The high air was as tricksome as the light. As it had done in the Wakhàn (which we now regarded as a mere lowland), the air refused to support the flames of our cook fires more than meagerly, and they burned only pale and blue and tepid, and our water pots took an eternity to come to a boil. Up here, somehow, the thin air also affected the heat of the very sunshine. The sunny side of a boulder would be too uncomfortably hot to lean against, but its shady side would be too uncomfortably cold. Sometimes we would have to doff our heavy chapon overcoats because the sun made them so swelteringly hot, but not a crystal of the snow all about us would be melting. The sun would fire icicles into blindingly bright and iridescent rainbows, but never make them drip.
However, that was only in clear and sunny weather on the heights, when the winter briefly slept. I think these heights are where the old man winter goes to mope and sulk when all the rest of the world spurns him and welcomes warmer seasons. And in here, perhaps in one or another of the many mountain caves and caverns, old winter retires to doze from time to time. But he sleeps uneasily and he continually reawakens, yawning great gusts of cold and flailing long arms of wind and from his white beard combing cascades of snow. Often and often, I watched the snowy high peaks blend into a fresh fall of snow and vanish in its whiteness; then the nearer ridges would disappear, and then the yaks leading our train, and then the rest of it, and finally everything beyond my horse’s wind-whipped mane would disappear in whiteness. In some of those storms the snow was so thick and the gale so fierce that we riders could progress best by turning and sitting backward on our saddles, letting our mounts pick their onward way, tacking like boats against the blast.
Since we were constantly going uphill and down, that iron weather would soften every few days, when we descended into the warm, dry, dusty gorges where young lady spring had arrived, then would harden around us again when we ascended once more into the domains still held by old man winter. So we alternated: plodding through snow above, slogging through mud below; half frozen by a sleet storm above, half suffocated by a whirling dust-devil below. But as we progressed ever northward, we began to see in the narrow valley bottoms bits of living green—stunted bushes and sparse grasses, then small and timid patches of meadow; an occasional greening-out tree, then stands of them. Those fragmentary verdant areas looked so new and alien, set among the snow-white and harsh-black and arid-dun heights, that they might have been snippets of faraway other countries cut out with scissors and inexplicably scattered through this wasteland.
Still farther north, the mountains were farther apart, allowing for wider and greener valleys, and the terrain was even more remarkable for its contrasts. Against the mountains’ cold white background shone a hundred different greens, all warm with sunlight—voluminous dark-green chinar trees, pale silver-green locust trees, poplars tall and slender like green feathers, aspens twinkling their leaves from the green side to the gray-pearl side. And under and among the trees glowed a hundred different other colors—the bright yellow cups of the flowers called tulbands, the bright reds and pinks of wild roses, the radiant purple of the flower called lilak. That is a tall-growing shrub, so the lilak’s purple plumes looked even more vivacious for our seeing them always from below, against the stark white snowline, and its perfume—one of the most delicious of all flower fragrances—smelled the sweeter for being borne on the absolutely odorless and sterile wind from the snowfields.
In one of those valleys we came to the first river we had encountered since leaving the Ab-e-Panj, this one the Murghab by name, and beside it was the town of the same name. We took the opportunity to rest for two nights in a karwansarai there, and to bathe ourselves and wash our clothes in the river. Then we bade goodbye to the Cholas and kept on northward. I hoped that Talvar and his comrades did get much coin for their sea salt, because Murghab had not much else to offer. It was a shabby town and its Tazhik inhabitants were distinctive only for their exceptional resemblance to their co-inhabitants, the yaks—men and women alike being hairy, smelly, broad of face and features and torso, bovine in their impassivity and incuriosity. Murghab was empty of enticements to linger there, but the Cholas would leave it having nothing better to look forward to, only the grueling journey back across the high Pai-Mir and all of India.
Our own journey, from Murghab on, was not too arduous, we having got well used to traveling in these highlands. Also, the farther-north ranges were not so high or wintry, their slopes were not so steep, the passes were not so far to climb up to and over and down from, and the intervening valleys were broad and green and flowery and pleasant. According to what calculations I could make with our kamàl, we were now much farther north than Alexander had ever penetrated into central Asia, and, according to our Kitab maps, we were now squarely in the center of that largest land mass on earth. So we were astonished and bewildered one day to find ourselves on the shore of a sea. From the shore where the wavelets lapped at our horses’ fetlocks, the waters stretched away to the west as far as the eye could see. We knew, of course, that a mighty inland sea does exist in central Asia, the Ghelan or Caspian by name, but we had to be far, far east of that one. I briefly felt sorry for our recent companions, the Cholas, thinking they had fetched all their sea salt to a land already provided with a more than ample salt sea.
But we tasted the water, and it was fresh and sweet and crystal clear. This was a lake, then, but that was not much less astounding—to encounter a vastly big and deep lake situated as high as an Alp above the bulk of the world. Our northward route took us up its eastern shore, and we were many days in passing it. On every one of those days, we made excuse to camp early in the evening, so we could bathe and wade and disport ourselves in those balmy, sparkling waters. We found no towns on the lake shore, but there were the mud-brick and driftwood huts of Tazhik shepherds and woodcutters and charcoal burners. They told us that the lake was called Karakul, which is to say Black Fleece, which is the name of that breed of domestic sheep raised by all the shepherds in the vicinity.
That was one more oddity about the lake: that it should have the name of an animal; but that animal is admittedly not a common one. In fact, looking at a herd of those sheep, one might wonder why they are called kara, since the adult rams and ewes are mostly of varying shades of gray and grayish-white, only a few of them being black. The explanation is in the much-prized fur for which the karakul is noted. That costly pelt, of tight and kinky black curls, is not just a shearing of the sheep’s fleece. It is a lamb skin, and all the karakul lambs are born black, and the pelt is obtained by killing and flaying a lamb before it is three days old. A day older, and the pure black color loses some of its black intensity, and no fur trader will accept it as karakul.
A week’s journey north of the lake, we came to a river flowing from west to east. It was called by the local Tazhiks the Kek-Su, or Passage River. The name was fitting, for its broad valley did constitute a clear passage through the mountains, and we gladly followed it eastward, down and down from the highlands we had been among for so long. Even our horses were grateful for that easier passage; the rocky mountains had been hard on both their bellies and their hoofs; down here was ample grass for feed and it was soft under their feet. Curiously, at every single village and even isolated hut we came to, my father or uncle asked again the name of the river, and every time were told, “Kek-Su.” Nostril and I wondered at their insistently repeated question, but they only laughed at our puzzlement and would not explain why they needed so many reassurances that we were following the Passage River. Then one day we came upon the sixth or seventh of the valley villages and, when my father asked a man there, “What do you call the river?” the man politely replied, “Ko-tzu.”