by Andrew Greig
She took off her boots. Her heels were blistered and beginning to bleed. She was the only one without the sponsored Nike boots. It was not a good sign. She took a couple of aspirin and fitted some of Adrian’s moleskin round her heels. ‘You be all right?’ She shrugs. ‘I’ll just have to be. There’s no way I’m going to let that creep beat me to Chaqpo.’ I smiled, knowing whom she meant and enjoying her spirit. I was pretty sure now she’d make it. When strength gives out, there’s always pride.
Burt, Donna and Sybil trekked along as a group. He was talking less now and sweating more. Donna looked strong and at ease, working well within herself. Sybil trailed along awkwardly, cheerfully, doing her best, asking innocent questions and suffering Burt’s scornful replies.
As we slogged slowly on the long uphill, Captain Shokat caught up with me. None of us had had much time to get to know him, just the odd chat in Skardu or during the jeep ride. He was immaculate in a tan suede shirt and new black cord trousers – I felt very conscious of my grubby yellow pyjamas but couldn’t help thinking that tight black cords were hardly the thing to wear in this heat. He was like that – very smart and attentive to detail, keen and out of place. Unadapted. It was his first trip as a Liaison Officer and he was finding it hard to grapple with the gap between his image of what it would be like and how it actually was. He’d turned up with pages of regulations looking for a military-style organized expedition, and instead found a bunch of shuffling dossers with no obvious leader and not enough money.
Where, he wanted to know, was the solar shower Malcolm had told him about? And in future he wanted a cooked breakfast each morning. Why did we carry our own packs when he had given his to the cook to carry? Because we can’t afford more porters, I said – it was easier than trying to explain that carrying at least some of your own gear was good Brit stylee. He asked me about Kathleen who he was obviously rather taken with and I took the opportunity to explain how upset she was about this piddling regulation that prevented her from going to Base Camp with us … He agreed it was unfortunate, but that was the regulation.
We all hoped that a few days on the trail would take some of the starch out of his new cords and his military mind. Then perhaps he would be amenable to sweet pastry and persuasion.
It was now approaching noon. Energy suddenly drained away and vanished like water down a plug hole. Every day was like that – the first couple of hours you’d feel good and strong, a little stiff maybe, and then for no apparent reason you were suddenly really struggling. Time for another water break. The disgusting pink juice from my bottle tasted good, so I must have been dehydrated.
I got to my feet and stumbled down a long precipitous path towards the distant river. When I arrived there, the first porters were lighting their fires and Jon was sprawled at ease in the shadow of a cave. ‘All right, mate?’ ‘Aye. Interesting section that by the river.’ ‘Impressive,’ he drawled, ‘very impressive.’
I took off my boots, washed socks and feet in the river. It was numbingly cold and solid with silt. Shokat turned up, then Kath, limping with her blisters. It was good to stretch out in the shade, feeling tired enough to be pleased with ourselves. The others showed up but lunch didn’t, due to several failures of communication. The porters eventually took pity on us and offered us some of their tea and chapatis. The tea was very sweet, very milky and very wonderful; I liked the porters too, they had a cheerful directness, a casual dignity about them, were neither ingratiating nor standoffish.
It was absurd to be by the river yet have no water. The glacier melt was solid with silt and almost certainly infected from the villages further up. We’d brought several thousand coffee filters with us but they didn’t really work. Still, Mohammed cheerfully promised us clean water in Chaqpo, just an hour or two further on.
Mohammed had no sense of time. The second half of the day was the heartbreaker. Always expecting to arrive, never arriving. We plugged on and on, up and down, long awkward traverses by the river then trudging through soft sandy areas then jumping or wading across streams. All I wanted was to keep Jon in sight and lie by clear water in the village of Chaqpo. In the heat of the day my thoughts became confused, then vague, then virtually stopped altogether. There were long periods of blank absence, then I’d come back and notice my tan boots were still moving over the dirt and the pack still dragged on my back.
The trance state was all right. Each moment was all right – uncomfortable perhaps, but not unbearable. What is hard to bear is when one thinks ahead and imagines another two hours of this, another eight days of this. Then one feels doubly fatigued because one is carrying two burdens, that of the present and that of the future. The future – or the past, come to that – is much the heavier. The present moment is seldom unbearable. I must cultivate this living on amnesia – amnesia towards the future as well as the past. It’s the only way to hump this load …
It was with these simple reflections that hours later I rounded a bend and saw Chaqpo ahead. The razor slash of green across the mountain, then the village cupped in the green palm of its trees and fields. If it had good water, it was the Promised Land. I met Jon lounging ultra-casually under a rock as he changed cassettes on his player. ‘Joy Division,’ he gloated, ‘pure death and destruction – great!’
In the shade of the apricot trees the first porters shrugged off their loads and smiled. ‘Okay, sahib?’ ‘Salam. Okay.’ One offered me a K2. ‘Shukria,’ I said, carefully trying out the first of the Urdu words Shokat had written down for me. It seemed to work, he nodded and smiled again.
I lay back against a tree and luxuriated in that cigarette. Already the memory of the day was fading. It wasn’t so hard, was it? Piece of cake, old boy, I’d say to Aido when he arrived. Soon I’d go to find this clean water, but for now there was the pure pleasure of not moving, and the thin blue smoke filtering up through the branches of the apricot tree.
By the time we’d put up our tents – Kath and I casually watching how the others did it, then imitating them, trying not to appear total bumblies – it was time to eat. By the time we ate – our now standard meal of chapati, dal and retorts – it was dark. By the time it was dark – a cool, brown, Asiatic, soft darkness – it was time to sleep.
I could see it was going to be a simple life.
We sat up a little late – that is, after 8.00 p.m. – round a porter’s fire, chatting idly of the days ahead, the day gone by, wondering how Mal was doing in ’Pindi. Burt had heatstroke and was lying pale and shivering, drinking pint after pint of water. My knee that I’d damaged while training was painful; Kath’s blisters were oozy with blood; various porters had headaches, blisters and cuts. Adrian attended to us all and when I crawled into my sleeping bag he was the last of us still up, with a line of patients between him and sleep.
I woke to the porters’ laughter and the smell of woodsmoke from their fires. Breakfast was the usual scramble: where’s the oatmeal, who took the last biscuit, Alex, where’s the electrolytic drink powder, get an extra Granola bar, lighten my pack by stuffing a jacket and some cassettes in the sleeping bag and putting it in a porter load. The usual little tensions and self-serving. Only Alex and Sandy are generous and unruffled at these times; the rest of us are out for ourselves.
We set off too late on another cloudless morning. My pack felt awkward and painful on yesterday’s shoulders, and my right knee was weak. Kath admitted she’d scarcely slept and felt dizzy this morning. Her face was swollen with water retention, and her fingers were too fat to take her rings off. People seem to react to the effects of altitude at different heights; I’d felt lousy in Skardu and was fine now, she was coming up against her first barrier. There was none of yesterday’s exuberance and novelty. The Americans were ahead of us. Time for some head-down-no-nonsense mindless trekking. We’ll see who’s ahead at the end of the day.
Mohammed had warned us this would be a long day to Chongpo. He was right about that. We spent the cool of the day on a long, slow trudge uphill. Already it was notic
eable how as soon as one got off the level onto the slightest gradient, the pace slowed. It had to. We breathed heavily through our mouths, trying to suck in air that wasn’t there. Then a long and slightly hairy section above the river, traversing on dust and loose rock. Most worrying were the bizarre mud towers overshadowing us on the left. They were up to 200 feet high and studded with boulders. Between the towers and the river, this section is a death trap when it rains. Mohammed said several trekkers and porters had been killed or injured along here, and now they refuse to set out from Chaqpo during or after heavy rain. There was no sign of rain now, not even a cloud, but we were still glad to leave that area behind. The porters move very quickly when they need to, almost skipping along with their loads.
After four and a half hours’ heavy-duty trekking we came to a valley shimmering with heat. But there was good water; we slung down our packs, refilled our bottles and drank and drank. There must be a tremendous water loss: I’d had three pints of fluid at breakfast, two more on the trail, three more here – it all went in and nothing came out.
‘Take picture,’ Captain Shokat demanded in his peremptory way, and carefully arranged himself in the shade of his umbrella, combed his hair and looked at the camera with such a smirk of self-satisfaction it was hard not to laugh. With his spotless attire, the umbrella, and the service he demanded from the porters, he was ten times more Raj than we could ever be.
He demanded hot showers, special food, juice from our water bottles if he didn’t like his own, considered the porters at his disposal. They didn’t like it but went along with putting up his tent, fetching him water, airing his sleeping bag. We made it very clear that we were not part of this.
When he was tired or querulous, we handled him by playing on his considerable vanity. We told him how fit, strong and tough he must be from the army – he smirked, pulled in his stomach, and tried to live up to the image we’d given him. And in fact he was doing all right. He was quite fit and tried to be part of the Expedition. He was beginning to realize that Mohammed was not a hired man to be talked down to, and the unspoken trade-off was that we’d do things to help him if he helped us. Kathleen had been putting in a lot of sweet pastry with him, working round to asking to be allowed to stay at Base Camp. He’d settle in. This was a big change for him from the ordered army life with two showers a day, the officers’ mess and attentive servants.
As we sat having lunch in the nonexistent shade, we could see the afternoon’s task ahead of us: a 1500-foot shoulder of a mountain. It dropped sheer into the river, so we had to go over it. No wonder we were in no hurry to set off. I hoped that the exposure wouldn’t freak me out. Still, what Burt could do, I could do.
I mentioned to Sandy that I was feeling the lack of air – which at round 9500 feet seemed a bit premature. ‘That’s all right, youth.’ He grinned. ‘I’m feeling it too.’ He said the secret was to begin slowing everything down, make no sudden movements, don’t get in a flap. Until you’re acclimatized to each new level, even three quick steps will leave you weak. He said he concentrated on the habit of breathing slow and deep, rather than the snatched, shallow breaths I’d noticed in myself.
With that in mind, we set foot on the crumbling zigzag path that crawled up the cliff. Sandy went very slowly indeed, a steady slow-motion plod, never hurrying, never faltering. I took my pace from him and was pleased to feel I could keep it up for hours. And hours was what it felt like, with the noonday sun hammering down and the energy plughole wide open. I was aware of nothing but this step and the next, the heat shimmering off the rocks, the sudden unexpected wild flower. It was all vivid and simple. I felt very happy.
We finally came out on top of the hill and took a breather. Now I had time to look around, I could see how steeply this promontory fell away on three sides, and immediately felt uneasy. I was at least six feet from the nearest edge, but was still gripped. I was alarmed and angry at my own weakness. Sandy gave me a reassuring grin, shouldered his pack, and together we set off along the ridge rising to our left, further up into the mountain. Some of it was very exposed. I kept my eyes down, focusing only on Sandy’s tan bootheels.
That uphill went on and on. At the top, we seemed to have reached quite alarming heights. It was not imagination that made the air seem thinner; it was quite noticeably so. It’s not just thinner in the lungs, it’s somehow thinner in the mind. My mental and emotional processes seemed to be becoming stripped, slower, simpler. One feels one can see for great distances, outside and within.
Mohammed appeared from nowhere and pointed out a distant white peak up ahead: Masherbrum. The name meant nothing to me but it looked vicious, even some 40 miles off, much higher than all the hills round about us. They were still below the snow line so probably under 15,000 feet; Masherbrum stood across the top of the valley like a lighthouse and had several thousand feet of snow on it.
‘Now I see why it was called K1,’ Jon enthused, ‘it’s the first major peak you see coming up this way. Fucking great, isn’t it?’ He and Sandy stared at it hungrily, pointing out various possible and impossible lines on it. Mountaineers are not monogamous by nature – even while obsessed with one mountain, they note the potential of every other one they come across, and file it away in the little black book of memory and desire. Even while passionately engaged with one mountain, they are planning how to woo the next, and dreaming of the one after that.
I decided they were promiscuous and crazy. I could understand the impulse, but it seemed obvious what they were really flirting with. I was different. The Mustagh Tower was my one and only, my first and last. After this, my probing ice axe was going where it belonged: in the attic. There would be only one mountain in the photos on my desk …
With these self-righteous and self-deceiving thoughts, I picked my way carefully after Mohammed.
Mid-afternoon of that seemingly endless day found Kath, myself, Alex, Adrian and Sandy lying in the shade of a great overhang beside the trail, some 2000 feet above the Braldu river. In the back of the cave where the sun never shone, it was blessedly cool. Jon had gone on; Burt, Donna and Sybil were nowhere in sight. We were in no hurry now, it was all downhill from here.
So we had a smoke and some peaceful, desultory conversation. We shared a sense of godlike detachment as we looked out over the river, the endless ranges of hills, the little green villages across the valley and the distant band of snow-capped mountains. Only the desire to get the day’s trekking over with finally made me get up and leave that place. Only an hour, Mohammed had said. Mind you, he’d said only two hours from our lunch spot, and that was at least three hours ago …
Should you ever have the good fortune to come this way and engage Mohammed Ali Changezi as your guide, remember this: he is a wonderful man, but he has no sense of distance or of time. He has this in common with all the mountain people in Baltistan. Balti time is elastic; it has nothing to do with watches. It is quite inscrutable, and has something to do with one’s state of mind and the amount of effort it takes to go from one place to another.
In Baltistan the question ‘When?’ is a waste of valuable breath.
I wasted my valuable breath cursing Mohammed as that descent went on and on through the blistering afternoon. Again and again I had to clamber down into the gorge of a river, then scramble up the other side. These rivers were swollen now with the full melt from their invisible sources, and a couple of them necessitated hazardous jumps to the tip of a rock in the middle, then continuing across. Through a daze of heat, tiredness and dehydration I remember a bizarre traverse across and down a slope of fine, shifting sand: down was easy, but if you failed in the across you were into a chute that ended in the refrigerated Braldu. During my semicontrolled slide I heard a shout, looked up and saw Mohammed on solid ground, holding out his ski pole; I grabbed it and pulled myself across to him.
‘I thought you said it was an hour from the cave,’ I protested, ungrateful to the last.
He shrugged, smiled. ‘Is not far. Maybe one hour.�
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I made a face and scrambled on, muttering over and over under my breath, ‘Living on Balti time, living on Balti time …’
It comes to an end, as it always does, quite suddenly. There are the fields, the trees and their leaves clattering in the late afternoon breeze, the mud and stone huts. Chongpo is the poorest village yet, a lot of goitre swelling out of the necks of adults and children, several village idiots, a couple of dwarves. Yet they don’t seem to view it as tragedy. The same with age and death. Rightly or wrongly, for them it’s just something that happens. I find Jon sitting with some porters, laughing and teaching them ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’. I lower my face into the nearby stream and let the water flush the day away, treasuring this long-awaited moment, the coolness, the sensuous fading ache of muscles finally at rest.
Kath limps in, pale but still on her feet. Then the others trail in. We’re all rather wasted, it’s been a big day. We put up our tents, it gets dark, we eat, it’s time to sleep. My knee’s aching, but there’s Mohammed’s solemn promise of a short day tomorrow to Askole, the last village in Baltistan. I look at the stars last thing. They’re still there. Jon stands beside me.
‘Sweet as a nut,’ he says cryptically, ‘sweet as a nut.’
I don’t know what he’s talking about, yet I know what he means.
It’s the oddest feeling. I’m sitting naked in hot sulphurated water in the middle of a valley of stone. It’s early still, and the cool morning breeze raises goose pimples along my arms. Ten minutes of pure happiness at 10,000 feet, till Jon suggests I get a move on and let him wash his sweaty body in the famous sulphur pool between Chongpo and Askole.