An Expedition to ‘Alexanders Lake’
“An intrepid journey through the foreboding mountains of Central Asia in search of a mysterious lake once visited by Alexander of Macedon…”
It was a grueling, unforgiving trek; ten hours of driving through the deadly Anzob Pass, infamous for being one of The World’s Most Dangerous Roads. The mangled remains of many cars, buses and trucks by the roadside, bore testatement to the ultimate price paid by those who gave themselves to a moments lapse of concerntration and ended up a tangled mess hundreds of feet below.
I was in the Fann Mountains of Northern Tajikistan in Central Asia. The object of my desire: Iskander Kul or Alexanders Lake. A turquoise gem nestled within the Gissar Range. The journey took you some 14,000 feet above sea-level before dropping you almost vertically to 6,000. The Chinese recently built a tunnel that is supposed to shorten the journey by several hours. But I opted against using it mainly after hearing that the tunnel is better known by its rather morbid sobriquet, ‘The Tunnel of Death,’ for its flooding, falling rocks and even Carbon Monoxide Poisoning!
And so the drive took me through the ‘old’ route that connects Dushanbe to the historic Samarkand, in Uzbekhistan. In 1906, a famous German mountaineer and adventurer described seeing the lake for the first time,
“As it bursts on one’s view the first impression is that of a Scottish loch in the wilder parts of the Highlands, but on a grander scale … The sky was flecked with fleecy clouds, the lake an exquisite shade of eau de nil, the silver grey of willow and tamarisk contrasted with the darker green of the mulberry, the westering sun brought out in all their fullness, the different tints — purple, red, green and grey of the mountains”.
This scene had not changed. I finally stood before the stark, azure stillness of Iskander Kul.
The outflow of Iskander Kul, is the Iskander Darya, which joins the Yaghnob River to form the Fan Darya, a major left tributary of the Zeravshan River.
Historians say that Alexander the Great once camped by this lake whilst pursuing Bessus, the Persian Pretender-King. The roughly two dozen resident locals share riveting folk-tales about the Greek conquerors visit, passed down, they say, from more than 2,000 years ago. They describe the manner in which he and his army marched in single-file into the valley. They even point to a cave nearby, navigable by boat, which they say is the exact spot on which Alexander camped.
The story goes that the Macedonian Kings war-horse, Bucephelus, who was left behind to recover from an illness, plunged into the lake and ended its life, at the very moment Alexander himself died, thousands of miles away. Separating fact from fiction would be impossible. Not to mention, utterly unromantic. And as I stepped up to Iskander Kul and touched her that chilly night, I felt a ferocity of history.
It was a pilgrimage to an inhospitable edge of the world that meant something, to me.
It has been an enduring fascination; The stories of his battles; the unsolved mysteries that persist to this day; his unmatched trek across much of the known world; his own sense of destiny- all combined to build an almost obsessive interest in his extraordinary story. Alexander is anything from a diety to a blood-thirsty tyrant. Whatever the opinion may be, the fact remains; few mortals have impacted history as did this Macedonian. In his own personal quest for glory, revenge, immortality or whatever it was that inspired the man, he destroyed civilizations and founded others. He tore communities apart, and yet, bridged the world’s great peoples. His character was as chaotic and bipolar as his deeds were. He was capable of untold ruthlessness and incredible clemency. He razed towns and then, spent time designing the most beautiful cities known to man. His warcraft was a sublime combination of brute force & unmatched brilliance. Terrain and opposition were treated with equal disdain. Nothing, could stop Alexander. In the words of J.C Fuller, (he) was a man who acted with “…imagination operating through reason, and reason operating through audacity…”
Standing by ‘Alexanders Lake’ that still night, I couldn’t help but give myself to some reflection. My family, life, the insignificant battles and the significant ones. The wins & the losses. The scarrs that remain. I thought about my late father. I thought about my son. I thought about the insanity that must have possessed a man in his 20’s to believe he could conquer the world and then, traverse over 20,000 miles to achieve it. And eventually, an inescapable mortality.
The full-moon bathed her face that night. She was so calm, it was a near perfect reflection. And then as if to personify the very spirit of her namesake, a sudden ripple out of nowhere would disrupt & dissolve everything.
There are moments in life that never leave you. And I urge you, to pursue them.
I left Iskander Kul the next day, and made the journey back across passes and glaciers, to Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan just in time to catch a flight back home.
“The dreams of men…. The seeds of empires!” — Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad.
To learn more about Alexander The Greats journey, I would highly recommend watching Michael Woods ‘In the footsteps of Alexander the Great’.
