"This is so important for Tajik people. If you swear on Koran and it's lie, even if your house is burning, nobody ever believe, ever believe word you say, ever, ever again." 

He points to where the Yeti climbed over the rocks. Further up, we can see a small, almost inaccessible cave. 

"His whistling chills to the bone." 

To my disappointment, there is no Yeti to be seen. The villagers point to a small waterfall where the Yeti has been seen washing. They seem relieved that as the sun falls behind the range we decide it is time to turn back. At the village entrance, three middle-aged men swear by Allah they have seen his footprints. Or thought they might have seen him. 

Mize has deep frown lines, tiny eyes. It is a face shaped by the seasons. I want to see the school. We walk through the village. An overpowering smell of fresh hay stacked on plank-roofed huts. "This is the school. The children are here, one, two hours, then they go to work." The room is tiny, the roof of wood. "They learn how to read here, start when they are seven, finish at 16." He is ashamed. "It's like a chicken-shed. We want it to be better. We do. But we are poor." The state has given them a poster with pictures of the leader for the wall. A torn Cyrillic alphabet is stuck to its left. The room is heated by burning branches in a stove that could belong to 17th-century England.

Living close to nature, without thorough schooling, peasants have always been frightened of the mythical wild man. In the 18th century, the oppressed central European peasantry was gripped by a terror of aristocratic vampires in the run-up to the French Revolution. 

The hysteria raged for a generation. Thousands of sightings were reported. Villages swore by Christ they knew what they had seen. The Austro-Hungarian Empress Maria Theresa was concerned enough to dispatch her personal physician to investigate whether or not vampires existed. They were not real, but poverty, oppression, ignorance and superstition were. 

With political reform across the continent in the 19th century, the swarms of fairies, Woodwose, beasts and ghosts that had inhabited European minds for centuries slowly faded away. But in Romit, I touched a living myth.