For light relief, he spends some time with the Khazak nomads and their celestial steeds, and is inveigled into a game of kokpar, played on horseback with a decapitated goat as prize. This game can at times be so frenzied that it's essential to keep your distance in order to avoid being wounded in the crush, but Middleton nevertheless sees it as reflecting the nature of the nomads, who have long aspired to live independently, and pays tribute to them for giving him the "primeval thrill" of life on the steppe.
Approaching his date with destiny at Rebirth Island, Middleton has serious misgivings about exposing himself to the horrors that await him -- chiefly anthrax spores -- and doubts the efficacy of the equipment he's brought along. Before approaching the "laboratories," however, he notes the absence of any sounds whatever. "No birds, just an eerie silence. It was truly a deathly hush."
On an island dedicated to the development of lethal biological warfare, this is his personal journey into the heart of darkness, and he emerges in somber mood.
"Of all the sagas of survival in extreme environments that I'd come across in my travels," he writes, the plight of anyone coming into contact with these evils "had to be placed at the lowest point on the scale. To brave the dangers of Rebirth Island took a very special blend of courage and desperation."
This account of the Silk Road, with its contrasts and exotic detail, certainly chronicles the challenges and hardships Middleton faced. But if he'd sacrificed some of the sense of his own heroism, and introduced instead more of a sense of wonder or of the absurd, the book would have proved a more entertaining read.
As it is, it constitutes at best a stop-gap for those who can't get enough of Asian travel narratives. It has little of the equanimity of Peter Fleming's classic News from Tartary (which covered some of the same territory and was also not without its comic episodes), none of the farcical brilliance of Eric Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, and absolutely none of the personal elan and lightly-worn scholarship of Redmond O'Hanlon, these days the man to beat in the arduous-yet-hilarious travel genre.
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