Song-Köl is a lake at 3,016 metres on a treeless plateau in central Kyrgyzstan, and nothing standing on its shore is meant to stay. There is no village here and no permanent building. The only structures are white felt yurts, up when the snow clears and gone again before it returns. The grass here is jailoo, high summer pasture, and herding families bring their sheep, horses and yaks up from the valleys to live at the water's edge. A boz-üy, the Kyrgyz yurt, is built rather than pitched: a red willow lattice unfolds into a circle, the roof-poles lift into a domed crown, and heavy felt goes over the frame. It takes a family a couple of hours, which is what lets a whole camp move with the herds. That crown of poles is the tündük, the emblem at the centre of the Kyrgyz flag.
You can borrow a horse from one of the families and ride out across the pasture at first light. There are no fences and no marked trail, just grass to the horizon with the lake a band of blue at the edge of it. Children out here ride almost before they can walk. Staying more than one night puts you inside the rhythm of the plateau: mares milked in the morning, kymyz — fermented mare's milk — churned through the day, sheep driven back at dusk. Dinner is whatever the camp is eating, set down in front of you: mutton, fresh bread, bowls of kymyz, while the lake turns violet outside the door. Loose herds of horses graze the slopes above the shore and drift down to the water as the light softens. You walk out to meet them and they do not get any bigger. In October the yurts are loaded onto trucks, snow shuts the passes, and the lake freezes more than a metre thick until April. The geese that nest here leave too: bar-headed geese, among the highest fliers on Earth, climb straight over the Himalaya to winter in India, and come back when the grass does.