A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

by Eric Newby

  ‘What’s a kro?’ I could see that the heat and our conversation about water had made Hugh testy. The fact that it was he who had to do most of the interrogation was already driving him into a state of despair.

  ‘One kro equals half an Iranian farsak.’

  It was some time before I was able to pluck up courage to ask what an Iranian farsak was.

  ‘The distance a man travels over flat ground in an hour – about three and a half miles. And, quite frankly, I think you should have made more progress with your Persian by now.’

  In Panjshir each bay of cultivation is succeeded by a great bluff up which the track winds, sometimes leaving the river a thousand feet below in the gorges, overhanging it in hair-raising fashion. Now, when we had been going for five hours we made the worst crossing so far. On this bluff there were no trees, there was no vegetation and, therefore, no shade; the earth was red and burning hot and the dust swirled about us. The sun seemed to fill the entire sky like a great brass shield. In the gorge below us the river was a dirty, turgid yellow. Frequently Hugh had to stop, consumed by stomach trouble, to take what solace he could on the barren hillside. Fortunately there were no other travellers. Our men were far behind; all others had long since taken refuge from the heat of the day.

  The descent from the col was long and slow. It was like walking on red-hot corrugated iron. In exactly an hour and a half as Abdul Ghiyas had predicted, we rounded a bend and there was a village, close to the river, green, cool and inviting. Dasht-i-Rewat, ‘The Plain of the Fort’, the last village before the gorges leading to Parian. Better still, even at a distance, we could make out two samovars belching steam.

  In the village we collapsed in front of the wrong samovar, one that was not patronized by our drivers, so that when they arrived we had to get up and totter bootless to the next establishment. There we spent the rest of the day in the shade of a huge walnut tree, horses tethered round us.

  It was a charming spot, like something from a painting by Claude Lorraine. We were in a natural amphitheatre of green grass deeply shaded by mulberries and walnuts. At the far end there were some curiously eroded cliffs over which a waterfall came bouncing down. At the foot there was a spring where the water bubbled up through silver sand into a little natural basin. The only sounds in this paradise of rock, water and green turf came from superabundant nature: the roar of the distant river, the splashing of the waterfall, the chattering of the little stream that led down from it, the buzzing of flies, the noise made by Abdul Ghiyas’s stallion as it tried to mate with Badar Khan’s little mare, and the clucking of the hens that had gathered about us attracted by the breadcrumbs.

  We bathed in a pool below a mill. It was very deep and cold. Out in the main river the stream was running at twenty knots. Above us at least a hundred men and boys watched us silently from the cliff. Presently some of the boys came in, too, swimming with a curious dog-paddle-cum-breast stroke.

  Feeling infinitely better, we returned to the walnut tree, trailing behind us a whole tribe of schoolboys. At first they surrounded me whilst I went through the grisly ritual of dressing my feet, but the smaller ones got clipped on the ear by older, hairier schoolboys, who were themselves clipped by Shir Muhammad, leaving only a half-circle of nosey men, the minimum audience that we were resigned to playing to wherever we went. We were hourly thinking more highly of Shir Muhammad; already, sure sign of popularity, he had received a nickname Sar-i-Sargin, ‘Head of Horse Dung’, from the immense amount of this material which he accumulated whenever we lit a fire on the way.

  Again we slept hemmed in by our belongings. Some time after midnight I woke up. A great moon was shining down on the road. As I lay there, a number of men, closely wrapped in dark cloaks, went by silently and quickly on horses, going up in the direction that we were following.

  We left early the next morning and it was still dark when we took the road. By five o’clock we had left the last houses in the lower valley behind and were beginning the long climb from the lower to the upper Panjshir. Soon we were abreast of the Darra Rewat, away to the east over the river, leading to a pass of that name into Nuristan.

  ‘We’re coming to the last samovar before Parian,’ said Hugh.

  But he was wrong. When we reached the top of the pass, really the crest of a big bluff, there was nothing; only some forgotten fields and what Hugh had remembered as a chaie khana which was now ruined and deserted. Far below, scarcely moving, was the river, covered with a thick green scum, confined between high cliffs of eroded sandstone, choked with rocks at the lower end and only escaping through a narrow sluice into the broad cultivated valley of Dasht-i-Rewat.

  ‘Why did they have a chaie khana here anyway?’

  ‘It’s a junction,’ Hugh said. ‘Up there’ – he pointed up the hillside to the north-west – ‘is the way to the Til Pass into Andarab. The country’s drying up. The glaciers are receding every year.’ He pointed to the ruined fields. ‘Four years ago there were beans growing there. All the earth’s dropping into the river, blowing away in dust. That’s why they’re abandoned. Nobody will live here any more.’

  Two Tajiks appeared, driving before them a herd of goats. They offered us dried mulberries made into a cake with walnuts, which they called talkhan. They themselves took green snuff, placing it under the tongue.

  ‘You know,’ Hugh said, ‘for the first time since we left England I’m beginning to feel fit. I can actually feel my legs under me.’

  It was true. In spite of the fearful liberties we had been taking with our insides, we were undoubtedly becoming stronger.

  ‘I can feel my legs all right,’ I said. ‘The only trouble is I can feel my feet, too.’

  By this time Abdul Ghiyas had come up, closely followed by the others.

  ‘How long is the gorge?’

  ‘Twelve kro.’

  ‘That’s about twenty-one miles on flat ground.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Hugh.

  ‘But is it flat?’

  ‘Not a bit.’

  ‘Golly!’

  ‘More than twice a farsak-i-ghurg, a wolf’s farsak,’ said Abdul Ghiyas with relish.

  The road swooped downhill to the river. Soon the horses were battling across a deep torrent, which swept at right angles into the main river.

  Waiting for us on the far bank, as we emerged dripping from the torrent, was a band of Pathans going down to Dasht-i-Rewat; father, mother, two sons and a sulky-looking girl on a pony, an evil-looking bunch, the men armed with rifles. As we went past they mumbled something to Abdul Ghiyas.

  ‘What did they say?’ Hugh asked him when we were clear of them.

  ‘That there are robbers on the road between here and Parian who have just taken everything from a man travelling.’

  A couple more miles and we came to a place where the river swirled round the base of a cliff and another torrent came racing down from the left to join it.

  ‘Ao Khawak,’ said Abdul Ghiyas, ‘the meeting of the waters; where it comes in from the Khawak Pass. The way of Timur Leng.’

  This was the place where Timur Leng’s wild cavalry crossed the Hindu Kush on their way from the Oxus to India in 1398.

  The bridge over the Khawak consisted of two parallel treetrunks, one higher than the other, with the gap between filled with rocks and turf. The trunks were loose and as we trod on them they rolled apart and chunks of rock and turf crashed into the torrent below.

  The fording of the river itself was not easy for the horses. They staggered through the torrent with their drivers perched on top of the loads, but it was nothing to what they were to be called on to do later.

  Beyond the river we found the traveller who had had everything taken from him. He was a young man of about twenty and he was lying face downwards in the shadow of a boulder with his skull smashed to pulp. Whoever had done it had probably struck him down from behind while someone else had engaged him in conversation. The instrument was lying some yards away – a long splinter of rock
with blood on it. He was only very recently dead.

  ‘What do you think we should do?’ Hugh asked Abdul Ghiyas. His suggestion was so eminently suitable that we adopted it.

  ‘Let us leave immediately,’ he said.

  Above our heads hovered a large bearded vulture, a lammergeier, a whitish bird with brown wing markings. As we stood there it was joined by another.

  ‘We call them “the burnt ones”,’ said Abdul Ghiyas.

  After placing a large flat stone over the head of the corpse we went on our way.

  Now the road became even more desolate, the gorge narrower still, filled with a wild chaos of granite blocks. We could see the flood level of the river, thirty feet above its present course. High on the cliffs above where there were slabs of limestone, we could see the mouths of dark caves. Higher still granite cliffs overhung the track and from time to time a slab of granite would detach itself and fall with a clang into the gorge. It was no place to linger.

  Yet down by the water’s edge, wheat was growing in minute fields hemmed in by rocks, and the water sparkled as it ran swiftly in the irrigation ditches. There were many birds; rollers, black and white Asian magpies and a beautiful bird whose feathers had a blue or green sheen according to the way the light fell on them. It was hot but the wind was blowing down the gorge, bringing with it a cool green smell of water. In spite of its air of solitude, the track was well used. In the dust beneath our feet beetles were at work cutting up and carting away newly-dropped horse dung to some private storehouse. On the steep eastern side of the valley 400 feet above us an irrigation channel slowly descended, flowing in the opposite direction to the river and giving the curious illusion of flowing uphill. Perhaps it was flowing uphill. In this place anything seemed possible.

  Finally after two hours’ march, during which we constantly drank from the river and bathed our faces in it, we came out of the gorge. The valley broadened out; to the east the hills rolled back, covered in mustard-coloured grass like grass which has had snow on it. Beyond these hills a range of big jagged snow peaks rose up shimmering in the sun.

  ‘Parian,’ said Hugh. ‘This is the upper valley and those peaks are the outriders of Mir Samir. Tomorrow we’ll see it at last.’

  * * *

  1. Kuruh.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Western Approaches

  In a few minutes we came to a hamlet of rude houses, the ragged inhabitants of which were strangely at variance with the clean air of the valley itself. This was Shahnaiz: the place Hugh and Dreesen had reached on their first day’s march, forty miles from Omarz.

  Beyond it the road climbed again high up the side of the hills, but we kept to the banks of the river, in the water-meadows of soft spongy grass. After the confined close air of the gorge it was good to be in the open with a cool breeze fanning us. Soon the water-meadows ended at the bottom of a crumbling cliff.

  The river was quite shallow but running very fast. We decided to cross it. It was a hazardous operation. The water was only thigh deep but the current was immensely strong and the bottom was formed of stones the size of footballs slippery with weeds. Half-way across we were forced to abandon the attempt; if a man slipped in such a place he would be gone for good. We should have known better than to attempt a short cut.

  We splashed back through the meadow by the way we had come and ascended the side of the hill where we met our drivers who had been watching our efforts with some amusement.

  ‘In Panjshir and in Parian there is only one way and that is the way of the road,’ remarked Abdul Ghiyas. ‘The roads were made long ago; if there were another way we should use it.’

  Together we went on until we came to a suicide bridge with a village beyond it, the houses nothing more than heaps of stones, but down by the river there was a grove of poplars, an ideal camping place, at which we looked lovingly.

  By now we were both a little tired of one another’s company. Hugh continued along the west bank and I, following the road as Abdul Ghiyas had advised, crossed the bridge with the horses and scrambled up through a labyrinth of alleys into the village which was more primitive than anything I had yet seen. It seemed deserted; the doors of every house were padlocked with half a handcuff, made, I was glad to see, in Birmingham. The alleys were blocked by great boulders over which the horses were moved with the greatest difficulty. Outside the village we floundered ankle-deep in a maze of water lanes which wound round the fields.

  A mile away, now far ahead of us striding out stiffly high above the river, I could see Hugh. He looked very solitary marching through Asia without attendants. But it was already clear that he had quite literally chosen the path of wisdom. As for the rest of us, at times we seemed to be making progress but then the track, which was nothing more than a morass between stone walls, would wind round the property of some landowner and land us back where we had started. Nor was there anyone to guide us; like the village the fields, too, were completely deserted.

  ‘Everyone is at the Aylaq,’ said Abdul Ghiyas, ‘gone to the summer pastures.’

  In two hours we reached a camping place at the mouth of the Darra Samir. It was a grove of poplars near the river. Hugh was already there. ‘In Parian there is only one way and that is the way of the road,’ he said meaningly to Abdul Ghiyas, who blushed.

  Too tired to be hungry we forced ourselves to eat the noxious bread that Badar Khan had got from Shahnaiz and between us ate a tin of jam from the compo. ration boxes that we had now broached. The rations were a bit of a shock: all four boxes were the same. They were of a particularly rare kind, without biscuits. Most of the tins contained Irish stew. The future that stretched before us looked unrosy.

  Although far from the next village, Kaujan, we had already been smelled out, in the mysterious Asian manner, by a number of elderly inhabitants who were too decrepit to make the ascent with the others to the high pastures, some of which were as high as 14,000 feet, but were ready for a good jaw.

  Here, in Parian, a valley twenty-five miles long extending to the Anjuman Pass on the main divide of the Hindu Kush, the people were still Tajiks but with flatter, heavier faces, due perhaps to a mixture of Uzbeg blood from the north. They were poorer and more primitive than the people in the lower valley, living a semi-nomad existence, taking their sheep, goats, cattle and ponies (for they are fond of horse coping) up to the high valleys in the spring and staying there until the first snows in September. In Parian there is no fruit and few trees except poplars and willows and these only close to the river. From their fields these people get beans, barley and corn; from the high pastures milk and butter.

  As the sun set it became very cold with a nasty draught blowing down the Darra Samir, ‘The breath of Mir Samir’, as one of the old men picturesquely described it. It made us huddle over the fire which, in addition to dung, was now fed with a sweet-smelling root called buta, and we talked of Panjshir Tajiks and the mountain. One of the old men opened the conversation.

  ‘Panjshir,’ he piped, ‘is sarhadd, the frontier.’

  ‘The frontier of what?’

  ‘The Jadidi and of the country to the north. The Panjshir road is the road to Turkestan.’

  ‘Ah,’ everyone said, nodding, ‘that is what we call it. “The Road to Turkestan”.’

  ‘Who are the Jadidi?’

  ‘The Jadidi are the Nuristanis. Until the great Emir (he meant Abdur Rahman) converted them by the sword they were pagans and great robbers.’

  ‘They still are,’ said someone.

  ‘We Tajiks had five leaders to defend the valley. They were the panj shir, the five tigers, holding the eastern passes against the Jadidi; the way to Turkestan (he meant the Anjuman Pass) against the Badakhshanis, the Khawak and the Salang against the Turkis (Uzbegs) of Andarab and the Jabal us Siraj (at the southern end of the Panjshir) against the Shi’a Hazaras. That is the meaning of Panjshir.’

  ‘Not so,’ said Abdul Ghiyas, who had been listening with rising impatience. ‘Shir is “tiger”; in the old
times there were many tigers in the valley. Even now on the summit of the Til, going into Andarab, there is a tiger. People have seen it.’

  ‘But the great Amir says that Panjshir is called after the tombs of five saints of Islam.’ This from Hugh.

  ‘Where are the tombs?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ At this all the old men grunted. This was not a subject to be discussed by a stripling of thirty-five, an unbeliever, from outside the valley.

  ‘But it has also been said that Panj-sher are the five lion sons of Pandu,’ he went on.

  ‘Who says this?’ they all asked.

  ‘The Hindus of Hind. I have read it in a book of an Amrikai.’1

  ‘An Amrikai!’ It was obvious that this was acceptable to no one. ‘And the people of Hind, what do they know of Panjshir? Those that have made the journey to it have perished by the sword.’

  ‘It is none of these things. It is from shirmahi, the tiger fish that is in the river,’ said another.

  ‘Pah,’ everyone said.

  But about the name Mir Samir no one had any idea at all.

  ‘No man has been there,’ was all they could say, ‘even the bozi kuhi, the ibex, has only once trodden there. That was in the time of Tufan-i-Nūh, when Noah’s Flood covered the earth. Then the waters rushed up the valley destroying everything, and so up the Darra to Kuh-i-Mir Samir itself. And there the last ibex took refuge on the very top. And the water followed up to the very belly of the ibex. Then it rose no more and after a while began to sink; ever since that time the belly of the ibex has been white. This is how it came to be.’

  A mist had risen from the river enveloping us like smoke. The old men rose to go. One of them was the water bailiff, the Mirab, ‘Lord of the Waters’. On his way home he opened the sluices in the higher fields, so that by three o’clock we all woke to find ourselves lying in a puddle, the whole wood swimming in water. Later still there was a terrific crashing outside the wood where a wild pig had got into a field of Indian corn and was churning it up. All night the horses were restless, pawing and snorting. I had dreadful dreams.