Whether there are seven bulls at Jeti-Ögüz depends on where you put your feet. The name belongs to a wall of iron-red rock above the pasture on the south shore of Lake Issyk-Kul, in Kyrgyzstan, and from a distance the bluffs do lie down in a row like animals. At the base, where the red rock lifts clear of the grass, the bulls come apart into what they actually are: conglomerate, the gravel and cobbles of ancient rivers cemented into stone and stained red by iron. As the Tian Shan pushed up, that slab of old riverbed was tilted toward vertical. Meltwater streams then cut down through the softer seams between harder blocks until the bluffs stood free. From a little way up the facing hillside the separate humps slide back into one line, and the name snaps into place. Beside them stands a cleft cliff that an old legend calls the Broken Heart, iron-red rock split clean in two.
The pasture in front of all this is still worked. Horses take you out across the meadows below the ridge, weaving between grazing herds and the shepherds' summer yurts, and on up the gorge toward the high meadows. A clear stream runs down from the red hills, and the path follows it in the shade of poplars and Tian Shan spruce as the valley narrows. It opens at last onto the alpine meadow of Kok-Jayik, the Valley of Flowers, which fills with colour in early summer. The cliffs face west, so the red they are named for belongs to the end of the day. At the mouth of the gorge, a sanatorium opened in 1927 around hot springs unusually rich in radon, and in the Soviet years the cosmonaut corps was sent here to recover between missions. Cabins were built for them up in the Valley of Flowers, behind the bulls.