This is the land which most Westerners call Far Tartary and think of as the uttermost eastern end of the earth. But the name is doubly mistaken. The world extends far eastward beyond this Far Tartary, and the word Tartary is even more of a misnomer. A Mongol is called a Tatar in the Farsi language of Persia, which is where Westerners first heard mention of the Mongol people. Later, when the Mongols-called-Tàtars rampaged across the borders of Europe, and all Europe trembled with fear and hatred of them, it was perhaps natural that many Westerners confused the word Tàtar with the ancient classical name for the infernal regions, which was Tartarus. So the Westerners came to speak of “the Tartars from Tartary,” much as they would speak of “the demons from Hell.”
But even Eastern men who should have known the proper names hereabout, the veterans of many karwan journeys across this land, had told us several different names for the mountains we were now making our way through—the Hindu Kush, the Himalaya, the Karakoram and so on. I can attest that there are indeed enough individual mountains and entire ranges of mountains and whole nations of mountains to justify and support any number of appellations. However, for the sake of our mapmaking, we asked our Chola companions if they could clarify the matter. They listened as we repeated all the various names we had heard, and they did not deride the men who had told them to us—because no man, they affirmed, could possibly say precisely where one range and one name left off and another began.
But, to locate us as accurately as possible, they said we were currently forging northward through the ranges called the Pai-Mir, having left behind us the Hindu Kush range to the southwest, and the Karakoram range to the south, and the Himalaya range somewhere far off to the southeast. The other names which we had been told—the Keepers, the Masters, Solomon’s Throne—the Cholas said were probably local and parochial names bestowed by and used only by the folk living among the various ranges. So my father and uncle marked the maps of our Kitab accordingly. To me, the mountains all looked very much alike: great high crags and sharp-edged boulders and sheer cliffs and the tumbled detritus of rock slides—all of rock that would have been gray and brown and black if it had not been so heavily quilted with snow and festooned with icicles. In my opinion, the name of Himalaya, Abode of the Snows, could have served for any and every range in Far Tartary.
For all its bleakness and the lack of lively color, however, this was the most magnificent landscape I have seen in all my travels. The Pai-Mir mountains, immense and massive and awesome, stood ranked and ranged and towering heedless above us few fidgety creatures, us insignificant insects twitching our way across their mighty flanks. But how can I portray in mere insect words the overwhelming majesty of these mountains? Let me say this: the fact of the highness and the grandeur of the Alps of Europe is known to every traveled or literate person in the West. And let me add this: if there could be such a thing as a world made entirely of Alps, then the peaks of the Pai-Mir would be the Alps of that world.
One other thing I will say about these Pai-Mir mountains, a thing I have never heard remarked by any other journeyer returned from them. The karwan veterans who had told us so many different names for this region had also been free with advice about what we could expect to experience when we got here. But not one of those men spoke of the aspect of the mountains that I found most distinctive and memorable. They talked of the Pai-Mir’s terrible trails and punishing weathers, and told us how best a traveler could survive those rigors. But the men never mentioned the one thing I remember most vividly: the unceasing noise these mountains make.
I do not mean the sound of wind or snowstorm or sandstorm raging through them, though God knows we heard those sounds often enough. We were frequently breasting a wind into which a man could literally let himself fall, and not hit the ground but hang atilt, held up by the blast. And to that wind’s bawling noise would be added the seethe of windblown snow or the sizzle of windblown dust, according as we were in the heights where winter still held sway or in the deep gorges where it was now late springtime.
No, the noise I remember so well was the sound of the mountains’ decay. It was a surprise to me, that mountains so titanic could be falling to pieces all the time, falling apart, falling down. When I first heard the sound, I thought it was thunder rolling among the crags, and I marveled, for there were no clouds anywhere in the pure blue sky that day, and anyway I could not imagine a thunderstorm occurring in such crystalline cold weather. I reined my mount to a halt, and sat still in the saddle, listening attentively.
The sound began as a deep-throated rumble somewhere out ahead of us, and it loudened to a distant roar, and then that sound was compounded by its echoes. Other mountains heard it and repeated it, like a choir of voices taking up, one after another, the theme from a solo singer singing bass. The voices enlarged on that theme and amplified it and added to it the resonances of tenors and baritones, until the sound was coming from over there and from over yonder and from behind me and from all around me. I remained transfixed by the thrumming reverberation, while it dwindled from a thunder to a mutter and a mumble and faded away diminuendo. The mountains’ voices only lingeringly let go, one after another, so that my human ear could not discern the moment when the sound died into silence.
The Chola named Talvar rode up beside me on his scraggly little horse, and gave me a look and broke my enthrallment by saying in his Tamil tongue, “Batu jatuh,” and in Farsi, “Khak uftadan,” both of which said, “Avalanche.” I nodded as if I had known it all the while, and kneed my horse to move on.
That was only the first of innumerable occasions; the noise could be heard almost any time of day or night. Sometimes it would come from so near our trail that we would hear it above the creak and clatter of our harness and cartwheels and the grumbling and tooth-gnashing of our yak herd. And if we looked up quickly, before the echoes confused the direction, we would see rising into the sky from behind some ridge a smoke-like plume of dust or a glittering billow of snow particles, marking the place where the slide had occurred. But I could hear the noise of more distant rockfalls whenever I chose to listen for them. I had only to ride ahead of the train or dawdle behind its racket, and wait for not long. I would hear, from one direction or another, a mountain groaning in the agony of losing a part of itself, and then the echoes overlapping from every other direction: all the other mountains joining in a dirge.
The slides were sometimes of snow and ice, as can happen also in the Alps. But they more often marked the slow corruption of the mountains themselves, for these Pai-Mir, though infinitely bigger than the Alps, are notably less substantial. They appear steadfast and eternal from a distance, but I have seen them close. They are made of a rock much veined and cracked and flawed, and the mountains’ very loftiness contributes to their instability. If the wind nudges a single pebble from a high place, its rolling can dislodge other fragments, and their movement shoves loose other stones until, all rolling together, their ever more rapid downhill progress can topple huge boulders, and those in falling can sheer the lip off a vast cliff, and that in coming down can cleave away the whole side of a mountain. And so on, until a mass of rocks, stones, pebbles, gravel, earth and dust, usually mushed with snow, slush and ice—a mass perhaps the size of a minor Alp—sluices down into the narrow gorges or even narrower ravines that separate the mountains.
Any living thing in the path of a Pai-Mir avalanche is doomed. We came upon much evidence—the bones and skulls and splendid horn racks of goral, urial and “Marco’s sheep,” and the bones and skulls and pathetically broken belongings of men—the relics of long-dead wild flocks and long-lost karwan trains. Those unfortunates had heard the mountains moan, then groan, then bellow, and they had never since heard anything at all. Only chance preserved us from the same fate, for there is no trail or camping spot or time of day that is exempt from avalanche. Happily, none fell on us, but on many occasions we found the trail absolutely obliterated, and had to seek a way around the interruption. This was trouble enough when the slide had left in our path an unclimbable barrier of rubble. It was much harder on the frequent trail that was nothing but a narrow shelf chiseled from the face of a cliff, and an avalanche had broken it with an unvaultable void. Then we would have to retrace our steps for many farsakhs backward, and trudge many, many weary farsakhs circuitously roundabout before we were headed north again.
So my father and uncle and Nostril all cursed bitterly and the Cholas whimpered miserably every time they heard the rumble of rockfall, from whatever direction. But I was always stirred by the sound, and I cannot understand why other travelers seem to think it not worth mentioning in their reminiscences, for what the noise means is that these great mountains will not last forever. The crumbling of them will of course take centuries and millennia and eons before the Pai-Mir crumble down even to the still-grand stature of the Alps—but crumble they will, and eventually to a featureless flat land. Realizing that, I wondered why, if God intended only to let them fall, He had piled them so extravagantly high as they are now. And I wondered too, and I wonder still, how immeasurably, stupendously, unutterably high these mountains must have been when God made them in the Beginning.
All the mountains being of unvarying colors, the only changes we could see in their appearance were those made by weather and time of day. On clear days, the high peaks caught the brilliance of dawn while we were still benighted, and they held the glow of sunset long after we had camped and supped and bedded down in darkness. On days when there were clouds in the sky, we would see a white cloud trail across a bare brown crag and hide it. Then, when the cloud had passed, the pinnacle would reappear, but now as white with snow as if it had shredded off rags of the cloud in which to drape itself.
When we ourselves were high up, climbing an upward trail, the high light up there played tricks with our eyesight. In most mountain country there is always a slight haze which renders each farther object a little dimmer to the eye, so one can judge which objects are near and which far. But in the Pai-Mir there is no trace of haze, and it is impossible to reckon the distance or even the size of the most common and familiar objects. I would often fix my gaze on a mountain peak on the far horizon, then be startled to see our pack yaks scrambling over it, a mere rock pile and only a hundred paces distant from me. Or I would glimpse a hulking surragoy—one of the wild mountain yaks, like a fragment of mountain himself—lurking just to one side of our trail, and I would worry that he might lure our tame yaks to run away from us, but then realize that he was actually standing a farsakh away, and there was a whole valley between us.
The high air was as tricksome as the light. As it had done in the Wakhàn (which we now regarded as a mere lowland), the air refused to support the flames of our cook fires more than meagerly, and they burned only pale and blue and tepid, and our water pots took an eternity to come to a boil. Up here, somehow, the thin air also affected the heat of the very sunshine. The sunny side of a boulder would be too uncomfortably hot to lean against, but its shady side would be too uncomfortably cold. Sometimes we would have to doff our heavy chapon overcoats because the sun made them so swelteringly hot, but not a crystal of the snow all about us would be melting. The sun would fire icicles into blindingly bright and iridescent rainbows, but never make them drip.
However, that was only in clear and sunny weather on the heights, when the winter briefly slept. I think these heights are where the old man winter goes to mope and sulk when all the rest of the world spurns him and welcomes warmer seasons. And in here, perhaps in one or another of the many mountain caves and caverns, old winter retires to doze from time to time. But he sleeps uneasily and he continually reawakens, yawning great gusts of cold and flailing long arms of wind and from his white beard combing cascades of snow. Often and often, I watched the snowy high peaks blend into a fresh fall of snow and vanish in its whiteness; then the nearer ridges would disappear, and then the yaks leading our train, and then the rest of it, and finally everything beyond my horse’s wind-whipped mane would disappear in whiteness. In some of those storms the snow was so thick and the gale so fierce that we riders could progress best by turning and sitting backward on our saddles, letting our mounts pick their onward way, tacking like boats against the blast.
Since we were constantly going uphill and down, that iron weather would soften every few days, when we descended into the warm, dry, dusty gorges where young lady spring had arrived, then would harden around us again when we ascended once more into the domains still held by old man winter. So we alternated: plodding through snow above, slogging through mud below; half frozen by a sleet storm above, half suffocated by a whirling dust-devil below. But as we progressed ever northward, we began to see in the narrow valley bottoms bits of living green—stunted bushes and sparse grasses, then small and timid patches of meadow; an occasional greening-out tree, then stands of them. Those fragmentary verdant areas looked so new and alien, set among the snow-white and harsh-black and arid-dun heights, that they might have been snippets of faraway other countries cut out with scissors and inexplicably scattered through this wasteland.
Still farther north, the mountains were farther apart, allowing for wider and greener valleys, and the terrain was even more remarkable for its contrasts. Against the mountains’ cold white background shone a hundred different greens, all warm with sunlight—voluminous dark-green chinar trees, pale silver-green locust trees, poplars tall and slender like green feathers, aspens twinkling their leaves from the green side to the gray-pearl side. And under and among the trees glowed a hundred different other colors—the bright yellow cups of the flowers called tulbands, the bright reds and pinks of wild roses, the radiant purple of the flower called lilak. That is a tall-growing shrub, so the lilak’s purple plumes looked even more vivacious for our seeing them always from below, against the stark white snowline, and its perfume—one of the most delicious of all flower fragrances—smelled the sweeter for being borne on the absolutely odorless and sterile wind from the snowfields.