Dante Alighieri's famous phrase could summarize the epilogue of everything that happened in this vast area of ​​Karakalpakstan during the second half of the twentieth century, with Moynaq as the epicenter of one of the worst ecological disasters in human history.

The town, made up mostly of small concrete houses with sheet metal roofs, seems abandoned. You don't see people around, you don't see animals, you don't see cars. The air temperature is hellish, we are closer to 50 degrees than 40 degrees.

Our off-road vehicle leaves us in the parking lot of the museum of the history of the Aral Sea disaster, where a monument represents the involution of what was once the fourth largest lake on Earth.

Behind the museum, a staircase leads down to what used to be the city's large port, now a barren desert where totally rusty fishing boats are stranded. We go down to look more closely at this ghostly cemetery, under a sun so hot that it quickly dehydrates, and so bright that it is reflected in the white shells and salt, witnesses of the disaster caused by man.

After dozens of shots of this landscape we visited the museum.

Aral, the canceled lake.

We are in the 60s.

The large city of Moynaq, which had around 40,000 inhabitants, was known throughout the Soviet Union for its intense commercial activity linked to the world of fishing. The port city's fishing community had a large fleet, capable of catching more than 100 tons of fish per day. The fish was transported to the city's fish processing factories, and from there throughout the Soviet Union. The lake also guaranteed a peculiar regional microclimate, very similar to the temperate European continental climate.

The city was constantly growing, the shipyards were always busy, and the population looked to the future with optimism despite the advent of the Cold War.

Competition was not spared even in the agricultural field: the leaders of Moscow looked for new land to be used for the cultivation of cotton, a plant that requires a lot of water and heat. Land they found in Central Asia, more precisely in Uzbekistan, crossed by the great rivers Amu Darya and Syr Darya. We then proceeded with the forced canalization of the two rivers, using the techniques of the time which were not very efficient.

The new crops, at least at the beginning, had a huge yield, aided by the massive use of fertilizers and pesticides, which however irremediably ended up in the lake and the aquifers. Subsequently, the water that the river naturally brought to the Aral Sea began to decrease drastically, to the point of completely compromising the water balance of the lake, net of its evaporation.

Grigory Voropaev, the Soviet leader, consciously declared that the consequences for the lake would be disastrous and that his aim was precisely to "let the Aral Sea die peacefully". In fact, the need for water was so abundant that the planners went so far as to declare that the enormous lake was considered a waste of water resources useful for agriculture and, literally, "an error of nature" that needed to be corrected.

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Today these statements make us shudder, but in the past, environmental modifications without thinking too much about the possible side effects were normal.

Year after year the river reduced its flow to the point of stopping before its estuary; the lake level began to lower due to evaporation, the salinity increased.

The regional water balance was broken: the climate, no longer mitigated by the lake, became desert-like, and today summer temperatures reach 50 degrees.

The shores of the city of Moynaq, once bathed by the waters of its lake, receded; to save the fishing activity they tried to dig connecting channels between the port and the lake, but it was completely useless.

After the end of the Cold War, the dark truth came to light about the island of Vozroždenie, or Island of Rebirth, which in Soviet times was used as a secret military base to build and study chemical and bacteriological weapons such as smallpox and anthrax.

With the retreat of the lake the island became a peninsula, a potential Pandora's box that was never opened only thanks to the reclamation intervention by the United States in the early 2000s.

The vast majority of the inhabitants who lived on the shores of the lake and in Moynaq have fled, and for the few who remained the incidence of contracting diseases such as tuberculosis, cancer and congenital pathologies has increased exponentially.

In just a few decades the lake has lost 90% of its water volume, and has been divided into two sections, north and west. Now all that remains of the lakebed is a desolate land, where sandstorms lift and transport the salt and chemicals used for cotton hundreds of kilometers away.

At the Yurt camp, crossing the Aralkum.

Today the seabed is called Aralkum, the Aral desert. We crossed it by off-road vehicle, stopping at some points to take a closer look at the salt and shells.

The crossing of the desert impresses and fills with contrasting feelings: if on the one hand all this saddens, on the other the "touching" and actually seeing what happens to the Earth if man does something wrong encourages us to do more to safeguard our planet, making us more aware.

Some disaster mitigation action has been taken on the Kazakhstan side, which we have not seen, where the World Bank has built a dam that prevents water from flowing into the rest of the dying lake in Uzbekistan, preserving the Little Aral of the North, where fishing activity has partially recovered thanks to the reintroduction of some species, and where salinity has returned to pre-disaster levels.

In Uzbekistan, species of shrubs resistant to this desert and salty climate are being planted, to form a sort of barrier against the disastrous storms of salt and chemical residues that afflict the area.

However, the Uzbek government decided not to restore the lake because it preferred to industrially exploit the salt and natural gas deposits discovered in this area.

From the old seabed we moved towards a scenic canyon of white rocks, and from there we headed to an old cemetery used in the past by nomads. Afterwards we went to the yurt camp, from which you can see what remains of the West Aral.

The guide took us to its banks, where all the drama of the disaster appears: it is horrifying to even think of wetting your feet in a sea devoid of life and full of chemical residues.

We finally returned to the yurt camp for dinner. The camp is very spartan, and it takes a strong spirit of adaptation to spend a night there: to take a shower you have to enter an open-air structure with sheet metal walls and, by pulling a chain, the water heated by the sun comes out of the suspended tank.

Despite this and other inconveniences, at sunset we had dinner with tasty dishes based on rice, lamb, Uzbek bread and vegetables.

Before retreating to our dusty but comfortable yurt, we waited for the night to witness something that modern man can no longer admire, a spectacle to be contemplated in silence, hundreds of kilometers from civilization, in total darkness: