Uzbekistan’s capital, Tashkent, is, for the eager traveler, little more than a gateway to the three great Silk Road cities--Samarkand, Bukhara, and Khiva--that make Uzbekistan so compelling. First, there’s Samarkand, whose Registan, the very picky Lord Curzon described as “the noblest public square in the world. I know of nothing in the East approaching its massive simplicity and grandeur, and nothing in Europe...which can even aspire to enter the competition.” The Registan is only one of Samarkand’s marvels; the Gur Emir, tomb of Timur (or Tamerlane), positively throbs with the presence of one of history’s most obsessively dedicated conquerors. Bukhara, the Second Mecca, was so revered that it was said that in “other parts of the world, the light descends upon earth. From holy Bukhara, it ascends.” And Khiva’s beautiful sky-blue domes and minarets inspired the Japanese traveler Yashushi Inoue to write that “the blue of Central Asia’s blue tiles is different from that of sky or sea, and it seemed to me that it sang a siren’s song, drawing the traveler from the desert, almost as through this deep ceramic blue was necessary to life.” (And, just by the way, Uzbekistan, along with Liechtenstein, are the answers to a fabulously obscure trivia question: What are the only two landlocked countries in the world whose bordering countries are all also landlocked?)