“Ismailis have a modernist outlook,” said John Mock, a scholar of South Asia at the University of California at Santa Cruz. “The Aga Khan promotes modernism.”

Wakhi villages dot Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and China. The Wakhan Corridor should logically be part of Tajikistan or Pakistan, but an 1895 agreement between Britain and Russia made it an Afghan-controlled buffer zone to prevent their two empires from touching.

The corridor has remained a no man’s land. It is so remote that the people still live on a barter economy. During the summer, they trade sheep, goats and yaks, usually their only valuables, to merchants who arrive on horseback bearing clothing and other luxury items. Some are resentful of the outsiders, who resell the livestock at a substantial profit.

Wakhi herders tend flocks of sheep, and women in traditional red dresses work the wheat and barley fields. They don burqas only when going to Ishkashim, a village at the western mouth of the corridor where half the residents are Sunni Tajiks. Some Wakhi traders cross freely between Afghanistan and Pakistan over high passes.

In the eastern half, toward China, the corridor becomes a lunar bowl not unlike the Tibetan plateau. This is the Little Pamir, home to about 100 nomadic Kyrgyz families who live in felt yurts above 13,000 feet. Closer to Tajikistan, 140 Kyrgyz families live on a plateau called the Big Pamir. Blizzards are known to blow through in August.

At Bozai Gumbaz, in the heart of the Little Pamir, centuries-old beehive-shaped tombs built by the Kyrgyz sit next to rusted concertina wire left over from a Soviet military base. Beside the graves flow the waters of the Panj, better known elsewhere as the Amu Darya, born from a glacier near the Chinese border.