OUT OF EDEN WALK

Walking through the world, one navigates endless frontiers: real and imagined, old and new, visible and invisible, passable and impassable.

In the remote Pamirs of Tajikistan, we skirt the salt surf of Karakul Lake, cupped in a giant meteorite crater, at 13,000 feet one of the highest bodies of water in the world. We walk the strands of barbed wire that divide China from Tajikistan. (A new boundary: Tajikistan ceded a chunk of its raw mountains to Beijing in recent years.) We pound the Soviet-built highway that once marked the wild Central Asian rim of a vanished empire—a road that today serves an exotic playground for affluent Westerners on touring bicycles.

And in the high cold desert of the Pamirs, we beachcomb the ghostly shores of a cold desert that was once the edge of an ancient sea: the Tethys Ocean.

The sun-warmed waves of the Tethys Ocean sprawled across the world for eons, dividing two primordial continents: Laurasia in the north and Gondwanaland in the south. Then, with unimaginable slowness, over inhuman spans of time, the two land masses crashed together, pushing up mountain ranges in modern Europe (the Alps) and Asia (the Pamirs, the Karakoram, the Himalayas). The Tethys Ocean shrank. Remnants of this once globe-spanning ocean live on as mere puddles: the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the Caspian, the dying Aral.

Echoes of this hundred-million-year-old collision still ring in the Pamirs.

Some of Asia’s highest, craggiest peaks shudder still with earthquakes, with temblors and aftershocks that dislodge massive avalanches, colossal landslides into the valleys.

This is the sighing of a long-dead ocean: the Tethys. The countless springs that bubble up from the rocks, from the river sands and alpine pastures of the Pamirs burble: Remember me.