Telegraph magazine

The journey to Birir in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan takes you along a terrifying jeep track of 11 hairpin miles. It winds so sharply and narrowly that you can't see more than 100 yards ahead; only extremely skilful drivers can handle the challenge of its crumbling steepness, and every year many people are killed as Jeeps overloaded with timber or passengers or both slide off the edge.

Birir and its two neighbouring valleys nestle below the soaring white walls of the Hindu Kush range, the last strongholds of the Kalash - the 'wearers of black'. The Kalash are the surviving Kafirs of Kafiristan, the 'land of the infidels' made famous by Rudyard Kipling (and then the film director John Huston) in The Man Who Would Be King. For centuries, Kafiristan stretched across Afghanistan and Pakistan; today all that remains is a hill tribe of 3,500 - the only pagans to be found for thousands of miles in any direction.

Many of the Kalash claim descent from the armies of Alexander the Great, and indeed their faces do look strikingly similar to those you would encounter in Croatia or Montenegro. They make wine, revere animals and believe in mountaintop fairies. To observe their lives is to be transported far from today's North-West Frontier, with its increasingly militant, misogynistic brand of Islam, to a world that Homer's contemporaries might have recognised.  Link to the complete article