A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

by Eric Newby

  We were extremely thirsty. Hugh was already dipping into his pot.

  ‘Do you think it’s all right?’ I asked him. ‘They may have T.B.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The cows.’

  ‘If we’re going to get T.B. we’ve already got it,’ he said. ‘Besides, it’s not cows’ milk. I think it’s goats’ and sheep’s mixed.’

  The bothy was crammed to the point of suffocation with people all jabbering an unknown tongue. I wondered if it were Bashguli. It was certainly unlike any other language I had ever heard but, as the Colonel’s Grammar was once again somewhere hidden away in the baggage train, there was no way of discovering what it was.

  After drinking nearly a quart of icy milk (the pots had just come out of the river), I felt as if I were going to burst. I put down my tree-trunk. Sitting next to me was one of the hairless Espresso boys. He picked up the ladle. ‘Biloogh ow,’ he grunted (at least that was what it sounded like) and began to forcibly feed me as though I were senile.

  One of the older, full bearded men, who seemed to have some sort of authority over the mob, addressed Hugh in Persian. Suddenly he pointed to the north.

  ‘Nikolai!’ he said.

  ‘Nikolai, Nikolai,’ everyone said.

  ‘Inghiliz, Inghiliz,’ said Hugh.

  ‘Nikolai, Nikolai.’

  ‘Damn it. They think we’re Russians,’ he said. He was very upset.

  The halting conversation continued. It appeared that we were the first Europeans ever to come over the Pass.1 The Russians they had heard of; but the British were something new, outside their experience.

  We were in the summer pastures of the Ramguli Katirs, a tribe of the Black-robed Siah-Posh. We were still in the Chamar, the valley and river on both sides of the watershed having the same name.

  Here in the summer months, men of the tribe lived without their women, looking after the flocks and cattle, making curds and butter to store for the winter and for trade with the outside world and every so often sending down some of their number to the valleys far below with the heavy goatskins I had seen hanging outside – a journey of from one to five days according to the destination – a sort of grim compassionate leave.

  All the time this recital was going on we were being ransacked. I could feel inquisitive fingers prying about my person, opening button flaps, groping in my pockets for my handkerchief, scrabbling at my watch-strap.

  We had already passed round several packets of cigarettes and a fight had developed for the empty packets. It was the silver paper they wanted. But what they really longed for were binoculars. They loved my camera, until they discovered that it was not a pair of binoculars, but they soon found Hugh’s telescope and took it outside to try it.

  In a world that has lost the capacity for wonderment, I found it very agreeable to meet people to whom it was possible to give pleasure so simply. Thinking to ingratiate myself still further with them, I handed over my watch. It was the pride of my heart (I, too, am easily pleased) – a brand-new Rolex that I had got in Geneva on the way out from England and reputed proof against every kind of ill-treatment.

  ‘Tell the headman,’ I said to Hugh, ‘that it will work under water.’

  ‘He doesn’t believe it.’

  ‘All right. Tell him it will even work in that,’ pointing to the cauldron which was giving off steam and gloggling noises.

  Hugh told him. The headman said a few words to the young existentialist who had the watch. Before I could stop him he dropped it into the pot.

  ‘He says he doesn’t believe you,’ said Hugh.

  ‘Well, tell him to take it out! I don’t believe it myself.’ By now I was hanging over the thing, frantically fishing with the ladle.

  ‘It’s no good,’ I said. ‘They’ll have to empty it.’

  This time Hugh spoke somewhat more urgently to the headman.

  ‘He says they don’t want to. It’s their dinner.’

  At last somebody hooked it and brought it to the surface, covered with a sort of brown slime. Whatever it was for dinner had an extraordinary nasty appearance. The rescuer held it in the ladle. Though too hot to touch, it was still going. This made an immense impression on everyone, myself included. Unfortunately, it made such an impression on the man himself that he refused to be parted from it and left the bothy.

  ‘Where’s he going?’

  ‘He’s going to try it in the river.’

  At this moment excited shouts and cries rose from outside. Our drivers had arrived. Everyone rushed out to greet them.

  They were a melancholy little group, huddled together at the foot of the rocks, gazing apprehensively towards the bothy in the same way as we had half an hour previously: all except Shir Muhammad who, apparently bored stiff, was looking in the opposite direction.

  Only when they were offered tree-trunks full of milk did they relax a little. Even then Abdul Ghiyas refused to allow his men to enter the aylaq.

  ‘It is better to go on,’ he said. ‘These men are robbers and murderers. We must make our camp far away.’

  ‘They want us to stay the night,’ Hugh told him. ‘They say there will be dancing and singing.’

  But it was no good. He refused absolutely.

  ‘They are very treacherous men. We shall all be slain whilst we sleep.’ I had never seen him so determined.

  ‘Perhaps it’s better,’ said Hugh. ‘They want us to unpack all our gear.’

  The thought of such a mob let loose among our belongings was too appalling to contemplate. We agreed that it was better to go – and as soon as possible.

  When the time came to leave there was no sign of Hugh’s telescope or my watch.

  ‘I want my telescope,’ Hugh told the headman.

  ‘What about my watch?’ I asked, when his telescope was finally produced from somewhere round the corner.

  ‘He says the man who had it has gone away.’

  ‘Well, tell him that he must bring him back.’

  There was a further brief parley.

  ‘He says the man wants to keep it.’ Somehow Hugh contrived to make this sound a reasonable request.

  ‘WELL, HE CAN’T! GET IT BACK FOR ME! MAKE AN EFFORT!’

  ‘It’s you who should make the effort. It’s really too much having to do your work all the time.’

  I could have struck him at this moment.

  ‘Damn it, you can hardly understand the man yourself and you speak fluent Persian. How the devil do you expect me to make him understand anything?’

  Just then I saw the man who had taken my watch skulking behind one of the walls of the aylaq. I went round the building the other way and came up behind him, and took hold of his wrists. Although he was without any apparent muscle, he was immensely strong. He radiated a kind of electric energy.

  ‘Tok-tok,’ I said. At the same time I looked down at my own wrist and nodded my head violently.

  He began to laugh. I looked into his eyes; they were strange and mad. He had about him an air of scarcely controlled violence that I had noticed in some of the others inside the hut. An air of being able to commit the most atrocious crimes and then sit down to a hearty meal without giving them a further thought. The man was a homicidal maniac. Perhaps they were all homicidal maniacs.

  I saw that his right hand was clenched and I forced it open. Inside was my beautiful watch. He had washed it in the river. It was still going and it continued to do so.

  As we left the aylaq three more Nuristanis came running up the valley, moving over the ground in short steps but with unbelievable swiftness. All three had full brown beards, they wore short fringed overcoats of a very dark brown – almost black, perhaps the last vestiges of the glory of the Black-robed Kafirs; on their backs were slung empty pack-frames.

  ‘They have come up from the Ramgul to take the place of those who will go down with butter tomorrow morning,’ said Abdul Ghiyas

  No one said good-bye to us. Some of the Nuristanis had already gone loping up the mountain-side
towards the flocks; the rest had retired into the bothy. It was a characteristic of these people that their interest in strangers was exhausted almost as quickly as it was born.

  * * *

  1. I don’t believe this.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Going Down!

  Below the aylaq the valley widened out until there was an expanse of grass a quarter of a mile wide on either side of the river, which here no longer raced over shallows, as it had higher up, but flowed deep and silent, winding through the meadow between high earthy banks. On the far bank a big herd of black cattle, calves and bullocks were slowly grazing their way up the valley.

  Presently two men came up riding upon bullocks, urging them forward with prods from the forked sticks they both carried. Neither of these men took the slightest notice of us.

  ‘It is time, let us make the camp,’ said Abdul Ghiyas. No one had the strength to disagree with him.

  ‘So long as there are sufficient rocks for each of us to have one when we need it, I don’t care where we camp,’ said Hugh.

  He looked like I felt, wan and exhausted. The last few days had been extremely trying: our reverses on the mountain; the crossing that morning of a pass more than 16,000 feet high, followed immediately by the awful party in the aylaq; all these, in conjunction with our wounds and the ills we had contracted en route, had been almost too much for us. Like dreadnoughts that had received the full force of an enemy salvo, until we could drop anchor in some haven and have time to clear up some of the damage, we were temporarily out of action.

  Having decided to camp, Abdul Ghiyas laid down all sorts of stringent conditions for the choice of a suitable site, mostly of a strategical nature and dictated by his distrust of the Nuristanis, an apprehension I was beginning to share with him.

  Eventually he found a grassy isthmus formed by a double bend in the river that was hemmed in by water on three sides. On it there stood a large rock that offered some protection ‘against being struck down from behind’ as he vividly put it; while on the landward side a fall of boulders from the mountains above provided plenty of the sort of dead ground that interested Hugh and myself far more than questions of defence against an enemy.

  While we were lying on the grass trying to summon up energy to unpack, two men appeared on a grey horse, one riding pillion behind the other. They both carried long wands that looked like lances. The man riding pillion wore a red skull-cap; the other, one of the large floppy sort. Seen against the background of the green meadow with the river between us the feeling of having been transported into the Middle Ages was overwhelming. With some monks in the foreground fishing for carp it could have been an illustration in a pictorial history of England. For a moment I felt homesick.

  They moved along the far bank, staring rudely over their shoulders at us, until they reached a place where some boulders out in the stream made it possible to cross. There they dismounted and, after tethering their horse, crossed the river, leaping from rock to rock, using their sticks to steady themselves, and came down the bank towards us.

  Close-to these two men made a most disagreeable impression on all of us. The one with the skull-cap looked nothing more than an assassin. As well as his willow wand he carried a rifle slung across his shoulder. There was nothing medieval about the rifle, a .45 Martini-Henry that, although almost eighty years old, could still blow the daylights out of anything, nor about the bandolier of ammunition he wore under his shirt.

  ‘That’s a nasty-looking man,’ said Hugh. ‘He’d be better dead.’

  ‘He’s thinking the same about us. But look at the other one. What a great conk he’s got!’

  The other was really sinister. In London in a dark suit and wearing a carnation he would have been unremarkable as a promoter of shady companies with an office in Park Lane. Here, dressed in the local costume, he was terrific.

  He had very long teeth, almond-shaped eyes that swivelled and a nose like a huge beak. He wore a white and red striped shirt and the same baggy trousers as the men at the aylaq but made of cotton the colour of faded denim. The trousers were secured below the calf with brown puttees wrapped round and fastened with red and white woven strings which terminated in red pom-poms. He wore short ankle boots with cowhide soles and goatskin uppers dyed red, tied with coloured laces. Round his neck were slung a pair of Zeiss binoculars.

  This man never looked at us except when he thought he was unobserved. Instead he sat close to Abdul Ghiyas, himself a strange figure in his windproof suit from which he refused to be parted, and from time to time hissed something in his ear.

  ‘I’m sure he’s a spy,’ said Hugh. ‘The question is who’s he spying for?’

  ‘I should have thought in your business you would have some way of recognizing a spy. Don’t you have some kind of sign, like Masons have? Or a badge?’

  ‘They don’t issue badges.’

  Whether he was a spy or not there was nothing I could do about it. Besides I thought him ill-mannered. I fell asleep, and slept for four hours.

  When next I woke, the sun was behind clouds, the air was soft and the grass without the glare was a darker green. The two men had moved away and were now sitting a hundred yards up the valley talking to one another. They had both put on their dark coats and at this distance they looked like seminarists out for the afternoon. With the soft air and the greenery we might have been in Ireland.

  Hugh had also been asleep.

  ‘I don’t like that man with the nose at all,’ he said when he woke. ‘Abdul Ghiyas told me that he wanted to know where we were going to sleep tonight.’

  We set off to bathe in the river but abandoned the idea when we found out how cold it was. When we came back the men had mounted their horse and were riding away down the valley.

  ‘Abdul Ghiyas says that we should post sentries for the night,’ said Hugh when it grew dark.

  ‘Do you want to be a sentry?’

  ‘No. I’d rather be murdered in bed.’

  ‘So would I.’

  ‘Abdul Ghiyas! No sentries!’

  Here at around 13,000 feet it was cold. In the night I woke to find that we were in the clouds. Everything was soaking. On the other side of the river I could hear horses drumming up and down in the mist. Our own horses were restless and the stallion was pawing the ground, like a small, thin Rosinante.

  Very early, when it was just growing light, a man appeared at a swift trot from the direction of the aylaq. He was barefooted and on his back he carried a skin full of butter.

  ‘Mandeh nabashi. May you never be tired,’ said everyone, as he came up to us and unslung his load. ‘May you live for ever.’ To which he replied, ‘Ayershah.’

  He was a youngish man, about twenty-five, with a brown beard and a moustache. He spoke some Persian. His name, he said, was Aruk. He had been three weeks at a still higher aylaq than the one we had visited, somewhere on the way to the Anjuman Pass. He was a handsome man but, like most of the people we had so far seen, with the same mad look of barely-controlled savagery. Across his nose there was a shiny white scar. ‘A man did it with a sword,’ was all he would say about it.

  When he was offered tea, he produced his own cup. It was beautifully made of thin porcelain decorated with a pattern of flowers. It was a Russian cup, made before the Revolution at the factory of the Englishman, Gardener, at St Petersburg.

  ‘There are many such in the Ramgul, he said.

  I lifted his pack. It must have weighed well over sixty pounds. The frame was made of two forked pieces of willow with the fork ends lashed together and the four uprights stretched open to admit the goatskin, a horrid-looking thing, inside-out with the legs sewn up, so that the stumps, like the body, were distended with butter. The carrying straps for this contrivance were two thin cords of plaited goats’ hair. Worn with nothing but a shirt between them and the shoulders they would have been excruciatingly painful, but across his shoulders he wore his fringed coat rolled up as padding. On top of the pack he carried a pair of c
hamus – the same red boots the other man had worn but faded pink with age – and a smaller skin which contained dried wild onions.

  He now offered to accompany us to Pushal, the capital of the Ramguli Katirs.

  Whilst the drivers were making the last adjustment to the loads I tried Colonel Davidson’s Bashguli Grammar on him, reading from the book and pointing to the objects I wanted to identify.

  ‘Wetzâ?’ I said, pointing to his chamus.

  ‘Utzar!’ he said.

  This was encouraging. I picked up his fringed coat.

  ‘Budzun?’

  ‘Bezih!’

  I pointed at myself. ‘Manchī?’

  ‘Manchī!’

  Girl. I made conventional curves in the air. ‘Jūk?’

  ‘Jug!’ he smiled.

  Valley was gōl. The Chamar Valley, Chamar b’gōl. But in Bashguli bread was yashī and here it was anjih. There was no doubt the languages had something in common.

  All this took a long time. Finally Hugh tried a sentence, taken straight from the book. ‘The Kafir language is very sweet’, ‘Katõ wari bilugh aruzwā essā.’

  Aruk shook his head. ‘Katõ dīz bilugh aruzwā essā,’ he said.

  With Aruk leading we set off downhill at a terrific pace. At the foot of this valley the grass came to an end and we passed through a narrow funnel-shaped defile and came out at the top of a desolate, cloud-filled glen with big mountain peaks rising through the clouds and shining in the sun. Here Aruk put on his boots and plunged on again faster than ever. But after a while he stopped.

  ‘Apparently his heart is hurting him,’ said Hugh.

  ‘It isn’t really surprising.’ Nevertheless we were disappointed to find him an unsuper superman. From now on he stopped regularly every ten minutes. For us with our various defects this was agony. On the move they were forgotten, but we were not carrying four Kabuli Seer.