Through the desert between Ashgabat and Geok-Tepe runs a four-lane motorway, complete with paved hard shoulders and crash barriers. With the exception of a brigade of men with hoes planting saplings in the central reservation, we had the expanse of tarmac all to ourselves. Traffic of the more agricultural variety – bicycles, horse-drawn carts, tractors – crawled along a dusty service road.

It was seven-thirty in the morning. I was riding in the passenger seat of a Daewoo minivan, a loaf-shaped vehicle that sat high on its wheels. The sky was cloudless, blown clean by a stiff breeze that stirred the dunes of the Karakum as if by an invisible hand. Ibrahim-Aka, the van’s owner, had to wrestle the wheel in order to stay between the white lines. We had left Ashgabat at sunrise and were heading, at 70 kilometres an hour, in the direction of the Caspian Sea.

‘Smoke?’ Bracing one knee against the steering wheel, Ibrahim-Aka lit a cigarette. The brand was President.

Uncustomarily, I joined him. My only concern was that I had no papers for travelling through the Turkmenistan interior.

‘Oh, but there won’t be any roadblocks till Geok-Tepe,’ Ibrahim-Aka said reassuringly.

We had plenty of petrol, a full tank and two jerrycans in the back. Flat loaves of bread, still warm to the touch. Two watermelons. Roast chicken in silver foil. Half a carton of Presidents.

There was no question of getting lost. This was the only road, and it ran parallel to the Turkmenbai Canal. The wind was whipping up the water in drab little waves that slapped against the side of the waterway. If we were lucky, nightfall would see us in Krasnovodsk, the seaport that was now called Turkmenbai.

Come what may, I had resolved to get closer to the bay at Kara Bogaz than Paustovsky had. Especially now that I knew what was what: the bay existed, and – with the exception of a single ten-year period – always had. During that remarkable interlude the bay had disappeared from the face of the earth. Or, to put it more precisely: from 1982 to 1992 the area known as Kara Bogaz had not been an inland sea but a dusty saltpan. Dzyamar Aliyev had explained that to me, the ichthyologist with whom I had lunched on carp. In that regard at least, he assured me, the map on my office wall in Moscow had not been tampered with. ‘A map dating from 1991 should not show the bay,’ Aliyev said resolutely. ‘Your version is one of the few which correctly represents Kara Bogaz.’

A few days after our initial meeting I had contacted him again, this time to ask: ‘Is it possible to travel around Turkmenistan without an internal visa?’ Now that Amansoltan’s attempt to mediate through the head of the Desert Institute had failed, I was sorely in need of his advice.

How could I have known that Aliyev had studied the bay at Kara Bogaz extensively, and even taken samples there? As soon as the biologist heard of my real destination, he pushed me down into a cane chair and uncorked a bottle of apricot brandy.

‘From my private distillery,’ the octogenarian said with a grin. We were sitting in his study at home, on a veranda where new tendrils of honeysuckle twined their way in through the windows.

Purring with delight, Aliyev began running down his favourite scapegoats again, the Soviet hydraulic engineers. In their ‘undying shortsightedness’, he said, they had insisted on damming the narrow strait between the Caspian and Kara Bogaz. To accomplish that they had resuscitated Lieutenant Zherebtsov’s antique arguments: Kara Bogaz was nothing but a useless evaporation kettle, an ‘insatiable maw’ swallowing up the valuable waters of the Caspian. ‘By closing off the bay, they hoped to stop the steady fall in sea level. The bay and the sea were communicating vessels that should no longer be allowed to communicate.’ That was how Aliyev summed up the engineers’ train of thought.

In the end, he told me, the experts got their way: in February 1980 the marine waterfall was silenced heavy-handedly: bulldozers on tank tracks had forced up a 200-metre-long dam across the Adzyi Darya, the umbilical connecting the Caspian with the bay at Kara Bogaz. Party bigwigs from Ashgabat had stood and applauded as the final clods of earth were ceremonially spread out across the dyke, while the director of the Moscow Institute for Hydraulic Affairs had spoken of a ‘universal, rational redistribution of Soviet water supplies’. Surrounded by the silent excavators, he proclaimed that the proletarian operators had now done more than merely close off a noxious body of water: they had laid the ‘first stone’ in the project to divert the great rivers, the perebroska for which his institute bore final responsibility.

‘Perebroska was a magic word,’ Aliyev said. ‘The divertors were seen almost as demigods. The press referred to them as “the tamers of nature” who were carrying out “the project of the century”.’

Perebroska had become an all-embracing plan: by that time it covered all of European Russia, Siberia and Central Asia. At the end of the Second World War, an entire generation of scientists had pounced on the ideas of Comrade Krzhizhanovsky, the ‘electrifier’ of the Soviet Union who had first propagated the reversal of the great rivers back in 1933. From the 1950s on, his proposal to divert the waters of Russia’s northbound rivers southwards was advanced as a panacea for all the Union’s water shortages. On the Soviet map, it looked like a neat enough plan: the blue veins running up to the polar seas would be redirected to lower latitudes by means of long, rectilinear canals. In order to irrigate the cotton plantations south of the Aral Sea, the Siberian rivers Ob and Irtysh would be rechannelled. Translated to a European scale, the intake of this ‘water bridge’ would lie north of Helsinki, while its outlet would be south of Rome.

In addition to this Siberian component, the catchment area of the Volga and the Caspian basin would also be altered. Along that route, however, man-made problems had accumulated; these, the fiziki felt, called for man-made solutions as well. The ‘cascade’ of reservoirs along the Volga slowed down the current and caused even more water to be lost to evaporation. This in turn only aggravated the Caspian Sea’s mysterious fall, which had started in the 1930s when Yakov Rubinschtein was appointed manager of the sulphate plant at Kara Bogaz.

Hydrologists drew up mathematical models to predict the future water balance of the Caspian. That balance, however, was purely economic: a profit and loss account with cyclically sensitive variables such as precipitation and evaporation. Drawing off even more water from the Volga for the irrigation of the Kalmuk and Kazakh steppes, their calculations showed, would result in a drastic lowering of the Caspian and cut off its major ports from the sea. What was needed, the hydro-accountants claimed, was more water. That could be achieved in two ways; by deflecting the Neva, Dvina and Pechora rivers of northern Russia southwards to the Volga – Krzhizhanovsky’s original plan – or by damming the entrance to the bay at Kara Bogaz.

‘Let Kara Bogaz die a heroic death, like a soldier at the front!’ the Deputy Minister of Public Works recommended. The bay should be sacrificed to the more useful allocation of scarce water. After all, wasn’t that exactly what an earlier generation of Soviet planners had done with the Aral Sea? But the Soviet Ministry of Chemical Affairs, which used the bay as a natural sulphate laboratory, did not like the idea. Cape Bekdash was the epicentre of the salt chemical industry for the entire USSR: there lay the greatest concentration of factories for the production of bischofite (the defoliant used in mechanical cotton harvesting) and epsomite (for tanning and textile processing). Chemical Affairs squared up to the Soviet Ministry of Public Works.

‘To no avail, of course,’ Dzyamar Aliyev said. ‘It was David against Goliath, with one difference: Goliath won.’

From the drawer of an old treadle sewing machine, an antique Singer, he produced a carbon copy of a letter he had sent ‘to the Council of Ministers of the USSR’ in the autumn of 1978. In those three pages he had explained his objections to the projected damming of the bay at Kara Bogaz.

My host emptied his glass and put the letter of protest on the table before me.

I skimmed the text, until my eye was caught by the words ‘sturgeon’ and ‘caviar’ – written in bold and underlined. The ichthyologist had stood up for the fish! Encouraged by his success with the silver carp, he had pointed out to the USSR’s leaders that damming the bay would endanger the Soviet caviar industry.

He had written: ‘The bay at Kara Bogaz has an influence on more than the water level of the Caspian Sea alone. It also keeps the saline content at a relatively low level (14.3 grams per litre). Closing off the bay would disturb this natural balance and cause salt concentrations to rise. Should the salt content of the Caspian Sea increase to more than 15.1 grams per litre, all varieties of sturgeon will die off.’

Aliyev drummed his fingers on the back of the chair as I read. Brezhnev, he had hoped, would recoil at the prospect of state banquets without caviar. The demise of the sturgeon population was one argument to which the rigid master of the Kremlin might prove sensitive.

The biologist had played his cards well, but his ploy missed its mark: in 1979, the Azerbaijani engineering agency BakHydroProjekt was commissioned to design the dam.

But only two years after the cutting-off of the bay at Kara Bogaz – Party leader Brezhnev was barely in his grave – a drastic error on the part of the hydraulic engineers came to light. According to the prognosis issued by the Institute for Hydraulic Affairs, the water at Kara Bogaz would take fifteen to twenty-five years to evaporate. But two years later, as it turned out, the entire 18,000-square-kilometre bottom of the bay already lay dry. The hydrologists sought refuge in technobabble. An error, they said, had been made in the correlation coefficient applied in the evaporation formula. An error to a factor of ten. They had never intended to allow the bay to evaporate completely, for that would cause the salt precipitate to be carried off by the wind. Borne away by the ‘tempests from Bukhara’, it could ruin the fertile soil along the Volga and the Don. The designers at BakHydroProjekt suggested installing conduits to restore the influx of Caspian Sea water, to at least moisten the bay. But the damage had already been done: the flamingoes that settled at Kara Bogaz that year found no food, and died by the thousands.

In 1983, Dzyamar Aliyev took part in an expedition organised by the Turkmen Academy of Sciences to investigate the rumours of avian mortality. From a helicopter he saw endless rows of strange pink hillocks: the plumage of dead flamingoes.

‘The cadavers had been picked apart by sea eagles,’ he told me. ‘The whole place stank of brine and decay.’

The members of the expedition found no water anywhere. Using soil drills, they took samples of the bay’s bed and found it to be covered with a 1.5-metre-thick crust of salt. And, as the chemists had once predicted, that layer was unsuitable for industrial use.

Up to one thousand kilometres away, on the far side of the Caspian, agronomists the following season noted the salinisation of arable soils: winter’s storms had covered Russia’s fertile Black Earth Region with a layer of powder. Analysis proved that this was, indeed, sulphate-bearing salt; there could be no doubt concerning its origin.

By commissioning additional studies, the Kremlin took halfhearted measures and tried to keep the catastrophe hidden from the outside world. That proved impossible. In 1983, in the town of Santa Barbara, California, hydrologist Norman Precoda noticed a white spot on a satellite image at 41 degrees north, 53 degrees east: an area formerly aquamarine in colour. He published his discovery (‘Kara Bogaz lagoon dried up’) in the journal International Water Power and Dam Construction.

As secretary of the Turkmen Academy of Sciences, Aliyev had privileged access to that kind of professional literature, and he had kept the most relevant articles in the drawer of his sewing machine.

In 1985, the magazine Soviet Geography pointed out the far-reaching consequences for cartographers: ‘In view of the enormous size of the bay at Kara Bogaz, it features prominently even on small-scale maps; in that context, its transformation into a vast salt pan requires adaptations to almost all maps and atlases currently in print.’

Conscientious cartographers all over the world began colouring in the shallow inland sea of Kara Bogaz (light blue) as land below sea level (dark green). But, as the irony of history would have it, they had little choice but to undo this change immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union: in the spring of 1992, Saparmurat Niyazov (not yet known as ‘Turkmenbai’, but already president of an independent Turkmenistan) sank a shovel into the dam. Rolling up his sleeves for the cameras, he spoke a few words about ‘casting off the yoke of Soviet colonialism’. Kara Bogaz, he said, had been stolen from Turkmenistan. As an accomplished demagogue, the president claimed that in a single decade the dam – cost of construction: 1 million roubles – had caused hundreds of millions of roubles in damage. By breaching the earthen barrage ‘on behalf of the Turkmen people’, he was reclaiming Kara Bogaz from the desert.

Dzyamar Aliyev noted waspishly that the same dignitaries who had applauded the damming of the strait in 1980 had also stood clapping at its reopening. He showed me a bulletin from the United States Geological Survey that documented the disappearance and return of Kara Bogaz with satellite images from 1977, 1987 and 1997. The caption: ‘To the well-known instability of the geopolitical borders of the former Soviet Union, the bay at Kara Bogaz has now added an element of physical instability as well.’

Before meeting Ibrahim-Aka at the bazaar and chartering him and his Daewoo van for my journey, I had purchased a road map of Turkmenistan at a local souvenir shop. The words in Roman script, rather than the Cyrillic formerly dictated by Moscow, showed it to be a recent edition. And indeed: on it, Kara Bogaz once again lay like a light-blue seashell amid the sands of the Karakum.

New landmarks such as the pilgrims’ mosque at Geok-Tepe were indicated by little drawings. This place of worship, consisting of four minarets and a prayer room where four thousand believers could kneel at once, had been built in the late 1990s by a French businessman named Martin Bouygues.

Ibrahim-Aka had seen the Breton industrialist on television often enough, in the company of Turkmenbai. ‘When they greet they kiss each other wherever they can,’ he said with a shudder.

As the sanctuary rose up in the distance, my driver told me above the rumble of the engine that it was a replica (‘but one size bigger’) of the mosque built for King Hassan in Casablanca.

‘Bouygues built that one as well. When our president visited King Hassan, he decided: I want one like that, too.’

The four minarets stood like spears planted in the ground. At a height of 63 metres – the age at which Muhammad died – they surrounded a jade-coloured dome that was 40 metres high – the age at which Muhammad received the title of prophet.

Ibrahim-Aka, who had earned enough as nightwatchman at the English school for diplomats’ children to buy himself this new Daewoo, was a devout Muslim. At fixed times he pulled his van over onto the hard shoulder, unfurled his prayer rug on the windy flats and bowed his wrinkled forehead in the direction of Mecca. But Ibrahim-Aka was suspicious of the religiosity of his president, who he claimed ‘spends half the national treasury on building temples to himself.’

‘Did you see the trinoshka while you were in Ashgabat?’

I burst out laughing: trinoshka, ‘tripod’, was an awfully irreverent way to talk about the 75-metre-high tower topped by a winged and gilded Turkmenbai. Arms outstretched, the sculpture of the self-appointed desert ruler turned to follow the sun in its course: a pose which announced that there could be only two focal points in the universe: the sun and him.

To Ibrahim-Aka, the mosque at Geok-Tepe bore witness to a similar megalomania. The structure was built on the ruins of a clay fortification from which the Teke, Turkmenbai’s clan, had fought off a tsarist invasion in 1879. Two years later, the stubborn nation of horsemen had nevertheless been routed, but that was not the battle which the Chief of All Turkmen wished to commemorate. His goal was to celebrate the glory of his forefathers who, with Allah’s help, had slowed the Russian advance.

The motorway ended at a roundabout. To our left lay the antique, overgrown earthen wall of Geok-Tepe, to the right the mosque with its slender guardians. With the exception of a stray mule and a class of uniformed schoolchildren crossing the street, this place of pilgrimage seemed deserted. We took the road ahead and drove straight into the trap of the first police roadblock.

A chain festooned with little red banners had been stretched across the road at bumper height. Ibrahim-Aka climbed out and went into a square hut built of glass and aluminium. I saw him gesticulating as he spoke with two policemen, their caps bent together in consultation; after a few moments my driver came bustling back out along the gravel path: they wanted to see my documents as well.

It was as I had feared: the officers noted the name of every passing traveller in a big ledger.

My name almost went down in the book as ‘The Mayor of Amsterdam’, until I succeeded in explaining that that was who had issued my passport.

A visor was suddenly tilted back, and two penetrating Asiatic eyes took my measure. Did I resemble the man in the photo?

Yes, I did.

The clerk flipped through to my visa. The policeman looked doubtful and glanced at his calendar – he appeared to be checking whether the document was still valid.

‘Here you are.’ To my amazement, he handed me my passport and returned Ibrahim-Aka’s driving licence. We were free to continue our voyage.

‘Semi-illiterates!’ Ibrahim-Aka cackled as he started up the van. He put on a tape by a Turkish lady singer who, judging by the cover, could also belly-dance. ‘Did you see that? The poor idiots still can’t read Roman letters, even though that alphabet was reintroduced back in 1993.’

I thought about Amansoltan and her shame at being unable to spell the address of the Desert Institute. She was not the only one unable to make the switch. Anyone who hoped to be someone in a Turkmenistan under Turkmenbai, I realised, had to possess great mental agility. One needed a magician’s facility to transform the familiar, worn-out verities into new ones: hammer and sickle into cotton and horse; red into green; the May Day Parade into the procession on 27 October (Independence Day). Opportunism was a necessity of life, and many did not have it.

I had visited Amansoltan’s house the evening before I left. Why, I asked her then, hadn’t she told me about the ten-year period during which the bay at Kara Bogaz had ceased to exist?

That, apparently, had been prompted by shame as well. She was unwilling to use the term ‘reclamation’; Kara Bogaz had been ‘liquidated’. The damming of the bay had been a wilful assault on the natural environment of her native country, committed by her Soviet tutors. ‘It felt like betrayal.’ Wavering between resignation and disbelief, she added: ‘I was never able to understand how the salt-extraction, which had been set up at such great cost, could be written off just like that.’

In the spring of 1992, of course, Turkmenbai had been her hero too. She remembered the excitement in her neighbours’ voices: ‘Did you see him on TV?’ At the time, Amansoltan had wondered briefly whether the Russians would just sit back and allow ‘their’ dam to be demolished, but she also realised that the new authorities in the Kremlin had other matters to worry about.

Meanwhile, the bay at Kara Bogaz had restored itself wondrously; the salt deposits had dissolved and the flamingoes, ducks and pelicans (Amansoltan called them ‘chatterboxes’) came back.

Only the salt-chemical activities at Cape Bekdash had not been resuscitated. ‘But what could you expect? They existed purely by the grace of the planned economy.’ Back when the plants were still running at full capacity, Amansoltan told me, GosPlan – the Soviet state planning agency – had stood surety for all output, for the workers’ holidays, for the flying-in of fruit and vegetables. An Antonov from Moscow landed twice a week, but those supply flights ceased in 1991; from that moment on, life in the chemical town had become an ordeal.

Amansoltan had not been to Bekdash since 1978, when her thesis was presented. She’d had disappointments enough to deal with, she said. Now that she had retired, she was planning to withdraw to Ushboy Gorge. In that majestic canyon carved out by the Oxus, she and her mother had once wandered on horseback, before the Soviets had forced their way in. Amansoltan talked about one aul there untouched by progress, a tiny settlement of clay huts called the Golden Spring. It had a well, a corral for the cattle, and a weekly camel and sheep market. She had spent last summer there, and had felt free of cares for the first time in years.

‘Nowhere else is the night sky so filled with stars,’ she said. ‘Even at new moon, you can see exactly where you’re walking.’

I listened to her and thought, this is what they call going back to your roots. I also thought how outrageously futile the Soviet meddling had been in Amansoltan’s life.

The spring sun had not yet taken on the blistering power of summer, but the basalt rocks sheltering the harbour at Krasnovodsk/ Turkmenbai were still warm in the early evening hours. The final police checkpoint before town was on the ridge, but temporarily closed for business: the policemen on duty, their fingers dripping with grease, were eating shashlik as we passed and allowing the sparse traffic to roll on through.

The port city below us was simultaneously beguiling and ugly. On the quayside lay a jumble of ship’s hulls, storage sheds, railway tracks, burner vents and wharves – veiled by a web of high-tension wires. In silhouette, however, with that picture-postcard sky above the Caspian, the huddled structures lent the scene a certain quaintness. The sea wind, the moriana, had subsided.

By cosmopolitan standards, there was nothing dazzling or even lively about Turkmenbai itself. My lack of horror at the Spartan facilities at the Khazar Hotel, and my appreciable hunger for the risotto in the cafeteria-like restaurant, reflected the emptiness of the road behind. I quenched my feeling of desolation with greedy swigs of beer. All day long we had been following the world’s longest irrigation canal, the ‘lifeblood of Turkmenistan’. But there had not been a single sprig of cotton along the road. The season would begin only after the spring festivals in March, with the start of the tournaments involving cockfighting and bayga, a rough game (‘rugby on horseback’) in which the players try to wrest a dead sheep from their opponents.

But nothing that sensational was in the air now. The population of the Karakum seemed to remain on its feet by virtue of promises and prognoses. A banner by the hippodrome in the oil town of Nebit Dag had announced that a major bayga tournament was COMING SOON. Signs along the way advanced prospects of prosperity within the decade. And then there was the vision of the future sketched for us at the ‘Glory’ kolkhoz: painted on the gates was an oasis surrounded by date palms and citrus orchards, warmed and illuminated by the shining countenance of Turkmenbai; here he had actually replaced the sun itself. Climbing out of the van to admire this futuristic scene, I read that the pleasure garden would arise on the east coast of the Caspian in 2005. The first five years of the new millennium would be spent extending the course of the Turkmenbai Canal by an additional 300 kilometres – all the way to the dry Oxus delta.

‘Sun King’ Turkmenbai hoped to go down in history as the man who had led the Amu Darya back to the Caspian Sea, after seven centuries of divagation. He had set for himself the goal of outdoing both Peter the Great, whose 1717 campaign had run afoul of the khanate at Khiva, and Stalin, who had been forced to abandon the construction of the Main Turkmen Canal in 1947.

It struck me how perfectly Turkmenbai, dictator and supreme water engineer rolled into one, fitted the profile of the Oriental despot. Consciously or otherwise, he was following in the footsteps of the fourteenth-century tyrant Tamerlane, who had forced the tribes he conquered to dig aryks, or irrigation canals, until they dropped, and had decorated the region between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya to his own greater honour and glory with palaces, Koran schools and mosques. Anticipating the completion of the remaining 300-kilometre-long channel, the Turkmen leader had issued a decree: ‘As from today, 3 May 1999, the Turkmenbai Canal shall be referred to as the Turkmenbai River.’

The next morning, at a stall opposite the railway station, we bought a case of bottled Kizlyar water from the Caucasus. According to my calculations, one litre of water cost the equivalent of three litres of petrol.

‘That’s preposterous,’ I said. But Ibrahim-Aka predicted that drinking water at Cape Bekdash would be even more precious.

The station clock was striking nine when an oldish-looking boy in worn shoes poured us our final cup of honey tea. I thought about Konstantin Paustovsky, who – seventy years ago – had stood on the far side of this Arabic-looking facade – with the name ‘Krasnovodsk’ painted over but still visible above the entrance – and gazed at the Russian trains. ‘The shiny goods wagons were, it seemed to me, the only tangible bond with Russia,’ he wrote. Amid the pillars of basalt above the city echoed ‘the dry crack of rifles fired by gangs of basmachi, pressed hard by the Soviet troops’. From here it was a two-minute walk at most to the busy quayside passenger terminal, where the port office had once stood. How often must Paustovsky have paced that distance as he waited for the arrival of the Frunze or the Dzerzhinsky?

How fortunate I was not to be dependent on unreliable marine transport, I realised again as Ibrahim-Aka slid his Daewoo out into traffic. After fifteen minutes of criss-crossing we found ourselves in a science-fiction theme park of glistening conduits: the Turkmenbai oil refinery. To the north of this diesel-choked terrain began the coastal road to Kazakhstan. One hundred and eighty kilometres ahead of us was where Bekdash was supposed to lie; strangely enough, even though the 1989 census showed it to have a population of 10,500 souls, the chemical town was missing from my Turkmen map. There, however, lay the main shipping route and the Adzyi Darya, the restored umbilical between the Caspian and the bay at Kara Bogaz.

On occasion the asphalt vanished beneath tendrils of sand. The drifting dunes were held in check, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so, by reed mats stuck upright in the sand, which themselves formed the start of even younger dunes. To the left and right were the yellow buds of thistles.

A white lookout tower appeared on the horizon. A lighthouse, I thought, but it turned out to be a guard post for the Turkmen border patrol. When we stopped at the lowered barrier gate, no one came down to meet us. Obviously we were expected to climb the steel steps ourselves and report to the command tower. Standing on the balcony circling the tower was a soldier in desert-yellow camouflage, a pair of binoculars around his neck; inside, an officer was sitting at a table with a field telephone.

‘What is your business here?’ The soldier with two stripes on his shoulders demanded of Ibrahim-Aka. But Ibrahim-Aka simply raised his eyebrows and looked at me: he was only the driver.

The main thing now was to maintain credibility. ‘Krevetki,’ I said. ‘I’m here for the shrimp.’

That was the tip Dzyamar Aliyev had given me at the last moment: ‘Pretend you’re a shrimp farmer.’ The only interest Turkmenistan could have in admitting a foreigner to Bekdash, he had stressed, was for the trade in brine shrimp – a tiny crustacean bearing the scientific name Artemia salina. With the sulphate industry on its last legs, the bay at Kara Bogaz now produced only fish food – the dried eggs of the brine shrimp – for hobbyists and shrimp farmers. Two fish-food wholesalers, the Sanders company of Salt Lake City and a firm from the Flemish town of Dendermonde, had competed for the monopoly on the supplies of brine shrimp from Kara Bogaz. The Belgians had prevailed.

‘Ah, the shrimp trade.’ The commander sat back in his chair. ‘And why should I believe that the two of you are not planning to sneak across the border into Kazakhstan?’

I looked at Ibrahim-Aka, hoping he would come up with a good answer. ‘I don’t even have the right papers for that…’ he tried.

The Turkmen border guard stood up stiffly. ‘I am going to have to inspect your vehicle,’ he announced.

He found a few packets of President cigarettes, of course, and also took his share of the bottles of mineral water. But then he slammed the van’s hatchback and was done with us.

Now that the tension had gone out of our exchange, I asked the watch commander about the ruins of the town of Kara Bogaz Harbour. I expected them to be somewhere in the vicinity, close as we were now to the marine waterfall.

‘Follow me,’ the officer ordered. He shouted something to the soldier on the balcony, who hopped to and began pulling on the cord that lifted the barrier. With the watch commander walking ahead as our guide, we drove to the bridge over the Adzyi Darya, which lay less than five hundred metres from the tower. I saw a mass of hissing water squeezing its way between the concrete pillars. Cormorants were floating in the inlet, occasionally diving to catch a fish. The bridge abutment stood a few metres higher than the rest of the landscape, and in the distance we could make out the surf of the Caspian Sea. Waves were washing over a sandbank peppered with jagged rocks. The closer the green water came to the bridge, the faster it moved, as if in a drain. It was strange to think that the volume of water rushing past us now evaporated at the same rate from the lagoon on the other side.

The bay itself was hidden behind a few rows of dunes through which the Adzyi Darya wound frantically.

Nowhere did I see traces of a settlement. No paved quay, no sand-blasted skeleton of a storehouse, no remnant of the saltwater fountain Rubinschtein had built. It was hard for me to imagine that Kara Bogaz Harbour, abandoned in 1939 in favour of Bekdash, could have vanished so completely under the lash of the moriana alone. ‘What happened to the remains of the town?’ I asked.

‘You’re standing on them,’ the commander said, pointing at my feet. I stepped aside; the soles of my shoes scraped across the packed grit of the access ramp to the bridge.

‘Powdered concrete?’

He nodded. When the Adzyi Darya was dammed, he said, the bulldozers had levelled the buildings that were left. The debris was needed to shore up the embankments. Twelve years later, in 1992, the dam was demolished and this same grit from Kara Bogaz Harbour was used to reinforce the bridge.

The officer tapped his visor and said: ‘I wish you a pleasant continuation of your journey.’ Spinning on his heel, he marched back to his tower.

Cape Bekdash looked deserted, but wasn’t. The settlement was only an hour’s drive from the Adzyi Darya, but still a good fifty kilometres from the Kazakh border. The road leading into town passed through an industrial graveyard. Parked on narrow-gauge railway tracks were a row of badly rusted flatbed wagons and a tanker marked ‘Pityevaya Voda’ (‘drinking water’). Behind the rails rose a skyline of silos, smokeless chimneys, production units and a jumble of steel conduits. The windows of an administration building had been decorated with the dates 1929 and 1999, and beneath them the slogan: 70 YEARS OF SULPHATE – HURRAH!

The Kara Bogaz Chemical Combine was silent as the grave. It reared out of the sand like a skeleton. A pair of eucalyptus trees beside the factory gates pointed their dead trunks blindly at the sky. All vital signs were absent, even as we drove into the high-rise neighbourhood for chemicals workers. There, a puny sway-backed cow was grazing around the climbing frames in a playground; chewing on a piece of cardboard, the animal turned its head and stared at us.

‘It looks like no one’s at home,’ Ibrahim-Aka said. That was an understatement: Bekdash resembled nothing so much as a post-apocalyptic film set. The limestone barracks had gaping holes where doors and windows should have been. Fewer than half the balconies were protected from the desert winds by glass or plastic – a sign of habitation nonetheless.

Then, between two of the buildings, we saw a little girl race by. She was running as fast as she could, a bright orange bucket in each hand. Ibrahim-Aka accelerated and steered his Daewoo towards the spot where she had appeared. It made me feel ridiculous, as though we were out hunting for human beings.

The girl with the orange buckets, it turned out, was not alone. Heading for a newly arrived tanker truck, she ran past pipelines on the ground and we heard her shout: ‘Mama, hurry!’ A woman in high heels followed haltingly, a washtub clenched under one arm. Suddenly dozens of thirsty souls came rushing out onto the street. Toting canisters and water bags, they thronged around the truck. This was not a queue, it was a small-scale riot. A man in boxer shorts, who had paused only long enough to pull on a quilted jacket, elbowed his way past the girl with the orange buckets. The shouting and yelling echoed between the buildings.

‘Give me that thing!’ Greenish water was gushing from a rubber hose. Fresh water. Someone bumped against a filled bucket, water sloshed over the edge. ‘Stupid bitch! Watch what you’re doing!’

We were witnessing a live re-enactment of the drinking-water sequence from the Kara Bogaz film. The scene before us brought the story full circle. When it came to potable water, Paustovsky the screenwriter had drawn a contrast between ‘every man for himself’ and the ‘plenty for all’ blessings of socialism in the form of the desalination machine. The nomad who donned overalls and laughed as he opened the tap: that was the end point of Paustovsky’s Socialist Realism.

But reality proved tougher: this coastal settlement had not been the mustering place for a ‘systematic campaign against the plains of sand’, the desert had not been transformed into a ‘blossoming vineyard’, and the now-sedentary nomads had not been elevated to a higher, happier state.

As soon as the hose ran dry, the bystanders scattered. An old man in rubber boots sank to the ground, exhausted. His bucket held only a shallow puddle of water. I went over to help him to his feet, but he gestured that there was no need. ‘I’m expendable… my wife is dead… there’s no one left for me to care for,’ he said breathlessly.

Ibrahim-Aka rummaged through our baggage for a couple of bottles of Kizlyar water. I asked the man where he was from.

‘Kazakhstan,’ he said, slapping the dust from his trousers. ‘I came here when I was fifteen. Lake Number 6: I worked there for more than fifty years.’

Until about ten years ago, he said, he had owned ‘a car, two camels and a television,’ but he’d had to sell it all when his pension stopped.

When asked, he said his name was Niazbay. ‘But bay is a suffix meaning “grand” or “wealthy”, and I’ve lost everything. So just call me Niaz.’

After a great deal of urging, Niaz let us walk him to the door of his flat, but we were not allowed in: his Kazakh pride, he said, would not allow him to show us his poverty.

The compound belonging to the Artemia company of Dendermonde was an oasis amid the desolation.

A skinny, bearded Fleming by the name of Eddy had set up house in the residence which had once belonged to the manager of the salt combine. There was a water tank on the roof, and two outsized jeeps parked in the fenced-in yard. Eddy received us like welcome envoys from a distant civilisation. In his velvety Flemish accent he apologised for the state portraits hanging by the coat rack, which showed King Albert and Queen Paola beside a baffled-looking President Turkmenbai.

The housekeeper brought us two pairs of embroidered slippers, which contrasted cheerfully with the black leather sofa in the living room.

Eddy, in his turtleneck and faded jeans, ran a two-million-dollar-a-year business. His counterpart in the joint venture was a foundation headed by Turkmenbai himself; the president, however, remained far away in his palace in Ashgabat and had never visited the shrimp fishermen at Kara Bogaz.

‘Artemia is the only employer still operating in Bekdash,’ Eddy told me. He had about thirty Turkmen on the payroll, including the former director of the combine. Immediately after celebrating its seventy-year jubilee in 1999, the Kara Bogaz salt works had declared bankruptcy. A single Iranian bulk-carrier had appeared at the quayside that year to take on a cargo of sulphate, and that was the end of it. As from 1 January 2000, a decree from the capital stated, Bekdash had ceased to be a regional centre. The Turkmen government, in other words, was leaving the town to its own devices. To encourage the remaining inhabitants, too old or too poor to start anew elsewhere, to leave, the utilities companies had been instructed to gradually cut back their services. The school, the cultural centre, the post office, the police station and the state-run Hotel Dzyonet (Hotel Paradise) had all been dismantled, bit by bit.

‘And the drinking-water supply?’

‘That too.’ Eddy glanced at Olga, the housekeeper, who was busy dusting the furniture. She had once been the headmistress at the only school in Bekdash, now defunct as well.

‘In the Soviet days we had running water,’ she explained, at Eddy’s request. ‘Every apartment here was connected to a freshwater mains.’

Back then, Olga said, the water was brought in by pipeline from Kazakhstan. ‘At the time, Kazakhstan was a “brother republic”. Turkmenistan paid for its water with natural gas, but then the countries argued about the tariffs and now all the pipelines are empty: no gas and no water.’

I asked Olga about her own life. How had she, a Russian woman, ended up in Bekdash?

The housekeeper sat down on the edge of the sofa and smoothed her apron. She had been nineteen, she said, in her first year of teaching college at Orenburg, a town in the Urals, when she signed up as a volunteer with the Komsomol. ‘They said there was a shortage of teachers in Turkmenistan. They needed me there; it didn’t matter that I hadn’t finished college.’

She was sent to Cape Bekdash. When she arrived in 1943 the town consisted of only a few barracks and storehouses. Olga was stationed there amid third-rank reservists, ragged soldiers in their fifties considered unfit for front-line duty. During the war years, she told us, the combine had been converted to produce tungsten and lithium for the arms industry.

‘But no one was willing to accept the fact that working here in the heat was even harder than digging trenches.’ The losses among the reservists sent into the desert, Olga said, were ‘every bit as horrible’ as those on the field of battle. ‘As a teacher I heard a lot of terrible stories, but no one dared to talk about it openly.’

I asked whether she had ever heard of Yakov Rubinschtein. Olga nodded: Oh yes! She reeled off the names of others who had been spirited away on suspicion of sabotage: Guzman, the chief engineer, and Salnikov, the man who piloted the ferry across the strait. ‘That man was so clever with his hands, he should have been an inventor. I remember him using scrap material to build a windmill that actually generated electricity. But he was a ferryman, and he talked too much; someone must have reported him as a suspect person.’

Sulphate production had resumed after the war, starting with artificial Lake Number 6. Ships arrived from Astrakhan with thousands of internal exiles, men who had been sentenced to six years of gulag labour at Bekdash for letting themselves be taken prisoner by the Germans. In Stalin’s view, that was a form of treason almost as heinous as desertion.

Olga had married one of those prisoners. Her husband’s name was Zorin, he was from a village in the Ukraine, not far from Odessa. Because he carried out his task of shovelling sulphate all those years in a disciplined fashion and without complaint, his Soviet citizenship was due to be restored in 1952. ‘As soon as his travel documents were arranged, we were going to move to his native village. Away from here. My husband was very anxious to see what was left of it, and who was still alive…’

Olga’s voice faltered, she began wringing her hands and turned her face away from me.

Steeling herself, she said: ‘But when his six-year term was over, they told him it had been prolonged by six more years.’ The plant’s management had decided to compensate for the shortage of workers by doubling their sentences. ‘My husband, they said, had made himself indispensable.’

Zorin died in 1972. The escape from Bekdash never came, not even for her as a widow.

There was an uneasy silence. To end it, I changed the subject to Paustovsky. Had she ever read Kara Bogaz?

Olga smiled wistfully: as headmistress she had owned three copies, which had been lent out almost constantly. She thought it was a wonderful book, ‘a fairy tale’. ‘Lovely, the way it sets free one’s imagination. Don’t you agree?’ Without waiting for me to reply, she went on: ‘I don’t mean that sarcastically. Paustovsky played along with the game, as we all did. I think he was just as naive as we were. We – members of the Komsomol – were going to change the world. Everything would get better. We glossed over every fault, and the things we couldn’t justify we didn’t talk about at all. My God, we were so gullible.’

‘And now?’

‘Now?’ Olga paused for a moment. ‘For us, “now” started in 1980. That was the year the bay was cut off from the sea. From that moment on we knew that our jobs would disappear. In fact, we knew that we were going to lose the bay entirely. We’ve succeeded in spinning things out for another twenty years or so. But for Bekdash, now that they’re cutting back the water, time is running out.’

At home, Olga said, she bathed in seawater, scrubbed the floors with seawater, even made soup with seawater. ‘You have to add salt anyway, so it would be a pity to use fresh water for that.’

Artemia paid its employees in cash and drinking water: fifty litres a week for each family. ‘If we ever did away with the water rations, I suppose all hell would break loose,’ said Eddy, who had offered to show us his ‘base station’ beside the bay at Kara Bogaz.

Without his four-wheel drive we would never have reached Lake Number 6 – the hills were too steep, the limestone gullies through them too deep and loose. Leaving the Caspian coast behind, we headed ten, twenty kilometres inland. Ibrahim-Aka was pleased not to be attempting this track in his Daewoo. ‘Your whole engine block gets covered in sand here,’ he said.

Europeans, or at least some Europeans, Eddy explained to him, actually did this as a sport. In 1997, a caravan of motorcyclists had raced across this landscape; the periphery of the bay was a special stage in that year’s Master Rallye, an alternative Paris-Dakar from Europe to Asia. Lake Number 6 was the only settlement the racers passed through. ‘The ones who broke down were picked up from the Karakum by helicopter.’

Ibrahim-Aka seemed puzzled, but didn’t have much time to think about it; our Flemish host was already pointing out the carcasses of strange-looking robots, designed to scrape sulphate from the shore. Like petrified skeletons (or was it pillars of salt?), they rose from the whitened bed of the Lake Number 6 production basin. In a semicircle around them stood the hovels of the settlement of the same name. Almost everything of value had already been pilfered; the remainder stood banging in the wind.

‘Would you like to turn around?’ Eddy looked at me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Go on.’

The jeep crawled up yet another hillside, and suddenly we were looking out over the bay at Kara Bogaz.

The water was a deep blue, outlined by a green film which clung only to its shallow edges. The ridge we were on draped itself around this corner of the lagoon like an open collar; the bay itself was so vast that, despite the clear air, I couldn’t make out the far shore.

We climbed out. Eddy zipped up his windcheater; he was familiar with the moriana’s powerful gusts. Below us, along the waterline, stood a group of white shipping containers; above them flew the flags of Artemia and Turkmenistan. On our way down we were startled by the loud shrieks of two black birds hovering menacingly above our heads. You could see their sturdy flight feathers, even their bent necks: they were keeping a watchful eye on us.

‘Golden eagles,’ Eddy said. ‘This is the first year we’ve had them here. Their nest is in a quarry over there.’

Ibrahim-Aka tried to imitate the raptors’ cry, but stopped when one of the birds dived at him. It was only a feint, but an effective one.

Eddy told us that the team of Jacques Cousteau, the famous oceanographer who died in 1997, had come here a few years earlier to study the lagoon’s submarine life. Owing to the extreme salinity, higher than that of the Dead Sea, the bay’s biology was beautifully simple. Red algae grew here; their colour came from the large quantities of carotenes found in them. The brine shrimp, less than a centimetre and a half long, lived off these red algae and therefore produced red eggs.

‘We hire a helicopter every year to see where the eggs are piling up,’ Eddy said. ‘They form reddish trails dozens of kilometres long, blown by the wind across the bay.’

The flamingoes subsisted on those eggs, as well as on the red Artemia larvae. Their own light-pink colour came from the carotene transferred up the food chain, from the algae and the brine shrimp to their plumage.

I walked down to the water’s edge. The white stripes on the sand, which I had taken for foam, turned out to be ridges of miracle salt. In my hands, it was coarse and caustic.