Traveller hopes to end 200-year argument in hunt for river source that has kept explorers in the dark
A BRITISH writer and traveller is heading to a remote Afghan plateau to settle an almost 200-year-old debate over the source of a river once synonymous with imperial ambition and Great Game intrigue.
The Amu Darya, then called the Oxus, was chosen as the dividing line between British and Russian influence in Asia, and captivated 19th-century explorers and statesmen.
A series of expeditions claimed to have found the river’s source and several candidates were put forward, including one by George Curzon, later Lord Curzon and Viceroy of India.
The river rises somewhere in Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor and, until it was diverted for Soviet agriculture, ended in the Aral Sea.
Writer Matthew Leeming and Colin
Boyle, a photographer, hope to journey up the corridor and find the source in a 14,000ft mountainous plateau called the Little Pamir.
“There are not many white spaces on the map, there are not many unknown geographical facts left in the world,” Mr Leeming said. “The only reason that this hasn’t been sorted is that it is so difficult to get there.”
His expedition, backed by Sir Ranulph Fiennes and the Marquess of Salisbury, is due to depart this summer.
At least four sites have been put forward for the source of the river, with the most widely accepted being Lord Curzon’s claim from a 1893 expedition it gushed from an ice cave in a glacier.
“It was partly because he was a very powerful personality,” Mr Leeming said. “He managed to persuade everyone that he was right.”
But in 2007, Bill Colegrave, a British explorer, said Curzon may have followed the wrong branch of the river to find the ice cave, mistakenly tracing a tributary rather than the main stream.
Mr Leeming’s expedition will take instruments to measure the flow of the
rivers, tracing back what Mr Colegrave thought was a larger tributary called the Chelab, which rises on the border with Tajikistan.
John Wood, a Scottish naval officer and cartographer, was the first modern traveller to claim to have found the river’s source. In 1838, he determined it rose in Zorkul lake.
Interest was heightened first with the river’s mention in Matthew Arnold’s 1853 epic telling of the tragedy of Sohrab and Rustum, and then as it became a landmark in British rivalry with Tsarist Russia, which it feared would menace India through central Asia.
“It’s just somehow fascinated travellers and geographers for ages to find the source of a river,” Mr Colegrave told the Sunday Telegraph.
Mr Leeming first visited the corridor in 2002, soon after the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
He said the Wakhan had long intrigued travellers.
He said: “I met Wilfrid Thesiger once and I said ‘What’s the area of the world you most regret not having been to?’ and he said the Wakhan. He would have been fascinated by this.”