Full Tilt (16 page)

Incidentally, I notice that in Pakistan – and I believe it’s the same in India – women never wear Western dress, though in Persia and Afghanistan the majority of middle- and upper-class women wear the latest European fashions under their
chadors
and
burkahs
.

I find it very interesting that Muslim families can carry suddenly acquired wealth and power so much more graciously than their European counterparts usually do. Aurang Zeb’s grandfather was an
illiterate tribal leader who by a combination of intelligence,
ruthlessness
and sheer personality secured control of Swat State in 1917 and Aurang Zeb himself hints with a chuckle that the ethics of the take-over left a lot to be desired. Yet in this case the end appears to have justified the means, as the little mountain state (area 4,000 sq. miles, population 600,000 in 1961) is now the most prosperous region of Pakistan, with the best roads – as I noticed yesterday on reaching the state boundary – and with a higher percentage of rural hospitals and primary schools than I’ve seen anywhere else in Asia. There is obviously a moral here to be pointed by someone better qualified than I am in such matters.

Again, Naseem’s paternal grandfather was a peasant-boy recruited to the old Indian Army from his village near Abbottabad, but in his distinguished descendants there is neither any self-conscious defensive bragging about this background nor any wish to forget it. In fact, President Ayub’s strongest psychological card in the political game is probably his genuinely felt link with the ordinary village people, and his understanding of them is no doubt one of the reasons why he doesn’t repeat the fatally unrealistic mistake of trying to run Pakistan as thought it were a Western democracy. Islamic countries have their own traditional type of democracy which, as I mentioned a few days ago, President Ayub is now attempting to revive in Pakistan. Whether the flair for accepting a drastic change of status with such natural dignity is due to the democratic aspects of Muslim philosophy or to the sense and sensibility of the individuals concerned it is difficult to know, but this characteristic certainly makes for a very pleasant social atmosphere.

I woke to a cloudless sky this morning and from my verandah the view of the long, broad valley of Swat was very lovely indeed. Blue mountains enclose wide sweeps of pastoral land, the cornfields shining gold between clumps of trees, now heavily green, and the river swirling brilliantly through the valley centre. The little ‘capital’ town of Saidu Shariff (altitude 3,150 feet), with the Waliahad on a slight rise above it, looks north towards the snow peaks and gives me the same feeling of carefree isolation as Andorra out of the tourist season. It’s a comparatively clean and very gay town where the people are all spontaneous friendliness and uninhibited, but not embarrassing,
curiosity. Roz has been minutely examined more times today than at any previous stop. She also had her back brake mended again (free, of course) and while the operation was being performed I was invited to have tea with a young doctor from Lahore who has recently taken up practice here. His living conditions were on a par with those of an Irish farm-labourer, but that didn’t worry him. His only complaint was of the lack of cultured people with whom to talk, and his motive for moving from Lahore was that his widowed mother wanted him to marry a girl of whom, for some undisclosed reason, he didn’t approve. In this he was a rare exception as the majority of young Muslims are very content with their parent’s choice. I suspect him of being one of those who lose more than they gain by a university education on the Western pattern.

Unfortunately, the most interesting corners of Swat are still
snowbound
and won’t be accessible for at least another month so I explored the nearby excavations of Buddhist remains at Butkara and Udezhan. The latter town, captured by Alexander and known to the Greeks as Ora, was interesting enough to make up for anything. This valley, once the centre of a very advanced Buddhist civilisation, is an
archaeological
treasure-trove; wherever you dig something exciting comes up. The arrangement is that the Rome Academy finances Professor Tucci’s expeditions and in return gets half the movable finds, Swat retaining the other half. Some of the Gandhara bas-reliefs I saw today decorating the outside walls of stupas were exquisitely beautiful and made me very conscious of the relative youth of our civilisation – which seems to be about to die in early middle-age!

Being entertained by oriental potentates is fine – among other luxuries I have a complete set of Beethoven Symphonies at my disposal, presented to President Ayub by Dr Adenauer! But the position also has snags, one of them being that it’s considered very bad form for a house-guest of the ruler of a state to transport herself around the said state on a lowly cycle, as I did yesterday. So today I was gently but firmly organised and driven up the length of the
valley by Hassan, Aurang Zeb’s younger brother. We went much too fast for my liking, but it was worth it to get to Bahrain where the Swat River, coming from its source in the surrounding 20,000-foot mountains, leaps triumphantly over cliffs on its way down to the valley floor. We drove along a rough track up the narrowing valley, and then got out and climbed mountains through cool forests of pine and walnut and larch. It had been a hot, cloudless day when we left Saidu but here the air was invigoratingly fresh. At about 4 p.m. dark clouds began to gather around the peaks and within half an hour torrential rain had reduced visibility to a few yards, but by then we were back in the little village where we had left the car and where we ate a huge tea of
paratas
and roast chicken and syrupy pastries.

Almost the best part of every day here is the interval before 9 p.m. dinner when Naseem and Aurang Zeb and I sit talking for a few hours, sometimes joined by Hassan or by Aurang Zeb’s youngest uncle, the Wali’s ‘kid brother’, who is the same age (thirty-five) as Aurang Zeb. If any visitor calls, Naseem has to retire to the women’s quarters because while in Swat she must keep strict purdah, her father-in-law being the religious as well as the civil Head of State. I feel that this is very hard on someone who is accustomed to complete freedom in Pindi and who has no other educated woman in the household with whom to converse. However, the main thing is that she and Aurang Zeb are very happy together, which makes all the restrictions of life in Saidu relatively unimportant to her.

Professor Tucci’s excavations have made Swat very conscious of its past as a centre of Buddhist civilisation, but the proud emphasis on an era that ended
C
.AD
800 seems faintly
non-sequitur
in view of the fact that the present population is descended from the Yusafzai tribe of Afghanistan who migrated
C
.AD
1500 and chased the then inhabitants across the Indus before settling down to enjoy the comparative ease of life in a fertile valley.

This evening Aurang Zeb told me that the first Wali’s grandfather
(the Akhund of Swat) was a warrior saint who led the Yusafzai tribe at the battle of Ambella in 1862 when the British forces were commanded by Neville Chamberlain’s grandfather.

It was after the Akhund’s death in 1877 that Swat became involved in a forty-year crisis of constant tribal warfare – mainly because the Akhund’s two sons had predeceased him and there was no acceptable leader. Then, in 1917, Badshah Sahib got a grip on the situation and since then Swat has never looked back. In 1949, after thirty-two years of vigorous work for his people, Badshah Sahib abdicated in favour of his son and has since spent his time leading the life of an ascetic.

Swat’s legal status is that of a princely state within Pakistan – it was the first state to accede to Pakistan after independence. The Wali runs all internal affairs and only on foreign policy does the Central
Government
intervene; justice is imparted according to custom and Islamic law and under the Wali’s orders. An army of 8,000 men and a police force of 2,000 are maintained by the state, whose annual revenue is approximately three-quarters of a million pounds sterling. There is no income-tax but the emerald mines near here annually provide one million rupees.

Today we visited a leper colony in a valley hidden away in the depths of the Bruner Range. A special mosque has been built there for the lepers, who spend most of their time praying – not to be cured themselves, but that nobody else may ever get the disease. There were appalling sights as we walked around, some too gruesome for description, but the lepers were pathetically pleased to see their Wali’s son and he was very kind and gentle with them, shaking hands without batting an eyelid even when there was hardly any hand left.

This was definitely my most enjoyable day’s cycling since leaving Afghanistan. We covered seventy-eight miles, crossing three mountain passes – all babies of between 6 and 7,000 feet, but so steep that they involved walking a total of over fourteen miles which is not particularly relaxing when the temperature is 102° F in the shade and you have
no
shade. I passed only two vehicles and no town, had three swims in a deep river, ate nothing but four teaspoons of salt, drank twenty-four pints of water and must have lost about
forty-eight
pints of sweat. (Aurang Zeb had presented me with his old army water-bottle, which holds six pints, and I had no trouble refilling it en route from the river.)

Between the infrequent villages peasants were busily harvesting barley and a little wheat, which is mostly blackened by the unusual rains. Their threshing is completely biblical – throwing the grain up in the air for the breeze to blow away the chaff. The landscape, as throughout Swat, was very green and we passed through many pine woods where the aroma of resin mingled in the hot air with the scents of a multitude of flowering wild shrubs and herbs. Weeping willows lined some stretches of the road, granting a brief escape from the sun, ‘Irish’ bramble hedges and ditches induced homesickness, and on the slopes of the grey, round-topped mountains little green bushes like juniper grew thickly. Crossing the last pass before coming down again to the Plain of Peshawar I saw enormous slabs of grey rock that reminded me very much of Inishmaan although they weren’t quite as big as those on the island. I also saw five of the lizards for which this
locality is famous; when resting under a tree I noticed the first one and for a brief, crazy moment imagined it to be a baby dragon. They’re between three and four feet long and are very fat and much respected by the locals who believe that they kill snakes, which seems to me a doubtful occupation for a lizard.

I passed hundreds of nomads today, trudging along beneath that brutal sun carrying all their possessions. Obviously they’re much poorer than the Afghan nomads, most of whom own huge herds of camels, goats and sheep; these people just have a few donkeys and goats and no tents. The women carry huge wicker baskets on their heads containing kettles, tin mugs, frying-pans, a hen or two and a few clothes. The men carry the babies tied to their backs and the toddlers sit on their shoulders; sick goats and lame kids travel in their arms. At this season they come up from the plains to the mountains where they live mostly on wild fruit and nuts. They’re not nearly as friendly as their Afghan cousins though the peasant people of these valleys are very kind and were really distressed at the sight of me pedalling along leaving a trail of sweat behind me in the dust. On two of the passes shepherd boys came leaping down from halfway up the mountainside to take over the job of pushing Roz to the top. And they weren’t looking for baksheesh – just being ‘Pathanical’!

The road we followed today is classified as a track but is fifty times better than Afghan main roads, though the last twelve miles (all
downhill
), after I’d passed the Swat frontier post, were very tricky; the Pakistan Government has covered the surface with about five inches of fine sand for the convenience of the camels and Roz did
not
like this. After she’d skidded twice near the edge of precipices I got off and walked. These mountains are north-east of the Plain of Peshawar and the descent reminded me of going down the Khyber Pass, though it is much more desolate and beautiful here. It’s extraordinary how the mountains rise absolutely sheer from this plain, with no intervening foothills – the effect is quite wonderful.

It got dark last night before I could finish with a description of my
bed in Rustam – a tiny village miles from everywhere. I arrived there at 7 p.m. and after a supper of fried eggs and dry bread (shades of Bamian!) I was given a charpoy outside a tea-house under an awning of cane-leaves and wrote till it got dark at 8 p.m., when I went to sleep with the entire male population of Rustam standing around in an awestruck circle. I woke at 4.30 a.m., as it was just beginning to get light, and we started out at 5 a.m.

We covered 118 miles today over a level metalled road, through pleasant but not exciting scenery. There was heavy traffic for the last sixty-six miles, once we joined the grand trunk road, where
water-buffalo
carts make cycling conditions almost as unpleasantly dangerous as in Teheran.

I’ve evolved a new technique of cycling in this sort of weather. Instead of taking a three-hour midday break I experimented
yesterday
and today with quarter-hour rests every twelve or fifteen miles and found this much more satisfactory. By 7.30 a.m. today it was uncomfortably hot and I find that fifteen miles is the limit at a stretch without a feeling of exhaustion setting in. Then just ten or fifteen minutes out of the sun, with hot,
very
sweet tea, restores one for the next lap. Perhaps this technique is quite wrong medically; I’m just going on instinct as to what best suits my physique. At 2 p.m. today an American AID man in a jeep pulled up to tell me that the temperature was 102° in the shade and that I was
mad
. I thanked him and explained my technique, but just standing still under that sun for a few minutes while talking to him made me feel quite dizzy. Roz will have to get rubber grips for her brakes as I burnt three fingers today on the over-heated metal. What’s really worrying me is the effect this heat must be having on her tyres.

I am staying here with a Pakistani General’s family. The General himself is in London now but his wife and elder daughter gave me a very warm welcome; their house resembles a military museum as the General collects ancient weapons and armour. My room is his library, which gives me a nice homey feeling – it’s a long time since I slept in a book-lined room. This is the first completely Westernised Pakistani home I’ve been in and a very faint but always perceptible ‘
pseudoness
’
pervades the atmosphere, which is much more formal than in Saidu. But I don’t mean to sound ungrateful; everyone here is very kind and sincerely hospitable and can’t do enough for me so it’s just a question of
my
limitations.

Last night I was bitten all over by mosquitoes while asleep on my charpoy and I’m tormented with itch this evening. Between that and the jackals who are howling like damned souls beyond the garden wall I see no prospect of sleep tonight: unfortunately all the drinking is done before dinner here, so that by bedtime one has sobered up.

I stopped six times for tea today and at none of these little
tea-houses
would they accept money from me; they usually pressed me to have a meal also, which I had to refuse, as the mere thought of food in that heat made my tummy turn over – though I realise it can’t be good to cycle such distances without eating.

At dinner this evening while discussing my journey to Gilgit it was casually mentioned that all pilots on the Pindi–Gilgit air-route get a fifty per cent danger bonus because flying through the Himalayas is so dicey. Then and there I almost abandoned my ambition to see Gilgit, but as usual my Scots blood won the argument and I decided that since I’m going as Aurang Zeb’s guest, I’d risk it. However, not being very brave about flying, even under the best conditions, I won’t be sorry when we’ve landed safely. Of course Roz is coming too and by mid-June (with luck) the Babusar Pass will be open again and we’ll come back at our leisure.

I spent much of today rapidly sorting out Pindi Society. The ‘Smart Set’ suffers in general from too much money and the depressing sort of snobbery that sometimes accompanies this affliction. The Orthodox Set, though no less exalted in military rank and social standing, is very much nicer. I called on a brother and sister of Colonel Zeb and found both homes very congenial. Begum Ghawas invited me to stop with them on my return from Gilgit, an invitation which I accepted with pleasure.

The basis of wealth in Pakistan now is either inherited money or
profits from one of the new industries – not, as formerly, officers’ pay, which has been drastically cut. The two households which I visited today (of a Brigadier and a Major-General) were quite dilapidated and barely ‘keeping up appearances’: but there was such a pleasantly genuine feeling that the ‘no drinking or smoking’ and ‘women in purdah’ rules were more than compensated for by the sense that one was being treated as a
person
rather than as a circus-act, which is the feeling some of the ‘Smart Set’ give me.

Today the National Assembly opened a new session and Aurang Zeb came down to represent Swat. He called for me at 9 a.m. and swept me off to the Distinguished (!) Visitors’ Gallery, where I met myriads of genuine Big Shots, who obviously thought someone had made a hideous mistake by admitting such a battered-looking object to their corner of the House.

The intricacies of the political system here are slightly beyond me. President Ayub appoints ministers who are not members of the Assembly, but who appear before the House to answer criticisms and defend themselves. There is complete freedom of speech within the House; members can, and do, stand up and denounce everyone from the President down, and on the whole this régime is probably the best for Pakistan at the moment even if some rich citizens dislike it. Certainly it is
not
a totalitarian régime, as Pakistan’s enemies would have us believe.

All the proceedings of the Assembly are in English, which is the only practical national language when the two wings of Pakistan speak so many different tongues. One motion concerned the movement for a separate nation which is now starting up in East Pakistan; apparently the feeling among many there is – ‘We’ve got rid of the British, now let’s get rid of the West Pakistanis.’

Ethnically of course the vast majority of East Pakistanis are Bengalis and the only tie between East and West Pakistan is religious. Also the poverty in the Eastern wing is much greater than in the Western, with 950 people to the square mile as against 150 here. In 1960 a census of agriculture was taken, and the report on East Pakistan has just come out. I give a few details below.

The experiment of transplanting families from East to West Pakistan is being tried but naturally is not being very successful; you might as well expect Italians to be happy if semi-forcibly settled in Lapland. Bengali farmers just don’t know
what
to make of the land around Karachi. Today there were heated arguments in the Assembly about this and when talking to a few experienced politicians I got the impression that it is possible to make a nation out of a country of which the two parts are separated without even overland communications.

This afternoon I went to visit the Presentation nuns here; there are thirty of them, all Irish. The Rev. Mother, who has been fifty years in India, had lots of interesting observations to make. She said that since Partition the only safe person in power from their Christian viewpoint was President Ayub, who is very liberal-minded. Of course all his daughters were at this school, and he knows where Pakistan would be without the Christian educationalists; also the best hospital in Pakistan is run by French nuns.

The temperature yesterday and today has remained around 110° and the strong breeze feels like a blast from the ovens of hell, even during the night.

Yesterday evening, while having dinner in the garden, we saw (at 8.40) the latest Russian satellite travelling at tremendous speed across the sky, looking just like a moving star.

I have decided that my old theory about extreme cold being better for cycling than extreme heat is now kiboshed. After all, minus 25° positively
stops
cycling whereas one can struggle on through 112° and live to tell the tale. But, In’she Allah, by this time tomorrow I’ll be cooling off in Gilgit or lying in small pieces on a Himalayan peak and either alternative seems preferable to sitting in Pindi at this
temperature
. There was a frantic flap today about whether I could cycle back from Gilgit or not: no one knows the exact state of the pass because now all supplies and personnel go by air, but general opinion was that it wouldn’t be open this year till mid-July, because of late snow.

The Muslims have a saying that ‘a man’s name is the sweetest sound in the language’, and as a result they consider it good manners to use your name every time they speak to you – which is disastrous for me as I find their names so difficult to remember. Of course they find Dervla equally impossible, so all the way through since Turkey I’ve been known as D. Except in the most Westernised circles they don’t use surnames – which explains why brothers have different names. What really intrigues me is the mixture of Urdu, English and Pushto spoken by all these Western-educated people; they habitually use the three languages, often in the same sentence, while speaking among
themselves
. A very curious phenomenon!