CLOUD ATLAS

IN RUGGED KYRGYZSTAN, LIFE SHADOWS THE WILD WHIMSY OF THE SEASONS. FOR ITS NOMADIC HERDERS AND HUNTERS, THE MOST JOYFUL MOMENT OF ALL IS THE RETURN TO THE SUMMER FREEDOM OF THE PLAINS

- STANLEY STEWART

FROM THE TOP OF THE PASS, we looked down on summer pastures shimmering with haze. Cloud shadows drifted like wandering states across the valley. Far off in the west, the grasslands tipped into empty reaches of the sky. To the south stood the ramparts of the Trans-Alai mountains, a spur of the Pamirs, armoured with snow.

A rickety truck pulled up. Ropes held precarious cargo in place, the nomads’ baggage: tents, carpets, yurt poles, felt rolls, trunks, cast-iron stoves and two boys with baby lambs.

When the doors of the cab opened, people tumbled out like a conjuring trick, first five, then 10, then 15, an extended family of four generations, from babies to an ancient granny. They gathered on the edge of the road to gaze down, like us, into the valley of Chong Kyzyl-Suu, 2,000ft below the pass, unrolled like a map of the promised land.

Two young women from the truck, sisters perhaps, stood arm in arm next to Granny, half their size. “Perhaps this summer you will be married,” Granny said, hopefully. The girls laughed. “The boys are too shy, Granny.”

Back in the car, we spiraled down from the height of the pass. Waves of sheep flooded the road until it felt like the landscape was on the move. Men on horseback whooped and hollered while dogs scampered around. On the roadside, stalls had sprung up, selling bowls of kaymak, or sweet yak’s cream, and bottles of kumis, fermented mare’s milk.

At a junction, we passed the turn Marco Polo might have taken seven centuries ago on his way to China, barely 130km to the east, across the high cols of the Pamirs. We turned westward, following another road as straight as a drawn line, toward the grasslands where the nomads were gathering.