Afterwards, I went out for a stroll on my own. Peshawar is a very ancient city--Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and Marco Polo had all been there before us. I wandered into a bazaar which looked like it had been there forever, and into a narrow, open-fronted building that from the outside seemed it might be a place to buy carpets or dates and pomegranates. Or batteries for my Walkman, which was what I actually wanted.

Inside, when my eyes adjusted to the light it was like Ali Baba's Cave. No batteries. No dates or pomegranates. Carpets, yes. A stack of them in a corner on one side of the room. Also porcelain vases, silks, a glass case of wristwatches, a whole wall covered with daggers shaped like crescent moons, another wall and the ceiling hung with hand-beaten copper trays and jugs, and coffeepots whose ornately curved spouts, like the gleaming oil lamps displayed beside them, suggested homes for genies. In the deep shadows in the back of the room I could just make out the stocks of rifles, maybe fifty of them, hanging on the wall. Beneath them was a brazier which was smoking and giving off just enough light to make the rifles' reddish-brown stocks but not their barrels visible.

Probably it was because I was staring toward the guns that the first words I heard inside the shop--spoken by a thin, young black-eyed fellow in a mud-colored turban who'd been lurking quietly since I entered--were: "You come, sir, for firing?" I hadn't answered yet when he spoke up again, said "My name, sir, is Young Honest Ali, and I will be pleased, sir, to accommodate your test firing of any of the many fine weapons on the wall."

As it turned out when he switched on the bare bulb hanging by a cord from the ceiling, there was a much broader selection than just the rifles I'd first seen. The gunmetal was dulled and absorbed the soft light emitted by the coals in the little brazier. Which explained why I hadn't seen the pistols or the machine guns or the hand grenades also hanging on the wall and from the ceiling.

Young Honest Ali pulled down an armful of guns, and then he opened a cigar box containing fountain pens, took one of those too, and turned and marched into the darkness, saying, "Come, sir. This way. Follow me." Off we went, through a warren of back rooms groaning with weapons, a whole Devil's larder of them.

Peshawar is the largest conduit for arms in the world. In Peshawar you can buy every Soviet, American, British, or Chinese gun, grenade, launcher, missile, mine, cannon, conventional bomb, or weapon of nearly any kind whatsoever small enough for five men or less to carry. If they don't have it now, they can get it for you by tomorrow night. What Dubai is to gold, Peshawar is to weapons, and a healthy portion of the arms the U.S. funneled into Pakistan for delivery to the mujahideen in Afghanistan actually flowed not west but east, into Kashmir. Where, after all, for the same cause of Al-Islam, mujahideen were fighting another enemy almost as big as the Soviet Union.

Another portion of those arms never made it to either war, but remained in Peshawar for sale to gun runners from all over the world. And in addition to the dazzling selection of foreign arms available in Peshawar, if you weren't hung up on buying guns manufactured by the OEM and you'd like a nice discount, sir, you could also select from the many excellent knockoffs made in the village of Darra Adamkhel, which is in the Tribal Areas near Peshawar.

"Welcome, sir" said Young Honest Ali, "to the Peshawar Smugglers' Market."

Now this was more like it. Just the sort of thing I'd had in mind when Miles recruited me.

But so far the jobs I'd done for the talented Mr. Copeland were nothing to write home about. In fact, my one covert act during this entire trip to Pakistan was an act of covert editing and typing I'd done at the request of Muhammad and Jabir, nothing for Miles.

Our hosts had asked Muhammad to sign a letter, and not just any letter, but "Muhammad Ali's Open Letter to the Pakistani People" for publication in newspapers all over the country. It was a stout and meticulous epic of a letter, and when Jabir and Muhammad read it they saw it included several pointed opinions about domestic Pakistani political issues they knew nothing about. When I read it, I realized also that it had been written by a highly-educated American, not our Pakistani hosts as had been implied. So, in the dead of the night in the back office of the Lahore Hilton, after a hunt for a typewriter of suitable font and point size, I'd rewritten it, and retyped it, careful to replicate the paper and layout of the original document in such a way that, we hoped, after Muhammad signed the new letter the changes wouldn't be noticed until it was too late to change them back. And it had worked. It was the revised and toned-down letter that appeared in Pakistani papers over Muhammad's signature. That had pissed off quite a few people.

But I didn't deserve to die for it.

So, why, when Young Honest Ali finished leading me up the outside stairway onto the rooftop, did he and about a dozen of his friends all lift AK-47s and fire them with wild abandon straight up into the night sky? From whence, my too-logical Western mind concluded immediately, all those bullets must soon rain straight down on us. Or someone nearby.

But next, nothing happened. No one cried out in agony or dropped dead from a bullet hurled back at us from heaven. Up there on the rooftop, cooking fires were going and there were maybe forty or fifty charpoys. A charpoy is sort of a cross between a low bed and a hammock. It consists of a wooden frame with legs which lift it maybe eight or ten inches above the ground and it's strung with webbing usually made of leather in Pakistan and of rushes or hemp in India. No mattress. You sleep on the webbing, and every night hundreds of millions of Pakistanis and Indians do just that in charpoys lined up side by side by side, sometimes acres of them in neat rows, under the sheltering sky. Which, at the moment, was not raining bullets.

So Young Honest Ali and his friends lifted their guns and launched a new and more prolonged burst of happy gunfire into the night. "Joy-shots" is what Lawrence of Arabia called them in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. All over the Muslim world, rifles and machineguns serve as something like the equivalent of party noisemakers in America or Europe. Probably, at any given moment somewhere in the Islamic world, at least one fool is rapturously squeezing off a brace of joy-shots aimed roughly at himself and whoever he's celebrating with.

What I wanted to do was wince and cover my head and tell these crazy assholes to cut it out. But something told me this was a time and place to act brave. No, really, you're too kind. You've made enough fuss about my arrival already. Thank you. Thank you. Nice to meet you too. An honor, really. In fact, I said those last two sentences to them right then in Urdu. But that only prompted huge smiles and reloading and more joy-shots.

Then the guns came down and everyone stood still to give Young Honest Ali a fair chance to ply his trade.

"We have here, sir, for your firing, a fine selection of weapons. All from the vast stores of the Americans and Russians and our brothers the mujahideen. Whom I believe you have met today, sir. We have seen you on the television this evening, sir. No mistaking such a distinguished gentleman as yourself, sir. Normally we charge dearly for the firing. But you, sir, may fire for free. No charge for the firing, sir. And should you wish to make a purchase, you will scarcely believe the price we will give such an honored guest."

Young Honest Ali handed me an AK-47, and said, "Please, sir, you fire now."

I wasn't about to fire it up into the air, and I didn't see any direction I could fire it without maybe hitting someone. The alley below us was filled with men and boys, and donkey carts, and dogs, and piles of spices, and some really-serious-looking chain-fed anti-aircraft guns mounted on tripods. This roof was crowded with people, as was the one on the other side of the alley.

I balked.

Young Honest Ali took the AK-47 from my hands and passed me an older rifle with a long yellow stock. "Here, sir, try this one," he said. "Lee Enfield three-oh-three. British rifle."

"Where? I'll hit someone."

"No, sir. You won't. Fire that way, sir. Through the lane and into the field. No one is there, sir. They all know to stay away."

The gap he wanted me to fire through was about fifty yards out and, because of a roofline that got in the way, about six feet wide at the most. In marksman's terms, the equivalent of the broad side of a barn.

"No."

"Look, sir. AK-74 Shorty Assault Rifle. Just like in Scarface, sir. You must fire it. No charge. You are our guest. Fire that way, sir."

I just stood there like a moron. So one of Young Honest Ali's friends showed me the gap to fire through. He aimed a Kalashnikov down the alley and through the gap and into the field and then squeezed off one round. It looked like fun, but what Young Honest Ali and his friends were running up against was all the gun safety rules my father had drummed into me before he'd let me fire his gun.

"Please, sir, you must fire something. Be our guest. Try this, sir." That was when Young Honest Ali showed me the first weapon of the night that looked safe for me to handle. The gold fountain pen. Which turned out to be the gold-fountain-pen-.22-caliber-single-shot assassination weapon.

Young Honest Ali opened it, loaded it, pointed it for me at a little mud wall on our end of the rooftop. At the moment, there was no one between the wall and me. He kept it pointed to the wall while he handed it to me. The wall had bullet holes in it already.

"Squeeze here, sir."

I did. And with an almost-silent pfffffffft, it fired and I actually heard the bullet smack against the wall.

"Low velocity, sir," said Young Honest Ali. "Excellent for stealth killing."

"How much does that cost?" I said.

"One hundred rupees, sir."

I put it back in his palm.

"For you, sir, our honored guest, fifty rupees."

"I'll give you eighty rupees for two of them," I said.

Young Honest Ali backed up a step and looked me over, saying "Must be ninety rupees, sir."

"Seventy," I said, starting toward the stairs, wondering if they'd grab me if I tried to just walk away now.

"Okay, sir, for you: two diabolical Peshawar pen-guns for eighty-five rupees. Do we have a deal?"

"Done," I said. "One for me and one for Miles."

"Who sir?"

"Miles."

After Young Honest Ali had led me back down the stairs and through the armory to the cigar box to pick up the second pen-gun, no ammo, thank you, he led me out to the street and shook my hand and I asked him where I could buy some batteries.

"I will show you, sir," said Young Honest Ali. "This way."

Then he led me down the street past two or three narrow shopfronts and stopped at a little stand attended by a young-but-one-eyed Pathan with a thick brown moustache and dark brown hair cut in a style reminiscent of the early Beatles. On the stand were what looked like Christmas puddings and fudge and brownies.

"This, sir, is not batteries. But I think it will interest you, sir."

I love England but I hate English pudding and cakes, especially the ones stiff with fruits and nuts and raisins they force on you at the holidays.

"Do you know what this is, sir?"

"Blood pudding?"

"No, sir. Semtex, disguised as pudding."

"Oh!"

"And this one, sir?"

"Fudge?"

"No sir. This one is hashish. You can tell by the color, sir."

"Batteries?"

"This way, sir. A little farther for batteries."

Once I got my batteries, I said good bye, and walked out of the bazaar alone, realizing I might be hard-pressed to find pomegranates here, but every one of the little buildings all around me was filled with arms. And then I remembered riding through San Francisco with Bill Tharp while he told me, "There's a secret world all around us. You just don't see it unless you know where to look."

-- from Overworld, by Larry J. Kolb