For us, the Pamir is a knot of mountains 400 kilometers wide as the crow flies, from which the most powerful ranges in Asia seem to emerge: the Triant-chân, the Kouen-louen, the Karakoroum, the Himalayas, the Hindou-kouch. For this is how, on a map of Asia, these gigantic foothills of the central mole of Asia appear, these gigantic foothills of the central Pamirian mole, which has always posed an impassable barrier to the great migrations of peoples, conquerors, ideas and civilizations. Until the beginning of this century, the Pamir was a barrier, an obstacle resisting the assaults of human communities; it was only with the rapid progress of the geographical sciences and the increasingly widespread infiltration of the European element and spirit around its base that the Pamir was able to become a goal, I mean a scientific goal of disinterested study (...).

When, in 1838, Captain Wood, as the first pioneer of the positive science of facts to be recorded and compared, climbed the difficult slopes of the "Roof of the World", it could be said that he was undertaking the discovery of a terra incognita. On February 19, 1838, the day her gracious Majesty the Queen of England acceded to the throne, he discovered Lake Sar-i-koul, to which he gave the name Lake Victoria. One of the main sources of the Oxus had been discovered.