TRAVEL AND INTERNATIONAL PROPERTY: Where no birds sing

Very few white people have seen the source of the Oxus in the Great Pamir. This vast Central Asian river that never meets an ocean was a source of fascination to 19th-century geographers, and the question of its origin, for which there are six candidates, was only finally settled in 1892 by Lord Curzon himself. He chose the highest glacier as the true source. I prefer the source of the biggest volume of water, christened Lake Victoria in 1835 by a British army officer. Both are found at the end of the Wakhan Corridor, that thin finger of Afghanistan that pokes out towards China. Marco Polo called it the ‘Roof of the World’, long before Tibet laid claim to the title, and wrote that there it was ‘too high for birds to fly, there are giant sheep with curled horns and fire burns with a different colour’. I had to see it for myself because I wanted to bring parties of adventurous tourists there next year.