Any variation meant a lot: small shifts in gradient, the appearance of a ruined fort on the horizon, occasional nomad tombs: domes a few metres high, made of well-preserved mud brick. Then the gradual appearance of low blunt mountains to the east, striped in bands of pink and grey. The snow thinned, and I realised the dirty white landscape beside me was salt. A hunter near the Uzbek border had once told me about centuries-old corpses brought up perfectly preserved.

I made out the horsemen ten minutes before I reached them. Two figures, rugged as the land around them, leading horses visibly starving beneath blankets. They seemed inexplicable, and you had to remind yourself this was the scale of their world.

They came over when I stopped. The horses were gaunt, ribs vivid. I greeted them in Kazakh and explained where I was going, asked if there’d been any trouble. They shook their heads.

‘Where have you come from?’ I asked.

They had come from a village 30 miles to the east, looking for pasture. That was the only trouble they were aware of: starvation. I drove on, wondering what they knew of the country around them. If there was a war, would they realise? There would be signs and portents; people like me passing through their emptiness, loaded with a meaning we carried away with us. The hunter I’d met in the south of the country ten years ago had spoken as if the Soviet Union still existed. He knew that England had once invaded India, that the English were bloodthirsty, but wasn’t convinced the country still existed. Events reached them like the light from dead stars.

I didn’t pass any other vehicles. The road surface was reasonable. I had five hours of daylight left. The nearest town was over 100 miles away. At 3 p.m. I passed a 12-ton China Transport Shipping lorry crashed on its side, a day’s snow on it. The windscreen was cracked but not by a bullet. Jiangxi plates, straps for the canvas sides hanging loose. Beyond it, pylons thickened across the landscape towards a town as if catching it in a web.

I checked the GPS. I was heading in the right direction. Heading into gulag territory. Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn. Kok-Terek, where Solzhenitsyn had been locked up and where he was released into exile, lay 30 miles to the east. There were towns around here where men freed from the gulags had settled, too exhausted to go further. Or unwilling, for reasons that never quite clarified for me, but made me think of Solzhenitsyn’s advice for survival in the camps: let go of the idea that your life ahead will be anything like the one behind. A new range appeared on the horizon, all grey shards. Then I hit a problem.