Full Tilt (20 page)

This village is a veritable metropolis – its one shop sells cloth and matches and three men from Lahore are posted here on a six months’ meteorological survey – they almost wept for joy to see someone else from down-country. The area also produces
potatoes
so I’d a luxury dinner with the boys this evening – spuds and stewed clover and ghee. It would have been even more luxurious without the ghee. They make butter here by putting milk in an ill-cured sheepskin and sitting for hours rocking it to and fro on their knees. The whole family takes a turn and eventually you have butter. Then the stuff is put in another, equally ill-cured, skin and buried in the snow for two years. When resurrected the thing is allegedly a delicacy. If you want to be frightfully polite you can describe it as ‘mature’ – and if you survive it you’ll survive anything. Sugar may be obtained by air from Pindi at 6s. a pound if anyone wants it. Nobody does. The people reckon to get enough from mulberries – surely the sweetest of all fruits – which are dried for winter use. Some time ago an American ‘expert’ came to demonstrate a better method of drying fruit, but the locals found it too expensive and have reverted to their traditional way. Incidentally, that American has become a legend in the valleys – they still giggle at the memory of him refusing to drink the spring water from the mountains without first boiling and then chlorinating it, and the kernel of the joke is that he got such violent dysentery in the end that a helicopter had to come from Gilgit to remove him.

I’ve come down a lot in the world today – to 7,800 feet. The Met. boys told me that the temperature in Gupis this last week has been between 80° and 88°. They have a ‘Post Office’ here also and once a week a runner goes to and from Gilgit (literally running in bare feet), armed with a six-foot spear against bears, wolves and leopards.

The food situation has improved here since I left a few days ago – apricots are ripe now and everyone can have their fill, gratis, including cattle. These seem a rather exotic fodder for animals but
transport costs are too high for fruit to be sold down-country and the people here can’t eat it all. The enormous trees – like giant oaks – are laden with their crop; and in another few days plums and peaches will be just as plentiful. I notice that, though in general the people are pathetically unhealthy, most have exceptionally good teeth – possibly so much fruit?

We took it easy today, covering only twenty-two miles, during which I had three glorious swims. The barley is ripening fast now and the little fields with their grey stone walls look like patches of pure gold as one gazes down from high up on the opposite mountain. The colouring on every side here is so vivid and clear and the contrasts are so wonderfully effective in their simplicity that I just soak it all up like a sponge and hope the memory will sustain me when I get back to the hell down-country – if I ever do! The Met. boys thought the Babusar Pass would be negotiable by now on foot, though they said it definitely won’t open to jeep traffic this year till mid-July. Apart from being squashed by sliding glaciers (and that would be sheer bad luck and is far less likely than being squashed by a bus in Pindi) they said the nullahs will be the chief menace. There’s a PWD Rest House eight miles from the top, so I’ll be sure of a night’s sleep before crossing. Of course it’s possible I’ll have to give up at some point and return to Gilgit. (Don’t worry – I won’t take any foolish risks. I’ve often wondered what a
wise
risk is and now I know – obviously the sort I take!) I have decided to hitch-hike with Roz from Pindi to Lahore (172 miles), as we will be returning on this road in October, when the weather is more reasonable for cycling; there’s no future in sweating along it for three days during the hottest fortnight of the year.

I forgot to tell you about the pseudo-soccer match I saw in Gupis. Having delivered our herd to their destination Rob was dragging herself (and me) along the road to the Met. office when suddenly I came on the most unexpected sight – a playing field complete with twenty-two youths and a soccer ball. I know very little about soccer,
but enough to realise that this is how it is
not
played. No one ever moved above trotting speed, no one ever tried to tackle anyone else, the referee never used his whistle, the ball was never headed and the two goalies sat cross-legged between the posts most of the time, looking abstracted. The real excitement from a spectator’s point of view was caused by the fact that one side of the field had a sheer drop of 200 feet, so that the main object of all the players was to keep the ball from going into the ravine rather than to kick it between the posts. Of course it frequently
did
go over the edge and then followed a ten-minute interval, while the ‘linesmen’ stationed down there retrieved it, and during this pause everyone lay about in attitudes of utter exhaustion, as though they’d been playing their hearts out. What fascinated me was the way they avoided the ball if someone occasionally (to his own evident astonishment) kicked it hard – both teams showed more speed and agility in getting away from this dangerous missile than they did in pursuing it. The final score, curiously enough, was 0–0.

That evening, too, I had my first bottle of Punial Water, the local wine which sells at 1 ½
d
per quart. It’s nice, yet can’t be described by likening it to any other wine, as its taste is unique; but it definitely is wine and quite potent on an empty stomach. Grapes are as plentiful here as other fruits but are not cultivated in vineyards. Instead, the vines have grown to full size and are like giant fossilised serpents, often coiling from a walnut to a mulberry to a plum tree and so
overwhelming
the ‘host trees’ that it’s difficult to determine their species. The wine is amber and rather cloudy and tastes faintly of that ill-cured sheepskin which plays a part in the production of most food and drink here.

We left Gakuch at 5.15 a.m., laden with apricots to ‘keep me going’. I don’t think that if I live to be a hundred I’ll ever forget those glorious early morning starts, seeing the first shaft of sunlight come over the sharp, snowy peaks to stream down the valley, and listening to the sweet, excited bird-song and to the rush of the brooks and the whinnying of local horses greeting Rob.

We’re now down again to 6,100 feet and it was damned hot by 11.30
a.m. I stopped at a tiny hamlet for four hours and met a most
interesting
man who spoke fluent English and gave me a lot of information about the locality. He got a government scholarship as a youth and is now trying to improve local farming methods. Aged 36, he’s one of the twenty-eight children of his father’s four wives. But he says that because he could not afford to feed children as he has now learnt they should be fed he refuses to marry. I thought him a very impressive character, absolutely dedicated to the task of helping his people. We sat outside his family’s stone hut, in the shade of walnut and mulberry trees, beside a ‘white-foam-and-green-water’ torrent hurtling down from the mountain, with weeping willow and golden barley on the other side of the nullah; the glaciers on the mountains across the narrow valley look very beautiful against the deep, deep blue sky. He and I were given roughly-made wooden chairs and about
twenty-two
other people sat around on the ground, fascinated and uncomprehending, as we talked in English while drinking bowl after bowl of buttermilk. Some of the girls were very lovely in a Germanic sort of way, but most were so dirty and undernourished that one could only pity them.

It’s just occurred to me that the inoculation I’d have needed most in this locality is the one I
didn’t
have – against TB. The coughing and spitting – often of blood – are appalling and about twenty per cent of the people in these villages are clearly dying on their feet. The only consolation – a poor one – is that a case of young parents dying and leaving half a dozen children isn’t the tragedy it would be in most ‘civilised’ communities, as the children will be as well cared for as possible by other relatives. The only essential for children
not
in short supply here is affection, and the result is an extraordinarily happy atmosphere in every family I’ve stayed with, despite the starvation and squalor. Each child is doted on by everyone from its tiny brothers and sisters up to its creaking great-grandparents.

I made an effort to get this family sorted out, but on discovering that the man on my left had sired three of the infants present – all aged between four and ten months – I gave up the attempt. One of his wives, aged eighteen and mother of four, looked at least forty, and the
eldest wife, who was forty, had just had her sixteenth (seven dead) and looked seventy – but was very gay and cheerful. In this region wives are quite frankly bought; until recently they were exchanged for livestock, now they fetch £5 to £50 depending on their looks. If a man wants an exceptionally beautiful girl for £50, he’ll pay £10 down and the rest on the instalment system. Beauty means big eyes, small mouth, curly hair, long neck, straight nose, white skin, good teeth and plenty of curves. If the beauty proves barren she will probably be divorced if she is a first wife, but another man who has already sons by his wife or wives, will buy her for her beauty alone; among Ismailis there is far less emphasis on virginity than among Sunnis or Shias. But adultery by the wife remains the crime of crimes; it is legal for the betrayed husband to kill both his wife and her lover on the spot if he catches them together. However, if the lover flees and the husband kills them apart it is murder, and he goes to gaol in Gilgit Town for eight years. I asked if murder for other motives was common but apparently it’s almost unknown, so probably the corpse I found was that of a lover who got away and was killed afterwards. Theft of any kind is equally rare (possibly because no one has anything worth stealing!) and my friend couldn’t tell me what the penalty is as he’s never heard of a case.
Girl-babies
are considered bad luck and everyone concerned weeps with disappointment at their birth – which seems very odd in a society where their sale will later on bring money into the family. Boy-babies are saluted with gunfire and twenty-four hours of rejoicing, singing and dancing. Nevertheless I notice that the girl-babies receive as much kissing and cuddling from both parents and from everyone else as the boys, so the weeping must soon stop.

Leaving my hamlet, after a lunch of apricots and maize bread, I jogged along in a leisurely way towards Gulapur, where I’d intended rejoining Roz this evening. Then, about four miles from the village, a horseman came galloping towards us in a cloud of dust, pulled up and with a broad beam and a low bow handed me a visiting-card. I looked at it in some astonishment, which you’ll agree is a natural reaction. Then the horseman signed that I was to follow him and he led me – by this time feeling slightly surrealistic – off the Gulapur track and over a
swaying suspension bridge to a very good imitation of the Garden of Eden on the other side of the river. Finally I found myself beside a mounting-block outside the Raja’s residence and there was my host greeting me as though we’d known each other for a lifetime! (He speaks adequate, though not fluent, English.)

This is quite the most fantastic set-up I’ve ever met. A new bungalow, very rough and ready, has just been built to replace the old stone fortress where all the other Rajas lived. Here I am installed with an
oil-lamp
, which is regarded in these parts as the last word in modernity (the ordinary people use the roots of the juniper bush as lamps because they burn very slowly for a long time), and with a lavatory off my room, which sounds good till you discover it is a board laid across a stream which runs through the compound. I presume our drinking water comes from the same brook and can only hope that it’s taken from upstream. The place looks almost completely unfurnished, apart from about half a ton of silver polo trophies. The Raja himself is an absolute darling who reminds me of something out of a fairy tale – I suppose because life in this tiny state of 15,000 inhabitants is all so simple and crystal clear that it belongs to childhood stories rather than to adult life. He had no difficulty whatever in persuading me to stay for a few days, so I sadly said, ‘goodbye, and thank you for looking after me so well’, to Rob, who was then taken home by one of the Raja’s henchmen. The postal runner passed on the other side of the river as I was leaving Rob so I hailed him and delivered a letter to Daphne into his leather satchel: presumably it will arrive in Ireland some day.

The Raja, who is forty-eight, has only one wife living (and one dead) which is very unenterprising of him as both his father and grandfather ran to four simultaneously. His grandfather helped define the Durand Line and was made KCIE for that and his father was an OBE, for no apparent reason except that he ruled his people well and justly. The present Raja has ten sisters and brothers and can’t remember half their names.

Life is pure bliss here – the Raja has offered me a present of a little farm under the mountains and I’m almost tempted to accept! Dinner last night consisted of stewed goat-meat and maize bread and cherries, and this morning after a breakfast of eggs and bread we set off on foot for a tour of the ‘village’, which is not a village in our sense of the word but about a thousand acres of fertile land with the little stone huts of the peasant farmers dotted around it and a criss-cross of artificial streams keeping the place green. The atmosphere is indeed of paradise regained – such perfect tranquillity, innocent of politics, budgets and rivalry of any kind. The Raja is accepted as father of the whole community and treats everyone as ‘family’ and that’s that. After every harvest he checks the amount of grain in the state and decides whether any should be sold in Gilgit bazaar or not and the people accept his decision without question – that’s his function as Minister for Finance. As Minister for Social Welfare he receives all families who have suffered any kind of disaster into his compound and supports them indefinitely – at the moment a hundred and twenty-four people are being maintained. As Minister for Justice he settles the disputes which the council of twelve men in each village of the state bring to his notice. This morning, while eating his breakfast, he received a deputation who reported on a dispute about a rope bridge near by. It has always been kept up by two villages, one on either side of the river, but now one village says that its people almost never use it, and that the other village should do all the repairs – so the Raja pronounced that this was fair enough and the dispute was settled in five minutes.