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explained that Pakistani law was non-existent where we were. Officially, it was in the hands of the tribal authorities. “But only on the roads,” he said. “If the police come into the village, the people will kill them.” Sohail said his own village was run by the patriarch of a leading family, “a very big man.” When the patriarch died, his son would take over.
    Dara Adam Khel, when we finally arrived, looked like any other rural village in the area. There were a few butcher shops with goat carcasses and sides of beef hanging in the windows. Some had tables out front covered in sheep heads. Small boys stood behind them trying to wave off the flies that gathered in the rising heat. Men lounged in shadowed teahouses. But the gunfire was constant and unnerving. It began the moment we stepped out the car and continued as we followed Sohail to his friend’s house, where we reclined on rope beds for a quick meal of flatbread and sweet, milky tea. All around the village, craftsmen and prospective buyers were testing the merchandise. And every time the gunfire shattered a few fleeting minutes of quiet, I would wince and Sohail and his friend would laugh, one of them slapping me on the back.
    When we finished our tea, we walked into town, Sohail’s friend carrying an assault rifle slung over his shoulder. We browsed through dozens of workshops and showrooms where proud and occasionally bored craftsman showed off their handiwork. It felt like we were on a school field trip. The gunsmiths worked sitting on the floor of simple workshops and appeared to use the most basic tools. One fit a gun barrel into the wooden stock of a rifle while squatting below a large poster of a dove with the word “Peace” written on it in English. Children crouched on mats outside shops with piles of defective bullets in front of them, knocking them apart to retrieve the gunpowder inside. The most common weapon produced was the Kalashnikov, or AK-47, the assault rifle that is popular throughout the developing world and is valued for its basic design and reliability. They’re cheap and easy to repair — the preferred weapon of guerillas everywhere. Other craftsman specialized in shotguns and pistols. One designed a one-shot gun disguised as pen.
    A gunsmith in Dara Adam Khel.
    I asked Sohail how everyone in town learned to make weapons. “It’s a skill that’s passed from father to son. They are not doing it for three or four years. They are doing it for 150 years. My grandfather, he was making guns, too,” Sohail said, and then added: “But I’m different. I want to work as a pharmacist.”
    I had grown used to the clatter of small arms fire when louder explosions erupted. Bright flashes like firecrackers appeared on a nearby cliff. Someone was hammering away at the hillside with an anti-aircraft gun.
    â€œThey’re having a marriage in the town. That’s part of the celebration,” Sohail said. “In the city, we use Kalashnikovs. Here, a bigger gun is okay.”
    Before leaving we fired off a few magazines from an AK-47, bruising our shoulders and burning our hands on the hot barrel. Then we said our goodbyes to the gunsmiths. On our way out of town, Sohail’s friend, who was driving, stopped the car and a small boy, about three years, climbed into Sohail’s lap. “This is my friend’s neighbour,” he said, nodding at the driver. “He is going to be a smuggler, too.”
    We stopped in the smugglers’ bazaar on our way back to Peshawar. Sohail knew one of the vendors, so it wasn’t a problem for Adam and me to be there. We drank tea in the back of the shop among enormous blocks of hash and opium. “This is the mother of cocaine,” the smuggler said, pointing to a fist-sized chunk of opium, “but you can also break off a little and put it in your tea.”
    The hashish and opium seller was a young man with the thinnest