We took an all-day excursion from Kashgar into the mountains to a place called Karakul Lake. Saying it that way makes it sound like a lovely drive in the country to a garden spot for a picnic. In fact we did dine in a felt yurt, on warm flatbread our driver stopped in a village along the way to pick up, along with eggs, tea, jam and bananas. But Karakul Lake, though beautiful and serene, is at 11,000 feet, smack in the middle of some of the harshest terrain I've ever seen. It's along the Karakoram Highway near the pass that separates China from Pakistan. The inhospitality of this landscape would be hard to overstate. You leave the parched, dusty desert and begin a climb along twisting roads -- and when the caravans were coming through here, there were no roads -- through mountains rolling endlessly away on both sides. These are stone mountains of varied mineral composition and therefore spectacularly beautiful varied colors. But virtually nothing grows here. The glaciers (which are, of course, receding now) provide snowmelt, but it races over the rocks to the oases, large and small, below. Sometimes enough collects for vegetation, and in those places there will be flocks of sheep, small herds of camels, yaks, or horses. Mostly, though, these giant mountains are rock, their beauty severe and uncaring. The Chinese are digging mines into these hillsides, looking for iron, copper, bauxite, and coal. Unlike the hills I'm used to, which seem stabbed by tunnel mines and flayed by strip mines, these mountains just laugh. They're so huge and so hard and so endless, you get the feeling people can dig wherever they want, as long as they want, and in the end, whenever the mountains feel like it, they'll shrug and bury everyone, and that will be that.