A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (9 page)

A most colourful traveller who was supposed to have visited Kafiristan was Colonel Alexander Gardner. He was a soldier of fortune employed as commandant of a picked body of horse by the nephew and deadly enemy of the reigning Amir, Dost Muhammad Khan. According to his own account he went there twice.
⁴

The first time was in 1826 when he had to flee for his life
through west Kafiristan on his way to Yarkand after the Amir had slaughtered and mutilated his followers together with his beautiful Afghan wife and small son by way of reprisal. (Gardner had captured her from a caravan in which she had been travelling as lady-in-waiting to a princess who was related to the Amir and had installed her in a
castello
in the Hindu Kush.)

The second occasion was in 1828 when he returned from Yarkand by way of northern Kafiristan and the Kunar Valley.

Subsequently Gardner entered the service of the great Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh.

A photograph of him survives, taken when he was seventy-nine. He is dressed from head to foot in a suit of tartan of the 79th Highlanders. Even his turban decorated with egret’s plumes is of tartan. With his Sikh’s beard and alert look he is himself rather like an eagle. He died in bed at Jammu at the age of ninety-two, a pensioner of the Sikhs.
⁵

In the 1830s the almost equally remarkable American traveller Charles Masson made his extensive journeys in Afghanistan disguised in the local dress, living with the inhabitants in a way which would be difficult today. Although he did not penetrate far into Kafiristan, he followed the Alingar as far as its junction with the Alishang and then followed the Alishang itself, a journey no European was to accomplish again until 1935.

Less well known is the visit of a Christian missionary, Fazl Huq, in 1864. Fazl Huq was a Pathan, the son of a
Mullah,
who had been converted to Christianity at Peshawar. To avoid any imputation of changing faith to curry favour with missionaries, he joined
the Corps of Guides as a sepoy, a regiment in which Christian other ranks were anathema to the Muslim rank and file and as much in danger of losing their lives as they were in civilian life.

Together with an ex-
Mullah
named Narullah, who was also a Christian convert, he set off for Kafiristan in September 1864, at the invitation of a Kafir soldier of whom there were several in the Guides, taking with him medicine and presents from the Church Missionary Society. The treatment they received from their own people, fanatic Muslims, on the road through Swat was as disagreeable as anything they were to encounter in Kafiristan itself, but after overcoming the most formidable difficulties they finally reached the Kunar river, floated down it on a raft of inflated skins, and entered Jalalabad disguised as women.

Eventually they reached a place somewhere on the southern marches of Kafiristan where the Kafirs came to barter for salt. Here the two faithful bodyguards they had hired in Jalalabad left them and, having abandoned their disguise, they continued into the country alone.

At the village to which they had been invited by the sepoy they carried on their missionary work for twenty days and were well received, the Kafirs reserving the martyr’s crown for Muslims.

Each day Huq kept a journal, using lime juice as an invisible ink.

Adultery was unknown, he wrote, only the unmarried ever being suspected of immorality which was extirpated with ferocity; married couples having a sort of laisser-passer in such matters. He also noticed that the Kafirs watched their relatives die in silence and that they put them in wooden boxes on the mountain-side with the lids weighed down with heavy stones. Some of the houses he saw were five stories high. During his stay he saw a variety of birds and beasts – crows, parrots, leopards, bears and wolves.

Huq and Narullah stayed in Kafiristan until the first snows fell, then returned by the way they had come. Reaching the Kabul river
at Jalalabad they floated down it on a raft as far as Peshawar, which they reached after an absence of two months. It was a remarkable exploit.

It was not until the eighties, when the great game of espionage between Britain and Russia was being played flat out beyond the frontiers of India, that another serious attempt was made to enter Kafiristan. In 1883 W. W. Macnair, an enterprising officer of the Indian Survey, disobeying the strict orders of the Indian Government that no European should cross the frontier without permission, penetrated the eastern marches as far as the Bashgul Valley. Macnair wore the dress of a Muhammadan
Hakim
and stained himself with a disagreeable mixture of weak caustic soda and walnut juice. He was accompanied by a native ‘known in
The Profession
as the Saiad’ and two Kaka Khel Pathans, a tribe respected by the Afghans and to some extent by the Kafirs. With him he took an enormous book decorated with cabalistic signs which concealed within it a plane table for mapping and other surveying instruments. As
Hakim
he was much given to solitary meditation and generally chose high peaks for this purpose.

Macnair reported that the inhabitants were celebrated for their beauty and their European complexions; that they worshipped idols; drank wine from silver cups and vases; used chairs and tables, and spoke a language unknown to their neighbours; that brown eyes were more common than blue; that their complexions varied between pink and a bronze as dark as that of a Punjabi; that the infidelity of wives was punished by mild beating and that of men by a fine of cattle, and that one of their prayers ran:

Ward off fever from us.

Increase our stores.

Kill the Mussulmans.

After death admit us to Paradise.

Macnair estimated the population at 200,000.

On his return to India he was officially reprimanded by Lord Ripon, the Viceroy, and later congratulated in private.

Two years later in 1885 the Bashgul Valley was more fully explored by Colonel Woodthorpe of the Indian Survey when he visited it with Sir William Lockhart on a mission whose object was to examine the passes of the Hindu Kush. But it was not until Sir George Robertson, the British Political Agent in Gilgit, made his prolonged journeys in Kafiristan in 1890 and 1891, visiting the upper reaches of the Bashgul and penetrating farther westwards than any other explorer had so far succeeded in doing into the upper part of the Pech Valley, that any real knowledge was gained of the country and the people. His book
The Káfirs of the Hindu Kush
gives the only complete picture that has come down to us of the Kafirs living in their pristine state of paganism. And it was to be the final one. Already Robertson was encountering tribes who had been converted to Islam and his was the last opportunity that any European was to have before the old pagan religion of the country was obliterated.

In the twentieth century the names of the countless secret agents of all nations who must have visited Nuristan have so far not been revealed. The first recorded visitors seem to have been two Russians, Vavilov and Bukinitsh, who spent four days in the Pech Valley in 1924.

It is the Germans who have held almost the entire monopoly of travel and exploration in Nuristan during the last thirty years. There is something about the place that appeals to the German character: the dark forests and gloomy valleys; the innate paganism of the ‘
grosse blonde vollhaarige Menschen
’ whose origins ‘
nicht indo-arisches, sondern ein europäisch-arisches Restvolk der Indogermanen sind
’.

In 1925 two Germans tried to enter from the southwards without
success; one a geologist, Dr Herbordt, the other a Baron von Platen. Both reached the frontier north of Jalalabad but got no farther.

In 1928 Dr Martin Voigt and Herr Seydack, a Prussian State Forester, both of whom were working for King Amanullah, went up the Kunar Valley and the Bashgul, reached the Hindu Kush divide and descended the Pech river to its confluence with the Kunar. They did not, however, visit the western part, the Alingar-Ramgul Valley which no European had so far seen.

In 1935 there came the Deutsche Hindu Kush Expedition. This, like everything else emanating from Germany in the middle thirties, was grandiloquent and slightly less thorough than it cracked itself up to be. It was certainly big. Its members travelled with forty mules specially imported for the job, fifteen mule drivers, three Afghan officers and sixteen soldiers. It worked methodically, establishing supply depots for itself en route. The objects of the expedition were rather ambiguous but its members seem to have spent most of their time, when they might have been looking for the Ashkuns, studying the comparative anatomy of the inhabitants. On their return to civilization they embalmed their findings, the result of the thorough measuring to which they had subjected the inhabitants, in a large almost unreadable volume printed in excruciating gothic type.

After the last war there were the enterprising journeys of von Dückelmann, an Austrian who had spent the last war interned in India, and Hans Neubauer, a botanist in the employ of the Afghan Government.

In November 1951 a young American called Mackenzie spent fifteen days in Nuristan, reaching a point where there was a rock inscribed by Timur Leng.

There was the Danish Henning-Haslund expedition on which the leader Haslund unfortunately died, which visited East and Central Nuristan on several occasions between 1948 and 1954.

And in 1956 it seemed that there was to be the Carless-Newby
expedition, consisting of a man from the dress trade and a career diplomat, who were setting off to visit the Ramgul Katirs in Nuristan for no other reason than to satisfy their curiosity.

Panjhīr is another tuman; it lies close to Kafiristan, along the Panjhīr road, and is the thoroughfare of Kafir highwaymen who also, being so near, take tax of it. They have gone through it, killing a mass of persons, and doing very evil deeds, since I came this last time and conquered Hindustan. (932 A.H. – A.D. 1526.)
Mem. Bābur,
p. 214

We left Kabul on 10 July (‘Probably for ever,’ we said, jesting in the tedious fashion that explorers employ to keep up their spirits). Our destination was the Panjshir Valley and The Mountain.

The last hope of recruiting an expert mountaineer had now expired. During our short stay in the capital we had been extremely discreet about our capabilities, or rather the lack of them, but still no one had come forward, except the cyclist, and he could scarcely be regarded as anything but a liability. It is true that we had met several people of different nationalities who said that they were just about to set off for Nuristan; so often did they say it that our project began to seem almost commonplace. However, we were reassured by an old inhabitant.

‘I’ve lived here thirty years,’ he said, ‘and I can’t remember a time
when someone from the town wasn’t threatening to go to Nuristan. But it’s all talk – and then only when they’re in their cups,’ he added picturesquely. ‘You’re not likely to find it overcrowded.’

With us in the vehicle were Ghulam Naabi and one of the private servants from the Embassy, a fine-looking, bearded man with loyal eyes. This is nearly always a bad sign in Asia where fine-looking, bearded men with loyal eyes have a habit of leaving you in the lurch at the most inconvenient moments – but this particular specimen really was faithful. He was to drive us to the Panjshir Valley and return to Kabul after dumping us there. It was a tight squeeze with all our equipment and the four of us sweated morosely.

The road climbed a pass where gangs of Hazaras, slit-eyed, round-headed Mongols in the uniform of the Afghan Labour Corps, were widening it, using Russian steamrollers with cruellooking spiky projections on the rolling part. Immediately the lugubrious air that hangs over the visitor to Kabul in an almost visible cloud was dispelled, and we entered the Koh-i-Daman, rich upland country. Our spirits rose.

In spite of being hot it was a beautiful day and puffs of white cloud floated at regular intervals in a deep blue sky, as if discharged by a cannon. Mulberry trees, loaded with fruit, shaded the abominable surface of the road from the heat of the afternoon; vines grew in profusion and everywhere there was running water, dancing in the sunlight and gurgling in the irrigation ditches on whose banks minute, bare-bottomed nomad children from the encampments that were everywhere along the road risked death happily.

To the west the more distant prospect was magnificent. The high crest of the Paghman range formed an imposing backcloth with the Takht-i-Turkoman, on whose summit we should already have planted our ice-axes, rising impressively at its southern end. It was from this range of mountains that the richness of the land proceeded, the parallel rivers which flowed down from it forming
a series of oases, rich with orchards, in the plain between the road and the mountains.

Of these oases, the oasis of Istalif is reputedly the most beautiful.

‘Istalif produces pottery of a delightful blue colour,’ Hugh remarked, whetting my interest. ‘The name comes from
stafiloi
, the vine – from the time when the Koh-i-Daman was Greek-speaking.’

‘He who has not seen Istalif has nothing seen,’ said Ghulam Naabi. Nevertheless, true to our policy of stopping for nothing, we thundered past the road that leads to it.

Presently we reached Charikar (Alexandreia ad Caucasum) where Alexander spent the winter of 327 B.C. with his army before moving on to Nikaia (a city on the site of modern Kabul), and the conquest of India. Now, ahead of us, the Hindu Kush mountains rose spiky and barren-looking out of the plain. Nesting under them was a small town built at the junction of two rivers, both emerging from narrow defiles, the Shatul and the Panjshir itself, which comes racing out of a great gorge and spreads over banks of grey shingle on its way to join the Kabul river and eventually the Indus and the sea. This was Gulbahar – ‘The Rose of Spring’.

Not far from Gulbahar, on the eighteenth of August 1519, the Emperor Bābur, the remarkable soldier-poet and founder of the Turk dynasty in India who was descended in the male line from Timur Leng and through his mother from Genghis Khan, embarked on a raft for a picnic with some companions.

Just where the Panjhīr-water comes in, the raft struck the maze of a hill and began to sink. Rauh-dam, Tīngrī-qulī and Mir Muhammad the raftsman were thrown into the water by the shock: Rauh-dam and Tīngrī-qulī were got on the raft again; a China cup and a spoon and a tambour went into the water. Lower down, the raft struck again opposite the Sang-i-Barīda (the cut-stone), either on a branch
in mid-stream or on a stake stuck in as a stop-water. Right over on his back went Shāh Beg’s Shāh Hasan, clutching at Mīrza Qulī Kūkūldāsh and making him fall too. Darwīsh-i-muhammad
Sārbān
was also thrown into the water. Mīrza Qulī went over in his own fashion! Just when he fell, he was cutting a melon which he had in his hand: as he went over, he stuck his knife into the mat of the raft. He swam in his
tūn aūfrāghī
(long coat) and got out of the water without coming on the raft again. Leaving it that night we slept at raftsmen’s houses. Darwīsh-i-muhammad
Sārbān
presented me with a seven-coloured cup exactly like the one I lost in the water.
¹

Descending stiffly from our vehicle, we drank tea on the balcony of a
chaie khana
which hung on stilts over the little Shatul river, which came purling down into the town between narrow banks. The tea place was beside the bridge at the junction of three roads and from its shelter we could watch the life of the little town.

Sitting with their backs to us on the wall of the bridge five ancient men, old Tajiks, with dyed beards, sat motionless. On the opposite side of the river, twenty feet away from us in another tea-house a band of Pathans, their eyes dyed with an extract from the plant called madder, carried on an animated conversation, passing a water pipe from hand to hand until, feeling themselves watched, they glared at us suspiciously.

The air was full of cries, outlandish smells of smoke and animals, dust and excitement. A bus gaily painted like a fantastic dragonfly and laden to suffocation point with passengers, failed to make the sharp turn and became jammed at the entrance to the bridge just at the moment when a flock of sheep, several hundreds strong, coming from the mountains also debouched on it. The noise was deafening as the sheep, mad with fear, tried to
nuzzle the old men over the pediment of the bridge and into the water below, but they sat stolidly on.

There was an interval of calm while five women, saucy ghosts in all-enveloping
chador
, with crocheted holes for faces, rode over the bridge on horseback, each with an anxious-looking husband trotting behind on foot.

They were succeeded by two urchins who fought strenuously in the dust, ripping great chunks out of one another’s already ragged clothing. Then, quite suddenly, the road was deserted and a young man appeared strutting slowly and stiffly with both arms held straight down in front of him. He was almost goose-stepping and he was completely naked. For some minutes he stood in the middle of the bridge with fingers extended, holding up the traffic.

No one, including the five old men, took the slightest notice of him. He went slowly up the road at the head of a small procession of men, animals and vehicles that had been piling up, waiting for him to make up his mind where he wanted to go, and disappeared. Lunatic,
Darwīsh
from some strange sect, or simply someone from the city come to take the waters of the Shatul (well known for their medicinal qualities) who had lost his bath towel, we shall never know. Even the omniscient Ghulam Naabi, who went off to interrogate the inhabitants, returned no wiser.

Just beyond Gulbahar where the mountains join the plain, east of the Panjshir, on a low and isolated ridge, is the yellow sandbank called Reg-i-Ruwan (the Running Sands) which is said to have the singular property of singing or moaning when agitated by the wind or otherwise disturbed. Among the local inhabitants opinions have always been divided; some say that it emits a sound like the beating of kettle-drums and then only ten or twelve times a year; others maintain that it only happens on Fridays; almost all agree that it is most likely to occur when the wind is strong from the north-west.

This sandbank so fascinated Lord Curzon that in 1923, when
he was Foreign Secretary and in the midst of his other preoccupations, he addressed a letter to the British Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at Kabul, Colonel Humphrys, instructing him to visit the Reg-i-Ruwan and make a report.

Colonel Humphrys duly visited the sandbank and, in an effort to drag some sound from it, he dispatched bands of men to the top of the slope and made them glissade down the face of the sandbank. ‘As the sand was dislodged it flowed down in parallel, rectangular streams,’ says the Colonel’s report, ‘and emitted a rustling sound faintly audible at twenty yards.’ The sort of noise that any sandbank might be expected to give out if disturbed by a body of men tramping up and down it.

It was late in the afternoon when we left Gulbahar. The road, with puddles a foot deep, mounted swiftly through a waste of banked rock and shingle brought down by the turbulence of the river in spate. Growing incongruously from these banks were a few stunted trees.

In a few minutes we came to the mouth of the Panjshir gorge from which the river raced, shooting down with little scuds of foam, brilliant in the sun. It was an exciting moment. Ahead of us the mountains rose straight up like a wall. Those on the left, towards the west, formed part of the main Hindu Kush range; those to the right, separated by fifty yards of the rushing water that had cut this gorge, were the final spurs of the great massif, itself a spur of the Hindu Kush that projects southwards from the Anjuman Pass at the head of the Panjshir Valley, forming the western marches of Nuristan in which was Mir Samir, our mountain.

I took one last look at the smiling plain behind us with its rich market gardens and the mountains to the west where the sun was beginning to sink, then we were in the cold shadow of the gorge with the river thundering about us, cold and green and white,
sucking and tugging at the great boulders that lay in the stream, the noise of it reverberating from the walls thirty yards from side to side like the entrance to a tomb. After about a mile the gorge suddenly opened out into a valley where the mountains were no longer sheer but ran back in steep banks of scree.

As we drove on we had momentary glimpses of jagged peaks. They were as dry as old bones; there was no snow or ice to be seen – that would be farther back, higher still in the Hindu Kush.

The road turned a corner and now, on the far bank of the river, infinitely secret-looking villages with watch towers built of dried mud, loop-holed and with heavily barred windows, clung to the mountain-side. We turned another corner and suddenly were in paradise.

It was evening but the last of the sun drenched everything in golden light. In a field of Indian corn women were slyly using their veils. They no longer wore the wraithlike
chador
that we had seen in Gulbahar and Kabul. In the small terraced fields, which fitted into one another like a jig-saw or, when they were at different levels, like some complicated toy, the wheat was being harvested by men using sickles. From the fields donkeys moved off uphill in single file to the tomb-like villages, so loaded that they looked like heaps of wheat moved by clockwork.

But it was the river that dominated the scene. In it boys were swimming held up by inflated skins and were swept downstream in frightening fashion until the current swirled them into deep pools near the bank before any harm could come to them; while in the shallows where the water danced on pebbles smaller children splashed and pottered. On its banks, too, life was being lived happily: a party of ladies in reds and brilliant blues walked along the opposite bank, talking gaily to one another; poplars shimmered; willows bowed in the breeze; water flowed slowly in the irrigation ditches through a hundred gardens, among apricot trees
with the fruit still heavy on them, submerging the butts of the mulberries, whose owners squatted in their properties and viewed the scene with satisfaction. Old white-bearded men sat proudly on stone walls with their grandchildren, grave-looking little boys with embroidered pill-box hats and little girls of extraordinary beauty. This evening was like some golden age of human happiness, attained sometimes by children, more rarely by grown-ups, and it communicated its magic in some degree to all of us.

The road wriggled on and on. It was like driving along the back of a boa-constrictor that had just enjoyed a good meal, and equally bumpy. At Ruka, the principal town of the lower Panjshir, the main street through the bazaar was covered in with the boughs of trees to form a dark tunnel in which the shopkeepers had already lit acetylene flares. It was not yet the time for custom and the owners of the stall-like shops sat cross-legged and motionless, waiting; proprietors of
chaie khanas
with their big brass samovars boiling up behind them and shelves of massed teapots; butchers in their shops where legs of mutton, still black with the day’s flies, hung from cruel-looking hooks; sellers of shoes with curly toes, rock salt in blocks, strange clothing – all ready for business. In the middle of the bazaar, chocked up on tree-trunks, without wheels stood an enormous American automobile of the thirties, the reputed property of a German who had gone prospecting over the Anjuman Pass and who had not returned.

Now that we were near our destination, Ghulam Naabi began to identify the scenes of the various mishaps that had overtaken him and Hugh on the road when they were last there in 1952. As we screeched round a particularly nasty bend with a steep drop to some water-logged fields below, it seemed likely that at least one of the disasters would be re-enacted.