In 1895, the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin became the first to cross the interior of the most hostile desert in Central Asia. In his bestselling books about the experience, Hedin claimed that two of the five expedition members had died of thirst. But desert expert and travel writer Bruno Baumann doubted Hedin’s story. In April 2000, the Austrian-born adventurer set out to retrace the famous explorer’s route through the heart of the Taklamakan. Baumann hoped to recover remains of Hedin’s “Camp of Death,” and learn the truth behind the ill-fated expedition. But the journey across the sand sea didn’t quite go as planned…

Roze, a middle-aged Uighur Turk, is one of our two camel drivers. Every morning, like clockwork, when the caravan moves out, he starts in with his endless monotone singsong. He makes up the words as he goes along, and they sound melancholy. But one thing we’ve come to learn: as long as Roze is singing, the world is in order. Our little caravan—four men and six camels—is making slow, but steady progress.

In front of us to the east, lies the heart of the Taklamakan, a desert of drifting sand over 600 miles across. The only thing parting this golden sea is the Khotan-daria, a river that runs through the desert from south to north, like a slender silken thread. Of course, the term “river” is only applicable during the weeks after the winter thaw, when the melting snow from the surrounding mountains flows down into the desert. Now, in the spring, the river is all dried up. Still, we should, hopefully, find a few water holes lingering among the tamarisks and poplars now peppering the riverbed.

Several days have passed since we left the oasis to tackle the 110-mile stretch of the most treacherous part of the Taklamakan desert. We still have another 30 miles to march before we reach the Khotan-daria —across a parched, barren, scorching-hot sand desert. We can make it in three days if our water supply lasts, if the camels hold out… if.

Roze’s singing has been interrupted several times since we got underway this morning. Niki, one of our camels, can hardly stand up anymore. He keeps collapsing, even though we’ve already removed all the loads he was carrying. Each time he goes down, it takes all the strength Roze and the other camel driver, Omarjan, have to get him back on his feet. In the last few hours, the caravan has barely made any progress, which is dangerous. If we don’t stick to our daily target of 9 miles, our water supply will be gone before we even lay eyes on the Khotan-daria, and turning back is no longer an option, since the last water site is a good eight-days march behind us.

I walked out far ahead of the caravan. From the crest of a dune, I scanned the horizon, hoping to see at least a speck of green somewhere—an outpost of the vegetation belt along the riverbed. Over the past few days, we’d seen several dried poplar leaves, insects, even a bird carcass. But the view from atop the dune wasn’t any different today than it was the day before, or the day before that—a labyrinth of dunes beneath a shimmering sky, swelling out like waves of gold as far as the eye could see. All of a sudden, I had the feeling I was completely alone in the desert. Just a second ago, I’d seen the caravan lumbering its way up the dune behind me. Now, it was gone, as though it had just been swallowed up by the sand sea. Silence was everywhere. Roze’s singing had stopped.

I shouldered my backpack and hurriedly followed my own trail back. After a few hundred steps, I ran into the others, just behind a line of dunes. Five camels were standing. The sixth, Niki, was lying flat on his side, legs and neck stretched out in the death position. Roze and Omarjan, who had been trying to get him on his feet, were now crouching in the sand, exhausted. Omarjan sat with his face buried in his hands. Helmut Moser, an expedition team member and fellow Austrian, was rummaging through one of the saddlebags.

I was faced with a terrible decision. If we stayed with the exhausted camel any longer, we’d risk dying of thirst ourselves. It didn’t matter whether we were standing around or walking, our bodies still required just as much water. We only had 20 gallons left—barely enough for three days. Every hour counted.

Neither Helmut nor I could bring ourselves to put the animal out of its misery. And the two Uighurs flatly refused to do it. They live by an unwritten law of the desert—the camel should always be given a chance to recover on its own, to follow the caravan’s trail later. Filled with a sense of helplessness and unspeakable sorrow, I walked over to the animal. Niki looked at me with weary eyes. I stroked his soft fur in farewell, fighting back the tears.

We moved on, but I couldn’t shake the image of the dying camel. It haunted me like a nightmare, as I ran like a man possessed as far away from the caravan as I could get. The further I ran, the more I could feel my sorrow turning into unbridled anger. I cursed the Taklamakan—more than that, I cursed my decision to ever set foot in it. What business did we have being here anyway? Would I have ever set out on this trip, had I known it would cost the life of even one of these magnificent creatures? Too late for regrets. The Taklamakan doesn’t forgive mistakes.

As I’d done so often over the past few weeks, I found myself thinking of Sven Hedin, and was reminded of the words he’d written in his journal during the expedition of 1895, “First the camels die, then we’re next in line.”

The Swedish adventurer was the first man ever to cross the mighty sand sea in the Asian interior. But his expedition had turned into a veritable death march. Nearly the entire caravan died. Later, in his book, Through Asia, Hedin wrote that he and one other caravan member were the only ones to escape the desert alive. That bestselling account of the ill-fated expedition made Sven Hedin famous overnight, and propelled him into the annals of history as one of the greatest explorers and travel writers of his time.

With an area of more than 130,000 square miles, the Taklamakan is the second largest continuous sand desert in the world. It is situated in the northwest corner of present day China. To the east, it is bordered by the Gobi desert, and on the other three sides, it is surrounded by the highest mountains on Earth–the Karakorum mountains in the west, the High Pamirs in the northwest, the Tien Shan range in the north, and the Kunlun Shan in the south. From the glaciers high atop peaks reaching 24,000 feet into the air, several rivers flow down into the “Desert of No Return”, as the locals call the Taklamakan. But not one of those rivers is able to penetrate the sea of sand. They all just seep into the sand and evaporate somewhere out in the middle of the dunes.

The Taklamakan had always been feared for its extremely dry climate and terrible sandstorms. As far back as 130 B.C., the legendary Silk Road split into two branches that skirted the northern and southern perimeters of the Taklamakan, but no one had ever succeeded in penetrating the desert’s interior. Hedin was the first to dare crossing straight through the heart of this waterless sea of sand.

Born in Stockholm in 1865, Sven Anders Hedin was typical of the colonial explorers of his day. He was less interested in cultural exchange and discovering natural wonders than he was in waging war on those “white spaces” on the map; in breaking new ground, and going “where no European has gone before”—that was the real objective of his great Asian expedition. His records read like those of a general going off to war, as he prepared “to fight the great battle” and “conquer all of Asia.”

Hedin set out on October 16, 1893, his pockets filled with more letters of recommendation from well-meaning friends than with money. He was 28 years old, and had no sponsor. But what he lacked in support, he made up for in determination. By the age of 16, he had already produced a six-volume atlas of the world, for no other reason than the joy of cartography. After graduating from high school in 1885, he took a position as a private tutor in Baku on the Caspian Sea. He rode there as far as Persia, and then published his first book about this “expedition.”

This time, in 1893, Hedin’s sights were set on the biggest “white spaces” in Central Asia—the Taklamakan and Tibet, which back then was off limits to foreigners. He planned to cross the desert first, and then head into Tibet—through the “back door”, as it were.

Just getting to the Taklamakan was an ordeal. Hedin liked to refer to it as his “via dolorosa”. In the middle of the winter of 1893/94, he set out on horseback across the High Pamirs, the roof of the world. The men battled the cold, trudging through treacherous new fallen snow, struggling for breath in the thin oxygen-poor air, inching across icy passes over deep chasms, where several horses plummeted to their death and hungry wolves fell upon their carcasses. But Hedin showed no sign of having learned anything from the experience. Far from it, when he finally did make it to Kashgar, the ancient oasis town on the edge of the Taklamakan, he wanted to go right from the mountains into the desert, at the worst time of year.

And so, on April 10, 1895, in the height of the sandstorm season, Hedin set out with four local men, eight camels, three sheep, ten chickens and one rooster. The camels were carrying 120 gallons of water stored in tin containers and goatskins. In addition to that, Hedin was also transporting several wooden crates packed full of equipment not just for the desert journey, but also for the planned trip to Tibet thereafter. He had measuring instruments, notebooks, cameras with 1000 photographic plates, and weapons and ammunition. There were tents, a field bed, rugs, gifts for the natives, loads of canned goods, books, and last but not least, a year’s supply of Swedish newspapers —Hedin planned to read one issue a day for a little diversion.

What followed was, as the Swedish explorer later described in his books, a series of one catastrophe after the other. First came the discovery just three days into the journey that they only had enough water for two days, because one of the local men had apparently failed to fill up the containers all the way; then there was a vain attempt to dig a well in the parched sand; next, the collapse and death of the first of the two camels; and, as if that wasn’t enough, a kara buran, the dreaded “black sandstorm”. After another five days of marching and strict water rationing, they were down to their last drop of water—and far and wide, naught but sand.

On they marched. In desperation, they slaughtered the rooster and one of the sheep, and drank the warm blood. Two of the men even resorted to drinking camel urine, and became so violently ill that they were unable to go on. Hedin made what he called the “final entry” in his diary, “Rested on a high dune where the camels had collapsed… mountains of sand on all sides, not a blade of grass, not a living thing anywhere.”

The two men were left for dead. Not long after, another member of the expedition fell to his knees, begging to die then and there. “This camp of death,” Hedin later wrote, “was the most horrifying thing I had ever experienced in all my travels… I took one last look at those gentle camels and fled that painful scene, where one man was battling death, and the veterans of our caravan, once so proud, were to forever end their desert travels.”

Hedin and one other comrade were now the only ones left. From that point on, they walked only at night. During the day, they buried themselves up to the neck in the sand. After five full days without a single drop of water, they finally sighted a dark strip on the horizon— their long-awaited destination—the Khotan-daria. Reaching the life-saving riverbed with their last ounce of strength, Hedin took off his boots and used them to carry water to his weakened comrade.

Shortly thereafter, another member of their party who had been given up for dead showed up with one of the camels in town. The other two local men on the expedition, Hedin claimed, were never heard from again.

Hedin’s account of the ill-fated expedition in Through Asia had fascinated me since I’d first laid my hands on the book as a boy. It created an image of the desert in my mind—an image of an infinitely vast and silent world unlike anything on Earth in feel, form and color. It awakened a desire in me to know first-hand what it felt like to live at the edge of extreme, be exposed to solitude, scorching heat—to be completely at the mercy of the forces of nature.

I first set eyes on the Taklamakan in 1989, 17 years after reading Sven Hedin’s book. Like Hedin, I traveled by camel caravan, although I followed a more easterly course than he had. I’d also chosen to travel at a better time of year. Maybe that’s why I had the feeling during that 21-day crossing that I’d crossed a completely different desert than Sven Hedin had in his day.

The Taklamakan wasn’t anywhere near as dry and hostile a place as I’d expected. Even in the most barren stretches of sand there were still green tamarisks whose roots managed to find water deep beneath the surface. We dug wells to water the camels, and were never short of water. The dunes were small and easy to navigate. We didn’t get lost; didn’t experience a single one of the dreaded black sandstorms. Was this the infamous desert of death? I was beginning to think that Hedin might have been exaggerating the dangers, embellishing the story for dramatic effect.

My skepticism increased all the more after my first attempted solo crossing of the Gobi desert in 1996. That experience taught me first-hand what it felt like to be close to dying of thirst. I had underestimated the amount of water I would need for the trek, and had already consumed the last drop, while still miles away from the next water site. Just those few hours without water were enough to cause me to deteriorate physically to the point of collapse. With my last ounce of strength, racked with kidney pains, I just about managed to drag myself to the next oasis, where I promptly threw in the towel, debilitated and exhausted.

After that experience, I re-read Hedin’s accounts of his desert drama in the Taklamakan—this time with different eyes. Running for his life through the desert for a full five days without a single drop of water? Impossible! It would have been a medical miracle. Burying himself up to the neck in the sand during the day and walking at night? A desert fairy tale! The time lost alone in making such stops would have been fatal, because he would have been dehydrating just as much at rest as he would have been while walking, but he wouldn’t have been getting any closer to water. How had the drama in the Taklamakan really unfolded?

In order to recreate the expedition as authentically as possible, I not only decided to take the exact same route and use the same method of transportation—a camel caravan—but I also chose the exact same month of the year. Of course, I knew there was only a limited comparison that could be made between a desert crossing nowadays and Hedin’s pioneering journey. After all, unlike Hedin, I had the most modern maps and state-of-the-art satellite navigation equipment. Plus, I knew the desert much better than Hedin had when he embarked on his first major expedition. For those very reasons, I didn’t consider my plan to be unusually difficult or dangerous, particularly since I was certain I could avoid making what was Hedin’s biggest mistake—not taking enough water along.

At first, everything seemed to go according to plan. In early April, my friend Helmut Moser and I arrived at Kashgar, the ancient oasis town on the Kyrgyzstan border. China had annexed the Province of Xingjian, where the Taklamakan was situated, in 1949. The city planners in Beijing had done their level best to redesign the old Islamic city to the point of being literally unrecognizable, with a real flair for kitsch and what was either unparalleled ignorance or blatant disregard of local tradition. They bulldozed a multi-lane highway through the maze of winding, narrow streets and alleyways surrounding Kashgar’s largest Mosque. The horse-drawn taxis and donkey carts were banned from the city, and even the bazaar was whisked away and hidden behind the gleaming façades of modern, high-rise department stores.

With the help of a local contact, we were able to buy camels. Although that proved to be more difficult than we expected, since the animals were generally very weak in late winter, and there weren’t many hardy specimens to be found on the market.

Hedin had returned to Europe in 1897. Because of the Taklamakan disaster, he never did make it to the Tibetan city of Lhasa, which had actually been his primary destination. But his books and lectures became famous nonetheless. In the years that followed, he mounted two more Asian expeditions, published scholarly and popular books, met Austria’s Emperor Franz Josef I, Pope Pius X, and US President Theodore Roosevelt. He was made a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Science and the British Royal Geographic Society, and in 1902 was knighted by his King, the last of his countrymen to ever receive such an honor. But the more famous he grew, the more controversial he became as an author—primarily because of his association with political right extremists. By the time he died in 1952, Sweden’s last knight had become a persona non grata in his own country.

On April 8, we pulled out of the oasis town of Merket, fully equipped with four men and six camels. Eight days later, we arrived at the last oasis on the edge of the Taklamakan’s interior. Everything had gone smoothly.

On April 17, we embarked on the most difficult leg of our journey—110 miles of a vast sea of sand stretching all the way to the shore of the Khotan-daria; 110 miles without a single drop of water. I figured we’d cover about 9 miles per day, which meant we could reach our destination in 13 days. We loaded up the camels with 14 day rations for the men (we were consuming 6.5 gallons of water a day altogether), and another 26 gallons for the animals. They would have to make it through the first five to six days without anything to drink, and then we would water them.

But after just a few days, all my careful calculations went out the window. The dunes were much higher and harder to navigate than any of us had expected. On top of that, we were slowed down by sandstorms. We weren’t that far behind schedule, but as it turned out, the camels needed much more water, and much sooner, than any of us had anticipated.

Five days later, we had reached the point of no return—from that point on, the distance was shorter going forward than it was to turn around and head back to the last oasis. Things still seemed to be going well. But, on day 8, another camel collapsed from thirst. And then, just hours after that, the third one

The whole time we were underway, I had been on the lookout for signs of Hedin’s expedition, scanning the terrain with my binoculars, hoping to find a weathered wooden crate or a tin canister, polished smooth by the sand, lying somewhere out on top of a dune. I never found any traces of Hedin’s “camp of death”—instead, I created one of my very own.

April 25. Day 9 in the Taklamakan: It’s a sad procession winding its way through the desert. We’ve abandoned almost all of our equipment: tents, supplies, stove, fodder for the animals. The dunes are noticeably lower than they’ve been in recent days, but our progress is still difficult and slow—too slow: we were forced to leave a third camel behind to die on the side of a sand mountain.

I took the compass and walked out ahead to try and find a passable route that wouldn’t take us too far off our ideal course. The caravan was following in shouting distance behind me. Helmut Moser was leading the caravan. Behind him came Roze, leading the three remaining camels on a rope. Omarjan was bringing up the rear. Ever since we’d lost our first camel, Roze had been singing some sort of mournful death chant, lamenting his fate in sad refrain —how he was doomed to die far away from home and family, where no one would find his sandy grave… Whenever his monotone sing-song stopped, so did I. I would stand stock still, hoping against hope that another camel hadn’t gone down; that the caravan had just stopped to take a break. Finally, we made camp again, still a good 21 miles away from the Khotan-daria.

The mood was somber. Thoughts and conversation revolved around one thing—water. The camels looked more dead than alive. We removed their packs, but they just lay there without stirring, like victims of some desert massacre.

Our lives had boiled down to just a few mechanical motions. We rolled out our mats, spread the sleeping bags over them, and climbed into them, wearing our sweaty, sand-covered clothes. Hair in a disheveled mess and matted with sand, faces burned by the sun, we looked like we were not long for this world either. Roze had already gone to bed. He lay wrapped up in his bedroll wedged between two pack saddles, as if awaiting the next sandstorm. As he did every evening at sunset, Omarjan climbed to the top of a dune, but this time it was not to pray. This time it was not the Koran he held in his hands, but the binoculars, as he turned a wistful, but futile, gaze eastward.

I watched the evening sky pass through the entire spectrum of colors, from yellow, to pink, right through to deep red. I would have preferred black rain clouds. I’d lost my eye for the beauty of the desert… had no interest in atmosphere, colors, or forms anymore. Everything about the place seemed cold and threatening to me now. My noble ideals, my dreams of a great meditative experience, had long since vaporized like a mirage.

April 26. Day 10 in the Taklamakan: This morning, for a few minutes at any rate, it seemed as though someone had heard my prayers. I woke up thinking I was seeing things: the sky was overcast. And then, a big fat raindrop pelted me right in the face.

I jumped to my feet shouting “Su! Su!—Water! Water!” The others got up, still groggy with sleep.

“We’ve got to catch the raindrops!” I yelled out to Helmut, who was just crawling out of his sleeping bag. We really could have used the tarpaulins now, but we’d left those behind the day before. Luckily, we still had a thin foil rescue blanket with us. We spread it out and waited with anticipation. It started to drizzle lightly and even a few heavy drops fell —but that was all. Within minutes, the show was over. We stood there with downtrodden looks on our faces, folded the rescue blanket back up without a word, and packed our things.

It was then that I noticed Omarjan was missing. We started calling him, but no one answered. Then we spotted his tracks, leading away from the caravan—and, to our horror, back in the direction from which we’d just come. Had Omarjan gone crazy with thirst and just wandered off into the desert?

Roze was beside himself with worry. Barefooted, he followed Omarjan’s tracks a way, but quickly gave up and returned. I noticed that Omarjan hadn’t even taken any water with him. His half-full water bottle was still lying next to his bedroll, as was his Koran, which he usually kept by him at all times. One of us would have to go bring him back.

Roze felt it was his responsibility to go. He grabbed a bottle of water and set out. We looked up nervously at the sky. If a sandstorm came up, the tracks would be erased instantly and Omarjan would be lost. From time to time, Roze would climb up one of the dunes and call out into the desert, into a void. Sometimes, a voice would answer, but it sounded like the voice of a drowning man—and then immediately, silence would return.

A little less than an hour later, Roze returned, leading Omarjan by the hand. The young Uighur didn’t even seem to recognize us. He was completely dazed and disoriented, hallucinating and trembling like a leaf all over. We gave him something to drink, wrapped him in warm blankets, and gave him a sedative, knowing full well that there was only one antidote for what was ailing him: we had to get out of the desert as soon as possible.

Hurriedly, we began preparing for immediate departure. We didn’t dare lose any more time. The camels were looking fatigued. Anticipating the worst, I told Helmut and Roze to remove their most valuable personal belongings from the camels’ saddlebags and carry them on their person. We distributed the last of the water supply, knowing that before the day was out, our reserves would be finished. We couldn’t spare another drop for the camels.

Thankfully, Omarjan could still walk. None of the camels would have been able to bear his weight. Face white as chalk, he staggered across the sand, supported by Helmut.

I walked far ahead to scout out a passable route. There were signs of life here and there; desert lizards, insects. At one point I even saw a bird. Whenever I spotted an area of higher ground, I would climb up to scan the surrounding terrain for a tamarisk or poplar, but there wasn’t a single plant anywhere in sight. It was downright depressing. Finally, I had to give up the constant climbing up and down —it was costing more strength than I could afford.

The dark clouds from the morning had long since dissipated, and we found ourselves marching under the scorching sun again. During the day, the surface of the sand would heat up to over 113 degrees. To escape the brutal midday sun, we decided to give “Hedin’s method” a try. We rammed our trekking poles into the sand, spread our jackets over them, and buried ourselves up to the neck in the shaded sand under the wobbly makeshift tents. But we couldn’t stand it for long. The hot sand didn’t help cool us off at all. Just the opposite; it dehydrated us that much faster, and we were reaching constantly for the water bottle. I would never try to wait out the heat the way Hedin supposedly had, because we would dehydrate just as quickly that way as we would by walking, but we certainly wouldn’t be getting a single step closer to life-saving water.

In the afternoon, a light breeze swept across the dunes, bringing a little relief from the torturous heat. But we still weren’t making much progress; we had one interruption after the other. Again I walked out ahead. Behind me, the caravan had sunk out of sight in the sea of sand —and when it resurfaced sometime later, there were only two camels left standing.

The “White One”, our lead camel, was missing. “He managed to keep up for about half an hour,” Helmut explained to me sadly, “then he collapsed and went into the death position.”

I walked out ahead again. The familiar sounds of the caravan had fallen silent; even Roze’s death chants had ceased. The silence was frightening. I didn’t dare turn around for fear I’d see another camel lying in the sand.

Sometime later, the caravan behind me came to a halt again. For several fearful minutes, I waited. When it didn’t show up, I turned and walked back. I was there in a matter of minutes. One look was enough to tell me that the end was upon us. Both camels had collapsed. One had already been freed from its loads, and was back on its feet, the other was lying on the ground, with its packs still on it. Roze and Helmut were trying to get the animal back on its feet.

Roze took one look at me, and started shouting angrily. I didn’t understand a word he was saying, but it wasn’t hard to guess that he was holding me responsible for the whole thing. And he was right. It was my brilliant idea to follow Hedin’s route. It had been a mistake to set out in April when the animals were still weak from the winter, knowing what Hedin had experienced, and the difficulties we ourselves had had finding sturdy camels in Kashgar. The death of the animals was on my head.

Our nerves were raw. We had to act fast. I told Roze and Omarjan to leave everything behind and follow Helmut and me. Each of us had about four liters of water left—enough for a few hours, at most. Other than that, I took only the absolute necessities: the satellite navigation device, compass, binoculars and a waterproof bag with a long drawstring, in case we needed to scoop water out of a deep well.

“If we walk night and day,” I said to the others encouragingly, “we can make it to the Khotan-daria by tomorrow.” We abandoned the camels, which were too weak to follow us, and I watched them fade out of sight as we crossed over the next dune.