After leaving the Balkan my compass permitted me no longer to doubt, in spite of all attempts at concealment, our having taken the middle route. In Körentaghi we had received intelligence that fifty Karaktchi, of the tribe of Tekke, were prowling about in the vicinity of the mountains; but the Kervanbashi seemed only so far influenced by the information as to give a wide berth to the wells and station called Djenak kuyusu, the water of which is besides very salt, so that no camel would touch it unless it had been without water for three days. It may have been about midnight--we had gone about two miles, and had reached a steep declivity--when the word was given that we should all dismount, for we were in the Döden (as the nomads of the district name the ancient bed of the Oxus), and the storms and the rains of the last winter had now entirely washed away all traces of the route which had been tolerably well defined the year before. We cut across the ancient channel of the river in a crooked line, in order to find a way out on to the opposite bank, the steeper one; it was not till break of day that we contrived, with great fatigue, to reach the high plateau. The nomads in their fables seek to connect the ancient bed of the Oxus with the ruins of Meshedi Misriyan, and declare that the Oxus formerly flowed near the walls of the edifice designed for the Kaaba, and that, at a later period, incensed at the sins of the Göklens, the river turned to the north.
The more the Balkan disappeared in the blue clouds in our rear, the greater and more awful became the majesty of the boundless desert. I had before been of opinion that the desert can only impress the mind with an idea of sublimity where both fancy and enthusiasm concur to give colouring and definiteness to the picture. But I was wrong. I have seen in the lowlands of my own beloved country a miniature picture of the desert; a sketch of it, too, on a larger scale, later, when I traversed, in Persia, a part of the salt desert (Deschti Kuvir): but how different the feelings which I here experienced! No; it is not the imagination, as men falsely suppose, it is nature itself, that lights the torch of inspiration. I often tried to brighten the dark hues of the wilderness by picturing, in its immediate vicinity, cities and stirring life, but in vain; the interminable hills of sand, the dreadful stillness of death, the yellowish-red hue of the sun at rising and setting, yes, everything tells us that we are here in a great, perhaps in the greatest, desert on the surface of our globe!