Samarkand smells of bread. Every morning before light the bakeries fire their clay ovens — tandir, domed and low — and by the time the sun reaches the minarets of the Registan, the air is already warm with it. I had arrived the night before on a train from Tashkent, through flat cotton country that became, slowly, the outskirts of one of the oldest cities in the world.
The Silk Road is not a road. It never was. It was a network of routes — some safer, some shorter, all variable by season, political climate, and the disposition of whoever controlled the mountain passes. The name was coined by a German geographer in 1877, long after the last camel caravan had made the crossing that the word conjures. But the routes themselves are real, and some of them are still walkable.
The Pamir Highway
The section I walked — a word I use loosely; there were horses involved for the high passes — runs from Osh in Kyrgyzstan through Tajikistan to Kashgar in China’s Xinjiang region. The Pamir plateau sits at an average altitude of 4,000 metres. In summer, the high passes are snow-free; in everything else, they are not.
The landscape is the opposite of beautiful in any familiar sense. It is too large, too bare, too indifferent. The mountains do not resolve into scenes; they are simply everywhere, in every direction, at every scale simultaneously. After a week I stopped trying to photograph them. No lens has the field of view.
What remains of the route
The caravanserais — the roadside inns where merchants and their animals rested, one day’s walk apart — are mostly ruins now, their mud-brick walls dissolving back into the same earth they were built from. A few have been partially restored. In one, near the Kyrgyz-Tajik border, I found a family who had been living there for four generations, the patriarch still able to tell you which wall was built when.
The trade that moved through here was not only silk, though silk was the prestige good that gave the route its name. Paper, gunpowder, porcelain, spices, ideas, diseases, religions — everything that defines the medieval world moved along these paths. Standing on a high pass in the Pamirs, you are standing where Buddhism entered China, where Islam followed, where the Black Death began its journey west.
That is a lot to carry in a landscape that otherwise offers nothing but altitude and wind.
