Coromandel Sea Change

by Rumer Godden

  Now we had to come down to the long valley below the pass itself. The descent was down one of the natural stone staircases, spiral and hewn by ice from the rock. It was so steep, so winding, that the ponies had to be brought down one by one, two men to a pony, holding it head and tail. Even climbing down on our own was slippery; our legs shook, our ankles ached, while our ears thrummed as the wind rushed up the narrow cleft way; but we did not have it to ourselves for we met a bakriwar clan coming up, the rocks echoing with their shouts and whistles.

  The elders had come up first and we had met them sitting in comfort at the top drinking tea from a samowar – the big Kashmiri teapot, elaborately chased and scrolled, that has charcoal in a hot pipe inside it, keeping the water bubbling, and that brews the Kashmiri kawa or pink salt tea. At the elders’ feet foals were lying, carefully carried up first, and the hookah went round as the younger men, and the women ceaselessly toiling, brought up the flocks and herds. The goats came by themselves but sheep had to be carried, the ponies steadied as ours had been by mane and tail, while the buffaloes were literally shouldered up. Jobara said eleven men could carry one of these unwieldy great black beasts but I was puzzled to know how their horns would pass through some of the narrower clefts.

  A young blood of a herdsman, driving his ponies, let me look at the baby tied on his back in a blanket. I knew it must be an especial child as nomad babies are always left to the women; I pulled down the blanket to see and it smiled at me over the folds. It had a red cap trimmed with cowries, dark eyes and a skin more like a peach than any baby I had seen. We met two little girls in embroidered caps, pretty children with the same great dark eyes as the baby; as goat children always do, they asked for money. Then a woman came up with a newborn child. She wanted aspirin, which I gave her, but only two tablets or she might have taken them all at once; Jobara made her show us how she had bound the baby’s feet and legs with strips of cloth into a tight papoose shape for travelling. The clan does not stop if a baby is born on the march; an old woman stays to help with the birth and, after an hour or two, she and the mother catch up.

  After we had left the cleft we met someone still more behind: a boy driving two goats and a kid each with a broken leg laced into a network of twigs so that the hurt limb was held still. Limping and bleating, they travelled very slowly; every now and then the boy picked up the kid and carried it but it was plainly too heavy for him. He had another, smaller kid in the front of his coat. We gave him two cigarettes – his face lit up when he saw them though he could not have been more than twelve. I kept looking back over my shoulder to see his forlorn little party getting smaller in the distance. I hope he caught up with the clan before the last of the flocks were taken up the staircase and that there would be men – or women – waiting to carry up his charges.

  Our way led down across an ice field but when we reached the valley floor there was grass, with wide streams running across it from the melting snow; they reflected the sky and the marshes between them were covered with alpine flowers, flat carpets of blossom as if my beloved Kirman carpets had come to life; there were small magenta primulas, celandines, gentians, anemones, growing among patches of blue water and white snow. We were almost too tired to enjoy them, terribly tired, partly because of the altitude. One pack pony fell on its knees and had to be whipped up, I stumbled as I walked and at the end, to reach our camping place, the only place protected enough if the wind should rise, we had to cross a deep ice stream. That meant the men would have wet clothes tonight – none of them had a change – and there was no fuel to build a campfire, only a little wood carried by the old coolie for the cooking stove and juniper bushes that burn at once; fortunately the long coats that all the men wore were of the rough country tweed that is pure wool and each of them carried the inseparable companion of every Kashmiri man – the women are not as lucky – the big soft shawl that they wear folded on one shoulder like a plaid.

  We camped above the stream and below a curious mountain, quite different from any of the others we had seen; it had not slate or granite colours but was entirely white as if it had been blown violently together of packed snow; perhaps it had, as it had wind-swirl patterns on it.

  The ponies grazed on what they could find up the mountain; we had no milk and there was no village at which to buy eggs but we thankfully ate Subhan’s stew – even though we suspected it was kid, not lamb, as he said. It was marvellously hot and so was the tea – we laced it with rum.

  Sol had walked nearly all the way, only occasionally accepting a ride on a pack pony; he had come down the stairway on his own four paws and crossed the glaciers by himself, yet when he came in he asked at once for his walnut and played with it until dinnertime.

  It was so cold that we went to bed at seven, but not to sleep. All night birds like seagulls flew below the mountain, making seagull noises. ‘They can’t be seagulls,’ said Paula, ‘We must be dreaming.’ We never discovered what they were.

  We had to leave our valley of primulas very early if we were to get over the pass in a day. I was sorry for there was something different and enchanted about this valley and its white mountain; perhaps it was the reified air that gave it its peculiar enhancement, a rare snow-iced air which made each pleat of the snow mountain, the patches of snow and grass, the streams, flat and blue to the sky, and the scattered colourings of the flowers, stand out with an extraordinary clearness.

  We rode and walked slowly along, our shadows making long shapes in the early sun, the ponies sluggish because of their poor night’s grazing. Paula was distressed about this; ‘You should carry hay for them,’ she told Jobara.

  ‘Where should I get hay?’ he asked. ‘They have to take what they find, as I do.’

  We began to climb again, and again it was over ice, ice fields, ice slopes, frozen rocks. We looked down on a lake, deep blue with small icebergs floating in it; they would float all summer, Jobara said, even when the lake shores had thawed. They were thawing now; already, where the sun caught the slopes, patches of grass showed, flowered with gentian. Every now and then we came to a difficult place of rock or ice and again the ponies had to be manhandled across them. Sol rushed about looking for marmots but there were none here.

  We reached the ascent of the pass itself that looked like a bite – a small one – taken out of the mountain high above us and above a sheer flank of snow. Here we could only climb by crisscrossing, countless times across the snow, leaving a network of tracks. It was exhausting work. Sol had to give up; his legs sank in like pegs so that he could not lift them, and the snow balled on his fringes and between his pads. Sol hated to be carried – he thought it undignified – but he would have been tipped off his pony as it floundered and struggled and in the end he had to submit; but the only person allowed to carry him was myself and I had not realized till then how much a little dog can weigh; he seemed to send me down deeper at every step and I thanked goodness we had brought our alpenstocks. The sun was hot now and beat on our backs as we toiled in a line from left to right, waited and got our breaths, and crossed back only a fraction higher, it seemed to me, from right to left, looking like ants on that great white expanse. We grew tireder and hungrier; ‘I told you it would not be comfortable,’ said Jobara; and it was long past lunchtime before we came out in the curiously undramatic hollow that was the pass head and where the wind blew as if it were in a tunnel. We were ready to drop down there, even in the wind, but ‘We musn’t rest here,’ said Jobara urgently and went forward again. It was then that we saw what we had to go down; below us was a drop of two hundred feet, rock with only a tiny serrated path, which seemed to me almost perpendicular. It looked impossible for men, let alone horses, but as we stood there once more some of the goat people were coming up; the elders leading the way and behind them the women, who tumbled their babies and the netted cooking pots they carried on their heads down beside the path, before they went down again to help the men. ‘Where they can go, you can,’ said Jobara.

  Our ponies w
ere unloaded and Jobara led the first, Lallah, to a glacier at the side, coaxing, pushing, pulling, with Amar at her tail. Lallah was an experienced old mare and she sat down and, on her haunches, slid the first twenty yards or so, held and swung by the men. I could not look; it seemed every moment she must crash down onto the ice below but presently Simon called me and there she was, standing far below on her own four legs, safe, unhurt and cropping the tufts of grass that had broken through by the path. Amar came up and he and the ponyman started off with Bulbul, while, exhorted by Subhan and clinging and sliding, Simon, Paula, Sol and I started down the path that Jobara was keeping clear of goat people. For their sakes we could not delay. ‘Come on,’ said Simon. I had no hands for Sol; he yelped and put his front legs stiff and, with a surprised expression on his face, slid, fell sideways and scrambled, straightened up and held with all his toes to the rock. Then, seeing we had gone down further, he gave another little yelp and came on down. When he reached the bottom his claws were bleeding. I had torn the knee of my trousers, and we had all scraped the skin on our hands; our legs trembled like the ponies’ but there was a wonderful feeling of satisfaction. ‘I told you you could do it,’ said Jobara.

  It was four o’clock when we had our lunch, there, at the foot of the rock. Sol sank into sleep the instant we stopped.

  After lunch we went wearily on down until we left the ice and came to rocks and streams and fir trees again. Once more the marmots were with us, to Sol’s delight. One came so near that we could see its markings, not unlike the markings of a respectably coloured orange-sable Pekingese; it turned itself upon its haunches to scream at us after we had passed, holding its paws in front of it like any little animal begging.

  This patch of country reminded me of the country of Andrew Lang’s ‘The Princess and the Goblins’: the rocks and rushing streams, the celandines and anemones and primulas, and the strange shapes of the trees twisted by the snow.

  We came in to camp in Narpa, in a glade with the river falling into rifts of streams to the north; above the streams the ring of mountains opened to show one vast snow peak looming up into the sky. Here there were more goat people encamped, in caves or huts that were hardly distinguishable from the forest trees, built of the same russet brown logs and roofed with earth and branches that were still green.

  Subhan had gone ahead to make camp as we were so tired but we had to make him move it because, to save himself trouble, he had pitched it among the herdsmen and the buffalo tethers, with all their flies and smells. In a rage he abused one of the herd boys, who had come to sell us milk. The boy, who was almost a young man and very dignified, answered back and Subhan hit him with a stick on the arm. Jobara brought the boy to me, his elbow swollen and hurt. Subhan created a great noise and said the boy had hit him first but he was a gentle, ignorant creature and I did not believe it. I doctored him as best I could with hot fomentations and put his arm in a sling, and asked him to come down with us to Sonamarg, where I would send him in by car to the hospital; but the evening was spoilt by the loud voices and dislike. This is the end of Subhan for me.

  But peace came back; in the late evening we, and Sol, walked up a little stream by the camp and found what I had never seen before, white primulas. Buffaloes were being driven down from the mountain, and from the encampment, now on the opposite side of the stream from us, the women brought the calves out onto the bank; they held them as the calves lowed and at once the mothers came running down to be milked; but I cannot like buffaloes; even the calves were ungainly and hideous. After each woman had milked, she loosed the calf, but one was ousted by a child that drank straight from the udder.

  A huge fire tonight and, at last, a hot bath. As I lay in bed, the sparks from the fire seemed to go up to the stars and behind them faintly glimmered the snow peak.

  The bakriwar pony bells kept me awake and I lay for what seemed hours watching the snows in the starlight that grew brighter as the fire burned down. I only fell asleep towards dawn and could not be roused when Subhan called us, so that we left camp late. The herd boy came with us, keeping close to me away from Subhan, and did not speak a word. I had a feeling he was badly hurt, perhaps the arm broken, but there was nothing to be done except take him down with us and send him on to the hospital at Srinagar. He kept his arm in his shirt, not in the sling I had given him, and had his shawl folded round him. He was shivering with pain but showed us the way as we went through the forests and crossed streams by rough log bridges. Here there were thousands of yellow violets and white clover, the whole air was scented with violet scents and honey.

  I stopped to rest, sitting on a log by the track, and a bakriwar girl came up to me. She spoke but I could not understand. She took my hand and held it and laughed, comparing it with her own, which was dark for a bakriwar, with such hard palms that my hand seemed soft, almost boneless, in hers. Then she let it go, laughed again and made a beautiful little gesture of goodbye. I had not known one of these women as friendly or as cheerful. All the people looked at Sol far more than at us and we kept a sharp eye on him in case he might be snatched up and taken away.

  We went on, by the streams and over them, stepping over roots of trees, passing glades, each a little marg of green where there were usually buffaloes and their herdsmen and a bakriwar hut. Each marg had its stream, its rocks and firs.

  It was a short march and soon after one o’clock we came to Aru and camped on the slope of the hill, on an island covered with clover, with a stream on each side. In front of us the hill rolled down, glade and meadow, until it opened into the valley of Aru at the foot of the mountains, a wide marg with, as always, streams and a wooden rest house near a small untidy wooden village and, on the mountain facing us, forests of fir topped with snow crests and threaded with waterfalls. It was warmer here, there were no glaciers and the valley was as quiet as Sonamarg, with once again only the sound of the streams and the neighings and nickerings of ponies, for it was full of mares with their foals. It was not as open a valley, not as rolling as Sonamarg, and more civilized. I counted three other camps, but the tops of the mountains in the sun had a blue I had not seen before; it was almost bluebell.

  In the afternoon we went down to the village, which was wretchedly poor, its wood and earth houses meagre and shaped like boxes, with one room for the cattle below and another for the whole family above. The people close the animals in for the winter and the steam of the midden rises up and heats the room above. Only the largest house had windows and a verandah, on which men were drinking tea out of bowls; a woman carried a winnowing basket down the steps and a man outside a shop was spinning, but there seemed no other working life. Four shops all sold the same things: salt, a little grain, cloth, cigarettes, the country soap that looks like old cheese, white buttons that bakriwar women buy to trim their clothes, and, hanging from the ceilings, bundles of brightly coloured threads in colours of saffron, green, red and white, for making mens’ caps and the coloured braid, like pyjama cords, with which they hold their loose trousers up. Goats wandered down the village street; a tailor had a shop with some white calico and an ancient sewing machine, but he was not sewing; in fact all the men were sitting or standing about with nothing to do. ‘Is this a very poor village?’ asked Simon.

  ‘These men are land-holders,’ said Jobara, as if to say, ‘Then they must be poor.’

  I woke very early that morning at Aru and watched the sun come down the mountains, turning the snow to even more colours that I had seen it turn before: first to violet, then pink, then gold, then yellow-cream, then white while, all the time, the rocks held that curious bluebell blue. Waking like this and looking down into the vale of Aru with the dew shining on the uplands, I had to use words that were half-forgotten and sounded affected: vale; uplands; pastoral; but these valleys are pastoral, not at all in the French sense but in a Chinese pastoral way. We got up early and after breakfast broke camp and took the way to Lidderwat.

  It was a long day walking and riding, through pine woods now, and
over rough grass like the downs in England, or on a hot dusty road that had openings among the trees that showed us the Liddar river, not milkily blue like the Sinde but a brown and rushing river. We passed more bakriwar clans on the move and were struck, as I have always been struck, by the type of face so many of the older women have, piercing and hawklike, thin and gaunt with misery. They are not really old but have led hard, often cruelly suffering lives, toiling for their men, bearing children on the march, carrying all the heavy gear; the great nets of iron cooking pots, firewood, sick animals, dragging their big dogs, and usually with a heavy baby in their slings. The children are lovely, their hair bleached almost gold, often ivory-skinned and pink-cheeked. As soon as they saw us they scampered up to ask for money and tried to sell us crystals, water-polished in the streams. We passed three boys hiding together under a rock and laughing; in the shadow of the rock we could see hardly anything but their teeth and eyes shining. How virile and hardy these people looked after the inertness of the Kashmiri peasants in the village.

  At Lidderwat were more wild ponies and foals, few flowers except clover, but that filled the small, enclosed, rather hot valley with such a smell of honey that it was almost stupefying. There were the same buffaloes and herdsmen, huts and firs and a motor road leading to Pahalgham. We watched a tribe of monkeys and Sol fell off his pony with excitement. He was surprised and resentful but not hurt. Then we took a short cut up to our last camping place, passing through a flock of sheep; the first big flock we had seen since we started.

  There had been a theft at Pahalgham and the police were chasing the bakriwars up the valley. Our hurt boy abruptly disappeared. ‘You see,’ said Subhan, but I think he was simply frightened of the police. It was too peaceful to argue, even with Subhan. Opposite our camp was a stream that ran from the snowline to the river, winding in white threads down the mountain, disappearing into the forest and coming out into waterfalls. It seemed to hedge us round for our last night.