At 3 a.m. we leave the battle behind and by the light of a crescent moon file silently up a riverbed that cleaves the rugged mountains. At dawn the Muslim call to prayer sounds from the village, now well behind us. The gunfire, which had continued unabated, stops. The mujahidin, and perhaps the government soldiers inside the walls of the fort, are now at prayer.

In this narrow, uncultivated valley some of Afghanistan's internal refugees have built crude houses of earth, wood, and stone. They live on what they have salvaged from their fields or imported from nearby Pakistan. It is still early when the roar of the first jet fills the sky. Though it is high overhead, we scatter, hiding under scrawny pine trees, covering our heads and bodies with pattu, camel-colored blankets that blend with the earth tones of the land. The noise of bombing echoes through the brown and snow-whitened hills. Beside me, Mustafa's face is grim and set.

IN THE LATE AFTERNOON we reach a house high in the mountains. I am invited to sit with the men, and I join them in the nightly ritual of listening to the BBC World Service for news of the outside world and news of their own war. Entering the separate women's world when it is time to sleep, I read, in Persian, a poem called "Autumn of Blood," by Afghanistan's Ustad Khalilullah Khalili:

Each red leaf in the meadow
Reminds me of those killed for
the homeland....

When I return to Pakistan, I learn that the United Nations General Assembly has passed yet another resolution calling for the withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan. The Soviet Union has ignored five previous resolutions, claiming that they constitute interference in Afghanistan's internal affairs.

In a refugee camp at Sateen, not far from the Afghan border, I find some of the last people to flee from Ali Sangi, the village where the gray-and-white cat walked along the ruined wall. Against the counterpoint of a nearby wedding, where women chant and bang hand drums, the survivors recount their stories.

Hazrat Bibi is probably in her 40s, but her face is thin and worn with grief and the trauma of her journey with six children into exile. She breaks into tears at the memory of her husband, killed only a month before.

As the men gather, she turns away toward the wall, hiding her face from them but always watching me. Akbar Khan, a middle-aged man who used to be a farmer and a driver in Kabul, speaks for himself and his village. "We came here about a month ago. Now there is not a single family living in Ali Sangi. Everything was destroyed, everything inside the houses, our clothes and possessions buried under the earth, our children buried under the earth."

PESHAWAR, capital of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, homeland of the Pashtun, or Pathan, tribes that inhabit the border areas of both Afghanistan and Pakistan, has two faces. The old face is that of an exotic crossroads, a wild frontier town near the foot of the Khyber Pass. The modern face is that of a noisy, congested, polluted city that is estimated to have doubled in size in five years since the Soviet invasion.

Some say that Peshawar is now the largest Afghan city outside Kabul. Most of Pakistan's refugee population of about three million is concentrated in this province, though refugees are settled in a long crescent from Chitral in the rugged Hindu Kush range of northern Pakistan to the deserts of Baluchistan Province.