Life on the Roof of the World

In September 1996, as the Russian helicopter airlifted us, a group of international guests, from the Islamabad airport to the northern town of Gilgit, we swooped along narrow valleys between snow-covered mountain peaks that gave way to arid earth and occasional plateaus of rich green terraces. Though I had not been there earlier, I felt a sense of déjà vu. When someone said, the "Karakorams," I remembered: the mysterious flight that opens the adventure in Lost Horizon (1933), James Hilton's bewitching novel about discovering the earthly paradise of Shangri-La. In his descriptions the author captures the "distant, inaccessible" essence of the long river valleys of Central Asia nestled below the "icy rampart" of the "majestic and remote" Karakoram Range, perhaps best known in the West for its towering peaks such as K2.

Gilgit, historically a confluence of Russian, Chinese, and Indian espionage networks, was only the way station as we set out by bus the next evening, climbing higher into the mountains for our final destination of Karimabad. As the white crest of Rakaposhi came into view, etched by moonlight, I again thought of Hilton: "Then the whole range, much nearer now, paled into fresh splendor; a full moon rose, touching each peak in succession like some celestial lamp-lighter, until the long horizon glittered against a blue-black sky."

For centuries tribal villages, scattered along these steep slopes descending to the Hunza River, remained in feudal isolation governed by a regional chieftain or mir. Change came abruptly with the completion in 1986 of a highway that snakes around the Karakorum mountains linking this region, the northern areas of Pakistan, to Islamabad and China, and hence to the rest of the world.

An omnipresent music courses through these villages day and night as torrents of water stream through ancient stone channels, irrigating tier upon tier of terraces cultivated for subsistence farming. By harnessing glacial springs flowing from icy peaks, the villages have turned arid land into a patchwork of luxuriant green crops, a startling contrast against the velvety brown desert terrain of the surrounding mountains. Dotted with poplar trees, the scene could be mistaken for a panorama of Italian hill towns, except for the distinctive clusters of rubble-stone houses and animal pens that form the tightly compact picturesque villages surrounded by old orchards of gnarled fruit and walnut trees.

Towering above the village called Karimabad, at the crucial juncture of the water sources, stands the historic thirteenth-century Baltit Fort erected on a massive tiered rubble-stone podium. A conglomeration of palatial domestic and defensive architecture, its high stone walls and overhanging wooden structures suggest a cross between British colonial architecture and a Tibetan lamasery. Home for centuries to the mirs of Hunza, the fort was located close enough to the fabled Silk Road for the rulers to conduct successful raids on caravans of traders. It also offered protection to the villagers during bouts of tribal warfare.

During evening entertainments we heard village storytellers—embellishing local legends with songs and sword dances—recount how the fort was constructed as the dowry for a princess of Baltistan who married the prince of Hunza and brought her own craftsmen to carve the elaborate woodwork. When, about 1940, the reigning mir deserted Baltit Fort for a new palace on a lower terrace, the original fort fell into decay, and therein lies the beginning of a modern tale of restoration and reassessment of the architectural underpinnings of these farming villages, so remote they were unaffected by World War ii.

Two men—Didier Lefort, a French architect, and Richard Hughes, an engineer with the London firm of Ove Arup & Partners—stumbled on the ruined fort during separate expeditions to the region in 1979 and 1980. Hearing Lefort relate his experience of turning a corner and discovering "the best example of fortified construction anywhere in the world," I thought again of that great moment in Lost Horizon when the hero Conway and his companions "stepped out of the mist into clear, sunny air . . . and only a short distance away lay the lamasery of Shangri-La." Lefort and Hughes...