I traveled to the Pamir mountains of eastern Tajikistan in the wintertime, going up and down the rugged road by car through the high mountains along the Panj river that for hundreds of kilometers forms the border with Afghanistan, which was literally a stone’s throw away for huge stretches of the route. Over on the Afghan side, I kept seeing glimpses of an endless, slender trail.

On that trail, ‘Afghans’ have been journeying on foot and by donkey from village to village, from generation to generation, from century to century. Maybe even Alexander the Great or Marco Polo, who traveled in the region centuries ago, also took the same path. The two sides of the valley, way up in these isolated mountains, was artificially divided by the narrow river which was repurposed as a border as a result of the Great Game between the Russian and British Empires in the late 19th century. And today, they are still divided – between Afghanistan and Tajikistan. On the Afghan side, it looked as if time had frozen.

Driving along the natural border, the scenery of that thin trail seemingly lasts forever. Taking in this view transports me – as if by time machine – to a scene from a distant past. My reverie lasts the whole length of the long old trail until my consciousness fades into the snowy valleys of High Asia.