It takes the best part of a day to reach the Line of Control on the Pakistan side from Skardu. Most outsiders come to this small town to set off for climbing expeditions in the surrounding western Himalayas.

So stunning is the scenery, so seductive the mountains, it seemed doubly tragic to be setting off in a jeep for the war front instead.

The Pakistani officer was breezily unsettling. That night, he said, two hundred shells had landed around the place we were heading for. And this was supposed to be the time the forces involved in the conflict were disengaging.

Flak jacket time again. So much for peace.

Refugee camp

Some have returned

It would almost have been easy to miss the refugee camp. It was about two-thirds of the way to the front.

There were some rudimentary tents, but they blended in with the house-high rocks alongside the dusty unmetalled road. The children scampering around and the elderly men sitting beside the road were the giveaway, as they so often are in refugee settlements.

This was a makeshift place, but the great rocks themselves were for these refugees a sanctuary from fear. They had quarried bunkers beneath them.

They said they had come here with memories of their own villages being shelled so much they couldn't live there any more. They pointed up to bare patches on the hillside above this place.

Shells or rockets had struck there just the night before, they claimed. This was a long way back from the Line of Control.

Could this all have been part of the propaganda war? Was it true? Who knows?

Nearing Kargil

The road clings to the rock face, the surging River Indus is to our left. If it were a crossable frontier ahead, we would soon be in Kargil.

Today the town is on the Indian side, and it gave its name to this war. It feels strange to be so near physically and yet in every other sense so far from Kargil when I have been in the town during the conflict.

But there's an even stranger experience to come, at a Pakistani artillery position. Two British-made World War Two guns are being cleaned. They're among the guns that have been targetting Kargil, the battery commander says.

I couldn't help thinking that meant me, too, when I have been in the town and there has been shellfire.

Some villagers remain

Nawaz Sharif backed down

I walk through Olding, the last village on the Pakistan side. It has an army post but the village itself has taken a punishing from shelling. Not all the inhabitants left.

Jaffar Ali couldn't see any point in doing so when his home is here. Likewise six families who have stayed to see the harvest in.

It's dusk and they are threshing their crop. A pastoral scene that hardly seems to square with their description of the previous night 's artillery duels as among the most intense of all. They tell me 30 adults and children have spent every night of the war in their two-roomed rock bunker.

The irony was that a few hours' trek would have taken me over the menacing ridges to a small village on the Indian side of the Line of Control where I had been hearing the same story earlier.

Though many civilians on this side of the line had taken flight, this too was a community that had stayed put...the children astonishingly unflinching as shells landed nearby.

So is it really over?

The resurgence of firing this week means it will inevitably be a hesitant return home to towns and villages in the battle zone.

An upsurge in militancy

Sonia Gandhi leads Congress against the BJP

After Kargil and the climb-down for Pakistan and the mujahadeen it was widely predicted that there could be a fresh upsurge in militancy in the Kashmir Valley and other parts of Indian Kashmir.

It's happening. India now says it won't talk to Pakistan until it stops stoking the fires of such separatist militancy and accepts the "sanctity" of the Line of Control.

Pakistan claims Kargil wouldn't have happened but for the failure to resolve the 50-year-old Kashmir dispute - both India and Pakistan historically lay claim to the whole of Kashmir.

Enter the Americans, patently cooler towards old ally Pakistan. Watching its hawks like hawks.

That's presumably why President Clinton set aside part of his Independence Day to persuade Pakistan's Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, to back down on Kargil.

But even though it wants India and Pakistan to start talking again there's little sign that Kashmir is on Washington's front burner.

For India, the immediate legacy of the Kargil conflict will be on the political stage. Atal Behari Vajpayee will doubtless fight the elections as the prime minister who saw to it that the infiltrators were pushed back without it turning into a full-scale fourth India-Pakistan war.

Sonia Gandhi already has Congress gunning for the BJP as the party that let the infiltrators in.