Attock
— — two rivers, one still grey with mountain.
Not only on a wall.
“Northern Punjab, the border country between the Pothohar plateau and the Khyber. The Kabul River runs down out of the Hindu Kush and meets the Indus here in two colours that hold their line for nearly a kilometre downstream. Akbar built the fort above the confluence in 1581 to hold the crossing on the road to Kabul. The trains still rumble across the old bridge.
Attock, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Attock District lies in the northern Punjab of Pakistan, on the right bank of the Indus River about 80 kilometres west of Islamabad. The town of Attock Khurd sits where the Kabul River, descending from the Hindu Kush across Afghanistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, joins the Indus. The Grand Trunk Road and the Karachi-Peshawar railway cross the rivers here on a pair of bridges. The district holds a population of roughly 1.9 million at an elevation around 340 metres above sea level, on the southern edge of the Pothohar plateau.
The Kabul River runs clearer and the Indus runs grey with glacial silt, and where they meet the two colours hold a distinct seam for nearly a kilometre before mixing. The combined flow then enters the Indus gorge and turns south toward the plains. The Indus past Attock carries annual discharge averaging around 90 cubic kilometres, fed by snowmelt from the Karakoram and the western Himalaya. The confluence has been a strategic crossing since at least the Mauryan period and was the river-crossing point for Alexander's army in 326 BCE.
Attock Fort sits on a low bluff above the right bank, built between 1581 and 1583 under the orders of the Mughal emperor Akbar to secure the river crossing on the road to Kabul. The walls are dressed sandstone, roughly two kilometres in circuit, with four gates oriented to the approach roads: Delhi, Lahori, Kabuli, and Mori. The fort served the Mughals, the Sikh Empire under Ranjit Singh, and then the British garrison after 1849. It remains a Pakistan Army installation today and is not open for public tours.