A Shaggy Yak Story

As a boy Peter Somerville-Large was captivated by travellers' accounts of Central Asia. In 1953 when he was in his early 20s he was appointed lecturer in English to the Royal Military College in Kabul, still then a small town of bazaars and catwalks, whose citizens proudly retained ancient Moslem custom and values. For 18 months he struggled to teach Milton, fairy stories and the elements of rugby to cadets in the eccentric atmosphere of Afghanistan's answer to Sandhurst before setting out on his travels with a friend from Dublin. Their first destination was the roof of the world, the remote Wakhan corridor bordering Badakshan. Turned back by authority only a short distance from the lofty Pamirs, they set out to explore more accessible parts of Asia. They went to Gilgit and to Kathmandu, where they took part in a disastrous tiger shoot, and made an illegal expedition into the jungle of southern Bhutan. Their travels evoke a vanished eastern world unsullied by tourism or the Kalashnikov. Over 35 years later the author returned to north-east Pakistan.
In a river-bed outside Gilgit he met a tribe of Kirghiz from the Wahkan who in 1979 under their venerable leader, Rahman Qul, had made a dramatic escape from the Russian advance into their territory. They were more fortunate than most refugees, since the Turkish government, acknowledging them to be of the same stock as Turks, gave them a new home near Lake Van in eastern Turkey. In Afghanistan they had herded yak, and it seemed fitting that they should have yak in Turkey. As a small compensation for travelling in their country long ago, Somerville-Large thought of providing them with these animals. He concludes his book with an account of his efforts to restore to these refugees a vestige of their nomadic culture by bringing them a pair of yak from Whipsnade Zoo.