Where the Indus is Young (31 page)

When everything was packed up, Rachel and I went out together to the latrine. (A diet of dried apricots leads to Regular Habits.) On the way we spent some moments admiring the peaks beyond the Shigar. A trail of soft pearly-rosy cloud was just touching the sharpness of snowy crests – which were rapidly becoming golden, one after another, as the sun rose above the eastern mountains.

Then, as I was loading Hallam, I observed that at least Rs.5 worth of kerosene had been stolen from the jerrycan – our first Balti theft, though our kit has so often been left unguarded for hours. This was a mean trick, when I had already given the family three pints of kerosene for their ink-bottle lamp, a dozen boxes of matches and Rachel’s fur-lined anorak, which would cost at least Rs.75 in Skardu’s K2 Store (a second-hand shop in the New Bazaar). I let it be seen that I had noticed the theft, but I thought it best not to get too rough. It is most unlikely that these people would have harmed us, yet there was about them an unmistakable aura of degeneracy and one can never entirely trust bigoted Muslims in a primitive region.

Our first stop was to water Hallam near the next tiny hamlet – the last in the valley – where several small streams of muddy melted snow crossed the track. Then we followed the mountains’ contours high above the valley floor, and crossed several small landslides. By nine o’clock I was sweating, though a slight descent had taken us on to a snowfield with that curious satiny sheen which precedes the thaw. Colossal angular boulders are strewn over this expanse and around these ‘storage-heaters’ the thaw is sufficiently advanced for clumps of thyme to have reappeared. These so tantalised Hallam that we halted here and for half an hour he tore ravenously at the dry, grey-brown bushes.

The next village was Dasso, some ten miles away up the Braldu Valley, and the head of the Shigar Valley was close – towering bastions of rock all jumbled together in snowy magnificence, leaving just enough space for the Braldu and Basna Rivers to find a way through. I scrutinised the steep, pale brown mountains above Yuno and
wondered why no thaw-water flows down their arid flanks: there is plenty of snow on the summits and it must go
somewhere
. Very odd.

At the head of the valley the track finally gave up pretending to be a road; but here the PWD (or someone) has certainly tried hard to improve communications. As our path dropped to river level – it must be partially submerged during summer – we could see the remains of two other paths very high up on the precipitous mountains directly above. Both have been broken in a dozen places by avalanches, rock-falls and landslips, but possibly one is repaired annually for summer traffic.

Soon our path became horrid for Hallam, with round, loose
riverbed
stones underfoot and a few feet of snow on either side. Then it became horrid for me, with liquid mud inches deep and the nearby snow too soft to take my weight. The Braldu Valley narrowed as we went east and we looked in awe at many massive new avalanches sprawled across the red-brown slopes on our right. These mountains were much more broken and jagged than the neat grey rock wall beyond the invisible river. At last our path curved across the snow towards the Braldu and we saw a racing, pea-soup tinted torrent, hardly forty yards wide. Next a huge outcrop of rock had to be negotiated and Hallam was twice brought to his knees by black ice in the permanent shadow of overhangs. Although Rachel had
dismounted
and the load was piled high he frequently seemed likely to go over the edge. It was impossible to estimate the true width of the path as snow lay deep along the verge; often when I prodded what seemed like solid ground it disappeared in an unsoothing way. Then we turned a corner and just ahead the path could be seen traversing a gigantic avalanche on a steep, snow-laden mountain. I looked at my watch: it was 11.45. We were hardly five miles from Dasso but the sun was very hot and prudence dictated a retreat.

Rachel was furious. ‘But we’re nearly there!’ she protested. ‘Why are you fussing now? You don’t usually fuss – why do we have to go back today?’

‘Because there is a time to fuss,’ I replied crisply, ‘and in my estimation this is it. Now will you kindly stop talking and get off this mountain as fast as you can!’ Which she did, being essentially an
obedient child, while I with great difficulty turned a somewhat
unnerved
Hallam on a boulder jutting out from the narrow path.

When we had re-negotiated the outcrop I readjusted the load and Rachel remounted. Then, characteristically, she pursued her study of the maternal psychology. ‘How do you
know
it’s time to fuss?’ she demanded. ‘I think we’ve been on much more dangerous paths.’

‘We have,’ I agreed, ‘but not at noon in mid-March on an avalanche mountain. It’s time to fuss when survival has nothing to do with personal skill or caution. On a dangerous path one can be surefooted and careful. But one can only die in the face of an avalanche.’

‘I see,’ said Rachel. And I hope she does.

On our return march we made a detour in an unsuccessful attempt to see the birth of the Shigar, where the Braldu and Basna unite. This involved following an uncomfortable little path over loose stones through deep snow to the edge of the Braldu. As we reached the water six men – the first people we had seen since leaving Yuno – arrived on the opposite bank. They had of course been visible for some time, moving towards us like ants across an immense width of snow, each man carrying a heavy goat-skin sack. They made no attempt to return my greeting but stared at us with that bewildered incredulity which is the normal reaction of the Baltis to the Misses Murphy. Then they took off their shalwars, tied them to their loads, and in three pairs, with arms around one another’s shoulders and sticks used to steady themselves, began very slowly to cross. The racing torrent was groin-deep and I realised too late that our presence meant their having to endure wet shirts in the cause of modesty. Their main difficulty was not the strength of the current – trying though that must have been – but the shifting stones on the
riverbed
. Three of the men were elderly and the frailest of these slipped once, briefly submerging his sack. But we discovered that it contained butter, so no harm was done.

When the men had gone on their way we remained by the water, stoically masticating apricots while Hallam enjoyed his oats. He is now much the best-fed member of the expedition; lifting Rachel into the saddle, I notice that she weighs about half what she did three months ago.

The sun was hot and the air sparkling as we continued down the valley. Despite our ‘defeat’, I count this among the best of many wonderful Balti days; and it emphasised the curious fact that here neither hunger nor lack of sleep seem to matter. Is this owing to the altitude or to the euphoria engendered by Baltistan’s beauty?
Whatever
the cause, it is most convenient to live on a plane so exalted that after an hour’s sleep one can effortlessly walk twenty-two miles on three fistfuls of apricots.

When we arrived in Sildi at 5.30 it seemed that we were again going to be ostracised. The first four men I approached either didn’t
understand
my request for shelter or pretended not to – I fancy the latter. Then I went towards an old woman on a roof, with a kindly, very wrinkled and incredibly dirty face. Before I could speak she beckoned me to bring Hallam around the side of her house and pointed to a one-roomed hovel some thirty yards away, which proved to be the residence-cum-shop of her married grandson. This young man’s wife and two children, aged three and one, have filthy faces covered with appalling running sores but are cheerful and friendly. Water was willingly provided and sugar was on sale in the shop (at Rs.9 a seer: I notice that most customers buy only a few spoonfuls), so I soon had a kettle of very sweet tea on the boil – the sort of concoction that would revolt me at home but here takes the place of a strong whiskey at 6 p.m. The little room quickly filled up with curious villagers and at first everybody seemed well-disposed towards us. Then a tall, arrogant, handsome young mullah arrived and treated us with calculated rudeness. While he sat by the stove we were ignored, but the moment he went everyone relaxed and our young hostess brought us four hot chapattis from the kitchen across the yard where granny was preparing supper. By the time we had wolfed these, with a second kettle of tea, Rachel was almost asleep on her feet; but there was no room to bed her down until our host, five of his friends and his wife had used the prayer-mat spread in the centre of the floor. When I unrolled her flea-bag the two other children were laid to rest beside her, wrapped in unspeakable shreds of old quilts. Meanwhile, business was brisk in the ‘shop’ – a home-made cupboard some six feet high and three feet wide containing small
amounts of dust tea, rock salt, goats’ milk butter, sugar, cigarettes, multi-coloured glass bangles and soap.

The young couple’s supper was brought from the kitchen by granny; it consisted of a small bowl of nasty-looking grey liquid, with four very thin chapattis for Him and two for Her. Then it was bedtime (8.30) so our hostess lay on the floor between the children and fed the year-old girl while her husband rolled himself in the only warm quilt and settled down on a narrow charpoy. In Baltistan one gets the general impression that women have the status of talking animals.

It was another restless night. I lay squeezed between Rachel and the three-year-old, whose frequent wretched whimperings in my ear were augmented by his sister’s no less frequent spasms of coughing and crying. During the small hours our host summoned his wife, but when no longer needed she returned to the floor. All the time I was being tormented by fleas who have come out of hibernation with appetites like lions, and Rachel tossed and muttered and scratched in her sleep though she never actually woke.

We set out at 7.45 a.m. and dawdled happily over the fourteen sunlit miles back to Shigar. When we paused in a village to look for food one mini-stall was open and on a top shelf reposed a solitary four-ounce packet of desiccated biscuits. Two tiny eggs were also on offer and I devoured these raw on the spot, to the enormous amusement of the assembled villagers.

We saw many more teams ploughing, the majority so reluctantly that it took three or four men to drive two animals; and two pairs of men were themselves pulling ploughs because their dzo had broken away and galloped off with raised tails, pursued by gangs of delighted small boys. In this valley we have seen more pack-ponies than
elsewhere
– small, sturdy and woolly, not at all like our lean,
long-legged
Hallam, who is really much too big for Balti paths. (I feel sure he has foreign blood.) To own a pack-pony is a considerable status symbol, because of feeding costs, and most people shoulder their own burdens, pausing often to rest on ‘shooting-sticks’. These have
a length of wood across the top to form a seat and are very necessary for long journeys through snow, or when a man’s load is too heavy for him to sit on the ground or get up again without help.

During one of our halts today, near a long slab of rock used as a regular resting-place, we were joined by three laden men who have unwittingly given me a guilt-complex. They were driving an
unusually
docile dzo, and leading a billy-goat with a goat-hair rope tied around his horns, and each was in his way a typical Balti. The barefooted old man, with an aquiline nose and an unkempt beard, was tall and thin and clad in rags; the middle-aged, shorter man wore a patched blanket and had a huge hanging goitre and a squeaky voice; the one-eyed young man who led the goat had a broad Mongolian face, a half-witted expression and a slight limp. When they paused beside us the old man mumbled a return to my greeting and all three stood staring at us for some moments in silence, before slowly lowering themselves on to the resting-rock. They then continued to stare in silence, as did the dzo and the goat, and I suddenly caught myself thinking (or rather, feeling) that there was perhaps more in common between them and their animals than between them and us. At once I was genuinely shocked by this involuntary reaction to three fellow-humans, a reaction that outrages the teachings of every religion and code of ethics, not to mention the UN charter and my own personal principles. But can it be that on occasions involuntary reactions push one closer to reality than one wishes to be? Ever since, I have been wondering just how equal men in fact are – forgetting principles and ideals. If those three had been transported, at birth, to a relatively prosperous Pakistani or Irish home, and brought up by loving, educated foster-parents, how would they strike one today?

I have come to suspect that in their pre-Islamic era the Baltis were only superficially influenced by Buddhism. The fact that they seem to have abandoned it so readily indicates this; in Tibet proper, neither Christian nor Islamic missionaries ever made any significant number of converts. Like the nomads of West Tibet – their comparatively near neighbours – the Baltis were probably primitive animists below the surface, with only a very vague idea of what Buddhism is all about.

Among the glories of this Rest House is a roll of pale pink loo-paper, left here last summer by one of the two tourists (an American girl and a Frenchman) entered in the Register for 1974. Rachel asked excitedly, ‘How did
this
get here?’, and when I explained she curled her lip. ‘They must’ve been cissies to put
loo-paper
in their luggage!’

‘It doesn’t follow,’ I said mildly. ‘Not everyone has been brought up the hard way, on snowballs and stones.’

Life in Baltistan certainly teaches one to adapt a few possessions to many uses: I can think of no better antidote to the West’s
gadget-demented
subculture. Our sack, for instance, is officially a sack – if you follow me – but in its off-duty hours it becomes, according to prevailing conditions, a window-curtain, a tablecloth, a mattress, a pillow, a horse-blanket or a floor-covering to protect new Rest House carpets from my culinary activities. Similarly, the lid of the old Complan tin used as a tea-caddy also serves as a mirror (the inside) and a candle-holder (the outside), while our frying-pan serves as Hallam’s grain-dish, and our kettle as tea-pot, and our nailbrush as clothes-brush, saucepan-cleaner, boot-brush and potato-scrubber, and our
dechi
as wash-up basin and,
in
extremis
, as chamber-pot. Possibly the time is nearer than we think for the Western world to learn how expendable are most of its newfangled gadgets.