Where the Indus is Young (7 page)

We met only one jeep all day – near here, where the track was slippy with snow. When it backed to let us pass my stomach felt sick for I swear at one point its outside wheels were hardly four inches from the edge: and I wondered how often that day our own had been similarly placed. Inevitably on such a track drivers get into the habit of regarding four inches as an ample safety margin, despite the crumbly nature of many of these cliffs. Otherwise the traffic consisted entirely of large herds of goats being driven, I surmised, to some less barren area, for here not even an Asian goat could last without
supplementary feeding. Their shepherds were among the
wildest-looking
men I have ever seen, wearing collections of patches rather than garments, and skull-caps decorated with pieces of coloured glass, and leather strips wound around their feet and halfway up their calves. Many looked very like Dolpo Tibetans or Ladakis – not surprisingly, since Baltistan is also known as Little Tibet. Yesterday we saw similar types, driving towards Gilgit a large herd of
crossbred
cattle; each animal wore a coat of sacking despite its yak-like wool, which indicated that they had descended from a great height, sleeping out en route.

When we arrived here at 4.30 it was already dusk because of low, thick cloud and flurrying snow. At this point the Gorge widens for a few miles and the track leaves the river to cross a wilderness of grey, boulder-strewn sand, riven by narrow minor gorges. Brand-new wooden bridges, barely wide enough for a jeep, span these deep cracks which allow swift torrents to roar down to the Indus, their noise amplified by echoes from their own rock-walls.

Mohammad stopped outside a ‘hotel’ ingeniously built on to a huge outcrop of rock by the roadside. The boulders that were already
in situ
are used as seats, and as supports for the mud fireplace, and as a table on which the cook prepares chapattis. As the
Connemara-type
stone walls admit icy blasts from every angle, guests huddle close to the great glowing pile of wood over which tea is brewed in a cauldron-like
dechi
and stringy fowl are simmered in dark brown gravy tasting only of chillis. Beyond the kitchen-cum-dining-room is a dormitory containing twelve charpoys, without bedding, which are rented out at Rs.4 a night to passing travellers – who are few at this season. The locals unselfconsciously refer to this establishment as ‘The Hotel’ and it serves as a depot for those Skardu-destined supplies which during winter often get so far and no further. (Between here and Skardu the track is reputed to be far more dangerous than between here and Juglote – something I find impossible to imagine.)

The little group of men and youths sitting by the fire received us noncommittally. While Mohammad was unloading they made no friendly overtures but discussed our inexplicable arrival in an
uncomfortably derisive way. This was my first sample of Balti; it is an archaic dialect of Tibetan and I could understand a few words. However, I don’t take our cool reception too seriously. It simply means the ball is in my court and I feel relations will quickly improve once the initial shock to the social system has worn off.

When Mohammad reappeared in the doorway he beckoned us and uttered his first words of English – ‘Rest House!’ We had been quite resigned to sleeping in the Hotel and I stared at him, bemused. Surely, I thought, even the Raj didn’t get around to building a Rest House
here
! I was right. The jeep crawled back the way we had come, through lightly falling snow, and eventually, having climbed a short, sharp hill, we found ourselves on the verandah of a small Rest House built only last year to accommodate government officials on tour. It is modelled on the Raj’s dak-bungalow, though at its worst the British PWD would never have put three large windows with ill-fitting frames in one smallish room at 8,500 feet.

Our room, with adjacent bathroom, is known as ‘the VIP suite’ and sports a thick wall-to-wall carpet on its concrete floor. The other, larger room has been occupied, since October, by a
down-country
team of three medical workers, of whom I shall have a lot more to say tomorrow. As we dragged our gear on to the verandah I was astounded to be greeted in fluent English by their leader, Dr Mazhar Javaid, a slim and handsome twenty-four-year-old who obviously regards the arrival of fellow outsiders as a gift from Allah. We have already had a long talk, but I am too tired and cold to record it now.

I have at last established the name of this hamlet which, on the recent invention of the Northern Areas, was chosen as administrative centre for the Ronda region – more phonetically spelt ‘Rongdo’ by Cunningham and other nineteenth-century travellers. Ronda is about forty-five miles from east to west and thirty-two from north to south. The name means ‘district of defiles’ and the local Raja has always been subject to the Raja of Skardu.

Thowar’s newborn importance explains our Rest House, where we
have the absurd and unnecessary luxury of a foam-rubber mattress for my bed, a well-sprung couch as Rachel’s bed, two easy-chairs, a table for our literary activities (Rachel is on page seven of her diary), and a hand basin and lavatory in our bathroom. Naturally there is no running water, but ‘sanitary fittings’ look good even if they smell otherwise. These luxuries irritate because the effort of getting them to Thowar is out of all proportion to their usefulness. Locally made furniture would have served the purpose just as well, looked a lot better and cost a lot less.

Behind the Rest House a glacial stream forms a waterfall as it jumps eight feet from the terrace above. A sheet of ice, about ten feet wide and two feet thick, has to be crossed to reach this waterfall and the first time I approached it its tremendous power knocked the kettle out of my unprepared hand. All around stand glittering pillars and mounds and giant globules of solid ice, their irrational shapes and arrangements seeming to belong to another planet.

The three windows which make it so difficult to heat our room overlook an exhilarating complexity of high peaks, many
snow-covered
, and the Gorge is visible far below if one knows where to seek for it amidst a shambles of dark, shattered rocks and sheer brown cliffs. This morning at eight o’clock we walked through this shambles to the Hotel, for tea and
paratas
, treading cautiously on new snow over old ice. Then we continued on for another half-mile to the Dambudass bazaar, where three Pathan hucksters between them sell flour, rock-salt, tea, sugar, tinned milk, kerosene, cigarettes, matches, cloth and soap. (Judging by the appearance of the locals this last item is not in great demand.) Another tea-house-cum-
doss-house
completes the ‘bazaar’ and is run by a charming old man with a face like an elongated walnut, under a cap of gay, glass-decorated brocade. He squats on top of his mud-stove, ready to prepare chi and chapattis on request, and he refused to accept payment for the two cups of tea we drank while waiting for a merchant to provide us with a packet of tea and a tin of milk. Now we are equipped to brew tea on our own kerosene stove.

Unfortunately the kerosene sent to the Northern Areas is often adulterated with diesel oil by unscrupulous down-country dealers
and the result does nothing for either one’s health or one’s temper. The powerful fumes from our stove – which works perfectly and cannot be blamed – give me a small nagging headache and make my eyes sore and watery. The candles I brought from Pindi are also eccentric; they behave in a most uncandlelike fashion, hissing loudly and spitting grease all over the page as I write.

On our way back from Dambudass, as we were passing the Hotel, a scowling young man appeared at the door and beckoned us in. He wore a Chitrali cap, baggy pants and a blanket, and his long pale face was disfigured by acne. Evidently he was a person of some local importance, for he had that smattering of English which is worse than none because it can lead to so many complicated
misunderstandings
. For some reason he seemed to be in a foul temper and sullenly antagonistic towards us. There was an odd atmosphere in the Hotel, where we sat on the only piece of furniture – a charpoy – looking down at a firelit semi-circle of faces around the blazing logs. This time the young man was the object of covert derision and he seemed determined to take it out on us. Making no attempt to introduce himself or define his status, he asked where we came from, why we were in Baltistan, how long we were staying and where we were going. He said we had no right to stay in the Rest House, or anywhere else in Ronda, and must leave immediately. (For where? And how?) His aggressiveness became more marked as our conversation exposed more fully the limitations of his English and I soon realised that he understood almost nothing of what I was saying, despite my efforts to speak slowly and clearly. Every now and then he turned to his companions and harangued them in Balti, apparently defending himself. It was all very odd. But I could sense the rest of the assembly inexplicably veering to my side as the conversation proceeded and I began to feel quite sorry for the young man, who obviously was at some sort of disadvantage in the community.

It began to snow again, quite heavily, as we continued back to the Rest House, and we have been weather-bound since noon. Dr Mazhar Javaid called on us after lunch and we went to the medical team’s room for tea. The doctor’s helpers are a good-looking, but
very shy young nurse from Pindi, and an elderly Skardu woman who acts as chaperone and interpreter. (There is no resemblance whatever between Balti and any of the languages spoken in Pakistan.) All three sleep on a row of charpoys; Muslims have no convention forbidding the sexes to share sleeping quarters. Their Russian-type tin stove, on which all water is heated and all cooking done, burns very expensive wood. To us the room seemed uncomfortably overheated, but Pakistanis naturally feel the cold more than we do – and the doctor comes from Multan. He is a most endearing young man and already Rachel worships him.

This ‘Medical Pioneers’ scheme is a gallant attempt to scratch the surface of Baltistan’s health problem. It will be impossible in the foreseeable future to provide normal medical aid for the Northern Areas, so a few unselfish volunteers come to such places as this to teach elementary hygiene to carefully chosen groups of young villagers. These are selected for their natural intelligence and because they are likely to remain always in Baltistan, where it is hoped they will gradually spread the light of hygiene. They are also taught how to treat dysentery, worms, bronchitis and other common local complaints.

We had just returned to our room and lit the stove when Mazhar reappeared, followed by our spotty antagonist of the morning. Instead of his blanket he now wore a frayed olive-green sweater and a red arm-band saying PPP – Pakistan’s People’s Police.

‘This is Wazir Ghulam Nabi,’ explained Mazhar. ‘He is the Head Constable of Ronda and would like to see your passports.’ Later Mazhar admitted that Ghulam was the only constable of Ronda but said he so appreciated the title of Head Constable it seemed unkind not to use it.

Ghulam spent the next twenty-five minutes poring perplexedly over our passports. Presuming his slow scrutiny of every page and health document to be a quest for visas, I asked Mazhar to explain in Urdu that Irish citizens need no visas. But Ghulam shook his head impatiently and continued to peer in a baffled, unhappy way at those green pages with the harp in the middle. Then suddenly he became very agitated because of stamps revealing that we had been in India
earlier this year. It took Mazhar and me ten minutes to calm him down. By this stage I had begun to feel quite fond of him; away from the tea-house milieu, which had so put him on the defensive, he seemed just an unsure youth terrified of slipping up in his new job. Before leaving he smiled suddenly, shook hands warmly, thanked me for helping him and said we must call on his brother when we got to Khapalu. So despite our unsatisfactory passports, he has apparently decided to accept us.

A glorious morning after the snow – all white and blue in clear gold sunshine. I stood outside the Rest House at eight o’clock and looked up at the nameless 20,000 foot peak directly above to the north – a peak dazzling and sharp as a knife against the blue – and I knew no other part of the world could so exalt me. Up the Gorge towards Skardu cloud still hung about the tangled summits and as we set off to find the village of Ronda the mountain-side was crisp with a thin layer of frozen snow, while the swift stream beside our path was invisible – though audible – beneath a lid of ice. We went slowly, for Rachel is having altitude trouble. ‘I feel panted!’ she exclaimed graphically and plaintively as her mamma bounded along, feeling as always more energetic at 8,000 feet than at sea-level. So I had to reduce my pace.

Our path took us between brown, oblong, terraced fields with neat stone banks, and past apricot trees hung with vines, and through a cluster of small square stone hovels. Then we came out on a wide, snowy ledge at the foot of a sheer dark precipice at least 1,000 feet high: the scale of everything here is fantastic, dream-like. And there was Ronda, the only place-name to appear between Gilgit and Skardu on Bartholomew’s map. Yet it cannot be described as even a small town. It is simply a jumble of wood and stone dwellings, some almost neolithic, scattered in groups over a ledge about one mile long by three furlongs wide. Many houses have animal shelters built on their flat roofs, to evade the snow and catch as much sunlight as possible, and crude stone steps lead up to these. The most conspicuous building was a large and very ancient square
two-storey 
dwelling, standing on its own with four unglazed
upper-storey
windows whose carved wooden panels reminded me of Tamang houses along the Nepal–Tibet border. Indeed, the whole place recalled the photographs one has seen of Tibetan towns and villages.

We were soon surrounded by puny, silent children, too astounded by our appearance to speak or even smile. Many were so fair they could have been Irish; there were even two red-heads with bright blue eyes. Ginger hair and blue eyes are quite common hereabouts. Then the adults appeared, including three extraordinarily beautiful young women with delicately moulded, triangular faces, clear fair skins, rosy cheeks and bright eyes. Most women wear ornate
headdresses
of silver ornaments attached to round brocade caps and all were carrying on their backs at least one filthy baby or toddler. They were no less friendly than their menfolk and trooped after us, excitedly laughing and chattering, when we were invited to the Headman’s home. The Headman himself was away in Dambudass so we were entertained by his eldest son, a tall, handsome man of about thirty, whose wife and sister were two of the local beauties.