Authors: Adrian Levy
Apart from the occasional herder, the group had the valley to themselves. For a while they walked in silence, listening to the cries of a hawk on the thermals high above their heads. Paul snapped his walking companions: Julie, wearing a bandana and baseball cap; bow-legged Keith, sporting a natty woollen waistcoat, bought from an insistent
shikara
salesman; Cath striding along with an improvised walking stick, happy for the first time since she had arrived in India. Ahead was the hulking mass of one of the smaller peaks.
‘It was as if God had given us a piece of paradise,’ Julie recalled. It was everything the posters had claimed. Kashmir had won her round. The mountains rose ever higher, thickly cloaked in red pines that grew so densely that the absence of light below the canopies ensured that nothing grew in the warm mulch of crushed leaves and cones around their bases.
After a few hours they stopped for lunch at Aru, which marked the end of the drivable road. Spongy, lush grass lay beneath their feet. A clutch of wooden houses served as
chai
stalls and guesthouses. This
was their last chance to buy sweets and biscuits. They sat down to vegetable curry and rice before heading out of the village, on a less well-defined path than before. Paul snapped a couple of shots of the dilapidated ‘Milky Way Tourist Bungalow and Cafeteria’ on the outskirts of Aru. It looked like a set from a spaghetti Western. Bashir mumbled that he didn’t like the place, and ushered them past. Something bad had happened here, he said. The owners were not good people. He would explain another time.
The path headed up through the pine forest at a precipitous gradient before swinging down to rejoin the Lidder. After a couple of hours they broke out of the conifers and into an expanse of grassland, a glacial valley that smelled of clean washing and star anise, where the wind blew the grass into eddies. Bashir said they had at last reached the Meadow.
Julie and Keith reached for warm jackets, while Bashir and his crew pitched the tents. There were a couple of other small groups already camping here, among them Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings, but Julie and Keith, conscious of everyone’s desire for space, chose not to go and poke around. People could come down later, drawn by the campfire, if they wanted to talk, they reasoned. Instead, the Mangans wandered over to the stony banks of the Lidder, taking sips from the ice-cold water while Bashir’s team clanked around, setting up the kitchen. They had brought everything they would need: big blackened cooking pots and pans, kerosene stoves, and enough food to feed a cricket team. One of the boys was sent off to forage for wood while Bashir set a fire in a ring of stones left by some other trekking party. By the time the tea had boiled the Westerners had settled around the fire, hungry and footsore. Tomorrow they would head for the glacier, travelling light, leaving most of their kit behind. The Meadow was that kind of place, Bashir said. It wasn’t like back home in Blackburn or Middlesbrough, he joked, where you had to leave the lights on all night to keep the burglars guessing. But, just to be safe, he would leave a couple of his boys to guard the camp while they did the eight or nine hours up and down. They would take food for the journey, but there was nowhere to stay at the top. Julie wasn’t sure she’d make it all the
way, but she’d give it a try. The Meadow was already proving hard to leave.
The next day, at dawn, Keith, Julie, Paul, Cath and Bart slowly made their way on towards Kolahoi base camp, a gentle climb at first through a vast, sweeping glacial valley, its floor littered with large boulders deposited by ancient ice floes, a solemn, eerie landscape that rose on either side towards sheer granite cliff faces high above. Here and there wild ponies grazed, tiny specks dwarfed by the rugged landscape. Dotted around was the odd
gujjar
settlement, a row of tiny stone shelters that jutted out of the hillside. Occasionally the party met the families who lived in them. They were dressed in scarves and robes, the men with brightly hennaed beards, the women with tightly bound hair, their children riding on the ponies along with the pots and pans.
A few hundred metres short of the base camp, an opaque mist had settled, limiting their visibility, though the sun shone through it with a glare that was trying to the eyes. Then the dark granite of the Kolahoi peak suddenly became visible, with the Zanskar mountains just visible behind. The party paused to take it all in. Ahead, they could see there had been an ice-fall, with huge seracs below the peak. To the left was the glacier itself, a frozen torrent of water, an iced-over moment that looked as if it could fracture at any time, sweeping them away. Then there were the crevasses that they imagined lay ahead, having heard stories that they regularly consumed sheep and ponies. In the distance they thought they could make out tiny figures climbing the fluted ice ribs and hanging glaciers. ‘Indian soldiers,’ said Bashir matter-of-factly. They came here to train before being deployed to the army’s most vertiginous bases at Siachen, at 18,700 feet. Paul took rolls of film, switching from black-and-white to colour. After their six-hour ascent they stayed at the summit for some time, taking in the panorama below, and the vapour trails above that seemed to be almost within reach. ‘I think at that point Paul must have realised he was very pleased that he had come to Kashmir,’ Bob Wells mused later. ‘Although it wasn’t Ladakh, it was just about as foreign and awe-inspiring as he could imagine a place to be.’
Later, their legs stiffening as the afternoon clouds rolled in, signalling that the temperatures would soon plummet, the group picked their way back down to the Meadow. Julie was finished well before she got back to the camp, and slumped down inside the entrance of her tent to examine her badly blistered feet. Bart too had had enough. In the grip of a vicious headache, he suspected he was suffering from altitude sickness, and went off to lie down without eating.
That night, the others sat around the fire, planning. It had been quite a day, the best since arriving in Kashmir. Some of them, exhilarated by what they had achieved so far, talked of going up to Tar Sar the following morning. Keith was keen, but Julie put the kybosh on it. This was her first attempt at serious trekking, and Kolahoi was enough. Tomorrow, she was staying put. Paul and Cath were also tired, and opted to explore closer to the Meadow. Keith was alone in wanting to try to see the mountain lake. He would follow the track up for a while, he said, just to find out what was up there. ‘A big, strapping lad’, as his mother Mavis called him, he thought he could make it there and back in seven hours. He would probably be back by mid-afternoon, definitely by dinner, he promised Julie.
John Childs had also arrived at the Meadow. ‘It was truly peaceful,’ he remembered. He had asked his guide Dasheer to set up his tent on a hillside, away from the other tents gathered down by the river. He had come here to push himself through the wild mountains, and he wanted to do it alone: ‘I was going to go down and say hello, but it just didn’t happen. I’m a very quiet, shy and private kind of person.’ While the Kashmiris prepared camp, John walked up to the woods behind his tent, following a herders’ path through the creaking pines. Somewhere up above he could hear dogs barking. Perhaps it was a remote
gujjar
settlement, he thought as a family of herders appeared through the trees. On seeing him they instantly scurried off into the undergrowth. ‘Although we were way up in the mountains there were people everywhere,’ he said. ‘It felt like nothing happened around this valley without everyone knowing about it.’ When he headed back down later, tired and hungry, he noticed that more tents had been
pitched in the Meadow, but he was glad to see that his was still several hundred yards from its nearest neighbour. Unlike Calcutta and Bihar, which he had found suffocating, here there was plenty of space. It looked as if he had chosen the perfect spot for a two-nighter.
Dasheer pondered John as he prepared their evening meal that night. He had torn up the track from Pahalgam, from where they had set out at daybreak, barely speaking a word the whole way. Most foreigners walked at half the speed of a Kashmiri, and many of them struggled to adjust to the altitude. But John had been at his shoulder all the way, making Dasheer work harder than he was used to. Three hours from Pahalgam to Aru, with two more to reach the Meadow. He could probably make it to Tar Sar and back with half a day to spare, Dasheer guessed. The Kashmiri guide admired the steely American, even if he could not say that he liked him. John seemed to him to cut a lonely figure. Kashmiris like to be surrounded by friends and family, but this American sought out no one’s company other than his own. He had not given Dasheer a chance to get close, and after exchanging pleasantries at dinner he retired to his one-man tent.
Jane and Don packed up and left the Meadow at dawn on 3 July, without meeting either the British party or John Childs. They wanted to get as much out of their last two days as possible, pushing to the head of the Lidderwat Valley and then branching north-west along a path that took them over a series of precipitous ridges. ‘It was the best day’s trekking we had, some of the most spectacular scenery we had seen on the Kashmir trip,’ Jane says. They began their descent, heading east through a sweeping valley to a remote campsite at Sekhwas. ‘I remember camping and seeing the moon in the sky next to what might be the 13,450-foot Yarnhar Peak.’ They were lucky to have caught it, Jane thought as she tracked wisps of light cloud moving across the plush darkness.
They woke on the morning of 4 July, daunted by the knowledge that by evening they would be back in Srinagar. Breaking camp, they headed out west along the same route they had taken the previous day to Tar Sar, but this time they continued towards the Sonarmas Pass.
For the whole trip Jane had kept a record of their route, and now she added this final journey to the map, tracing it in black felt-tip pen. As they ascended, Don photographed the wildflowers. ‘The meadows were still somewhat soggy from recently melted snow (not all of it was gone), and the wildflowers including creeping phlox were amazing,’ Jane recalled. Then some
gujjars
up ahead waved them down. The normally solitary herders were feared by many Kashmiris, who treated them like tinkers. This group talked for a time to Bashir in Urdu. He nodded, then turned to the foreigners. The
gujjars
had said the pass ahead was choked by snow, he told them. There was no way through. But there was something about his manner that made Jane and Don uneasy. They needed compelling reasons to abandon a route. Bashir suggested they should return to the Meadow, and camp there for one more night before descending to Pahalgam early the next day.
Don and Jane did not want to retrace their steps. Was he sure the information was accurate, Jane asked Bashir. She and Don were experienced ice climbers, who could make it over most things. Sultan, silent at first, claimed he was worried about his pony falling, while Bashir appeared uneasy. Was it laziness, or was he being overprotective, Jane wondered. Or was there something else to the story? Was he pushing them into another part of the mountains on the instructions of some unseen hand or authority? Don and Jane debated it. They were paying the guy, so he should do as they wished. ‘But if the pony got injured we’d be responsible,’ Don reasoned. ‘In the end,’ said Jane, ‘we had to take Bashir at his word.’
As they irritably started their descent, a young Danish couple came up the path towards them, travelling alone. They stopped and chatted in English. When Don and Jane explained what their guides had told them about the blocked pass, the Danes said they would take their chances. They had no ponies to hold them back, and were experienced climbers. Jane never saw them again, ‘But I think about them even to this day. Turning back would be the worst decision of my life.’
Shortly after, Jane and Don had another chance encounter, meeting a tall young British trekker, walking alone with a daypack. He introduced himself as Keith Mangan from Teesside, and said he was on his
way up to Tar Sar. It was truly stunning, they said, well worth the effort. Keith said his wife, Julie, was waiting for him at the Meadow. They were heading back there, they replied. ‘Tell her I’ll be back later,’ Keith said with a wave before heading up the path.
Within a couple of hours, Jane and Don were back at the Meadow. The Upper Camp was crowded, but they easily found Julie, sitting outside her tent. ‘We met your husband,’ Jane told her. They chatted for a few minutes, until Don looked around for Bashir and Sultan. They had agreed to pitch camp here, but the guides were already heading down out of the campsite, seemingly in a hurry. Jane and Don gave each other a
look
. Bashir knew something that he was not sharing. ‘We felt that he was being evasive,’ says Jane. But, nearing the end of a glorious trip that had buoyed their spirits, they followed anyway. They were tired, Jane’s tooth throbbed and she was actually looking forward to going home.
Twenty minutes later they stopped beside a newly-built log bridge that marked the start of the Lower Camp. Bashir and Sultan were already busy getting the tents up. Jane went down to the river to relax while Don attempted to wash their socks and T-shirts in the icy water, doing his best to work up a lather. She caught up with her journal. It was 4 July, Independence Day. She realised this was the first time she’d thought about it all day. ‘What would all our friends be doing back in Spokane?’ she wondered. The great thing about leaving home was the warmth of returning, she thought. Don was already talking about what he would tell the Spokane crew. She started to write one last sentence about the day: ‘So we agreed to come back the same way we had come,’ she began, before she was interrupted.
The name chosen for the operation was
Ghar
, the Urdu word for ‘home’. It reminded everyone of the objective – getting Masood Azhar back to Pakistan. And from the moment of its conception in January 1995, one candidate emerged as the man to handle it.