For hundreds of years, only a few brave travellers and merchants dared to cross the ocean of arid land and grass that is the Kazakh desert on the backs of camels: there was nowhere suitable to build a city, there was nothing worth fighting for. It has always been this way; from the dawn of time, until 1953 when an unnamed portion of the desert, on the banks of the Syd Darya River, was invaded by an ‘alien’ species the locals had only heard of, until they suddenly became their rulers, but only a few of them knew them in person: the Russians.