Most of the separi, or snake-catchers, are under twenty. For weeks past they had been hunting snakes in the mountains where they abound. Capturing them while they are still dazed with their winter sleep, they disarm the poisonous ones by giving them the hem of a garment to bite, which, when snatched away, breaks off their teeth and drains their poison. Then, stored in jars or sewn into goatskins, they are put by until the great day comes round. There were now several hundred of them in the streets of Cucullo—black, grey, greenish, speckled and striped, all hissing and knotting together and impotently darting and biting with their harmless jaws.
The floor of the baroque, and surprisingly large church was deep in crumbs and bundles and debris. Hundreds of visiting peasants, finding the village overflowing, had slept there all night. Queues waited their turn at the confessional, and, under a pink and blue baldachin, relays of priests administered the sacrament. In the north transept a bell clanked almost unceasingly as peasant after peasant, taking a metal ring between his teeth, tugged at a chain that rang the clapper of a bell that had once belonged to St Dominic, to draw his notice to their petition. On waiting trays the crumpled fifty lire mounted up. From behind the altar precious lumps of rubble—from the ruins, it is said, of one of St Dominic’s foundations—were carried off to be sprinkled over the fields to ensure a good harvest and rid the fields of rats.
A young priest applied a battered silver reliquary to the arms and shoulders of an interminable procession of kneeling pilgrims, or to the upheld crusts of bread they would later feed to their livestock to ward off rabies. Inside the cylindrical casket swung and rattled a wonder-working tooth of St Dominic; now, after a thousand years, a chipped and discoloured fang. Then the devotees moved on to the effigy of St Dominic himself, a life-size wooden figure in black Benedictine habit with a horseshoe in one hand and in the other a crosier. Embracing him with hungry possessiveness, they rubbed little bundles of coloured wool—sovereign thenceforward, when applied to the spot, against toothache and snakebite and hydrophobia—down the grooves of his habit, or lifted their children into kissing distance of the worn and numinous flanks. Silver ex-votos hung round his neck, and pink ribbons with pinned sheaves of offered banknotes fluttered from his shoulders. St Dominic of Sora, or ‘the Abbot’—he has nothing to do with the great founder of the Order of the Preachers—was a Benedictine of Umbrian origin, born in 951. He was by turns eremetical and peripatetic, and his countless miracles during his lifetime, and, the Abruzzesi relate, through the agency of his relic ever since, were nearly all connected with the foiling of bears and wolves, and, especially, snakes.
By the time High Mass began, there was no room to move in the crowded church. Yet a passage was cleared and two young women advanced with large baskets balancing unsupported on their heads, each of them containing great hoop-like loaves; both baskets were draped in pink and white silk and decked with carnations and wild cyclamen. They stood like caryatids on either side of the high altar until, at the end of the service, the image of the saint was hoisted shoulder-high and borne swaying into the sunlight before the church door. There, while the compact multitude clapped and cheered and the bells broke into a jubilant peal, the serpari clustered round the lowered float. Snakes began flying over the tonsured head like lassoes. Parish elders arranged them feather-boa-like about his shoulders, twisted them round his crosier and wound them over his arms and through the horseshoe and at random all over his body until the image and its pedestal were a squirming tangle. Many fell off or wriggled free, and one over-active reptile was given a crack over the head. The effigy, like a drowned figurehead from the Sargasso Sea, was raised shoulder high once more. A small pink banner pinned all over with notes, then a large green one, were unwieldily hoisted. Village girls intoned a hymn in Abruzzi dialect in St Dominic’s honour; then the clergy, one of them bearing the cylinder with its swinging tooth, formed a procession.
The two girls with their peculiar baskets came next. A brass band struck up the triumphal march from Aida, and the saint, twisting and coiling with the activity of the bewildered snakes and bristling with their hissing and tongue-darting heads, rocked insecurely forward across the square. The innumerable peasants, the conjurors and pedlars and quacks, fell in step; the wine-shops emptied; pigs and poultry were abandoned in their pens, and the whole immense concourse, now itself forming a gigantic many-coloured serpent, wound slowly along the rising and falling streets. Every few steps the effigy came to a halt while fallen snakes were replaced or yet more banknotes, which floated down from the upper windows, were pinned on the fluttering ribbons. Boys ran alongside, brandishing tangled armfuls of redundant reptiles and, looking up at the bright midday sky, I saw girls on the rooftops flourishing skeins of the now familiar reptiles in both hands.
At last the saint was back at the church door, and there, like a disentangling of cold macaroni, the de-snaking began. It was as if they had frozen to their perch. When St Dominic was in his chapel at last, a strange haggling and chaffering began over the carcasses of his denizens. For snakes are eagerly sought by pedlars, who display them as a reinforcement to their patter, attract a crowd, and then slily open their suitcases of combs or medals or celluloid toys. There was even an atheist patent-medicine manufacturer all the way from Bologna, who boils them down and turns them into ointment against rheumatism. The back of his little car was soon as warm.
It is tempting to seek a link between these strange doings and some possible pre-Christian worship of Aesculapius, but there was no Aesculapian temple in the area, it seems, though Apollo and Jupiter were worshipped at Sulmona. It is known, however, that the warlike Marsi from whom these Abruzzesi descend were snake-worshippers and snake-charmers and wizards, and there is no reason why these things should have died out by St Dominic’s day. Antiquarians also find certain affinities between the Cucullan customs and the fertility rites of the Agathos Daimon. Be that as it may, the strange cult in honour of St Dominic the Abbot shows no signs of dying out. If anything, it grows more popular and more deeply felt as time goes on.
With every mile of the return journey next day through the twisting Sabine gorges and down into the Campagna with the dome of St Peter’s growing larger on the skyline, the proceedings at Cucullo seemed odder and more remote. It was only when I touched my coat pocket and felt a responsive uneasy wriggle through the tweed, that it seemed real at all. For, by paying a few hundred lire, I had become a snake-owner too. It was a fine grey animal over a yard long with clever little black eyes: very active, letting slip no chance of nipping my hand with its unarmed (I hoped) gums. But, when I reached Rome, and my destination on the Tiber island, it had vanished. It must have slid gently away to freedom in the tram between the city walls and the Piazza di Spagna. Perhaps, after a panic in the tram, it was put out of the way. But perhaps it is still rattling its way unobserved round the Seven Hills; or it may be curled up among the pillars of the Forum, or, best of all, basking sleepily on a warm and grassy ledge of the Colosseum, beyond the reach of all harm.
Paradox in the Himalayas
London Magazine, December 1979—January 1980
This piece was written in memory of Paddy’s friend Robin Fedden (1908—77), writer, scholar, mountaineer, aesthete and poet. Although he is not mentioned by name, the journey—which took place in 1976—was the last of many expeditions of which he was the leader. Malana, autonomous and isolated, is up the Parbati valley north of the town of Kulu. It is situated at 9,000 ft.
It was late October when we struck uphill through the golden, auburn and crimson trees, and the air smelled of incense and decay; all sound but the crackle of pine-cones underfoot and the breaking caskets of fallen chestnuts was muffled under heaped-up leaves which occasional breezes lifted in small eddies and then let fall. Our first night’s fires lit up a glade near the end of the forest and by noon next day a wisp of birch ended the trees just short of the Chanderkhani pass. This narrow saddle, 12,000 feet up, bristled with tall and enigmatic blades of rock stuck
vertically into the grassy ridge, early hints of the idiosyncrasy that lay ahead. Many snow-peaks familiar from recent climbs had kept pace with us on the skyline, but in changed formations, and Deo Tibba had shifted three-quarters round to display a score of new facets. The far side of the pass was an abyss where two lammergeiers were balanced in the hot stillness and our arrival sent them gliding on lazy wings to the next range. An invisible river whispered below. Somewhere, deep in those buttresses and forests, our destination lay.
In under an hour, each in his private landslide, we scrambled 4,000 breakneck feet down a corrie until the thorn-barriers and boulders of a cavernous goat-fold made us halt for breath. The air was stagnant. Flocks scattered the clefts and a white-bearded, white-clad and barefoot shepherd, starting up in consternation, laid aside his ball of yarn and his distaff and only recovered from the shock over a reluctant cigarette. To mitigate defilement, this was offered not by us but by Wangyal, the chief Sherpa; we thought a Buddhist would be better than a Christian. Even so, the shepherd lodged it carefully at the base of a little finger-joint and then, forming an airtight box like a dry hookah with his clasped hands, he filled the hollow with smoke and drew on it, safe from pollution now, by putting his mouth to his joined thumbs, as though about to imitate an owl hooting. Malana, he told Wangyal, was not far below. While they talked he had kept his troubled glance away from our faces, and now he pointed to our boots and our leather belts and watch-straps with an air of distress. The village is protected by a private but all-powerful god called Jamlu to whom leather is an abomination. If they know nothing else, even strangers in these folds of the Himalayas know this and so did we, but we had been caught unawares. If we took these forbidden things into the village, said the shepherd, only the offer and sacrifice of a goat apiece could wipe out the desecration.
A turn in the track brought us above a scattering of roofs put together with irregular slabs. Above them on our side, rock soared to snow-slashed cordilleras; the other side dropped still deeper into a canyon of forest.
It was forbidden, we knew, to enter Malana without permission, so we cast about and found a convenient knoll. But the power of Jamlu came into play at once. Some wild-looking girls, who were huddling there like little crows, took wing, crying a warning, as they fled, not to settle there: it was sacred to Jamlu. Where could we camp without sacrilege? As our search flagged, three hideous boys began to dog our footsteps, squatting wherever we went in a derisive row—two of them witless from inbreeding, the third a vision of nameless evil—until we were rescued by a compassionate villager. He had a D. H. Lawrence beard and wore a round pahari cap and he was called Sangat; a man of fine looks and, as we discovered, great good nature. He led us to a pine-clump, a safely unsanctified one, and our tents were soon pitched, fires lit and chapattis baking on the hot stones. Then he left us to consult with the elders. He was back next morning and seeing that all wristwatches were off and our belts and our boots replaced by rope and gym-shoes, he led us downhill and into the village.
Poplars and cypresses and birch-trees rose haphazard among the tall houses. Built of impacted stone and bonded with massive beams, the lower floors were given over to animals and the murk of byres. Higher up, carved and arcaded balconies ran all round the buildings, and primitive looms were set up there among stored hay and purple heaps of amaranth. Instead of stairs, these upper storeys were reached by felled tree-trunks set at a slant, with the branches lopped off short for rungs, and the dwellers sped up and down them like the bandarlog. Aromatic smoke crept between the roof-slabs to float across the village and hang in a blue veil. The villagers in the lanes and the weavers and the spinners on the galleries looked askance at our entry and stopped dead. The spreading silence was soon complete. Men averted their gaze, children ran off as though ogres were coming down the street and the women at the spring—striking figures in homespun tartan, their thick plaits lengthened with black wool, babies slung on their haunches, distaffs in hand and huge brass water-jars on their heads—stood transfixed, and after a long disbelieving glance, turned away with a rictus of bewilderment and pain. Nearly all the village was out of bounds to us. One or two fellow-villagers joined Sangat, less as an escort than to ward off pollution; and even along permitted ways a flutter of anxious hands herded us innocuously to the middle. Malana is a smelly hamlet. To rough mountain folk after dark, all the world’s a jakes and all the men and women, etc.; so in some of the by-ways the roles were reversed and our careful steps needed no prompting.
We were halted and bidden to admire the Treasure House. Elaborate triple bands of moulding surrounded the heavy door and many forest-trophies—slender ibex and the heavy crinkled horns of the great Tibetan sheep, the nyam, the urial and, I think, the mark-hor—adorned the intricately carved wood. It was the storehouse of Jamlu’s boundless wealth.
But the heart of the village was a little piazza, sloping and grassy, and enclosed on three sides by arcaded buildings of sacred aspect. The timber façades were wrought with geometric designs and elaborate friezes of peacocks, lions, elephants and horsemen with guns ran right across them, but no Hindu gods were enshrined there, no marigold petals strewn and no camphor flickered in the shadows. But in the very middle of this little piazza, a slab of boldly cut stone lay half-embedded in the grass. It was the holiest place in Malana, Sangat whispered; in fact, Jamlu himself. Following his precept and example, we placed our offerings before him, then lifted joined hands in puja and lay prone for a minute with our brows in the dust.
A feeling of awe dwelt in these lanes; nothing was wholly secular. The hushed devoutness, the anxiety and the lowered lids sealed us away as effectively as helmets of darkness, so it came as a surprise, after a consultation of the elders, to be waved to seats on a stone ledge in this ceremonial square. Our pious homage to Jamlu had made a good impression, it seemed; and here, bit by bit, linguistic curiosity began to break the ice. Among themselves the Malanis talk a language called Kanishta, and the Sherpas, who spoke Tibetan and the Kulu dialect of Hindi, could make nothing of it and least of all Wangyal, who had also picked up more than a smattering of English from earlier mountaineers; and, somehow, so had our local protector. ‘What is “house” in Kanishta?’ we asked him. ‘Kim!’ Sangat answered. And in Hindi? ‘Gher!’ Wangyal said, catching on with a collusive look. And in Tibetan? ‘Khumps!’ the Sherpas cried in chorus. Then more Malanis began to gather and chime in, doubtfully at first, then as eagerly as children playing Animal Grab. We would point at something—a foot, a knee, an elbow, a tree, a boy, and ‘Guding!’ they boomed back in Kanishta, ‘Chig!’ ‘Yuska!’ ‘Biting!’ and ‘Tchokts!’ In a few cases, as one would have expected, there were Tibetan or Hindi loan-words from the two great languages Malana is sandwiched between; but most of them resembled neither. Growing more daring we began to dabble in the abstract. ‘God?’—pointing up—‘Jong!’ ‘Devil?’ ‘Bhutan!’ ‘good?’ ‘shovilez!’ ‘bad?’ ‘nork!’ ‘Sun?’ ‘Jhari!’ ‘Moon?’ ‘Josta!’ . . . By now we were among friends.
Unlike the nomad herds, the flocks of Malana winter in the mountains. That evening the approaches were a turmoil of bleating; but they had been folded by sundown and in the silence by the camp-fire we pondered the vocabulary of about two hundred words I had jotted down; and later on, kept awake by an owl with a queer double-noted cry, we pondered still: who were the Malanis? Where do they come from? How do they live? Above all, what about Jamlu?
Very few travellers ever climbed to Malana. It was on the way to nowhere. Steep barriers and a bad reputation fended off all but a few lonely scholars; an Asiatic traveller or two, that is, an observant and literate captain on shikar, a clergyman with a bent for languages and some historically minded ICS officers like G. Mackworth-Young, the first outsider to observe a jamlu ceremony; and, in recent times, Dervla Murphy has splendidly described its winter aspect in Tibetan Foothold. But Dr Colin Rosser, a social anthropologist who has studied the place for two years, must remain the chief authority, and sourc
e.
The wild local gods have given rise to much speculation. In some ways Jamlu is suzerain of all the deified spirits of trees, caverns, mountains and springs in the region, and Jamlu himself was once the spirit of a mountain, one of twin peaks, and perhaps the younger brother of Gyephang La in Lahul; more important, it is certain, or nearly so, that he was a god in pre-Aryan times. On his way to Malana for the first time, he and his wife Naroi were carrying a box full to the brim with lesser deities. The wind on the Chanderkhani pass blew off the lid and scattered them over Kulu—eighteen of them or more—dropping them at the very points where their shrine later on sprang up when they had sidled into the Hindu pantheon. The only worship of an anthropomorphic deity in Malana itself is the minor cult of Jamlu’s wife, now renamed Ranuka, whose little fane stands on the edge of the village. Perhaps out of pre-Aryan pride, the omnipotent Jamlu has neither temple nor image and he has thriven for millennia on this lack of definition. [. . .]
And what of the Malanis? Are they earlier than the Aryans too? Some scholars say so. After all, it was only a few centuries before the Siege of Troy that the chariots of the city-rending invaders stormed into India. Other scholars, bolder still, think they may be pre-Dravidian as well. For the Dravidians, and perhaps their kindred citydwellers of the Indus valley, like all the successful assailants of India except the English, may also have come here from the north-west and only a few thousand years before the sub-continent turned into Vishnu-land. The Malanis, then—the cloud of surmise expands here like a mushroom—probably descend from the union of pre-Dravidian aboriginals with newcomers of the Vaisia caste when the Aryans, settled in at last, started wandering up the remote Himalayan valleys. Many sources have been suggested for their peculiar language, which must be one of the smallest in the world. The likeliest is Kinnauri, a dialect still spoken in the wild mountains of the former Bashahr state, which stretched from Rampur on the Upper Sutlej to the borders of Tibet. (As far as I can make out this is also the most probable setting for the Himalayan adventures of Kim and the Lama. What Shamleh middens lay beyond those overlapping skylines and shifting visions of Kedarnath and Badrinath?) The region is seventy miles from Malana, as the crow flies; so, sundered as it is by fierce ranges, ten times further for a man. I can find only two Kanishta vocabularies in the Secretariat Library—could my ad hoc collection be the third?—but a rare missionary’s handbook of the dialect of Kinnauri—faded, dog-eared and Victorian—divides the dialect between four Sutlej regions, some of which are incomprehensible to each other though only ten miles apart. It makes no mention of Malana, however. A link there plainly is: both are technically subdivisions of the great Tibeto-Burman family; but they must have been parted for hundreds of years and perhaps for thousands. Apart from those few loan-words, the Sherpas could spot no Tibetan admixture; and it is noticeable that Malani faces—which are surprisingly pale and either very beautiful or masks of hideous degeneracy and squalor—have none of the Mongol traits of the Sherpas, or the few Kinnauris that people have pointed out to me in the Lakka Bazaar a mile or so away. The link would be one of language more than race, perhaps, and a thin link at that.
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