A night in the desert outside Khiva

It is two hours from Khiva to the camp below Ayaz-Kala, along a road that gradually stops being a road. First fields, then salt flats, then sand. The yurts stand at the foot of a fortress that is two thousand years old and that nobody has ever restored: the walls crumble exactly the way they have always crumbled.

You arrive towards sunset. While there is still light, people climb the fortress: from up there you see flat desert all the way to the horizon, and a lake, if the year has not been dry. You have to come down before dark, the path is not marked.

Dinner by the fire. Plov or shurpa, flatbread, tea. The talk with the hosts turns to camels, to how much snow falls here, and to the fact that in summer you simply cannot be out here in the daytime: fifty degrees on the sand. That is why the season is short.

Then the main thing. The hosts switch off the generator and the last lamp goes out. The nearest streetlight is thirty kilometres away. Your eyes take about three minutes, and after that the sky stops being black: the Milky Way shows as a band, the stars run right down to the horizon, and the horizon differs from the sky only in having no stars on it.

It is so quiet you can hear the sand cooling. At night the desert is cold even in May; there are camel-wool blankets in the yurt, and you need them.

In the morning you set off before dawn, to meet the sun on the road: it comes up on the left, over the sand, and for the first half hour the road back to Khiva is red. By nine you are in town, and the town feels very loud.