Motorway Between the Higher Mountains: Deep Valleys Below and the Road Towards Islamabad
Rahim Yar Khan → Islamabad · 19 October 2026 · 6:09 AM
Motorway Between the Higher Mountains: Deep Valleys Below and the Road Towards Islamabad
The mountains are higher now, and the motorway runs between them — with deep valleys dropping away below the road.
One minute. That is all that separated the two views. At 6:08 in the morning the motorway had folded itself into a zigzag and begun to climb, curve after curve, higher and higher above sea level. At 6:09, the climb showed us its other face. The mountains on either side had grown taller — not the low, mist-wrapped ridges of the first sighting, but great, steep, silent slopes rising on both sides of the road — and between them, far below the carriageway, the land fell away into deep valleys, mist sitting in them like slow rivers of light. After crossing the plains all night from Rahim Yar Khan, travelling between these great silent mountains towards Islamabad is a feeling that words can hardly hold. This video — sixty-one seconds filmed from the moving vehicle — is that feeling, held still for a minute: the road running between the higher mountains, the valleys deep below, and the capital waiting somewhere beyond the next ridge.
Watch the Video
Watch the sixty-one-second 4K video from the M2 motorway in the Salt Range — the road climbing between the high ridges, with deep valleys falling away on either side, on the morning of 19 October 2026.
Between the higher mountains: the motorway curves between steep green ridges at dawn, the deep valley falling away below the road. AI-generated illustration for this article.
1. The Mountains Grew Higher
There is a moment on every mountain road when you realise the hills have stopped being hills. It does not happen all at once. First there are the low ridges on the horizon, pale in the early light. Then they grow closer, layer upon layer, until they stand on both sides of the road. Then the road begins to climb, folding itself into curves. And then — suddenly, quietly, without any announcement — the slopes on either side are higher than anything you have driven between all morning. The road is no longer crossing a range of hills. It is running through a corridor of mountains, with great steep faces rising on the left and on the right, and the sky narrowed to a bright ribbon overhead.
That is the moment this video catches. Look at the frame and you can feel the change in scale. The ridge on the right is not a gentle slope any more; it is a steep, rocky face, climbing away from the road in a single long sweep, green and gold where the morning sun touches it, dark and cool where it turns away from the light. The ridge on the left falls away just as steeply, down into the valley. And between them, the motorway — a thin, pale ribbon of asphalt with its white centre line — threads its way forward, small and neat and entirely sure of itself, as if it had always belonged here.
It is a strange and wonderful feeling, being small between big things. On the flat plains of the night, the world felt wide and empty, and the vehicle felt like the only moving thing in it. Here, between the higher mountains, the vehicle feels small, and the mountains feel like the only permanent thing in the world. They were here long before the road was built, long before anyone thought of driving from Rahim Yar Khan to Islamabad in a single night, and they will be here long after the last vehicle of the morning has passed. Driving between them is not a conquest. It is a permission — the mountains allowing a road to pass, for a little while, through their country.
And yet the road is not afraid. That is the quiet confidence of a motorway: it does not climb over the mountains or tunnel through them, it simply finds the line between them and follows it, curve after curve, the way a river follows a valley. The engineers who laid this road understood something simple and true — that the kindest way through high country is not to fight the mountains, but to travel with them, between them, at their pace.
“After crossing the plains all night from Rahim Yar Khan, travelling between these great silent mountains towards Islamabad is a feeling that words can hardly hold.”
2. Looking Down: The Deep Valleys Below
Every mountain road has two views, and the second one is the one that makes your stomach drop a little. The first view is ahead: the next curve, the next ridge, the road still climbing. The second view is down. And on this stretch, down is a long way.
The valleys beside this road are deep — not the shallow dips between low hills, but real mountain valleys, falling away from the carriageway in steep green slopes until they reach a floor you can barely see, where the morning mist sits thick and white. From the window of a moving vehicle, the valley floor looks like a different world: soft, pale, silent, lit by a light that has not yet reached the bottom. The mist moves slowly down there, curling around the lower slopes, hiding the stream or the fields or the small road that must run along the bottom, and revealing them again in slow, drifting glimpses.
There is a particular kind of beauty in a deep valley seen from above, and it is different from the beauty of a mountain peak. A peak is proud and distant. A valley is close and secret. It draws the eye down, and the eye wants to follow it — to see where it goes, what lives at the bottom of it, how far it runs before it opens out into the plains. From the motorway, you cannot follow it. You can only watch it fall away beside you, curve after curve, and wonder.
Why the road runs high
The motorway runs high here for a simple, practical reason: the valley floor is no place for a fast road. Down there the land is steep, broken and wet, cut by streams and rockfalls, and any road built at the bottom would be washed out, blocked or buried within a season. So the road climbs the slope instead, finding the firm ground halfway up, where the rock is solid and the drainage runs away from the carriageway instead of across it. The valleys stay deep below, and the road stays safe above them — close enough to see the mist, far enough above it to keep moving in any weather.
That height is what makes the drive so memorable. A road that runs along a valley floor shows you the valley from the inside, one bend at a time. A road that runs high on the slope shows you the whole valley at once — its depth, its shape, the way it bends away between the ridges, the mist lying in it like a river of cloud. It is the difference between walking through a room and seeing it from a balcony. From up here, the land becomes a map you can read with your eyes, and every curve of the road turns the page.
It is also why the passengers do the looking and the driver does the driving. The drop beside this road is real, and the barrier at the edge of the carriageway is there for a reason. The driver’s eyes belong on the road — on the next curve, the next vehicle, the white line. The passengers can lean to the window and watch the valleys fall away, and they should, because the view changes with every bend, and no two curves show the same valley twice.
From the plains to the peaks — where we are now
The gauge above is the journey in one line. The plains are behind us, the foothills are under us, the zigzag is the climb we have just made, the higher mountains are where we are right now — and Islamabad, still unseen beyond the next ridge, is waiting at the end of the road.
High above the valley: the mountain road winds along the steep slope with the mist-filled valley far below and the ridges climbing higher towards Islamabad. AI-generated illustration for this article.
3. The Silence of the Great Mountains
If the zigzag climb was a feeling of rising, this stretch is a feeling of quiet. The mountains here do not shout. They stand. And standing beside them, in a vehicle moving quietly between them, you feel a kind of silence that the plains never gave you.
On the flat motorway of the night, the sound was the sound of the road itself — the steady hum of the tyres, the rush of the wind, the engine holding its note for hour after hour. Between the higher mountains, that sound changes. The slopes on either side seem to swallow it. The wind is different here too: cooler, thinner, smelling faintly of rock and pine and the cold air that has sat in the valleys all night. Even the light is quieter, softer, filtered through the mist and the ridges, falling in long, slow bands across the slopes.
It is the silence that travellers remember most about mountain mornings, and it is the hardest thing to describe in words. It is not the absence of sound — there are birds, there is wind, there is the engine — but the presence of something larger than sound. The mountains are so big, and so still, that they make everything else feel temporary: the vehicle, the journey, the night behind us, even the road itself. For a minute, between the ridges, you are not a traveller on a schedule. You are a small, moving thing in a very old, very quiet landscape, and the quiet is a gift.
That is why the caption for this video says the feeling is one that words can hardly hold. Some moments on a journey are not meant to be explained. They are meant to be felt, and then remembered, and then — if you are lucky enough to have a camera running — watched again later, when the plains are flat around you and the mountains are far behind, and the quiet comes back for sixty-one seconds.
4. The Night That Brought Us Here
No moment on a journey stands alone, and this one is no exception. To understand why the higher mountains mattered so much at nine minutes past six in the morning, you have to remember the road that brought us here.
It began at a lonely level crossing outside Rahim Yar Khan, where the gates were down, the road was empty, and the watchman’s house stood dark beside the silent tracks — a scene straight out of a horror film, waiting in the still night for a long freight train to rumble through. It continued at a quiet motorway fuel station at one in the morning, with fuel, fresh air and a short break under the bright canopy lights. Then back on the M4 in the dark, overtaking a bus and crossing the great River Ravi on its long bridge, the night drive in full flow.
By dawn we were leaving the Bhera rest area, crossing the River Jhelum on the M2 with the early fog still hanging over the water and the fields. At 6:04 the first mountains appeared on the horizon — the hills that welcome you to Islamabad. At 6:06 they had grown closer, layer upon layer of mist-wrapped ridges. At 6:07 they were all around us, and the sky was opening above them. At 6:08 the road folded itself into a zigzag and began to climb, higher and higher above sea level. And at 6:09, this: the mountains grown higher still, the deep valleys falling away below, and the road running between them towards the capital.
Each of those moments is part of the same story, and the story is richer for all of them. The night at the level crossing, the one o’clock fuel stop, the rivers crossed in the dark, the first mountains, the closer ridges, the mountains all around, the zigzag climb, and now the higher mountains with their deep valleys — the road has been building towards this moment all night, and this minute is the reward it has been saving.
5. How a Motorway Threads the Mountains
It is easy to watch a video like this and think only about the view. But the road itself deserves a moment of attention, because running a motorway between higher mountains with deep valleys below is one of the quietest pieces of engineering on the whole journey.
A mountain slope is not flat ground with a road painted on it. It is rock, soil, water and gravity, all pulling in different directions, and a road that ignores any one of them will not last. The builders of this stretch had to cut into the hillside where the slope was too steep, build up the downhill side where the ground fell away, and put drains and culverts everywhere the mountain’s own water wants to run — because mountain water does not ask permission, and it will take a road with it if the road stands in its way.
The barriers along the valley side are part of the same thinking. On flat ground, a barrier is a courtesy. Here, beside a deep valley, it is a promise: that the road knows where its edge is, and that it will keep you on the right side of it. The wide lanes, the gentle curves, the clear markings — all of them are the road’s way of saying that it has thought about this valley before you ever arrived, and that it has done the worrying for you.
The road that follows the valley
Notice, too, how the road follows the land instead of fighting it. It does not punch straight through the ridge, and it does not drop to the valley floor. It takes the line the mountain offers — the shelf of firm ground along the slope, the natural contour that the water and the rock have already shaped — and it follows that line, curve after curve, for as long as the mountain allows. That is why the drive feels so smooth, even here, between the higher mountains: the road is not forcing its way through the landscape, it is travelling with it.
It is the same lesson the zigzag taught us a minute earlier, carried one step further. The zigzag folds the climb so that no vehicle has to do the impossible. The high road between the mountains folds the journey so that the road never has to fight the valley. And the traveller gets the best of both: a safe, steady road, and a view that no flat motorway could ever give.
There is something worth remembering in that, beyond the drive itself. The best roads, like the best journeys, are not the ones that force their way through. They are the ones that find the line the land is already offering, and follow it — patiently, curve after curve, between the higher mountains, above the deep valleys, towards whatever is waiting at the end.
6. If You Drive This Road at Dawn
For anyone planning the same road — Rahim Yar Khan to Islamabad, overnight, by motorway — this stretch carries a few practical lessons that are worth writing down before the memory fades.
- Time your night so the dawn finds you in the mountains. The higher mountains are at their best in the first hour of light, when the mist is still lying in the deep valleys and the sun is still low enough to paint the ridge tops gold. Plan your fuel and rest stops the night before so that the morning finds you rising between the mountains, not still crossing flat country in the dark.
- Let the passenger take the photographs and the video. The views change with every curve at this hour, and the drop beside the road is real. The driver’s eyes belong on the road — on the next curve, the next vehicle, the barrier at the valley side. The best footage from a moving vehicle is taken by the person who is free to watch the mountains, not the one watching the traffic.
- Expect mist in the valleys, and welcome it. The morning mist on this road is not bad weather — it is the weather that makes the deep valleys beautiful. It softens the valley floor, lights the near slopes, and turns an ordinary drive into a moving picture. The road above the mist is the view you will remember longest.
- Keep your speed gentle on the curves. The road is engineered to be easy, but it is still a mountain road, with real drops beside it. Slow down for the turns, hold your lane, and let the road do its work. The view will still be there at the next curve.
- Keep your fuel and your energy in hand. A mountain road asks more of a vehicle than flat driving does, and the road ahead climbs higher still, past Kallar Kahar and towards the Margalla Hills. A full tank, a rested driver and a short break at Bhera make the difference between enjoying the hills and merely enduring them.
- Watch for the moment the mountains grow higher. It will come suddenly, as it came to us at 6:09 — not gradually, but all at once, when the ridges on either side rise into great steep slopes and the valleys fall away deep below. When it comes, let yourself feel it. That first sight of the higher mountains is the dawn paying you back for the night, and it is the best part of the whole journey.
Above all, remember what this minute of road is really saying: the journey is the destination’s first chapter, not its waiting room. The night at the level crossing, the one o’clock fuel stop, the rivers crossed in the dark, the first mountains at 6:04, the closer ridges at 6:06, the mountains all around at 6:07, the zigzag at 6:08 and the higher mountains at 6:09 — each of them is part of the story, and the story is richer for all of them. Islamabad was waiting at the end of the road, but the road itself had already given us the morning.
So here is the view, exactly as we felt it: a motorway between the higher mountains, deep valleys below, the great silent slopes rising on either side, and the capital waiting beyond the next ridge. The whole night of driving, worth it for this one minute of road. And the best of the journey — the higher mountains, the deep valleys, the bridge between the peaks, Kallar Kahar, and Islamabad itself — still to come.
A traveller’s note: the higher mountains are only the middle of the climb. Ahead lie the deep valleys, the bridge between the peaks, and the famous town of Kallar Kahar — and then, at last, the Margalla Hills and Islamabad. Take the mountain road slowly. It is the part of the journey you will remember longest.
All words original. Images: AI-generated illustrations for this article. © Explore With Sarim.
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