Since New Year’s Eve the daytime temperatures have been dropping perceptibly and our waterfall has now been frozen solid for forty-eight hours. It is quite difficult to chip off enough ice for cooking and washing – not that the latter activity occupies much of our time. The universal filthiness of Baltistan discourages attempts to keep clean; these could only lead to frustration, not to mention pneumonia. Neither of us has undressed since we left Islamabad, but we are none the worse for that, at least in our own estimation. (Admittedly my readers might think otherwise, should some magic carpet suddenly transport us to their homes.) The first few days in dirty clothes are always slightly uncomfortable; then one happily settles into one’s niche among the great unwashed.
Aman is still, alas! with us, sitting opposite me as I write, flicking through Ian Stephens’ The Horned Moon. I lent it to him in a desperate effort to render him less irritating but as he is turning the pages rapidly, with a well-wetted forefinger, my effort is having the reverse effect. He seems to half-resent our being here though we are providing him with free heating, lighting and accommodation.
Thowar – 4 January
There has been a dramatic deterioration in the weather today, which is hardly surprising on the fourth of January in the Karakoram. We usually wake at sixish and read for an hour or so in our flea-bags, as no one in their right mind would get up here before the sun does. But this morning reading was difficult: we each had to glove the exposed hand. Several times during the night the whining of the wind woke me and by 8 a.m. it had become a shrieking fury that sent clouds and pillars and curtains of grey dust flying through the air – weirdly beautiful to watch, but no fun to be out in. And we were out in it, because we breakfasted at the Hotel as refugees from Aman. He has an odd way of making one feel uncomfortable without saying or doing anything positive enough to be described.
We were both impressed, between gale gusts, by the silence of a completely frozen landscape. Until they have been stilled one doesn’t realise how much background noise is provided by streams, irrigation channels and waterfalls. Much of the track was covered with sheets of thick ice, and waterfalls had become towering, transparent columns, surrounded by the bizarre elegance of giant bouquets of icicles formed around clumps of thyme. Fantastically convoluted masses of ice hung from roadside rocks and Rachel was so overcome by all this loveliness that she soon forgot her discomfort. The air was so cold when we left the Rest House that she could scarcely breathe. I have been breaking her in gently and this was her first morning to be out before the sun reached Thowar – not that it ever reached us today.
When we left the Hotel at 9.30 the sky was a uniform chilly silver and the peaks were being veiled by fresh snowfalls. We had hoped to find Aman gone about his day’s business (the paying of PWD coolies) but he was only starting his prayers. Then he had to have his breakfast and attend to his toilet – a lengthy process, as he carefully creams his face and spends fifteen minutes grooming, oiling and setting his wavy hair in front of a hand-mirror. When Rachel asked, ‘Mummy, why don’t we have a mirror?’ he was deeply shocked to realise that a woman had ventured into Darkest Central Asia without this essential piece of equipment. He is good-looking in an effeminate way but has a mean, petulant little mouth and evasive eyes.
Our potential pony lives at 12,500 feet and his owner appeared without him at noon, explaining that the way was too icy this morning to risk taking him down. Nor could Aman get much work done; most of the men he was to have paid were unable to leave their high hamlets. All day everybody huddled around whatever heat was available and the wind howled and moaned like a creature in agony; everything in our room was permeated by fine dust and the mountains disappeared as the sky sank lower and darker over the Gorge. At three o’clock I went to the Hotel to fetch paratas for our supper and found the door closed for the first time. About thirty men were crouching around the fire in the flame-lit darkness (there is no window) and a chorus of friendly welcomes greeted me. It seems a long time since the evening of our arrival, when we were regarded with such grim hostility. As usual I had a long wait while our paratas were being kneaded, rolled, shaped and fried by a cheerful ragged youth with a running nose who I’m sure hasn’t washed since birth; he is the fourteen-year-old Balti apprentice of the Pathan proprietor. I wouldn’t dare take Rachel to such a filthy region during summer: now it is too cold for bacteria to survive.
Going home I overtook an old man with a bushy beard and a big grin who was wearing a long scarlet lady’s overcoat that might have been fashionable in Europe fifteen years ago; one wonders by what unlikely series of journeys it arrived here. Behind him three very small boys were struggling with a threadbare blanket, trying to make it long enough to protect them all from the searing wind; they looked like an illustration in some tear-jerking Victorian novel, yet when I passed I saw that they were giggling happily.
On every rock ice gleamed dully, under that sunless, pale grey sky, and the sandy dust whirled in sudden choking spirals, and the bleak walls of the Gorge towered blackly over a snow-flecked Indus. Ronda today seemed a place desolate and tortured and torturing, without mercy or hope. Yet in three months’ time its oases will have come to life again and in five months they will be Paradise Regained.
Mazhar brought news this evening of a jeep-drivers’ strike. The idea of striking seems very alien to this part of the world but I suppose it goes with modern machines. The drivers’ grievance is that the Pakistani Army road-construction gangs working in the Gorge never forewarn them about blasting operations. Therefore jeeps are often held up for hours and these delays can necessitate travelling in the dark on a track which not even the most reckless driver will voluntarily tackle at night. The jeep-wallahs are demanding that the Pakistanis should imitate the Chinese, who give a forty-eight hour warning before every closure. But obviously this is asking too much; life’s not like that in Pakistan.
I am happy to report that this evening Aman found our room too cold: it is heated only by our own little oil stove. So he has taken himself off to the chowkidar’s wood-stove. There is a wood-stove here, too; but firewood costs Rs.40 per maund and Aman is fanatically parsimonious.
Thowar – 5 January
Today’s weather was only slightly less ferocious than yesterday’s. Blizzards were visibly active on the high peaks and though the sun appeared occasionally it was unable to thaw anything. The high-altitude pony therefore remained inaccessible, but at noon another animal was brought from Ronda village for our consideration. This retired polo-pony is aged ten according to his owner and fourteen according to Head Constable Ghulam, who is determined we shall not be cheated. His long winter coat is what I call ginger, though no doubt horse-wallahs have another word for it. (I seem to remember being told once that white horses should be called greys – or is it the other way round?) He has a most endearing disposition and accepted our saddle, and Rachel in it, without demur. But clearly he has been half-starved for months. When Rachel rode him up and down the level space in front of the Rest House he went well enough, but on my leading him up a steep stretch of track he slowed ominously. His owner is asking one thousand rupees, which is absurd. A first-class polo-pony in good condition will fetch four or five thousand locally, but this poor creature is not worth more than a few hundred. If we do buy him he will have to be put in good condition when we get to Skardu – a considerable expense, at this season – before being required to transport Rachel and our kit across the length and breadth of Baltistan. I have offered five hundred and at present his owner is feigning horror at the insult implicit in such a figure.
The above is a drastically condensed account of negotiations which took up most of the day. I spent hours drinking tea in the Hotel while discussing everything except ponies with the pony-owner, a group of his henchmen, Mazhar, Ghulam and an assortment of ragged Ronda villagers who for some reason – probably connected with village politics – are obviously on my side in the bargaining. This evening Ghulam tells me that by playing it cool I am
likely to get the pony for six or seven hundred. He advises me to go to the high hamlet tomorrow, weather permitting, and enter into negotiations about the other pony – but on no account to buy it, as it is not accustomed to jeep traffic.
Aman is still with us and has been trying to sabotage my good opinion of Mazhar, whom he calls ‘that Punjabi’. I have discovered that this ‘Incharge’ is not popular locally. It seems he should reside in Ronda District, according to the terms of his appointment, but he sybaritically refuses to do so and comes only once a quarter to pay coolies who are entitled to a monthly wage.
A triangular feud is in progress between Mazhar, Aman and Zakir, our shiftless young chowkidar. It came to a head today when Mazhar told Aman, whose department is responsible for the staffing of this Rest House, that Zakir should be sacked – a conversation on which Zakir was eavesdropping from our bathroom. It then transpired that in fact Zakir was sacked a month ago for incorrigible inefficiency and laziness, but he refused to accept dismissal since a new two-roomed hut goes with his job. So he was reinstated by Aman the other day, presumably because our room-mate couldn’t think what else to do, or whom else to appoint without starting a serious feud between Zakir and the new employee. As Aman plaintively pointed out, it is almost impossible to find normal chowkidar material in a region with no dak-bungalow tradition. He then withdrew from the fray to warm himself at Zakir’s stove and the chowkidar turned to Mazhar and passionately denounced the Incharge’s meanness, accusing him of not paying for his food and expecting free warmth. He certainly uses up a lot of our kerosene to heat water for his frequent pre-prayer ablutions, so on this issue I can sympathise with Zakir.
Thowar – 6 January
This morning was windless, though a good deal of cloud still hung about the peaks. After breakfast we started out for the pony hamlet beyond Gomu – a 4,500 foot climb which proved almost too much for Rachel. Had the gradient been less severe she could easily have coped with both distance and altitude, but the last 1,000 feet were up an almost vertical stairway of boulders, made treacherous, and sometimes completely obscured, by new snow. Mercifully, however, there were no precipices to fall over. (Or at least not what count as such hereabouts; after a fortnight in Ronda one simply doesn’t notice a few drops of fifty feet or so.) Just below this stairway was a brutally steep pathless slope of soft, loose, sandy soil – at 11,000 feet as exhausting as anything I have ever ploughed through. Leaning on my dula with one hand I helped Rachel up with the other and we could almost hear each other’s hearts hammering.
We tackled the snowy stairway separately, Rachel following in my footsteps, and about halfway up I heard an unhappy sound and realised that my gallant companion had had enough. She looked at me with brimming eyes and said, ‘I’m panted out. I can’t go up any more.’ So we sat on dry cushions of thyme, all the rocks being snow-covered.
I considered the summit of stark, grey-brown cliffs and felt irresolute. To force a wilting six-year-old up that last demanding stretch would be sheer cruelty, yet the idea of retreating when almost there went totally against the Murphy grain.
Then Rachel said, ‘I wonder what we could see from the top?’
Inwardly, I rejoiced at this manifestation of classic travellers’ curiosity, but I replied casually, ‘Nothing much in this weather.’ About half an hour earlier it had begun to snow lightly and we were surveying the world through a haze of tiny flakes.
‘But I’d like to see over the top,’ continued Rachel. ‘I wish I didn’t feel so tired! It’s not really tiredness – I just feel too panted.’
‘No wonder,’ said I, listening to that distinctive silence which rests like a blessing on high places. Far below us was spread a sublime panorama of gorges, cliffs, valleys, escarpments, ledges, ravines and minor mountains, a view made all the more awesome by the thin drifting snowfall.
‘I’d like to get to the top,’ persisted Rachel. ‘Could you help me?’
I stood up and took her hand and we struggled on together; because of the new snow it was becoming increasingly difficult to discern the path and twice we went astray. ‘This is worse than a nightmare!’ wailed Rachel, when we had another hundred feet to go; and I didn’t disagree. She is a solid chunk of humanity and she really was too ‘panted out’ to be more than one-third self-propelling. Moreover, at that height the snow was freezing as it fell.
Then at last we were on level ground and I saw that we had conquered a gigantic escarpment rather than a mountain. Above us on our right rose another fifty feet of rocky rampart – the true ‘summit’. It would have been possible to climb it, but I did not propose so doing.
Rachel was wildly elated, though there was little to be seen through a curtain of thickening snow. Looking both ways, she said, ‘I’ve really got quite high up for someone who isn’t even six and one month!’
‘You have indeed,’ I agreed.
The blurred bulk of several snow-giants loomed directly ahead to the north and we could just see, about half a mile away, a group of fruit trees marking the pony hamlet – a dozen hovels in the shadow of another mighty escarpment. I had doubted the place’s existence on the way up, so improbable did it seem that anyone should have chosen to live at the end of such a path. Now I reluctantly decided that we must not risk continuing to our final goal, with a full-scale blizzard possible at any moment. If our tracks were completely obliterated we might never find the path down, and if we spent the night at the hamlet all Ronda would be in a frenzy of anxiety about us. So we sat cosily in an empty stone animal shelter behind the rocky rampart, drinking our kidney soup while gazing over a glittering expanse of new snow, eighteen inches deep and flawed only by our own trail. Within the past quarter of an hour the temperature had risen abruptly as the snow thickened, and now the air felt almost mild. Outside the shelter was one stunted, wind-deformed poplar on which a tit perched and sang for a moment – to us as astonishing a sight as the dove’s branch must have been to Noah. This is the only bird song we have heard here, though Ronda has a colony of squalling, squeaky choughs and many crows and magpies.
We started down at two o’clock and had to go very cautiously on the slippery boulder stairway. Then came that long slope of loose soil, which from Rachel’s point of view was enormous fun to descend. To her delight I repeatedly skidded and either sat with a bump or went rolling uncontrollably for ten or twenty yards. When we had regained a reasonable path she proved that she had not really been tired by leaping around me like an ibex while conversing enthusiastically about such diverse subjects as erosion and haemophilia. She has entered this dauntingly scientific phase at just the wrong time, when there is no library within reach.
On the Rest House verandah we were greeted by a tense-looking Aman. ‘You must take your baggage now,’ he said, ‘and move to the kitchen quarters. I have news our Chief Engineer is coming on the ninth for four days.’
I stared at him in astonishment and then edged past him into our room, which I hardly recognised. It had been cleaned for the first time since we came on 26 December, though Zakir is supposed to clean it daily.
Aman followed us, waved a hand eloquently and said, ‘It has all been cleaned, you see, so it is better you take your baggage and stay out of here tonight.’
I was in no mood to appreciate this superb non sequitur, being tired and hungry and thirsty and able to think only of brewing a dechi of tea and enjoying it in peace. All my suppressed irritation of the past four days erupted and I furiously told Aman that we would move neither ourselves nor our baggage until tomorrow morning when we leave for Skardu. As I spoke he nervously backed away from me on to the verandah, whereupon I shut the door firmly and lit our stove. I could see how his mind was working. He also plans to leave for Skardu tomorrow and he doesn’t trust an unsupervised Zakir to make the VIP suite as it should be for their boss, who may then punish Aman for not having replaced Zakir by some more industrious individual. But I fail to see why we should be the victims of this situation.
Some time
later Aman reappeared, followed by Zakir with the register. I had Rs.120 on the table, ready to pay for our twelve nights, but as I opened the book Aman leant forward in his chair and half-whispered, ‘You must not pay so much! Zakir cannot read – put ‘1 January’ as your arrival date – then you can save Rs.60.’
This adding of insult to injury was of course meant to placate me. Aman looked genuinely bewildered when I replied frigidly that it is not my habit to sign false statements and that if he wished to ease my financial burden he could pay Rs.5 for each of the nights he had been sleeping on the bed. He then claimed that government officers are not expected to pay for accommodation in Rest Houses, though a notice in English on the verandah declares that government officers must pay Rs.5 per night and other travellers Rs.10. I’m glad I didn’t know, before we used the ghrari, that this bone-headed creature is responsible for its maintenance.
Mazhar and Ghulam have just been in to give me pony advice. The Ronda pony-owner has already been told by Ghulam that I have no interest in his expensive bag of bones and he is now repenting his cupidity. A dramatic fall in the price of horseflesh may therefore be expected tomorrow morning. Mazhar says I must go early to the Hotel and ask for a seat in the next Skardu-bound jeep that stops there, and Ghulam says I must at the same time announce that I have decided to buy an animal in Khapalu, where ponies are very cheap.
Poor Rachel – a naturally truthful child – was scandalised to observe her mother becoming enmeshed in such a web of lies. ‘They’re not really lies,’ I explained disingenuously. ‘This is what’s known as wheeling and dealing.’
4
Enter Hallam
Part of the way we rode the forlorn-looking ponies of the district, all dirty and covered with long shaggy hair, but plucky and willing like their masters. The primitive saddles were so uncomfortable that we usually preferred to walk … between these impossible saddles and the pony’s back goes the thick folded namdah (a species of soft felt manufactured in Kashgar and used throughout both sides of the Karakoram region), which has a tendency to slip out and drag saddle and rider with it. Anyone intending to take a long journey through Baltistan should provide himself with a good leather saddle.
Where the Indus is Young Page 10