Where the Indus is Young (6 page)

But now I feel very glad that we did not leave this morning, today has been so blissful. At ten o’clock we set off in brilliant sunshine with pockets full of dried apricots to do a little gentle climbing, and by four-thirty we had walked twelve miles and done a little ungentle climbing organised by Rachel. She is taking to the Himalayas like a camel to sand. ‘Why don’t we go to the top of
that
?’ was her constant refrain. At times I was terrified by her casual approach to precipitous slopes above 500-feet drops; but small children are naturally sure-footed, like animals, and I insisted on guiding or lifting her only when we were moving across ice. What really made our expedition so worthwhile, for me, was the degree of pleasure
she derived from being among these mountains. We came closer today as human beings (never mind the mother–daughter bit) than ever before.

Gradually we climbed from river-level on a sunless slope where in places, along irrigation channels, vast masses of ice formed intricate and astonishingly beautiful edifices, sometimes five or six feet high. Rachel walked delightedly along those solid channels, making footprints on their thin carpet of powdery snow, and soon we reached the sunny side of the mountain, where clear glacial water leaped swift and sparkling from terrace to terrace. The tiny pale brown fields were new-ploughed and an occasional leafless tree bore its huge golden burden of maize-straw, like the nest of some fabulous bird. From here Gilgit’s gigantic suspension-bridge seemed a lost Meccano toy.

On a wide, sunny terrace stood three primitive mud dwellings, amidst apricot and walnut trees. We were greeted by five women – unveiled, uninhibited and handsome, in total contrast to the hidden, tongue-tied, pallid females of Gilgit town. Unwashed within living memory, they wore elaborate but clumsily made silver ornaments on their foreheads, over heavily-embroidered brocade caps. Three were suckling flyblown babies of indescribable filthiness, normally kept under Mamma’s ragged cloak but proudly displayed for our benefit. While I made admiring noises over these infants a little girl was sent to fetch a dozen walnuts. As we walked on I reflected that this gift meant more than all the lavish hospitality of our
down-country
friends, who are endlessly kind but so rich their generosity could never have the significance of that fistful of nuts.

Higher up the mountain, on another, narrower ledge, an elderly woman was breaking ice to fill her water-jar. She insistently beckoned us to follow her into a compound where she put her jar down beside an ancient hand-loom that was leaning against the dry stone wall. Then she took my arm, with a smile of welcome that needed no words, and led us into the living-room. A few embers smouldered in a stone-lined depression in the centre of the earth floor under a square hole in the roof, and we sat on a mud platform built around the fire. Tea was made for us in an enormous
dechi
, which meant the
squandering of several fistfuls of precious donkey-dung fuel. I then saw that our wrinkled hostess could not be as elderly as she looked; she was still feeding a two-year-old boy, the youngest of her nine living children. She indicated that four others had died. The eldest was a strikingly beautiful fifteen-year-old girl who sat beside me with her first-born at her breast, encouraging me to help myself to dried apricots and occasionally leaning forward to blow the slow-burning dung. Three boys, wearing ragged homespun jackets and Chitrali caps, sat beside Rachel staring at her with comical expressions of disbelief. They all had sore eyes – not surprisingly, for dung-smoke is very acrid and as it swirled around us it made everyone cough.

Two built-in sets of four shelves held the family’s few possessions – a minimum of cooking utensils and spare clothing – while straw mats on the platform indicated that this was where everybody slept, in padded quilts stacked against the wall during the daytime. From the ceiling hung two goat-skins used, as in Tibet, to make butter in summertime. A dishevelled but obviously cherished ginger cat kept close to the flames and in the doorway stood a very small, very woolly sheep, meditatively chewing a long twig.

I noted that the tea had been imported from China, though it was what we call ‘Indian’ tea, and when it had been brewed, with a little fresh goat’s milk, it was strained into two grimy tumblers (made in France) and a tin mug holding sugar was taken down from a shelf and offered to us. But sugar is very expensive here, despite its being subsidised, so I told Rachel to decline it. Our hostess then held up a lump of pink rock-salt and looked questioning. I nodded, so she quickly dissolved some for addition to my glass – further shades of Tibet.

As we left, the fire was being stoked with maize cobs. These burn more quickly than dung and so are reserved for the cooking on an iron griddle of maize-flour chapattis. We were of course invited to lunch but everyone looked so undernourished it would have been unfair to stay. When I explained this to Rachel she said, ‘But couldn’t you have paid them for the food?’ So then I had to try to explain the revulsion I feel at the thought of desecrating this ancient tradition of hospitality with offers of money. Coming from the greedy West, one
realises that what such people have to give is truly beyond price. It comforts me to think that less than four miles from Gilgit town the tourist-belt has been left behind. At least half the people we met today invited us into their homes.

Still higher up that mountain, on a slope that was treeless and no longer cultivable, we crossed a desolate burial-ground. The graves were nameless and dateless, so that the difference between an adult’s and a child’s was apparent only by the size of the outline in stones, or of the hump of earth. Amidst such anonymous barrenness death seems much more dignified than in our own macabre, flower-
be-decked
cemeteries where futile monuments with verbose inscriptions perpetuate the rat-race of life.

Just beyond the burial-ground we turned the shoulder of the mountain and found ourselves looking into a hidden side-valley, some 1,000 feet below – a most spectacular drop. No wonder Rachel was overcome today by the sheer scale of the landscape. We
continued
up our mountain and then descended by another route to the narrow head of the side-valley. In winter this is permanently shadowed and ten-foot icicles, thick as a man’s body, glinted on the towering dark walls above us – cliffs immeasurable by the eye. We followed the sunless nullah down to the level valley floor: quite a feat for Rachel, as we had repeatedly to cross from side to side by scrambling over massive boulders encased in ice. This must be a tremendous torrent when the snows are melting but now the water is so low that to have fallen in would merely have been uncomfortable.

From the warm, bright fields of the side-valley we climbed again, to rejoin the main Gilgit path, and on our way home we were facing, in the near distance, a superb trio of sharp, soaring snow-peaks, dazzling against the deep blue sky.

Ghulam Mohammad was waiting for us in the Jubilee restaurant with the news that a Pathan jeep-driver, named plain Mohammad, will take us towards Skardu at 8 a.m. tomorrow – for Rs.100 if Rachel wants a seat and Rs.75 if she goes on my lap, leaving more cargo-space. This seems very reasonable for a 146-mile journey that takes two days in winter, though it can be done during the summer in one fourteen-hour marathon. Many jeep-drivers smoke hash
before a journey, to calm their nerves, and as a result are often incapable of the judgment necessary to avoid the Indus. But Ghulam Mohammad assures me that Mohammad smokes only cigarettes and is reputed to be the most cautious and skilful driver on the Skardu route.

At 7.55 a.m. Begum Sahib and Missee Sahib were standing with their gear beside the relevant jeep in the jeep-yard opposite the Jubilee. We seemed unlikely to start within five minutes, but I fondly imagined that we might be on the road by about ten o’clock.

At 8.20 a couple of grease-coated adolescents strolled into view, lifted the bonnet of our jeep, exchanged lugubrious comments, inserted a jack under the front axle and began complicated repairs which occupied the next three hours. We were repeatedly told they would be finished ‘in one quarter of one hour’ and though this seemed decreasingly credible we optimistically stood by. It was a dour morning, with snow falling heavily on the nearby slopes and occasional flurries here. I preferred not to leave our gear for very long but at intervals we had to retreat to the Jubilee to thaw out on tea. The local insensitivity to cold seems unnatural. Five ill-fed youths were lounging about all morning in the jeep-yard, wearing only cotton rags and open sandals made of old tyres. Twice they lit tiny fires to thaw their hands but they seemed not to feel any real discomfort. Lucky Gilgit has no litter problem; every minute scrap of everything is either devoured by wandering animals or collected for fuel.

When at last the jeep was pronounced fit to travel Mohammad could not be found. An hour later he appeared to explain that the trip was off because of heavy snow towards Juglote, but he promised that if the weather improved we would start tomorrow punctually at noon. I’ll believe it when it happens.

We joined Ghulam Mohammad and Aman Shah for lunch in the Jubilee – chapattis and stewed goat, need I say. Aman Shah observed that of course Mohammad had never had any intention of leaving today, because tomorrow at 9 a.m. he has to say his Id prayers at his own local mosque. This Ghulam Mohammad indignantly denied,
but I fancy Aman Shah was right. Probably Mohammad was simply manoeuvring to keep our custom lest we take off with some less pious driver.

After the meal we were introduced to Jemal Khan, a lively young Hunzawal with fair, freckled skin, light brown hair, a long, thick auburn beard and eyebrows that are one straight black line above hazel eyes. He comes from a village eight miles south of the Chinese border and is studying Political Science at Lahore University. He means to be a professional politician but seems unsure of the
procedure
for getting launched on this career. Like every other
Hunzawal
to whom I have spoken here – quite a number, the Jubilee being their Gilgit headquarters – he bitterly resents the Mir’s deposition and claims that his country’s whole way of life is being rapidly changed for the worse. As an example, he quoted the present fate of Hunza women. Before the introduction of soldiers and police from down-country they went about their villages unveiled, but now they are being put into purdah. A curious side-effect of ‘Progress’, recalling what happened in many remote Turkish villages when Ataturk the Secularist provided buses on which women could travel to the market-towns.

Jemal condemned the general Pakistani assumption that
Islamabad
is entitled to dictate to the Northern Areas. True, these all gladly acceded to Pakistan in 1947–8 and some fought and suffered for the right to do so. But was it fair – I was asked rhetorically – to reward their Islamic loyalty by abolishing that degree of independence which had been left to them even by the British, who were supposed to be such villainous imperialists …? At which point people began to stare at Jemal, whose voice had been getting louder and angrier, and Rachel made the timely suggestion that we should do some more exploring.

On our way through the bazaar we saw two groups of Chinese road-workers, getting into smart Range-Rover-type vehicles. They impinge very little on Gilgit town, despite being so numerous locally. Most of their supplies come from China, so they rarely need to shop here, and they have no other contact with Gilgitis. Yet one hears of them repeatedly doing good deeds, unasked and unrewarded, for villagers whose terrace walls or irrigation channels have collapsed;
and everybody praises their energy and industry, as observed by road-users. All this is rather reminiscent of how Tibet’s invaders behaved during the early 1950s, but I doubt if the same ulterior motive exists here. Yet the present unrest in these Northern Areas could easily be used by interested outside parties. Especially, perhaps, in Hunza, which has always had very close links, both cultural and political, with Sinkiang.

As we walked by the river, clouds were draping all the surrounding mountains and the air was raw and still, with bare branches black against an iron-grey sky. We passed several scenes of wayside carnage as sheep were being slaughtered for Id feasts, but these were the only symptoms of festivity. Returning at dusk through the dimly-lit bazaar, where most merchants had already closed and locked their wooden shutters, I pictured the streets of London or Dublin this evening and praised Allah for allowing me to be in Gilgit instead. But that was a selfish reaction: from poor Rachel’s point of view it is extremely bad luck to have missed the thrills of two successive Christmases. Fortunately, however, she has a passion for jewellery and Rs.10 will buy unbelievable quantities of bangles, brooches, rings and necklaces.

I doubt if Rachel will ever experience an odder Christmas Day. At sunrise the band of the Northern Scouts (whose parade-ground was nearby) began to play
Auld Lang Syne
very loudly and quickly and continued to play it for half an hour without pausing to draw breath. Whether this was a sentimental salute to the memory of Christian officers, or a military way of celebrating Id, no one seemed to know. It was a dark, cold morning, with low cloud, and at 7.30 a sudden thundering of hooves, accompanied by blood-curdling war-whoops, brought us rushing to the restaurant door. Twenty fast little
polo-ponies
, wearing gay, tasselled saddle-cloths, were charging past like the Light Brigade in fancy dress. Their riders – the Northern Scouts polo team – wore mufti but carried long lances with pennants. Nobody else took the slightest notice of the team, or knew where they were going, or why, and quickly they disappeared into the foggy greyness of the morning.

Not long after, the sky cleared and we enjoyed a brisk walk down the left bank of the river while waiting for Mohammad. At four minutes past noon he appeared, to my considerable astonishment, but then the key to the jeep-yard could not be found; it was thought probable that the yard-owner had taken it to his village, seven miles away, not expecting it to be needed over the Id holiday. I volunteered to break the lock and replace it (a new one would have cost all of
Rs.2.50) but this immoral suggestion was ill-received. I then insisted that Mohammad should take action and for forty minutes we stood staring frustratedly at our vehicle through the wooden slats of the yard gate.

By the time a panting youth arrived with the key Mohammad had of course vanished. When at last he reappeared a fire had been lit under the engine to thaw it, our gear had been taken aboard and we were in our seat – but then the jeep refused to move, though the engine started willingly enough. Mohammad jumped out, looking unperturbed, and a number of hammered screws and knotted pieces of wire were ‘done hast’, to replace what the makers would undoubtedly describe as vital parts. These ‘re-pears’ had the desired effect and at 2.10 we moved off, along a track I well remember following on my bicycle Roz. Despite its being now called the Karakoram Highway it remains so rough on this stretch that I had to hold Rachel very firmly on my knee and forbid her to talk lest one of the more violent bumps might cause her to bite her tongue off.

Deeply as I deplore the building of motorways through the Karakoram, I could not but admire the gangs of young Chinese soldiers, hundreds strong, whom we passed at frequent intervals. Seen toiling against the barren immensity of this landscape they seem true ‘Heroes of the Revolution’. (In deference to Islamic custom, no Heroines of the Revolution work here.) Their task is one that makes the combined Labours of Hercules seem trivial and they are tackling it with the minimum of machinery. Today we saw only one electric generator on the back of a truck, to drill holes in the cliffs for dynamite, and an occasional wheelbarrow – if wheelbarrows count as machines. Most of the work is being done with shovels, picks, wicker baskets and naked hands. It is impossible to recognise foremen or gang-leaders; they wear the same denim-blue,
high-collared
, patched boiler suits as the rest and do the same work. This last fact enormously impresses (and sometimes disconcerts) the Pakistanis, whose own foremen would scorn to touch a shovel and wear clothes chosen to distinguish them from ‘mere coolies’.

If this road-building corps has been hand-picked to make a good impression on decadent capitalists, it certainly succeeds. After a week
in Gilgit town these young men – all from Sinkiang – seem
exceptionally
healthy, well-built, well-fed and well-equipped against the cold. To us the majority look below average stature but otherwise – with their bright brown eyes, happy bronzed faces, plump, ruddy cheeks and strong white teeth – they might be older brothers of Rachel. Their formidable task is being accomplished according to schedule, yet they seem singularly unhurried and unharried. They laugh and sing as they chop up the Himalayas and often a youth may be observed relaxing on a rock with a cigarette, like road-workers the world over. They were obviously astonished to see Rachel staring out at them, yet they showed no sign of friendliness and spared us not even one of their many jolly smiles. This saddened me
disproportionately
; or perhaps not disproportionately, when one considers the personality-warping necessary to make these good-humoured lads freeze up when non-Communists appear.

At four o’clock we reached Juglote, a few miles beyond the
confluence
of the Gilgit and the Indus. Not far away are two of the huge Chinese camps and we stopped to load the jeep where a small Pakistani army camp stands on one side of the road, opposite a supply depot for Baltistan. Here down-country trucks, which have precariously got thus far on the new highway, deposit petrol,
kerosene
, sugar, flour, rice, dahl, cigarettes, tea, tinned milk, cloth and the few other goods that are imported into a region accessible only to small jeeps in good weather.

By this stage Mohammad was looking a little tense and one could see why. The forenoon sun had long since disappeared, clouds were curling among the harsh heights all around us and the
darkness
of snow lay over Baltistan. Mohammad’s depot friends are pessimistic about the chances of any jeep getting to Skardu in the foreseeable future so he proposes taking his passengers and load as far as the track is clear and then dumping the lot in some
unspecified
hamlet – a plan I like immensely. As neither he nor any of his friends speaks a syllable of English I wonder now how we achieved all these explanations and arrangements. At times I suspect myself of understanding more Urdu than I realise, when the pressure is on.

We have both fallen for Mohammad. Tall, lean and handsome, he wears baggy Pathan pantaloons, an oil-stained anorak and a woollen scarf wrapped turban-wise around his head; yet he has that
commanding
and distingué air which marks so many Pathans, whatever their apparel or occupation. He is one of those taciturn but not at all unfriendly people with whom I feel a certain affinity. Even among his friends he speaks only rarely and briefly and he never needlessly addresses us. I can think of no more reassuring driver for a trip through the Indus Gorge.

Jeeps can carry a lot, if cleverly packed, and Mohammad was taking on two large barrels of kerosene, six sacks of flour, two sacks of sugar, several bales of cotton and sundry crates of tinned milk (from Germany), tinned ghee (from Holland), biscuits, soap and cigarettes from Pindi. The securing of such a load, to withstand the unimaginable jolting involved on this route, takes hours of hard work. Apart from the financial loss, should anything fall into the Indus, a loose load could cause the jeep itself to go off the track on a dangerous bend. Rachel and I therefore had plenty of time for our Christmas afternoon walk, though there was no Christmas fare to be digested. We watched a cockfight in the depot compound, where a score of men had gathered to enjoy this ‘entertainment’. The army put in a brown bird and the depot civilians a speckled bird and the pair sorted it out bloodily against a background of rusty barrels marked ‘White Oil. Made in the People’s Republic of China’. The army won and then both birds were killed for Id dinners.

As dusk fell we all squatted around a smoky little oil-stove on the verandah of the stone depot building. The manager invited us to spend the night on charpoys in a store room but for some obscure reason Mohammad insisted on driving another two miles away from the Gorge track to this doss-house in the village of Juglote. I have stayed here once before, on 15 June 1963, when I slept on a charpoy by the roadside because it was too hot to remain indoors.

Tonight it is too cold to remain outdoors for longer than it takes to pee. It was pitch dark as we bumped along the village street, where the only light came from a dim kerosene lantern hanging in the cavernous tea-house behind which we are now accommodated.
The proprietor-cum-chef is a gnarled ancient wearing a greasy,
gold-embroidered
skull-cap, a henna-streaked grey beard and three long, protruding brown teeth in the left corner of his mouth. He genially invited us in from the freezing tea-house to the comparative warmth of the kitchen where his culinary feats are performed on a mud stove built up to waist-level and fuelled with bright yellow mulberry wood. Here the only light came from the leaping flames and our only fellow-guest was a wordless character with an Early Man brow and a rifle on the table by his tin plate. He ate squatting on his haunches on a wooden bench, wrapped in a thick brown blanket, and when he stood up to go out into the icy night I saw that his feet were bare.

Our Christmas dinner consisted of chapattis and a watery dahl gruel, followed by watery tea. Seemingly they never rise to meat in Juglote, even for Id. But as this was our first meal in twelve hours it tasted remarkably good.

Then the proprietor led Rachel and me across a narrow yard to a room in which no progressive Irish farmer would keep pigs. The stone walls are smeared with dung and mud and for ventilation we have a tiny, high-up unglazed window and a ‘chimney’ hole in the roof. (There are signs on the sanded floor that some guests bring their own wood and make their own fires.) One corner is occupied by a tall pile of quilts, for hire to those without bedding, and we are sharing this suite with Mohammad at a cost of Rs.3 for each sagging charpoy, which is expensive by local standards. To get to bed
everyone
has to clamber over everyone else’s charpoy and two of my ropes collapsed as Mohammad was on his way across, just a few moments ago.

Earlier, as I was reading Rachel her bedtime story (a ritual which unfailingly takes place in the most unlikely surroundings), we heard through the gloom weird, unhuman movements and utterances close beside us in this supposedly empty room. Rachel went rigid with fright and even I was momentarily unnerved. Then I resolutely swung my torch towards the sound – and discerned a speckled hen settled for the night on that pile of quilts and engaged in a vigorous flea-hunt.

Tomorrow the question mark will be replaced by a name, when I have found out precisely where Mohammad has dropped us. So far I have been given three totally dissimilar names for this hamlet in the heart of the Indus Gorge, but none of them appears on my detailed map of Baltistan – which perhaps uses a fourth. Anyway, what’s in a name? The important thing is that I can imagine no more desirable place in which to be marooned by snow for an indefinite period.

The seventy-eight miles from Juglote took eight and a half driving hours. Presumably Mohammad has little imagination and much fatalism; otherwise he could never summon up enough courage to drive an overloaded, badly-balanced and mechanically imperfect jeep along a track where for hours on end one minor misjudgment could send the vehicle hurtling hundreds of feet into the Indus. As the river has found the only possible way through this ferociously formidable knot of mountains, there is no alternative but to follow it. Without having travelled through the Indus Gorge, one cannot conceive of its drama. The only sane way to cover such ground is on foot.

Apart from one’s own nervous tension – which is not fully appreciated until the journey is safely over – there is an intrinsically intimidating quality about this landscape such as I have never encountered elsewhere. Its scale, colour and texture combine to create an impression of the most savage and total desolation. None of the adjectives usually applied to mountain scenery is adequate here – indeed, the very word ‘scenery’ is comically inappropriate. ‘Splendour’ or ‘grandeur’ are useless to give a feeling of this tremendous ravine that twists narrow and dark and bleak and deep for mile after mile after mile, with never a single blade of grass, or weed, or tiny bush to remind one that a vegetable kingdom exists. Only the jade-green Indus – sometimes tumbling into a dazzle of white foam – relieves the grey-brown of crags and sheer precipices and steep slopes. Many of these slopes are strewn with sharp, massive hunks of rock, often the size of a cathedral yet seeming mere boulders. Soon the river begins to have a hypnotic effect and, appalled as one is by the sight, one peers constantly down at that
beautifully untouchable green serpent which is usually so far below it looks no more than a stream. We passed two of those steel rope ‘bridges’ across which the locals propel themselves in small wooden boxes and glimpsed one man so occupied. Rather him than me …

Naturally most of this area is uninhabited. But at rare intervals, where the gradient permits terracing, or a ledge of rock has allowed some soil to defy erosion, clusters of rectangular stone hovels stand amidst apricot, mulberry, plane and poplar trees. In summer these oases must look very lovely. Now, observed in the fearful sterility of mid-winter, they simply seem improbable. One wonders why and how people ever came to settle in such a violently inhospitable region, where climate and terrain are equally opposed to human survival.

This jeep-track was built less than ten years ago and based on an ancient footpath. At present the Pakistani army are trying to convert it into a conventional motor-road that will take buses, trucks and ‘auto muboils’, but tough as is the Chinese task theirs is
incomparably
tougher. One cannot see them ever succeeding, unless their methods and morale are radically changed. Yet Mr Bhutto expects them to have completed the job by the beginning of 1977. One vignette I shall never forget. A colossal boulder had been blasted to the edge of the track and was being imperceptibly shifted by a quartet of elderly privates. All four were sitting on the ground – two facing the boulder, endeavouring to push it over the edge with their bare feet while leaning against their mates’ backs. How not to build roads in a hurry … This was a sight to gladden any
motor-hater
’s heart.