Yerkinpa Ki Talash Main
By Muhammad Abduhu
Green Heart Publishers, Faisalabad
144pp.

It is not known when the route first came to be used, but a learned conjecture is that, at least a thousand years ago, the people of Shigar Valley (northeast of Skardu) in Baltistan were travelling up the glaciers leading to what modern maps label as the Muztagh-Karakoram region to cross the 5,300-metre high glaciated Muztagh Pass.

Across the pass, the Sarpo Laggo (actually Sarfa Laggo — New Pass or Top) Glacier empties its meltwater into the Shaksgam River that winds around tortuous rocky mountains to slake the desert region in the Chinese province of Xinjiang. In the upper reaches of the Shaksgam, a narrow wind-swept gully leads to the 4,800-metre-high Aghil Pass, from where the route descends into the Surukhwat Valley, to eventually reach Yarkand after a long and tedious journey. We do not know what the Baltis of old times would have called this route but to British explorers and map-makers, this was the Muztagh Pass route.

Maps printed after a survey as late as the 1950s show the dotted line marking the border between Jammu and Kashmir and the China ‘Sinkiang [Xinjiang] Province’, passing over the Aghil Pass. However, since the 1963 border adjustment with China, in which Pakistan ceded a large slice of land to that country, the border now runs over the head of the Sarpo Laggo Glacier and the route was thus cut even........

© Dawn (Magazines)