Asia > Pakistan > North West Frontier > Peshawar > Military History > Articles > On The Frontier

Violence is to the North West Frontier what religion is to the Vatican. It is a raison d'être, a way of life, an obsession, a philosophy. Bandoliers hang over the people's shoulders, grenades are tucked into their pockets. Status symbols here are not Mercedes' or Saville Row suits; in Peshawar you know you've arrived when you can drive to work in a captured Russian T-72 tank.

The pathological frame of mind of the frontier people is partly derived from the harshness of the landscape. It is hard, barren, dry country drained of colour, warmth and softness. The mountainsides are grey and sheer, covered with sharp mica schist, the tedium relieved only at the valley bottoms with windbreaks of poplar and ashok. There is no snow here- it is too dry- but the winds from the snow peaks sweep down the slopes and the scarred valley sides and brush the streets clear of people. The sky is grey and the air is grey and the greyness seeps into the ground and the stones and the buildings. The only colours are the red and yellow silk flags flying over the new graves in the graveyards. As you wander past, you can feel winter lying like a curled dragon across the land.

The people here are as cold and hard as the schist. Black stony faces with long, drawn features look out from blank forests of facial hair. The sub-zero temperature makes them withdraw into themselves, both mentally and physically. They lift up their knees to their chins and wrap their heavy Kashmiri shawls across both. On top, their heads are covered with woollen roll-mop caps. You see only the dark eyes peering out into the cold. Eighty per cent are illiterate. Yet they are a proud people. They sneer through their moustaches, eyes levelled straight, in contempt as much as in curiosity.

These people- the Pathans- have never been conquered, at least not since the time of Alexander the Great. They have seen off centuries of invaders- Persians, Arabs, Moguls, Sikhs, British, Russians- and they retain the mixture of arrogance and suspicion that this history has produced in the Pathan character. History has also left them with a curious political status. Although most Pathans are technically within Pakistan, the writ of Pakistan law does not carry into the heartland of the Pathan territories.

These segregated tribal areas are in effect private tribal states out of the control of the Pakistan government. They are an inheritance from the days of the Raj: the British were quite happy to let the Pathans act as a buffer zone on the edge of the Empire and they did not try to extend their authority into the hills. Where the British led, the modern Pakistani authorities have followed. Beyond the checkpoints on the edge of Peshawar, tribal law- based on the institution of the tribal council and the blood feud- rules unchallenged and undeveloped since its origins long before the birth of Christ.

The tribal areas are officially closed to all foreigners as their safety cannot be guaranteed by the Pakistan government: kidnapping and murder are so frequent here they are virtually cottage industries. To visit you have to smuggle yourself quietly across the tribal border, ideally in the company of some tribal elder. It is not difficult to do this, but to enter the territories does require a little care and preparation.

In the shops in the bazaar in Darra Adam Khel, deep in the tribal territories, lines of high explosive warheads sit in glass cupboards facing onto the street as innocently as jars of humbugs in an English village store. The stacked mortar shells and the anti-tank ammunition are available over the counter, for cash, as if they were tins of Heinz Baked Beans. Nearby the belts of machine gun bullets are hung up like strings of onions. Outside, left lying around in the streets like so much discarded gardening equipment can be found heavy machine guns, rocket launchers and field guns. There is a fantastic, almost surreal feel to the place: here we go round the arms bazaar, half a pound of tuppeny shells, five green gas masks sitting on a wall.

Mohammed Rafiq, prop., Khyber Military Supplies, (private) Ltd., was a serious man with thick black glasses, a pinstripe waistcoat and a tall Astrakhan hat. He served cardamum tea in delicate porcelain bowls and moaned about the demise of the Afghan war:

"Sahib, I am telling you the truth," he said sipping at his bowl. "Five year ago we were selling forty or fifty Kalashnikovs a day, no problem. Now business is not good. Occasionally we are selling some anti-aircraft missiles, now and then an RPG. But the Afghan war is over. Now it is only our tribesmen who are buying."

This thought appeared to depress Mohammed Rafiq. But his assistant Abdul Qadir was more optimistic.

"Our tribesmen are good customers," he said, wobbling his head from side to side in the Indian manner. "Everyone is wanting many guns."

Mohammed Rafiq nodded in agreement.

"Our people are liking too much these arms. In the tribal areas you do not need permit, not even for tank."

"Take middle rank man," said Abdul Qadir philosophically. "He does not have the comforts of life. But he has gun and pistol and rifle, maybe two: one Lee Enfield for tradition-sake, one Kalashnikov for killing people."

"If he is big man- a malik- he may have rocket launcher and anti-aircraft gun. Too many gun. Is good business."

"And they actually use these guns?" I asked.

"Often they are using."

"On who?"

"On each other."

"Oh yes," said the assistant, proudly. "Our tribal people are having these enemies and they are having to kill them. All the people of the North West Frontier are gunfighters."

As we spoke, the wail of a muezzin pierced the air from a loudspeaker outside.

"Excuse me," said Mohammed Rafiq. "This is the time of our prayer."

The two partners got out strips of carpet from under a heavy machine gun and laid them down behind the desk. Intoning their prayers, they began rising and falling so that all you could see was two Astrakhan hats bobbing up and down between the telephone and the stapler on the front of the desk.

On the way back to Peshawar, I called on Khan Abdul Wali Khan, once one of the great landlords and politicians of the area, now a frail and half-blind old man. We sat in his summer house in the middle of his irrigated garden, beneath great jungles of climbing bougainvillaea, looking out on his flower beds full of yellow narcissi, roses and chrysanthemums. There was a sound of bird song and running water. The Khan poured jasmine tea and gestured at the bowls of walnuts, dates and raisins on the table. I told him what I had seen at the Darra arms bazaar.

"Yes, " he said. "There are now more than one million Kalashnikovs in this province alone. It has got completely out of control."

He shook his head sadly.

"I feel," he said, "as if I'm living on an ammunition dump."

The bazaar in Peshawar is the great meeting place of the tribes. It is here that the region's produce is brought to be sold, here that goods smuggled over the Afghan border pass into Pakistan, here that news and gossip is passed on and exchanged. Appropriately enough, the main street of the bazaar is known as the Qissa Khawani, the Street of the Storytellers.

It is only here, as you wander through the bazaar, that you realise the great diversity of racial types that the different invasions have left behind them. The genes of one hundred different races meet here and intermingle. The passage of Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes has elongated many eyes and turned to silky down the normally thick beard of a Pathan chin. Bright Aryan-blue eyes flash beneath mountainous turbans, calling to mind the old tales of Alexander's lost legions left stranded in these mountains- and also the taste for British memsahibs that the Pathans developed over the century following 1840. Curly hair and semitic noses remind one of the (admittedly slightly far fetched) legends which maintain that the Pathans are a lost tribe of Israel- those who got separated from Moses during the forty years wandering in the desert and mistakenly stumbled into the Hindu Kush while looking for the way back to Egypt.

The contents of the bazaar are as diverse as the people within it. Along with the rugs and sheepskin coats, the karakul caps and the Chitrali cloaks, the pavements of Peshawar appear to be the end of the line for many of the knitted woollies and discarded trousers proudly donated by 10,000 home counties grannies to Save the Children or Oxfam. Ten yards further down the street plastic mirrors, broken toy tanks and red water pistols all appear to have fallen off the back of a lorry en route from Taiwan. Fraudulent Rolex's, brass idols, cassettes of wailing music and garish calenders seem to have been smuggled across the border from India.

But beside this small scale junk business is disguised another much more lucrative trade. In the last few years many of the mud-brick houses in Peshawar have been faced with marble. Goatherds have become millionaires and bazaars become boulevards. The same transformation has left the lobby of the Hotel Pearl Continental in Peshawar one of the strangest sights in Pakistan. The hotel is one of the most lavish establishments of its kind in South Asia, but unlike its rivals it is not full of Western tourists and businessmen. The people who eat in its five different restaurants and spend in its lavish shopping arcade are wild-looking tribesmen, hung with ammunition belts and weapons, eating with their hands, looking to the casual observer too poor to be eating anywhere more luxurious than the kebabji of the bazaars. Yet these people have money, and in no small quantity. They pay for their meals in cash, handing out bundles of notes from the sport's bags they keep tucked by their side.

The source of this money is no mystery to the inhabitants of Peshawar, although it is a matter for some indignation: "I am number two in this hotel," I was told by Mohammed Riaz, the assistant manager of the Pearl Continental. "I work 13 hours a day and have been working like this for eight years. But in that time how much do I manage to save? Perhaps one hundred thousand rupees in two years. With that I can afford a small motorbike. But I see my classmates: they have beautiful Suzuki jeeps, some even have Mercedes. I ask- how much do these cost; they reply- seven hundred thousand. I ask- where did you get that money; they reply- we have shops. Shops! Shops do not make this sort of money. Of course it is drugs money. Go to the tribal areas- you will see there bad land and no industry. Everyone there is uneducated and illiterate. But the tribesmen are driving around in big BMW's. They are all in it up to their necks."

According to U.S drug Enforcement Officials, about 30% of all American and perhaps 80% of British heroin passes through Peshawar. The poppies are grown in the tribal areas and in Mujahedin-held areas of Afghanistan. Hence it is brought to one of 60 illicit processing laboratories dotted around the Khyber Pass. From there it passes to Peshawar where it is loaded onto lorries- and occasionally onto military transports- and taken to Karachi. Then it is shipped to the West. Pakistani Customs officers actively encourage the trade. Their monthly salary is about 40 sterling, but payoffs from the drug mafias are so lucrative that people compete to bribe their way into the Customs service. A recent survey at Karachi University found it to be the single most popular job.

Most of the rich men in Peshawar are involved in some way, as are much of the Pakistani civil and military establishment. Known heroin smugglers sit in Parliament. In Pakistan they can buy themselves out of trouble. Only when they venture abroad are they in danger of getting arrested: the brother of the Chief Minister of the North West Frontier and the son of the province's Governor are currently both in jail near New York on narcotics charges.

Yet even the Americans have to tread carefully here. Pakistan is a valuable and fragile ally which cannot be bullied and invaded like Columbia or Panama. Pakistan is a base near the Gulf, a base for the operations in Afghanistan, and a base on the Iranian border. For this reason the Americans put up with the martial law of General Zia, and they put up with the new and ever-expanding drug culture for the same reason.

Landi Khotal at the top of the Khyber, is the nerve centre of the opium trade and home to Pakistan's biggest drug barons. Hiring a security guard armed with an American-made automatic rifle, I managed to wangle a press pass from the tribal authorities and set off soon after dawn in an old Morris Traveller, still in service as a taxi after twenty-five years.

We passed a clutch of mud-walled refugee camps and then were out of the town and onto the plain of Peshawar. As we came to the border of the tribal area two ominous signs reared out of the scrub:

SEEK HELP FROM ALMIGHTY GOD

and beyond it-

BETTER ALONE THAN IN BAD COMPANY.

I looked nervously at the guard. He smiled blankly back.

We snaked into the narrow mouth of the Khyber Pass, and rose, past a series of castellated farmsteads, higher and higher into the barren hills. On one bend we passed a huge marble-faced enclosure surrounded by high-tension electrified wire. Guards holding Kalashnikovs flanked the marble gateway.

"Zakir Afridi- big drugs man," explained the guard.

Every so often we would pass a fort- a succession of bleak, mud walled enclosures- at least one of which, Kafar Kot, the Fort of the Unbelievers, dates back to the time of Alexander the Great. Few places in the world have seen such a succession of armies pass through them. When Alexander's generals, Hephaestion and Perdiccas, led their Macedonian legions down the caravan road which threads through this narrow defile, they were already following in the footsteps of Darius and no doubt countless other prehistoric armies. Since then the same snaking road has seen Seljuk, Mughal, Khajar, Afghan and British armies come and go. All have left their mark, but none have managed to hold the pass for more than a century or two.

On the outskirts of Landi Khotal we passed the station. When it was built in 1925, in the aftermath of the Third Afghan War, it was the last railhead in British India and the terminus of the Khyber Railway, one of the most remarkable- and expensive- engineering projects ever undertaken by the British in India. Costing more than 2 million to complete, it wound its way up 24 kilometres of impossible gradients through 34 tunnels and over 92 bridges and culverts. But since 1985 the railways has been closed down: "the tribesmen were firing Stinger missiles at it," I was told by a friend in Pehawar. "It was the drugs barons that were behind it: it was crossing their territory so they closed it down."

Certainly, Landi Khotal station looked as if it had been built to expect the worst. It looked more like a castle than a railhead, with solid stone walls pierced by tiny loopholes. Projecting turrets on the four corners covered every angle. All around houses had been cleared away to leave a free field of fire. Afghanistan was less than half a mile away; this was once the British Empire's first line of defence.

The windows were covered with a lattice of thick metal grilles, and the doors were of reinforced steel. One, however, had been smashed off its hinges, and I climbed inside to explore. The interior- a quadrangle of rooms giving off an overgrown cloister garth- had something of the air of Custer's Last Stand. You felt instinctively as if something terrible had happened here: that the tribesmen had crucified the station master perhaps, or garroted the ticket collector. This was the sort of place where Kipling's short stories came to an end, the true blue Victorian hero lying disembowelled on a frontier pass, and the vultures hovering nearby:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
An' the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll on your rifle an' blow out your brains,
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

Inside the station masters office, everything was as it had been when the last train pulled up the Pass. The Pakistan Railways Almanac 1962 lay open on a desk and old ledgers gathered dust in a shelf. It was an eerie place and I had no wish to linger.

It was now mid-morning and the market in the centre of Landi Khotal was in full swing. Old men were gathered around a fire drinking Pathan khawa (sweet green tea). Kebab-wallahs fanned little charcoal grills while butchers disembowelled chickens and tanners skinned dead goats, leaving little rivulets of goat blood running into the open sewer. Nearby a scrap merchant was weighing a crate full of spent shell-cases. I explained to the guard what I was looking for and he nodded and led me further into the labyrinth.

Along an alley, down a slimy, dark staircase we arrived at a gateway. The guard knocked three times, and the door swung open. Inside eight bearded tribesmen were sitting in the half-lit gloom under some trellising . For a moment I looked at my companion wondering why he had brought me here. Then one of the tribesmen took from his pocket a paper envelope. He tipped the contents- browny-white powder- out onto a piece of silver foil, and held the foil up to his face. He lit a match and warmed the foil until the powder liquified. Then he took a small white tube and inhaled the vapours. The sweet, sickly stench of heroin filled the air.

Landi Khotal was awash with narcotics. Heroin itself was generally kept invisible, under the counter, but hashish and opium were freely available alongside and as casually displayed as cigarettes and betel nut. Some of the hash was set in great toffee-like blocks; other pieces were folded into hash chapattis or tortured into spaghetti strands. One roadside stall moulded its hash into curvilinear arrangements that looked like something out of a box of Liquorice Allsorts.

"The U.S tried to bribe us to stop growing the poppy," one opium vendor told me. He tore a little lump of opium off a block, nonchalantly rolled it into a ball and popped it in his mouth. "They promised us irrigation and improved roads if we destroyed our crops. We let them spend their money, then used the wells to grow better poppy."

Drugs were not the only illegal trade flourishing in Landi Khotal. The town also has one of the largest smuggling bazaars in Asia. Electrical goods from Hong Kong and Japan and cheap Russian household goods (huge washing machines; vast, outdated air conditioners) are brought by rail or air from the Soviet Union to Kabul; there they are transferred to lorries and driven towards the Pakistani border. Here they are loaded onto pack-mule or camel-back and wind their way by night across the border and into the tribal territories. They are either sold direct or passed onto middle men who smuggle them into Pakistan proper. No duty is paid at any stage. The profit is colossal.

The question that currently exercises the intelligence agencies is how long it will be before nuclear warheads from the former Soviet Union join the hardware passing on donkey back into the Frontier- and hence onto the international market.

But it is not the first time that these barren and remote hills on the edge of the Hindu Kush have been both unexpectedly prosperous and crucially strategic. For centuries the area has been a natural border zone between the rival cultures of India, China, Persia and Central Asia, the place where the goods of the different civilisations have been exchanged and where the porous cultures, religions and languages of the area have all mixed and intermingled; not for nothing does 'pesh awar' mean 'frontier town'. But however large the profits of the opium trade in Peshawar today, they are nothing compared to the riches brought to the area by the silk route, especially in the first five centuries A.D. It was at this time that the area around Peshawar gave birth to Gandhara, one of the most remarkable composite cultures in Asian history.

I first stumbled across Gandhara when, a couple of days after hitching a lift out of Peshawar, I found myself climbing up a goatpath in Swat, one of the most beautiful valleys on earth. Here, the snow peaks of the Karakorums widen and thaw into a landslide of cultivation terraces. Below, the Swat River- in autumn the colour of lapis-lazuli- meanders lazily around a green plain of orchards and wheat fields. As you wander past, scenes from a Moghul miniature take shape in the fields around you: men are bent double beneath stooks of corn, reaping with sickles; others carry bundles of juniper branches for feeding to their goats.

The tarmac road had given up far below, and a shepherd boy had offered to lead me to my destination. Although he could have been barely twelve years old, he marched on ahead, scrambling up the track at a pace that only one born among mountains could set. I followed in fits and bursts, stopping every few minutes to wheeze and catch my breath. In this fashion we climbed up past mud-brick farms and through unharvested fields, the track getting ever smaller and steeper. Behind us the dying sun was sketching deep-cut shadows in the hills. We passed a group of hay-ricks, and above the hay-ricks, a herd of cows chewing their evening cud. In the distance you could hear the ringing of bells as the shepherds led their fat-tailed sheep home for the night. We climbed on; and eventually, doubling back up the side of the hill and turning a corner, we arrived.

It was an extraordinary sight. Perfectly preserved in the middle of nowhere- miles from the nearest main road, somewhere in the wilds of the North West Frontier lay a sophisticated and beautifully-constructed monastic complex. It was built in a style that would not be out of place in Rome or Athens: the ruins had porticoed and pedimented fronts, and were supported by carved Corinthian pillars. Halls, chapels, burial mounds- all were built in a style immediately recognisable as Classical Greek; yet these were Buddhist buildings, a few miles from the Afghan border, and they dated from the early centuries of the Christian era, long after the demise of Classical civilisation in Europe.

I stood on top of the highest stupa [burial mound]. A crescent moon had just risen though it was not yet dark, and the cicadas were singing. Pillars of dung-smoke rose from the valley villages. I looked out over the Asian landscape, astonished by what I was seeing. It was only later, in the libraries back home, that I was able to make sense of what I had seen.

It seems that the origins of these extraordinary buildings date back to the autumn of 327 B.C when Alexander the Great swept into these Highlands of Swat at the head of his victorious Macedonian army. Intending to conquer even the most distant provinces of the ancient Persian empire, Alexander had crossed into the Hindu Kush; and there, high on the Afghan plateau, he had first heard stories of the legendary riches of the Indian subcontinent- of its gold, said to be dug by gigantic ants and guarded by griffins; of its men who lived two hundred years and women who made love in public; of the Sciapods, a people who liked to recline in the shade cast by their one enormous foot, of the perfumes and silks (which, the Afghans told the Greeks, grew on the trees and even in the cabbage patches of India); of the unicorns and the pygmies, of the elephants and falcons, of the precious jewels which lay scattered on the ground like dust, and the unique variety of steel which could avert a storm.

It was the end of the hot season, the beginning of the rains, and Alexander had arrived at the edge of the known world. Now he made up his mind to conquer the unknown world beyond. Easily defeating the Hindu Rajahs of Swat on the banks of the river Jhelum, Alexander prepared to cross the last rivers of the Punjab and conquer the Indian plains. But on the swollen banks of the Beas he was brought to a halt. His homesick soldiers refused to go on; the torrential monsoon rain had destroyed their spirits where everything else- heat, starvation and disease- had failed. Alexander was forced to turn back, leaving a series of Greek garrisons behind to guard his conquests. On the return journey Alexander died- or was poisoned- in Nebuchadnezzar's empty palace in Babylon; and his empire split into a million pieces.

In the ensuing anarchy the Greek garrisons of India and Afghanistan were cut off from their homeland. They had no choice but to stay on in Asia, intermingling with the local peoples, and leavening Indian learning with Greek philosophy and classical ideas. Over the following one thousand years, further cross fertilised by Central Asian influences brought by the conquering Kushans, an astounding civilisation grew up in the fastness of the Karakorums, deep within the isolated and mountainous kingdom known as Gandhara. Buddhist in religion- though worshipping an encyclopedic pantheon of Greek, Roman, Iranian, Hindu and Buddhist deities- Gandhara's principal icon was a meditating Buddha dressed in a Greek toga.

Gandhara survived for a thousand years, long after Greek civilisation had disappeared in Europe; and when it died it left behind a legacy of finely-constructed monasteries- in the plains around Peshawar a fifth Century Chinese traveller counted no less than 2,400 such shrines- and also a scattering of well-planned classical cities, acropoli, stupas and superb sculptures. Most of these illustrate the Buddhist scriptures, but to do so use the motifs and techniques of classical Roman art with its vine scrolls and cherubs, tritons and centaurs. The slowly-decaying remains of the culture which emerged from this extraordinary clash of civilisations still litters much of Northern Pakistan.

I had left Peshawar early in the morning the day before, and hitched out of town on a succession of brightly painted trucks.

It was both harvest and election time in Pakistan and the little roadside villages were suffering from the head-on collision of agriculture and politics. As you approached a bazaar you would come across a traffic jam made up of bumbling herds of fat-tailed sheep, strings of bad-tempered camels and heavily-laden tractors bringing in farm-folk with their crops. You did not have to wait long to find the cause of the obstruction: from the opposite direction a float containing a Parliamentary candidate and his supporters would be making slow progress through the village lanes waving banners, pasting posters and shouting slogans.

For all their machismo, the Pathans have a great love of celebrations, festivals and bright colours, and to their minds elections seem to come under the same sort of heading as New Year celebrations, pilgrimages and religious festivals. They much enjoy festooning their mud-brick houses with the colourful flags of the different political parties, even if it means that one house carries the flapping colours of three rival parties. Processions and meetings are well-attended and even the most hopeless candidate can gather a cheerful crowd of tribesmen.

This is all very well for the candidate, but is less of a boon to any traveller trying to get anywhere at election time. In one village where the streets were clogged solid, my truck driver was forced to give up and retire to a tea shop until the procession had passed. Pin-ups dotted the walls: Benazir Bhutto, a selection of election candidates, Sylvester Stallone, Madonna and the Ayatollah Khomenei.

"Which of these is the best candidate?" I asked the dhaba-wallah, gesturing at the posters.

The man shrugged his shoulders: "Who knows?" he replied, looking up undecidedly at the posters. "All are good Muslims."

Because of such delays, it was well past noon by the time we arrived at the ruins of Pushkalavati, the City of the Lotus. Once upon a time, Pushkalavati had been a rival of the great Babylon, but its conquest by Alexander began a decline from which it never recovered. Today it is a strange and romantic ruin, more like a ziggurat in desert Mesopotamia than the ruins of the onetime capital of the fertile Punjab. The barren grey clay walls rise eighty feet out of the cane-breaks, huge and sheer and craggy. Their original shape has been washed away by two and half thousand years of rain, and all that remains now is a Herculean block of mud, a series of local legends of a City made of Gold, and a lingering impression of strength and antiquity.

I climbed to the top of ramparts, unrolled a rug and sat munching away at my packed lunch; while I ate I listened to a shepherd boy playing a reed flute in the cane-breaks below. Afterwards I picked around the ramparts, trawling through the mass of pottery, bones and arrowheads which lay scattered across the hillocks of the ruin. Handles of ancient amphorae, painted shards and fragments of geometric decoration lay strewn around like autumn leaves- tens of thousands of broken shards poking out of the mud as if some ancient sledgehammer-maniac had run amok in a pottery kiln. At its height, traders came to Pushkalavati from all over the world: archaeologists have found alabaster from Rome, painted glass from Antioch and Alexandria, porphyry from Upper Egypt, ivories from South India and lacquers from the China coast. Now it was just the shards and the mud and the ruins and me. I pocketed a couple of glazed pot handles and returned to the road.

Beyond the ruins of Pushkalavati the first lavender-coloured peaks of the Himalayas rose up into the sky. I flagged down a passing Morris Traveller driven by an unusually small and round Pathan named Murtazar and we set off towards the Malakand Pass, the gateway to Swat.

In the nineteenth century the valley's ruler was the Akond of Swat, who inspired the famous Edward Lear comic poem:

Who or why, or which, or what,
Is the Akond of Swat?
Is he tall or short, or dark or fair?
Does he sit on a stool or a sofa or chair,
Or squat,
The Akond of Swat?

But there was nothing in the least comical- or whimsical- about the Malakand Pass. Here the road rises some five thousand feet in a near vertical ascent of only a few miles. It is a most dramatic drive up a virtual cliff face, unspoilt by such tiresome impediments as crash-barriers or fences to break your fall. It is emphatically not a road to be travelled by anyone suffering from vertigo; nor is it recommended for anyone driving an ancient Morris Traveller- as we soon discovered.

We had only turned the first of the great U-bends when the car began to shake and rattle like a boiling kettle. "Car going ruk-ruk," observed Murtazar. "This ruk-ruk not good noise" It certainly wasn't. But despite the noise the car jolted grudgingly on. Below, the fields of the Plain of Peshawar receded into a quilt of patchwork squares, broken by seams of poplar avenue. We crawled on, up and up, and suddenly we were there. The Traveller gave a last metallic groan and turned its nose triumphantly into the valley the far side. "Olden car is golden car," said Murtazar in a tone as much of surprise as of pleasure and as if to reward the car for its good behaviour, he then turned the ignition off and let the Traveller freewheel down the slope to the banks of the Swat river.

So relieved was I to have achieved the top of the pass, that it was several minutes before I began to take in the beauty of the valley into which we were rapidly plunging. It was like entering a lost world, a forgotten Eden isolated on its high Himalayan plateau.

We were passing rapidly through the vortex of an Ashok avenue, flanked on one side by the blue Swat river and on the other by green orchards watered by bubbling irrigation runnels. There were mangoes and cherries and quinces and apples and apricots and almonds, and beyond the orchards there were thickets of tamarisk and casuarina as well as groves of mulberry trees belonging to the silk farmers. There were children paddling in the streams, and girls carrying brushwood bundles on their heads, and old men sitting in the shade, sucking at their silver hookahs. Everywhere you looked there were the undecayed remains of the Gandharan golden age: colossal Buddhas and reliefs of the Kushan king Kanishka cut into the rockface; huge stupas rising from hexagonal drums and great fortresses sitting on vast bluffs of rock overlooking the erratic winds of the old silk road.

Though many of the most remarkable surviving Gandharan remains lie in Swat, Gandhara's ancient capital lies one hundred kilometres to the south at Taxila. When Alexander appeared in the area, the king of Taxila decided against challenging the Greeks. Instead he met Alexander in Swat and guided him through the forests of rhododendron and alpine clematis to the walls of the city. Here, for the first time, Alexander's troops were able to rest and take in the Indian scene.

To the Greeks, familiar with the glories of Athens, Babylon, Susa and Egyptian Memphis, the buildings of Taxila were unremarkable: the houses were made of mud and uncut stone, and were laid out without any central order or plan. But what did amaze the Greeks were the Pathans who lived there:

"Physically, the Indians are slim," wrote Alexander's Admiral Nearchus. "They are tall and much lighter in weight than other men... they wear earrings of ivory (at least the rich do), and they dye their beards, some of the very whitest of white, others dark blue, red or purple or even green... they wear a tunic and throw an outer mantle around their shoulders: another is wound round their head. And all except the very humblest carry parasols in summer..."

Others wore no clothes at all. Two miles outside Taxila, the Greeks came across fifteen naked wise men who laughed at the Greeks in their cloaks and knee length boots. They demanded that the foreigners should undress if they wanted to hear some words of the ancient wisdom of India. "But the heat of the sun," wrote one of Alexander's men, "was so scorching that nobody could have bared to walk barefoot, especially at mid-day." So the Greeks kept their clothes on, and the senior guru questioned them about Socrates, Pythagoras and Diogenes. Later, the Gurus, still naked, dined at Alexander's table: "[they] ate their food while standing," wrote one witness, "balanced on one leg."

Although Alexander only stayed at Taxila for a matter of weeks, his visit changed the course of the city's history. Visiting the museum at the entrance to the archaeological site, I wandered through the rooms looking at the Gandharan sculptures, some of which dated from nearly one thousand years after Alexander's death. Even the Buddha, that symbol of Eastern philosophy, had undergone a process of Hellenisation: his grace and easy sensuality was thoroughly Indian; yet the images in the Taxila museum were all defined by Western ideas of proportion and realism; moreover the Buddha was wearing a toga, European dress.

Most remarkable of all was the coin room. Over one entire wall were scattered the gold and silver coins of a millennium of Taxila's rulers. It wasn't just that the coins were all modelled on Greek originals. What was amazing were the names of the rulers: Pantaleon, King of North India; Diomedes King of the Punjab; Menander of Kabul; Heliochles, King of Balkh. The coins hinted at the strange hybrid world these kings inhabited. They brought East and West together at a time when the British, the only other Europeans who succeeded in ruling the area, were still running through prehistoric fogs dressed in bear skins. The coins of Heliochles of Balkh were typical: they showed a Roman profile on one side- large nose, imperial arrogance in the eyes- but on the reverse Heliochles chose as his symbol a humped Indian Brahmini bull.

Outside, among the ruins- which are spread out over a distance of some thirty square kilometres, and overgrown with hollyhocks and wild foxgloves- it is this strange mix of Europe and Asia that continues to grip the traveller's imagination. At Sirkap on the edge of Taxila, the Bactrian Greeks, descendants of Alexander's soldiers, founded a classical Greek suburb in 190 B.C.. It was to be the New Taxila, a great advance on the Old City, and they carefully laid out the different streets in a grid of straight lines, like a chess board. As at Athens, a magnificent boundary wall loops around the residential areas and rises up to the fortified citadel, Sirkap's answer to the Parthenon.

From there you can stand on the citadel walls and see the expanse of houses unfold beneath you. It is a scene of striking- almost suburban- regularity: it could be any modern New Town, except that each street is punctuated with Buddhist shrines, not supermarkets, and that the whole city was built nearly two hundred years before the birth of Christ. Most intriguing of all, one of the shrines in the town bears the insignia of the double-headed eagle: centuries later the same symbol was to become the crest first of Byzantium, then of the Hapsburgs, and finally of Imperial Russia. Its first appearance, here in a lost city on the edge of the Karakorums, is one of Gandhara's great unsolved mysteries.

My favourite of the Taxila ruins, I decided, was that of the monastery of Julian, named after its founder, an Imperial Roman envoy who converted to Buddhism. The monastery was always a place of retreat, and today it still retains its original calm. I arrived there late in the evening just as the smoke from the village fires was forming a perfect horizontal line above the fields. At the foot of the hill, below the olive groves, leathery black water buffaloes sat with their legs folded up beneath them. Above, there were parakeets among the olives and, as you walked up the hill, flights of grass-hoppers exploded from beneath your feet.

I was shown around by the elderly chowkidar. He was a fascinating old man and, as he explained the function of the different ruins, the monastery came to life. Soon I could see the orange-robed monks tramping clockwise around the stupas, queuing for their food in the refectory, or snuffing out their oil lamps in their austere stone cells.

Best of all, I could visualise the builders. They were men with a sense of humour, for they included in the design a hundred little conceits, all lovingly pointed out by the chowkidar. Here were a series of grotesque Atlantes- they had narrow Mongol features, mutton-chop moustaches and giant earrings- groaning as they sank under the weight of the stupa which was resting on their shoulders. Here- and this was obviously the chowkidar's favourite- was a scene from the temptation of the Buddha: as he sat meditating under an arch, two girls appeared around the corner flashing their breasts at him, trying to distract him from his spiritual quest. Round the base of the stupa the chowkidar pointed out more temptresses- some extending legs, others baring their breasts, others proffering amphorae of wine: "Girls, dancing, drinking- all no-problem to Mr. Buddha. He liking only prayer, preaching and hymn-singing," said the chowkidar. "Buddha-sahib is very good gentleman."

Remarkable as these remains of Gandhara are, it is difficult at first to understand how the warlike Pathans could be descended from the gentle Greek philosophers who created the civilisation of Buddhist Gandhara. Yet they are, and if you visit the museum in Peshawar you can slowly begin to understand the connection which links the warlike tribesmen in the bazaar with the philosopher-soldiers of Alexander's army.

The most obvious link is material. In the wonderful friezes of sculpture which illustrate the ancient Buddhist scripture, the Gandharan sculptors included details from the everyday life they saw around them, details which one can still see repeated in the lives of the people of the Frontier today. The writing tablet and reed pen which the Buddha uses as a child can still be seen in the Frontier primary schools. The turbans which the Gandharan chieftains sported in the sixth century A.D have yet to disappear and many of the tribesmen still dye their beards, just as they did when Nearchus wandered through the streets of Taxila in the third century B.C. The sandals of the Bodhisattvas are still worn; their musical instruments still played; their jewellery manufactured in the silver bazaar today. Even the design of the houses remains more or less unchanged by the passage of time.

But the link with the world of Gandhara runs even deeper than this. The Peshawar museum is home to one of the most magnificent collection of Buddha images in existence. Room after room is filled with spectacular black-schist figures, standing, meditating, preaching or fasting. The images follow a prescribed formula. The physique is magnificent: muscles ripple beneath the diaphanous folds of the toga. The saviour sits with half-closed eyes and legs folded in a position of languid relaxation. His hair is oiled and groomed into a beehive topknot; his high, unfurrowed forehead is punctuated with a round caste mark. His face is full and round; the nose small and straight; and the lips firm and proud.

It is only when you have stared at the figures for several minutes that you realise what is so surprising about the Gandharan version of the Buddha: it is its arrogance. There is a hint of rankling self-satisfaction in the achievement of nirvana; a sneer on the threshold of enlightenment. This is the Buddha as he was in life- a Prince. And soon you realise where you have seen that haughty expression before- outside in the bazaar. Unlike the tendency to grovelling subservience which you find in some of the other peoples of the subcontinent, the Pathans meet your gaze. Hawk-eyed and eagle-beaked, they are a proud people; and as the Buddha-images demonstrates, their poise and self-confidence directly reflects that of the Gandharan Bactrian Greeks who sculpted these images in the plains of Peshawar nearly two millennia ago.

The institution that perhaps most directly links the modern Frontier with the area's primaeval past is the blood feud. These small but incessant inter-family battles cause literally thousands of tribal deaths every year, the ancient defects of the system magnified a hundred times by the killing power of modern weaponry.

What surprised me was the level of culture of some of the families caught up in the cycle of violence. Blood feuds sound the preserve of mafiosi, but in the North West Frontier the most gentle and civilised families are involved in tit-for-tat killings of appalling brutality.

Hajji Feroz din-Khel is a charming old man who lives in a tumbledown stronghouse near the tribal village of Barra. He has twice visited Mecca, has 18 grandsons and is held in great respect by everyone in Barra where he is the main landlord and the honourary muezzin in the mosque. He has a long white beard and on a dark night could easily be mistaken for Father Christmas. Yet with his own hands he has murdered three men and a number of children. This is what he told me:

"Feuds usually start over a dispute about land or money. In this family we have feuds with two other families both of which started simultaneously about forty years ago. Those two families have formed an alliance against us although they are not related. I have lost a father, two sons and one nephew aged about seven. The other two families have lost nine people altogether, so at the moment we are winning.

"The feuds started over a completely petty matter. There was a stream which flowed between our lands. It was divided by a line of stones, and on our side of the stream the water was diverted to a water mill. One day I was removing some of these stones to build a wall. My neighbour saw me and said- stop, these are my stones. We had a quarrel and I insulted him. The next day he killed my father, Faizal Akbar.

"After thirty years of killing we arranged a truce. But that truce was broken last year. My youngest brother Said Lal was walking along the road towards Barra when a car stopped and five men jumped out. They tried to kidnap his son who was walking with him. Said Lal shot at them and chased them away, but as they went one of them sprayed his machine gun behind him. They killed my nephew. He was only seven.

"Despite this killing I want to make a settlement. But the other side have had more people killed so they have to get their own back."

I visited the Hajji several times while I was staying in Peshawar, and on my last trip I saw the effects of the blood feud for myself. Up to then, all the talk of guns and violence had been just that- talk. Now I saw what it actually entailed, the stark reality.

It was late afternoon and I was chatting to the Hajji in the shade of his veranda. We drank tea and Hajji told me about his last trip to Mecca. Suddenly men came rushing in, screaming in Pushtu. Hajji rose to his feet, apologised to me and made straight for his jeep:

"There has been some trouble in the bazaar. My brother tried to kidnap a man who owed him money. The man resisted. Now Said Lal's been shot."

I sat in the Hajji's house for an hour before the messenger came. Said Lal was dead. His body had been brought back to a house further down the road.

By the time I got there about one hundred people had gathered in and around the compound. Hajji greeted me, his face distorted with sadness, but his eyes dry. He whispered a prayer and went back into the house. You could hear muffled wailing from the women within the harem, but the men outside were completely silent. They sat on charpoys, heads lowered, hands cupped around their faces. Other's pulled their beards. The dry, silent male mourning seemed much worse than the noisy grief of the women. Despite the frequency of violence in the tribal territories, the shock of loss was no less tangible than anywhere else.

I was still holding my notebook, and my cameras were slung over my shoulders; I was a journalist intruding on a moment of private tragedy. It was time to make an exit. At the gate, I passed a friend of the din-Khels who I had met with the Hajji earlier in the week.

"What will happen now?" I asked.

"There will be a truce for the funeral," said the man, "and then the Hajji will be required to recover his honour."

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"It means," said the man, "that he must seek revenge."

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