So my father and uncle and Nostril all cursed bitterly and the Cholas whimpered miserably every time they heard the rumble of rockfall, from whatever direction. But I was always stirred by the sound, and I cannot understand why other travelers seem to think it not worth mentioning in their reminiscences, for what the noise means is that these great mountains will not last forever. The crumbling of them will of course take centuries and millennia and eons before the Pai-Mir crumble down even to the still-grand stature of the Alps—but crumble they will, and eventually to a featureless flat land. Realizing that, I wondered why, if God intended only to let them fall, He had piled them so extravagantly high as they are now. And I wondered too, and I wonder still, how immeasurably, stupendously, unutterably high these mountains must have been when God made them in the Beginning.

All the mountains being of unvarying colors, the only changes we could see in their appearance were those made by weather and time of day. On clear days, the high peaks caught the brilliance of dawn while we were still benighted, and they held the glow of sunset long after we had camped and supped and bedded down in darkness. On days when there were clouds in the sky, we would see a white cloud trail across a bare brown crag and hide it. Then, when the cloud had passed, the pinnacle would reappear, but now as white with snow as if it had shredded off rags of the cloud in which to drape itself.

When we ourselves were high up, climbing an upward trail, the high light up there played tricks with our eyesight. In most mountain country there is always a slight haze which renders each farther object a little dimmer to the eye, so one can judge which objects are near and which far. But in the Pai-Mir there is no trace of haze, and it is impossible to reckon the distance or even the size of the most common and familiar objects. I would often fix my gaze on a mountain peak on the far horizon, then be startled to see our pack yaks scrambling over it, a mere rock pile and only a hundred paces distant from me. Or I would glimpse a hulking surragoy—one of the wild mountain yaks, like a fragment of mountain himself—lurking just to one side of our trail, and I would worry that he might lure our tame yaks to run away from us, but then realize that he was actually standing a farsakh away, and there was a whole valley between us.

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.