In Pakistan, it was hard to know which tragedy to dwell on most.

I lay in bed, picking at blood-crust. Two days ago, as I’d walked back to my hotel room, I’d knocked into something — a scrap of metal, a skull. My foot, in the damp, was slow to heal. I felt neither pain, nor even, at this added delay, frustration. Once I’d registered Farhana’s absence, and registered especially that it was a continuous thing, much like rain and roadblocks, I felt very little at all, except, quite unexpectedly, a sudden peace. We still had time. The longer our stay in the north, the more opportunities would present themselves to me, to us. In the meantime, I was sapped of energy. It was a peculiar feeling, and I’d never felt a fatigue like this before. It was as though I was being swept in a mudslide, swallowed and crushed. But this was okay, it didn’t hurt. Someone was blowing something over me, as I’d blown love and blessings over Farhana in my dream, except, this was neither to love, nor to bless. And it was okay.

Ironically, it was Wes who knocked on my door that day. He came into my room to ask if we should have breakfast together. I agreed. Afterward, we played Scrabble. I noticed he’d stopped shaving. Plenty of clean-shaven men around, so I didn’t think it was to fit in. He arranged his tiles on the board, unable to come up with anything better than road, and I laughed and said we were all thinking the same thing. It was very congenial, and even this was easy, because I didn’t really feel I was there with him, and it was peculiar but not unpleasant.

I said, “The beard literally suits you.”

He laughed. “Makes me look skinny, huh?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

He stood up, stuck his thumbs into the waist of his jeans. “What do you call this?”

“Skinny thumbs.”

He sat back down again. “You’re all right.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

Afterward — the game was so low scoring I didn’t even remember who won — our driver Nur Shah joined us, and we drank salty tea, listening to his many tales of Mirs and forts, listening to the rain and the men who had gone missing.

That night, I felt another absence. It took me longer than it should have to understand that the rain had ceased. I turned to Irfan’s side of the bed to wake him to ask whether this meant we would leave tomorrow. He wasn’t there.

In the morning, Nur Shah drove us as far up the highway as the road would go. Where the mudslide rendered it impassable, we got out of the jeep, and, carrying our bags on our backs, walked tentatively across a stone pathway slippery with black clay. Our escort, whom I hadn’t seen again after the first night in Gilgit till we set out this morning, leaped across like a gazelle.

Once across, we were met by a second jeep. I’d grown attached to Nur Shah and was sad to lose his company. He made us promise to visit Baltit Fort and, once there, imagine the throne from which the Mirs would command the Eskimo Force to walk on glaciers with bare soles. We promised.


Hunza lay nestled in the Karakoram Range as sweetly as a cat in a closet. I knew that the mountains took their Turkic name of Karakoram, meaning black gravel, from the rubble that covered the glaciers everywhere around us, for we were now in the most densely glaciated part of the globe outside the poles. To pick one to study or photograph was like plucking an apricot to roll along your thumb when granted a basket of thousands.

It was the contrast that took my breath away, the layers and layers of contrast. At the furthest end soared the snow-topped seven-thousanders, including the spear of Rakaposhi, dominating this valley as surely as Nanga Parbat dominated my dreams. A little closer loomed a row of brown and barren peaks, smeared in gray glaciers that, from our perspective below, held none of the dazzling white beauty of the glacier Irfan and I once witnessed in marriage, nor even the one all of us had walked across on our way to Lake Saiful Maluk. Along the valley’s waist rose an erect forest of poplar trees, somber witnesses to the misdemeanors of earth, sky, and ice. Across the valley floor sprawled terraced fields, all the way down to the Hunza River.

Without the mountains, the valley might be too pretty. Without the valley, the mountains too stark. A rose has thorns, a cat has claws, an owl the ferocity of her gaze, and Hunza, location. If geography is an accident, then for thousands of years this one had worked out well.

Hunzakut settlements could reach several thousand feet up the valley; we passed many shepherds and their flocks grazing in these high summer pastures as we stretched our legs that first day. They met us openly and warmly. They hadn’t heard of us here. We were welcome!

Smitten with the way Hunzakut women and men greeted each other — by blowing kisses when apart, and, when near, planting kisses on each other’s fingers — Wes kissed the air and Farhana’s fingers repeatedly. Her attention lay elsewhere. Laughing at Wes’s flamboyant overtures, she pulled away, to walk with the women, who were as visible as expressive, and far more so than in the valleys to the south. She also photographed them. And grew friendly with their daughters. I told myself, Leave it behind. Not all girls were about to be annexed, not all women about to be aggrieved.

I tried to hope instead for the freedom we’d have here, Farhana and I, if we allowed ourselves. In my mind, I fed her air kisses. I brushed the tips of her fingers with my tongue.


Though the valley offered up glaciers as easily as fruit, first thing tomorrow, it was still to be Ultar Glacier. The hike was notoriously steep, as we all knew, but, also as we all knew, we were traveling with the incredible hulk, the one with skinny thumbs. And, though I was of course a pale (or dark) shadow by comparison, I’d done a fair bit of daredevilry myself, what with all the places I’d walked in the night without even a flashlight. It was the Hunza River I’d fallen into once, under a moonless sky, on my last visit here. I’d pulled myself out somehow. I could manage Ultar.

The glacier sat near the crest of the incredibly sheer Ultar peak, or Ultar Sar, which rose behind Baltit Fort. Before retiring to our hotel, we decided to see both. In this way, we’d keep our promise to our driver Nur Shah, who’d been “best of friends” with the grandson of a Mir.

We stopped first at the fort. At a windowless bay window, crisscrossed with spider webs, I recalled another — one that was five-sided — in a world of purple houses and art-glass windowpanes. But Nur Shah had wanted us to imagine the Mir on his throne in this room of the fort, and so I did, happy to inhabit a memory that wasn’t mine. The floor was now thick with debris, and chalk marks in the design of a hopscotch grid. I stepped into the grid, while, through the spider webs across the window frame, I searched the valley for Ultar Sar. The peak lay to my back; for some reason, I hesitated to leave these ruins to look at the mountain directly.

So we lingered at the spider webs and the hopscotch grid, while our new driver, Danyal, deciding he was not to be outstoried, told us that the first people to settle here had walked south from the foot of K2. Like the Eskimo Force that succeeded them, they’d crossed the ice on bare feet. All but two had died in a landslide that, he assured us, originated from Ultar. The survivors were a girl and her grandmother. Those now living here, and in the twin valley of Nagar across the river, were descendants of the girl. She’d been beautiful and had worn on the soles of her feet a skin that could walk across any glacier (and, clearly, any avalanche), gifting her people with both.

The legend wasn’t tough to believe. Everywhere around us, Hunzakuts trudged up mountain slopes carrying hefty loads of fodder on their backs, many without shoes, with stunning features, and most of all, with poverty and age. I saw countless men and especially women, including the very elderly, engaged in all manner of physical work. While the men had been able to move into commerce, owning shops in big cities, or becoming drivers, the women stayed back to manage the small farms and orchards. And children.

Now I could see Farhana walking away from the fort and down a trail, toward a woman carrying a basket of apricots on her head. A girl skipped beside her. Before I saw it, I knew it. She had a black goat.

“What is she doing now?” asked Irfan, standing beside me at the window.

I shook my head.

“It’s been a long day.”

“One of many.”

“I’ll ask Wes to get her.”

“I hear you,” Wes said, behind us.

Nobody moved.

Farhana, the woman, the girl, and the goat were turning into a side lane, presumably to one of the many thatched-roof shacks we’d passed on our way to the fort.

“Not now, Farrah,” Wes mumbled, not without irritation. Despite all the finger-kissing, maybe he was still sleeping on the floor.

Farhana disappeared from our crumbling lookout.

Danyal parted a spider web. “The hike is not so good in the rain. Tomorrow, it may rain.”

We gazed at the sky. Perhaps five minutes passed. Perhaps twenty. Irfan scratched his head. “Have you seen our escort?”

I hadn’t. And I didn’t care. I began walking toward Farhana. Of course the rain didn’t wait till tomorrow. It began as soon as I left the fort, marching with me on the trail.


She was coming out of a shack, with the girl.

“The woman knows a bitan who tells the future.”

“What’s a bitan?”

She was pleased to inform me a bitan was a “religious authority” who inhaled the smoke of burning juniper branches. “She also dances, to her own music.”