Today as the remnants of Hurricane Laura dumped rain on my house, I chose to stay indoors and resume reading “Land of the Turkomans”, an anthology of reports delivered in the 1800s to the Royal Geographic Society of expeditions and explorations of what is today Turkmenistan. As I delved into the reports, I realized that I had been in many of the places described, and if not, at least knew where they were. Out came the Soviet military maps, and I began trying to plot the routes of the explorers.

One noted the names of water wells as he crossed the Karakum Desert led by a local guide. It struck me. Of course, a semi-nomadic people like the 19th-century Turkmen tended not to reside in villages out in the middle of the desert, but to move their flocks of sheep and herds of camels from pasture to pasture, always bearing in mind the locations of wells for watering themselves as well as their animals. Thus the wells have names! A review of the Soviet military maps revealed that some of those wells existed at least as late as the 1980s (and probably still do). I’d never thought of that…where there are few to no villages, names are assigned to water wells.

A trip from Gokdepe to Khiva, which today might take perhaps 10- to 12 hours by automobile (including up to two hours to clear Customs at the border), back then involved a minimum of two weeks’ “march” across the desert, including one five-day stretch without water, and was only possible in practice during spring and fall, when temperate weather was somewhat assured.