The Wakhan Corridor is a finger of Afghan mountain 350 kilometres long and in places only fifteen wide, in the Badakhshan province of the far northeast, drawn in 1895 so that the Russian and British empires would never touch, walled by the Pamir to the north and the Hindu Kush to the south, and it is travelled up the Wakhan river by track to the last village and on foot with pack horses over passes of 4,000 metres to the yurt camps of the Kyrgyz on the high plateau. The corridor is the one part of Afghanistan that the wars mostly passed by, home to the Wakhi, Ismaili farmers of the valley who take travellers into their guest rooms, and the Kyrgyz herders of the Pamir, descended from the households that refused to follow their khan out of Afghanistan in 1978, the rest of the community now living in Turkey; the track runs unpaved from Ishkashim along the river, squeezing through a narrowing gorge with the water running grey with glacial silt, past villages of flat-roofed houses and the hot springs, to Sarhad-e Broghil, the last village, and from there the trek climbs onto the open Pamir, the Little and the Big, where the yurts and the yak herds stand in the summer pastures above 4,000 metres until the first snow. Stepping over the Wakhjir pass at the corridor's end into China, the time jumps three and a half hours, the sharpest clock change on Earth.
The mountains hold the Marco Polo sheep, which carries the longest horns of any sheep alive and owes its name to the traveller who described it while crossing these mountains in the thirteenth century, along with ibex, wolves and snow leopards, watched by the herders. The corridor is entered from Tajikistan through Ishkashim with permits and a guide, and the security of the country decides whether it opens, so the few who come do so in the short summer. The Wakhan is a valley two empires drew as a gap between them, and the people in it kept their own ways.