The thing is, I’ve never been to Laarh. Till some months ago, I didn’t even know it existed. Then, one warm morning, a man turned up in Islamabad carrying his tale and his place, and I spent the next several weeks springing the name on people I met, friends, reporters, refugees, and acquaintances, in the hopes of scaring some information from them. Every outsider to this warbitten region knows this experience. For the past decade, the conflict has been churning and ploughing the ground in the border zone till it convulsed and threw places into view, some valleys so hopelessly beautiful you couldn’t believe the stories, the titan clashes, how bodies, guts, and bone had rotted there till the land consumed them, places where the war had lacerated the land into stillness, dusty towns undergoing “security operations,” empty villages standing strange and serious, pakka (built) road, kaccha (unfinished) trail, brushland, heath, pasture, scrabbled earth where the ground was always in a state of play.1 Once, standing on a riverbank where we had come to drink in the scenery, a friend casually pointed a stone’s throw away into the tall, green grass “over

中文翻译：

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地面一直在发挥作用

问题是，我从来没有去过拉尔。直到几个月前，我什至不知道它的存在。然后，一个温暖的早晨，一个人带着他的故事和他的位置出现在伊斯兰堡，接下来的几个星期里，我在我遇到的人、朋友、记者、难民和熟人的名字上出现，希望能吓到一些信息从他们。这个饱受战争蹂躏的地区的每个外人都知道这种经历。在过去的十年里，冲突一直在边境地区翻滚和犁地，直到它发生震动，一些地方被映入眼帘，有些山谷美得令人难以置信，故事、泰坦冲突、身体、内脏和骨头在那里腐烂，直到土地吞噬了它们，战争将土地撕裂成寂静的地方，尘土飞扬的城镇正在进行“安全行动，