A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (10 page)

‘Here I was overset in a lorry with Carless Sahib.’

‘You never told me that,’ I said to Hugh.

‘It was nothing. The driver lost his head. Ghulam Naabi was a bit shaken, that’s all.’

Another mile. We ground up a really steep piece covered with loose stones. ‘Here we had a puncture.’

A little farther and we reached a place where the radiator had boiled over. It seemed impossible that such a short distance could encompass so many misfortunes.

At the meeting of a lesser stream, the Parandev, with the Panjshir, we got down and washed. The water was very cold. Coming from the regions of snow and ice it reminded us, as we stood there sticky and hot, of the rigours that awaited us higher up in the mountains.

‘Very high the Parandev,’ said Hugh, ‘nearly 16,000, according to a book I read. We couldn’t measure it, we hadn’t got an aneroid, but there’s snow on it from October to May.’

I asked him about the passes into Nuristan.

‘Probably higher. Don’t mention the word Nuristan when we come to hire the drivers, otherwise they won’t come. They’re terrified of the place.’

The road continued close along the river bank and now Ghulam Naabi began to look out for the man we had come to find, the Tajik who had accompanied Hugh on his previous journey and whom we hoped would now come with us, bringing with him two more drivers with horses.

‘
ABDUL GHIYAS
!’

Ghulam Naabi let out a great cry that scared the driver, causing him to swerve so that he nearly landed us in the river.

As we flashed past, there was a momentary vision of someone glaring up at us from the water’s edge. By the time we had stopped and got out he had climbed up the bank and was coming towards us along the road. Abdul Ghiyas had been saying his prayers and had been just as frightened by Ghulam Naabi as the driver. He was
dark and thin, aged about thirty-five, with a moustache and no beard. His face was deeply lined on either side of the nose towards the corners of his mouth, and his eyes were dark brown. He was wearing a
chapan
, a loose woollen cloak-like garment of white homespun with wide sleeves. On his head was an old black headcloth, tattered but clean. This was the man who had been struck on the head by a stone on the last visit to the mountain, the one I had read about in a hotel bedroom in Manchester, half a world away. It was an historic moment, but for someone who hadn’t seen his one-time master for more than four years he did not manifest any great enthusiasm; rather he showed a lively apprehension.

‘He doesn’t seem very excited to see you,’ I said to Hugh, while we were parking the station wagon in a little lane that led steeply off the road and into the orchard at the back of Abdul Ghiyas’s house.

‘He’s probably wondering how he’s going to feed us all. We
are
rather a mob.’

‘I expect after the last time he wonders what you’re planning for him. Seeing you must be rather like being handed a death warrant.’

We climbed a wall of crumbling stones into a little garden that led down to the river. It was a charming place. Mulberry trees and a trellis of vines sheltered it from the heat of the day and the grass was green. Willows overhung the river, which here ran swift and deep except close into the bank where some quirk of the current made it move sluggishly upstream. Beyond the narrow road which divided it from the garden was the house, like all the other houses, a fortress of brown mud with loophole windows, wooden gutter pipes and a flat wooden roof with wide eaves. From it came the sound of giggling and there was a swirl of gaily coloured cloth on the roof as his wives gazed down on us, until he shouted something sharp at them and they vanished.

‘He always was a dreadful prig about women,’ Hugh said and proceeded to tell him so.

From one of the loopholes half-way down the sheer wall of the house a minute girl of three or so was observing us, but as soon as she felt herself watched, she veiled herself with a scarlet cloth.

Now, with great solemnity, the greetings and introductions began. Besides Abdul Ghiyas himself there was his old father, toothless and doddery, and a line of his relations down to a degree when kinship must nearly have been extinct: several sinisterlooking men in skull caps, hangers-on, who were ignored, and a host of children, all boys. All these had appeared as if they had been expecting our arrival; as indeed they had, the news having in some mysterious way preceded us from the capital.

‘
Salaamat bashi
,’ droned Abdul Ghiyas, looking apprehensively at the roof. ‘May you be healthy.
Khub hasti? Jur hasti?
Are you well? Are you harmonious?’

‘
Mandeh nabashi. Zendeh bashi
,’ we intoned. ‘May you never be tired. May you live forever.’

‘
Salaamat bashi
,’ squeaked the old father and, because Hugh had been a secretary, ‘
Sar Ketab.
I remember you, Head-of-the-Book.’

Meanwhile rugs and quilts had been brought out from the house and we sat down in a half-circle with our legs drawn up. A young man came up from the river with two big, circular baskets, one filled with apricots, the other mulberries – the Panjshir
tūt
– dripping with the water in which he had just washed them.

‘You have arrived for the last of the apricots but for the
tūt
there is still time,’ said Abdul Ghiyas.

The apricots were good but the mulberries were delicious, small and sweet and white with a faint purplish tinge. It was difficult to resist them. Like a mechanical shovel, Ghulam Naabi’s hand rose and fell, scooping them from the basket and into his mouth until I thought he would burst. As the light failed he seemed to grow larger like a white balloon.

After an hour of
tūt
eating he lay back on his quilt and languidly
gave instructions for the preparation of an evening meal, waving a sticky hand. My spirits rose. I was hungry, too hungry to satisfy myself with sweet mulberries however good. I noticed that he took no part in the actual cooking, which was carried out over a dung fire in a remote corner of the garden. Judging by the blasphemous sounds that came out of the darkness, it was not altogether easy but the results were satisfactory. A dish of eggs and
nan-i-roughani,
thin, flat wheat bread fried until crisp in clarified butter, and a pot of tea for each one of us. It was evident that if Ghulam Naabi was with us all would be well.

While we were eating a big moon rose and shone down on us through the trees, throwing a network of shadows over us. The village
Mullah
arrived, an elderly man with a full beard dyed bright red. Soon a water pipe began to circulate, passing from hand to hand. It reached me but I made it gurgle so horribly that I quickly passed it on, afraid of becoming a social disaster.

Up to now there had been no mention of the business we had come about, perhaps before dinner it would have been considered impolite. Now Abdul Ghiyas gently broached the subject.

‘Last year an American came to Jangalak.’ (Jangalak was the name of the little hamlet where Abdul Ghiyas lived.) ‘I went with him to Mir Samir.’

‘What happened to the American,’ said Hugh. ‘How far did he get?’

‘Not so far as you did, only to the glacier. But for me the journey was more pleasing. I was not hit on the head by any stones. The American had ropes. He was rich.’

‘All Americans are rich,’ said Hugh, ‘but they were my ropes, I lent them to him, they cost me £17 from England.’

To me it seemed a lot of money for a few ropes.

‘They came from England by air. The freight was terrific. They didn’t come in the “Bag”. There was some kind of mistake and I
had to pay the duty. The Customs worked out the value at the bazaar rate of exchange and then charged the duty on that. It was most unsatisfactory.’

With infinite slowness all was agreed. Abdul Ghiyas was to be our guide and caravan master. He was to bring his own horse and two other drivers, each with their own beasts. We were to leave the following morning. It was not considered advisable to discuss the financial arrangements before Ghulam Naabi and such a large audience, and at any rate the other two drivers would have to be present.

Now we sat for hours and hours while the
Mullah
, who had constituted himself chairman, decided who of the company should speak of the problems that afflict the world. It was obvious that we were going to be up all night. Like everyone present, the
Mullah
was a Tajik.

We were now in fact in the heart of Tajik country. As Abdul Ghiyas said proudly, later in the evening, ‘From the British Embassy at Bāgh-i-Bālā through Panjshir and over the Anjuman Pass to Faizabad in Badakshan all is Tajik.’

He was right. The embassy at Kabul is on the northern fringe of the city. All day we had been travelling in Tajik territory. There are also Tajiks in Andarab, the parallel valley to Panjshir to the west and also around Ghazni and Herat. In the Panjshir there are, according to the
Mullah
, about 5,000 households, about 30,000 people in all. The Tajiks are the original Persian owners of the Afghan soil, conquered and dispossessed by the Pathans but still speaking Persian; pleasant, regular-featured people; agriculturists, Sunnites, intense in their religion, a far more ancient people than the Hazaras, round-headed, flat-faced Mongols who were settled in Central Afghanistan by Genghis Khan in the fourteenth century in the region he himself had depopulated, and converted to the Shiah faith in the eighteenth by Nader Shah’s
Persian Army.
²
Now like the Tajiks the Hazaras are a subject race, independent only in the fastnesses of their own country, the Hazarajat.

For hours and hours we sat there. The
Mullah
spoke of the King and how he came to hunt in the mountains just behind us.

‘He comes by jeep and good horses wait him. There are ibex and panther; wolves also. In winter there are many wolves. They attack the people and take sheep.’

‘Do many young men come from the city to hunt?’

‘They would not come to our mountain,’ said Abdul Ghiyas; in spite of his misfortunes on Mir Samir he still seemed proud of his connexion with it. ‘The mountain needs men of hard flesh.’

I shuddered, thinking of our efforts to climb Legation Hill four days before.

It was now very late, and cold too; here we were nearly 8,000 feet up. Our breath smoked in the moonlight. The river was over the banks; the effect of the glaciers melting in the midday sun was only just making itself felt. In the last hour it had risen six inches.

Hugh was telling an interminable story, something from South America, about an anaconda killing a horse. To express it in classical Persian was heavy going; judging by the look of almost hysterical concentration on the faces of his audience it was pretty difficult for them too. I was very tired and my head kept falling forward with an almost audible click. Fortunately, the story of the anaconda broke even the
Mullah
’s resistance, and soon we were left alone. We wrapped ourselves in our sleeping-bags and instantly fell asleep.

I woke the following morning to find Abdul Ghiyas regarding me at close range with his large haggard eyes. I had the sensation that he had been doing this for some time, perhaps trying to make up his mind by a close inspection what defects I possessed. Partly in order to reassure him, I went to swim in the river. The water was like ice. I emerged from it with chattering teeth to find that Ghulam Naabi had made tea and that the other drivers had already arrived.

While drinking our tea Hugh and I regarded them covertly. Our first reactions were not altogether favourable; judging by the hostile glances they shot at us from time to time, neither were theirs. Both of them were about our own age. One was thin, with a small foxy moustache. He wore a striped jacket that was part of a western suit, loose
shalvār
trousers, a huge, floppy turban and shoes with curly points. He looked cunning, intelligent and the antithesis of the faithful retainer. The other had a broad, stupid face, like an old-fashioned prize-fighter, with a thick, trunk-like nose and a deeply lined forehead with a wart on it. On the back of his head he wore a little pill-box hat. He looked as hard as nails.

They were crouching with Abdul Ghiyas over a wooden bowl
containing curds and talking with great animation while they scraped the bottom of the bowl with great hunks of bread; occasionally they would interrupt their conversation to look at us with sinister emphasis. There was no question of our accepting or rejecting them. It was Abdul Ghiyas who was hiring them.

Outside the garden, on a small strip of green by the river, the three horses were picketed to iron pins driven into the ground. I knew little enough about horses but these seemed very small horses.

‘Surely mules would be better. Why don’t we take mules?’

‘There aren’t any mules in Afghanistan. At least I’ve never seen any.’

It seemed extraordinary that, after a century of guerrilla warfare on the north-west frontier, no one had succeeded in capturing any mules from the British, but whatever the reason I never saw a mule in Afghanistan.

Now all our gear was brought out and stacked around us in the garden; coils of rope, boxes of rations, bags of flour, damp things that had already squashed and our
crampons,
those metal frames covered with sharp spikes that defied all efforts to pack them.

The driver from the Embassy prepared to leave. From an inside pocket Ghulam Naabi produced a letter addressed to Hugh which he handed to him. His face wore an expression of mask-like innocence. The letter was short but to the point. It was from his employer, the Australian.

Sir,

I understand from my servant, Ghulam Naabi, that you are proposing to relieve me of his services for a month, leaving me with a sick wife, several children and no cook. I write to inform you that Ghulam Naabi is
not
accompanying you on your expedition. He will return to Kabul immediately.

There was nothing to say to this. It was the sort of letter I should have written myself in similar circumstances. With some show of emotion Ghulam Naabi transferred his few belongings to the station wagon. They were so few that it was obvious that the contents of the letter had already been communicated to him before he had left Kabul. Soon he was gone in a cloud of dust.

My worst fears were realized. I was now alone in Asia with a companion whose attitude to food was one of undisguised contempt and whose ideas were almost as austere as those of the followers who surrounded us.

‘I can’t understand that Australian,’ said Hugh. ‘It’s a most extraordinary attitude. Never mind, we shall probably get on much better without Ghulam Naabi. Be able to travel faster. Less of a problem.’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course, it means doing the cooking ourselves.’

‘Yes.’

‘Still, it’s all in tins.’

‘I know.’

‘You’re unusually quiet.’

‘Yes.’

‘Hope you’re feeling all right. Nothing wrong inside?’

‘Nothing like that. I just feel as though I’ve been sentenced to death.’

There seemed little hope of leaving that day. It was not due to lack of preparation. There was very little to prepare. It was simply that the first day of a caravan was like being under starter’s orders on a racecourse – only there was no starter.

Bloated with mulberries and slightly sticky, I lay on my stomach on the river bank, looking into the water. Occasionally a shaft of sunlight filtering down through the upper branches would illuminate a small fish, not more than six inches long, darting among
the roots of the willows where the earth had been washed away. Out in midstream in the midday sun the river bubbled and surged past, the colour of jade rippled with dazzling silver. On the far bank sheep and goats browsed in a deep water-meadow; birds Abdul Ghiyas called
Parastu
, brown banded bank-swallows, flew over the shingle without ever alighting; above the valley the mighty screes with small sun-baked patches of grass on them swept up and up; beyond the road the house simmered in the heat, its brown mud walls baking harder and harder. There was no sign of Abdul Ghiyas or the other drivers.

I was joined by Hugh. He buried his head in the river and drank.

‘Is that a good thing?’ I asked.

‘Excellent water. Comes from the high glaciers. You shouldn’t drink it when you’re hot, of course.’

Remembering the affair of the ice-cream that had all but destroyed my wife, and the
qanat
water in north Persia, I was suspicious. The water certainly looked delicious; besides, there was so much of it. Surely such a volume would nullify all but the most urban germs.

‘What about the villages higher up?’

‘There’s nothing large enough to infect it,’ he said. ‘Besides you have to accustom yourself to this kind of thing. The most important thing is never to drink unless you absolutely have to. I never do,’ he added.

So I drank some too.

By three-thirty in the afternoon all hope of leaving seemed to have gone. Drivers and animals were locked in lassitude and indifference. Neither wanted to leave at the fag-end of the day – and they were right; to venture into the oven-like landscape beyond the garden seemed to them suicide. Only by shouting at them and
appealing to Abdul Ghiyas were the drivers finally prevailed upon to load their horses.

It was a long job. All the stuff had to be slung in nets made from a special reed and hooked to the pack saddles. Soon everything was ungetatable: the rations in their fibre boxes, everything else in sacks as a protection against the battering it would receive from the rocks. It was obvious that unless one started the day with the gear one required, one would never see it till the evening.

Unwisely, we decided to carry loaded rucksacks. ‘To toughen ourselves up’, as we optimistically put it.

‘About forty pounds should be enough,’ Hugh said, ‘so that we can press on.’

Our drivers were aghast. It was difficult to persuade Abdul Ghiyas that we were not out of our minds. With the temperature around 110°, carrying our forty-pound loads and twirling our ice-axes, we set off from Jangalak.

It was good to be on the road; it stretched ahead of us full of ruts, following the river. On both sides the mountains rose steeply. Looking back we could see Abdul Ghiyas in the orchard at Jangalak where he was making the last adjustments, putting off his departure to the last possible moment.

At first we congratulated ourselves on seeing more of the countryside on foot. What we had not taken into account was the diminished social status that was accorded to a couple of Europeans plodding through Asia with heavy loads on their backs. It was after a long mile, when we met two wild-looking crop-headed mountaineers coming down from above by a rough track, that we first realized that nobody admired us for what we were doing. They themselves were carrying immense loads of rock salt in conical baskets. We waved cheerfully but they uttered such angry cries and made such threatening gestures that we passed hurriedly on. They turned to shout after us. It was always the same word.

‘What’s a
sag
?’

‘It’s a dog.’

‘Is it rude in Persian?’

‘Very, they think we should be on horseback.’

The road followed the west bank of the river through mulberry orchards and fields of wheat and Indian corn. At this time of day all were deserted. After two miles we reached the village of Mala Asp. From here the road became impassable for vehicles. At the stop beyond the village the evening bus stood up to its axles in a deep puddle. That we should have walked here heavily laden when we might quite easily have travelled by bus seemed to make us even more ludicrous figures. As we left a nasty old man screamed at us from the top of a rock, ‘
Xar, Xar
, Donkeys! Why don’t you ride?’

To which we replied, in fury, ‘—off!’

The two miles we had covered since Jangalak had wrought great changes in us. We no longer chatted gaily. In the cool garden it had been difficult to realize how hot it really was. Soon we were suffering all the agonies of heat, thirst and fatigue, accelerated by our poor condition. Our legs felt like melting butter.

So that Hugh could give me a piece of chewing-gum, we halted for a moment in the shade of a solitary tree. Already our mouths were full of a thick, elastic scum, which with the chewing-gum became like a gigantic gobstopper. Our rucksacks with their forty-pound loads seemed to weigh a hundredweight; nevertheless we both agreed that whatever else happened we should carry them for today. I was wearing a new pair of Italian boots that had been specially constructed for me in Italy. In the whole of England I had not been able to find, in the short time at my disposal, a pair of climbing boots that would fit me (my old boots had collapsed during the visit to Wales). As the Italian boot-maker at Brescia said, with a simplicity that robbed his words of offence:

‘
Signore, non sono piedi d’uomo, sono piedi di scimmia
.’ ‘Sir, these are not the feet of a man, but of a monkey.’

The boots had arrived by air in Tehran on the morning we left for Meshed and, apart from our short outing on Legation Hill, I had not tried them. Now, in the hot afternoon, they became agonizing. Apart from a pair of gym shoes they were the only foot covering I possessed, my walking shoes having failed to arrive from England, where they too had had to be made.

We were now travelling what, before the motor road had been constructed over the Hindu Kush by the Shibar Pass, had been the main caravan route to Northern Afghanistan, Badakshan and the crossing of the Oxus. Coming down towards us we met a variety of travellers. First a band of Tajiks mounted on donkeys who were on their way from Jurm in Badakshan more than 150 miles to the north-east to buy teapots and tea at Gulbahar; they had been twelve days on the road and the skin around their eyes was all shrivelled by the sun. Then there were some Pathan camel drivers who had come over from Andarab with wheat, their beasts swaying down like great galleons under a press of sail. Going up were caravans of donkeys with cotton goods from the mill at Gulbahar. All the people we met who were travelling the road were more friendly than the householders we had so far encountered.

‘How is your condition?’ ‘Are you well?’ ‘Are you strong?’ ‘Where are you going?’ To which we replied, invariably, ‘Up’ or ‘
Parian mirim
. To Parian,’ the upper part of the Panjshir Valley; vague enough, yet it seemed to satisfy them. All soon became a bore. For our part we did not speak to one another; we had no moisture to spare.

At six o’clock, when the heat had gone, we reached a place where the road passed close to the river at its junction with a torrent coming from a big valley to the east. This was the Darra Hazara, where some 400 families of Hazaras live who have become Sunnites as the price of living in peace among the Tajiks.

It was an eerie place. Behind us the sun was lost in clouds of yellow dust raised by the wind that had got up suddenly, howling across the valley as the sun went down and lashing the river so that it smoked.

On the left of the track, already in cold shadow, were a number of tombs on a hillock; piles of stones decked with tattered flags that fluttered sadly in the wind and ibex horns decorated with twists of coloured paper. According to Hugh it was a
ziarat
, a shrine, and the tomb decorated with ibex horns that of a
Mirgun
– a matchlock man, or master hunter.

On the Hazara side there was a fort. Marz Robat, the Fort of the Frontier. It was about a hundred feet square, built of mud brick and defended at the four corners by towers that tapered thickly to their bases.

‘One way into Nuristan,’ Hugh said as we plodded past the Darra Hazara. ‘Two days over the pass and you’d be on the headwaters of the Alishang river, but you’d still only be on the outskirts of Nuristan. You’d have to cross the Alishang Pass into the Alingar Valley and then you’d only be in the lower part. I want to get to the upper part.’

It sounded very complicated.

As we covered the last awful mile into the village that takes its name from the fort but is called by the locals ‘Omarz’, two fit-looking men came steaming up behind us. The taller of the two, a fine-looking fellow with a black beard, turned out to be of the same profession as the one under the pile of stones, a
Mirgun
.

I was too far gone to really care what a
Mirgun
was but Hugh, with a perversity that I had already remarked in him, proceeded to tell me at great length, translating, sentence by sentence, as the man spoke.

From beneath an immense
chapan
the
Mirgun
produced a muzzle-loading rifle fired by a percussion cap. It looked quite new.
Everything this man had about him was robust and strongly constructed for the hard life he lived on the mountain-side.

‘From
Englestan
,’ he said. ‘I have not had it long.’

While I was trying to imagine some small factory in Birmingham still turning out muzzle-loaders for
Mirgun
, he added, ‘I have buried my other in an orchard. When I killed a thousand ibex I became a
Mirgun
. Then I buried the gun with which I slew them. It is the custom. I buried it secretly in my orchard. Then the young men from the village came to seek for it. He who finds it can buy the gun.’