Travels (35 page)

A group of children came running to greet us. I was struck by how scraggly and unattractive they were. Here a mixture of ethnic origins—Chinese, Persian, Afghani, Mongol—led not to a beautiful blending, but to a stunted, deformed pack of mongrels. In this fabled land of self-sufficiency, the children clutched at our clothing, begging to sell us locally mined garnets. I inspected a few dirty fists; they held gems of poor quality.

In the villages themselves, I looked for the fabulously old people, but saw none. There was disease and poverty, and signs of a harsh mountain life on all sides: genetic defects, evidence of inbreeding, cataracts, rashes, infections, running sores.

However, Hunza’s physical setting was captivating, a little principality of green terraced fields nestled in a bowl of high, snow-streaked mountains, with the Hunza River running through the center. Above the town rose a whitewashed fortress, its siting spectacular. But the fortress was disused, its windows broken, its white façade peeling.

Hunza was once an autonomous mountain state, one of a string of feudal nations across the Himalaya that included Swat, Ladakh, Nagir, Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan. In the nineteenth century, the British supported these states as a buffer between India and powerful neighbors to the north—Russia and China. For centuries, these little nations remained cut off from the world, inaccessible in the mountains, and forbidden to foreigners. Elaborate myths grew up around them.

The British briefly conquered Hunza in 1891, after the Hunza bandit attacks on caravans began to get out of hand, even by the standards of that lawless corner of the world. But the British allowed Hunza to retain her independence. Now the Pakistani government wanted to take over these independent mountain states. Their procedure was simple: they waited until the Mir died, and then did not allow him to be succeeded. The last Mir of Hunza had died two years before; the Pakistani government took over the country and opened it to tourism.

So we were seeing the shell of a former state, the remnants of what once had been. We stayed in Hunza two nights. It was peaceful and beautiful, particularly at sunset, when the valleys, already in shadow, glowed in the light reflected from the mountain peaks. But it was not the Shangri-La of imagination.

From Hunza we went to the Hopar Valley in the adjacent kingdom of Nagir. In fable, the Nagyri have been as much despised as the Hunzakuts have been idealized. The Nagyri are said to be darker, weaker, frailer, and more depraved than the Hunzakuts. The Nagyri are unsanitary, ungracious, and unpleasant. You know you are in Nagir, say the Hunzakuts, because there are so many flies.

As is often the case with neighboring states, the people and ways of life appear virtually identical to an outsider. It is proximity that causes competition, and a natural human tendency to consider all bad traits as located on the other side of the valley.

At Nagir, we camped in a beautiful valley alongside the Bualtar Glacier. I had never seen a glacier before, and I found it quite remarkable, a frozen river of stone. To the naked eye, there appeared to be no ice at all. There were simply two vertical canyon walls of dried mud, and in the middle, between them, this flowing, riverine shape of gray rock. Nagir has many glaciers, including the Hispar—forty miles long, the second-largest in the world outside the polar caps. But the Bualtar was a small, rather tame-looking glacier.

One day our trip leader, Dick Irvin, Loren, and I decided to hike on the glacier. Loren and I were both glad for the excursion; during our stay at this lovely campsite, some unspoken tension had increased between us, which was incongruous in the beautiful setting. I felt there was something on Loren’s mind, but I was reluctant to ask her. When I finally did, she just shook her head and insisted she was fine. Yet the tension remained.

So it was good to spend a day on the glacier; I found it a fascinating environment—a little slippery in places, windy, and very cold, which seemed peculiar after the stifling heat of camp. But, following the initial surprise, the glacier proved rather featureless, just a great frozen river covered with rock, and after an hour we grew tired of hiking. Dick, a much stronger hiker, decided to walk on. Loren and I headed back to camp.

We had climbed down onto the glacier on a gentle, sloping trail, but it was a circuitous route and added an extra mile of walking. If we were willing to climb the earthen cliffs, we could go directly back to camp.
There were trails going up the cliffs, and we had seen shepherds driving goats up these cliffs, so we knew the trails were passable.

We picked a suitable trail and started climbing. The cliffs were fairly sheer, crumbling dirt. But the trail was easily three feet wide; it wasn’t difficult to climb for the first hundred feet of ascent. I often stopped to look back at the glacier as we rose higher and higher above it.

Then the trail became a little steeper, the path a little narrower. I was uncomfortable, and I stopped looking back, but fixed my attention on the trail. Still, we were already halfway up, and it seemed sensible to keep going.

The trail deteriorated. Pretty soon it was less than a foot wide, a mere track in the crumbly earth, and occasionally it gave way underfoot. There weren’t many handholds in the sheer dirt walls of the cliffs; and no vegetation to grab on to, so these little collapses were frightening. There were many gaps in the trail, where the ground had broken away before.

As we ascended, the gaps grew wider. They were occasionally two feet wide, then three feet wide. They were difficult to step across—especially since you had no assurance that the earth on the far side of the gap would hold and not give way.

We were now two hundred feet up. Another hundred feet and we would reach the upper surface, and camp. We kept going.

The trail was now very narrow. In most places we had to hug the rock wall, pushing our bodies against the warm dirt, as we moved up the trail. It was more and more difficult to proceed.

And then the trail stopped.

At some time in the past, it had broken away, and there was now a gap of at least six feet between where I stood and where the trail resumed. I was standing with my body flat against the wall. There was hardly any room to stand. There was no room for me to turn around. I was two hundred feet in the air on a narrow trail on an earthen cliff and I was stuck.

I am afraid of heights. I wanted to scream.

“Why have you stopped?” Loren asked. She was behind me, on the trail. She couldn’t see anything; my body blocked her view.

“There’s no trail.”

“What do you mean, there’s no trail?”

“I mean, there’s an open gap ahead of me, about six feet wide.”

“Can you get across it?”

“No, I can’t get across it!” I was becoming panicky.

“Let me see,” Loren said. “Maybe I can do it.”

“I can’t move,” I said. “And anyway, I’m telling you, you can’t do it, either.”

“Just move your body a little; let me see.”

I moved my chest away from the rock a few inches, so she could peer through to the gap in the trail ahead. I was starting to sweat.

“It’s wide,” she said. “Too wide for me.”

“Can we go back down?” I asked. I couldn’t see; her body blocked the trail down.

“Too steep,” she said. It is much easier to go up a steep, narrow trail than down it.

“Then we can’t go up and we can’t go down.”

“Yeah.”

I was seriously fighting panic now. I had one of those momentary visions—like a near miss in a traffic accident. This is how it’s going to happen. Nothing dramatic, no great incident, nothing so big as the landslide.
Just a little day hike from camp in Nagir, they somehow took the wrong route back, got nervous, fell off the trail. We first suspected something when they failed to turn up for lunch.…

“Somehow we have to get across it,” she said.

“I can’t get across it,” I said to her. “We have to go back down.”

“I can’t go down,” she said, “and I know you can’t.”

And there we were, and there we stayed, frozen for the next few minutes. I don’t know how it would have turned out if we hadn’t heard a voice say, “What seems to be the trouble?”

It was Dick Irvin. He’d already crossed the glacier, and was on his way back. He’d noticed us climbing the cliffs and had decided to follow.

I was never so glad to see anyone in my life.

“There’s no trail, Dick,” I told him, trying not to whine.

“No problem,” he said. And somehow—I am not clear on the details—he managed to move past us, and I watched him kick a toehold in the dirt halfway across the gap, and he leapt lightly across, and from the other side he held out his walking stick, and he got first me and then Loren across the six-foot gap. Then Dick led us on up the trail. My body was shaking. I was soaked in sweat. My vision seemed greenish and too bright. There were several more gaps in the trail, but Dick got us past them all, somehow.

When we reached the top, I felt dizzy and had to sit down. Dick went on to camp to check on lunch. I sat on the ground and thought I might throw up. Loren kept asking me if I was all right. I said I was, but I wasn’t. I didn’t eat lunch; I wasn’t hungry.

In the late afternoon, when it was cooler, Loren suggested we go for a walk. We moved along the rim of the valley, looking over the town and the terraced fields. In this remote pastoral setting, we found ourselves
talking about our plans for the future, our hopes for our lives when we returned home. Standing here in a grove of apricot trees above the Hopar Valley, we talked about having a family and working and about our plans, which were, it became increasingly clear, not shared plans but individual plans. The seriousness of this conversation made us both very calm and polite. Neither of us was willing yet to say the marriage was over, but that prospect hung in the cool afternoon air. Finally we began talking about dinner, and how hungry we were, and we went back to the camp.

The next morning we got back into the jeeps, and started the long trip back to Islamabad. When we got to the landslide, the road had been cleared.

Sharks
 

“Have you dived in the pass yet?” the proprietor of the hotel asked the first evening, when we told him that we liked the diving.

“No,” we said, “not yet.”

“Ah,” he said. “You must dive the pass. It is the most exciting dive on Rangiroa.”

“Why is that?”

“The swiftness of the current, and also there are many fish.”

“Sharks?” someone asked.

“Yes,” he said, smiling, “usually some sharks.”

I was in Tahiti for Christmas with my family—my brother and sister, and assorted husbands, wives, girlfriends, friends. We were visiting several islands, and we had begun with the most remote.

Rangiroa was more than an hour from Papeete, one of the Tuamotu chain of atolls. The highest point on Rangiroa was about ten feet above sea level. From the air, it looked like a pale, sandy ring in the middle of the ocean.

The Tuamotus were old islands; their volcanic peaks had been eroded until they finally disappeared, and nothing remained but the coral reef that had originally surrounded the island, but now merely enclosed a lagoon.

On Rangiroa, the lagoon was enormous—some twenty miles in diameter. There were only two breaks in the enclosing reef, through which the
tides came and went twice a day. So much water, moving through just two passes, meant that tidal currents were strong indeed. It also meant that lots of fish were attracted to the pass, because of the great nutrient flow in the water.

“It is very exciting,” the proprietor said. “You must do it.”

We went to Michel, the divemaster, and said we wanted to dive the pass. He consulted a tide table, and said we would do it at ten the following morning. (You can only dive the pass when the tide is running into the lagoon. Otherwise you risk being swept out to sea.)

The next morning, with everyone out on the dock ready to go, my sister asked Michel, “Are there really sharks in the pass?” We were all experienced divers; she was the only one who hadn’t seen sharks.

“Yes,” Michel said. “You will see sharks.”

“A lot?”

He smiled. “Sometimes many.”

“How many?”

He saw she was getting nervous and said, “Sometimes you see none at all. Are we ready to leave?”

We got in the boat and set out. The pass was a quarter-mile-wide gap in the atoll. Inside was the calm lagoon, outside the swells of the ocean, which crashed continually against the outer reef. We took the boat to the outside, and Michel got out a float and a spool of thread. Then he gave us a lecture.

“You must stay together,” he said. “Everyone get your equipment on, and everyone go into the water as close together as possible. Go right down; do not stay at the surface. When you are down, try to stay within sight of each other. I will be in front of you, with this float”—he gestured to the float in his hands—“so the boat can follow us. The current is very strong. Partway along the pass there is a valley where we can get out of the current for a rest; keep an eye out for that. From there we will continue, and we will be swept into the lagoon; you will feel the current slow; you can look around the coral at your leisure until you run out of air, and come up to the boat. In the pass, do not go below seventy feet. Okay?”