North of the Himalayas and the plateau of Tibet, thousands of miles from the nearest ocean, rise the remote and mysterious mountains of Central Asia, shimmering like mirages on the distant horizon. The Kunlun, the Tian Shan, the Pamir, the Altai – ranges whose names conjure up visions of faraway places stretch off in long ridges of snow peaks to waver and vanish in clouds of dust swept up from two of the harshest and most forbidding deserts on earth – the Gobi and the Taklamakan. Older than the Himalayas, but nearly as high, these little-known ranges form some of the most formidable barriers in the world, folded and squeezed up in great walls of metamorphic and sedimentary rock, topped here and there by impregnable towers of granite.