by Andrew Greig
Next morning, one by one, we grope towards wakefulness. We’re sweaty and uncomfortable and irritable. We drink warm water to rinse the staleness from our mouths. First cigarette and I start taking an interest in things. We’re off the Karakoram Highway now, on a rapidly deteriorating track following the Indus river. It’s a heaving, rolling, ferocious spate of glacier melt, more like grey liquid ice than water.
This bus trip is shaking us together. Through the day we swop places – except Jon, happily oblivious and dreaming in great detail of two naked Thai girls walking up and down his spine – and the conversation and shared discomfort is making us into something of a group. We’re rubbing corners off each other – Jon’s sweaty feet are in the small of my back, mine are behind his neck, Sybil’s arms lie across my legs, Alex is asleep, his head resting on Mohammed’s shoulder. It’s a shake-down. We’re grubby, disorganized, thirsty and bruised – but we’re a group.
It’s a long day, a long jolting grind uphill into the foothills. We stop for thick, sweet tea in a dusty village. We stare and are stared at. Mohammed bargains to reduce the price, we set off again. Jon is finally ousted from his cosy corner and starts chatting away about Thai girls and Chamonix and reggae music. We’re lively for a while, joking and abusing and handing out stress to each other. As the ‘road’ winds higher and deeper into the Indus gorge, we gradually fall silent. Looking out the window is not pleasant. Our wheels are a foot or so from the crumbling edge of a rough track blasted into the side of the mountain. Above us, some 3000 feet of rock-fall-prone scree. And below us, a straight 800-foot drop into the glacier river.
‘Fuckin’ desperate,’ Jon says quietly. No one disagrees. The driver’s been at it sixteen hours straight now, and the bus suddenly slides out across the road. We all instinctively lean away from the edge, the front wheels grip again and we veer away from the lip. We feel totally helpless. There’s nothing we can do. Watching is too much of a strain; I shut my eyes, turn up the volume on my Walkman and resign myself to the will of Allah. Wake me if I die.
When I open them two hours later the situation has if anything deteriorated. The road is a track of rubble, fit only for a Land-Rover. The drop on our right has doubled. We keep grinding past concrete stacks. ‘What are those?’ I ask Mohammed. ‘Many men killed making road – these are monuments.’ ‘Do buses ever go off the road?’ ‘Sometimes.’ He smiles warmly. ‘Not this time, inshallah.’ He instinctively fingers the travelling amulet he wears on his right upper arm.
‘How can you know anything about me,’ says Sandy, ‘when I know damn all about myself?’
‘You’re not jolly Sandy Allan at all, are you?’
‘Search me – how should I know?’ He bursts out laughing. ‘Borrow your Joan Armatrading cassette, youth?’
At the turn of the road, the first great mountains swing into view, Harmosh and its neighbours. Like a shield, Kathleen thinks. She is stunned by their height, their white menace. Someone here could die on those. She feels at first an instinctive revulsion. Even from 40 miles away, the Karakoram are more daunting than she’d ever imagined.
To me, the shattered, gleaming teeth are beautiful and terrible. Wondrous and an assault on the eye. Epic. My heart leaps out towards them. The Karakoram Himalayas.
Jon looks out the window. ‘Foothills,’ he says.
Another tea stop. Sweet relief of open air, free movement. We sit on benches round a wooden table in the dusk. A boy limps over and lights a kerosene lamp. He looks at us curiously, impassive, only his large eyes moving as they flick from one to another of us. His smile is swift and complete and decisive. He vanishes into the shadows. The cook is ringed with fire as he pulls chapati from an oven.
Adrian resolutely plunges into the ‘kitchen’ to check it out. He emerges shaking his head. ‘Total death on a stick, old boy. You might survive the chapati and dal, but that’s all.’
‘Good stress,’ says Jon, nodding vigorously, ‘about bleedin’ time. Too much luxury on this trip, not enough shuffling dossing. Great!’
The Man from Lahore, I think, as we settle back into the jolting forward motion of the bus, was the low and high point of our time in ’Pindi. He had picked us up in Flashman’s dining room. His English was more than adequate, like his stomach and his purse. Both his money and his need for company were very evident. He insisted that we were his friends and that we should have a party with him. As a Pakistani, he couldn’t buy alcohol, but we were infidels and we could … He’d pay for all the beer we could drink if he could drink with us.
It seemed too good to be true. We went back to Room 45 and ordered our first crate of beer.
We were in a bored, frustrated mood that night and needed to let off steam. The first crate was emptied as he rolled out his life in front of us like a carpet salesman. He was a rich man’s son. He didn’t work. Instead he drank with ‘sweet friends’ like us. His marriage was arranged, neither he nor his wife liked each other. She had a colour TV and a VCR, and he moved round the country from Lahore to ’Pindi to Peshawar to Murri to Lahore to ’Pindi … His allowance kept him on the leash; should he leave the country or find another woman, the money would stop.
A second crate arrived. He insisted we turn up the music and he expanded on friendship. ‘When sweet friends drink together and are happy, then God is happy.’ Well, fair enough, but we knew very well that we were not friends of this man, only drinking companions, and we were only drinking companions because he was buying the drinks.
He insisted we dance. Particularly the women. Dance, dance! Donna and Sybil got up and swayed about the room – which now seemed to be tilting and melting at the edges – while Alex did an extraordinary shuffle round an invisible totem pole. Sandy and Kathleen refused point blank. Why should they perform for the Man from Lahore?
‘Because you’re drinking his beer,’ Mal murmured, leaning at an alarming angle on the couch as he opens another beer.
‘That’s no reason,’ said Sandy curtly.
The Man from Lahore ordered more beer, more music, more ice, more food. The hotel waiters brought it, looking unhappy and sullen. To them he was a corrupt Muslim making a fool of himself with foreigners, bereft of dignity. He papered up the cracks by throwing money at them. They continued to serve us, with icy disapproval.
The Man from Lahore suggested a midnight coach ride to the hill station of Murree. He’d pay, of course – and he could promise to lay on some ‘dancing girls’. Some of our company perked up at this, their sexual frustration now superheated by alcohol, their bodily loneliness exacerbated. There followed intricate manoeuvres to persuade the women that Murree would be boring and pointless, but that just to humour the Man from Lahore, some of the guys would go along.
In the end there proved to be no available coaches for hire. I felt drunk and uneasy. We’d started off going along with him for the ride, and were ending up being morally hijacked. Jon, who has a very definite cut-off point, abruptly left, followed by Adrian. The night degenerated further with the Man from Lahore sweating and cajoling from the couch as the girls danced for his pleasure. Alex crawled around the floor as a dog while Mal and the Man gave him orders. A hand-kissing routine started by the Man and the auctioning of Sybil were threatening to get completely out of hand.
Finally Alex disappeared and walked back in wearing a gorilla mask. He had become Robbie, the mute Himalayan chimpanzee. His way of standing and looking, everything about him had changed. It was a triumph of mime as he silently went up to the man from Lahore and poured him a beer.
I have never seen anyone so thunderstruck. His jaw dropped, he looked at Robbie, at us, at Robbie. He scowled. He tried to smile. He looked pale and ill. Then we roared with laughter. We laughed ourselves onto the floor. We laughed at him.
The Man from Lahore was angry, scared and insulted. ‘Take bad man away!’ he shouted. ‘Make him go away!’
It was very funny and not very nice. But we’re not very nice, are we? We’re part good, part bad, and part easil
y led. Loneliness, frustration and boredom – that night they all came to the surface like salts left on the skin from a drunken sweat.
We left Mal, Burt, Alex and the Man from Lahore to drink themselves into helplessness. They finally slipped the Man a sleeping pill and poured him, half-conscious, into a taxi to Islamabad. That was the last we saw of our sweet friend.
Next morning we realized no one even knew his name.
And now at last we were nearing Skardu. The day had been long. We were beyond weariness. The things we’d seen were disconnected memories, like slides shot up on a screen. What lingered in my mind were the tiny irrigated villages we saw across the Braldu gorge. In the midst of that vast desolation of rock, that ultimate barrenness, they were little mirages of green. We’d rubbed our eyes and looked again. Yes, tall slender trees, little rock houses, green patchwork fields draped across the hill like a shimmering scarf. Below them, a 1000-foot drop to the river; thousands of feet of bare rock above. They were connected by barely discernible terrifying paths that snaked right across the face of the cliffs.
They were tiny islands of life, a few hundred feet across, where a handful of people lived their entire lives, knowing little and needing less. They were glimpses of a life we could scarcely imagine and certainly never know. They looked like torn-up scraps of an original paradise, saved from the ruins of the world around them.
We stared and stared in the fading light. We took our pictures, then turned up the cassette player and churned on towards the darkness, towards Skardu.
Our last pit stop was some three hours short of Skardu. Our driver’s eyes were inflamed after twenty-four hours of heavy driving. While Adrian rummaged about in our medical kit for eye drops, we sat by lanternlight in the Baltistani equivalent of a truckers’ drive-in. The night was cool and soft and black. A scent of thyme in the breeze. We drank water and sweet tea, lit up another cigarette, waited for the inevitable chapati and dal.
No one spoke much. The night was full of stars. We heard the piping cry of bats, were aware of sleeping forms shifting in the darkness around us. We were dreamlike and numb, yet oddly wide awake to the beauty and promise of that night. Nothing particular was said or done in that half-hour, and yet our brief supper has stayed with me as the distillation of the joy of travel in company. Our silent closeness, our patient fatigue, and flickering through the night the flame of adventure. I can still picture the faces sculpted by the firelight from the chapati oven, see the gestures and attitudes, and the vague glimmer of our Magic Bus waiting to take us away.
We arrived in Skardu after midnight. Twenty-eight hours of travelling had reduced us to the living dead. In the K2 motel we found cool sheets, a bed that did not shake, and sleep within minutes, dreamless sleep.
Skardu is the end of the road. The last telephone, last electricity, last helicopter, last motor vehicles, last shops and banks are here in this market town oasis, completely encircled by the mountains. The air was wonderful after ’Pindi, cool and clean. And less of it; already at something like 7800 feet we were having to move a little slower, not get too excited. Otherwise, rapid shallow breathing and slight dizziness.
Kath and I walked along the main street on our first morning there, happy and elated and quite ignorant of the storm that was brewing up back at the motel. ‘Good ethnic action,’ Jon had remarked cryptically, and it was. Now we were in Baltistan, the people looked quite different. Instead of the moon-faced, frequently corpulent people of ’Pindi, the men here had strong hooked noses, high cheekbones, a reddish rather than a brownish skin. A few had blue eyes, that stood out startlingly. They looked like mountain men, lean and stringy.
Kath stood out too, for in that busy little town there were no women on the streets. None. Nor in any of the shops. Only men and boys. It was oppressive, all that maleness. No wonder the men tend to touch and hug each other a lot, and sometimes hold hands, and gossip and carry on – they have to create in themselves the whole missing female element. Which, ironically, can make them very charming and less macho. They wear flowers behind their ears and giggle and nudge each other like schoolgirls – then abruptly revert to solemnity.
We could feel all eyes on us as we ambled down the street. I was overpoweringly aware of Kath’s femaleness, of the softness of her contours, her light hair and blue eyes. So was she. And so, it felt, was the entire population of Skardu. She was deliberately dressed as unprovocatively as possible, baggy blue trousers, a blue scarf over her head and arms and round her throat. No one whistled or laughed or made any gesture – it was more of a falling silent, and the sensation of a hundred pairs of eyes silently swivelling as we walked by.
The difference between Pakistan and Baltistan was striking. They were Shiite Moslems here, followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini, whose portrait was in evidence in cafeś and shops and houses. For all that, they seemed very gentle, though they looked fierce enough. They’re largely Afghan by descent, with the occasional smaller, slightly slant-eyed man as witness to the Chinese and Tibetan strains in them. They spoke their own language, Balti, and wore distinctive woollen hats that looked like several chapati stacked on the head, then folded under like a French beret.
Baltistan is to Pakistan roughly what Scotland is to Britain – part of it but distinct. They too have what they consider to be effete southern neighbours. Their Hadrian’s Wall is the 400-mile long road through the hills we’d just come off, and it quite effectively preserves their separate identity.
Would-be porters were assembling on the lawn of the hotel, dropping in and chattering like bedraggled swallows gathering for migration. They were a mixed bunch, but wiry and strong. Alex struggled with an endless list of contents of barrels as he tried to work out how many porter loads we had. It looked like an awful lot more than we’d expected.
Burt took me aside. He seemed hesitant. One eye was on my forehead, the other looking over my shoulder. ‘How close a friend are you of Malcolm’s?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know how to tell you this, but he’s really dropped you and Kathleen in the shit.’
In a show of frankness, Burt came clean. Mal had misled either Kathleen or the rest of the Expedition. As Kath was nominally a trekker, she had to stay on a highly specific route up and down the Baltoro Glacier – and that route did not include Mustagh Base Camp. Even accompanied by Mohammed as official guide, she was not allowed to go there. And she would have to share the costs with Sybil of their porters and Mohammed’s guiding fee to Karakoram Tours.
We knew she didn’t have anything like that kind of money. And as for Mohammed’s fees – well, it looked as if he was working full time for the Expedition now. In fact he was doing wonders in bargaining for us, arranging porters, tractors, jeeps, haggling prices, securing permits. The man was priceless, was practically the King of Skardu, was related to everybody up and down the Baltoro – an asset to the Expedition. So why shouldn’t the Expedition pay for him?
‘The Expedition hasn’t enough money,’ Burt said simply. ‘Your friend Mal gave Rocky a hopelessly low budget. I’ll show you the figures if you like. There’s not enough money – and you and Kath are going to have to come up with some from somewhere.’
Kath was bewildered, angry and tearful. We were sitting talking in low voices like conspirators at one end of the corridor. At the other end, Alex was going through his baggage lists again, with Mohammed beside him looking very unhappy. I could hear the angry voices of Sandy, Jon, Donna and Sybil from one of the rooms. Something had definitely gone wrong.
Two expeditions turned up on their way back from the mountains. We watched these worn and weathered veterans jump down from their jeeps and saunter with just a hint of swagger into the hotel. We started talking to the French team who’d made the col on Broad Peak but were driven back by sustained bad weather. Just like the Spanish group we’d met in ’Pindi, who’d spent twenty-one out of twenty-five possible climbing days stuck in their tents at Gasherbrum 2 Base Camp and simply run out of food and enthusiasm. And it could just as easily happen
to us, for the weather is supposed to get worse as the summer drifts on.
But at least they’d got out to their mountain. At least they’d been there. They’d earned the right to their nonchalant ease, to get stoned in the dining room and gaze at the flickering TV. The way things were going, I was beginning to wonder if Kath and I were ever going to get to Mustagh.
To save money, we were now doubling up on bedrooms and paying for our own lunch. In fact we were feeling so mean we all just settled for Coke and toast. Sandy and Burt calculated and calculated, working out porter costs, walk-out costs, Mohammed’s fees, walk-in provisions, insurance. Burt sweated and yelled, his eyes popped and swivelled, he cursed Duff and the Paki government and the hapless Sybil. Sandy scored out one row of figures and started again.
Finally Burt announced, ‘A crevasse of nonviability has opened up beneath us.’
And as Sandy went over the figures, we saw that he was right. Even leaving Mohammed out of it, we did not have enough money to hire enough porters to carry our loads to Mustagh Base Camp, then on to Gasherbrum 2, then back out again. We sat there, slumped and defeated, while the newly arrived Swiss expedition celebrated their success on Nanga Parbat.
‘What if we forget about Gash 2?’ someone suggested.
Jon sat bolt upright. ‘There’s no way we’re going to forget about Gash,’ he said vehemently. His eyes were bright with anger. Sandy nodded agreement and wondered to himself if Mal had ever had any serious intention of going to Gasherbrum 2. Had he only booked it to tempt Jon and Sandy out as cheap labour guides for the Mustagh Tower bumblies? And that was another thing – Burt and Donna had the impression they were support climbers, while Sandy and Jon had been told that they were clients to be guided up the hill. And Burt had hinted that Mal was being paid a guiding fee by Rocky, so why had they heard no mention of it?