‘Roof Of The World’ Best Sunday Newspaper Read
This was one of those perfect Sundays when the nearest I got to venturing outdoors was when I fetched the newspaper off the stoop early this morning. Cloudy and cold weather, along with having all the Christmas presents bought and wrapped, allowed me a lazy day of reading and drinking tea. Given that I was already in a good mood made this find in the newspaper about ‘the roof of the world’, an area I had read about recently, and fell in love with, only more reason to think life is pretty good.
“In The Footsteps of Marco Polo” was one of the most enjoyable books I read this year. (I wrote about this several weeks ago). One of the places that seemed so adventuresome (of the countless ones in the book) was the Pamir Mountains, and ‘the roof of the world’. Today a huge and wonderfully scenic story about this region, and the people was featured in the travel section. For a slide show of the Pamir Mountians as featured in the story click here.
In part this article reads…
Nasim invited me to his family’s house for lunch, and we followed him down a dirt pathway. Wheat, apricots, mulberries and dung lay on the flat roof to dry. The stone-and-plaster architecture was typical of traditional homes throughout the Pamirs, rich in symbolism that includes elements of ancient Aryan and Buddhist philosophy. For Ismailis living here, the home is itself a symbol of the universe and serves instead of a mosque as a place for prayer.
Nasim’s father, Aydar, mustached and wearing a track suit, led me into a main room divided, according to tradition, into three areas signifying the kingdoms of nature: animal, vegetable and mineral. Five supporting pillars represented the five members of the family of the prophet Muhammad and his son-in-law Ali: the one for Muhammad, left of the entrance, is traditionally where a newborn’s cradle is placed and where newly married couples sleep.
Light beamed in through a skylight framed by four concentric square wood layers, representing earth, water, air and fire. Under it Aydar’s daughter laid a spread of raisins, peanuts and berries, potato and corn soup, fresh round flatbread and salty milk tea, which is passed and received with one hand to the heart. As Marco Polo noted, the language in the Wakhan Valley is different even from the Iranian dialects spoken in other Pamir valleys. But Aydar spoke some English and Russian, which was translated for me. I asked him how long his family had lived here.
Aydar told of a legend about a hotheaded emir in the 15th century who killed an entire family save one boy, who fled north, married and had three sons. One son returned to the valley years later, and eventually the two others followed with their families; these were Aydar’s ancestors. The dates were vague, but I was awed by a family story that began 600 years ago.
After lunch, we continued on to the nearby village of Vrang, where children were tending sheep below a tiered stone stupa built on a rocky perch by sixth-century Buddhists. “Buddha, Buddha,” Somon, a local boy, said, cupping his hands in a pantomime of meditation. He volunteered to guide me up to the stupa’s ancient rocks. I sat there looking at sunset over the Pamir crest, coloring the valley from on high like light slanting through clerestory windows, at moonrise above the Hindu Kush — and at Somon, who was eager to climb down. “Homestay?” he asked sweetly, pointing to a faintly lighted house in the birches below. I followed him there.
“Having left this place, and traveled three days, always among mountains,” a man “ascends to a district which is said to be the highest in the world,” Marco Polo reported 700 years ago, describing the climb north from the Wakhan Valley to the 13,000-foot-high desert plateau in the eastern Pamir from which several major ranges — the Himalaya, Karakorum, Hindu Kush, Kunlun and Tien Shan — fan out across Asia. The same journey took us three hours in our temperamental jeep, passing Stone Age petroglyphs, a lone Soviet watchtower, two Swiss mountain bikers and (across a tributary of the Panj, demarcating the border) Afghan traders leading a caravan of double-humped Bactrian camels.
“Along this high plain, which is called Pamier, he sees neither habitation nor verdure,” Polo went on, and until late in the Soviet period, the majority Kyrgyz population that endures this extreme realm known to early Persians as the Roof of the World remained mostly nomadic. The few permanent settlements today have a weathered, frontier character: tin roofs, rusty vehicle parts, satellite dishes.
