The Qalas

24/08/09

I “celebrated” my thirty first birthday in the desert of Uzbekistan with a couple of Slovakian guys. After waiting for a couple of hours for a ridiculous pontoon bridge to open, we ripped past cotton fields over a rough road toward some untouched ancient fortresses, Qalas, deserted in the sand.

As we drove, it was amazing to see the contrast between the land near the road, irrigated by the great soviet canals that drain the red sea. They produce a green strip along their banks that fades out over the land, ending with the last irrigation ditch, ultimately giving way to the desert sand. At one point there were sand dunes to the right of us and lush green cotton fields to the right. The driver pulled off the main road and headed out into the desert. The landscape was nothing but sand and hard packed dried earth. The only life was sagebrush and the occasional goat or sheep nibbling at it.

Just when it was looking most bleak, the horizon was broken by a massive fortress that seemed to rise out of the desert sand. The mud brick walls seemed older than time, some dating back to the fourth century BCE. All lie in ruins today, the last having perished at the hands of Chinggis Khan in the early thirteenth century. The desert climate has preserved the mud walls for thousands of years, and the arid climate gives the mud a rock like hardness.

From the top of the walls, I looked out and saw the canals in the distance, scarring the desert and giving life to a channel of artificial green. The land is flat and barren, with a horizon that extends as far as the eye can see. From the top of the walls, a warm sandy wind whipped over me with gusts hard enough that I had to watch my balance. For hundreds of years, nothing had touched these ancient buildings except that wind and the occasional footstep.

The Qalas were the first place in Uzbekistan that I could really feel. We found them deserted, the area around them deserted, the road leading there deserted. There was no ticket booth, no stairs to the top, no guardrails, no areas off limits. Only crumbling archways and decaying paths between ancient ramparts that we explored, cautious to avoid damaging the crumbling fortresses as we scrambled up the walls and under archways that had once supported great ceilings of mud.

I pulled an ancient piece of grass out of a mud brick and sat on the top of the wall, feeling it between my fingers as I felt the hot desert wind blow over me under the grey sky. I was astounded to think that people could survive in such a harsh environment, particularly with such a highly developed and structured society. This was built millennia before the soviet development projects that brought water and fertility to the area.

After the driver attempted to re-negotiate the price of the car, we were off, covered in dust, but finally feeling inspired in this country by something real, raw, and spectacular. The day ended with me walking alone on the streets of Urgench, a big block soviet city with colossal squares, empty save for some Uzbek monuments. There was a ghostlike feeling in the air as that warm desert wind blew in from the horizon under the setting sun.