Hunza is a valley of apricot terraces in the Karakoram of northern Pakistan, green on a narrow shelf under a wall of ice. The wall runs up to Rakaposhi at 7,788 metres, and it climbs nearly six thousand of those metres from the valley floor in one unbroken sweep. One road comes in. The Karakoram Highway threads the gorge on the line of an old Silk Road branch, past stone-walled villages and under Rakaposhi's ice face towards the Chinese border. Where it hangs above the river you can stop and watch the water wind below, pale turquoise with glacier melt.
Above Karimabad stands Baltit Fort, seven hundred years of mud, stone and timber on a moraine over the terraces. You start in the storerooms cut into its base and work up past the guardroom to a windowless room with a pit in the floor for the Mir's gold. Higher again is the durbar, where the Mirs heard their people under a carved wooden canopy. The roof terrace is open on every side, and it puts you over the flat roofs of the old town. The fort got its Tibetan look six centuries ago, when a Mir married a princess from Baltistan and the craftsmen she brought rebuilt it. Altit, on a rock spur above the river, is three centuries older and holds a watchtower dated to about 1100. Two kilometres downhill, Ganish is the oldest settlement in the valley: a walled square with a stone water tank and eight mosques, one for each clan. Before dawn a steep jeep track switchbacks up to Duikar, where the sun reaches the summits long before the town, so you watch Rakaposhi, Diran and Ultar burn while Karimabad is still in shadow. The language here is Burushaski, and a century of study has failed to connect it to any other tongue. Outsiders filled that gap with a story. For decades it was said that people here routinely reached 120, even 150, kept young by apricots and glacier water, but no one in Hunza was writing down birthdays, so every one of those ages was a guess.