TRAVEL AND INTERNATIONAL PROPERTY: Where no birds sing

Very few white people have seen the source of the Oxus in the Great Pamir. This vast Central Asian river that never meets an ocean was a source of fascination to 19th-century geographers, and the question of its origin, for which there are six candidates, was only finally settled in 1892 by Lord Curzon himself. He chose the highest glacier as the true source. I prefer the source of the biggest volume of water, christened Lake Victoria in 1835 by a British army officer. Both are found at the end of the Wakhan Corridor, that thin finger of Afghanistan that pokes out towards China. Marco Polo called it the ‘Roof of the World’, long before Tibet laid claim to the title, and wrote that there it was ‘too high for birds to fly, there are giant sheep with curled horns and fire burns with a different colour’. I had to see it for myself because I wanted to bring parties of adventurous tourists there next year.

We set off from Ishkashim, the village that controls the pass to the Wakhan, early in the morning. It was late August and harvest time. Men in turbans were kneeling on the ground, grasping a handful of corn with their left hand and cutting it with a scythe. Women and girls, dressed in pink and purple, were picking it up and laying it in neat piles to dry. Elsewhere bullocks were threshing it, and on either side of the village rose huge snow-covered mountains that my map showed to be more than 20,000 feet high.

The corridor was well named, no more than half-a-mile wide and walled in with massive mountains. The landscape changed, alternating huge pile-ups of terminal moraine from the last Ice Age with areas of desert and sand dunes and then fertile grass plains with great herds of two-humped Bactrian camels.