A sandstorm like that would have swept away every trace of the passage of any caravan traveling along that stretch of the “Râh-e Abrisham”, the Silk Road. Muhammad, leader of the expedition, was completely wrapped in clothes to protect himself from the sand. As he stood still he thought back to what he had learned from his father about the art of surviving in the Kyzylkum, the same teaching given to his father by the grandfather he had never known.

In his family there had been merchants for generations, men who wandered for months, willing to travel those dangerous routes, full of pitfalls and bandits, to trade the most precious goods of that time: spices, silk, jewels, relics, technologies, gold, so much gold.

His destination was Bukhara, where he would sell his cargo of spices taken from that cheap Ahmet in Khiva, and buy some indigo. Bukhara was a very important stop: it was the city where the Kaylan minaret stood, so majestic that Genghis Khan himself was so impressed by it that he ordered his army not to tear it down. Muhammad's mind drifted further to the gates of Samarkand, where his family was waiting for him. While he was lost in calculations to determine the time needed to reach the citadel, the sandstorm ended: it was time to get back on the road.

This scene that we imagined could have been experienced in a distant time along the Silk Road, the most important trade route of the Middle Ages. It connected the West with the Far East, and partly crossed what is now Uzbekistan, the country richest in history in all of Central Asia, one of the most fascinating we have ever visited.