days. Eschatological themes — creation and apocalypse, the beginning and the end — run through this city of the dead, and through the region in which it lies. A hundred miles to the north is the site of one of the modern world’s worst ecocides. I have come to Uzbekistan to visit a vanished sea.
My journey started far from here, in the ancient city of Samarkand. I landed shortly after dawn and walked toward its center. The famous madrassas with their minarets and blue-tiled domes, UNESCO World Heritage sites that draw tourists from around the world, were hidden by Soviet tenement blocks, gaudy shopping malls and urban sprawl. It wasn’t quite the Silk Road oasis I had been expecting. But underneath a pink sky, a more mysterious sight emerged. The highway from the airport passed a barren area seemingly stranded by development: curiously eroded hills grazed by skinny sheep. I assumed it was pastureland or else a vast demolition zone, but it turned out to be the ruin of an even older settlement.
The site, Afrasiyab, dates back at least 2,500 years. Within canyons of cracked dirt, which hint at vanished walls and streets, are layers of archaeology almost 40 feet deep. Murals discovered in the 1960s show opulent processions and feasts; camels, swans and elephants; ambassadors arriving from courts as distant as China and Tibet. Inhabited by the Sogdians, an Eastern Iranian merchant culture, and situated roughly midway between Beijing and Rome, the fortunes of this thriving city rested upon trade. In 1220, the invading Mongols wiped it off the map.
Even by the standards of Genghis Khan, the destruction was impressive. Almost every trace of the city’s existence was erased. Samarkand grew rich again — in the 14th and 15th centuries, it was one of Central Asia’s wealthiest centers, a magnet for scholars and artisans from across the world — but the ruins of the earlier city were left alone. Its mud-brick walls crumbled back into the land. Subsequent inhabitants never built upon the rubble. The modern suburbs that have crept around it only emphasize its void; it stands preserved as an architectural memento mori.
Much of Uzbekistan, I saw as I traveled on, is littered with the remains of vanished civilizations. From Samarkand, my route led west for 500 miles by train, from the country’s more fertile east to the vast, arid region of Karakalpakstan. The track parallelled the Amu Darya, the river that divides two forbidding deserts: the Kyzylkum (“Red Sand”) to the north and Turkmenistan’s Karakum (“Black Sand”) to the south. There was nothing red or black in the vastness I could see, nothing but low, wind-sculpted dunes stretching on and on. But then in the distance a grey silhouette appeared, a kind of flat-topped mountain with symmetrically sloping sides. Even from afar it was clearly not natural. After watching it for a while — the only thing to focus on in the horizontal endlessness — I recognized it as Chilpik Kala.
A gargantuan “tower of silence,” Chilpik Kala was a site for the mortuary practice of excarnation. Two millennia ago, bodies were laid on top of it to be picked apart by carrion birds, keeping the decomposing flesh from polluting the sacred elements of earth, water and particularly fire. Before Arab invasions from the west spread Islam across the continent, this region — ancient Khwarazm — was a heartland of Zoroastrianism. The Arabs characterized its people as “fire-worshippers.”
Zoroastrians do not worship fire — like Muslims, they recognize one god — but the sacredness of fire is central to their faith. From Iran to India, where Parsi (Persian) refugees fled from religious persecution, fire temples are dedicated to eternally burning flames fed by priests with sandalwood to ensure they never fade. But the supply of worshippers is less sustainable than wood — there are fewer than 200,000 in the world today.
Far to the south of Chilpik Kala, across the border in Turkmenistan, is another site that houses an eternal flame. On my map it was marked as “Door to Hell (Tourist Attraction).” Also known as the “Shining of Karakum,” the Darvaza gas crater is a collapsed natural gas field 230 feet wide that has been continuously burning for half a century. Its origin is debated — some say it was caused by a drilling accident, others that the pit formed naturally — but it was flared deliberately by engineers in the 1980s to burn off methane escaping into the atmosphere. Since at least 2010, Turkmenistan’s government has planned to extinguish it, but this will be difficult and expensive; for now it provides a source of income to local tour guides. Visitors take selfies against a bowl of orange flames. A Canadian explorer, descending the crater in 2014 protected by a Kevlar suit, described it as a roaring “coliseum of fire.”
My 12-hour train ride ended at Nukus, Karakalpakstan’s capital, a down-at-heel industrial city structured on the principles of Soviet linearity. One of the places I visited first was the state history museum. Among dusty relics of the cultures of ancient Khwarazm were melancholy displays of the region’s vanished animal life: dead-eyed foxes, snarling wolves and the strange, trunk-faced antelope — once widespread, now endangered — known as the saiga. Saddest of all was the “last Turan tiger,” killed in 1949 on the banks of the Amu Darya, its face displaying an expression of pure madness. Officially, the Turanian or Caspian tiger is extinct, but they once roamed from eastern Turkey to western China.
What most drew my attention was a dusty diorama. Draped with nets, a wooden boat was beached inside a cabinet. Behind it was a painted sky teeming with painted gulls. A bunch of taxidermied fish had been strewn around its hull. The sign upon the case simply read “ARAL.”
Until the 1960s, the Aral was the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water, covering an area of around 26,300 square miles. Its Uzbek name, Orol Dengizi, meant “Sea of Islands.” In the space of the last six decades it has shrunk to a tenth of its former size, one of the worst ecological disasters in history. Technically an endorheic lake, a body of water with no natural outlet, its existence was dependent on the inflow of two rivers: the Amu Darya and, farther to the north, the Syr Darya. Under Soviet mismanagement, both rivers were diverted into arid steppe to irrigate booming cotton farms — “white gold.” The planners knew what was happening but considered the loss worthwhile; the Aral became what ecologists term a “sacrifice zone.” As the shoreline receded year by year, the water’s salt content increased, causing a mass die-off of aquatic species. Soon the Amu Darya no longer reached the shore. This astonishingly quick decline was charted by satellite images that show, frame by frame, the ragged coastline becoming desert, islands turning into peninsulas, landmasses merging, brown and yellow replacing blue. In the final frame, all that remains are a few disconnected pools.
The exposed seabed, bleached to a ghostly white, has become the Aralkum, the world’s youngest desert. Its surface is littered with millions of tiny shells. Rusting trawlers beached on dunes of pale sand, once part of a thriving fishing fleet, have become iconic — and Instagrammable — symbols of collapse, the eerie centerpiece of a post-apocalyptic tourist industry. Four-wheel-drive vehicles ferry visitors from Nukus to Muynak, once a busy industrial port, to view these graffitied “ships of the desert,” and from there to the nearest seacoast, now a journey of many hours on bone-shaking dirt roads. There you can stay in a yurt camp overlooking the dying sea, little more than a narrow lake stretching north into Kazakhstan.
My journey to the sacrifice zone followed the same itinerary. The other passenger on the tour was a software designer from London named Steve. To a soundtrack of blaring Uzbek pop, in a battered SUV driven by a gold-toothed man named Kolya, we ascended to the Ustyurt Plateau, a vast, elevated shelf of desert once roamed by Kazakh nomads, the eastern edge of which used to be the Aral’s sea cliffs. The scale of what we saw from there was impossible to comprehend: a living ecosystem now dead, a sea replaced by desert.
What remained of the South Aral was visible from the yurt camp, a panoramic view over eerily still water. The unreal mirror of its surface captured the changes of the sky as it slid from dawn to dusk, from blue to blood orange. Each morning started with a ritual: The 30 or so tourists who had come here on their separate tours — Canadians, Japanese, Spanish, Russians — were roused from sleeping in their yurts to watch the sun rise over the sea, which produced a light effect I had never seen anywhere before, a reflection like a bar of gold, perfectly vertical, that split the body of the water into scintillating halves. The desert glowed Martian red; the water ran with blood and flames; the half-asleep spectators took pictures on their phones. It occurred to me that this was another form of fire worship — a ball of flame, symbolizing life, rising over the ebb tide of something dying.
Down by the waterline, the sense of death was magnified by a stench like a decomposing body. While Kolya smoked his cigarettes, I trudged ankle-deep through grey, stinking mud to bathe; the water felt viscous, as slick as glycerine. Its high level of salinity makes it similar to the Dead Sea, so swimming is nearly impossible; Steve and I bobbed comically on a kind of liquid mattress. It turned out we were not alone. Surrounding us were squiggling crustaceans, later identified as Artemia or brine shrimp, a species of extremophile that finds its evolutionary niche in places that are otherwise inimical to animal life.
Better known as “sea monkeys,” these shrimp have provided the children of the last Aral fishermen with a new way to make a living on the sea’s retreating shores: harvesting dormant Artemia cysts to be sold as fish food. In 1960s America, they were marketed as Instant Life, magically reanimating when added to water. When the wheels of our Toyota sunk in soft sand, a group of brine shrimp harvesters appeared from nowhere to help dig out the tires. Later we saw them speeding across the dried-out seabed in a repurposed Soviet military vehicle, scarves wrapped around their faces, trailing a cloud of white dust — a post-apocalyptic vision straight out of “Mad Max.”
The term “post-apocalyptic” is commonly applied to the Aral, and the label is hard to disagree with. The disappearance of the sea has made the summers hotter and drier and the winters colder, and for years the wider region has been wracked by drought. Maelstroms of dust laced with carcinogenic pesticides and other toxic residue are lifted by the wind into the atmosphere, millions of metric tons of it a year. Until 1992, an island called Vozrozhdeniya was used to develop biological weapons, including bubonic plague and anthrax — which, like Artemia cysts, can lie dormant for decades. Exposure to the chemicals can cause a quick and painful death; an anthrax outbreak was the possible cause of an incident in 1988 in which 50,000 saiga died within an hour. The ex-island, landlocked now in the western part of the Aralkum, has since been partly decontaminated, but its poisons are suspected to have seeped into the soil. The Karakalpak population suffers from high rates of cancer, anemia and respiratory disease, a legacy of decades of polluted fallout. With the loss of tens of thousands of jobs from the collapsed fishing industry, the region is among the poorest in Uzbekistan.
The tiny crustacean bodies wriggling in the brine are a clear example that if the apocalypse has come, life has managed to carry on. The brine shrimp harvesters have adapted to another form of fishing. Now their vehicles plow the seabed that their ancestors once sailed above — from a distance, they could be trawlers on a mirror sea. Paying to see the site of an ecological catastrophe has been criticized by some as voyeuristic, but so-called “last chance” or “dark” tourism has enabled many locals to continue living here, running yurt camps and hotels and acting as guides for foreigners.
A hardy, woody shrub called saxaul is another form of new life. Saxaul thrives in arid, saline environments, and it can grow to the height of a small tree. Its roots fix sandy soil in place; a fully grown plant can stabilize four metric tons of it or more. The government of Uzbekistan is planting it everywhere it can, and the bleached white of the desert is turning green. The endangered saiga have adapted too, using the seabed as a corridor to migrate from Kazakhstan. A herd of around 200 grazes on Vozrozhdeniya, which translates as “rebirth” or “resurrection”; despite the toxins in its soil, the former bioweapons base is now a protected nature reserve.
And across the border, there is even hope for the North Aral. Unlike the inexorably shrinking lake that Steve and I experienced, the Kazakh remnant of the sea is, incredibly, growing. With the installation of the eight-mile-long Kokaral Dam, an $86 million project completed in 2005, the Syr Darya once again nourishes the sea; within only a few months, the water level rose by almost 12 feet. The sea’s salinity has decreased and mackerel have returned, reviving the local fishing industry. The city of Aralsk, once a port, remains as landlocked as Muynak, but it is possible that the water might one day return there.
The South Aral, however, will almost certainly be gone in a generation.
On my last morning in the yurt camp, I found myself sharing the sunrise with a Russian woman. The Russians had kept themselves apart, I noticed, from the Western tourists, the war in Ukraine an unmentioned barrier between us. But Irina made it clear that she was against the war. She spoke in broken English and seemed on the verge of tears. “The war, crazy,” she said. “The world, crazy. Russia, Ukraine — brothers.” With two fingers for a gun she mimed shooting herself in the head. And then she turned to the limpid sea reflecting the colors of the sky. “Here, mir,” she said — the Russian word for “peace.”
The thought that she had found peace in such a desert of death … I didn’t know what to say. We shook hands rather stiffly before we went back to our groups, but on parting she told me something else: “Life is beautiful, and so short.”
Steve had another take on the journey back to Nukus. “This used to be a sea, now it’s hell on earth!”
Kolya had stopped the SUV beside a long wire fence. Shredded plastic waste was scattered among the seashells. A metal tower rose from the sand, a kind of monstrous Bunsen burner roaring with orange flames, a fearsome sight against the blue of the desert sky. Here was another eternal flame, one of many natural gas flares.
At night from the yurt camp I had seen them flickering, distant sparks of light in the otherwise perfect blackness. In another adaptation to the sea’s decline, the exposure of the seabed has enabled a rush for fossil fuels. Under the polluted sand and elsewhere in Karakalpakstan lie an estimated 60 trillion cubic feet of gas and 1.7 billion metric tons of oil. The exploitation of these reserves is a government priority, and the Central Asia-Center pipeline, a branch of which runs west of here, is conveniently placed to carry gas to Russia. The pipeline is controlled by Gazprom, the Russian state energy giant, and Russians are the leading investors in oil infrastructure. The water might be gone, but carbon flows. Dozens of potential fields are slated for exploration.
It can’t be a coincidence that an ancient faith that venerates fire took root in a region that is soaked with fossil fuels. Our turbocharged industrial culture venerates fire too — but rather than symbolizing renewal, our addiction to petrochemicals, in an age of climate breakdown, signifies the opposite. If fire represents both life and death, we have chosen the latter option.
Dust devils swirled around us as we drove south, and small tornados of white sand occasionally spun across the road. Kolya stopped to let them pass with an odd politeness, as if they were other travelers going on their way.
The necropolis of Mizdarkhan, 13 miles southwest of Nukus, sprawls over three low hills rising from the yellow steppe. It is the place of the first human and the end of days. My first impression is of an abandoned termite mound. Two thousand years ago, it was very much alive, one of the largest cities in the oasis region of Khwarazm. At some point, the living fled and the dead moved in. It still has an eerie feeling of being occupied; the mausoleums resemble houses, the spaces between them winding streets. Some modern tombs are modeled after yurts with curving ribs of rebar. Propped against walls like ladders are the wooden frames often used to carry corpses to their final resting places. Many of the simpler graves have collapsed into gaping holes — it feels as if the dead clambered out and went for a walk, wandering like dust devils among the fallen brickwork.
A sign near the entrance gate warns against improper attire, worshipping the tombs, lighting candles or hanging ribbons — all practices frowned on by Islam. Clearly, older superstitions have not quite gone away. Across a dried salt marsh looms another mud-brick ruin, a site called Gyaur-Kala. The Arabs coined its name: “Fortress of the Infidels.” Some guides refer to it as “Fortress of the Fire-Worshippers.”
There are other mysteries here. Inside one seven-domed mausoleum lies a sarcophagus that is more than 80 feet long, like a siloed missile. According to legend, Shamun Nabi, a mystic with superhuman powers, was martyred here by infidels. His tomb was built to cover the length of ground his blood spilled across; either that or, as some believe, he was a giant. In 1966 archaeologists opened the tomb to try to solve the mystery. There was nothing inside it at all.
The highest point of Mizdarkhan is the Jumart Kassab mound, where Gayōmart’s wooden beacon stands against the sky. Jumart Kassab means “Butcher’s Hill,” supposedly named in memory of a wealthy benefactor who distributed beef to the poor in times of famine. As always, legends overlap: This might be yet another reflection of the Zoroastrian creation myth, in which Gavaevodata, the primordial ox, was sculpted from the same mud that formed Gayōmart. Whatever the truth behind the tale, the hill was clearly a place of power: Livestock used to be driven around it seven times to ward off disease, and women would roll down it seven times to help them conceive.
Turning my back on creation, I approach the Apocalypse Clock. A woman is keening distantly, her sobs carried on the wind. The half-demolished mausoleum is besieged by pilgrims’ bricks, stacked in untidy sevens. But a group of workmen are making more permanent repairs. One, balanced precariously at the top of a crumbling wall, has laid at least a dozen rows, postponing the end of the world by several centuries. His colleagues, taking a cigarette break, call me over to sit with them. One speaks a little English. He flicks his neck, a Russian gesture that he would like a drink, shrugging fatalistically when I say I have none to offer.
“The story about the end of the world. Do you believe it?” I ask.
“Maybe,” Oktur says with a smile. Then he takes out his phone.
First he shows me pictures of his home and his family — and then a picture of himself holding up a six-foot-long sturgeon. “Eighty-seven kilos!” he says proudly. The son of an Aral fisherman, he caught it in the Amu Darya, which appears in photo after photo, fish after fish, still apparently full of life.
Karakalpakstan has witnessed many endings over the millennia. The Aral today is often considered a terminal calamity, an indictment of human hubris. But life finds a way — from wriggling extremophiles to the saxaul greening its dry bed. Hard to see among the clouds of toxic dust is a picture of remarkable adaptation and regeneration as post-collapse cultures find ways to survive. The mud bricks stacked here day by day, anonymously and patiently, are an expression of hope for the world’s renewal.
Zoroastrianism is considered not only the oldest monotheistic but also the first truly “apocalyptic” religion. Somehow, in the fiery lands that stretch from here to Iran, a radical belief was born that the trajectory of the world arced toward a grand collapse; the future was not continuity, but a final dramatic showdown. Judaism, Christianity and Islam traced the same path, and arguably — in fears of fossil fuel-driven climate apocalypse — so does the modern industrial culture that grips us now.
Near the Apocalypse Clock is another mausoleum. An inscription on its walls, written in Arabic, uncannily echoes Irina’s words: “Life is beautiful, what a pity it is not eternal.”
In a deep sense, though, it is. The fire is continually renewed. Even now, the end of the world is not the end of the world. I crouch down among the stones and made my own stack of seven.
