Song-Köl, Kyrgyzstan

We rode in from the south at noon. Bahrom, my driver, is from Samarkand, and Samarkand drivers do not love the high passes of Kyrgyzstan. He says nothing the whole way up. When the Song-Köl lake comes into view, he says, in Uzbek, Subhanallah. Then he says it again.

The lake is three thousand and sixteen metres above the sea. It is the colour of slate when the wind moves across it, and the colour of mercury when it does not. There are no trees here. There are yurts. There are horses. There is a young man whose name is Adilet, which means justice in Kyrgyz, who is twenty-three years old and has been riding since he was four.

His mother brings us kymyz, the fermented mare's milk that the books call sour and that I have never managed to call anything other than sour. I drink it because I love her, even though I met her one hour ago. She presses the bowl back into my hand a second time. I drink. She nods.

Adilet has a hunting eagle, a bürküt. The bird is hooded. She is twelve years old. She has caught seventeen foxes in her life, two of them this winter. Adilet's grandfather caught more. Adilet's grandfather was a man called Saparbek, who learned eagle hunting from a Kazakh master in the 1950s, when borders were not yet drawn through the jailoo the way they are now. Saparbek died in 2009. His eagle is buried near the yurt.

I ask Adilet why he does this. He is the only one of his three brothers who has not gone to work in construction in Bishkek or Moscow. He looks at me as if I have asked why he breathes.

The sun is going down behind the western ridge. The horses are coming back from the pasture. The light on the lake is the colour I have seen only here, only at this hour, only in this month. The bird shifts on his arm. The mother brings out another bowl.

I think about my own daughters at home in Samarkand, and what they will inherit from me, and what they will choose not to. I think about the word jailoo, which means summer pasture, and which is also the word my Kyrgyz friends use when they mean the good life. I think about Saparbek and his eagle in the ground, and I think: every traveller who comes here and is honest about what he sees leaves part of his heart on this lake.

I am not in the business of saying things that cannot be proved. So I will only say what I know. The light went. The fire was lit. The mother sang a song her grandmother taught her. I do not speak Kyrgyz. I understood every word.