Muynak, last month. A letter has arrived at a house in this town, and it has changed two lives.
In 1987 a thirteen-year-old boy here wrote four lines on a page of a school exercise book, put the page in a bottle and threw it into the Aral Sea. His name was Timur.
Then the sea went away. The boats stayed on the sand. Timur grew up, became a driver and forgot the bottle.
Two hundred kilometres from that shore, in the salt and dust of the old sea bed, a twelve-year-old girl found a rusty bottle under a dead tree. Her name is Mira.
"I have washed it three times," she says. "The paper is brown, but the words are there. I have read it about fifty times."
The letter says: My name is Timur. I am thirteen. Our sea is going away and the grown-ups are quiet about it. If you find this, please write to me. Under the four lines there is an address.
Mira has written to that address. The house is still there.
Timur is fifty-one now, and he has answered her.
"A boy threw a bottle into a sea," he says. "The sea has gone. The bottle hasn't."
They have not met. Mira has put the bottle on her windowsill. Timur has kept her letter in the frame with his mother's photograph.
Two letters, thirty-four years, one bottle. The sea has left — but somebody has answered.