by Adrian Levy
After a few minutes the crowd drifted away, and John asked to get out of the car. He was becoming concerned that everything he had heard about Kashmir was unreliable. He could still turn back, he told himself; but then he gazed at those distant mountains once more. He wandered off, still nervous, but hoping to ask other travellers for tips. The further he walked into the town, the more alarmed he became by the air of decay that hung over this place. Pahalgam was empty, a single road fringed by wooden shop-houses, some offering trekking services, and not a soul to be seen in any of them. John passed the ornamental park and gardens, the police station and a couple of grander-looking hotels down by the river, the Heevan and the Lidder Palace. Where were all the tourists, he wondered, the throngs of people he had been told about by the factory workers in Bihar. The only visible Western faces were in yellowing photographs pasted in travel-agency windows. But every few yards there was a sorry huddle of trekking guides, all of whom would rush over at the sight of a rare Western visitor. These days it seemed all they could do was dream of a time when they had had all the work they could handle, carrying clanking cooking stoves up and down the mountain paths to glittering shrines illuminated with ghee lanterns and burning sandalwood.
Sick of the relentless attention, John waved off the last huddle and strode down the road in search of his companions. Dasheer had made arrangements for them to stay in a cheap hotel on the outskirts of the town. ‘I seem to recall it didn’t really have windows,’ John said. ‘At the time I felt I was semi-camping already. But soon I would come to think of it as luxury.’ As he bedded down for the night, he tried to forget about the worryingly negative aspects of his trip, and focused on the next day. The three of them would set out at dawn the following morning for the Lidderwat Valley. They would head for Kolahoi Glacier, the three lakes of Tar Sar, Mar Sar and Son Sar, and would set up camp in the Meadow. He was determined to enjoy his holiday, whatever the cost. His company was paying, after all.
By 2 July, the day John Childs set out from Pahalgam, Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings had been walking at high altitude for several days. They too had been concerned by the cratered road up from Anantnag – ‘a horrendous, horn-honking mad dash’ – and the ghostly appearance of Pahalgam. But once they had departed the town along the eastern route, following a well-worn track beside the East Lidder River, heading into the heart of the Betaab Valley and towards Amarnath Cave, their misgivings were left behind. ‘It was glorious shirt-sleeve weather,’ says Jane. The temperature was in the seventies. The scent of pine and lilac filled the air. The skies were clear, and the meadows alive with grazing sheep. Due to an unusually late thaw, the wildflowers were only just coming out on the hillsides, springing up with extra vigour because of the snowmelt. Little streams wound between pollarded willows, their crystal-clear water flowing between banks of vivid green moss and over beds coloured like autumn leaves. Jane was delighted. ‘Everything was perfect. Good food. The guides, Bashir and Sultan, were good. All we saw were the local shepherds.’ The only disconcerting sight was the occasional army jeep charging past them.
The first day, their guide, Bashir, had suggested they take noon chai with a gujjar family. It was a tourist stunt, but Jane didn’t care. This was a way for these people, who had little, to make a few rupees, and for visitors to see how they lived. Jane and Don followed Bashir’s lead, and sat dunking rolled-up pieces of salty girda bread into sugared tea. The family’s hut, or dhoka, set back from the main trekking path among the pine trees, was constructed of four sturdy trunks around which stone walls had been built, using mud as a mortar. Someone had pushed little strands of wild plants into the cracks, allowing them to cascade down the walls. The family sat mute, smiling. They spoke no English, and the guide said they did not speak Kashmiri either, but had their own dialect. Don took a few snaps, and Jane asked Bashir to identify some of the local flowers, and wrote their names down in her journal. Noonday chai would become a welcome part of their routine.
Later, after zigzagging back and forth over the East Lidder on little wooden pony bridges, wild lilac bushes perfuming the air, they reached Chandanwari, a village Hindu pilgrims called Amarnath base camp. Famous for its snow bridge, a semi-permanent glacial sheet that spanned the river, this was as far as army vehicles could reach. From now on the route consisted of a trekking path that climbed sharply, and Indian soldiers had to proceed by foot to their positions in the heights. Although the military presence was by no means overwhelming, there were still troops everywhere. Don and Jane reasoned that security was a good thing. The soldiers gave them no trouble, and soon they had left them behind, walking through pastures filled with violets, primulas and anemones, and spending their first night in the open steeped in air flecked with blossom. They sat with their books and journals by a gurgling stream, while Sultan, the pony-wallah who also doubled as their cook, prepared pots of daal, rice and curried vegetables on a kerosene stove.
After eating, Jane and Don talked a little to the guides about their families, who lived in Aru, a village near the Meadow. ‘You will come to our homes,’ they said. ‘You will have a meal with our families.’ But behind the smiles, Bashir and Sultan seemed sad, as if they knew that this business that had come their way would not be sufficient to mend Kashmir’s problems. Jane and Don had been quick to spot this, and it unsettled them. Whenever the guides talked together in their own language, over the pots and pans or with the ponies, they seemed to be arguing. ‘Life is hard these days,’ Bashir commented one evening, trying to spark up a conversation. ‘Why have people stopped coming?’ Jane asked, and probed them about any danger from militants. Bashir frowned. There was no militant activity in these parts, he mumbled. She must be sure to tell her friends back in the United States. ‘You are our friends, your friends are now our friends too.’ When the conversation dried up, Bashir and Sultan drifted off for a smoke. Jane and Don contemplated the valley as the darkness deepened, the roar of the river swelling and spreading. Above them rose the sombre masses of the snow-topped mountains, and meteorites streaked across the sky behind the seven snowy peaks of Sheshnag to the north-east. From this vantage point, the two Americans could see why these mountains, so closely connected to each other, were said to resemble the writhing heads of a mythical naga. This untamed beauty was worth coming to Kashmir to see. But they couldn’t help wondering if they would ever understand the crisis that had blighted the state.
The next day they hiked to nearly ten thousand feet, clambering across a field of moraine over Pissu Top. Don looked back, taking pictures along the valley. They dropped down into Zargibal, a wind-blasted stone hamlet, and a little further on they spent another night in the open, listening to their campfire crackle.
Up with the sun, they headed for Wavjan on the third day, overlooking the velvety waters of Sheshnag Lake and a slew of glaciers that ballooned out before them like pegged laundry. Blue irises grew all around. Jane asked Don to take some pictures, as she doubted if the specimens she picked would survive the trip back home. From here, Bashir told them, they would have to make it over Mahagunas Pass, before descending into the meadows of Panchtarni, the last place they would camp before trying for the Amarnath ice cave. Don had read that the cave was the supposed site of a tryst between the Hindu god Lord Shiva and Parvati, his divine consort, the place where he had explained to her the secrets of immortality. Bashir said a pair of mating doves had overheard, transforming the cave into their eternal dovecot. Inside was a shrine built around a giant ice lingam, a phallic stalagmite that represented Shiva’s potency. During the holy Hindu month of Shravan, between the full moons of July and August, when devotees made their annual yatra, the lingam was said visibly to wax and wane.
Eventually, still walking well, despite a few aches, over fields of scree, they reached Mahagunas Top at fifteen thousand feet. With rippling layers of geology exposed all along the bare ridgelines, and the glittering Himalayas spread out ahead, the landscape inspired them to forget the weariness they had begun to feel i
n their calves and knees. After Don, thinking of the post-trip potluck dinner they would arrange back in Spokane, got as many shots as he could, they headed for Panchtarni, the confluence of five streams, and the last camp before the holy cave itself.
Amarnath was a hard three-hour walk from there, the culmination of the yatris’ pilgrimage, at the end of a well-worn path that wound its way at a forty-five-degree angle through a gigantic glacial amphitheatre, where the bedrock rose hundreds of feet on either side, causing the trekkers’ footfalls to echo. When Don and Jane reached their destination the following morning, the giant cavern, more than 150 feet high and open to the elements, carved deep into the side of the mountain, was an overwhelming spectacle. The final approach was a zigzagging path, and Jane and Don could imagine how the cave had inspired stories of the gods for many hundreds of years: the Rajatarangini, a twelfth-century Sanskrit chronicle of the kings of Kashmir, had recorded how Aryaraja, a monarch who had ruled around the time of Jesus Christ, had worshipped a phallus formed of snow and ice ‘in the regions above the forests’.
After reaching the mouth of the cave and catching a glimpse of the giant ice lingam, filling their lungs with the sandalwood incense left by pilgrims, Don and Jane began to retrace their steps along the mountain path before branching off along a little-used track Sultan had told them about. ‘We didn’t do a “V” all the way back to Pahalgam, but instead cut across due west at around the area where the streams come into the East Lidder River from the north,’ Jane says. ‘That would have put us a little south of the village of Barimarg.’ There were trails all over the place, and the guides knew the routes. They were heading for the Lidderwat Valley and the Meadow, where they would spend the night before pushing on north-west, along a high-altitude route to the difficult Sonarmas Pass, at eleven thousand feet. Near here they would spend their last night in the mountains. A few hours beyond lay Sumbal, a village on a metalled road, from where a taxi would take them back to Srinagar.
Carpeted with white daisies and blue gentians, the Meadow was spellbinding when they reached it at the end of that afternoon, exhausted after a full day of walking and climbing. Bashir and Sultan set the tents up as usual, choosing a pitch in what they described as ‘the Upper Camp’, near a couple of empty dhokas, whose roofs were grassed over for insulation. They made a point of positioning Jane and Don’s tent close to the blue ice water, so they could hear it where they lay.
The couple fell asleep early, Jane complaining of toothache. The next morning, 3 July, they woke feeling glum. Just one more yomp to the high-altitude lake, Tar Sar, lay ahead of them. The adventure was coming to an end, although Jane’s toothache almost made her quit early: ‘I thought it was just a seed that had got stuck and so I ignored it, and we went ahead.’
The day John Childs set out on his trek up the Lidderwat Valley, heading for the Meadow, British tourists Keith and Julie Mangan, Paul Wells and Cath Moseley, accompanied by their new Canadian friend Bart Imler, arrived in Pahalgam with the Holiday Inn’s owner Bashir, who introduced them to their guides and pony-wallahs. True to his word, Bashir had arranged a full team: ponies, a cook, guides, and two extra teenage boys, brought along for ‘emergencies’. But there would be none of these, Bashir had assured them, his words ringing in their ears after the alarming drive down from Srinagar, the road pitted with constant reminders that there was a major military operation going on in the Kashmir Valley.
Now that she was here before the mountains, Julie was excited, and grateful that she would not have to heft her cumbersome kit. The party set off in bright sunshine, Julie and Cath in shorts and T-shirts, small daypacks slung over their shoulders, following the same track up the Lidderwat Valley that John Childs had taken at daybreak. Bashir was chatty, passing on titbits about the flowers and wildlife. The pony-wallahs asked where they came from, what life was like in the UK and where they had been so far on their travels. As they made their way out of the town, heading north-west up a gentle incline along a path that followed the route of the sloshing Lidder River, Paul got out his camera and began taking photos of the nomadic shepherds tending their flocks, men whose entire lives were spent wandering with the seasons, their burnished faces topped by wool caps, inset with tinsel and mirrored fragments to catch the sunlight.
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.’