The mountain troopers numbered twenty-four men, all tall, tough, rangy members of K’Ayub’s Frontier Rifles. The day was hot and clear. The road north from Rawalpindi was crowded with traffic for the first hour— Army transports, bullock carts plodding the edge of the fields, bicycles, men carrying bundles and bales on their shoulders. The oppressive morning heat lifted as they wound up toward the hill station of Muree, the most historic of the British military posts and summer resorts, 7,500 feet above sea level. Along the road were rice paddies flashing in the sun, then terraced farms and maize and potatoes, mud-house villages and then houses with thatched roofs. In a short time the convoy roared through groves of long-needled Chiel pine that sheltered old-fashioned resort hotels placed at vantage points for the views. The villages they passed had narrow streets, some of them banned to auto traffic. At eight thousand feet the road became tortuous, switching back and forth up the terraced mountainsides, now and then with a glimpse of the far mountains of Kashmir, where snow lingered on the peaks like an illusion in the clear August sky.
