Over the Hills and Far Away

by Rob Collister

  There were still the loads to fetch, however. This was far worse than the actual climbing. Not only was it strenuous, even with the help of a rope, but if the top-heavy packs were not swaying sideways, they were jammed immovably against the rock above. I did not have the strength left to climb the overhang with a load, and had to haul it up after me. Strapping on crampons on a sloping ledge too narrow to let me take a pack off, required a balancing act worthy of Blondin. All in all, it was very unpleasant; and it had to be done twice.

  On top of the knoll, Netti took her pack and carried on while I went back for mine. Dark was falling and I was near the end of my tether by the time I followed Netti’s crampon marks up and across a small stream, bowed like Saint Christopher under a load that seemed to grow heavier moment by moment. I was resigning myself to a long trudge when, unexpectedly, I came across the tent snugly pitched in a grassy hollow. Netti was bending over a guy. ‘Somebody’s had a fire here, and there’s yak dung everywhere,’ she told me excitedly. We were back in the land of the living.

  As I wearily took off boots and gaiters before they could freeze rigid, I glanced back the way we had come. Suddenly, in my mind’s eye, I saw the sketch map (which was in David’s possession), the river flowing out of the Hidden Valley represented by a thicker line than that flowing down the upper Keha Lungpa. It dawned on me that the apparently insignificant side-gully whose stream we had just crossed was in reality, the main valley, the Keha Lungpa, which at that point itself narrowed to little more than a gorge. The Hidden Valley was behind us and somewhere nearby there must be a path.

  Our journey was far from over. Three days of hard walking with very little food, along a switch-back path often obliterated by avalanche debris still lay between us and Kagbeni in the Kali Gandaki. From there, it was to take another two days to reach Tukche. But the anxiety and suspense were at an end. Mentally, we could relax.

  The gorge was a dark, forbidding gash down a mountainside of snow and scree; above it, like a streetlamp in a gloomy alleyway, hung a crescent moon, already bright in the gloaming.

  ‘Happy?’ I asked Netti. Smiling, she nodded and delved in her rucksack for a hairbrush.

  – Chapter 21 –

  A SUMMER IN GILGIT (1976)

  Ever since we had shared a tent in the Himalaya in 1973, Dick Isherwood and I had been plotting a two-man expedition to climb in the Karakoram mountains. I use the word ‘plotting’ advisedly, for we would be in no way official and of planning there was little, and that hindered by the peripatetic nature of Dick’s job in the Far East. One of the last communications I received was a card scribbled in an aeroplane and posted in Japan. It read: ‘How About Distaghil Sar? Buy a goat in Hispar and drive it up the glacier. Dick.’ Distaghil Sar is 7,885 metres high. Investigation revealed that despite several attempts it has only been climbed once, and then after a struggle involving ice cliffs, avalanches and violent storms. However, the Hispar Glacier is forty miles long and surrounded by peaks only slightly lower and considerably less dangerous, so I was quite content to head in that general direction.

  With three kilos of potato powder and some freeze-dried meat in my rucksack to supplement the goat, I flew to Pakistan on 21 June. I was met by Dick with the news that, because of work on the Karakoram Highway, Hunza, the northernmost province of Pakistan and the only feasible approach to the Hispar Glacier, had been closed to foreigners. Following an old Himalayan trade route but built for political and military rather than commercial reasons, the ‘KK Highway’ runs from Islamabad to Kashgar, in Chinese Turkestan, over the 16,000 feet Kunjerab Pass (where, according to Dick who had reached it clandestinely the previous year, there is nothing save a sign reading ‘CHINA. DRIVE ON THE RIGHT’). Work still goes on, however, widening, metalling and endlessly repairing the road. The prohibition on foreign tourists seems to have been prompted mainly by the objection of several thousand Chinese labourers and engineers to being photographed. At all events, plans to climb around the Hispar Glacier had to be shelved.

  We had other strings to our bow, but the immediate problem was to reach Gilgit. This scruffy but strategically placed little town is the unavoidable gateway to the western Karakoram, but the road to it from the plains was also infested with Chinese and out of bounds to foreigners. With the road closed, air flights were even more heavily subscribed than usual, with a booking list stretching into August. That in itself meant little, but Rawalpindi was suffering from the vagaries of its erratic monsoon and many of the daily flights had been cancelled. Rawalpindi was full of long-faced expeditioners of many nationalities, some of whom had been waiting a fortnight already. Neither Dick nor I are good waiters and, besides, Dick had only four weeks’ holiday. So, after one abortive visit to the airport, we decided to take the long way round through Swat and Chitral, small states to the south and west of Gilgit.

  Two days’ travel, mostly by minibus, saw us at Matiltan in Swat state, a village which boasts an unusual flyover irrigation system of hollowed-out tree trunks on stilts. Set amid fields of maize, wheat and potatoes, its solid stone-built houses are shaded by huge walnut trees and enjoy a fine view of the twin Bateen peaks. Its people, however, seemingly untouched by their environment, are grasping and unfriendly.

  Our plan was to walk up the Ushu Gol (valley) and over the Kachikani An (pass) to Sor Laspur in Chitral. From there we would have to cross the Shandhur Pass, and travel down the long length of the Gilgit valley, much of which, however, can be done in a jeep. Our original concept had seen us tottering under thirty-five kilo loads up a glacier to a mountain. Faced with intense heat and several days’ walk up and down passes, with loads which were nearer forty-five kilos than thirty-five we admitted defeat and decided to hire two porters to help. Easier said than done.

  We had both been to Swat in the Sixties, but things have changed considerably since then. We found that organised trekking, both by foreigners and Pakistanis, has become popular and as a result, wages have increased by a factor of four or five. Porters were not inclined to haggle. In Matiltan those who were found themselves set upon by a vigorous Trade Union movement, the militancy of whose members seemed to be directly related to their affluence. It was only with difficulty that we found two men, or rather a man and a boy, sufficiently impecunious to defy the militants and accept our terms.

  The Ushu valley, though not without its arid sections, is a lovely place. Its stands of pine and deodar, its water meadows dotted with ponies and cattle, and the snowy peaks visible at either end, make it as picturesque as anything in the Alps. Springs of fresh water bubble up among banks of orchids. Beside the path bloom familiar flowers – cinquefoil, forget-me-not, comfrey, stitchwort, celandine, gentian, even the ubiquitous dandelion. And there are birds everywhere – beside the turbulent white glacier stream, dippers and white-capped and plumbeous redstarts; where the river has flooded, sandpipers and the striking black and yellow citrine wagtail; on open rocky hillsides, kestrels and black redstarts; and among the trees, rose finches, and cuckoos calling insistently. Dick, ever on the watch with his powerful Leitz glasses, was compiling a checklist which had soon exceeded fifty species.

  The only discordant notes in this idyll were struck by our predecessors. Earlier the same month a party led by one Mr Langlands, who I am told teaches at a school in Lahore, had travelled up the valley. We knew this because either Mr Langlands or one of his acolytes appears to suffer acutely from the ‘Kilroy was here’ syndrome. At least once in every day’s march the legend ‘Mr Langlands’ and the date, artistically enclosed in Urdu script, would appear painted on a prominent rock. We were compelled to follow the progress of Mr Langlands all the way up the Ushu Gol, into Chitral and even some of the way down the Gilgit valley. We wished that, like Kilroy, he could have confined his activities to lavatory walls.

  Two days ahead of us from Matiltan was a commercially-organised trekking party of fifteen Americans led by a Pakistani, with a huge number of porters. Of their passage, too, we were left in no doubt, followin
g a trail of Kodachrome boxes, sweet papers and fruit drink packets until, near the end of the second day’s walk, we caught up with them, camped in a birchwood not far from the snow-line. They were so affable and welcoming, however, that I did not have the heart to give vent to my feelings.

  The Kachikani An proved straightforward enough, though without a guide the correct route might not have been obvious and from the opposite direction would, I suspect, be even less so. We spent most of the day on snow. The porters were not strong and in their plastic shoes made heavy weather of the steep sections. I was no faster. A ‘touch of the sun’ the previous day had made me feel so poorly that I had eaten and, more important, drunk virtually nothing. As a result, I was badly dehydrated and found every upward step an effort.

  Another day’s walk through a very different, near desert, landscape brightened only by dog roses and purple vetch, brought us to Sor Laspur – a prosperous well-irrigated village sited, like so many in these parts, on an alluvial fan. Here we had to change porters, the villagers being jealous of their territorial rights.

  Finally, in a twenty-five mile day, we crossed the long plateau of the Shandhur Pass to reach Teru. In December 1895, the Pass was the scene of an epic crossing by Colonel Kelly, on his way to the relief of a beleaguered garrison in Chitral, when unfortunate sepoys from the Punjab had to drag their cannon through two metres of snow. In summer, though, cattle graze upon it and there is even a polo ground laid out. In days gone by, the annual polo match between Chitral and Gilgit, held on top of the pass in August, was the social event of the year. Alas, the advent of the jeep has made the ownership of a horse a luxury rather than a necessity, and the match is no longer played.

  The sight of a blue-throat, so rare in England, only a few feet away and quite undisturbed, enlivened a dull walk on the far side. But almost as memorable for their homely associations in that foreign setting, were house martins swooping over the broad white river and, in Teru, skylarks singing above the fields. Over the last few miles, however, I noticed little. In the glare of mid-afternoon, my feet swelled and swelled until it seemed as if, like the princess in the fairy tale, I could feel the tiniest pebble through the thick rubber soles of my boots. The two porters from Laspur must have found it a long day also, for they arrived late in the evening driving their loads before them on a donkey.

  A rough road runs right to the top of the Shandhur Pass but only occasionally do jeeps go even as far as Teru. We were in luck, for one arrived that night which took us sixty-odd miles down the hospitable Gilgit valley the following day, more than once being flagged down to sample the first fruits of the apricot harvest. Rather than continue to Gilgit itself, we now decided to travel up the Ishkoman valley to the Karumbar Glacier, from which we could attempt Kampire Dior.

  After various vicissitudes involving jeep-drivers and bouts of a mysterious fever, we eventually reached the roadhead at Imit, renowned locally for its opium poppies. On the way, we had been given every assistance by the police in our desire to ‘visit the glaciers.’ But here we were met by a gentleman from military Intelligence who was quite emphatic that a permit was needed and that ‘law is law.’ Despondently we walked twelve miles back to the next village where we found a jeep going to Gilgit.

  We spent only one night in that unprepossessing place and next day took a jeep along the spectacular mountain road to Chalt, thirty miles north of Gilgit in the Hunza Gorge (the Karakoram Highway running along the opposite bank of the river). In addition to the usual oft-described horrors of such roads, we found ourselves perched high up on top of sacks of flour and lumps of rock salt, in imminent danger of decapitation by branches, telegraph wires and overhanging rock, though in a good position to help ourselves to apricots.

  Foiled twice now, we were making for two unclimbed peaks of 6,800 metres at the head of the Kukuay (pronounced Cook-ooa) Glacier. Again, the local police were friendly and helpful – ‘you are our guests’ – and as there is no frontier in the vicinity, this time there was no sign of the army. Putting our belongings on a horse, we reached Bar, the last village in the valley, in four hours and started the lengthy process of finding porters.

  In Gilgit we had pared our baggage down considerably and, with only a fortnight of Dick’s holiday left, we needed less food. The two loads probably weighed less than thirty kilos each and normally we would have had no hesitation in shouldering them ourselves. In fact, the following morning when negotiations broke down, we did so and we were not bluffing. Nevertheless I, for one, was relieved when, after half a mile, the porters and their representatives caught us up and agreed to our price. I was finding the searing heat and the dryness of the atmosphere very trying. (A German expedition to this region, in 1954, estimated the relative humidity to be often less than 10 per cent.)

  The porters agreed to our rate of payment but insisted on lighter loads, and by the time we had taken our own climbing sacks they were left with no more than twenty kilos apiece. With loads so light, they might have been expected to travel relatively fast. Instead, the distance we covered that first day from Bar was so paltry that we would have paid them off there and then had I not been feeling, again, the effects of dehydration.

  We spent that night outside a goatherds’ shelter which had clearly been occupied by the goats as well as the herds, and I put in some determined drinking. As a result, I went much better the next day. Initially, we tried to stay with the porters, but they were impervious to hints and the combination of a rest every quarter of an hour and a pace that would not have been out of keeping in a dead march, was too much for our patience. Anxious not to walk through the heat of the day unnecessarily, we went on ahead, vowing to pay the porters off that night.

  Having crossed the moraine-covered snout of the Baltar glacier in a long detour enforced by an uncrossable river, and returned to the stony wastes of the main valley we reached, about midday, the place called Toltar – or what we took to be Toltar. There was nothing there but a few charred sticks and some dry stonewalling beneath a boulder. But the porters had made it clear that Toltar was the day’s objective, so we sat down to wait for them. (Returning that way some weeks later, I discovered that it had been, in fact, 300 metres above our heads in a narrow ablation valley whose existence we never suspected from below. However, the porters would have had to pass us to reach the exiguous path, visible only to the eye of faith, which slants up to it across a high moraine wall.)

  The porters never came. Every hour or so we carefully scanned the valley with binoculars but there was never a sign of them. Dick read Richard Burton on Sindh. Having rashly left my book behind in the interests of weight, I contemplated alternately the sky and my navel. The hours passed and we began to feel hungry. Finally, as evening drew in, we unrolled our sleeping bags and tried unsuccessfully to stave off the pangs in sleep. Just before dark, Dick had a final look round but still there was nothing to be seen, not even the smoke of a fire.

  Next morning our hunger was no less, but, convinced that the porters must be nearby, we left our sacks and backtracked a mile or so, searching and shouting. We were certain that they could not have passed us. Not only were we keeping a lookout, but at that point, there is so little room between the mountainside and the river that they could hardly help but see us. But there was neither sight nor sound of the two men. With nothing to eat, there was no alternative but to beat a retreat to Bar, by now a highly desirable land flowing with chapattis and salt tea.

  At the insistence of the villagers, who professed themselves certain that the porters would return any moment, we spent two days in Bar, lying in the shade of a walnut tree. An almost morbid fear of the police stemmed, we learned later, from a successful raid in search of stolen property only a fortnight before. So strong was this fear that it induced the local prophet to go into a convulsive trance, wherein he was bold enough to foretell the very hour of their arrival. Unfortunately he was wrong. In the meantime, we lived on what the villagers chose to provide, mostly mulberries and chapattis of matu
re vintage, sometimes eggs and, on one memorable occasion, a packet of vermicelli, a tin of cheese and a large quantity of sugar boiled up together into an edible glue. However, two days seems a very long time when one is a public spectacle throughout the hours of daylight and has nothing to do but debate the likelihood of villainy or disaster. Eventually, when requests that we stay showed signs of hardening into a refusal to let us leave, we flitted on a dark moonless night to Chalt – our noiseless departure marred only by Dick’s describing a somersault from one terraced field to the next, wrenching a knee in the process. In Chalt we made a statement to the Inspector of Police and, after a day over-indulging in apricots and sweet biscuits, returned to Gilgit full of gloom.

  With a damaged knee and his holiday almost over, Dick cut short the fiasco of our ‘expedition’ by taking the first available flight back to Rawalpindi. Within minutes of his departure, I met a policeman from Chalt in the bazaar and learned that our baggage had been recovered. Back in Chalt, I was told that the porters had brought it in themselves, claiming to have carried it all the way to the Kukuay glacier and back and demanding nine days’ wages for their pains. Unfortunately the inspector believed them. Apparently one of them had made the pilgrimage to Mecca and ‘They are very gentle men.’ Secretly, I wondered if a man who had been to Mecca might not be all the more anxious to con an infidel. Aloud, I voiced the suspicion that they might have spent most of those days reclining in the shade of a birch grove beside the Baltar Glacier, a known beauty spot. But there was no convincing the inspector and in the end, suspecting that we might be seeing more of both the officialdom of Chalt and the men of Bar, I reluctantly handed over nine days’ wages.