Mir Samir (2022) by Walton Ford depicts a large ibex who stands alone at the summit of a mountain while a school of fish rushes past its legs, submerged under a rising sea. In realizing this painting, Ford drew inspiration from a passage in Eric Newby’s memoir A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958), an autobiographical account of the English travel writer’s experience as the first mountaineer to ascend Mir Samir in Afghanistan. There, Newby recounted a local Afghan folktale where an ibex climbed to the top of the mountain to retreat from the flood as told in the Book of Genesis. While the flood drowned the earth, the water rose just to the underside of the ibex’s belly.

“But about the name Mir Samir no one had any idea at all. ‘No man has been there,’ was all they could say, ‘even the bozi kuhi, the ibex, has only once trodden there. That was in the time of Tufan-I Nuh, when Noah’s Flood covered the earth. Then the waters rushed up the valley destroying everything, and so up the Darra to kuh-i-Mir Samir itself. And there the last ibex took refuge on the very top. And the water followed up to the very belly of the ibex. Then it rose no more and after a while began to sink; ever since that time the belly of the ibex has been white. This is how it came to be.’”
—Eric Newby, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (London: Secker & Warburg, 1958)