Full Tilt (17 page)

More chaos this morning. First my plane couldn’t go as the cloud was too dense in the Himalayas; some of the peaks en route are 20–26,000 feet high, and as Dakotas can’t fly
over
these they only take off when visibility is perfect for flying
between
them. Then my hostess, who really is being endlessly kind and helpful, started an elaborate series of phone calls in sixteen different directions and finally announced that the majority opinion of experts was that I
could
cycle back by the end of June. So the latest plan is that I fly up on 2 June and meanwhile go to Murree and what is known as ‘Free Kashmir’, starting tomorrow.

I went this morning for the inevitable interview with Radio Pakistan. It was very frustrating as I couldn’t say I loved Afghanistan, took a very dim view of Persia, approved of Bulgaria and etc. Having to be
non-committal
irritates me more than anything else in the world.

It’s quite cool today – only 96° in the shade. I’ve been told that my biggest risk cycling in this weather is pneumonia – of all unlikely things; but it’s good to be warned.

Last night soon after I went out to dinner one of the dust storms, for which Pindi is famous, blew up so that within five minutes
everything
and everyone in the room was coated in dust; you could see it on the food and feel it in your mouth and smell it horribly. Then all the lights went out and, what was far more disastrous, the fans stopped and we all sat in lamplight, streaming sweat and grinding dust with our pilau.  

You’d think that the people here would take this heat in their stride but the papers go to town on it with banner headlines – ‘Eighty per cent of Lahore’s cab-horses fainted …’, ‘Pindi streets deserted as all flee from sun …’ and so on. Evidently being born to it doesn’t make people immune. In summer factory-production goes down and the general efficiency level drops in the Civil Service, business, etc. Coming from sun-starved Ireland it takes time to adjust to the custom of avoiding the sun: it seems so
odd
to sit at lunch with curtains drawn and lights on.  

We left Pindi at 7.30 a.m. today after what is here a ‘late night’ (bed at 11.15 p.m.) and covered forty-four miles, the last sixteen of which had to be walked as the road rose from 1,300 to 7,040 feet and the average gradient was one in fourteen. It fascinated me to watch the plain falling farther and farther away as we ascended and to notice the flora becoming more and more familiar until we were surrounded by daisies, dandelions, heavy blossomed chestnuts, stately pines, lavishly flowering white and pink dog-roses and many very lovely shrubs, my favourite being one with dark green leaves and flame-coloured flowers. Despite going up and up the heat remained intense. So, at 1 p.m., I abandoned
Roz in a tea-shop and retired to the depths of a silent pine wood where I slept for an hour before exploring the cool dimness of the forest. (Murree is Pakistan’s only hill-station and the road was pretty busy all day as rich families in sleek cars sped up from the plains to their mountain residences. During summer the population of Murree rises from 15,000 to 50,000 so it’s not exactly my sort of place … ) At 5 p.m. I continued the sweaty crawl upwards, stopping at every tea-house to absorb sugar and salt and mango-juice, this being reputedly the best remedy of all for heat-exhaustion, from which I suspect I’m now permanently suffering; but the mangos must be
un
ripe and baked and the juice then squeezed out, so I carried a supply from Pindi.

The hour from 6.30 to 7.30 p.m. was unforgettable, with sunset colours tinting the snowy ridges of the Himalayan foothills, and long shadows stretching across the valley’s steep slopes, which were terraced and irrigated in orderly patterns and dotted by tiny mud houses. Then the cool radiance of moonlight succeeded the brief dusk as I dragged myself up the last and steepest two miles to the PWD rest-house where I’m now half asleep as I write. There’s a small snake in the corner of this room but he also seems to be half asleep and, as I’m too exhausted to face the fuss and flap-doodle if I report his presence to the authorities, I’ll chance his company for the night: probably he’s harmless anyway.

Now that I’ve forgiven Pakistan for not being Afghanistan I’m enjoying it like mad and have had a most blissful day today. I left Murree at 7.30, having called on the Irish Presentation nuns at the somewhat startling hour of 6.45 a.m. and got a terrific reception. They’re always so pathetically pleased to see someone fresh from Ireland that it’s worth the effort of answering all the usual questions for the umpteenth time. On the way out of Murree a carload of tourists stopped to ask was I the Irish woman? When I said ‘yes’ they asked if I was going to Madras, and I said ‘perhaps’, whereupon they gave me their address and told me I must stop with them. Then they drove on – just like that! I should be used to it by now, but I’m being
repeatedly touched and astonished by the hospitality and kindness of
everyone
in this part of the world.

The first thirty miles today were all one continual sweep downhill – even finer scenery than yesterday and no traffic as this is the Prohibited Zone of Azad Kashmir. I saw my first monkeys and spent one and three-quarter hours stalking them through a dense forest with my camera – which is funny when you come to think of it. One wonders how I expected to photograph two monkeys, considering that I can’t even get a moderately good picture of a mountain that stands still and waits to be photographed. Needless to say they effortlessly eluded me, but only when they had with deliberate malice led me almost to the top of a mountain so steep that I was terrified to look down and realised that I had to go back. For minutes I stayed hanging on to a shrub, gazing miserably down seeking inspiration as to how best to begin the descent, while those two sat hugging themselves with joy and positively giggling at my predicament. Then I suddenly remembered that Roz had been left unguarded by the roadside and this gave me such a fright that I just let go of the shrub and began the descent by falling six feet into a bramble bush – which doubtless rounded off the monkeys’ joy – acquiring innumerable horrid scratches in the process. After that I carried the camera in my mouth and went down like a monkey myself, swinging from branch to branch of the pines and big shrubs.

I can’t understand the birds here; they sing – very melodiously too – right through the midday heat, a thing no well brought up Irish bird would ever dream of doing. And such glorious colours. Some are only the size of our butterflies, and some of the equally beautiful butterflies are the size of our robins. There’s masses of lovely heather too – white and an extraordinary red-gold colour, but no purple.

After thirty miles we were down to 2,000 feet and level with the river, now flooded by melting snows and tearing furiously along between high mountains. For the next thirty-five miles this road, more or less level, followed the river: a memorable cycle-ride though it was so hot that I could only cover about eight m.p.h. with countless stops to sit nude under waterfalls. I saw lots of logs going down from high
up-river, being swept along at tremendous speed. There were no bridges after the one I crossed at the foot of the mountains; the locals use pulley ropes, suspended above the foaming, forty-foot deep,
fifty-yard
wide waters which they cross as nonchalantly as circus artistes, using only their hands. I notice the people in this region build their cottages of stones, just like the Aran Islanders, and roof them with a flat thatch of straw covered over by mud.

Here I’m still being entertained by the Army in a wonderfully primitive camp by the river-bank. This is being written sitting on a charpoy overlooking the noisy rush of water, glinting in the moonlight. Yet it’s too hot even now because this is a narrow valley enclosed by rock mountains which retain and throw back the day’s heat during the night and though there’s a strong breeze it’s hot too.

I stopped in the little town of Muzaffarabad for half an hour and talked to the locals about the Kashmir problem. On my Bartholomew’s map this region is in India, but they tell me here it’s in Pakistan – I give it up! Anyway, they’ve their own separate ‘Government of Azad (Free) Kashmir’ which is financed by the Pakistan Government. The people are in general the most moronic I’ve met since Persia, but they’re friendly once over the initial shock of witnessing such an unusual arrival. I met two government officials and a local ‘doctor’ (who is not qualified but has a second-hand stethoscope and can give injections – so people think he’s wonderful) and they all said that the only way to get Kashmir is to fight for it, an opinion shared by most Pakistanis of all types.

From the town to this camp is a two-mile walk on a dirt-track by the river, past one of Akbar’s colossal forts – a splendid sight in the moonlight, overlooking a wide curve of the river and overlooked in turn by jagged mountains. It’s very peaceful here with a little village near by where peasants are still sifting the grain by moonlight on their beaten mud threshing-floor. I’m going to sleep now under the stars.

Another wonderful day. I slept from 9.30 p.m. to 4.30 and was wakened by pale light spreading over the mountains and slowly
filling the valley. We were on the road by 5.15 a.m. and at the top of a tremendous pass, after a six-mile walk up, by 7 a.m. As usual, no film was left for the glorious sight of a river forming a semicircle round the base of a granite mountain thousands of feet directly below me. The mountain we were on was so sheer that I was able to drop a big stone into the water from that distance. Then came a ten-mile
freewheel
down, overlooking another very different but equally lovely river valley. Next followed a very steep eight-mile climb through hushed, ancient pine woods, where massive Himalayan peaks, sharp and snow-covered, could be seen in the distance between the giant trees. After that we again free-wheeled down for five miles and the final twenty-five miles were through undulating country, with lots of trees and golden cornfields and reddish cliffs of clay and tiny mud villages. The heat is now extreme and is making me unusually irritable; if people are stupid on the road and nearly get knocked down by Roz I lose my temper and swear like a trooper at them – poor devils, it’s probably just the heat softening their brains too!

Since leaving Swat I’ve seen very few cows, goats or sheep; it’s mostly grain farming around here. One of the most appalling local sights is a cow in calf; they’re so underfed that you can see plainly the whole shape of the calf in the womb. Only the poorest people use cows’ milk; most prefer buffaloes’ because buffaloes are immune to TB, whereas the cows are reeking with it, as are many of the human population. Buffalo milk is delicious – pure white and much richer than cows’.

The family with whom I’m staying tonight are delightful people. One daughter is a doctor now working in Lahore who previously ran the hospital here for two years single-handed, performing an average of twenty Caesarean operations per week without a single nurse or anaesthetist to help her. One of the results of malnutrition is that the mother’s pelvic (and other) bones disintegrate during pregnancy, when the system’s calcium is going to form the baby’s bones, and as a result they can’t give birth normally. Some time ago, having tried to push birth-control and failed, the Government in despair put a tax on every new-born baby, but that didn’t work either and has now been dropped.
Yet eighty per cent of the girls still marry as soon as they reach puberty and produce ten or fifteen children, seventy per cent of whom are born diseased and, because epidemics are coming under control, the majority of these babies are fated to live on as semi-invalids.

The temperature on the plains shot up to 112° today and your correspondent began to think that Yugoslavia in February ’63 wasn’t such a bad place after all! Pindi was my original destination for this evening, but I couldn’t cover more than fifty-seven miles and even that felt like fifty-six too many. There can be no report on today’s scenery because I was past observing it as I slogged along with my very lungs being blistered by the hot air. I only know that there were few trees and little greenery, a lack which always accentuates the heat. On every side stretched bare stubble fields and arid wastes of rock and stony soil – if you never hear from me again you’ll know that I was thinking of you all as I lay expiring by the wayside! The very pleasant family I’m with tonight are friends of my Abbottabad host, as were the people I stopped with for the afternoon from 1 to 5.30. I reached here at 7.30 this evening in a state of collapse.

When Roz and I left Wah at 8.30 a.m. there was such a strong headwind that we could only crawl at 5 m.p.h. despite the level road. The gale felt absolutely scorching, as if coming from an open furnace, and after about three hours I was suddenly overcome by headache, nausea and severe cramps in the leg muscles – the latter I believe due to salt deficiency, although I’ve eaten over
three-quarters
of a pound of solid salt in the last few days. Fortunately we were on the main Peshawar–Pindi road, where buses pass frequently, so I stopped one and was pulled on to it by a
twinkling-eyed
passenger who asked whether I was a mad dog or an Englishman? This immediately made me feel better, and I replied ‘neither – an Irishwoman’, and he said that that was obviously much the same thing. It was only five miles back to Pindi and after
lying down in my air-conditioned room at the General’s house, and absorbing eight pints of mango-juice and sour milk heavily salted, I had recovered by 2 p.m. – as much as anyone could recover in this infernal region.

This afternoon I had a date with one Father O’Leary at the Mission Hospital eight miles away. At 3 p.m. I put my head outside the door, felt as though my face was being burnt, retreated rapidly, rang the bell and ordered the air-conditioned Jaguar in a lordly way – poor Roz must have felt jilted!