Another indicator of the climb was the river running the length of the valley. The Ab-e-Panj, we had been told, is one of the headwater sources of the Oxus, that great river which Alexander crossed and recrossed, and in his Book it is described as immensely broad and slow-running and tranquil. However, that is far to the west and downhill of where we were now. The Ab-e-Panj alongside our trail was not wide nor deep, but it raced through that valley like an endless stampede of white horses, tossing white manes and tails. It even sounded sometimes more like a stampede than a river, the noise of its cascading water being often lost in the scrape and grate and rumble of the sizable boulders it rolled and jostled along its bed. A blind man could have told that the Abe-Panj was hurtling downhill and, for it to have such momentum, the river’s uphill end had to be somewhere far higher yet. In this winter season, certainly, the river could not for a moment have slowed its tumultuous pace, or it would have frozen solid, and there might not have existed any Oxus downstream. This was apparent, because every splash and spatter and lick of the water on the rock banks instantly turned to blue-white ice. Since that made the footing close to the river even more treacherous than the snow-covered ground—and also because every splash of the water that reached us froze on our horses’ legs and flanks, or on ours—we kept our trail well to one side of the river wherever we could.
Still another indicator of our continuous climb was the noticeable thinning of the very air. Now, I have been often disbelieved, and even jeered, when I have told of this to non-journeyers. I know as well as they do that air is weightless at all times, impalpable except when it moves as wind. When the disbelievers demanded to know how an element without the least weight can have less weight yet, I cannot tell them how, or why; I only know it does. It gets less and less substantial in those upland heights, and there are evidences to show it.
For one, a man has to breathe deeper to fill his lungs. This is not the panting occasioned by fast movement or brisk exercise; a man standing still has to do it. When I exerted myself—loading a horse’s packsaddle, say, or clambering over a boulder blocking the trail—I had to breathe so fast and hard and deep that it seemed I never would get enough air into me to sustain me. Some disbelievers have dismissed that as a delusion fostered by tedium and hardship, of which God knows we had enough to contend with, but I maintain that the insubstantial air was a very real thing. I will additionally adduce the fact that Uncle Mafio, though he like all of us had to breathe deep, was not so frequently or painfully afflicted by the need to cough. Clearly, the thin air of the heights lay not so heavily in his lungs and did not so often have to be forcibly expelled.
I have other evidence. Fire and air, both being weightless, are the closest-related of the four elements; everybody will concede that. And in the high lands where the air is feebler, so is fire. It burns more blue and dim than yellow and bright. This was not just a result of our having to burn the local burtsa shrub for fuel; I experimented with burning other and more familiar things, like paper, and the resultant flame was equally debile and languid. Even when we had a well-fueled and well-laid camp fire, it took longer to char a piece of meat or to boil a pot of water than it had done in lower lands. Not only that, the boiling water also took longer than customary to cook something put into it.
In that winter season, there were no great karwan trains on the trail, but we did meet an occasional other traveling party. Most of these were hunters and trappers of furs, moving from place to place in the mountains. The winter was their working season, and in the clement springtime they would take their accumulated stores of hides and pelts down to market in one of the lowland towns. Their shaggy little packhorses were heaped with the baled pelts of fox, wolf, pard, the urial, which is a wild sheep, and the goral, which is something between a goat and a qazèl. The hunter-trappers told us that this valley which we were climbing was called the Wakhan—or sometimes the Wakhan Corridor, because many mountain passes open off it on all sides, like doors off a corridor, and the valley constitutes both the border between and the access to all the lands beyond. To the south, they said, were passes leading out of the Corridor to lands called Chitral and Hunza and Kashmir, in the east leading to a land called To-Bhot, and in the north to the land of Tazhikistan.
“Ah, Tazhikistan is yonder?” said my father, turning to gaze to the north. “Then we are not too far now, Mafio, from the route we took homeward.”
“True,” said my uncle, sounding tired and relieved. “We have only to go through Tazhikistan, then a short way east to the city of Kashgar, and we are again in Kubilai’s Kithai.”
On their packhorses, the hunter-trappers also carried many horns which they had taken from a kind of wild sheep called the artak, and I, having so far seen only the lesser horn-racks of such animals as the qazèl and cows and domestic sheep, was mightily impressed by those horns. At their root end they were as big around as my thigh, and from there they spiraled tightly to points. On the animal’s head, the points would be easily a man’s length apart; but if the spirals could have been unwound and stretched out straight, each of the horns must have measured a man’s length. They were such magnificent things that I supposed the hunters took them and sold them for ornaments to be admired. No, they said, laughing; those great horns were to be cut and fashioned into all manner of useful articles: eating bowls and drinking cups and saddle stirrups and even horse shoes. They averred that a horse shod with such horn shoes would never slip on the most slippery road.
(Many months later, and higher in the mountains, when I saw some of those artak sheep alive and at liberty in the wild, I thought them so splendidly beautiful that I deplored the killing of them for merely utile purposes. My father and uncle, to whom utility meant commerce and commerce meant everything, laughed as the hunters had done, and chided my sentimentality, and from that time on referred sarcastically to the artak as “Marco’s sheep.”)
As we went on up the Wakhan, the mountains on either side remained as awesomely high as ever, but now, each time the snowfall let up enough for us to raise our eyes to the mountains’ immensity, they stood perceptibly closer to us. And the banks of ice on either side of the Ab-e-Panj River built up thicker and bluer, and constricted the racing water to an ever narrower stream between them, as if vividly to illustrate how the winter was closing its grip on the land.
The mountains kept shouldering in on us day by day, and finally others reared up in front of us as well, until we had those Titans standing close all around us except at our backs. We had come to the head end of that high valley, and the snowfall ceased briefly and the clouds cleared, for us to see the white mountain peaks and the cold blue sky magnificently reflected in a tremendous frozen lake, the Chaqmaqtin. From under the ice at its western end spilled the Ab-e-Panj we had been following, so we took the lake to be the river’s source, hence also the ultimate headwater of the fabled Oxus. My father and uncle marked it so, according to their practice, on the Kitab’s otherwise imprecise map of that region. I was not any help in locating our position, as the horizon was much too high and jagged for me to make use of the kamal. But, when the night sky was clear, I could at least tell, from the height of the North Star, that we were now a far way north of where we had begun our overland march at Suvediye on the Levant shore.