A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (14 page)

‘We’re over the worst.’

‘I don’t care a—what we’re over. Watch what you’re doing.’

I was sobered.

By now all three of us were tired. The journey over the glacier was a test of endurance. Our goggles were steamed up; we moved infinitely slowly. As we neared the end of the glacier, my horizon dropped more and more until it took in nothing but the loop of rope between myself and Abdul Ghiyas and the ice immediately
underfoot. In the ice were mysterious holes eight inches deep and perhaps an inch wide. It was as though they had been made with a drill or else as though a plug had been removed. At the bottom there was sometimes a little earth or a single stone. The glacier was now in full melt: from beneath it came the whirring of invisible streams and when we reached the foot the water roared from it like a mill race in flood.

We reached our camp at half past one. The exhilaration we had felt perched high on the wall seemed a dream, something we had never experienced. Now all the disadvantages of the place we had chosen as ‘Camp I’ were apparent. The sun was high overhead and there was no shade; the tent was like a small oven. It was not constructed for this sort of thing; it was intended for ‘the final assault’ and lacked a fly sheet which would have reduced the temperature inside to a bearable level for at least one of the party. ‘The tent for the approach march’, fitted with all the aids of comfort that any explorer could desire, ventilators, fly screens, ridge poles and extensions, had been a non-starter. It was an excellent tent but it had been obvious, when we had erected it in a garden in Kabul, that if we took it with us we should be spending most of our waking hours putting it up and dismantling it.

Tentless, we rigged up our sleeping-bag covers on the ends of our ice-axes and cowered behind them, too tired to do anything but drink tea and nibble a little mint cake.

Hugh looked green. ‘As well as that other trouble, I’ve got a splitting head,’ he said.

‘At least your head’s not bleeding.’ I was carrying out my twice-daily dressing on my feet; each time the operation became more and more gruesome. I was wondering whether there would be enough lint to last the whole journey. ‘And I’ve got an inside, too.’

Abdul Ghiyas said he proposed to give up climbing altogether. ‘I have a headache. Also, I have a numerous family,’ he remarked.
I sympathized with him. Similar thoughts had been occurring to me constantly throughout the morning.

With the general lack of amenity and conversation resembling that of three elderly hypochondriacs, I found it impossible to sleep. All through the afternoon I trudged miles over the plateau. I even revisited the higher lake and lay down on my stomach half-tempted to drink. The shallows were a ledge of rock two feet wide; beyond they plunged into green, icy depths, in which strange fish, like little brown sticks fitted with furry stoles, shrugged themselves along.

Besides the primulas which were growing everywhere, there were golden
ranunculus
and
pontentilla
, blue
nepeta
and yellow and red rose root; there were bees and small ivory butterflies with grey wing markings; high above the plateau choughs with ragged wings cawed sadly; I also saw numbers of small speckled birds rather like thrushes and, wheeling about the crags near the
Son of Mir Samir,
one solitary great eagle.

By seven o’clock the sun had gone from the plateau and once again clouds swirled about the mountain. After a good dinner of soup, chocolate, jam and coffee we got into the tent. It was a very tiny tent so Abdul Ghiyas slept in the open. Wrapped in an Arctic sleeping-bag with a hood fitted to it so that he looked like some fantastic insect at the chrysalis stage, he was really better off than we were.

Before retiring into it he made us arm ourselves with knives and ice-axes.

‘Against the wolves.’

‘It seems silly,’ I said to Hugh.

‘It’s all right for us. We’re inside.’

Like all the other nights I ever passed with Hugh it was a disturbed one. The tent fitted us like a tight overcoat and it was difficult to avoid waking one another on the journeys to the
outside that we were forced to make with increasing frequency as the night wore on. Every time one or other of us emerged Abdul Ghiyas would start up brandishing his ice-axe. Exposed on the mountain-side in the wind, everything crackling cold around us, Abdul Ghiyas’s night terrors seemed more tangible.

Yet in the morning Hugh seemed surprised when I complained that I had had a bad night.

‘Whenever I got up you were sound asleep.’

‘I wasn’t. That was to avoid hurting your feelings. I pretended to be asleep.
You
were asleep when I got up. I heard you snoring.’

‘But I didn’t sleep
at all
.’

Whether because of too little sleep or too much we all got up far too late in the morning and it was half past five before we left. We should have started an hour earlier. From what we had experienced the previous day, it was obvious that it was going to be far too hot to beat about investigating routes up the mountain much after eleven o’clock. Abdul Ghiyas remained behind. But it was difficult to envy him his solitary vigil, exposed to the sun on this beautiful yet awful plateau.

Our destination was the south-west side of Mir Samir – if such a side did in fact exist, what was by no means certain. We hoped to reach it through the break in the rock wall beyond the lake.

Inside, beyond the break, the valley was a fearsome place choked with vast boulders that rocked underfoot at the lightest touch; from far under them came the sound of distant streams. To the left the inner walls of
The Son
rose sheer above us; to the right the smooth icy wall from which Abdul Ghiyas’s great stone had descended on him. Ahead the
moraine
was so steep that the mountain itself was invisible.

At the top we came to a wall of rock with a trail scooped out of it by ibex, up which we got easily enough, roped together, and found ourselves in a vast box with three sides, shut in under the
west wall, with the ‘Son’ towering above us on the left. It was a dark fearsome place at this hour, full of swirling mist which obscured the summit, with black rock underfoot in which were pools of water still covered with thick ice from the night frost. To the right Abdul Ghiyas’s stone-falling wall died out, and there was a defile between the end of it and the mountain which rose in a vast buttress to a false summit. Up one side of this buttress there was a possible way to the false summit, starting with steep snow, but there was no way of knowing whether one could reach the summit itself from it other than by going to see, which neither of us was anxious to do. The foot of the buttress was littered with fragments of rock that had only fallen quite recently. As we moved gingerly round the base, other small pieces came whistling down, none of them larger than a penny but heavy and quite lethal, like falling shrapnel.

‘I wish those climbing waitresses from the inn were here,’ said Hugh. He voiced a thought that I had been about to express myself. ‘They’d be worth their weight in gold.’

Quite suddenly we found ourselves looking on to another glacier. The part we could see was about two miles long and on the far side was the ridge we had been looking for, the south-west ridge, a jagged reef a thousand feet high, curving round at the head of the glacier and joining on to the mountain itself in much the same way as the wall on the other glacier but far higher and longer; like a saw with teeth, sixty feet high.

The glacier was a strange place. Here there was no sound of rushing water. There was an immense silence except for the occasional rumbling of falling rock.

We sat down on some curious flat boulders supported on stalks of ice, phenomena of glacial action, and considered what to do next.

‘If we can get on to the ridge, we might do it,’ Hugh said.

‘How do you propose to get on to the ridge?’

‘From the end. We can work our way along it.’

I thought of the pinnacles; negotiating these might take us days. With no porters to back us it seemed impossible. I produced these objections.

‘All right, let’s try the backside of this buttress; at least it’s near.’

We were about two thirds of the way up the glacier; the backside of the buttress led to the false peak we had admired from the other side in the three-sided box earlier on.

Hugh led. The rock was a sort of demoralized granite which came to pieces in the hands. After two pitches I had been hit on the head twice by fragments the size of a ping-pong ball, but when pieces as large as cannon balls began to fall I called on him to stop. On this front the whole thing was falling to pieces. It was suicide.

By now it was intensely hot. The sun was sucking the strength out of us like a gigantic sponge. Because of this, the time of day and our own lack of guts, we gave up. I am ashamed to write it but we did.

Back in the box we tried the other side of the buttress, climbing the first steep ice slope. By now the mist had cleared and the way ahead shone clearly. Both of us were convinced that the way led nowhere that would advance us to the top.

‘Down?’

‘Damn! Yes.’

We made our way to the head of the wall where the ibex trail was, coming to it too far to the left where it was really steep. Now with the same recklessness born of fatigue that I had shown the previous day, Hugh raced ahead and began to descend it unroped.

All the way down to the camp with Hugh far ahead of me, I nursed this grievance, treasuring up all the disagreeable things I was going to say to him. I even hoped he would fall and break his ankle so that I could say ‘I told you so’.

It was in this unhealthy frame of mind that I tottered into the camp but he, himself, was so exhausted and so obviously pleased to see me that I forgot these insane thoughts. Abdul Ghiyas had already made tea and rose to meet me with a steaming bowl the size of a small chamber pot. Unfortunately he had damaged my air-bed by dragging it over the rocks and sitting on it with no air in it.

‘I suggest we try another day’s reconnaissance,’ Hugh croaked, as we lay side by side on the rock, like a couple of herrings grilling steadily. ‘I think we should try the south-west ridge, in spite of what you said up on the glacier.’

‘It’s crazy.’

We wrangled on for some time; such an altitude is not conducive to mildness. Finally Hugh said, ‘The only alternative is to try the other side of the mountain, the south side of that ridge which we saw from the rock wall yesterday.’

‘How far?’

‘Three days’ march – the state we’re in at the moment. If we leave at once we can be at Kaujan tonight, half-way up the Chamar Valley by tomorrow night and under the mountain the day after tomorrow.’

When we sorted out the gear, I discovered that I had left a karabiner and a nylon sling at the foot of the glacier when we had unroped after the attempt of the day before. It says something for the state of mind induced by altitudes even as moderate as this that I immediately decided to go and fetch them.

‘Where the devil are you going?’ I was putting on my boots.

‘Going to fetch the karabiner and the sling.’

‘Don’t worry. It’s not worth it. We’ve got quite enough.’

All would now have been well but he added in a rather schoolmasterish way, ‘The only thing is don’t make a practice of it.’

‘I knew you’d say that, that’s why I’m going to fetch them.’

‘You must be mad,’ said Hugh.

I was mad. I went up past the lake that invited me to drink from it or bathe in it or drown in it, all by turns; over the
moraine
by a different route. I reached the glacier, here a mile wide, and by an unbelievable stroke of fortune struck the exact place where I had left the karabiner lying on a flat rock.

I turned back feeling virtuous. But not for long; this time the lake was too much for me. It twinkled and beckoned in the sunshine, stirred by the gentle breeze. I thought how agreeable it would be to plunge my head under water, if only for a moment. The next instant I did so. Before I realized what I was doing I was drinking deeply from the warmer shallows. Having done so I felt exactly as though I had participated in some loathsome crime, like cannibalism, a crime against humanity that turns all men’s hands against one. Actually, it was only a crime against my own person but the feeling of defection from moral standards was the same.

I reached the camp at a quarter to one, exactly two hours after I had quitted it. It was no longer a camp, just a slab of rock with my pack resting on it, strapped up, waiting for me; somehow it accentuated the loneliness of the place.

Apart from the sound of rushing water and the occasional boom of falling rock there was not a sound. I stayed there for ten minutes, enjoying the experience of being alone in this great amphitheatre of mountains and at the same time not doing anything. Then I started off with my load. For the descent the loads had been divided among the three of us, so the shares were larger than they had been going up.

By now my powers of concentration were seriously impaired. Instead of following the main torrent down to the meadow, I started to come off the mountain too far to the north and found myself in the middle of the
moraine
that descended to the meadow a thousand feet below.

The descent was a nightmare. It was only a thousand feet but the rocks were balanced insecurely on top of one another, making it impossible to hurry. I could see the rock of our ‘base camp’ below, the horses, our men crouched over the fire, the green grass, but none of these things seemed to get any closer. I was nearly in tears from vexation.

Finally I got down and stumbled over the blessed grass and the few yards to the shadow of the rock. For the moment shade was all I required. An hour later we left for Kaujan in the valley below. The mountain had won – at least for the moment.

At the bottom of the third meadow, sitting cross-legged on the thick green grass beside the river, Abdul Rahim was waiting for us. He had already been down to the
aylaq
and returned, and we wondered what had brought him back to meet us half-way up again. He had been waiting for several hours, news of our failure on the mountain having reached him by the mysterious system of communication, part telegraphy, part telepathy, that operates all over Asia. With him he had brought a loaf of bread for each of us. It had been cooked in butter and was just sufficiently burnt to make it delicious, far better than the awful stodges produced by our drivers.

‘I baked it for you myself,’ he said, and waited politely for us to finish it before telling us what he had come about.

‘There has been an accident. This morning, while it was still dark, Muhammad Nain, my brother’s son, went out from the
aylaq
with his rifle to shoot marmot. He was high on the mountain waiting in
kaminagh
[ambush] on a needle of rock. At the fifth hour I heard a shot and looking up saw Mani [this was how Abdul Rahim contracted his name] fall from the top. Like an ibex I ran
up the hill and found him lying like a dead man. I carried him on my back to the
aylaq.
He is badly hurt; I fear that he will die. Only you with your medicine can save him.’

Abdul Rahim had seen Hugh dressing the deep cut on the foreleg of Shir Muhammad’s horse; also the saddle sores which that feckless and brutal man had allowed to develop by neglect. Watching Hugh as he had applied ointment and lint, gently as though to a sick child, he had commented dryly:

‘If Shir Muhammad was ill he would never receive such treatment as his horse does today.’

We set off at a tremendous pace, pains in feet and stomachs forgotten, to catch up with the drivers who were an hour’s march ahead and prevent them going on down the Parian Valley with the medicines. Soon we came to the rock wilderness where Abdul Rahim, who had up to now been travelling barefooted with his shoes slung round his neck, stopped to put them on. I could see no difference in the going, most of the way the track itself had been equally rough. Perhaps like Irish peasants who are reputed to carry their boots to the church door, he sensed that he was nearing civilization.

At this point I was forced to a halt by an overwhelming necessity and the other two pressed on ahead without me. Thence I had to follow the trail of Abdul Rahim’s shoes in the dust. Soled with American motor tyres they left the imprint ‘Town ‘n Country’ in reverse – yrtnuoC n’ nwoT, yrtnuoC n’ nwoT. On and on it went until by repetition it acquired an almost mystic quality, Town ‘n Country, Town ‘n Country, Town ‘n Country, and I became bemused by it like a Buddhist saying
om mani padme hum om mani padme hum
, as he tonks along the road to the holy places. As a result I lost myself high above the main track at a dead-end fit for ibex only with a descent as difficult as the descent from the glacier had been a few hours before.

I was tired and the track seemed to go down and down for ever; past the defile where we had had such difficulty with the horses on the way up; past nomad tents that had not been there three days previously; past a woman who crouched like a scared rabbit by the side of the track, face averted until I passed; past mountain men, Tajik and Pathan, who clasped my hand silently but in a friendly way; down until I reached the
aylaq
where I found Hugh with the horses all unloaded and the medicine spread over the path blocking the way.

He was in a filthy temper. ‘Couldn’t find the—medicine chest; had to unload every—horse before I could find it. Never realized we had so many packets of soup in my life. Do you know where it was? In the last box, on the last—one.’

‘Should I have given him morphia?’ he asked anxiously. Hugh’s attitude to medicine was always a little vague, reflected in the curious collection of drugs he had assembled for this journey.

‘What have you done up to now?’

‘Cold compresses, washed the cuts I could get at.’

‘You haven’t told me what’s wrong with him yet.’

‘I’ve seen him,’ Hugh said. He was calmer now. ‘I went with Abdul Rahim. He was lying in one of the bothies under a pile of quilts. It was very dark, difficult to see anything inside and the place was crowded with people. He must be about sixteen; his moustache was just beginning to grow. I could only see his face. It was covered with flies. His nose and his lips were so swollen he looked like a Negro. The women had shaved his scalp; it was all bruised and covered with bloody patches. He was very restless, moving under the quilts and groaning.’

‘Lucky you didn’t give him morphia: he’s probably got concussion. It would have finished him off.’

‘I didn’t. His eyes were sealed up with congealed blood. We washed his head and face. Gradually he managed to open one eye
and part of his lips. He groaned a lot. Then everyone began to shake him. “Mani, Mani, can you hear us?” they began to shout but he couldn’t answer. Then the most extraordinary thing happened. The time had come to dress his other wounds. Abdul Rahim pulled the quilt back and uncovered his arms and chest. It was the most devilish thing I have ever seen.
The boy had the body of a goat.
He was completely encased in a thick black goatskin. It fitted close up under his arms and sticking up above his chest were two grey nipples. I asked Abdul Rahim what was the meaning of it.

‘“When our people are sick,” he said, “we always put them in this goatskin. Its heat draws the poison out of the body and into the skin.”’

It was a strange story. Was Mani’s goatskin a last vestige of the kingdom of the goat-god Pan who, having been driven from the meadows by the sword of Islam, still retained some influence in the sick room of the nomad peoples?

Back in the poplar grove at Kaujan we were too tired to eat much. Abdul Ghiyas and his men cooked the lamb they had bought from the Pathans in the top meadow, boiling it for an hour and a half in a big iron pot with salt, pepper and the fat of the tail until it was ready to eat. The meat was rather tasteless and peppery, but the smell of fat was almost unendurable after such a day. We had been on the go since half past four, climbed to 17,000 feet and had now come down to 9,000. Thinking to please me, for I had kept my views about the tail of
ovis aries
to myself, Abdul Ghiyas dug into the wooden bowl from which we were eating communally and fished out the most esteemed gobbets of fat which he presented to me. Not daring to hurl them away, I chewed them with grunts of appreciation for some minutes and then, when no one was looking, put them inside my shirt to be disposed of later.

During the night the
Lord of the Waters
played his joke with the dykes for the second time and once again we were flooded out. I woke to find myself in an attitude of prayer, completely lost, having forgotten which way round I was sleeping.

The next morning we lay around after breakfast but apart from repairing our punctured air-beds and taking pills for bad stomachs we did very little. In the compo. boxes I found several bottles of water-sterilizing tablets and made a solemn vow that I would not drink a drop of water that had not first been treated with them. Sterilizing water is tedious work: from now on, I was a more than usually remarkable sight on the march as I swung my water bottle like an Indian club in an effort to dissolve the tablets, which were as hard as lead shot and far less appetizing. There was another little pill that was supposed to take away the bad taste but sometimes this failed to operate and I was left with an Imperial pint (the contents appropriately enough of my water bottle) of something that reeked of operating theatres.

But it was not until late the following afternoon that we summoned enough energy to set off.

To get to the south side of Mir Samir we had to go right round the base of it. At Kaujan we crossed the river by a wooden bridge. Ahead of us going through the village were a band of Pathan nomads on the way up to their tents, members of the Rustam Khel, a tribe who spend the winter in Laghman, what they call the
garmsir
(warm place) near Jalalabad, kinsmen of the tented nomads we had met in the Samir Valley.

The eyes of the young men were coloured with madder. Some of them carried sickles made from old motor-car springs. With the tribe there was an old blind woman and when they crossed at the next bridge, a single pole over the river, she went over hanging on to the tail of a donkey.

We were accompanied up the Chamar Valley by a Tajik to
whom some strange mutation had given pink eyes and a blond moustache. With this Albino, the
Thanador
(literally the Keeper of Nothingness) of the Nawak Pass, the keeper of the Pass retained at a salary of 500 Afghanis a year to over-see it, we never got on good terms. He came at his own request, ‘to protect us from brigands’ as he put it. How he was to do this unarmed without recourse to bribery was not clear.

His name was Abdullah,
The Slave of God
(it was unseemly, as he backfired like an early motor-car all the way up the valley). Shir Muhammad and Badar Khan ragged him unmercifully at the frequent halts he insisted on making at the nomad encampments to eat
mast,
for he was a greedy man.

‘Look at his face.’

‘Look at his hair.’

‘Look at his eyebrows.’ He had no eyebrows.

‘Like a bastard German.’

‘O, Abdullah, who was your father?’

And so on.

Abdul Ghiyas took little part in these pleasantries. He was in his element. Down by the river the Pathan women, beautiful savage-looking creatures, were washing clothes. Now as Hugh had predicted he vanished into the tents on one pretext or another, ostensibly to gather information, having first warned the laundresses to veil themselves.

The Chamar was a wide glen, more colourful than the Darra Samir, with grass of many different shades of green and full of tall hollyhocks in flower. The nomad tents were everywhere and there were sheep high on the mountains. At seven we rested at a small hamlet of bothies, Dal Liazi. Behind us, above Parian, we could see the way to the Nawak Pass with Orsaqao, the big brown mountain which it crossed, with a serpent of snow wriggling across it.

It was an interrupted journey. At the instigation of Abdullah we had stopped at seven, at eight we stopped again and this time everyone disappeared into the tents for half an hour, leaving Hugh and myself outside with the horses, fuming and sizzling in the heat. But when he wanted to stop at nine, even Abdul Ghiyas protested.

‘O thou German,’ said the drivers.

‘My mother was a Kafir.’

‘Ha!’

Like small boys at prep school, they mocked him. From now on he sulked.

As we climbed, the country became more and more wild, the tents of the Chanzai Pathans, in which the drivers had been assuaging themselves, less frequent. From the rocks on either side marmots whistled at us officiously like ginger-headed referees. Here the horses stopped continuously to eat wormwood,
artemisia absinthium,
a root for which they had a morbid craving.

After five hours on the road we came to the mouth of a great cloud-filled glen stretching to the west.

‘East glacier,’ said Hugh, ‘we’re nearly there. Pity about the cloud.’

As we stood there peering, it began to lift. Soon we could see most of the north face of the mountain as far as the rock wall, and the summit, a snow-covered cone with what seemed a possible route along the ridge to it. Our spirits rose. ‘If we can only get to the ridge we can make it,’ we said.

With the cloud breaking up and lifting fast, the whole mountain seemed on fire; the cloud swirled like smoke about the lower slopes and drove over the ridge clinging to the pinnacles. From out of the glen came a chill wind and the rumble of falling rock. It was like a battlefield stripped of corpses by Valkyries. In spite of the heat of the valley we shivered.

‘If the south face is no good we can always come back and try here,’ said Hugh. As always he seemed unconscious of the effect he created by such a remark.

Ahead of us in the main valley a waterfall tumbled down over a landslide of rocks; climbing up beside it we rounded the easternmost bastion of the mountain and entered the upper valley of the Chamar.

We felt like dwarfs. On our right the whole southern aspect of Mir Samir revealed itself: the east ridge like a high garden wall topped with broken glass; the snow-covered summit; the glaciers receding far up under the base of the mountain in the summer heat; and below them the
moraines,
wildernesses of rock pouring down to the first pasture, with the river running through it, a wide shallow stream fed by innumerable rivulets. To the east the mountains rose straight up to a level 17,000 feet, then, rising and falling like a great dipper, encircled the head of the valley, forming the final wall of the south-west glacier where we had made our unsuccessful effort among the ice toadstools on the other side only two days before.

‘On the other side of that,’ said Hugh, pointing to the sheer wall with patches of snow on it to the east, ‘is Nuristan.’

It was a lonely place; the last nomad tents were far down the valley in the meadow below the waterfall. Here there was only one solitary
aylaq
, a wall of stones built against an overhanging rock and roofed over with turf, the property of the headman of Shahr i Boland, a Tajik village we had passed in Parian on the way to the Chamar. The shepherd was the headman’s son. As we came, more dead than alive with our tongues lolling, to the camping place on a stretch of turf hemmed in by square boulders, he appeared with a bowl of
mast
, wearing long robes and a skull cap, the image of Alec Guinness disguised as a Cardinal.

It was midday. The light was blinding. To escape it we crawled
into clefts in the rocks and lay there in shadow, each at a different level, in our own little boxes, like a chest of drawers.

As soon as he had eaten, the
Thanador
of the Nawak Pass went off without a word to anyone.

‘What’s wrong with him?’