Down in the lowlands—basically everything west of Chandigarh—it was easy to move laterally from one river to the next by crossing the table-flat doab or Mesopotamian plateau between them. Now, though, topography made it imperative simply to choose one river and follow it up to its beginning. By far the most direct one was the Beas. It had stopped Alexander the Great. Perhaps it could stop the Chinese as well. Shimla, a city of a couple of hundred thousand that the Brits had planted up in the mountains so that they wouldn’t all perish of heat stroke during the summer, was not on the Beas. But one of the least terrible ways to get to the upper Beas from Chandigarh was to pass through it, and anyway Jasmit was bound in that direction and avidly wished to support the quest of (until this morning) Laks and (now) the Fellowship. Halfway there, they stopped at a factory that, like all other structures here, was perched improbably on a slope, and picked up cargo, which the boys helped load, then sat on the rest of the way.