Once again since the days of Wood a party of Europeans, which included two well-known geographers (Lockhart and Woodthorpe, both of whom have since gone to their rest), reached Ishkashm in 1886, and they were treated there with anything but hospitality. Wood seemed to have fared better. With the authority of Murad Beg to back him, and his own tact and determination to carry him through, he succeeded in overcoming all obstacles, and from point to point he made his way to where the Oxus forks at Kila Panja. From Ishkashm to Kila Panja the valley was fairly wide and open, and here for the first time he met those interesting nomadic folk the Kirghiz.
Wood's observations on the people he met are always acute and interesting, but he seems rather to have been influenced (as he admits that he may have been) by his Badakshani guides in framing his estimate of Kirghiz character. Thieves and liars they may be. These characteristics are common in High Asia, but even in these particulars they compare favourably with Uzbeks and Afghans generally. At any rate he trusted them, and it was with their assistance that he reached the source of the Oxus. Without them in a world of snow-covered hills and depressions, with every halting-place buried deep and not a trace of a track to be seen, he would have fared badly. At Kila Panja he was faced with a difficulty which gave him anxious consideration. Could he have guessed what issues would thereafter hang on a decision to that momentous question--which branch of the Oxus led to its real source--it would have caused him even greater anxiety. Ultimately he followed the northern branch which waters the Great Pamir, and after almost incredible exertion in floundering through snowdrifts and scratching his way along the ice road of the river surface, on February 19, 1838, he overlooked that long narrow expanse of frozen water which is now known as Victoria Lake.
We may discuss the question of the source, or sources, of the Oxus still, and trace them to the great glaciers from which the lakes north and south of the Nicolas range are fed, or to the ice caverns of the Hindu Kush as we please--there are many sources, and it is not in the power of mortal man to measure their relative profundity--but Wood still lives in geographical history as the first explorer of the upper Oxus, and will rank with Speke and Grant as the author of a solution to one of the great riddles of the world's hydrography. With infinite labour he dug a hole through the ice and found the depth of the lake at its centre to be only 9 feet. Were he to plumb it again in these days he would find it even less, for the lake (like all Central Asian lakes) is growing smaller and shallower year by year. The information which he absorbed about the high regions of Asia, the Pamirs (the Bam-i-dunya), was wonderfully correct on the whole, and is strong evidence of his ability in sifting the mass of miscellaneous matter with which the Asiatic usually conceals a geographical truth. He is incorrect only in the matter of altitude, which he fixes too high by more than a thousand feet, and he makes rather a strange mistake in recording that the Kunar (the Chitral River) rises north of the Hindu Kush and breaks through that range. Otherwise it would be difficult to add to or to correct his information by the light of subsequent surveys. With his return journey surrounded by all the enchantment of bursting spring in those regions we need not concern ourselves. After a three months' absence he rejoined Dr. Lord at Kunduz.