A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

by Eric Newby

  There was an interval of calm while five women, saucy ghosts in all-enveloping chador, with crocheted holes for faces, rode over the bridge on horseback, each with an anxious-looking husband trotting behind on foot.

  They were succeeded by two urchins who fought strenuously in the dust, ripping great chunks out of one another’s already ragged clothing. Then, quite suddenly, the road was deserted and a young man appeared strutting slowly and stiffly with both arms held straight down in front of him. He was almost goose-stepping and he was completely naked. For some minutes he stood in the middle of the bridge with fingers extended, holding up the traffic.

  No one, including the five old men, took the slightest notice of him. He went slowly up the road at the head of a small procession of men, animals and vehicles that had been piling up, waiting for him to make up his mind where he wanted to go, and disappeared. Lunatic, Darwīsh from some strange sect, or simply someone from the city come to take the waters of the Shatul (well known for their medicinal qualities) who had lost his bath towel, we shall never know. Even the omniscient Ghulam Naabi, who went off to interrogate the inhabitants, returned no wiser.

  Just beyond Gulbahar where the mountains join the plain, east of the Panjshir, on a low and isolated ridge, is the yellow sandbank called Reg-i-Ruwan (the Running Sands) which is said to have the singular property of singing or moaning when agitated by the wind or otherwise disturbed. Among the local inhabitants opinions have always been divided; some say that it emits a sound like the beating of kettle-drums and then only ten or twelve times a year; others maintain that it only happens on Fridays; almost all agree that it is most likely to occur when the wind is strong from the north-west.

  This sandbank so fascinated Lord Curzon that in 1923, when he was Foreign Secretary and in the midst of his other preoccupations, he addressed a letter to the British Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at Kabul, Colonel Humphrys, instructing him to visit the Reg-i-Ruwan and make a report.

  Colonel Humphrys duly visited the sandbank and, in an effort to drag some sound from it, he dispatched bands of men to the top of the slope and made them glissade down the face of the sandbank. ‘As the sand was dislodged it flowed down in parallel, rectangular streams,’ says the Colonel’s report, ‘and emitted a rustling sound faintly audible at twenty yards.’ The sort of noise that any sandbank might be expected to give out if disturbed by a body of men tramping up and down it.

  It was late in the afternoon when we left Gulbahar. The road, with puddles a foot deep, mounted swiftly through a waste of banked rock and shingle brought down by the turbulence of the river in spate. Growing incongruously from these banks were a few stunted trees.

  In a few minutes we came to the mouth of the Panjshir gorge from which the river raced, shooting down with little scuds of foam, brilliant in the sun. It was an exciting moment. Ahead of us the mountains rose straight up like a wall. Those on the left, towards the west, formed part of the main Hindu Kush range; those to the right, separated by fifty yards of the rushing water that had cut this gorge, were the final spurs of the great massif, itself a spur of the Hindu Kush that projects southwards from the Anjuman Pass at the head of the Panjshir Valley, forming the western marches of Nuristan in which was Mir Samir, our mountain.

  I took one last look at the smiling plain behind us with its rich market gardens and the mountains to the west where the sun was beginning to sink, then we were in the cold shadow of the gorge with the river thundering about us, cold and green and white, sucking and tugging at the great boulders that lay in the stream, the noise of it reverberating from the walls thirty yards from side to side like the entrance to a tomb. After about a mile the gorge suddenly opened out into a valley where the mountains were no longer sheer but ran back in steep banks of scree.

  As we drove on we had momentary glimpses of jagged peaks. They were as dry as old bones; there was no snow or ice to be seen – that would be farther back, higher still in the Hindu Kush.

  The road turned a corner and now, on the far bank of the river, infinitely secret-looking villages with watch towers built of dried mud, loop-holed and with heavily barred windows, clung to the mountain-side. We turned another corner and suddenly were in paradise.

  It was evening but the last of the sun drenched everything in golden light. In a field of Indian corn women were slyly using their veils. They no longer wore the wraithlike chador that we had seen in Gulbahar and Kabul. In the small terraced fields, which fitted into one another like a jig-saw or, when they were at different levels, like some complicated toy, the wheat was being harvested by men using sickles. From the fields donkeys moved off uphill in single file to the tomb-like villages, so loaded that they looked like heaps of wheat moved by clockwork.

  But it was the river that dominated the scene. In it boys were swimming held up by inflated skins and were swept downstream in frightening fashion until the current swirled them into deep pools near the bank before any harm could come to them; while in the shallows where the water danced on pebbles smaller children splashed and pottered. On its banks, too, life was being lived happily: a party of ladies in reds and brilliant blues walked along the opposite bank, talking gaily to one another; poplars shimmered; willows bowed in the breeze; water flowed slowly in the irrigation ditches through a hundred gardens, among apricot trees with the fruit still heavy on them, submerging the butts of the mulberries, whose owners squatted in their properties and viewed the scene with satisfaction. Old white-bearded men sat proudly on stone walls with their grandchildren, grave-looking little boys with embroidered pill-box hats and little girls of extraordinary beauty. This evening was like some golden age of human happiness, attained sometimes by children, more rarely by grown-ups, and it communicated its magic in some degree to all of us.

  The road wriggled on and on. It was like driving along the back of a boa-constrictor that had just enjoyed a good meal, and equally bumpy. At Ruka, the principal town of the lower Panjshir, the main street through the bazaar was covered in with the boughs of trees to form a dark tunnel in which the shopkeepers had already lit acetylene flares. It was not yet the time for custom and the owners of the stall-like shops sat cross-legged and motionless, waiting; proprietors of chaie khanas with their big brass samovars boiling up behind them and shelves of massed teapots; butchers in their shops where legs of mutton, still black with the day’s flies, hung from cruel-looking hooks; sellers of shoes with curly toes, rock salt in blocks, strange clothing – all ready for business. In the middle of the bazaar, chocked up on tree-trunks, without wheels stood an enormous American automobile of the thirties, the reputed property of a German who had gone prospecting over the Anjuman Pass and who had not returned.

  Now that we were near our destination, Ghulam Naabi began to identify the scenes of the various mishaps that had overtaken him and Hugh on the road when they were last there in 1952. As we screeched round a particularly nasty bend with a steep drop to some water-logged fields below, it seemed likely that at least one of the disasters would be re-enacted.

  ‘Here I was overset in a lorry with Carless Sahib.’

  ‘You never told me that,’ I said to Hugh.

  ‘It was nothing. The driver lost his head. Ghulam Naabi was a bit shaken, that’s all.’

  Another mile. We ground up a really steep piece covered with loose stones. ‘Here we had a puncture.’

  A little farther and we reached a place where the radiator had boiled over. It seemed impossible that such a short distance could encompass so many misfortunes.

  At the meeting of a lesser stream, the Parandev, with the Panjshir, we got down and washed. The water was very cold. Coming from the regions of snow and ice it reminded us, as we stood there sticky and hot, of the rigours that awaited us higher up in the mountains.

  ‘Very high the Parandev,’ said Hugh, ‘nearly 16,000, according to a book I read. We couldn’t measure it, we hadn’t got an aneroid, but there’s snow on it from October to May.’

  I asked hi
m about the passes into Nuristan.

  ‘Probably higher. Don’t mention the word Nuristan when we come to hire the drivers, otherwise they won’t come. They’re terrified of the place.’

  The road continued close along the river bank and now Ghulam Naabi began to look out for the man we had come to find, the Tajik who had accompanied Hugh on his previous journey and whom we hoped would now come with us, bringing with him two more drivers with horses.

  ‘ABDUL GHIYAS!’

  Ghulam Naabi let out a great cry that scared the driver, causing him to swerve so that he nearly landed us in the river.

  As we flashed past, there was a momentary vision of someone glaring up at us from the water’s edge. By the time we had stopped and got out he had climbed up the bank and was coming towards us along the road. Abdul Ghiyas had been saying his prayers and had been just as frightened by Ghulam Naabi as the driver. He was dark and thin, aged about thirty-five, with a moustache and no beard. His face was deeply lined on either side of the nose towards the corners of his mouth, and his eyes were dark brown. He was wearing a chapan, a loose woollen cloak-like garment of white homespun with wide sleeves. On his head was an old black headcloth, tattered but clean. This was the man who had been struck on the head by a stone on the last visit to the mountain, the one I had read about in a hotel bedroom in Manchester, half a world away. It was an historic moment, but for someone who hadn’t seen his one-time master for more than four years he did not manifest any great enthusiasm; rather he showed a lively apprehension.

  ‘He doesn’t seem very excited to see you,’ I said to Hugh, while we were parking the station wagon in a little lane that led steeply off the road and into the orchard at the back of Abdul Ghiyas’s house.

  ‘He’s probably wondering how he’s going to feed us all. We are rather a mob.’

  ‘I expect after the last time he wonders what you’re planning for him. Seeing you must be rather like being handed a death warrant.’

  We climbed a wall of crumbling stones into a little garden that led down to the river. It was a charming place. Mulberry trees and a trellis of vines sheltered it from the heat of the day and the grass was green. Willows overhung the river, which here ran swift and deep except close into the bank where some quirk of the current made it move sluggishly upstream. Beyond the narrow road which divided it from the garden was the house, like all the other houses, a fortress of brown mud with loophole windows, wooden gutter pipes and a flat wooden roof with wide eaves. From it came the sound of giggling and there was a swirl of gaily coloured cloth on the roof as his wives gazed down on us, until he shouted something sharp at them and they vanished.

  ‘He always was a dreadful prig about women,’ Hugh said and proceeded to tell him so.

  From one of the loopholes half-way down the sheer wall of the house a minute girl of three or so was observing us, but as soon as she felt herself watched, she veiled herself with a scarlet cloth.

  Now, with great solemnity, the greetings and introductions began. Besides Abdul Ghiyas himself there was his old father, toothless and doddery, and a line of his relations down to a degree when kinship must nearly have been extinct: several sinisterlooking men in skull caps, hangers-on, who were ignored, and a host of children, all boys. All these had appeared as if they had been expecting our arrival; as indeed they had, the news having in some mysterious way preceded us from the capital.

  ‘Salaamat bashi,’ droned Abdul Ghiyas, looking apprehensively at the roof. ‘May you be healthy. Khub hasti? Jur hasti? Are you well? Are you harmonious?’

  ‘Mandeh nabashi. Zendeh bashi,’ we intoned. ‘May you never be tired. May you live forever.’

  ‘Salaamat bashi,’ squeaked the old father and, because Hugh had been a secretary, ‘Sar Ketab. I remember you, Head-of-the-Book.’

  Meanwhile rugs and quilts had been brought out from the house and we sat down in a half-circle with our legs drawn up. A young man came up from the river with two big, circular baskets, one filled with apricots, the other mulberries – the Panjshir tūt – dripping with the water in which he had just washed them.

  ‘You have arrived for the last of the apricots but for the tūt there is still time,’ said Abdul Ghiyas.

  The apricots were good but the mulberries were delicious, small and sweet and white with a faint purplish tinge. It was difficult to resist them. Like a mechanical shovel, Ghulam Naabi’s hand rose and fell, scooping them from the basket and into his mouth until I thought he would burst. As the light failed he seemed to grow larger like a white balloon.

  After an hour of tūt eating he lay back on his quilt and languidly gave instructions for the preparation of an evening meal, waving a sticky hand. My spirits rose. I was hungry, too hungry to satisfy myself with sweet mulberries however good. I noticed that he took no part in the actual cooking, which was carried out over a dung fire in a remote corner of the garden. Judging by the blasphemous sounds that came out of the darkness, it was not altogether easy but the results were satisfactory. A dish of eggs and nan-i-roughani, thin, flat wheat bread fried until crisp in clarified butter, and a pot of tea for each one of us. It was evident that if Ghulam Naabi was with us all would be well.

  While we were eating a big moon rose and shone down on us through the trees, throwing a network of shadows over us. The village Mullah arrived, an elderly man with a full beard dyed bright red. Soon a water pipe began to circulate, passing from hand to hand. It reached me but I made it gurgle so horribly that I quickly passed it on, afraid of becoming a social disaster.

  Up to now there had been no mention of the business we had come about, perhaps before dinner it would have been considered impolite. Now Abdul Ghiyas gently broached the subject.

  ‘Last year an American came to Jangalak.’ (Jangalak was the name of the little hamlet where Abdul Ghiyas lived.) ‘I went with him to Mir Samir.’

  ‘What happened to the American,’ said Hugh. ‘How far did he get?’

  ‘Not so far as you did, only to the glacier. But for me the journey was more pleasing. I was not hit on the head by any stones. The American had ropes. He was rich.’

  ‘All Americans are rich,’ said Hugh, ‘but they were my ropes, I lent them to him, they cost me £17 from England.’

  To me it seemed a lot of money for a few ropes.

  ‘They came from England by air. The freight was terrific. They didn’t come in the “Bag”. There was some kind of mistake and I had to pay the duty. The Customs worked out the value at the bazaar rate of exchange and then charged the duty on that. It was most unsatisfactory.’

  With infinite slowness all was agreed. Abdul Ghiyas was to be our guide and caravan master. He was to bring his own horse and two other drivers, each with their own beasts. We were to leave the following morning. It was not considered advisable to discuss the financial arrangements before Ghulam Naabi and such a large audience, and at any rate the other two drivers would have to be present.

  Now we sat for hours and hours while the Mullah, who had constituted himself chairman, decided who of the company should speak of the problems that afflict the world. It was obvious that we were going to be up all night. Like everyone present, the Mullah was a Tajik.

  We were now in fact in the heart of Tajik country. As Abdul Ghiyas said proudly, later in the evening, ‘From the British Embassy at Bāgh-i-Bālā through Panjshir and over the Anjuman Pass to Faizabad in Badakshan all is Tajik.’

  He was right. The embassy at Kabul is on the northern fringe of the city. All day we had been travelling in Tajik territory. There are also Tajiks in Andarab, the parallel valley to Panjshir to the west and also around Ghazni and Herat. In the Panjshir there are, according to the Mullah, about 5,000 households, about 30,000 people in all. The Tajiks are the original Persian owners of the Afghan soil, conquered and dispossessed by the Pathans but still speaking Persian; pleasant, regular-featured people; agriculturists, Sunnites, intense in their religion, a far more ancient people than the Hazaras, round-headed, flat-faced Mongo
ls who were settled in Central Afghanistan by Genghis Khan in the fourteenth century in the region he himself had depopulated, and converted to the Shiah faith in the eighteenth by Nader Shah’s Persian Army.2 Now like the Tajiks the Hazaras are a subject race, independent only in the fastnesses of their own country, the Hazarajat.

  For hours and hours we sat there. The Mullah spoke of the King and how he came to hunt in the mountains just behind us.

  ‘He comes by jeep and good horses wait him. There are ibex and panther; wolves also. In winter there are many wolves. They attack the people and take sheep.’

  ‘Do many young men come from the city to hunt?’

  ‘They would not come to our mountain,’ said Abdul Ghiyas; in spite of his misfortunes on Mir Samir he still seemed proud of his connexion with it. ‘The mountain needs men of hard flesh.’

  I shuddered, thinking of our efforts to climb Legation Hill four days before.

  It was now very late, and cold too; here we were nearly 8,000 feet up. Our breath smoked in the moonlight. The river was over the banks; the effect of the glaciers melting in the midday sun was only just making itself felt. In the last hour it had risen six inches.

  Hugh was telling an interminable story, something from South America, about an anaconda killing a horse. To express it in classical Persian was heavy going; judging by the look of almost hysterical concentration on the faces of his audience it was pretty difficult for them too. I was very tired and my head kept falling forward with an almost audible click. Fortunately, the story of the anaconda broke even the Mullah’s resistance, and soon we were left alone. We wrapped ourselves in our sleeping-bags and instantly fell asleep.

  * * *

  1. The Bābur-nāma in English (Memoirs of Bābur), by Zahiru’d-dīn Muhammad Bābur Pādshāh Ghāzi. Trans. by A. S. Beveridge from the original Turki. 2 vols., London, 1921.