A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

by Eric Newby

  The lower part was obscured by pesar ha ye Mir Samir, ‘one of the sons’, a mountain loosely chained to the parent at a great height, 18,000 feet high, rising from the pediment of snow slopes above the glacier and running parallel with it across our front. From the valley it had seemed a continuous ridge but immediately beyond the lake it broke in a gap a mile wide, then rose again but not to the same heights. Between these two ridges there seemed to be the entrance to a deep valley, the far side rising in a fiendish-looking unscalable ridge, serrated with sharp pinnacles, like a mouth full of filed teeth.

  Hugh was full of excitement.

  ‘That’s the way to the foot of the west wall.’

  ‘That’s the place I was hit on the head by a great stone with Carless Seb.’ This from Abdul Ghiyas who was looking extremely unwell; I was not feeling so good myself, having now rejoined Hugh in his troubles; inheritance of the deadly drinking habits we had cultivated in the Panjshir.

  We set up our little tent. It was impossible to drive in pegs, there was too little earth. They simply folded up on themselves; instead we used boulders. With its sewn-in ground sheet and storm-proof doors it was like an oven. From it we emerged dripping with perspiration.

  Abdul Rahim and Shir Muhammad now withdrew, having first bade us farewell in their different ways. There were tears in Abdul Rahim’s eyes as he clasped our hands. I was as deeply affected as he was. I respected his judgement in mountain matters and this demonstration of emotion I took as a confession that he did not expect to see us again. Nothing could shake that man of iron, Shir Muhammad; he set off down the mountain without a word and without a backward glance. He was negotiating with one of the Pathan nomads to buy a lamb and was anxious to resume business.

  It was half past seven; already the day seemed to have lasted unduly long. Hugh was already laying out the gear.

  ‘The sooner we get to the top, the sooner we can leave; this is no place to linger,’ he said.

  For once I agreed with him. Before we left I slipped behind a rock (no remarkable thing now that both of us were doing this anything up to a dozen times a day) and quickly studied the section of the pamphlet on the ascent of glaciers. It was rather like last-minute revision while waiting for the doors of the examination room to open, and equally futile.

  We set off at a quarter to eight. All three of us were now dressed alike in windproof suits, Italian boots and dark goggles. On our heads we wore our own personal headgear. It was essential to wear something as the heat of the sun was already terrific. Our faces were smeared with glacial cream and our lips with a strange-tasting pink unguent of Austrian manufacture. We looked like head-hunters.

  At first the way led over solid rock which shone like lead, polished by the friction of thousands of tons of ice passing over it. It was only a surface colour; chipped, it showed lighter underneath, like the rest of the mountain, a sort of unstable granite. To the left was another lake, smaller than the lower one but more beautiful, the water bright blue, rippled by the wind, inviting us to abandon this folly. At last we reached the terminal moraine, the rock brought down by the glacier now locked across the foot of it in confusion. It was as if a band of giants had been playing cards with slabs of rock, leaving them heaped sixty feet high. Through this mess we picked our way like ants. From the depths of the moraine came the whirring of hidden streams. Above us the ‘Son of Mir Samir’ towered into the sky, and from its fastnesses came unidentifiable tumbling sounds.

  At eight-thirty we reached the glacier, the first I had ever been on in my life. It was about a mile and a half long. The ice was covered at this, the shallow end, by about a foot of snow, frozen hard during the night but now melting rapidly. The water was spurting out of the foot of the glacier as if from a series of hosepipes.

  We embarked on it, keeping close in under the snow slopes which rose sheer to the mountain on the right hand; now in the cold shadow of the ‘son’ we put on our crampons. Apart from the day in Milan when I had bought them in a hurry, it was the first time I had worn crampons. I didn’t dare ask Hugh whether he had, but I noticed that his too were new.

  ‘I do not wish to continue,’ said Abdul Ghiyas, courageously voicing my own thoughts at this moment. It was obvious that he had never worn crampons from the difficulty he was having in adjusting them. ‘My head is very bad.’

  ‘My stomach is bad; the feet of Newby Seb are bad, yet we shall continue,’ said Hugh.

  Cruelly, we encouraged him to go on. Perhaps it was the effect of altitude that made us do so. At any rate we roped up and he allowed himself to be linked between us without demur.

  We set off; Abdul Ghiyas with his awful head, Hugh with his stomach, myself with my feet and my stomach. Apart from these ills, we all agreed that we felt splendid, at least we could feel our legs moving.

  ‘I think we’ve acclimatized splendidly,’ said Hugh with satisfaction. I found it difficult to imagine the condition and state of mind of someone who had acclimatized badly.

  We moved up the glacier, plodding along with the unaccustomed crampons laced to our boots, clockwork figures, desiccated by the sun, our attention concentrated on the surface immediately ahead which we carefully probed with ice-axes for crevasses. All the time I had the feeling that our behaviour was ludicrous. Perhaps a more experienced party would have looked at the glacier and decided that there were none, at any rate as low down as this. But in the absence of any qualified person to ask it seemed better to continue as we were.

  The light was very trying; even with goggles it was like driving into someone else’s headlights. We were thirsty and all around us was running water. It was difficult to resist the temptation to scoop up a mouthful but the state of our insides was sufficient warning for us not to do so.

  Now the angle of the glacier increased as we began to climb towards the head. Here the snow was deep and I began to cut steps. At first unnecessarily large but, as I got better, smaller ones. The rock wall was looming up now above us but running round the head of the glacier between us and the wall was something that looked like an anti-tank ditch.

  ‘Bergschrund,’ said Hugh.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A sort of crevasse. This one’s only five feet deep.’

  ‘How do you know?’ We were in a rather unsuitable place for a prolonged discussion.

  ‘The year I was with Dreesen I slipped coming down and fell in it.’

  ‘Did you have crampons?’

  ‘No. Get on.’

  I went on, marvelling. Even with crampons it seemed difficult enough but, of course, we were all wearing rubber soles. With nails it would have been more feasible; but then Hugh had not been wearing nailed boots in 1952 either.

  Slowly we gained height until we were close under the overhang of the rock wall which was in cold shadow with great slivers of ice reaching down to impale us. Here the bergschrund gave out and we crossed it and began to traverse across the top of it on snow that was so hard and shiny as to be almost ice. It was impossible to see into the bergschrund; only the opening was visible. For all I knew it might have been a hundred and fifty feet deep.

  Traversing this steep slope was far more difficult than the direct ascent we had been making up to now. For the novice crampons are both a blessing and a disaster and I was continually catching the points in my opposite trouser leg. For some time we had been belaying and moving in pitches in the correct manner taught us by the Doctor.

  Finally at ten-thirty we hauled ourselves wearily up a few feet of easy rock and on to the top of the wall. We had only been travelling for two hours but at this altitude it was sufficient for mountaineers of our calibre. At this point the wall was about fifteen feet wide; below us to the east it fell away in a sheer drop of two hundred feet to the head of the other glacier, the twin of the one we had just ascended. It was a much larger twin, tumbling away to the east in an immense field of white. Above it the north face of the east ridge swept up 3,000 feet from the glacier in fearful snow slopes, like something o
ut of the pamphlet illustrating the dangers of avalanche, with overhangs of black rock and a really deep-looking bergschrund high up, under them.

  ‘What about rappelling down on to it?’ said Hugh.

  ‘How do you propose to get back if we do?’

  ‘It would be difficult,’ he admitted.

  Somewhere above us was the summit but it was invisible, masked by the north-west buttress, smooth and unclimbable from the point where it was joined by the wall we were perched on. The wall itself was crowned with pinnacles of rock thirty feet high; at this moment we were in a dip between two of them.

  Far away beyond the east glacier and a labyrinth of lesser mountains was a great mass of peaks, all snow-covered; one of them like an upturned cornet.

  ‘That’s Point 5953, the one we’re going to climb if we have time after this one,’ Hugh said.1

  The whole thing was on such a vast scale; I felt a pigmy, powerless.

  ‘Just what I thought,’ Hugh said. ‘It just confirms what Dreesen and I decided last time. Too much for us.’

  I smothered an overwhelming impulse to ask him why we had come this far to find out something he already knew, but it was no place for irony; besides, the view was magnificent.

  ‘I’d like to see the other side of that ridge,’ he went on, indicating the east ridge. ‘If we fail on this side we’ll try it, there’ll be less snow.’

  ‘But more rock.’

  ‘It’s only three days’ march. We’ve got to go there in any case. It’s the way into Nuristan.’

  The retreat began. I was end man. The feeling of relief that I experienced when I knew that we were to go no farther, coupled with the belief that the bergschrund was only five feet deep, had induced in me a light-headed sense of freedom from care; what the Americans call euphoria, a state of mind not consonant with my present responsibilities. It was no place for playing about. The snow was as hard as ice; none of us knew how to make an ice-axe belay on such a surface.

  It was all right when I was controlling Abdul Ghiyas’s descent. He was behaving splendidly anyway and, probably from an innate appreciation of what to do in such a situation, he was handling the tools with which he had been issued admirably. It was only when I was descending myself that I felt irresponsible. Twice I caught my crampons in my trousers and slipped, giggling, fortunately in places where the snow was deep and soft.

  Finally Abdul Ghiyas shouted to Hugh, who immediately halted. ‘He says you’re trying to kill us all,’ he bellowed up at me. ‘Are you mad?’

  ‘We’re over the worst.’

  ‘I don’t care a—what we’re over. Watch what you’re doing.’

  I was sobered.

  By now all three of us were tired. The journey over the glacier was a test of endurance. Our goggles were steamed up; we moved infinitely slowly. As we neared the end of the glacier, my horizon dropped more and more until it took in nothing but the loop of rope between myself and Abdul Ghiyas and the ice immediately underfoot. In the ice were mysterious holes eight inches deep and perhaps an inch wide. It was as though they had been made with a drill or else as though a plug had been removed. At the bottom there was sometimes a little earth or a single stone. The glacier was now in full melt: from beneath it came the whirring of invisible streams and when we reached the foot the water roared from it like a mill race in flood.

  We reached our camp at half past one. The exhilaration we had felt perched high on the wall seemed a dream, something we had never experienced. Now all the disadvantages of the place we had chosen as ‘Camp I’ were apparent. The sun was high overhead and there was no shade; the tent was like a small oven. It was not constructed for this sort of thing; it was intended for ‘the final assault’ and lacked a fly sheet which would have reduced the temperature inside to a bearable level for at least one of the party. ‘The tent for the approach march’, fitted with all the aids of comfort that any explorer could desire, ventilators, fly screens, ridge poles and extensions, had been a non-starter. It was an excellent tent but it had been obvious, when we had erected it in a garden in Kabul, that if we took it with us we should be spending most of our waking hours putting it up and dismantling it.

  Tentless, we rigged up our sleeping-bag covers on the ends of our ice-axes and cowered behind them, too tired to do anything but drink tea and nibble a little mint cake.

  Hugh looked green. ‘As well as that other trouble, I’ve got a splitting head,’ he said.

  ‘At least your head’s not bleeding.’ I was carrying out my twice-daily dressing on my feet; each time the operation became more and more gruesome. I was wondering whether there would be enough lint to last the whole journey. ‘And I’ve got an inside, too.’

  Abdul Ghiyas said he proposed to give up climbing altogether. ‘I have a headache. Also, I have a numerous family,’ he remarked. I sympathized with him. Similar thoughts had been occurring to me constantly throughout the morning.

  With the general lack of amenity and conversation resembling that of three elderly hypochondriacs, I found it impossible to sleep. All through the afternoon I trudged miles over the plateau. I even revisited the higher lake and lay down on my stomach half-tempted to drink. The shallows were a ledge of rock two feet wide; beyond they plunged into green, icy depths, in which strange fish, like little brown sticks fitted with furry stoles, shrugged themselves along.

  Besides the primulas which were growing everywhere, there were golden ranunculus and pontentilla, blue nepeta and yellow and red rose root; there were bees and small ivory butterflies with grey wing markings; high above the plateau choughs with ragged wings cawed sadly; I also saw numbers of small speckled birds rather like thrushes and, wheeling about the crags near the Son of Mir Samir, one solitary great eagle.

  By seven o’clock the sun had gone from the plateau and once again clouds swirled about the mountain. After a good dinner of soup, chocolate, jam and coffee we got into the tent. It was a very tiny tent so Abdul Ghiyas slept in the open. Wrapped in an Arctic sleeping-bag with a hood fitted to it so that he looked like some fantastic insect at the chrysalis stage, he was really better off than we were.

  Before retiring into it he made us arm ourselves with knives and ice-axes.

  ‘Against the wolves.’

  ‘It seems silly,’ I said to Hugh.

  ‘It’s all right for us. We’re inside.’

  Like all the other nights I ever passed with Hugh it was a disturbed one. The tent fitted us like a tight overcoat and it was difficult to avoid waking one another on the journeys to the outside that we were forced to make with increasing frequency as the night wore on. Every time one or other of us emerged Abdul Ghiyas would start up brandishing his ice-axe. Exposed on the mountain-side in the wind, everything crackling cold around us, Abdul Ghiyas’s night terrors seemed more tangible.

  Yet in the morning Hugh seemed surprised when I complained that I had had a bad night.

  ‘Whenever I got up you were sound asleep.’

  ‘I wasn’t. That was to avoid hurting your feelings. I pretended to be asleep. You were asleep when I got up. I heard you snoring.’

  ‘But I didn’t sleep at all.’

  Whether because of too little sleep or too much we all got up far too late in the morning and it was half past five before we left. We should have started an hour earlier. From what we had experienced the previous day, it was obvious that it was going to be far too hot to beat about investigating routes up the mountain much after eleven o’clock. Abdul Ghiyas remained behind. But it was difficult to envy him his solitary vigil, exposed to the sun on this beautiful yet awful plateau.

  Our destination was the south-west side of Mir Samir – if such a side did in fact exist, what was by no means certain. We hoped to reach it through the break in the rock wall beyond the lake.

  Inside, beyond the break, the valley was a fearsome place choked with vast boulders that rocked underfoot at the lightest touch; from far under them came the sound of distant streams. To the left the inner walls of
The Son rose sheer above us; to the right the smooth icy wall from which Abdul Ghiyas’s great stone had descended on him. Ahead the moraine was so steep that the mountain itself was invisible.

  At the top we came to a wall of rock with a trail scooped out of it by ibex, up which we got easily enough, roped together, and found ourselves in a vast box with three sides, shut in under the west wall, with the ‘Son’ towering above us on the left. It was a dark fearsome place at this hour, full of swirling mist which obscured the summit, with black rock underfoot in which were pools of water still covered with thick ice from the night frost. To the right Abdul Ghiyas’s stone-falling wall died out, and there was a defile between the end of it and the mountain which rose in a vast buttress to a false summit. Up one side of this buttress there was a possible way to the false summit, starting with steep snow, but there was no way of knowing whether one could reach the summit itself from it other than by going to see, which neither of us was anxious to do. The foot of the buttress was littered with fragments of rock that had only fallen quite recently. As we moved gingerly round the base, other small pieces came whistling down, none of them larger than a penny but heavy and quite lethal, like falling shrapnel.

  ‘I wish those climbing waitresses from the inn were here,’ said Hugh. He voiced a thought that I had been about to express myself. ‘They’d be worth their weight in gold.’

  Quite suddenly we found ourselves looking on to another glacier. The part we could see was about two miles long and on the far side was the ridge we had been looking for, the south-west ridge, a jagged reef a thousand feet high, curving round at the head of the glacier and joining on to the mountain itself in much the same way as the wall on the other glacier but far higher and longer; like a saw with teeth, sixty feet high.

  The glacier was a strange place. Here there was no sound of rushing water. There was an immense silence except for the occasional rumbling of falling rock.