Northern Pakistan; Character, Beauty, & Tears

Bret Wallach

The Geographer's Journal, Vol. 42, Issue 3

Publishing Date: Tuesday, July 26 2005

It is some testimony to the relations between the countries formerly constituting the British Indian Empire that, just as the only air connection between Bangladesh and India is a route between Dhaka and Calcutta, so, too, the only connection between Bangladesh and Pakistan - formerly East and West Pakistan - is a route between Dhaka and Karachi.

Thus it was that Biman Bangladeshi Airlines changed its schedule and got me to Karachi one hour after the departure of that day's last flight to Lahore. Things snowballed. I arrived in Lahore a day late, found that my hotel reservation had been cancelled, and was forced into a place where I kept the bathroom light on all night. Too early the next morning, I went car hunting.

The Avis agency in Pakistan rents selfdrive cars, but that's only theory: in practice the manager was most reluctant to do so, particularly when I explained that I intended to go to Peshawar and then, backtracking a bit. go north to Swat, over Shangla Pass to the Karakoram Highway, and up to Hunza. Finally he said I could take my chances, but it turned out that the only car he would let me take those chances in had considerably more than 60,000 miles on its odometer. While I was pondering things a call came from Faisalabad, a mere 60 miles away. A car in the fleet had broken down; the driver was asking for help and was told to take a bus. Perhaps it was simply a failure of nerve, but I set out a couple of hours later with a driver named Rashid and a very nice black Honda Accord - moonroof, power windows, even seatbelts.

We crossed the Ravi River, which bounds Lahore on the west, stopped briefly at Jahangir's tomb of perpetual tranquility, and headed west across the great Rechna Doab, the plain bounded by the Ravi on the east and the Chenab on the west. It was harvest time for wheat, though many fields were actually stocked with a blend of wheat and oats and - I believe - rye: certainly when I stopped at one field where two boys were cutting grain I indicated my surprise at seeing two grairis growing side by side and they corrected me - handing me samples of three. Fattailed sheep grazed nearby, their tails (and ears) nearly touching the ground; a crop like clover (berseem, I suppose) was also being cut. We crossed the Upper Chenab Canal, which just before World War I was responsible for the reclamation of this part of the Rechna Doab; the canal was as modest as a python in a cage.

Beyond the Chenab there is another doab: the Chaj, which extends as far as the Jhelum River but through countryside no longer fecund. The land began rising in soft hills that had been cut to ribbons by erosion, so that fields of wheat were bounded not by straight lines but by ragged badland scarps, which grew progressively more severe. It was spectacular country for soil conservationists, a classic demonstration of how to lose arable land - so rugged that people seeing photographs of these fields surrounded by towering cliffs have sometimes thought they were looking at limestone. Long before Islamabad and its twin city, the older Rawalpindi, the Punjab had given up any pretense of being anybody's granary.

I can say nothing more complimentary about Islamabad than I can about the other planned cities of this planet - and I used my day there mostly to drive with Rashid up to Murree, the old hill station to which one modern potentate made his way that day by helicopter. The trees were wonderful - conifers rather than Eucalyptus - and there were bungalows on a grander scale than anything I had seen in any other hill station, except for the former Viceroy's Lodge in Simla. But then the Punjab and the country to its west were always the grandest parts of the British Indian Empire the parts which most excited the British, chiefly because the people in them so enjoyed a good fight.

The morning after Murree, we headed west to Peshawar. We stopped at the famous ruins of Taxilla, where a Greek town stood in Alexander's time. where the foundations of India's only Greek temple may still be discerned, and where the archaeologically devoted British built a splendid museum, with doors and hinges as fine, to my taste, as the materials on display. We stopped at the barren rocky crossing of the Indus, an unfriendly river, clear and cold from its release upstream at the huge Tarbela Dam. And third - though first in fact - we stopped at the once famous obelisk erected, as its plaque says, "by friends, British and Native, to the memory of Brigadier-General John Nicholson, C.B., who, after taking a hero's part in four great wars, fell mortally wounded, in leading to victory the main Column of assault at the great siege of Delhi. and died 22nd September 1857, age 34." Nicholson once ranked in the imperial pantheon only slightly below David Livingstone and Charles George Gordon. but the joints in the massive stones of the obelisk were beginning to open, and high-tension power lines crossed so close to it that the obelisk looked like a pylon awaiting its crossbars. Less assaulted was the old stone highway built in the 16th century to connect Kabul and Calcutta: short stretches were perfectly intact, with no more than decorative grass growing between the stones. Beyond, the countryside rose into still more rugged badlands, with houses cut into the hillsides like caves.

A sign in the Peshawar hotel provided a succinct introduction to the North West Frontier Province: "HOTEL POLICY. Arms cannot be brought inside the hotel premises. Personal Guards or Gunmen are required to deposit their weapons with the Hotel Security. We seek your cooperation." Down in the money-changers' bazaar the next morning, I encountered my first police charge: a crowd suddenly surging toward me to avoid a dozen or two policemen swinging their long bamboo batons. Deft as James Bond, I stepped into a stall, waited for the police to pass, and continued on to the cluster of merchants who sold nothing but the old clothing and jewelry of Afghani refugees. I told myself that it would hardly do those refugees any good if visitors like myself were too principled to buy the goods that the refugees had been forced to sell. I bought so much that I had to buy a suitcase and violate my own carry-on-only rule.

Rashid helped me get a pass the next day, we picked up the required armed guard, and all three of us headed out to the Khyber Pass, whose approach is blocked by a gate staffed by police next to a sign stating: "foreigners not allowed beyond this point unless specialty permitted by the Political Agent Khyber Agency." I was not particularly impressed by the scenery or the military fortifications, mostly because I knew how many hundreds thousands - of tourists had preceded me, but I was sobered by the 12-foot walls and gates surrounding every house along the road. and I did have my own little adventure near the summit, in the town of Landi Kota]. It was only there that my guard would let me out of his sight, almost only there that he would let me out of the car. And I found that Landi Kotal was not quite as bland as it first seemed when, unknown to me, we had driven over the partially subterranean bazaar. I asked if we could stop and if I could get out, and the guard, not anticipating my disappearance, indicated that I could. I wandered into another money-changers' market, this time a lane so crowded with men that taking a picture was almost impossible. One shopowner invited me to sit and take tea - the excellent and unmilky green tea served everywhere in the North West, and the instant I sat down on his bench I was surrounded by a semicircle of between a dozen and twenty men, all of whom were intensely curious and none of whom knew anything about American conceptions of personal space. I blamed the heat and the crowding for the abominable fact that beads of perspiration covered my forehead.

The shopowner himself was keen for a photograph in which he flipped his thumb through a brick of bills; weeks later I sent him one. But two men in the semicircle had blue eyes, with which they stared at me without expression minute after minute. I felt no hostility, but I did feel that if things turned hostile I'd be as helpless as a baby. It was a feeling that eased only when one man, who had been sitting with his splendidly intense face eight inches from mine and who had been enthusiastically repeating what I thought was the word "dollars," added the word "Texas."

One man appeared who spoke some English. By the time he invited me to his village, we had spoken long enough that I was confident he was making a bonafide offer, not setting me up for one of the spider-and-the-fly kidnappings for which the region is famous. We started walking. That was when my guard showed up, with not the least trace of a smile. I felt his unfriendly grip on my elbow, and I heard the futile protests of the man who had been escorting me. Kids crowded round, one making a most friendly gesture of shooting me with a toy pistol. Rashid was relieved when he got me back to Peshawar, and I began to understand why the British always had such a special feeling for the Frontier.

Early the next morning he and I headed northeasterly to Mardan, where we went around in circles until we found the marble-canopied monument commemorating those British soldiers from the Queens Own Corps of Guides who died in Kabul in 1879. The plaque said that they had "conferred undying honor not only to the regiment to which they belong but on the whole British army." It wasn't the army that tamed the country around Mardan, but the Benton Canal, completed in 1902 and bringing a part of the Swat River under the Malakand Pass and out around Mardan, whose outskirts were green with orchards and yellow with wheat stretching from tree to tree.

The Malakand Pass itself still presents a respectable climb over very rugged hills, but finding the Benton Tunnel proved more difficult; after we had climbed a thousand feet or so I told Rashid to turn around and go back to a dirt road that I could see running alongside the canal in the valley below. He did so. and we came to a canal dropping so quickly that it had been designed with hundreds of drop structures, spaced perhaps a hundred yards apart over a distance of several miles. Eventually we came to some bifurcation works: the canal we had been following was one of two.

I told Rashid to wait while I walked up the road paralleling the parent canal. A couple of hundred yards later I came to a gate with strictures against entry, let alone photography. I tried strolling past the two armed guards talking in a small guardhouse, but I didn't make it, and when I persisted in trying to go in they got on the phone. A minute later one escorted me inside, where I was handed to the very friendly engineer in charge, who impressed me by calling his superior some miles away, asking for permission to show me around, then doing so despite the fact that his request was immediately denied. It was another whiff of that Frontier air.

The powerhouse had been built in the 1920s and had then supplied power to government offices in Peshawar and Rawalpindi. Nowadays, with Tarbela and other stations, the national grid has grown so large that this plant has become almost insignificant. Still, nobody has ever overestimated Pakistan's security consciousness. While Bashir the engineer and I talked, I noticed a skipcar which ran up the hill behind us at a ferociously steep angle alongside the four or five black penstocks. pipes perhaps four deep in diameter and bringing water downhill to the turbines. Bashir was surprised at my interest but signalled to the man above. who began [etting the car down its tracks. A greasy cable played out on rollers for a hundred yards, then bowed up in a catenary curve that wowed up and down, making the car, which was literally creeping downhill, accelerate and decelerate. Worse, at the bottom the car almost didn't stop, and Bashir waved with some energy at the man above, who seemed about to let the heavy car, which must have weighed a couple of tons, crush the powerhouse doors, which were closed. But the car did grudgingly stop, we climbed in, and it started back up, this time with me pretending to be calm while I reckoned how fast we would come back down if the cable broke.

The British must have liked this place, because they had elaborately landscaped the grounds alongside the canal at the top; we walked downstream past the penstocks to a dry siphon and what would have been a tremendous waterfall if the penstocks for some reason were closed; upstream we crossed over the trashracks protecting the penstock mouths, then we walked in the gardens and past a small escape, through which some surplus water even now went crashing downhill in a display of the even greater power that had to be contained within the quiet penstocks. Finally we came to the mouth of a tunnel - not the Benton Tunnel proper, Bashir said, but a power tunnel which began near the mouth of the Benton Tunnel, which I would only be able to see if I was willing to spend some hours of steep climbing.

Bashir had worked out all the apparently-forgotten hydraulic particulars of the plant, and he had put them in a long memorandum to his superiors. He himself was impressed at how well the plant was still working - at how sound the machinery was after so many years service. But there wasn't much for him to do. He had a brother finishing a doctorate in Illinois; he himself was now thinking of advanced studies in Russia. I said that the conditions might not be favorable there just now, but he disagreed: Other people were doing it and making a fortune by taking mountains of luggage filled with goods for sale.

Just then a group of three men and two boys came up: they had walked down from the highway above, the guard at the picket there presumably having been told by Bashir sometime earlier to allow them through. They were friends of his: one man an English teacher; the second a banker; the third I do not recall. But they had planned this Friday, had come with food and had arranged for a cook, who was waiting below. I was stupid enough to ask one of them if their wives were coming. He shook his head quietly, as though not to reveal my stupidity to the others.

They asked where I was going, and I said I planned to go past Saidu Sharif, the capital of Swat, and stay another 20 or 30 miles up the road, at a place called Miandam. It was good choice, the English teacher said, "a charming place." I said that this place, too, was charming, but Bashir said that the gardens were no longer maintained as they had once been, and the teacher said I wouldn't want to stay here all the time.

We rode down the skipcar together, with me all the while calculating how I might jump. At the bottom it was no longer possible for me to ask Bashir for a tour inside the plant. I thanked him, and he, for all his genuine hospitality, made sure that a guard accompanied me all the way back to Rashid and the car. My camera had stayed in my pocket for well over an hour, and it only came out when Rashid and I came near the top of the pass, where I managed a distant shot of the power canal foaming its way to the gardens at the top of the penstocks.

From the Malakand summit there was a view down over rocky slopes to the broad and green swath of cultivated land in the valley of the Swat River. We went to the low dam where water is diverted for the Benton Tunnel, and I looked upstream at a silty stream, swift but smooth, a hundred yards wide but never very deep. Or so it seemed: a couple of days later we drove upstream some 60 miles, until winter snows just short of Kalam blocked our route, and on that day we passed a great many furious tributaries of the Swat. There were so many of them that I am either a poor judge of water volumes or a lot of water that flows into the Swat moves downstream out of sight and under the broad bouldery bed.

We went through Saidu Sharif in a hurry and missed the charms of this former capital of a former state. But 30 miles past Saidu Sharif we turned up a branch valley and ran steeply uphill for about five miles to Miandam, which later in the summer becomes a refuge for people seeking relief from the heat downhill.

In itself, Miandam too was a disappointment, hardly more than a hairpin turn lined with perfectly ordinary shacks and a few larger buildings of a more expensive but even less picturesque character. Still, secrets unfold, and though the heat of Peshawar had turned into rain whose clouds cut off the tops of the mountains, my hotel-window view was tremendous: an alpine valley rimmed with terraces walled with stone where they were steepest, cultivated in ripening wheat or newly planted potatoes, and rising up to forested slopes that were gashed with snowy ravines. Throughout the cultivated zone there were scattered houses, interconnected with the simplest of cobbled paths. There were power lines, but they too were primitive, and as night fell scarcely more than one or two lights were visible. Even those vanished when the power went out for several hours.

I had time for a short walk that evening, during which I was gradually accompanied by more and more children. Unlike most groups of children, however, this group was brutally dominated by one boy who, wanting me to photograph him, shouted at the others to move and, that failing, didn't hesitate to get physical. I didn't like it, didn't like him. But the house he lived in. like the houses of all the other children, was the simplest of affairs: a windowless block of coursed stone that would have been handsome if exposed but which in fact was chinked over with mud, presumably to cut the wind. The roof was dead-flat and of rolled earth - the roller at hand for occasional tamping. I looked closely at the heavy roofbeams: they supported smaller crossbeams, which supported a mat of branches, which supported a crosslaid mat of reeds and twigs on which lay the cap of earth. And it didn't take long to notice that whenever you came close to these houses there was a good chance you'd hear children crying from within.

Farms here were no longer self-supporting: the population had grown too much; the average landholding had shrunk. There had to be some other source of income either from people moving to towns or cutting wood higher up in the countryside. Indeed, the logging I would see here and farther north in Pakistan absolutely amazed me, for though bad weather almost consistently blocked my seeing the forests, over and over again I would see piles of squared baulks, two or three or four times the bulk of a railway tie. Sometimes I would see the ravines down which the timbers had been skidded on temporary timber roads, which came up as soon as the last log had been brought down; I even passed cable setups where logs that had been skidded down one ravine were trundled across a river to the road opposite, where the logs were loaded on flatbed trucks by men - two men to a log weighing hundreds of pounds.

Those people who still farmed often had the advantage of irrigation, for about half the fields around Miandam were able to get ditchwater. But the fields were far too small for anything more than a bullock: everything from potato planting to wheat harvesting was by hand, and if that was no different from much of the Punjab, the harvested crops there at least could be moved by cart. Here everything went by back, up and down paths and across the simple suspension bridges which exist here by the hundred - sometimes new but often old, with planks missing or rotten over waters that would be fatal.

In the towns along the Swat River Valley I saw bakers selling hot-fresh wheat flatbreads for a nickel a round. I saw neighboring stalls where patties of ground meat were fried in huge woks tilted so that the oil accumulated on one side, where the patties could be pushed for cooking, then withdrawn. But except in Swat's higher elevations, where the summer is cooler than in Miandam and where farming is therefore reduced to a single crop of summer wheat, the surprising diet in rural Swat is chiefly cornbread, made household by household from corn grown during the summer on the same fields that I now saw in wheat.

Someone on my first evening in Miandam mentioned that there were grain mills for that corn nearby, within walking distance. It's hard now to believe that I had not noticed any of them on the way up to Miandam, but I only noticed one of these mills the next morning, when I walked downhill from Miandam to the creek that had trenched a course several hundred feet below.

At perhaps a dozen places along this stream, which ran down to the Swat River of course, people had built small dams from which a headrace canal took off for a distance of a hundred feet: you could step across the ditch - it was that small. Then, when the water was about 10 feet above the parent stream, it funneled into a log that had been hollowed out with an adze and set at a 45-degree angle leading into a hut hardly different, except for size, from a typical house. If you came around the other side of the building, however, there was a door, and below the door there was a channel through which, if the mill was operating, water gushed back into the river. If the mill was not operating, the tail-race would be still, and all the water in the headrace would be pouring out through an escape a few yards upstream from the mill.

These mills had a timeless, even atavistic beauty, and they reminded me of Bashir and his archaic powerplant, but the most startling thing about them was that their millstones were literally almost too hot to touch.

I had stepped inside that first mill. Two men were wrapped in coarse grey and brown blankets. They sat on the floor, next to sacks of corn meal. In front of them, just above the spot where the hidden gearing must have been, there was a horizontally set stone wheel about two feet in diameter and ten inches thick. It was pierced by an axial hole about three inches across.

I couldn't quite figure out how the corn was actually ground - and neither of the men spoke English - but later in operating mills I saw how a boy sat on a shelf over the stone and how bit by bit the corn that he kept heaped up disappeared through a wooden funnel and trickled down into the axial hole; a minute later the corn reemerged as flour from between the base of the grindstone and the stone table on which it rested. A mist of cornmeal came flying out from the base of the stone and onto the floor.

And yet - and I am still amazed - the stone grinding that corn generated so much frictional heat that the entire mass of the stone was hot - and naturally stayed hot for some time after the mill stopped working. The men at that first mill laughed when I pulled my hand away in surprise.

It was last year's corn now being ground, of course, It made sense to do it this way, bag by bag, for corn keeps better as grain than as meal. But that's why there were so many mills, for every householder had to carry a sack of grain one way and a sack of flour another way every couple of weeks.

At some of the larger towns in the Swat Valley - I am thinking of Kalagram, upstream ten miles from the Miandam turnoff - there would be a dozen mills clustered around two or three parallel headraces: the water in each was divided into four streams fed into four separate hotlowed-out logs which drove four wheels housed in a single building. Even more spectacular were the mills lined up along the Shangla River, which Rashid and I saw a few days later, when we climbed out of the Swat system over a pouring-wet divide and came down into the Indus drainage at Besham. The Indus itself was grim as ever - its water too deeply trenched to be put to any use along this part of its course but the tributary Shangla Valley was extensively terraced, and the river itself drove dozens of mills, most of them hurling, every second, a barrel of water out of their headrace escapes.

A few days before our coming through, a landslide had wiped out one set of those terraces and had briefly ponded the Shangla River. A new course had been established at the toe of the slide, established at the cost of creating an island between the slack water of the river's old course and the raging water of its new one. On that island there was a field of wheat that would never be harvested, and on the slope above you could see where one family's terraces came to a terrifyingly abrupt end.

Besham is eight hours from Gilgit and another eight from China, assuming you don't get stopped by landslides. I had always had a cavalier attitude toward such things, but I was growing more sober. Now we were held up for a couple of hours while the Pakistani army set about clearing a slide, and there was something educational about boulders crashing down the canyon wall and echoing for miles, something pedagogical about repeated charges of dynamite exploding and sending showers of rock flying overhead and landing behind me. Then. as we drove through the same slide section, a large rock, newly freed from its lodgment in the cliff, fell and thudded on the pavement behind us. I began visualizing what the same chunk would do to our moonroof.

Rashid himself didn't like slides, looked cautiously at every one of the dozens of unstable slopes, and crept over the cleared slides at a pace a tortoise would have been comfortable matching. Near one notorious slide area, at Patan, there was a small roadsign whose two-word masterpiece said only Good Luck.

Near Chilas and about halfway to Gilgit the loggers dropped out; so did the trees and nearly every other sign of greenery. I didn't expect it - somehow expected rising elevation to bring greater not less precipitation. But the Indus now looked like a river in Death Valley, and the roof of clouds laughed at anyone expecting rain. It was not until we left the Indus and were following the Gilgit River that, a few miles short of Gilgit Town, we came to terraced and irrigated orchards.

Gilgit itself has a major military base, as well as administrative functions for the Gilgit Agency - in British times a subdivision of Kashmir. It also has a civilian airport, whose flights - all to Islamabad - had been cancelled by bad weather for five days running. Its one main street had few attractions for me, apart from bags of dried apricots and bottles of straight apricot juice, which I grew very fond of. It was here that I picked up a six-dollar suitcase for my Peshawar treasures and here that I rented a jeep for Chaprot. I only knew of Chaprot because of a book, written 50 years ago by a Colonel R.C.F. Schomberg, called Between the Oxus and the Indus. Schomberg, who came through Gilgit in the 1930s, spoke of Chaprot as "more beautiful than any other valley in the whole of the Gilgit Agency."

That was no mean ranking, for this is the region that seems to have inspired James Hilton's Lost Horizon, whose Shangri-La, though supposedly located in Tibet, bears a very close resemblance to Karimabad, deeper in the Agency and another 50 miles up the Hunza River. Like the monastery in Hilton's novel, Karimabad is approached through starkly and mountains, crossed by a road cut into a mountain wall. And although the Karakoram Highway today is a good two lanes wide, you can hardly miss seeing traces of the terrifyingly narrow pre-1970s roads on the opposite and near-vertical canyon walls. As in the novel, too, Karimabad is perched on a very steep slope backed by snow-capped mountains, and it looks across a fertile valley to an immense pyramidal mountain - Karakul in the novel, Rakaposhi in fact.

Hilton seems never to have visited Hunza, and he certainly neglects to mention the most spectacular feature of its valley, the magnificent ranks of irrigated terraces, each walled with chunks of stone and looking from a distance like a staircase. When Rashid and I eventually pulled in to Aliabad, the town that sits on the Karakoram Highway a few hundred feet below Karimabad, half the manpower of the valley was gathered to discuss some repair work on one of the irrigation canals that bring glacial water down through the terraces; after a half-hour's conversation sitting outdoors on this cold day the men shouldered their hoes and walked off into the terraces, which were planted in stilt blooming apricots, in wheat and fodder, and - as a backup fodder crop - Lombardy poplars. Such houses as were scattered in the terraced area were themselves terraced, so that the doorway of one opened on to the flat-earth roof of the one below.

Back in Gilgit, however, it soon became clear that though our Accord could make Hunza with no more than a blowout on a canyon ledge, it would never make it to Chaprot; that's why I was bouncing early one morning in a jeep headed back on the Karakoram Highway to Karimabad. Even more assiduously than Rashid, the jeep driver looked upslope at every slide, and to my alarm the more worried he looked the more he slowed down, even in the middle of the slide.

An hour outside Gilgit I looked across at a natural terrace, cliff-walled, level, green with trees and fodder, and almost a hundred feet above the Gilgit River, as yellow and inhospitable as the Indus. We turned off the highway and crossed a one-lane wooden suspension bridge that would have stopped the Accord cold, for on its far side the bridge nosed straight into a cliff, onto whose face we made an amazingly abrupt 90-degree turn.

Within a few hundred yards we were in the village of Chalt, to whom the irrigated terrace belonged, unless it is the other way round. I had no idea how far Chaprot was, and so we just drove through Chalt, whose buildings were all of stone and which seemed to have no commercial enterprises at all.

We had brought rain with us, climatological norms notwithstanding, and the road was now mud. And so it remained for the perhaps five or six slow miles to Chaprot, miles that crossed steep bridges, made hairpin turns, took us past terraced fields of young wheat and Lombardy poplars. They were miles that also ate thousands of pink apricot blossoms, which the rain had knocked off the trees and which our tires now buried.

We finally came to a village and a collapsed bridge; the driver asked around and told me: "Chaprot." I asked for clarification: yes, this was it.

There weren't a tot of people around, and the residue of the road was steep and slippery. Apart from their doors, which were built of planks so short that one had to stoop to enter, the buildings were built entirely of rock - some cut but mostly just unchinked river boulders: even the roofs were mantled with rock. So, too, were the pathways between buildings: I walked up rock slits, with a gray-white sky overhead and buildings on either side rising one after another like tiers of piled rock, so primitive that I could not distinguish homes from barns except by my Swat test: listening for crying children.

Perhaps it was just the weather: eventually some children came outside. The boys in drab hooded jackets of Western style, but the girls at least in bright colors - the only color in Chaprot outside the village fields. Their mothers withdrew. but the boys and girls posed, most of them happily but some of them too cold to smile. One girl in particular sticks in my mind: she's on the main road and standing with her back close to a stone wall neatly built of alternated slabs and blocks. There's a doorway a foot past her: it's open, and its wooden framework is visible, along with a tree in the courtyard. She herself has that characteristic Pakistani dress: a colorful knee-length shirt tucked out over matching trousers, but she is wrapped in a magentapink shawl that frames the Tibetan features of her face and hangs nearly to midthigh. It makes a fine picture photo - but Shangri-La aside I know that the pleasure is all on the viewer's side of the lens.

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