ABSTRACT
Captain Aziz and I set off at dawn from Skardu in a green Toyota Land Cruiser. Aziz was a thin, wiry Punjabi from Multan, in the south, with a ready smile, a cheerful disposition, and (I happily noted) well-developed driving skills. We followed the mighty Indus for some hours, skirting its banks and its gravelly alluvial plain, over what purported to be a road, at least on the military map he provided me with, but which was in truth no better than a rough dirt track, with occasional patches of gravel where water flowed down, pitted with deep, treacherous holes that seemed designed to break axles. Shaky bridges of wooden planking crossed dry water courses, or nullahs, that intersected the track. Land Cruisers are not built for creature comforts; their dour Japanese designers seemed to have forgotten, or never learned, the use of springs.
