A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

by Eric Newby

  2. The death of Muhammad, the founder of Islam, without male heirs and his omission to appoint a successor, led to the division of Islam into two sacerdotal and political factions – the Shiites and the Sunnites. The Sunnites took their name from a collection of books on traditional law called the Sunna which are received as having authority concurrent with and supplementary to the Koran. The Sunnites claim the right of nominating the prophet’s successors. The Shiites recognize the divine right of succession to rest with his cousin Ali and his descendants.

  CHAPTER NINE

  A Walk in the Sun

  I woke the following morning to find Abdul Ghiyas regarding me at close range with his large haggard eyes. I had the sensation that he had been doing this for some time, perhaps trying to make up his mind by a close inspection what defects I possessed. Partly in order to reassure him, I went to swim in the river. The water was like ice. I emerged from it with chattering teeth to find that Ghulam Naabi had made tea and that the other drivers had already arrived.

  While drinking our tea Hugh and I regarded them covertly. Our first reactions were not altogether favourable; judging by the hostile glances they shot at us from time to time, neither were theirs. Both of them were about our own age. One was thin, with a small foxy moustache. He wore a striped jacket that was part of a western suit, loose shalvār trousers, a huge, floppy turban and shoes with curly points. He looked cunning, intelligent and the antithesis of the faithful retainer. The other had a broad, stupid face, like an old-fashioned prize-fighter, with a thick, trunk-like nose and a deeply lined forehead with a wart on it. On the back of his head he wore a little pill-box hat. He looked as hard as nails.

  They were crouching with Abdul Ghiyas over a wooden bowl containing curds and talking with great animation while they scraped the bottom of the bowl with great hunks of bread; occasionally they would interrupt their conversation to look at us with sinister emphasis. There was no question of our accepting or rejecting them. It was Abdul Ghiyas who was hiring them.

  Outside the garden, on a small strip of green by the river, the three horses were picketed to iron pins driven into the ground. I knew little enough about horses but these seemed very small horses.

  ‘Surely mules would be better. Why don’t we take mules?’

  ‘There aren’t any mules in Afghanistan. At least I’ve never seen any.’

  It seemed extraordinary that, after a century of guerrilla warfare on the north-west frontier, no one had succeeded in capturing any mules from the British, but whatever the reason I never saw a mule in Afghanistan.

  Now all our gear was brought out and stacked around us in the garden; coils of rope, boxes of rations, bags of flour, damp things that had already squashed and our crampons, those metal frames covered with sharp spikes that defied all efforts to pack them.

  The driver from the Embassy prepared to leave. From an inside pocket Ghulam Naabi produced a letter addressed to Hugh which he handed to him. His face wore an expression of mask-like innocence. The letter was short but to the point. It was from his employer, the Australian.

  Sir,

  I understand from my servant, Ghulam Naabi, that you are proposing to relieve me of his services for a month, leaving me with a sick wife, several children and no cook. I write to inform you that Ghulam Naabi is not accompanying you on your expedition. He will return to Kabul immediately.

  There was nothing to say to this. It was the sort of letter I should have written myself in similar circumstances. With some show of emotion Ghulam Naabi transferred his few belongings to the station wagon. They were so few that it was obvious that the contents of the letter had already been communicated to him before he had left Kabul. Soon he was gone in a cloud of dust.

  My worst fears were realized. I was now alone in Asia with a companion whose attitude to food was one of undisguised contempt and whose ideas were almost as austere as those of the followers who surrounded us.

  ‘I can’t understand that Australian,’ said Hugh. ‘It’s a most extraordinary attitude. Never mind, we shall probably get on much better without Ghulam Naabi. Be able to travel faster. Less of a problem.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Of course, it means doing the cooking ourselves.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Still, it’s all in tins.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You’re unusually quiet.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hope you’re feeling all right. Nothing wrong inside?’

  ‘Nothing like that. I just feel as though I’ve been sentenced to death.’

  There seemed little hope of leaving that day. It was not due to lack of preparation. There was very little to prepare. It was simply that the first day of a caravan was like being under starter’s orders on a racecourse – only there was no starter.

  Bloated with mulberries and slightly sticky, I lay on my stomach on the river bank, looking into the water. Occasionally a shaft of sunlight filtering down through the upper branches would illuminate a small fish, not more than six inches long, darting among the roots of the willows where the earth had been washed away. Out in midstream in the midday sun the river bubbled and surged past, the colour of jade rippled with dazzling silver. On the far bank sheep and goats browsed in a deep water-meadow; birds Abdul Ghiyas called Parastu, brown banded bank-swallows, flew over the shingle without ever alighting; above the valley the mighty screes with small sun-baked patches of grass on them swept up and up; beyond the road the house simmered in the heat, its brown mud walls baking harder and harder. There was no sign of Abdul Ghiyas or the other drivers.

  I was joined by Hugh. He buried his head in the river and drank.

  ‘Is that a good thing?’ I asked.

  ‘Excellent water. Comes from the high glaciers. You shouldn’t drink it when you’re hot, of course.’

  Remembering the affair of the ice-cream that had all but destroyed my wife, and the qanat water in north Persia, I was suspicious. The water certainly looked delicious; besides, there was so much of it. Surely such a volume would nullify all but the most urban germs.

  ‘What about the villages higher up?’

  ‘There’s nothing large enough to infect it,’ he said. ‘Besides you have to accustom yourself to this kind of thing. The most important thing is never to drink unless you absolutely have to. I never do,’ he added.

  So I drank some too.

  By three-thirty in the afternoon all hope of leaving seemed to have gone. Drivers and animals were locked in lassitude and indifference. Neither wanted to leave at the fag-end of the day – and they were right; to venture into the oven-like landscape beyond the garden seemed to them suicide. Only by shouting at them and appealing to Abdul Ghiyas were the drivers finally prevailed upon to load their horses.

  It was a long job. All the stuff had to be slung in nets made from a special reed and hooked to the pack saddles. Soon everything was ungetatable: the rations in their fibre boxes, everything else in sacks as a protection against the battering it would receive from the rocks. It was obvious that unless one started the day with the gear one required, one would never see it till the evening.

  Unwisely, we decided to carry loaded rucksacks. ‘To toughen ourselves up’, as we optimistically put it.

  ‘About forty pounds should be enough,’ Hugh said, ‘so that we can press on.’

  Our drivers were aghast. It was difficult to persuade Abdul Ghiyas that we were not out of our minds. With the temperature around 110°, carrying our forty-pound loads and twirling our ice-axes, we set off from Jangalak.

  It was good to be on the road; it stretched ahead of us full of ruts, following the river. On both sides the mountains rose steeply. Looking back we could see Abdul Ghiyas in the orchard at Jangalak where he was making the last adjustments, putting off his departure to the last possible moment.

  At first we congratulated ourselves on seeing more of the countryside on foot. What we had not taken into account was the diminished social status that was accorded to a
couple of Europeans plodding through Asia with heavy loads on their backs. It was after a long mile, when we met two wild-looking crop-headed mountaineers coming down from above by a rough track, that we first realized that nobody admired us for what we were doing. They themselves were carrying immense loads of rock salt in conical baskets. We waved cheerfully but they uttered such angry cries and made such threatening gestures that we passed hurriedly on. They turned to shout after us. It was always the same word.

  ‘What’s a sag?’

  ‘It’s a dog.’

  ‘Is it rude in Persian?’

  ‘Very, they think we should be on horseback.’

  The road followed the west bank of the river through mulberry orchards and fields of wheat and Indian corn. At this time of day all were deserted. After two miles we reached the village of Mala Asp. From here the road became impassable for vehicles. At the stop beyond the village the evening bus stood up to its axles in a deep puddle. That we should have walked here heavily laden when we might quite easily have travelled by bus seemed to make us even more ludicrous figures. As we left a nasty old man screamed at us from the top of a rock, ‘Xar, Xar, Donkeys! Why don’t you ride?’

  To which we replied, in fury, ‘—off!’

  The two miles we had covered since Jangalak had wrought great changes in us. We no longer chatted gaily. In the cool garden it had been difficult to realize how hot it really was. Soon we were suffering all the agonies of heat, thirst and fatigue, accelerated by our poor condition. Our legs felt like melting butter.

  So that Hugh could give me a piece of chewing-gum, we halted for a moment in the shade of a solitary tree. Already our mouths were full of a thick, elastic scum, which with the chewing-gum became like a gigantic gobstopper. Our rucksacks with their forty-pound loads seemed to weigh a hundredweight; nevertheless we both agreed that whatever else happened we should carry them for today. I was wearing a new pair of Italian boots that had been specially constructed for me in Italy. In the whole of England I had not been able to find, in the short time at my disposal, a pair of climbing boots that would fit me (my old boots had collapsed during the visit to Wales). As the Italian boot-maker at Brescia said, with a simplicity that robbed his words of offence:

  ‘Signore, non sono piedi d’uomo, sono piedi di scimmia.’ ‘Sir, these are not the feet of a man, but of a monkey.’

  The boots had arrived by air in Tehran on the morning we left for Meshed and, apart from our short outing on Legation Hill, I had not tried them. Now, in the hot afternoon, they became agonizing. Apart from a pair of gym shoes they were the only foot covering I possessed, my walking shoes having failed to arrive from England, where they too had had to be made.

  We were now travelling what, before the motor road had been constructed over the Hindu Kush by the Shibar Pass, had been the main caravan route to Northern Afghanistan, Badakshan and the crossing of the Oxus. Coming down towards us we met a variety of travellers. First a band of Tajiks mounted on donkeys who were on their way from Jurm in Badakshan more than 150 miles to the north-east to buy teapots and tea at Gulbahar; they had been twelve days on the road and the skin around their eyes was all shrivelled by the sun. Then there were some Pathan camel drivers who had come over from Andarab with wheat, their beasts swaying down like great galleons under a press of sail. Going up were caravans of donkeys with cotton goods from the mill at Gulbahar. All the people we met who were travelling the road were more friendly than the householders we had so far encountered.

  ‘How is your condition?’ ‘Are you well?’ ‘Are you strong?’ ‘Where are you going?’ To which we replied, invariably, ‘Up’ or ‘Parian mirim. To Parian,’ the upper part of the Panjshir Valley; vague enough, yet it seemed to satisfy them. All soon became a bore. For our part we did not speak to one another; we had no moisture to spare.

  At six o’clock, when the heat had gone, we reached a place where the road passed close to the river at its junction with a torrent coming from a big valley to the east. This was the Darra Hazara, where some 400 families of Hazaras live who have become Sunnites as the price of living in peace among the Tajiks.

  It was an eerie place. Behind us the sun was lost in clouds of yellow dust raised by the wind that had got up suddenly, howling across the valley as the sun went down and lashing the river so that it smoked.

  On the left of the track, already in cold shadow, were a number of tombs on a hillock; piles of stones decked with tattered flags that fluttered sadly in the wind and ibex horns decorated with twists of coloured paper. According to Hugh it was a ziarat, a shrine, and the tomb decorated with ibex horns that of a Mirgun – a matchlock man, or master hunter.

  On the Hazara side there was a fort. Marz Robat, the Fort of the Frontier. It was about a hundred feet square, built of mud brick and defended at the four corners by towers that tapered thickly to their bases.

  ‘One way into Nuristan,’ Hugh said as we plodded past the Darra Hazara. ‘Two days over the pass and you’d be on the headwaters of the Alishang river, but you’d still only be on the outskirts of Nuristan. You’d have to cross the Alishang Pass into the Alingar Valley and then you’d only be in the lower part. I want to get to the upper part.’

  It sounded very complicated.

  As we covered the last awful mile into the village that takes its name from the fort but is called by the locals ‘Omarz’, two fit-looking men came steaming up behind us. The taller of the two, a fine-looking fellow with a black beard, turned out to be of the same profession as the one under the pile of stones, a Mirgun.

  I was too far gone to really care what a Mirgun was but Hugh, with a perversity that I had already remarked in him, proceeded to tell me at great length, translating, sentence by sentence, as the man spoke.

  From beneath an immense chapan the Mirgun produced a muzzle-loading rifle fired by a percussion cap. It looked quite new. Everything this man had about him was robust and strongly constructed for the hard life he lived on the mountain-side.

  ‘From Englestan,’ he said. ‘I have not had it long.’

  While I was trying to imagine some small factory in Birmingham still turning out muzzle-loaders for Mirgun, he added, ‘I have buried my other in an orchard. When I killed a thousand ibex I became a Mirgun. Then I buried the gun with which I slew them. It is the custom. I buried it secretly in my orchard. Then the young men from the village came to seek for it. He who finds it can buy the gun.’

  ‘Why should he wish to do so?’

  ‘Because with it he too will slay a thousand ibex and himself in turn become Mirgun.’

  At six-thirty we arrived at the village of Marz Robat itself. We had been on the road for three hours and during this time had covered perhaps ten miles but, nevertheless, I felt utterly exhausted. By the look on Hugh’s face he was experiencing somewhat similar sensations.

  Outstripped by the Mirgun and his companion, whose opinions of our powers of locomotion were plain enough, we followed them into a narrow enclosure on the right of the road and sank down on the scruffy grass.

  ‘You know,’ said Hugh, ‘I feel rather done up, I can’t think why.’

  ‘It must be the change of air.’

  We were in a little garden high above the river, on the outskirts of the village, which belonged to a chaie khana across the road. The chaie khana was really only a hole in a wall with a sagging roof of dead vegetation strung on some long poles. Standing in a wooden cradle, looking like a medieval siege mortar and equally defunct, was a Russian samovar made of copper and decorated with the Imperial eagles. It was splendid but unfortunately it was not working. Deciding that it would take a long time to get up a head of steam in a thing of this size, I closed my eyes in a coma of fatigue.

  When I next opened them I was covered with a thick blanket of flies. They were somnolent in the cool of the evening and, when I thumped myself, squashing dozens of them, they simply rose a foot in the air and fell back on me with an audible ‘plop’, closing the ranks left by the slaughtered like
well-drilled infantry.

  Now the samovar was belching steam, jumping up and down on its wooden cradle in its eagerness to deliver the goods. It no longer resembled a cannon; it was more like an engine emerging from its shed anxious to be off up the line and away.

  Bending over us was the proprietor, a curious-looking giant in a long brown cloak reaching to his feet, which stuck out coyly from under it. He was an object of nightmare but he brought with him all the apparatus of tea.

  My teeth were chattering like castanets and without a word the giant took off his verminous cloak and wrapped me in it, leaving himself in a thin cotton shift. Another cloak was brought for Hugh. Here, when the sun went down, it was cold.

  Regarding us silently from the walls of the little garden there was an immense audience. The male population of Marz Robat, all but the bedridden, come to view these extraordinary beings who to them must have had all the strangeness of visitors from outer space. To appreciate their point of view one would have to imagine a Tajik stretched out in a garden in Wimbledon.

  It was green tea and delicious but the cups were too small; pretty things of fine porcelain. After we had each drunk two entire pots we still had need of more liquid. Ours was not a thirst that proceeded from dry throats but a deep internal need to replace what had been sucked out of us in our unfit state by the power of the sun.

  ‘I shouldn’t do that,’ Hugh croaked, as I demanded water. ‘You’ll be sorry.’

  My powers of restraint, never great, had been broken. Now our roles were reversed.

  ‘I thought you wanted me to drink it.’

  ‘Not when you’re tired. It’s too cold.’

  He was too late; the giant had already sent down to the river for a chatti of water. Somewhere I had read that salt was the thing for a person suffering from dehydration, so I called for salt too; a rock of it was produced and I put it in the pot, sluiced it round and drank deep. It was a nasty mixture but at least I felt that in some way I was justifying my lack of self-control.