The road ends, and the old Soviet car I’m in — a Lada Niva — begins to shake on the unpaved lane. In the darkness, Erdni, the driver, somehow manages to maneuver between large gullies and mounds of sand that seem impossible to discern.

After a couple hours of driving east from the Russian city of Elista, I find myself in the heart of the Kalmyk steppe — at the farming spot, or camp, where Erdni lives with his wife, his children and his father.

It’s the end of 2020, and the world is still gripped by the ongoing pandemic. Everywhere, it seems, people are struggling to maintain social distance. But there are communities in some parts of the world — here, for example, in the Russian republic of Kalmykia, on the northwestern shores of the Caspian Sea, south of the Volga — where distance is an inescapable reality.

Kalmykia is a sparsely populated republic; only about 300,000 people live here, in a territory of some 30,000 square miles. You can drive for hours on end without meeting a single person.

I’ve come here, to the Kalmyk steppe, where the descendants of some of the last nomads of Europe live, in order to witness the customs and day-to-day lives of its people.

After we arrive, I toss my backpack into the corner of the guest yurt where I’m staying. Erdni’s house is several hundred feet away. The nearest camp, several miles. The nearest large settlement, more than a hundred miles.

The nighttime silence is broken only by the sounds of the wind and by a fox scratching at the walls.

Erdni wakes up around 5 a.m. and starts his motorcycle. I go with him to the sheep enclosure to watch as he drives them out to graze.

The sun rises and floods the desolate and lifeless steppe with a pinkish light. I gaze out at the landscape and imagine the many tribes and groups who once occupied these lands. Here, some 1,400 years ago, the Khazars, a seminomadic Turkic people, formed one of the most influential trading empires in the medieval world, profoundly influencing the histories of Europe and Asia. The Kalmyk people came much later — descendants of the nomadic Oirat Mongols who, in the 16th and 17th centuries, traveled west from what is now Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia and China in search of pasture land.