Across the Black Sands and the Red: Travel Writing, Nature, and the Reclamation of the Eurasian Steppe, c. 1850 Through a reading of nineteenth-century Persian travel narratives, this paper locates the history of Iran and Central Eurasia within the context of the recent literature on global frontier processes, and the encounter between empire and nature. It argues that Persianate travel books (safarnama) about Central Eurasia were part of the imperial project to order and reclaim the natural world and were forged through the material encounter with the steppes. Far from a passive act of collecting information and more than merely an extension of the observer's preconceptions, description was essential to the expansion and preservation of empire. While there exists a vast literature on Western geographical and ethnographic representations of the Middle East, building on the critiques of Edward Said in Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, only recently have scholars begun to mine contacts that took place outside of a Western colonial framework and within an Asian setting. Based on an analysis of Riza Quli Khan Hidayat's Sifaratnama-yi Khvarazm, the record of an expedition sent from the Qajar Dynasty to the Oxus River in 1851, the following pages explore the nineteenth-century Muslim "discovery" of the Eurasian steppe world. The Khvarazm expedition set out to define imperial boundaries and reclaim to the desert, but along the way it found a permeable "middle ground" in between empires marked by trans-frontier and cross-cultural exchanges, such as trade and pilgrimage.