Khinalug is a village of stone houses stacked so tightly up a Caucasus ridge that the roof of each one is the courtyard of the house above it. It stands above 2,000 metres in northern Azerbaijan, the highest village in the country that has never been abandoned. You get there on one narrow road out of the town of Quba, switchbacking through the passes and into the cloud. Near the top the valleys vanish under a floor of white and the village appears on its ridge, flat-roofed, river stone and dung-brick, looking grown rather than built. About two thousand people live in it. Among themselves they speak Khinalug, a language with no known relatives that survives in this one village; outside it they switch to Azerbaijani. They call themselves Kettid, and fewer children learn the word every year.
The village lives off its animals. In summer the shepherds take sheep, cattle and horses up to the meadows above the houses, and if you walk out with them the bells and the dogs carry a long way over the grass. On the rooftops and in the courtyards women beat, wash and spin raw wool by hand, working it into the thick socks and carpets a household needs once the snow comes. Deep winter buries the Quba road, cuts the village off for weeks at a stretch and holds it near −20°C. There are no hotels, so you eat at a family table: bread still hot from the courtyard tandoor, mountain cheese, thick yoghurt, herbs picked off the slope. Over tea the household slips between Azerbaijani and Khinalug while you listen. Five kilometres above the houses a flame burns on bare ground at 3,000 metres with nothing feeding it, sacred here long before Islam arrived. The one road out is shut for months of the year, and it is not the route the village depends on. That is the Köç Yolu: 200 kilometres between these pastures and the winter grazing on the plains, walked down every autumn and back up every spring behind the flocks.