OUT OF EDEN WALK

Chelas, a mountainous district near the headwaters of the Indus River in Pakistan’s rugged Karakoram, has a hard reputation.Aid agencies tread carefully among the remote villages, where tough Chelasi clans call the shots. In 2012 Sunni extremists, who may or may not have been from Chelas, executed 18 Shiite bus passengers on the Karakoram highway that snakes through the canyon-sliced region. Today police supply armed escorts to tourists passing though by car. The local reputation for aggression isn’t new. “Over the last period of years the annual murder rate averaged about twenty—more than any other district in British India in proportion to the population,” wrote William Brown, a British colonial officer posted to the area in the 1940s. “Quarrels over women inevitably lead to a brutal murder in which the victim will probably be ambushed and have his head chopped off with a none too sharp axe.”The people of Chelas were very warm toward us. After recovering from shock at seeing a foreigner walking through, they offered sweet milk tea and shady benches to sit on. School kids in disheveled uniforms—many hitching rides on tractors—gave us grins and a thumbs-up. But then the police arrived in Jeep and told us we must stop. Chelasis were hotheads and unpredictable, the officers argued. There was an operation up on Babusar Mountain against a Robin Hood who was carjacking travelers and distributing the loot. They wanted no trouble with us. Protests were useless. For the first time since Turkey in 2014, I was forced to motor through a zone of human conflict. We taxied 78 miles through the Karakoram. Every one of them bruised my heart.