The Oxus, that vast central Asian river that rises somewhere in the Afghan Pamirs, has fascinated explorers for centuries. Its name gives us the land of Oxiana. Yet few Europeans had set eyes on it before the second world war. Robert Byron’s 1937 book, The Road to Oxiana, is an account, among other things, of a failed attempt to find it.
What most gripped the handful of 19th-century explorers, diplomats, spies and sportsmen who did make the perilous journey, however, was identifying its source. While the sources of other great rivers were being more or less accurately traced, that of the Oxus was fiercely contested, owing to the unusually difficult terrain. One of the worst journeys I have ever made was to one claimed source: Lake Victoria, or Syr Kul, on the Afghan-Tajik border (admittedly, I had been misdirected by the locals).
All possible sources of the Oxus are to be found in the Wakhan Corridor, that thin finger of Afghanistan that points towards China. This starts out as a stunningly beautiful river valley, walled in by massive mountains. To get into the Small or Great Pamir, where the Oxus must rise, one needs to traverse passes of over 16,000 feet and brave snow even in the height of summer. The Pamirs themselves are enormous grassy basins, 12,000 feet high, sculpted by the last Ice Age, possessing their own micro- climate and fauna — snow leopard, eagles, marmots and the extravagantly spiral-horned Marco Polo sheep being among the most famous.
When I was in the Wakhan in 2002 I met a remarkable English doctor working there. I told him that I was looking for the source of the Oxus, and he replied: ‘But is there a source of the Oxus?’ It was a good question.
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