by Andrew Greig
I reluctantly make way for him. Sandy ambles up and asks where the girls are. In the pool round the corner, I say. ‘Good value, eh?’ He grins and goes off to join them.
Good value indeed. Two hours later, we were all smiling as we walked into Askole. Pete Thexton had written that the Askole chicken is probably the most unfortunate life form on earth, so we were expecting the pits. Instead, bubbling irrigation streams of clear water running under the tall trees, fields of young wheat spread out like green plates of a banquet beneath the blue sky, sweet-smelling shrubs, little round stone mills powered by sparkling sprays of water rushing down hollowed-out logs … Askole is paradise simple but visible, a balm to tired eyes.
The houses and people looked distinctly less desperate than those in the tiny villages we’d left behind. We were formally introduced to Haji Mahdi, the head of the village, and pitched our tents in the village square. We were finished for the day, and had the prospect of a rest day after that while we bought final provisions and kerosene and engaged more porters. Joy, joy, joy.
I spent the most unflawed hour of my life washing socks in the clear spring high above Askole. Warm sun, ice-cold water, the shade of trees; the green fields stacked below, the barren hills all round, the snowbound peaks floating off into another world. A slow purification of the senses, a cleansing of the mind along with the socks. Completely on my own, completely happy.
As I finally pick up my things and saunter down the paths towards the village, I feel born again into the world. No doubt about it – altitude affects the mind. Hang on to that scepticism, son, it’s the best inheritance your father left you.
That night, as the moon rose and its pale waters flooded the valley, I sat in front of my tent in an F.S. Smythe stylee, smoking my pipe. Trouble and activity all around me – Adrian was painstakingly cleaning and stitching a gash on a boy’s foot (‘next time tell him not to cover it in mud, old boy’), Alex stormed about looking for a lost sleeping bag, the others were locked in yet another urgent conference about money.
The Expedition has changed so much from its original conception. Gone are Rocky Moss, the four Sherpas, half a dozen trekkers and an awful lot of fixed rope. Mal and Tony aren’t here, and there’s no guarantee they ever will be, if Mal doesn’t find the money. Discussing it earlier this evening, we realized our cutting edge was reduced to just Sandy and Jon, and Jon’s feeling sick. The edge isn’t so much blunter as thinner, too thin probably to hammer home any advantage good weather might give us. There’s just not enough skilled support, not enough manpower, no margin. The only chance we have left is to attempt an Alpine-style ascent from the Col. Alex, Adrian, Mohammed, myself, Burt and Donna are here to set up that attempt by carrying loads to the Col, if possible.
I don’t mind, I don’t think anyone does. ‘Shit or bust’ was Jon’s comment, and Sandy nodded. It’s better this way, less of a circus and more of a modern climbing expedition. It would be an insult to a great mountain to put clients on the top of it, using Sherpas and fixed rope throughout.
It made me think of Hartog’s comment about the first Mustagh ascent: ‘Now we knew it might be too hard for us, morale went up enormously.’
6
Stranded in Askole
We fall apart and wait for deliverance
25 June–5 July
On Sunday 25 June, in Askole, the Joint Anglo-American-Nepali Karakoram Expedition finally fell apart. The inner cabal – Sandy, Jon, Burt – had been up half the night doing their sums, and whichever way they added it, the answer was always the same: NO MONEY. Not enough money to take all our loads to Mustagh Base Camp and still have a reserve to pay for the walk-out.
The instant porridge was thick and tasteless in my mouth. Kath was silent, resigned or angry, I couldn’t tell. My heart was fluttering at the slightest provocation. I could see what was coming next. Either the Expedition was going to have to wait here in Askole – which would cost, and eat into our valuable time and provisions – in the hope of Mal turning up in ten days with some cash, or else something, someone, would have to be jettisoned. For the good of the Expedition, the least essential members and their loads would have to be left behind, enabling the others to go on.
A long, tense silence as we sat on our boxes in the village square. Shokat looked bemused, Mohammed looked very unhappy; the rest of us didn’t look at each other at all. A moment of truth that many expeditions have to face eventually: who is least important here?
We did it the easy way: who is most important? Sandy and Jon, no one else has any chance of climbing the Tower. Adrian as the doc and support, Alex as support and camp manager. Mohammed, if we can persuade Shokat into letting him go without the trekkers.
So, asked Sandy, who would ‘volunteer’ to stay behind? Sybil, well prepared for this kind of situation by life with Burt, immediately said she would. Which was pretty decent, seeing she’d put her spare cash into the general funds and still had to pay half of Mohammed’s fees, all for a trek that looked like ending in Askole. Then Kath said okay, she would stay. She was already fascinated by Askole.
Sandy said he couldn’t be sure till they’d repacked the loads, but more of us would have to wait in Askole if the ‘sharp edge’ was going to make it to Base Camp. ‘And have enough to get to Gash 2,’ Jon added swiftly.
I wasn’t too keen on that. Were the lads sacrificing us to have an outside chance of Gasherbrum 2? While our argument flared, Sandy and Alex were hastily conferring. Then Sandy interrupted us: ‘Look, I’m sorry about this but all of you are going to have to stay. We’ve eighty-five loads here and we can only pay for fifty. That means only the absolute minimum of people and supplies can go to Base Camp.’
After a pause, Burt accepted he and Donna would have to stay. So I accepted Kath and I would too. It seems childish, doesn’t it? But the truth was that all of us were prepared to do the right thing to save the Expedition, but none of us wanted to be a mug.
Thus ended our breakfast conference. I decided to leave the pressure cooker of the camp behind and trek up to the high spring. I took soap, a towel, and half a dozen water bottles but that was just an excuse. I needed out for a while.
I was feeling breathless and headachy as I followed the paths that looped round one field after another, stacked in layers back up towards the spring. It was irritating, having to walk so slowly on that mild uphill. A lot of things were irritating that morning. But after ten minutes, a couple of hundred feet above the village, I began to gain enough perspective to see how much of that aggravation came from me and how much from what was happening round about. I’d been ratty and paranoid and it was partly from altitude. The effects of altitude seem to make themselves felt not at the time but the morning after you’ve slept at a higher level than before.
I cooled my thoughts and slowed my steps.
The path I was following snaked up near the boundary wall of Askole which was some six feet high, made of boulders and topped with thorns. To keep out predators, I supposed – snow leopards? The division the wall marked was startling and absolute: on this side, lush green fields of young wheat and lentils; on the other, barren red rock, scree, desolation, the wilderness.
The path looped along by the irrigation channels. Some were clear, some muddy, some had no water in, only damp silt. I began to appreciate the extreme simplicity and complexity of the system that allowed the villagers to flood, moisten and let dry out, according to daily need, what was probably over a hundred fields spread out over an area of hillside roughly a mile and a half wide and the same in length. It was a network as complex and organic as the circulation of the blood, divided similarly into main arteries, veins, capillaries. I saw the sun flash on the spade of a villager half a mile up the hill; three minutes later the channel at my feet filled with muddy, silt-laden water. I stood and watched the life force of Askole snake its way downhill, branching out, flooding out across some fields and passing others by. An aged man below who appeared to be passing by chance bent down and removed a sma
ll stone from a junction of two channels, and the water took off on an entirely new tack across the fields. The gap-toothed peasant carefully placed the stone on the bank and walked on. The man up the hill and the old one below hadn’t even looked at each other, let alone shouted instructions.
It was as subtle and simple as water itself.
Two round black boulders in the fields beside me stirred, then straightened up … Two Askole women, patiently weeding. They wore thick, coarse black cloth woven from goat and yak hair, offset with a bright scarf and plastic beads, zips sewn around the rim of their flat caps. They saw me but did not turn away and hide their faces. Instead they stood and had a good stare. ‘Asalam ο aleikum,’ I called. After a pause and a giggle, ‘Salam.’ Then they bent again to their work and all I could see were two black, rounded backs.
The women in Askole seemed to be more independent and visible than in other parts of Baltistan and Pakistan, certainly more so than in Skardu. Perhaps this is because the Askole economy so clearly needs them to be out and working in the fields – mostly weeding and planting. The men spend their time digging and directing, repairing irrigation ditches, ploughing the fields with a wooden plough and two oxen, cutting and carrying loads of firewood. Little children carry weeds in tiny wicker baskets; the weeds are spread out to dry and used as animal feed through the five-month winter. Old men carry loads of dried yak dung for fuel, or sit in the shade of the school in the village square, chewing a green tobacco substance and shooting the breeze with Haji Mahdi and the young schoolteacher. Boys herd yaks, goats and the miniature sheep. Girls work in the fields, giggle when you pass, their decorated hats jingling as they move. Old women cook and look after babies. Young men hope to be porters. The harvest involves everyone.
Everything is used, everyone has a role, everything fits. Askole life is as unbroken, unforced and interconnected as the irrigation channels that sustain the village.
I came to the high spring, to the cool willow trees and the green grass beneath them. Once again it was a balm to the mind and all its fretting. I knelt down and began filling the water bottles.
Returning to camp was walking back into the pressure cooker. Our boxes were strewn about the courtyard as we feverishly sorted out and argued over the essential and the nonessential gear. Alex was wild-eyed, constantly bombarded with ‘Where is?’, ‘How many?’, ‘How much?’, irritable and worn out. Jon and Sandy were grim and determined. For the first time I saw some of the self-centredness that made them mountaineers: they’d sacrifice anything and anyone to get to the Mustagh Tower.
Burt emerged from his tent, walked over to Sandy and started waving his arms about. We could hear snatches about the money he’d put in, how he should go on, how Duff had fucked up. Mohammed squatted beside me looking very distressed, running his hand through his thick black hair. ‘Anger,’ he said slowly, ‘is glass in my heart.’ I looked at him closely. He put his hand on his chest and made little clawing gestures. ‘It cuts me. You understand?’
Our eyes met. I felt I understood him perfectly. I’d understood it at the spring, that nursed anger wounded mostly oneself. I nodded, and our glance seemed to leap across the gap between our cultures.
‘All men,’ he continued hesitantly, ‘the same. But different. Anger …’ He spread his fingers in the dust. ‘See, five fingers. All different length, different shape. But all fingers, all my hand. All this finger, not that finger. When I see this about men – no more anger.’
He looked up questioningly. I spread my hand, looked at it, let his words sink in. There was nothing more to say.
Then Sandy called him over; he clasped his hand round my forearm, got up and walked across the compound. He was being asked to give our LO ‘sweet pastry’; Shokat was getting more and more unhappy at the prospect of the Expedition splitting. It was against regulations. We each took turns to talk with him, soothe him, flatter him, anything to stop him blowing the whistle on us. Burt played poker with him, but unfortunately won. Kath put on her blue headscarf, looked into his eyes and asked him to escort her round Askole and interpret for her. As an officer and a gentleman (though unfortunately not a Balti speaker, so he couldn’t understand most of what the locals were saying) he was delighted, combed back his lick of black hair, shook some imaginary dust from his black cords, and set off with her into the maze of mud and boulder houses. She had strict instructions to keep him away for as long as possible while we attended to a few other minor body-swerves.
The highlight of the day: midafternoon, when we were at our most fraught and exhausted, there was a hissing from one of our boxes in the middle of the square. One of our two oxygen cylinders had been left out in the sun. Everyone scattered as if from a bomb; the safety valve blew and with a great WHUMPH the cylinder blew out.
As silence and dust settled again, there was scattered applause. Someone laughed. Then we all started laughing, laughter to the point of pain in our unacclimatized lungs. All the tension went out of us, all the pressure blew out into the mountain air.
Adrian spent much of the time treating local people for everything from conjunctivitis to TB. The prevalence of goitrous swellings and the simplicity of eliminating them – iodine for pregnant mothers and occasionally through childhood – upset him a lot. When he said, ‘Give me a year here and I could halve infant mortality’, it was a simple statement of fact. He tried to persuade them that covering wounds and sores with mud or yak dung was not a particularly good idea, that pills were to be swallowed, not kept as talismans to ward off sickness, that aspirin might cure headaches but not epilepsy.
Finally, waiting in line, was a yak. His jaw dropped. Was this an Askole joke? No, Haji Mahdi explained, it had been mauled by a snow leopard, but it was a strong yak and had escaped. We were astonished, because we’d thought snow leopards were near-mythical, elusive creatures that never came near human habitation. But there were great chunks torn from the animal’s back. Keeping a very wary eye on the unhappy animal’s great horns, Adrian cleaned out the bleeding wounds with antiseptic, took a guess at the yak’s body weight and shot it full of penicillin.
Haji and the yak’s owner were delighted. That evening, a dozen fresh eggs were quietly delivered to our camp.
Evening. A last supper together round the fire. The light flickered on our faces, the muezzin wailed into the dusk. All our possessions were split into two piles. It was like the break-up of a marriage, and no one was sure how amicable it was. I alternated between acute anxiety and calm indifference to our plight. The drive to scheme, work and manoeuvre to secure what we want, and the ability to accept what is and will be – as the last brews went round, those conflicting impulses flickered in me like the light and shadow cast by the lamps.
At least some of our Expedition was still going forward. Mohammed had managed to persuade Captain Shokat that the guide should go on to Base Camp while the Liaison Officer would stay in more comfortable Askole and wait for our honoured leader and his 40,000 rupees. And Shokat had quite casually agreed to letting Kathleen visit Base Camp, assuming she ever got there.
Even Sybil had had a good break. A couple of English climbers that Sandy knew had turned up in Askole; they were going down the valley, then turning off to trek elsewhere in Baltistan. Yes, they’d be delighted to have Sybil with them. Even now they were all getting wrecked round a camp fire in the upper camp site and, judging by her high-pitched, delighted laughter, she was having a wonderful time. Burt scowled and looked uneasy, Jon caught my eye and winked.
As I drifted off to sleep I could hear Sybil giggling as she stumbled about among the guy ropes, and Burt hissing in the next tent as he cursed ‘Duff – and that pair of fucking liberal cocksuckers’. It’s always interesting hearing oneself talked about. Apparently Kath and I were personally responsible for his plight.
It was hard luck on Burt. He’d met a problem that couldn’t be solved by phone.
So that morning Sandy (now by general consent the acting leader), Jon, Adrian, Alex and Mohammed set
off on the five-day trek to Base Camp with forty porters. In addition to us, they left behind our barrels, kerosene, most of the Gasherbrum boxes, books, the expired oxygen cylinder, and some provisions. They took with them a mild sense of guilt, two goats and three chickens – the first in their hearts, the second on a lead, the third squawking indignantly from a box on a porter’s back.
Kath and I walked with them for the first couple of hours. We parted from them at a bend in the trail, shook hands. ‘Good luck, youth’, ‘See you at Base Camp’, ‘Go for it’ – the usual. Sandy apologized for the situation. ‘But you see how it is,’ he said and shrugged. Adrian took us aside. ‘If I was you, old boy, I’d take one porter between you and follow us up.’
It had occurred to me. It had certainly also occurred to Burt. I could see us sneaking away separately before dawn and Captain Shokat waking up to find himself abandoned. An entertaining prospect, but not on.
We waved goodbye and turned away rather than watch them dwindle into the distance.
Jon (26 June): And so we left like naughty schoolboys allowed out on an undeserved treat. A retreat from Moscow in reverse. Mohammed in flowing white robes, ski stick and red rucksack looks like a latter-day Moses leading the damned/chosen through the wilderness. He’s a man desperately trying to remain an individual under a stifling culture, regime and religion. We do like him.
Jon (27 June): Delicate purple and yellow blooms behind porters’ ears – a gesture against their harsh physical lives? The way they crowd together, Balti hugs at seeing a friend again.
Me and Sandy feel the responsibility and our lack of experience, but still in good heart.