A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Introduction 15
and most notorious examples, counterparts to the still more inhospitable
Taklamakan desert of Eastern Turkestan.
Fergana, as we have said, is surrounded by the Tianshan and Pamir
mountain ranges on three sides: on the north, south, and east.Both
systems are also known by local names applied to their specific segments;
thus Tianshan’s Kungey and Terskey Alatoo, the ranges to the north and
south of the Issyk Kul (“Warm Lake” in Kyrgyz) in Kyrgyzstan, for
example.The elevation of this natural wall separating Western from
Eastern Turkestan is breathtaking – a number of peaks over 5,000 meters
high, with such giants as Zhengish Chokusu (the less well known but
more appropriate Kyrgyz version of the Russian name Pik Pobedy,
“Victory Peak”) on the Kyrgyz–Sinkiang border (7,439 meters), Garmo
in Tajikistan (7,495 meters; the highest mountain of the former Soviet
Union, it was then called Pik Kommunizma, “Communism Peak”), or,
still higher, Kungur in Sinkiang (7,719 meters).The Pamir ranges (nicknamed,
in nineteenth-century travel literature, as the “Roof of the
World”) fan out through Tajikistan and Sinkiang into Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Tibet, and India under such names as Kunlun, Karakoram,
Hindukush, and Himalayas.Incredible though it may sound, this convergence
of giant mountain chains was the crossroads, in antiquity and
the Middle Ages, of the celebrated Silk Road – caravan tracks that linked
Inner Asia and China with India, the Middle East, and the
Mediterranean world.Man found ways to penetrate them through
passes some of which lie higher than peaks considered lofty elsewhere
(for example Bedel in Kyrgyzstan, 4,288 meters, or Akbaital in
Tajikistan, 4,655 meters; or the track linking India with Sinkiang through
Srinagar–Gilgit–Hunza–Tashkurgan–Kashgar, with Karakoram’s K2
or Godwin Austen, the second highest mountain in the world – 8,611
meters high – not far to the east of there).
To the east of Fergana but separated from it by the Tianshan and
Pamir ranges extends the Tarim basin, in some respects a mirror image
of the Fergana valley but much vaster and starker.Sinkiang, of which it
is a part, is an administrative term covering a larger area; no adequate
generally accepted name exists for the region we are referring to now,
but “Tarim basin” comes closest to meeting that need.It is a roughly
elliptical area encompassed by three groups of mountain systems: the
Tianshan on the north and northwest, the Pamirs on the southwest, and
the Kunlun, Altyntagh, and Nanshan on the south and southeast.As in
Transoxania, here too human settlement has depended on water
brought by streams descending from the mountains.Three of these