A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

by Eric Newby

  ‘If the south face is no good we can always come back and try here,’ said Hugh. As always he seemed unconscious of the effect he created by such a remark.

  Ahead of us in the main valley a waterfall tumbled down over a landslide of rocks; climbing up beside it we rounded the easternmost bastion of the mountain and entered the upper valley of the Chamar.

  We felt like dwarfs. On our right the whole southern aspect of Mir Samir revealed itself: the east ridge like a high garden wall topped with broken glass; the snow-covered summit; the glaciers receding far up under the base of the mountain in the summer heat; and below them the moraines, wildernesses of rock pouring down to the first pasture, with the river running through it, a wide shallow stream fed by innumerable rivulets. To the east the mountains rose straight up to a level 17,000 feet, then, rising and falling like a great dipper, encircled the head of the valley, forming the final wall of the south-west glacier where we had made our unsuccessful effort among the ice toadstools on the other side only two days before.

  ‘On the other side of that,’ said Hugh, pointing to the sheer wall with patches of snow on it to the east, ‘is Nuristan.’

  It was a lonely place; the last nomad tents were far down the valley in the meadow below the waterfall. Here there was only one solitary aylaq, a wall of stones built against an overhanging rock and roofed over with turf, the property of the headman of Shahr i Boland, a Tajik village we had passed in Parian on the way to the Chamar. The shepherd was the headman’s son. As we came, more dead than alive with our tongues lolling, to the camping place on a stretch of turf hemmed in by square boulders, he appeared with a bowl of mast, wearing long robes and a skull cap, the image of Alec Guinness disguised as a Cardinal.

  It was midday. The light was blinding. To escape it we crawled into clefts in the rocks and lay there in shadow, each at a different level, in our own little boxes, like a chest of drawers.

  As soon as he had eaten, the Thanador of the Nawak Pass went off without a word to anyone.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘He’s in a huff because they kept calling him a German.’

  ‘Well, it is rather insulting. I wouldn’t like it myself.’

  ‘But he was a bore.’

  All through the afternoon we rested, moving from rock to rock to escape the sun as it spied us out. Hugh read The Hound of the Baskervilles; I studied a grammar of the Kafir language. Apart from the pamphlets on mountaineering, this was the only serious book the expedition possessed. (Put to other uses our library was disappearing at an alarming rate.) Both of us had already read all John Buchan, who in the circumstances in which we found ourselves had been found wanting, the mock-modesty of his heroes becoming only too apparent, the temptation to transport them in the imagination to the Hindu Kush too great to resist. Remarks something like ‘Though I say it who shouldn’t, I’m a pretty good mountaineer, but this was the hardest graft I ever remember,’ cut very little ice with people in our position about to embark on a similar venture with no qualifications at all.

  Notes on the Bashgali (Kāfir) Language, by Colonel J. Davidson of the Indian Staff Corps, Calcutta, 1901, had been assembled by the author after a two-year sojourn in Chitral with the assistance of two Kafirs of the Bashgali tribe and consisted of a grammar of the language and a collection of sentences. I had not shown this book to Hugh. He had been pretty scathing about my attempts to learn Persian, no easy matter in my thirty-sixth year, confronted by Tajiks who at any rate had their own ideas on how it should be spoken.

  I had schemed to memorize a number of expressions in the Kafir language and surprise Hugh when we met up with the people, but, in the midst of all our other preoccupations, the book had been lost in one of the innumerable sacks; now with Nuristan just over the mountain, it was discovered in the bottom of the rice sack, where it had been ever since I had visited the market in Kabul.

  Reading the 1,744 sentences with their English equivalents, I began to form a disturbing impression of the waking life of the Bashgali Kafirs.

  ‘Shtal latta wōs bā padrē ū prētt tū nashtontī mrlosh. Do you know what that is?’

  It was too late to surprise Hugh with a sudden knowledge of the language.

  ‘What?’

  ‘In Bashgali it’s “If you have had diarrhoea many days you will surely die.”’

  ‘That’s not much use,’ he said. He wanted to get on with Conan Doyle.

  ‘What about this then? Bilugh âo na pī bilosh. It means, “Don’t drink much water; otherwise you won’t be able to travel.”’

  ‘I want to get on with my book.’

  Wishing that Hyde-Clarke had been there to share my felicity I continued to mouth phrases aloud until Hugh moved away to another rock, unable to concentrate. Some of the opening gambits the Bashgalis allowed themselves in the conversation game were quite shattering. Inī ash ptul p’mich ē manchī mrisht wariā’m. ‘I saw a corpse in a field this morning’, and Tū chi sē biss gur bītī? ‘How long have you had a goitre?’, or even Iā jūk noi bazisnā prēlom. ‘My girl is a bride.’

  Even the most casual remarks let drop by this remarkable people had the impact of a sledgehammer. Tū tōtt baglo piltiā. ‘Thy father fell into the river.’ I non angur ai; tū tā duts angur ai. ‘I have nine fingers; you have ten.’ Ōr manchī aiyo; buri aīsh kutt. ‘A dwarf has come to ask for food.’ And Iā chitt bitto tū jārlom, ‘I have an intention to kill you’, to which the reply came pat, Tū bilugh lē bidiwā manchī assish, ‘You are a very kind-hearted man.’

  Their country seemed a place where the elements had an almost supernatural fury: Dum allangitī atsitī ī sundī basnâ brā. ‘A gust of wind came and took away all my clothes’, and where nature was implacable and cruel: Zhī marē badist tā wō ayō kakkok damītī gwā. ‘A lammergeier came down from the sky and took off my cock.’ Perhaps it was such misfortunes that had made the inhabitants so petulant: Tū biluk wari walal manchī assish. ‘You are a very jabbering man.’ Tū kai dugā iā ushpē pâ vich: tū pâ vilom. ‘Why do you kick my horse? I will kick you.’ Tū iā dugā oren vich? Tū iā oren vichibâ ō tū jārlam. ‘Why are you pushing me? If you push me I will do for you.’

  A race difficult to ingratiate oneself with by small talk: Tō’st kazhīr krui p’ptī tā chuk zhi prots asht? ‘How many black spots are there on your white dog’s back?’ was the friendly inquiry to which came the chilling reply: Iā krũi brobar adr rang azzā: shtring na ass. ‘He is a yellow dog all over, and not spotted.’

  Perhaps the best part was the appendix which referred to other books dealing with the Kafir languages. One passage extracted from a book1 by a Russian savant, a M. Terentief, gave a translation of what he said was the Lord’s Prayer in the language of the Bolors or Siah-Posh Kafirs:

  Babo vetu osezulvini. Malipatve egobunkvele egamalako. Ubukumkani bako mabuphike. Intando yako mayenzibe. Emkhlya beni, nyengokuba isenziva egulvini. Sipe namglya nye ukutiya kvetu kvemikhla igemikhla. Usikcolele izono zetu, nyengokuba nati siksolela abo basonaio tina. Unga singekisi ekulingveli zusisindise enkokhlakalveni, ngokuba bubobako ubukumkhani namandkhla nobungkvalisa, kude kube igunapakade. Amene.

  ‘It does not agree with the Waigul or Bashgalī dialect as recorded in any book which I have seen,’ the Colonel wrote rather plaintively. ‘There are no diacritical marks.’

  But later in a supplementary appendix he was able to add a dry footnote to the effect that since writing the above a copy of the translation had been submitted by Dr Grierson, the distinguished editor of the Linguistic Survey of India, to Professor Khun of Munich who pronounced that it was an incorrect copy of the version of the Lord’s Prayer in the language of the Amazulla Kaffirs of South Africa.

  * * *

  1. M. A. Terentief, Russia and England in Asia, 1875. Transl. by Dankes, Calcutta, 1876.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Round 2

  The two of us left at five o’clock the next morning to find a way to the east ridge. Abdul Ghiyas, sti
ll wearing his windproof suit and labouring under the delusion that he was a sergeant, produced green tea for us brewed as strong as the army sort, and very nasty it was. We both harboured a determination to reach the ridge and, if possible, the summit, that in retrospect I find unbelievable. Our drivers watched us go sadly and Abdul Ghiyas asked us what he should do if we failed to return. (All our impulses were to tell him to head a search party but this seemed unfair.) Apart from telling him to go home, it was difficult to know what to say. The air was full of the promise of disaster. I had not felt it so strongly since the day I embarked on what was to prove my last voyage in a submarine and the wardroom orderly had come running down the mole waving my unpaid bill.

  After an interminable climb through a wilderness of black rock we reached the moraine at the foot of the glacier. A few minutes on the moraine convinced us that we would be better on the black rock, however unstable, and we moved back on to it close under the ridge, leaping from plate to plate as they see-sawed underfoot. Here we met our first snowfields, so tiny that it seemed hardly worth while putting on crampons, but they were frozen hard and we fell several times, hurting ourselves badly, so we roped ourselves instead.

  At 17,000 feet we were high up on the approaches to the ridge, following a narrow ledge. Above our heads a sheer wall rose a thousand feet to the ridge itself, below it fell away five hundred to the head of the glacier. It was a charming spot; the wall overhung the ledge in a bulge and under it there was a little earth in which giant primulas were growing. Farther under still, in perpetual shade, columns of ice and hard snow stretched from roof to floor.

  But this was something seen only as we clumped by; soon we were out in the sun again, which was now very hot, and were crossing another snowfield, no bigger than a football pitch, that some strange action of wind or weather had forced up in stalks four feet high set together, like a forest of fossil trees, through which we battled our way sweating and swearing horribly.

  Up another ledge, this time less friendly than the first and up to now the property of the ibex whose droppings littered it, and we were on bare rock with streams of melting snow pouring over it. It was not a particularly impressive face but there were hardly any projections to belay to, the handholds either sloped downwards or else were full of grit, a sort of shiny mica that poured ceaselessly down from above and had to be picked out of each handhold in turn, as lethal for the fingers as powdered glass.

  I had never seen such a mountain. It was nothing like anything we had seen in Wales. To someone like myself, completely unversed in geological expressions, it seemed to be made from a sort of shattered granite; ‘demoralized’ was the word that rose continually to my lips while, as the thaw continued and progressively larger rocks bounded past us on their way to the glacier, the childish ‘it isn’t fair’ was only repressed with difficulty.

  To cheer one another in this hour, when the first intimations of fatigue were creeping up on us and while whoever was leader was scrabbling awfully with his feet for a possible foot-hold where none existed, we pretended to be Damon Runyon characters trying to climb a mountain. Hugh was Harry the Horse.

  ‘Dose Afghans soitinly build lousy mountains’ was what he said, as a particularly large boulder went bouncing past us over the edge and on to the glacier below with a satisfying crash.

  At eleven we reached the foot of a gully and, with the help of the pamphlet, which we consulted unashamedly in moments of crisis, ascended it.

  By this time, by the application of common sense and without the help of the book, we had evolved a far swifter method of roped climbing than we had ever practised before. Previously if Hugh led he had waited for me to come up to the place where he was belayed and, when I had hooked myself on, repeated the whole ghastly process. Now, instead of halting, I went straight on up to the full extent of the rope; in this way we moved much faster. Like Red Indians made cunning by suffering, we were learning by experience. That what we were doing is common mountaineering practice is a measure of our ignorance.

  In this way we ascended this nasty gully, the head of which was jammed with loose rocks, all ready to fall, and at eleven-thirty came out on to snow on top of the east ridge.

  It was a tremendous moment. We had reached it too low down and further progress towards the top was made impossible by a monster pinnacle of extreme instability. Nevertheless, the summit looked deceptively close. The altimeter after a good deal of cuffing read 18,000 feet.

  ‘That’s about right,’ Hugh said. ‘Splendid, isn’t it!’

  ‘I’m glad I came.’

  ‘Are you really?’ he said. He sounded delighted.

  ‘I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.’ And I really meant it.

  Two thousand feet below us, like an enormous new frying-pan sizzling in the sun, was the east glacier. Away to the east the view was blocked by a bend in the ridge in which we sat, but to the south the mountains seemed to surge on for ever.

  Hugh was full of plans. ‘In some ways I’m sorry we didn’t try that,’ he said, pointing to the impossible slopes that swept down to the east glacier, ‘but perhaps it’s all for the best. What we’ve got to do now,’ he went on, ‘is to put a camp on that second ibex ledge, just below the smooth rock, at about seventeen thousand with enough food for two nights. Then we must hit the ridge farther up, beyond this pinnacle. Unless there’s something extraordinary between here and the top, we ought to be able to make it in one day.’

  ‘What about dead ground?’ I said. It was my stock objection but only put up half-heartedly. At 18,000 feet in the rarefied atmosphere Hugh’s enthusiasm was infectious. Like him, I could now think of nothing else but getting to the top.

  ‘We’ve been six and a half hours from the valley to the ridge but only an hour and a half from the ibex ledge. It shouldn’t take us much more than that to reach the ridge beyond the pinnacle. It’s just a matter of choosing another couloir.1 From there it can’t possibly be more than three hours to the summit, but make it five and a half at the outside – that’s seven hours. If we leave at four in the morning, we’ll be on the top at eleven o’clock. It can’t take up longer to come down. We’ll be at the ibex camp before dark.’

  ‘We’re really going to do it this time,’ I said: both of us were entranced by this nonsensical dream of planning.

  After drinking some coffee and munching Kendal mint cake that seemed the most delicious thing we had ever tasted, we began the descent. Going down was a good deal more horrible than going up and I regretted that so much of our meagre formative training had been concerned with getting to the top and then walking down.

  Two hours later we were once again shoving our way through the snow forest; four hours later, very tired and cross, we dragged ourselves into the camp, surprising Abdul Ghiyas, who was lying on his back watching the ridge through the telescope and giving a kind of running commentary on our progress to Shir Muhammad and Badar Khan. They all seemed pleased to see us.

  While we were waiting, flat out, for tea to arrive, Hugh held his hands towards me.

  ‘Look at these,’ was all he could croak. They were raw, red and bleeding and looked like some little-known cut of meat displayed in a charcuterie. The rock of Mir Samir is granite long past its best that comes away in great chunks with points as sharp as needles and edges that tear the fingers to shreds.2 For today’s climb I had worn wash-leather mitts. They were already worn out. Hugh had been bare-handed. I set to work to bandage his hands. Before I was finished he looked as though he were wearing boxing gloves.

  ‘How the hell do you expect me to climb like this?’ he said gloomily.

  ‘They’ll be better tomorrow.’

  ‘No they won’t.’

  ‘I’ll cook,’ I said, feeling heroic. Each night, unless we were eating Irish stew, we took it in turn to prepare some primitive delicacy. It was really Hugh’s night. This evening I chose Welsh rarebit.

  Fascinated by this dish that was outside their experience, the drivers gathered round me w
hilst I assembled the ingredients, opened the tins of cheese and started the primus. Soon, just as the mixture was turning from liquid to the required consistency, the stove went out. It had been snuffing out all the time in the wind but this time it went out for good because it had run out of fuel. Abdul Ghiyas rushed off and returned with a can of what I soon found, when he started to pour it into the stove, to be water, and Badar Khan, on this the only recorded time during the entire journey that he ever did anything that was not in his contract, produced another containing methylated spirits that would have blown us all to glory. Faced with the failure of the Welsh rarebit and the rapidly cooling stove I got up to find the paraffin can myself, caught the trousers of my windproof suit in the handle of the frying-pan and shot the whole lot over the rocks.

  At this moment, looking sleek and clean, Hugh returned from the stream where he had combed his hair and put on a clean shirt and thick sweater.

  ‘Ready?’ he asked pleasantly.

  ‘It—well isn’t.’

  ‘Taking a long time.’

  Was it possible that he couldn’t see us all trying to scrape it off the rocks?

  ‘You’ll have to wait a long time for this one. I should go to bed.’

  Both of us were temporarily done in. The effort that we had made to put ourselves on the ridge had cost a lot in terms of energy; other more experienced climbers would have done the same expending less. This, and the mental effort of probing and finding a way on an unknown rock face, had been as much as we could take in one day.

  As the sun went down behind Mir Samir in a final blinding blaze of light, the wind rose and howled down on us from the screes. But in spite of it, huddled together over the smoky fire chewing Abdul Ghiyas’s abominable bread, speaking of pilgrimages to Mecca and similar things, we began to feel better. Although there had been no Welsh rarebit, inside us was the best part of a packet of Swiss pea soup, a tinned apple pudding and a pound of strawberry jam eaten straight from the tin with spoons.