Khojabay is not the only one who looks daily “out to sea” across the desert.

Tara FitzGerald met another elderly former ship’s captain doing exactly the same - but 400km further south, in the one-time Uzbek port of Moynak.

His children moved away in search of jobs and his wife died, and the town around him - complete with promenade overlooking the dry seabed - is now lifeless.

The hulls of former fishing boats dot the horizon here too.

“I asked him why he was staring at the desert so long,” she says. “And he said, ‘If I look hard enough, maybe the sea will come back.’”

But it would take a miracle to bring the sea back to Moynak, and the Kokaral dam is one reason for that.

“It is helping to save the Small Aral sea,” says FitzGerald. “But it was also a death warrant to the Big Aral, on the Uzbek side. People on the Uzbek side are very angry about it. The dam shut the only source of water that was entering their sea.”

That ignores, however, the fact that the Amu Darya - known to Central Asian schoolchildren as the Amazon of the region - was diverted into myriad irrigation channels supplying Uzbekistan’s own cotton and rice fields.

This was done for what were, on the face of it, good reasons. Millions of lives depend on these crops.

“If we want to save the whole Aral Sea, then we have to stop irrigation altogether in the region,” says Medad Ospanov, head of the Save the Aral Sea Foundation. “But that would be impossible.”

Some now also accuse the Uzbek authorities of lacking the will to save the sea, because of the oil and gas deposits identified under the seabed, which are much easier to extract in dry conditions.

Russian and Korean energy companies have already begun the job.

Whatever its reasons, instead of trying to bring back the sea, the Uzbek government is focusing on two plans to help improve living conditions for people living on the perimeter of the Aral desert.

One is to plant saxaul trees on the seabed to reduce the spread of the toxic salts, which cause kidney disease, and possibly heart problems and strokes.

The other is to create lakes for fish-farming. For this it is hoping to secure large sums of money from the World Bank.

When the scale of the Aral Sea disaster first became apparent in the 1980s, Soviet planners considered moving the whole population of the Aral region.

This never happened, and though some left of their own accord, many had no desire to leave their ancestral land.

For them the disappearance of the sea is a disaster. The revival of the Small Aral brings hope to some, but it was only ever 5% of the whole. The Western basin accounts for another 5%.

Ninety per cent of the sea has gone.

It’s one of the world’s most startling ecological calamities - the story of how cotton soaked up an entire sea.