A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (21 page)

Hugh was upset. ‘I can’t find anything wrong with it.’

As soon as he had finished his helping, which was very large as no one else wanted any, he tucked into a big bowl of
mast
provided by the
Mullah
’s household; I groped for Alka Seltzer (one of the few treats we possessed now that we were out of tobacco).

It was dark now. As I scrabbled amongst my possessions for the Alka Seltzer, watched by an audience of grave, elderly gentlemen, Hugh continued to pester me about food.

‘What would you like to eat now.’

‘Nothing. Go away!’

‘All right! I won’t ask you again. Personally,’ he said, ‘I’m starving.’

Much later some hot fish arrived. The name sounded like
mahseer
or it might have been
machhli
, the Indian word for fish, but, as it was decapitated, there was no means of telling what it was. It was delicious but I was not equal to it. I toyed with it in a half-hearted way by torchlight until it grew cold and unappetizing.

As we continued downhill the next day the people began to dress differently. They no longer wore the strange uniform of the higher valleys; instead they wore white turbans and thin
shalvār
trousers, and they had a more civilized air.

By contrast the road became more difficult. Frequently it was blocked by huge boulders and there were places where, when the cliff was sheer to the river, instead of climbing over the top it continued round the edge supported precariously on flimsy wooden galleries.

At such places the horses had to cross and re-cross the river, moving from one island of sand or shingle to another or down the opposite bank where dwarf willows grew. With them went Abdul Ghiyas, Badar Khan and the
Mullah
(after we had spent the night in his garden he had insisted on accompanying us still farther). Shir Muhammad took no notice of his horse, he continued to follow us down the right bank and left her to follow the others as best she could.

Five hours downstream we came to the junction of the Linar, the valley that leads to the Arayu Pass, the route by which the butter runners make the journey into Panjshir. Half-way across, waist deep in the strong current, with our feet slithering on the round slippery stones, we were overhauled by an oldish man carrying a wooden cage in which there was a fighting cock partridge. Having crossed over himself and put down the cage, he came back to help us over as if we were elderly ladies. He was on his way to match his bird in a fight and showed us the curved spurs it wore. They were like razors.

We had to wait a long time for the horses. They had been forced to climb over a bluff two thousand feet high. When at last they came slithering across the river we saw that Abdul Ghiyas was covered in dust and dirt. He was past speech.

‘His horse fell over a cliff,’ said Badar Khan, ‘and he was on it.’

Abdul Ghiyas at this moment seemed on the point of death. Forced to walk because of the difficult ground he had become a shambling wreck, roasting in his windproof suit. Shir Muhammad was an extraordinary sight too with his cotton trousers looped
up to show his bandy legs and feet encased in unlaced climbing boots several sizes too large for him. (I had bequeathed him mine, having decided to finish the journey in gym shoes.)

We descended a steep combe where the undergrowth was shoulder high and entered a childhood paradise, a dim and mysterious place where the track, which wound along the top of a high wall, was completely roofed in by trees and so overgrown with vegetation that we could only feel it underfoot but not see it. With the sun filtering down and everything green and cool it was like being under water.

Then all of a sudden we came out into the sunlight on to a high hill above a village that nestled between humps of lichencovered rock. Far below, the river, now wide and slow-moving, wound between green fields until it entered a lake hemmed in on three sides by mountains. This was Lake Mundul. With the curious rocks in the foreground, the winding river and the mountains hemming it in, it was like a landscape drawing by Leonardo.

Eager to reach the water’s edge we raced down the track towards it.

Once by the river, here a hundred yards wide, we crossed a dyke into a field of short, cropped grass that was full of buttercups. It was like the shores of an estuary where it meets the sea. There was a beach and at the mouth of the river there were sandbanks. Far out in the lake itself where it was shallow two solitary willows grew, and closer in to the shore there were beds of reeds with backwaters winding through them. A cool breeze was blowing down the valley bowing the reeds and ruffling the water.

For the two of us it was a moment of sheer delight that was certain to be ruined as soon as the dozen hangers-on from the village caught up with us. On the far bank Badar Khan and the
Mullah
were moving downstream with the horses, Abdul Ghiyas
having been unequal to the crossing, Shir Muhammad disinclined to make it.

‘Unless that
Mullah
knows a ford, they’ll have to go back,’ Hugh said. ‘I don’t think there’s a way across.’

Horror of horrors, before we could stop him and without a word of warning the
Mullah
mounted Shir Muhammad’s horse and with Abdul Ghiyas’s on a leading rein plunged them both into the river and began to swim them across.

So far, whenever the horses had forded a river, they had always had all four feet on the bottom and elaborate precautions were always taken to ensure that only the lower halves of the loads would get wet.

Now we watched in silent agony as everything we possessed, with the exception of what was loaded on Badar Khan’s beast, cameras, films, notebooks, clothing, to say nothing of the flour and the Irish stew sank beneath the water.

At first Hugh was paralysed; then he started bellowing at the
Mullah
to go back, but it was too late, he was already halfway across. Hugh now turned his attention to Badar Khan, but that prudent man had no intention of crossing a river of unknown depth.

When the
Mullah
emerged from the river, proud of what he had done and smiling, I thought Hugh was going to strangle him. ‘Go away,’ he croaked in fury. ‘You’re a disgrace. You, a
Mullah
.’ It seemed dreadful after he had entertained us so hospitably, but it was difficult not to be angry. Only my inadequate command of the language prevented me from joining in. ‘And you too,’ he shouted at the twelve villagers, one of whom it turned out was the headman of Mundul, the village we had just come from. ‘Go away!’

To escape from them in our moment of agony, we hastened
through a swamp up to our knees in water and took refuge on a little promontory that stuck out into the lake. Soon we were joined by Abdul Ghiyas and the horses and here we made our camp. Shir Muhammad did not appear. If he had been where he should have been, on the other side of the river with his horse, at least part of the disaster would have been avoided. He lurked somewhere out of sight among the oaks that grew down to the water’s edge, waiting for the storm to blow over.

We were not left in peace for long. Soon the headman detached himself from the little group of villagers who surrounded the
Mullah
like rugger players shielding one of the team whilst he changed his trousers, and came splashing through the shallows towards us.

‘Go away!’

‘We are coming!’

‘Go away! What can you do? The
Mullah
has ruined a camera costing twenty thousand Afghanis not to speak of everything else we possess.’

‘We are countrymen,’ answered the headman sturdily, ‘and we shall go where we wish.’

‘You are not Muhammadans!’ This from Abdul Ghiyas who had found the
Mullahs
in the Ramgul excessively devout, even to his taste.

Before his voice finally gave out Hugh resorted to his favourite weapon. ‘If you don’t leave us alone, I shall speak to General Ubaidullah Khan at Kabul and you will be punished.’

In spite of this threat they all moved up the hillside and descended on us from the rear, where they squatted down a few yards away and grumbled among themselves – all except the wretched
Mullah
, who was far away at the edge of the dyke, alone in his agony.

This disaster had the curious effect of putting everyone in
excellent spirits, so that when Shir Muhammad quietly slipped into the camp as though nothing had happened, he failed to get the rocket he deserved.

Everything was soaked, except one camera, which by extraordinary good fortune had been transferred to Badar Khan’s horse at the last moment. It seemed unlikely that any of the film would survive. All the cartons were full of water and we spent a long time emptying them.

‘What about Badar Khan,’ I said, after we had emptied the final carton and hung our bedding up to dry.

‘Let him wait a bit, and the
Mullah
. We shall have to make peace with the
Mullah
eventually, but he deserves to suffer.’

After forgiving the
Mullah
we undressed and crossed the river on foot. It was up to our necks but the bottom was firm sand and we brought all the gear over in two journeys assisted by two men of the Kulam Katirs, who had come over the mountains by a remote route with a consignment of butter.

All this time Badar Khan sat on the bank, watching our efforts and doing nothing to help. He rode across without even getting his feet wet.

While we were returning to the camp the weather began to change; the wind dropped; black clouds formed over the lake and from high in the mountains came a premonitory rumble. In the woods the pigeons rose in alarm; rooks circled above the trees cawing sadly. Suddenly there were hordes of flies and large fish began to rise in the lake. For the first time since leaving the mountain we erected the tent. The villagers left for home at a steady trot.

After the storm had passed there was furious insect activity. The camp site was like some kind of by-pass; not to be deflected from a predetermined destination hordes of ants tramped remorselessly over us.

Towards evening the weather cleared and we set off to explore the lake towards the south with the headman, who had returned and with whom we also made our peace – poor fellow, he had done nothing wrong.

The part of the lake on which we were camped was about three-quarters of a mile long, then it turned sharply in an S bend and opened out into a stretch of water more than a mile in length and four hundred yards broad. At the far end towards the south there were more mountains at right angles to the valley.

‘Last year because the King (Zaher Shah) wished to come here for fishing and hunting he sent his
Mīr-i-Shīkari
, his head gamekeeper, to see if it were possible for a party of people to get here. The
Mīr-i-Shīkari
came with horses by the Kotal Arayu out of Parian but he found the way too difficult for a King.’

‘That’s the way we’re going out, over the Arayu,’ Hugh said. ‘But why doesn’t he come from the south?’

‘Because it is very difficult with horses. From here to the Lower Alingar at Nangarāj is three days through the country of the Pashaie people.’

‘Is it possible to do it in winter?’

The headman slipped his shirt off his shoulders to show a scar a foot long which extended from shoulder to elbow.

‘This happened last year in deep winter when there was much snow. It was a black bear that did it; as big as a Nuristani cow. I went down by the Alingar. I was many days on the road to the hospital at Kabul.’

Just before it grew dark two cormorants came flying up the lake and landed on one of the sandbanks. To us it seemed a remarkable place to find them.

‘I think I shall write a piece for the
Royal Central Asian Journal
about Lake Mundul and seeing cormorants,’ Hugh said when we
were wedged uncomfortably in our tent. ‘Very few Europeans have ever been here.’

‘If you do that somebody is bound to write a chilly letter saying that it’s a very well-known lake and that it isn’t at all remarkable to find cormorants on it.’
⁵

In the night as a result of the storm, the river rose three feet. After an unsuccessful attempt to catch fish with an ugly artificial French fish, which I eventually lost, I spent the rest of the morning on one of the sandbanks. It was the sort of place you see from a train or from a ship and can never visit. In the afternoon I visited a valley that led to the west, a deep gorge between high cliffs, full of boulders. Half a mile up there was a bridge over a torrent leading to some small fields at the foot of one of the cliffs. Hidden away behind the Indian corn there was a tiny hovel, with the exception of the
aylaq
in the high valley the loneliest house I had seen.

The place seemed deserted. Apart from the humming of insects, there was absolute silence. Inside the house there was no one but the tools belonging to the occupants were leaning against the cliff, a wooden hand plough, a long-handled spade and several hoes. Whoever they were had been threshing; there was chaff everywhere and there were flails lying about, long poles with flexible whips on them. All the time I had the uncanny feeling of being watched.

The next day, the twenty-ninth of July and the twentieth of our journey, we left for the Arayu.

Before leaving Lake Mundul an argument developed over the route, Hugh maintaining that we should go by the valley as far as Mundul village, Abdul Ghiyas favouring the mountainside.

Eventually the mountain was decided on and we found ourselves stuck high above the valley unable to go backwards or forwards. In this way the journey to Mundul village took three hours instead of thirty minutes. The horses had to be unloaded three times and Shir Muhammad’s kicked me in the stomach. Before this happened I had never realized that horses kick sideways. Temporarily I began to wonder why I had become an explorer.

Once again, with pain and difficulty, we crossed the Linar, the river where we had met the man with the bird cage, and turned westward up the gorge for the Arayu and home. We soon found out that the gorge was impassable.

‘You know what this means,’ Hugh said. ‘Over the top!’

We climbed two thousand feet straight up the mountain until the river looked like a narrow ribbon below; through a dry uncultivated wilderness, where the only trees were the holly oaks and the earth was nothing but pulverized rock.

All day the track switchbacked up and down; at one moment a hundred feet above the river, the next a thousand, so that our progress resembled a temperature chart in a funny drawing.

In the middle of the day, when the sun was intolerable, we reached an oasis, a place called Warna, where there were two or three houses and, best of all, a waterfall and a patch of grass. In Warna no one bothered to collect the mulberries when they fell and the air was heady with the smell of them as they lay fermenting under the trees in drifts six inches deep.

Here Abdul Ghiyas bought a chicken from a smelly old man and salted it for dinner. We shared two apple puddings between us. Although a very long way from home an end-of-term air pervaded the party.

The old man decided to accompany us up the valley, thereby adding materially to our discomfort. Never in my short acquaintance with Asia had I encountered anyone or anything, dead or alive, who smelled like this old man. Although I couldn’t say why, he reminded me of the Crimean War.

‘He is a Tajik,’ Abdul Ghiyas explained, as if it was an extenuation. ‘Twenty years ago he came over the Pass with some merchants and got left behind. He has been here ever since.’

‘If he smelled like he does now twenty years ago,’ Hugh grumbled, ‘I can’t say I blame them.’

We were climbing high along the side of the gorge now. Its far bank was in shadow and there were the scours of waterfalls and patches of old snow. Abdul Ghiyas was very ill. We noticed that whenever there was an opportunity, which was frequently, he drank the water from the stream. We told him that if he continued to do so he would die.

I dreamt of all the cool drinks I had ever had in my life. The ginger beer I had drunk as a child; foaming lager; draught
Worthington; Muscadet kept in a stream until I was ready for it; pints of Pimms; buckets of ice …

There were clouds now, hemming in the sun but not obscuring it, concentrating it on our heads like a burning glass. All the time, to windward, was the awful old man whose clothes were like cerements.

‘I wish to God he’d go away,’ I said at last.

Hugh’s reaction to this was even more violent.

‘If there weren’t any witnesses, do you know what I’d do? I’d push him over the edge.’

At last the sun began to sink and, as it grew cooler, we came to Linar. On the outskirts of the village grew a magnificent mulberry tree,
shāhtūt
, loaded with fruit.

As the only really fit man left among us and as a punishment for his behaviour at the lake, Shir Muhammad was ordered to remain behind to collect a basketful. The last we saw of him was swinging aloft in the branches like a great overgrown schoolboy.

In the village Abdul Ghiyas halted. ‘I have an aunt in Linar,’ he said. ‘Here we should stop the night.’

At this moment angry cries rose on the air from the direction of the
shāhtūt
tree. It was obvious that Shir Muhammad had been caught by the owner.

‘Perhaps after all,’ Abdul Ghiyas went on, ‘it is better to continue.’

As we passed through the inhabitants of Linar turned out in force. They were a wild-looking independent lot. For some reason they took exception to Abdul Ghiyas in his windproof suit. They left the rest of us alone, but, as Abdul Ghiyas lumbered up the road, they treated him to a sort of slow handclap.

The air began to grow cold. A few miles farther on the track descended sharply and at the junction with another valley, the Makhin Kadao down which an icy wind was howling, Abdul Ghiyas halted.

‘It is time to camp.’

It was a crazy, windy place to choose for a camp. Without saying anything Hugh hurled his ice-axe to the ground and set off alone up the Makhin Kadao. There he sat down at the foot of a cliff with his back to us. I must say that at this moment he had my sympathy.

Whilst we were standing in the middle of the gorge in some indecision, Shir Muhammad came stumbling down the hill towards us. His nose was bleeding and he had a beautiful black eye. He had apparently been caught up the tree by the owner, an old woman, who had summoned her son and two hefty daughters. They had given him a fearful beating. He had also lost the basket, but he still had his shirt full of
shāhtūt
, although they were a bit squashed.

Mustering this sad, mutinous little force, I drove them before me up the Linar gorge, cursing the lot of them. It was not difficult for me to work up a rage at this moment. All of a sudden I felt that revulsion against an alien way of life that anyone who travels in remote places experiences from time to time. I longed for clean clothes; the company of people who meant what they said, and did it. I longed for a hot bath and a drink.

The track immediately climbed a thousand feet out of the bottom of the gorge. Whenever we came to a small table of level ground that might accommodate two men without horses, Abdul Ghiyas suggested that we should stop. He was very sick but we had to go on until we found a suitable place.

‘
Seb
. Here!’

‘No!
GET ON
!’

After a long hour we came to a fine place; close to the river and with fresh water from a spring.

‘Abdul Ghiyas!’

‘
Seb
?’

‘What about this? Good place.’

‘The old man says there is a better farther on.’

The old man, now that he was cooling off in the streaming Asian wind, was less objectionable.

When it was dark, after being twelve hours on the march we came to the place recommended by the old man. He was right; it had been worth the extra effort. Almost immediately Hugh arrived. He seemed in excellent spirits. The men ate their delicious chicken; we ate horrid tinned bacon-and-egg mixture and delicious apple pudding and some of the
shāhtūt
that had survived the battle at Linar. As a result of enjoying this modest feast Hugh was very ill.

Without their pipe, which had broken down, and having still a little tobacco, Badar Khan and Shir Muhammad constructed a pipe from mother earth, boring a hole in the ground for the bowl and connecting it by an underground passage with another smaller one that served as the mouthpiece. They applied their lips to the ground, sucking horribly. It was a disagreeable spectacle.

On August the first, early in the morning, we reached Achagaur, the last village in Nuristan.

The men of Achagaur all wore heavy sleeveless knitted pullovers with a sophisticated pattern of black and white dicing on them. They gave us melted butter and bread. We gave them Irish stew. Here they still spoke the Katir.

‘We are Koreish Katirs,’ they said, ‘from Arabia, as are the Linar people of the same tribe as the Prophet.’

‘When did you come here?’

‘We cannot tell. We do not know.’
¹

We asked them how they traded with the Panjshir people.

‘We meet them beyond the Arayu – in a lonely place. They bring us salt and we exchange butter for it.’

Up beyond the last houses the valley of the Linar was nothing like the Chamar Valley. Because the bottom of the valley was blocked with stones, there was hardly any grass and therefore there were few cattle and sheep. The last dwelling of all high up in the valley was the herdsman’s hut and from it a family sprawled out who themselves looked like animals.

To the left, in the direction of the Panjshir, the valley swung round and became a vast cul-de-sac of peaks. Straight ahead, far up the valley and high above us, was the Arayu Pass, like a funnel with a track winding interminably up through it. To think that this was one of the principal butter routes out of Nuristan into Panjshir was a sobering thought.

All of us, proprietors and drivers, even Shir Muhammad, were now ill. For this reason our caravan presented a curiously scattered appearance, as it wound its way up the dreadful slope, exposed to wind and sun and the whistles of the marmots who were out in force among the rocks. As one or the other of us succumbed, a ruthless atmosphere prevailed; no one waited for anyone else and those who had fallen out had to catch up as best they could when they finally emerged, green-faced, from behind the inadequate boulders that covered the lower slopes.

The climb began in earnest at a quarter to ten and took three hours. The last few hundred feet were
moraine
and the way through it was marked by cairns, two stones on top of one another. But it was worth all the suffering. Once again, as on the Chamar, we stood on the great dividing ridge of the whole massif. To the left the ridge plunged down in snow-covered slopes straight into a glacial lake; to the right of the
col
the mountains were smoother, more rounded. Ahead was Mir Samir.

Here on the Arayu, one of the lonely places of the earth with
all the winds of Asia droning over it, where the mountains seemed like the bones of the world breaking through, I had the sensation of emerging from a country that would continue to exist more or less unchanged whatever disasters overtook the rest of mankind.

We went down towards the north, following the cairns and later the stream from the top of the watershed, with the cold yellow mountains all about us standing alone, like sentinels.

It was mid-afternoon before we stopped. In spite of everything, I was mad with hunger. Hugh, having a queasy feeling, was more finicky.

‘It’s your turn to cook,’ he said. ‘I want green tea and two boiled eggs.’

‘Well, I want a damn great meal.’

There was a screaming wind. Boiling water at 15,000 feet or thereabouts is a protracted operation using nothing but solid fuel. Whilst I was waiting for the egg water to boil, I fried two eggs in thirty seconds and ate an entire apple pudding, cold.

Hugh looked like death but he was in a fury. At first I thought he would have some kind of seizure.

‘Look at you. Hogging it. You only think of yourself. When are you going to cook something decent for
me
?’

‘You asked for boiled eggs. I can’t think of anything more difficult at this height. You can cook them yourself and anything else you want in the future.’

I set off over the green grass down the valley alone.

In spite of this ridiculous tiff, rarely in my life had I felt such an ecstatic feeling of happiness as I did coming down from the Arayu. The present was bliss beyond belief; the future looked golden. I thought of my wife and children; I thought of the book that I had already written; I even thought about the Everest
Foundation and the grant that up here seemed certain to materialize (it didn’t – one can hardly blame them).

I went down past high, cold cliffs already in shadow where the first tented nomads were, down and down for two hours.

Eventually I came out in a great green meadow with a river running through it like a curled spring. The sun was just setting, the grass that had been a vivid green had already lost its colour, the sky was the colour of pearls.

Under the wall of the mountain on the left there were four rocks, each forty feet high and fifty long; built out from under them were the stone houses and pens of the summer
aylaq
. Women and children dressed in white were standing on the roofs watching the herds come slowly down from the fringes of the mountain. Standing in the river two bullocks were fighting.

Before going to the
aylaq
I waited for Hugh to appear.

‘You know I’ve had the most extraordinary feeling coming down,’ were his first words when he appeared. ‘As if there was never going to be anything to worry about again.’

‘I expect it’s the altitude.’

The night was a bitter one. The wind howled over the screes but we dined on rice pudding (the rice was provided by the headman, our own provisions were exhausted) and, although we were blinded by the smoke of the
artemnesia
root, we were content to be where we were.

All through the next day we still had the same feeling of extreme happiness. Until late in the afternoon we went down; always with the great bone-coloured mountains on either side and valleys choked with the debris of glaciers, leading to regions of snow and ice and to rocks too sheer for snow to cling to them.

We came to cornfields and a village called Arayu, full of savage dogs and surly-looking Tajiks and mud houses like those of Egyptian
fellahin
.

This patch of cultivation was succeeded by a mighty red-cliffed gorge where there were caves in which we sheltered from the midday sun. But not for long. The path to Parian and Shāhnaiz led up out of it high over the mountain. At the watershed we turned still more to the north going downhill again now and into a final narrow valley where the wind threw the spray from a river in our faces. It was spray from the Parian, the Upper Panjshir. We had made it.

We crossed the river by a bridge, went up through the village of Shāhnaiz and downhill towards the Lower Panjshir.

‘Look,’ said Hugh, ‘it must be Thesiger.’

Coming towards us out of the great gorge where the river thundered was a small caravan like our own. He named an English explorer, a remarkable throwback to the Victorian era, a fluent speaker of Arabic, a very brave man, who has twice crossed the Empty Quarter and, apart from a few weeks every year, has passed his entire life among primitive peoples.