Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
and okayed it. This explained why everything looked well built,
well maintained, and reassuringly solid after the crumbling
architectural bedlam of Pakistan.
Swat's beauty deepened as we drove into its heart, past albescent
snow-capped peaks, plunging rivers flashing and foaming over
rocks, broad, verdant valleys, dense, lush forests, and tall legions of
evergreen firs patrolling the lower slopes. The temperature was
cooling, already a pleasant 79 degrees Fahrenheit, which, after
Peshawar's low hundreds, seemed cooler still, especially in this clear,
clean mountain air. All year round, apparently, the moderate climate
ranges between 45 and 85 degrees, dipping slightly lower at night
from November to February, the winter months.
'So,' asked Ray as we passed another landscape of beguiling
elegance and opulent beauty, 'how d'you like my little kingdom?'
'Nice.'
'Hadji and me are thinking of deposing the wali,' he then
announced. 'Yeah. Make Hadji the wali and me his minister of
pleasure.'
Hadji roared with laughter. 'Yes! Good, Ray Sahib!
Wali Hadji
, I
like this too much. But we must fight war, take Shameem Valley -
women there
too
good,' he explained for my benefit. 'Too much
beautiful, the Shameem womans.'
Just north of Swat, beyond the Lawari Pass, which connects the
states of Dir and Chitral, is Kafiristan. The only people in this area
to resist Islam, the Kafirs are light-skinned, fair-haired people who
still practise an ancient form of 'paganism' abandoned elsewhere.
Only a few thousand of them survive now, but the extraordinary
beauty and passion of their women is legendary to the Pathans, who
locate the fabled 'Valley of Shameem' somewhere just east of the
Afghanistan border, north of the town of Drosh. To Hadji and his
men the place existed as a pleasure dome, a place to imagine forever
rather than ever actually see.
This plan to depose the wali, however, seemed to be something
more than a joke. I hoped the two of them weren't planning to
attempt a coup while I was there. It seemed the classic gangster's
dream: a land of your own, where you made the laws, where no one
could interfere with your whims.
