Rawalpindi was founded as the principal British military base to control the wild Northwest Frontier. Around the large imperial cantonment, with its neat cottages and prim British churches, grew up a typical South Asian urban agglomeration of low, jumbled buildings, innumerable shacks, open-air garages, markets of every variety, oily smoke, sharp, pungent smells, incessant din, and a ceaseless stream of humanity. Today, the officers of Pakistan's crack army have neatly assumed the character and style of Britain's Imperial Army, complete with swagger sticks, clipped pukka accents, cricket matches and polo. At Dean's Hotel, a venerable, charming, colonial dump, you take high tea in the musty lounge, watched by an unsmiling portrait of King George V and ghosts of the British Raj. Aged waiters with watery eyes glide by, almost unaware that their former British masters have long ago returned to their distant, rainy island.
Lizards scamper up the cracked, plaster walls.
Heat hangs thick in the lounge, pushed here and there by antique ceiling fans that replaced the old, hand-pulled screens that once fanned the sweltering sahibs in their thick wool uniforms. Nothing has changed at Dean s, it is said, and nothing ever will. The road to the north is deceptive. You first leave Islamabad along a well-surfaced highway, with four luxurious lanes bordered by impressive, white curbstones. Muree, a cluster of low, wooden buildings atop a steep hill, has little to recommend it save its 7,500 ft altitude and panoramic views of the Karakoram mountains to the north.