A piece of skull wrapped in a rag. That’s what the shaman pulled out of the frozen ground, and the old man’s fever broke a few days later. Up here, people don’t ask for proof. They ask for protection.
I’d come to the Himalayas looking for Shangri-La, a place that supposedly existed somewhere in these mountains. I’d seen the desecrated graveyard of the Kalash people, whose Muslim neighbors scattered their ancestors’ bones across the dirt. I’d watched horsemen play buzkashi with a headless goat, settling blood feuds older than the game itself. I’d passed through the Swat Valley, where stone carvings of Buddha lay smashed, their faces beaten away because Islam forbids depicting a deity.
I’d met a shaman who chewed juniper smoke until he dropped into a trance and ran outside to dig in a spot that looked no different from any other. I’d seen him find that skull, wrapped in cloth, buried by an enemy. A curse. And I’d watched him drink the blood of a slaughtered goat, the villagers celebrating his prophecy that the season would be good.
But I wasn’t here for the darkness. I was here for the myth. In the 1930s, James Hilton wrote *Lost Horizon*, a novel about four travelers fleeing Afghanistan who crash in the Himalayas and stumble upon a Buddhist monastery called Shangri-La. A place of peace, of harmony, where people lived to be two hundred years old.
The book sold millions. A world on the brink of war wanted to believe paradise existed somewhere. Hilton insisted it was fiction, but that didn’t stop people from searching for it. He’d given one clue: the plane flew past K2 and Nanga Parbat.
Then it disappeared. I started in Peshawar, a frontier city where you can get anything, including a copy of the novel itself. I headed into the Hindu Kush, then east toward the Hunza Valley, deep in the heart of the Himalayas. The mountain passes were already dusted with snow.
The Lowari Pass, nearly three thousand meters high, is cut off for months every year, and the locals were still digging it open when I arrived. Eight hours to travel eighty kilometers. That’s the kind of place this is. My guide was a man named Juno.
He took me to see the Kalash, a remote tribe on the Afghan border who look more European than Pakistani, with their blue eyes and blonde hair. The story goes that Alexander the Great’s soldiers stayed behind after his quest for the fountain of youth failed, and they intermarried with the Kalash. The Kalash are the last non-Muslim minority in a country that’s overwhelmingly Islamic, and their Muslim neighbors have called them *kafirs*, the non-believers, for a thousand years. Once eighty thousand of them lived in the valley.
Today there are barely two thousand five hundred. The graveyard Juno showed me had been torn apart, bones scattered by grave robbers. When I asked if the Kalash had done it, Juno shook his head. “No.
Kalash don’t take Islamic people. ”
Everyone I met seemed to know the name Shangri-La, but no one knew where it was. “It’s a good place,” one man told me. “Very far from here.
Maybe in Gilgit somewhere. ” Maybe it was in Gilgit. I kept moving. Winter was chasing me.
First came the snows, then the road closures. Time wasn’t on my side. I hitched a ride on one of Pakistan’s famous decorated trucks, covered in flowers and religious symbols painted on every surface. The driver was a Pashtun, a member of the warlike tribe that dominates the trucking industry.
He told me the decorations weren’t for business. They were for pride. And they were supposed to protect the truck from the dangers of the road. I believed him.
We drove along the Karakoram Highway, following the Indus River toward the range that holds K2, the world’s second highest peak. In the novel, Shangri-La was near the source of this river. If I followed it, I might find it. The road ended.
I continued on foot, up toward the snow line, where the locals believe fairies live. Keeping on the right side of those fairies is a matter of survival. People here have unshakable faith in the supernatural. Those who believe themselves cursed often die.
That’s where I met the shaman. He inhaled the smoke of burning juniper leaves until he entered a trance, then he ran outside and dug in the frozen ground, guided by spirits I couldn’t see. When he found that wrapped skull, he knew the old man’s illness was a curse. A few days later, I was told, the old man began to recover.
The shaman’s work wasn’t done. The next day he performed a public seance for the entire village, translating the prophecy of the mountain fairies. The village held its breath. If he looked sad, the news was bad.
He looked happy. A goat was slaughtered, and the shaman drank its blood, which they call fairy milk. The trance lifted. The villagers celebrated.
It would be a good year. I wondered if the fairies could help me find Shangri-La. If they answered, I couldn’t hear it. I had an appointment further up the highway, in Gilgit, a town known for one thing: polo.
The game originated in Persia, but Gilgit gave it its name. *Polo* means ball in the local language. The British cavalry officers stationed here in the days of the Raj were captivated, and that’s how the game spread to England and then the world. I rode horses my whole life, but I’d never played polo.
I was terrible at it. The locals were brilliant. I managed to hit the ball once. Over tea, I told my companions why I was there.
I was searching for the lost valley of Shangri-La. They told me about a crashed plane near a town called Skardu. Maybe it was the one from the book. Hilton’s clues pointed to the headwaters of the Indus, not far from Nanga Parbat.
That made Skardu a candidate. It was nowhere near paradise. The upper Indus Valley is one of the most barren places I’ve ever seen. It’s also Kashmir, disputed territory, claimed by both India and Pakistan.
A war zone is an unlikely setting for Shangri-La. But there was a resort there, a 70s theme park cashing in on the myth, with a crashed plane on display. It was someone’s idea of Shangri-La. It wasn’t mine.
My journey was still far from over. From Skardu, I headed north toward the Chinese border, into the Hunza Valley. The Hunza is legendary for its healthy old population. People there regularly live past a hundred years old.
It was beautiful, peaceful, timeless. If this was Shangri-La, there had to be a Buddhist monastery. And there it was, at the head of the valley, a building with a distinctly Buddhist look that fit the description of Shangri-La better than anything else I’d seen in the Himalayas. It clung to the mountainside, pavilions rising like petals impaled on a crag.
From a distance, it was strange and half incredible. I entered alone, unsure what I’d find. Narrow corridors, glimpses of the valley below, a sense of being watched. I could imagine the monks who once lived here.
History said the fort was built in the fifteenth century by a family that ruled the Hunza. When a daughter married, craftsmen came from Tibet to build these structures. That might explain why it looks more like a fort than a monastery. The question remained: was this the inspiration for James Hilton’s fantasy?
A man named Eaz approached me on the terrace. He’s the custodian of the building and has lived in the Hunza all his life. He told me about the battle with British troops in 1891, when the independent kingdom fought against the empire’s fear of Russian movement toward India. He mentioned that “1938” was a significant year.
James Hilton wrote *Lost Horizon* in 1933. When I asked if Hilton could have been inspired by this valley, Eaz nodded. “I suppose he came here,” he said. “This might have been his inspiration.
”
I wasn’t so sure. But it didn’t matter. I set out knowing Shangri-La was fiction. James Hilton invented it.
But he also believed that each of us needs a place like it, a place to escape to, even if only in our imagination. A place of hope, a safe haven from the world. So my search for Shangri-La was never just about finding a valley. It was about finding something within myself.
A heaven at the end of the earth. And maybe that’s why I kept walking.
