Song-Köl is a lake on a treeless plateau in central Kyrgyzstan, 3,016 metres up, with nothing on its shores but grass, horses and the felt yurts that herding families put up each summer and take down again before the snow. This is the jailoo, the high summer pasture, and from June to September the plateau works the way it has for centuries: families drive their sheep, horses and yaks up from the valleys, pitch their yurts a few steps from the water, and live there until the cold comes. You can sleep in one. A boz-üy, the Kyrgyz yurt, is warmed by a dung-fired stove and a stack of quilts, and it is built rather than pitched: the family unfolds a red willow lattice into a circle, lifts the roof-poles into a domed crown, and wraps the frame in heavy felt, all in an hour or two. That crown of poles, the tündük, is the emblem at the centre of the Kyrgyz flag, and lying under it at night you see why: the smoke hole frames a circle of stars.
The plateau is travelled on horseback. You borrow a horse from a herding family and cross the open pasture with no fences, no marked trail and nothing but grass to the horizon, the lake a band of blue at the edge of it; the herders' children ride the same way, without saddles. Loose herds of horses graze unfenced across the slopes above the shore and drift down toward the water as the light softens, and at dusk the yurts send up their smoke. Bar-headed geese nest on the lake in summer, among the highest-flying birds on Earth, crossing the Himalaya twice a year between here and their winter home in India. From June wildflowers spread across the plateau, and the nights are cold even in July. By October the yurts are gone, the families are back in the valleys, the lake freezes, and Song-Köl is empty until the grass comes up again.