In Xanadu (39 page)

Despite this public-spirited act both men came to sticky ends. Prinsep fell ill from overwork trying to translate the Ashoka Brahmi and after four years, having finally cracked its secrets, he developed 'an affectation of the brain'. By the time he was bundled aboard the
Hertfordshire
his 'mind was addled'. He reached England, but never recovered his sanity'lingering a year until relieved of his sufferings' in 1840. His old partner, James Pattle, fared no better. 'The biggest liar in India', as he was known (with justice; one of his claims was to have rowed across the Atlantic in a hen coop), drank himself to death, and wai put in a cask of rum to preserve him during the voyage back to England. His wife had the cask placed outside her bedroom door. In the middle of the night there was a violent explosion, and when the widow rushed out into the passage she found the container had burst and her husband was stuck half in, half out of the barrel. 'The shock sent her off her head then and there, poor thing, and she died raving. . ..' But the worst was yet to come. The cask was nailed down and put on board ship. Sometime after the boat had set off, the sailors guessed that the cask was full of liquor, bored a hole into the side of it and began to get drunk. The rum continued to run out, caught fire and set the ship ablaze. While the drunken sailors were trying to extinguish the flames, the ship ran onto a rock and blew up. So it was that Pattle was cremated rather than buried in England, as he had wished.

Mulling over whether there was perhaps a moral in this stop', Louisa and I setoff up the Karakoram Highway. It was a beautiful day and even the warnings of our Punjabi friend -that if we were not eaten alive we would certainly perish in a rockfall - did not lower our spirits. We were soon picked up by a road contractor. He was making repairs to the highway sixty miles further up and said he would take us as far as he was going.

The Karakoram Highway was built as a joint venture by the Chinese and Pakistanis in the 1960s when the two countries were thrust together by mutual hostility to India. It was planned as a military road, strictly closed to foreigners, but in May the Pakistan Government announced that it would be opened. This was the catalyst which led us to plan our expedition, and we were thus among the first Westerners ever to see the highway. The Begum had given us an unreadable publicity pamphlet about it before we left Lahore. If the brochure was to be believed, the road was eight hundred kilometres long, involved blasting some thirty million cubic yards of rock and claimed over four hundred lives during the twenty years it had taken to build.

Leaving Mansehra we snaked upstream along river valleys, high above the rapids. The mountainsides were covered with wild flowers. The upper slopes were wooded. There were some wattle huts built beside the road and in them tribesmen were selling melons. The road rose and the air grew colder. Then, suddenly, the spaces widened, and we found ourselves in a hanging valley, ablaze with the violent green of ripe paddy terraces. In the Punjab, all the rice fields had been full of villagers grafting and tending the shoots. The Pathans seemed to take a more relaxed attitude to agriculture. They sat on their
charpoy,
as immobile as the water buffaloes beside them, and waited for their rice to grow. One village made cricket bats, but despite a small pile of finished bats propped up against the wall of one hut, no one seemed to be too busy there either. When we stopped for ray, the male villagers were kind and relaxed and cheerful. They squatted on their hams and offered us dried apricots. We saw few women in these villages.

As we drove on, the valley narrowed again. The villages became fewer and the houses fuller and stronger. The walls were mud, but they were lined with timber, and their windows were narrow. At one such village we gave a lift to a family of Pathans. The father of the family was a fierce orange-bearded tribesman who held a machete in one hand and a live chicken in the other.

Sometimes, the contractor would ask one of us to take over the driving, but for most of the journey Louisa and I sat in the back. I browsed through the translated memoirs of the first Mogul, Babur, one of a number of books I had been lent by Mozaffar (in return he took my much-thumbed and very dirty
Cnme and Punishment).
Babur was the great-grandfather of Jehangir, but lived in the very different, more precarious world
of
early sixteenth-century Transoxiana. He spent much of his youth throneless, living with his companions from day to day, rustling sheep and stealing food. Occasionally he would capture a town (when he was fourteen he took Samarkand and he d it for three months) but generally he lived out
of
a tent, a peripatetic existence that appealed little to him. 'It passed through my mind,' he writes in the
Baburnama,
'that to wander from mountain to mountain, homeless and houseless, had nothing to recommend it.'

What appealed to me, reading the book as we passed through the valleys of Bafa and Battagram, was the similarity of the landscape I was passing through to that described by the Mogul nearly Five hundred years before. Of his home province of Ferghana he writes:

It abounds in grain and fruit and its grapes and melons are excellent and plentiful. In the melon season it is not customary to sell them at the beds: passers-by eat them gratuitously. ... The district also abounds in birds and beasts of game. Its pheasants are so fat that it is said that four persons may dine on the broth of one of them, and not be able to finish it....'

It could be Battagram he was describing. It did not take much imagination to see in the turbaned valley tribesmen the bearded faces which fill the court scenes of early Mogul miniatures.

Having dropped the Pathan family in a fortified village, we stopped for lunch at roadworks forty miles north of Mansehra. About two-thirds of the width of the road had crumbled down onto the paddy terracing below, and with it had fallen a small Toyota pick-up, the double of our own. The contractor took great pleasure in pointing it out to us as we sat on a
charpoy
at the edge of the precipice.

Toyota with Australians’ he said with a cheery wave in the direction of the pick-up. 'All now deads.'

The food that his friends cooked for us was equally unsettling. At meals Pakistanis manage to produce pieces of meat from perfectly normal animals, sheep or chickens, that bear no apparent relation with the meat served up from the same animals in Europe. What part of a sheep was given to me that lunchtime I have never discovered. It was soft and flexible and covered with grey rubbery meat that tasted a little like gum Arabic. Worse still was the alcohol that was produced from a tent to celebrate our arrival. Pakistan is a teetoal Muslim country so all alcohol must be produced illegally. The contractor proudly told us it was made by a friend of his who worked in a hospital. It was stored in a little clouded-glass bottle, the sort used for cough medicine. He carefully mixed it with a sickly-sweet bottle of Cola, then decanted it into dirty tea cups. Louisa was sitting the far end of the
charpoy
to the contractor and was able to pour her cup down the precipice without being noticed. I, however, was forced to drink the whole measure: it was horrible stuff. The effect of drinking it was half anaesthetic, half disinfectant, but it did at least take away the taste of the gum Arabic.

Feeling distinctly unwell, we carried on up the highway. The contractor was in fine form after his fix of disinfectant and he drove on at a terrifying pace. He seemed to take particular pleasure in near-misses with juggernauts heading in the opposite direction, after which he would turn around and grin at us. Often this would lead to yet another even closer miss which would in turn cause ever greater outbursts of high spirits. Pakistanis believe illegal drinking to be rather chic, and will go out of their way to show quite how drunk they are. We closed our eyes, but were still haunted by premonitions of imminent disaster. Then it happend. We turned a sharp comer and suddenly in front of us, far below, we saw the Indus curving
around the foot of a great mountain. The contractor looked around to point it out. There was a sickening jolt. I saw a cow take off, fly across the road and achieve a remarkable all-fours landing on the verge. Without so much as a look at us it continued to munch the grass, apparently unmoved by its brief flight. But the Toyota was a write-off. The front radiator had completely caved in on one side, and water from it was forming a large puddle on the road.

For a while we all stood around hopelessly. The contractor sobered up and examined the damage. We tried to look sympathetic. Lou helped the contractor to raise the bonnet. I tapped the radiator in an authoritative manner. Lou pointed to the puddle. The contractor nodded. He fiddled with the battery. He spun the fan. He got onto his back and wriggled under the radiator. He shook his head. The cow tore at a tuft of grass.
I
removed
the rucksacks from the back. It was clear that the pick-up was not going anywhere, at least not in the immediate future.

The question was what to do next. The contractor decided to walk back to his friends at the roadworks and try and get them to help. We decided to walk on. We pushed the truck onto the verge, shook hands and set off in opposite directions, leaving cnly the cow to keep the pick-up company.

Ahead of us the gorge opened up into the main valley of the Indus. Here the river was about half a mile wide: a great swathe of stone-grey snowmelt cutting through the mountains. A small sidetrack led off the road to a solitary white bungalow on the riverbank. The bungalow was surrounded by mown lawns and hedged with conifers. It was now late afternoon and we had made no plans as to where we would spend the night. We stumbled down the track, and were met at the bottom by a
chowkidar.

'Sahib,' he said, bowing slightly. This is an inspection bungalow. It is sadly reserved for the servants of the Government of Pakistan.'

I had seen these
dak
bungalows before in India. Officially they were open only to circuit judges, postmaster generals, brigadiers and the like, but occasionally an appropriate gesture (i.e. a bribe) to the
chowkidar
could secure a bed for a single night. I was just about to enter negotiations, when I heard Lou pipe up beside me.

'We
are
servants of the Government of Pakistan,' she said.

I looked round at her.

'Aren't we. Willy?'

'What?'

'We are the official Anglo-Pak Marco Polo expedition,' she explained to the
chowkidar.

'Oh that's absolutely right,'
I
said, catching on. 'We are the official Anglo-Pak Marco Polo expedition. That's exactly what we are.'

I found the Begum's letter and gave it to the
chowkidar.
The man looked at it, bowed again, and led us into the bungalow. Lou winked at me, then followed the
chowkidar
inside. We were given a room looking out onto the Indus. In it were two magnificent four-poster beds equipped with elaborate canopies of mosquito netting. There was a clean, European-style bathroom. There was even a roll of soft loo paper.