The Borders We Share: A New Way to Fix a Broken World
Section 7: Deserts and Plains (Posts 37–42)
Post 38: Cimmeria’s Flats, Steppes’ Stretch: Dust Meets Grass
Enigma of the Endless Horizon
The sky is so wide it feels like the earth has forgotten how to curve.
Two immense grasslands lie almost within sight of one another beneath the same pale winter sun.
One is the Eurasian steppe that rolls unbroken from the northern shore of the Caspian to the Altai foothills—Kazakhstan’s sea of feather grass and wormwood, where the wind never rests and the horizon is a promise that tomorrow will look exactly like today. The other is the great brooding plain of Cimmeria, Robert E. Howard’s shadowed land of wind-scoured flats and low hills that lies somewhere north-east of Conan’s Aquilonia and south-west of the drifting shadow Laputa now casts across northern Hyboria. In the last century the island’s magnetic field has begun to tug at the plain below, stretching Cimmeria’s grasslands unnaturally far—almost as though the steppe itself is reaching upward, yearning to touch the floating disc that darkens its sun. Dust swirls upward in slow spirals; grass bends sideways in long, sighing waves; the line between myth and steppe becomes difficult to see from horseback.
Both plains are endless.
Both are sparsely peopled.
Both are bleeding topsoil into the wind.
Both are claimed by distant powers that rarely smell the dust they own.
I arrive with the companions who have walked every fractured frontier of this series: Sherlock Holmes, deerstalker traded for a wide-brimmed hat against the steppe glare; Dr. John Watson, notebook already filling with wind-speed readings and grass-species counts; King Arthur, who has swapped mail for a plain wool cloak but still carries Excalibur at his side like a vow that cannot be broken.
With us walk the people who actually belong to these grasslands.
From Cimmeria come the last free clans—descendants of the horsemen who once raided south into Stygia and north into Hyperborea; Conan himself, now middle-aged, scarred, unexpectedly reflective, leaning on his great sword as though it were a walking stick; Bêlit’s daughter, who has taken her mother’s name and her father’s blade; and a young shaman whose braids are threaded with eagle feathers and who says the wind has begun to speak in two languages since Laputa drifted closer.
From the Eurasian steppe come a Kazakh herder whose family has grazed the same valley since the time of Ablai Khan; a Russian environmental scientist who monitors the slow southward creep of the desert from Kalmykia; a young Kazakh activist who has been documenting illegal land leases to Chinese and Gulf agribusiness firms; and an elderly Cossack woman whose great-grandfather fought with the White Army and whose granddaughter now herds on the same land under a lease agreement she cannot read.
This is Post 38, the second stride in Section 7: Deserts and Plains. We have left the shifting sands of Laputa and the Sahara. Now the series steps onto the open grasslands, where sovereignty is measured not in vertical metres or mineral tonnes but in the number of hooves that can still graze before the topsoil blows away.
The Two Plains, One Slow Erosion
Cimmeria’s flats are the brooding expanse Howard described as “a land of brooding hills and wind-scoured flats.” In the last century Laputa has begun to exert its magnetic influence downward, so that the plain now stretches unnaturally far—almost as if the steppe itself is trying to reach up and touch the floating disc. Every year approximately 14,000 hectares of grassland are lost to wind erosion accelerated by the island’s low-level downdraughts; the topsoil blows southward into the Hyborian kingdoms, silting rivers and burying pastures. The clans who still live here have no voice in the decisions made above them. They are not subjects; they are scenery.
The Eurasian steppe is brutally real. The Russia–Kazakhstan border runs 7,598 kilometres, the longest continuous land border on earth. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, large tracts of Kazakh grazing land have been leased—often for 25–49 years—to Russian, Chinese, Gulf, and Western agribusiness firms for wheat, barley, and fodder production. In the last decade alone, Kazakhstan has lost an estimated 1.8 million hectares of pasture to desertification and conversion. The herders whose families have used these lands for generations are rarely consulted. The leases are signed in Astana and Moscow; the grass disappears under tractors. Both plains are bleeding topsoil into the wind; both are claimed by distant capitals that rarely smell the dust.
Sovereignty Conflicts (2017) frames both as classic triadic disputes: two privileged claimants exercising sovereignty over a populated third territory whose constitutive population is treated as peripheral to the claim yet suffers the direct environmental and economic cost.
Territorial Disputes (2020) adds the sociological fracture: in Cimmeria the upper-island scholars versus the underside clans; on the steppe the urban lease-holders versus the rural pastoralists.
Cosmopolitanism and State Sovereignty (2023) asks the moral question: can a claim to land be legitimate if it systematically excludes or exploits the majority who actually inhabit and sustain it?
Territorial Disputes in the Americas (2025) provides the practical precedent: guarantor-led shared-land-use zones that have achieved high durability in Latin American cases—models now urgently needed here.
The Evidence Gathered in Grass and Dust
Holmes refuses to stay on horseback. He spends four days walking Cimmeria’s flats with the clans, measuring wind speed, grass height, and the interval between Laputa’s magnetic pulses and the sudden gusts that strip topsoil. He spends the next four days walking the Kazakh steppe with herders and scientists, timing the arrival of leaseholders’ tractors and the departure of saiga herds. The data he returns with are grimly symmetrical.
In Cimmeria 14,000 hectares of grassland vanish each year to wind erosion accelerated by Laputa’s downdraughts; 1,800 herding families have been displaced in the last decade. On the Eurasian steppe 1.8 million hectares of pasture have been converted or degraded since 2015; 47,000 Kazakh herding households have been affected. In Cimmeria no scholar has visited the flats in living memory. In Kazakhstan no senior leaseholder has spent a night in a yurt on land they now control.
Watson’s notebook grows heavy: “Both plains are being grazed to death by powers that never smell the grass. The difference is only in the signature—royal decree or lease contract.”
Arthur stands on a Cimmerian hill watching Laputa drift overhead, then stands on a Kazakh rise watching a distant line of combine harvesters move north to south like steel locusts. He says only: “A plain does not care who rides across it. It only remembers who rested their herds upon it.”
A Conclave on the Grass
We meet where the two plains almost touch: a neutral stretch of shortgrass prairie on Laputa’s lowest dune, lowered to within 150 metres of the Kazakh steppe for the first time in history, with Russian and Kazakh officials brought by helicopter and Cimmerian riders arriving on horseback.
Present: King Laputian, seated on a portable throne of adamant, visibly uncomfortable at being so close to grass; Conan, middle-aged, scarred, unexpectedly reflective, leaning on his great sword; Bêlit’s daughter, sword at her hip, eyes fierce; a Kazakh herder whose family has grazed the same valley since the time of Ablai Khan; a Russian agribusiness representative carrying a briefcase of lease documents; a young Kazakh activist holding a drone-captured map of converted pastures; Hamed al-Ghabri, the Omani elder whose water-bag has become a symbol of cross-border memory.
Conan speaks first, voice like gravel under hooves: “The grass is moving. It does not ask permission. It only asks to be shared.”
The Kazakh herder answers: “Our grass has been moving under foreign tractors for twenty years. We ask only for the right to follow our herds freely.”
The Russian representative, voice calm: “We have brought investment, jobs, grain exports. The steppe is more productive now than it has ever been.”
Arthur lays Excalibur flat across a low rise. Every hand—royal, warrior, herder, executive—rests on the scabbard at once.
I open:
“Egalitarian shared sovereignty does not ask who owns the grass. It asks how we keep the steppe from turning to dust beneath the hooves and wheels that feed us all.”
The “Steppe Accord” is drafted in dust and ink:
- Joint Laputa–Russia–Kazakhstan Grassland Commission with binding stocking-rate and conversion caps; surplus funds a cross-border soil regeneration programme.
- Cimmeria’s flats declared a shared ecological corridor; 30 % of any future crystal revenue funds permanent descent corridors and mobile schools for nomads.
- “Grass-to-Sky Residency Pathway”: ten continuous years of contribution (herding, scholarship, land restoration) = permanent residency in Kazakhstan or citizenship on Laputa’s grounded ring.
- Higher Court seated alternately in Astana and on Laputa’s lowest terrace, with judges from Kazakh, Russian, Cimmerian, and nomadic communities; veto power on any lease or extraction that increases erosion or reduces migratory corridors.
- Every new large-scale lease or crystal operation must display, in Kazakh, Russian, Cimmerian dialect, and Arabic, the source of the water and the names of the herders and workers who sustain it.
King Laputian signs first, his hand steady because it rests on real grass. Conan signs second. The Kazakh herder signs third. The Russian representative signs fourth. Bêlit’s daughter signs last—her sword resting beside Excalibur like an equal.
Murmurs of the Steppe Wind
The wind still carries warnings: topsoil will blow away, aquifers will fall, herds will thin. Yet it also carries new notes: the soft thud of hooves following a restored migratory corridor, the laughter of Kazakh and Cimmerian children learning rotational grazing together on a neutral rise, the quiet rustle of a Laputan scholar choosing to walk rather than float, the sound of a water-bag being refilled from a well that no longer runs dry.
Peace along this horizontal frontier is not a treaty signed in glass towers. It is a blade of grass left standing so a herd may graze again, a lease rewritten so a herder may stay, a plain whose horizon is wide enough for every horseman and every scholar to ride beneath the same sky.
Why This Resonates in You
You have stood on a plain so flat you could see tomorrow coming.
You have watched grass bend under wind and hooves and wondered who decides which herds may follow the old paths.
You have, perhaps, never met the herder whose grazing rights were signed away in a distant capital, the scholar who learned that the stars are beautiful but the grass is home, or the warrior who discovered that even a king can learn to walk.
The Borders We Share asks only one thing: the next time you look across a plain, remember there is always a ground—and that the ground remembers every hoofprint, every footprint, every promise kept or broken.
Next Tuesday we move deeper into the steppes—new dust, new horizons.
I remain, as always, Dr. Jorge (https://x.com/DrJorge_World) and at https://drjorge.world
Trails to Wander:
• Sovereignty Conflicts (2017).
• Territorial Disputes (2020).
• Cosmopolitanism and State Sovereignty (2023).
• Territorial Disputes in the Americas (2025).
NOTE:
New posts every Tuesday.
PREVIOUS POSTS:
Post 37: Laputa’s Dunes, Sahara’s Split: Sand for All
NEXT POSTS:
Section 7: Deserts and Plains (Posts 37–42)
39, Erewhon’s Sands, Sinai’s Edge: Nowhere to Share
40, Narnia’s Wastes, Sudan’s Split: Kings of Nothing
41, Oz’s Plains, Outback’s Reach: Emerald to Dust
42, Laputa’s Dunes, Part II: Quantum Sands
AUTHOR’S SAMPLE PEER-REVIEWED ACADEMIC RESEARCH (FREE OPEN ACCESS):
State Sovereignty: Concept and Conceptions (OPEN ACCESS) (IJSL 2024)
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Tuesday 20th January 2026
Dr Jorge Emilio Núñez
X (formerly, Twitter): https://x.com/DrJorge_World
