Pamirs – by Nathan Mifsud
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In 1271, the merchant-explorer Marco Polo came upon the treeless valleys of the Pamirs – literally, the pastures. He saw lean beasts fatten within ten days, and wild sheep with horns six palms in length.
In 2015, two Australian cyclists negotiated a Tajik border post without incident. An eagle soared overhead. Marmots chirped and scampered in the alpine grasses. For lunch the men consumed two dumpling soups, two coffees and a bottle of Pepsi.
Murghab, a town at the midpoint of the Pamir Highway, has a bazaar of wind-worn shipping containers where vendors speak Tajik, Russian, Kyrgyz, Bartangi, Shughni, Wakhi and other languages, and sell goods that come from the Chinese trucks that trundle between Osh and Khorugh. In Tajik, the town’s name means river of ducks. In Kyrgyz, it means bag of light.
In 1914, the Soviets had not yet completed the Pamir Highway, and the route was impassable to vehicles. A piano gifted to a Russian commandant’s daughter in Khorugh was carried through the mountains for 700 kilometres on the shoulders of a dozen soldiers.
A century later, a Tajik man and his family spent their day making dung cakes to use as stove fuel during winter, when nights on the plateau sometimes drop thirty degrees below zero.
The greatest Tajik poet of the 17th century warned, ‘The candle, having killed the moth, turns on itself.’
In 1991, Tajikistan seceded from the Soviet Union. There followed a civil war of enormous human cost. An apparatchik named Emomali Rahmon became leader, beginning an enduring regime. His portrait looms from buildings everywhere: a large, dark-suited figure floating across snow-topped scenery, or else sniffing poppies.
In 2011, to celebrate two decades of independence, Tajikistan constructed the world’s tallest flagpole, raising a 700-kilogram flag up the 165-metre monument in Dushanbe, the capital.
Later that year, a British couple bribed a policeman in Dushanbe at a checkpoint on the Pamir Highway. They continued south to the Panj, a river that forms the border with Afghanistan, where the highway becomes little more than a gravel inscription along improbable cliffs. For days the couple gazed across a span of glacial water sometimes shallow enough to ford on foot, watching Afghan men guide their laden donkeys as Afghan women hung their laundry beside adobe houses.
Three years later, a sandstorm on the road engulfed an American woman and her father.
Seven years after that, the Taliban gained control of the Afghan side of the river.
In 1853, Friedrich Engels, anticipating the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, wrote that ‘nothing is stable except instability, nothing is immovable, except movement’.
In 1892, a Scottish earl travelled the Pamirs on a mission of either diplomacy or espionage, it’s not clear which. The nights became so cold that he asked the cook to unfreeze his ink bottles, and ultimately resorted to pencils.
In 2017, the Tajik government ordered journalists to refer to their leader in every instance as The Founder of Peace and Unity, Leader of the Nation, President of the Republic of Tajikistan, His Excellency Emomali Rahmon, which takes 15 seconds to scroll past on the news ticker and 19 seconds for television presenters to pronounce.
In the 7th century, Ali, the cousin of Muhammad, landed his flying horse on a mulberry tree to battle a necromancer. Pilgrims leave ribbons on its bent trunk to this day. Elsewhere in Tajikistan, Ali sliced the throat of a dragon and brought forth a hot spring to wash away its poisonous blood.
Around the same time, the monk-scholar Xuanzang crossed the Pamir Knot in search of Buddhist lore. He visited a lake called Issyk-Kul, a well-trafficked stop on the Silk Road. Xuanzang marvelled at its mirrored surface and recorded that sharks, dragons and turtles lived in its depths.
Some historians consider the origin of the Black Death that haunted the 14th century to be infested rodents, including marmots, that hitched to Europe-bound merchant caravans lured by the sweet waters of Issyk-Kul.
At a different, smaller lake, Alexander the Great has been seen rising in the dawn mists astride his beloved horse Bucephalus.
In 2014, Saudi Arabia erected a flagpole six metres higher than the monument in the Tajik capital.
In 2016, a South Korean woman camped beside a modern fragment of the Silk Road, arranging the horns of a Marco Polo sheep in the dirt to protect her during the night.
Seven weeks later, an earthquake in north-eastern Afghanistan shook boulders down cliffsides in view of an Australian couple boiling water for their afternoon coffee. ▼
Images: Johnny van der Leelie (top), EJ Wolfson (bottom)
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