Timur Cherdabayev
In those distant times, traveling was always an unsafe business, so every merchant had to consider the risks of it. The road was rarely even, not to mention picturesque. It typically ran through a desert, often stony, with camels’ skeletons strewn all around—eerie marks, indeed, but useful for any traveler to use them for road signs. Piercing cold in winter and unbearable heat in summer. Ever-nagging thirst, fostered by the need to conserve water. Constant anticipation of storms or encounters with nomads—nobody knew which of the two was worse. Finally, sporadic towns and oases where the odds of finding a hearty welcome were much lower than those of facing tolls and charges. The Great Silk Road was never a single highway, but rather a system which incorporated multiple branches of caravan routes which took different passes through mountain ranges, skirting the deserts. Originally, the Silk Road took off at Chang’an, China’s ancient capital, and ran along the northern Tian Shan toward Dunhuang, a city near the end of the Great Wall of China. Here the single Road forked to by-pass the Taklamakan desert from the north and from the south. The northern branch ran through Turpan to the valley of the Ili River. The middle one (the so-called Southern way) traveled from Gaochang to the southern coast of Issyk Kul, from which, via Khotan and Yarkant, it went to Bactria (North Afghanistan). There the Southern Way split again to form two other routes: one of them led to India, the other steered westward to reach Merv, where it merged with the Northern way. Further, having passed Nisa, the capital of Parthia, it went on through Iran, Mesopotamia, then, via Baghdad, led to Damascus and beyond to finally reach the Mediterranean. The third route, the most difficult of them, was called the Steppe way. Having crossed the Tian Shan, some of the caravans that traveled along it, via the Fergana valley and the Tashkent oasis, headed for Samarkand, Bukhara, Khwarezm to reach the Caspian co
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