LANDI KOTAL was grim, but nonetheless basking in its wild beauty this last March when an unforeseen event took one to the tribal land of Shinwaris. It kept drizzling steadily throughout the eighty-minute or so arduous journey to the 3,500-ft heights of Landi Kotal on a highly unpredictable and potholed road.

The extended winter spell had unleashed an unabated wave of piercing icy winds lashing the valley relentlessly, quite uncommon for the third month of the year. However, uppermost on one’s mind was neither the weather nor the travails of the road, but the intensely troubling fear of the reappearance of the primitive snipers and the spectre of the present day suicide bombers. Luckily, the somber event – a funeral passed off peacefully as the area was found to be enjoying a lull in disorder. The tribesmen too were more or less found to be content, if not happy.

The journey back to Peshawar in the evening hence proved to be more sanguine, providing one with ample time to contemplate the jagged, treeless and stern hills and mountains, and the grassless terrain with rapt concentration. The reverie unfolded numerous pictures of an eventful train journey undertaken some years back through the same plateau. With ecstatic children rushing perilously close to the rails and women coyly beholding the spectacle from atop their rooftops as the train chugged and whistled past their mud and stone houses, a journey back in time ensued in one’s head.

The Khyber Steam Safari that used to carry tourists to the tribal land was an ordinary train, and yet it was not so ordinary. It had perhaps never been intended to be so when it was put into service in 1925. In fact it was the brainchild of a simmering animosity that had occupied the British and Russian Empires for most part of the nineteenth and the first quarter of the twentieth century. But as it happened, in the days to come the train propelled by two engines, one in the front and one at the rear, would prove to be a wonder in the wonderland for the most wondrous people of the world.

One would always wonder which one of the two would be the most fascinating aspect of the adventure, the serpentine treacherous mountainous track or the sight of the wild excitement that the train may incite in the uplands. It turned out that although the arrival of the train did lend an aura of festival to the tribal lands, the erection of the railway track in that particular region must go down as an achievement of profound significance in the annals.

The Landi Kotal plateau offers one of the most daunting settings for any kind of undertaking involving construction in that area.

How did the British engineers perform this feat of the construction of nearly thirty five miles long stretch of the track without recourse to the machinery that we see these days in a period of mere five years? Of course the feat was accomplished with the help of the local tribesmen and the Indians employed as labourers and who must have toiled by the sweat of their brows, but the credit for the conception of the idea and the will to make that happen must go to where it belongs.

It is the absence of that particular idea and the desired will that has paralysed life in our land these days. The most veritable proof of this could be witnessed in Peshawar where the construction of a much trumpeted flyover and most recently of an underpass has brought life to a standstill with both the idling men and the underuse of the state of the art machinery at the site presenting a grotesque example of absurd incompetence and failure.

It is impossible to tell whether our present day engineers have ever used their God given faculties of imagination or if they have ever beheld the view that the thirty four tunnels on the Peshawar to Landi Khana railway track present? If truth be told, each one of those tunnels is a piece of art worth adoring and contemplating endlessly. Not a single brick in that marvel of engineering looks to be out of place, and neither does it look that an inch of the rock more than necessary has been chiseled or blasted off during the construction work that must by all means have been extremely testing and grueling.

Equally awesome is the engineering and aesthetic beauty of those ninety odd bridges and culverts passing through which the travelers would experience an ineluctable feeling of suspense and drama. What an unmitigated tragedy that no train has passed through those panoramic and immensely beautiful tunnels and bridges since 2007!

Where on the planet have all our big talking mandarins disappeared who claim to be in possession of extraterrestrial powers that enable them to have knowledge of industry, agriculture, health, education, irrigation so on and so forth at the same time?

Why cannot they at least make this fabled track functional again, if they cannot produce its equal in craftsmanship and artistry?

Zahoor Durrani, the indefatigable tour operator of KP knows the worth of those nincompoops better than any other person, dead or alive, and he can relate it convincingly in his own modest and passionate style. ‘The last of the safari trains carrying tourists to Landi Kotal left the Peshawar Railway Station in May, 2007,’ he recalls vividly with palpable pangs of pain. ‘It had carried a group of thirty people including eleven ambassadors and their spouses,’ the elderly Durrani recounts as a matter of a significant record set by him as the founder of the safari train service through wilderness.

‘Earlier in 1997, I took Churchill’s grandson and before that several dukes and duchesses on tours that mesmerised them beyond the level of description,’ Durrani keeps sharing information. ‘But since 2007, it is all quiet, no train has moved on the track and portions of it have been washed away by flash floods,’ he laments and adds further how he has tried and failed to shake those in charge out of their rotting and menacing slumbers.

With no saviour in sight, there is little one can hope for in these dark times on our land. The only ray of hope one sees is in the shape of Zahoor Durrani who, lo and behold, is still attracting one odd tourist from nowhere and taking him or her on tours round the city. Would Zahoor be able to bring life back to those forlorn tunnels also?