Nearly no one lives in Aksai Chin to tell stories about it, one of the highest deserts in the world, surrounded by peaks that stop the clouds from entering so the sun melts the glaciers at its borders and its lakes catch their waters briefly before releasing them downhill hoping to find someplace where water can be of more use; delimited to the north by one British civil servant and to the south by another, each with an entire nation aligned behind them but nearly no one living there to support or deny the territorial claims on either side, north of Kashmir and south of nearly nowhere.