MUINAK, Uzbekistan — The old man roams what used to be the floor of the Aral Sea, coaxing a ram, a goat and a cow in search of food in what is now relentless desert.
Not far away is the rusting hull of the fishing boat that three decades ago he sailed high above, on the surface of bountiful waters. The marooned wreck stands askew amid a ghostly fleet anchored in salty dunes.
Stopping his tiny herd in a patch of desert grass, he encounters a stranger who inquires about the sea.
"I can no longer imagine any sea out there," replies Sanginkik Saktaganov, turning his lean, weathered face north toward the horizon where the shore disappeared. "I don't think it will ever come back."
It is a pitiful epitaph for Central Asia's dying fountain of life, uttered from a harsh and poisoned landscape that is the region's costliest legacy of Soviet rule. The presidents of the five countries dependent on the sea have joined to lobby for worldwide help, but they have received only modest commitments and even less relief.
"You cannot fill the Aral Sea with tears," says an Uzbek poem.
Until 1960, the Aral was the world's fourth-largest lake and produced 160 tons of fish a day, much of it hauled in boats like Saktaganov's to a huge cannery in this onetime coastal city.
Then, in one of humankind's cruelest assaults on nature, Soviet engineers began diverting the two Aral tributaries into the desert to irrigate the world's largest cotton belt.
Today the sea has shriveled to a third of its former volume and split into near-lifeless lagoons, its nearest shore 30 miles from here. The Aral watershed, which sustains most of Central Asia's 54 million people, is poisoned.
Chemical pesticides and fertilizers wash from irrigated cotton fields into the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, polluting much of the region's drinking water, its soil and the sea. Toxic salts and dust blown off the exposed sea bottom by blinding windstorms turn everything grayish-brown.
Millions of people are sickened by the air and water, and impoverished by the loss of fish and fertile land. The drying of the Aral, whose water volume moderated the weather, has brought Sahara-like extremes of hot and cold to the valleys nearby, cutting the growing season by two months.
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Worst of all, the Soviet Union, which created this mess, is not around to clean it up. The five Central Asian republics that emerged from the Soviet collapse in late 1991 lack the resources to cope.
