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WONDERS OF NATURE
Amu Darya river. Nature miracle
From the slopes of the sky-high Hindu Kush ridge in Afghanistan, from under a glacier located almost at a five-kilometer height, a stream flows out, swift and stormy due to the steepness of the fall. In the lower reaches, it has already become a small river, has the name Vakhandarya. The Pamir takes on a new name - Pyanj, and for a long time becomes a border river, separating Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan from Afghanistan.
Most of the right bank of the Pyanj is occupied by Tajikistan. The river gnaws through rocky ridges in this area, has a swift current and is absolutely unsuitable for either navigation or irrigation. This is just a turbulent white stream in the abyss, and even the roads along it have to be laid in places along the concrete cornices hanging over the Pyanj. The mountains of Tajikistan tirelessly feed the river with the melt water of glaciers flowing down from their slopes. Gunt, Murghab, Kyzylsu and Vakhsh, having flowed into the Pyanj, make it so full-flowing that below the Vakhsh, finally changing its name to the Amu Darya, the river already carries more water than the famous Nile. But even before that, the "Central Asian Volga" meets on its way the first curiosity of those that nature generously scattered along its banks. On the right bank of the Pyanj, just above the confluence of the Kyzylsu, rises an unusual, one-of-a-kind mountain, Khoja-Mumin, consisting of ... pure table salt. Geologists call such formations "salt domes". They are found in many places in the world: off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, in Iraq, in our Caspian region, but everywhere they are more like hills - their height does not exceed tens, maximum hundreds of meters. And Khoja Mumin is a real mountain peak with steep slopes, gorges and even caves. The height of this extraordinary mountain is one thousand three hundred meters! Towering nine hundred meters above the surrounding plain, it is visible for tens of kilometers. Local residents have mined salt here since ancient times. Now science has managed to unravel many of the mysteries of this mysterious natural anomaly. Khodja-Mumin, it turns out, is a huge massif, composed of salt, and on the top and in some places on the slopes it is covered with a thin layer of soil formed from dust brought by the wind. At ground level, the area of the massif reaches forty square kilometers, and further down the salt column narrows sharply and goes to a depth in the form of a column with a diameter of about a kilometer. The slopes of the mountain are not white, as one might expect, but pale pink, greenish or bluish, depending on the impurities that have fallen into the salt layer. In some places they are cut off by sheer walls up to two hundred meters high. In some parts of the slopes, rainwater washed out deep caves with huge halls and beautiful smooth-walled passages. And the places where the soil cover was formed are covered with low thickets of thorny bushes. In the bowels of the mountain are hidden gigantic reserves of table salt - about sixty billion tons. If it were divided among all the inhabitants of the Earth, each would get almost ten tons! Penetrating deep into the thickness of the mountains, rain streams have laid long tunnels and wells in them and, having passed through the mountain, come out at its foot to the surface in the form of unusual salty springs. Their waters, merging, form many (more than a hundred!) Salt streams running across the plain to the nearby Kyzylsu. In summer, under the hot rays of the sun, part of the water in the streams evaporates on the way, and a white salt border forms along their banks. As a result, a kind of semi-desert landscape is formed, reminiscent of fantastic films about Mars: a brown, scorched plain, along which poisonous reddish watercourses meander with lifeless whitish shores. Surprisingly, it is a fact: on the flat top of Mount Khoja Mumin there are several sources of absolutely fresh water! Geologists say that, perhaps, layers of other, insoluble rocks are sandwiched in the thickness of the salt dome. Here, under pressure from below, water rises to the top, without touching the layers of salt and retaining a bland taste. Thanks to her, grass grows on the mountain (of course, only where there is soil). And in spring, among the rocks sparkling with snow-white salt crystals, scarlet carpets of tulips appear on the top of the mountain. Having left the borders of Tajikistan, the full-flowing Amu Darya receives the last major tributary, the Surkhandarya, on Uzbek territory, and rapidly rushes further to the west. Behind is the green city of Termez with a unique zoo. Here, at the latitude of India, the warm climate allows even elephants to live in the fresh air all year round, without knowing stuffy enclosures. True, polar bears have a hard time here. They are rescued only by icy mountain water in the pool. After parting with Uzbekistan, the Amu Darya soon says goodbye to the left-bank plains of Afghanistan, turning to the northwest and entering the territory of Turkmenistan on both banks. From here, two thousand kilometers, to the very Aral Sea, it flows along the border of the two main Central Asian deserts: Kyzylkum and Karakum. From the city of Chardjou, where the first (and only) bridge across the wide river was built, motor ships are already running along the Amu Darya. The countries along the banks of the river - Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan - use the waters of the generous Amu Darya to irrigate their cotton fields and orchards. To the right, towards Uzbek Bukhara, the Amu-Bukhara Canal is laid, and to the left, into the sultry sands of the Karakum, the wide navigable channel of the Karakum Canal, or the Karakum River, as it is also called, leaves. The Karakum desert occupies three quarters of the vast territory of Turkmenistan. When you fly over it on a plane, below you see an endless sea of golden sands with green beads of oases scattered here and there. And from the south, high mountains serve as the border of Turkmenistan. From there, two large rivers run down to the plain - Tejen and Murghab. They flow for several hundred kilometers across the country, irrigating the surrounding lands, until they are finally "drank" by numerous canals-aryks. In these places, before our era, there were ancient agricultural civilizations, here and now they grow the most valuable fine-staple cotton, luxurious melons, fragrant juicy apples and grapes. Nature has endowed Turkmenistan with fertile lands with interest, but, as the local proverb says, "in the desert, it is not the earth that gives birth, but water," and there is just not enough of it. And hundreds of thousands of hectares of excellent land lay burnt by the sun, deserted and barren. The Karakum River has changed life in Turkmenistan. The route of the canal stretched for one thousand two hundred kilometers through the whole republic. Murghab and Tedzhen oases, Ashgabat, Bakharden, Kizyl-Arvat and Kazanjik he gave to drink Amu Darya water. Further, to the city of oil workers NebitDag, the water has already gone through the pipeline. Cotton and vegetables, watermelons and melons, grapes and fruits are now provided by the land of the Karakum. And the Amu Darya runs further - to fertile gardens and cotton fields stretching beyond the horizon of the ancient Khorezm oasis. The power and width of the huge water artery in these places is simply amazing, especially after a two or three day trip by train or car through a dry, waterless plain. Already near Turtkul, the river is so wide that the opposite bank is barely visible in the distant haze. A giant mass of water rushes to the Aral Sea with great speed and power. Oblique, some kind of irregular, although rather high waves constantly rise on the surface of the Amu Darya. This is not the wave that the wind blows, it is the river itself that sways and boils from fast running along an uneven bottom. In some places the water boils, foams and bubbles, as in a boiling cauldron. In places, whirlpools form on it, dragging fragments of boards or bundles of reeds floating along the river. In the evening, in the slanting rays of the setting sun, their ominous spirals are visible from afar from the deck of the ship on the river surface shining from the sunset light. It is not surprising that the channel laid by the Amu Darya among the low-lying plains is not always able to keep this wayward stream in its banks. Here and there the river suddenly begins to wash away the bank, more often the right one. Block after block, huge pieces of loose rocks that make up the plain begin to fall into the water. At the same time, they produce a deafening roar, reminiscent of a cannon shot. No force can hold back the furious pressure of the river. The Amu Darya has long been famous for its whims. It is known that in the old days it flowed into the Caspian Sea. Then she changed her direction and began to pour into the Aral Sea. Until now, in the sands of the Karakum, its ancient channel, called the Uzboy, can be traced, and in the Krasnovodsk Bay in the Caspian Sea, one can easily find a place where all signs of a large river flowing into the sea have been preserved. Even the Arab medieval historian al-Masudi said that in the XNUMXth century, large ships with goods descended along the Uzboy from Khorezm to the Caspian Sea, and from there sailed up the Volga, or to Persia and the Shirvan Khanate. At the beginning of the 1545th century, the Amu Darya was divided in the region of the present delta of the river into two branches: one of them, the eastern one, flowed into the Aral Sea and the western one into the Caspian. The latter gradually became shallow and dried up, until, in XNUMX, it was finally covered by moving dune sands. Since then, the once densely populated area along the banks of the Uzboy has become a desert, and only the ruins of ancient cities remind of the absurd nature of the wayward and violent river. Actually, the channel periodically changed even above the delta - starting from the steeply curving gorge of Tyuya-Muyun ("Camel's neck"). The flow of the river here is fast, the banks are composed of loose clays and sands, easily eroded by water. Sometimes a continuous zone of deigish stretches for several kilometers along one of the banks - this is how the destructive work of the river is called here. It happens that in three or four weeks of high water, the Amu Darya "licks off" up to half a kilometer of the coastline. It is very difficult to deal with this scourge. Even in the 1925th century, catastrophic situations occurred in the lower reaches of the river. So, in 1932, the Amu Darya began to wash away the right bank in the area of the then capital of the Karakalpak Autonomous Republic of Uzbekistan - the city of Turtkul. For seven years, by 1938, the river "ate" eight kilometers of the coast and came close to the outskirts of Turtkul, and in 1950 washed away the first quarters of the city. The capital of the republic had to be moved to the city of Nukus. Meanwhile, the Amu Darya continued to do her dirty work, and in XNUMX she finished with the last street of Turtkul. The city ceased to exist, and its inhabitants were moved to a new town, built away from the river. But now, finally, the lands of ancient Khorezm, which stretched along the left bank, were left behind, the domes and minarets of the pearl of Central Asia, the unique Khiva, which preserved, like no other Asian city, preserved the flavor of the Middle Ages, not disturbed by typical modern buildings, disappeared in the haze. In this regard, even the famous Samarkand and Bukhara cannot be compared with Khiva. And the Amu Darya hurries forward to the Aral Sea. However, before flowing into its light blue expanse, the lush river presents another surprise: it scatters into a dozen channels and forms one of the largest river deltas in the world - an area of more than eleven thousand square kilometers. There is no exact map of this huge intricacies of channels, channels, canals, islands and marsh reed jungles. As the unstable river changes its course, some channels dry up, others, previously dry, fill with water, the outlines of the islands, capes and bends of the river change, so that it is impossible to cultivate the land of the delta, despite the presence of water. The kingdom of tugai is spread here - dense thickets of two-three-meter reeds and bushes, where even formidable Turanian tigers were found fifty years ago. And even now in the tugai there is a real paradise for birds, turtles, wild boars and muskrats recently brought here. Fishermen, on the other hand, sometimes pull out two-meter catfish for spinning. And beyond the green sea of the Tugai, the Aral, suffering from lack of water, is waiting for the Amu Darya, which has almost completely lost its recharge from the waters of the Syr Darya, the second most important river in this region. Almost all of its water is taken for irrigation, and it flows into the Aral Sea only during floods. So the Amu Darya alone has to water the drying sea alone. Thus ends its journey from the distant glaciers of the Hindu Kush, this amazing river with three names that has made Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan drunk. And to be precise, on two and a half thousand kilometers of its tireless run, we saw three different rivers: a furious mountain stream, a mighty water artery in the endless desert and a web of channels in the reed labyrinths of the delta. This changeable, formidable and fertile river, which four countries and five peoples call by the ancient name of the Amu Darya, will remain so diverse and unusual in the memory. Author: B.Wagner
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