by Eric Newby
Whilst we were eating, a tremendous wind began to blow up the valley from the south. Like magic the audience began to disperse uttering cries of warning, while girls, previously invisible, who had been working in the fields, scuttled for home emitting tiny frightened squeaks. It was obvious that some cataclysm was at hand.
Soon we were at the centre of a violent storm. There was a continuous rumbling and forks of lightning tore down on us from the sky. With the background of bulbous rocks, beetling cliffs and twisted junipers it was like a landscape by a Chinese painter of the thirteenth century.
Thunder and lightning were succeeded by torrents of rain. Crouching under one of the rocks we each smoked our last cigarette. My pipe was somewhere on Mir Samir; Hugh had dropped his in the Chamar. At any rate we had no more tobacco.
When the rain stopped a small boy who spoke Persian arrived with a message from the Captain inviting us to his house. After packing everything we set off with him, each of us enveloped in an aura of steam that proceeded from our wet clothes as they dried in the hot sun.
He was an odious little boy; the sort whose very appearance invites ill-treatment. Unwisely he decided to play a practical joke. After leading us through a maze of sodden undergrowth he eventually returned us to the place where we had started.
All the time, as we floundered after this juvenile delinquent, Hugh had been getting more and more red in the face and breathing heavily.
‘What is the reason for this?’ he said.
The boy laughed and stuck out his tongue.
‘You little—. Take that!’ said Hugh, ‘and that! … and that! … and that!’
It seemed to make very little impression on him. His bottom and ears seemed to be made of cast iron. All the way up the steep climb to Pushal he continued to loiter and Hugh continued to cuff him. In this way, profoundly depressed, hating Hugh and the little boy equally, I arrived at Pushal, the capital of the Ramgul Katirs.
Knowing something of the irregular way of life pursued by the Kafirs before the conquest, it was easy to see that strategic considerations alone had governed the choice of the site on which it stood, a large rock poised above the river. On the rock, in indescribable confusion, the houses were piled one atop the other like stone boxes, many of them two-storied, with large unglazed windows and some with little galleries, which overhung the river supported by wooden struts.
There was no main street in Pushal because no two houses were at the same level. The way through it was like a gully, far too steep even for our horses, which had had to cross the river and ford it again lower down beyond the town. There were no shops, no chaie khana but, as in Panjshir, the roofs were covered with apricots and mulberries. Among the fruit, watching us go by, stood wraithlike figures in white so muffled up that it was impossible to say whether they were men or women.
The Captain’s house was at a place called Asnar, half a mile beyond Pushal, one of several standing among rocks and apricot trees. It was a two-storey building with a slightly pitched roof with boulders on it to stop it blowing away. It was not in fact his house at all but belonged to his son-in-law who came to meet us as we came steaming up followed by the drivers, and escorted us into it.
His name was Abdul Motaleb, which translated means The Slave of the Summoner. Like some of the others here in the capital, he was dressed like a Pathan in white shalvār trousers and a turban. He had a soft face, a fine wavy beard and bore no resemblance to any other Nuristani we had so far seen (not that any of them bore much resemblance to one another).
The ground floor of the house was mainly store-rooms. We went up a flight of stone steps on to a platform supported on tree-trunks. Above the door a pair of magnificent ibex horns sprouted from the wall. Like all the other houses I saw in Nuristan it gave me the impression of being still in the course of construction.
The doorway that was partly filled with hurdling was not on the same level with the platform but was a foot or so above it, so that it looked more like a window.
Once over the threshold and inside it was as dark as night. Facing the entrance was the kitchen from which came a dim red glow and a scuttling sound as the owner’s wife made herself scarce. We passed through a bare room slightly less dark with a brokendown bed in it, a wooden framework covered with interlaced woven thongs, like an Indian charpoy, then through another completely empty, then into a third, with a large, square window and solid wooden shutters that opened inwards. The shutters, like the double doors, were decorated with crude orange stripes. The floor was of mud; the ceiling laths were willow and were supported by solid beams of poplar, the space between the laths being filled with the dead leaves of the holly oaks that grew in thousands on the mountain-sides. On the wall hung a Martini-Henry rifle with the date 1906 on it and a jezail, a heavy Afghan musket with a barrel four feet long.
Soon a boy appeared loaded with carpets and quilts, which he spread on the floor. It was the same little boy whom Hugh had kicked so enthusiastically. As he went out he glared.
‘My son,’ said Abdul Motaleb proudly.
Soon the boy was back. This time he carried two wooden bowls of apricots, one of which he put down in front of Hugh.
‘Have some of these,’ said Hugh with his mouth full. ‘Excellent apricots.’
‘I think I’d prefer to have some from the other basket. After the way you kicked his bottom they’re probably poisoned.’
As we sat there, another storm developed and went rumbling away up the valley. This time it continued to rain steadily. Looking out of the window on to a river in spate and mountains shrouded in mist, I experienced a sensation forgotten since childhood; the mixture of cosiness and despair that I used to feel looking out from a seaside hotel on a wet day.
Distinguished visitors began to arrive: the Captain, together with a vigorous-looking old man whose beard was dyed with henna, and another like the man with the skull-cap we had met in the upper valley with the hard face of a professional killer.
The old man was very lively, remembering vividly the happenings of sixty years back.
‘I was fifteen years old when the great Amir attacked us. His army was in three columns and we fought with them long and hard, using our bows, spears and swords and what few guns we had.’ (For ‘guns’ he used the word ‘artillery’ and I wondered if they had had some ancient cannon.1) ‘But it made no difference, in the end we were beaten. I and many others were taken prisoner and brought to Kabul as slaves. There I remained twenty-five years; first, while I was still young, as a page at the court of the Amir; later as a bodyguard until the new Amir, his son, was slain at Qala Gosh.’ (This was the Amir Habibullah who was murdered while asleep in a tent on a hunting expedition in the valley of the lower Alingar. I wondered if the bodyguard had been on duty at the time.) ‘When that happened I was allowed to return to the place where I was born.’
‘What do you remember of the life before you were converted, when you were Kafirs?’
‘We used to make wine and hunt bear. There was much killing in those days and I was a great swimmer but I do not remember that time with much pleasure. Now there is no longer any wine made,’ he said rather wistfully.
The coming of Islam to Kafiristan seemed to have had the same deadly effect as Knox and the Reformation on Scotland.
The talk of killing gave the murderous-looking man an opportunity to butt in. It turned out that he had been twelve years a bodyguard to a former prime minister.
‘Have you ijazat, permission to be here?’
‘What sort of permission?’
‘Written permission.’
‘Yes.’
‘Here,’ he said happily, ‘we shoot people without permission,’ and went on to tell a gloomy story about an Afghan who had married an American girl and fled with her to Nuristan for sanctuary. It ended badly for both of them. I was not surprised; to me it seemed an unsuitable place to choose for such a purpose.
‘If I didn’t feel so ill, this man would frighten me,’ Hugh said.
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br /> By a system of barter too tedious to relate, Abdul Ghiyas, who himself looked like death, obtained a chicken and cooked it together with wild onions and apricots, a mixture which in retrospect sounds awful but at the time seemed very good.
Later, to escape the hoi-polloi who had been admitted to rummage in our belongings, we went for a walk in the rain with two young bloods. They were coarse-looking youths and they had not improved their appearance by painting their eyes red and tinting their eyelids with antimony. They said their names were Shyok and Paluk, at least that is what they sounded like, but they also admitted to more conventional Mussulman names.
Shyok and Paluk were tiresomely fit; hurling great stones about; leaping into the branches of mulberry trees and gibbering down at us, and all the time challenging us to feats of strength that were impossible for people in our condition. By comparison with them we seemed like corpses.
The place seemed deserted. Warned of our arrival women and girls kept out of sight. There were no longer the happy groups of girls playing together. Flitting among the trees were the same ghostly white figures who had looked down on us from the rooftops of Pushal. They were mandares, Theological students from one of the eastern valleys come to the capital of Ramgul to study at a college run by the mullahs.
At this moment one of them came into view, a pouting creature with soft doe eyes, running rather feebly, closely pursued by Akuts, our friend with the cut on the nose, and disappeared from view behind some large walnut trees.
Later the Captain visited us. He was very smart in a doublebreasted gaberdine overcoat and wore a turban wound round a flat-topped kullah like a pill-box set with coloured stones. With him was the Company Promoter whom we had last seen in the upper valley. He wore a dark brown Chitrali cap, a wine-coloured silk shirt, chaplis from Peshawar and carried an American Carbine.
Because we admired this weapon, news of our interest spread quickly. Men with rifles began to pour into the house: .303 Lee-Enfields identical with the sort issued to the British Army, with the correct-looking serial numbers but marked V.R. 1912, made at the tribal gun factory at Kohat on the frontier (the bolts were genuine). There was a Prussian rifle called a Dreyse with the date 1866 on it, one in which a needle pierces a paper cartridge and strikes a detonating composition between it and the bullet. Where the ammunition for such a weapon came from was a mystery, as it was for the long-barrelled Imperial Russian rifle inlaid with brass and a Canadian Ross rifle. All were in a disgraceful condition, particularly the barrels.
‘I didn’t think you were allowed to have rifles,’ said Hugh.
‘No,’ everyone replied happily and ambiguously, ‘we’re not; but in Nuristan there are many robbers.’
Apart from the work in the summer pastures and the carrying down of the butter, the men seemed to have little to do, most of the labour in the fields, except for some ploughing, being done by women.
‘In the autumn,’ they said, ‘when the crops are lifted and we bring the horses down from the aylaq we play buz-kashi. We used a dead goat with its head cut off. It is a very strong game when we play it,’ they said, and all grinned. ‘And we go hunting; and in the winter we sleep.
‘At the aylaq,’ they said, ‘we make the butter and curds and store it in the rivers until it is needed. When it is needed we bring it down to the valley and it is boiled. Then it is carried away.’
For some time we had been mystified by what happened to the dairy produce that seemed to be constantly on the move but never eaten. No one ever offered milk or butter to us, nor could we buy any.
‘But what do you do with it?’ we asked them.
‘We have not enough grain to make bread. We take it over the Kotal Arayu and down the Panjshir to Gulbahar and exchange it for grain.’
This meant taking it back up the hill again. It seemed crazy to us. I wondered why they didn’t boil it up at the aylaq.
‘Are the men who carry it paid anything?’
‘Each man carries four seer (about sixty-four pounds) and for each seer he receives thirty Afghanis. But that is a short journey; we also go to Kashkar.’
At first we thought they said Kashgar.
‘But that’s in China!’ The thought of a man making such a journey loaded with sixty pounds of butter was impossible to contemplate.
‘They mean Chitral,’ the Captain said. ‘They call Chitral Kashkar. It is a long journey: from Pushal up the Bugulchi, then to the east over the Kotal Suan into the country of the Kantiwar people; then by the valley of Kanitwo and into the country of the Presun people; then eastwards to the head of that river and beyond by the Kotal Mrami and the Kotal Papruk to the Bashgul river; north again to Dewane Baba (Ahmad Diwana) and then to Kashkar.’
‘How long does it take?’
‘Two days to the Kantiwar; two and a half to Papruk; two days to Dewane Baba and two days by the Kotal Semeneck to Kashkar.’
‘What do you exchange your butter for in Kashkar?’
‘For caps.’ Everyone smiled and pointed to his porridge plate.
‘But it’s fantastic,’ Hugh said to me. ‘Nine days to buy caps, eighteen there and back. Why don’t they make them here on their looms?’ Most of the houses, when the weather was fine, had looms outside them on which the brown material for the men’s trousers were made.
‘If you were going to buy a bowler, you wouldn’t make it yourself. You’d go to Lock. It’s just that these people are particular what they wear.’
‘It is the custom for the hats to come from Kashkar. It has always been so,’ the Captain said.
‘What about your boots (the red chamus, which the Ramgulis called ūtzār)?’
‘Before,’ someone answered, as if referring to a period of unspeakable iniquity, ‘they were made by our slaves. Now they are made by the people of Kamdesh on the Bashgul River.’
I wanted to find out whether they ever relapsed into the old religion. Instead Hugh asked them a lot of questions about taxes, a subject that seemed to fascinate him. Unlike the Tajiks in Panjshir they paid none on their animals, only on their land. ‘Two Afghanis for every jarib2 we possess.’
And about military service. ‘Only five in every two hundred are conscripted but many go willingly. We have always been soldiers.’
Just before he left the old man, who had been a slave in Kabul, came up to Hugh.
‘Tell your companion,’ he said, ‘that tomorrow an old man will die. There will be work for his little book and camera.’
We slept badly. Our air-beds had slow punctures and the floor was hard. Also we discovered that we both had dysentery.
We were woken before it was yet light by Abdul Motaleb and Aruk who wanted to sell us their hats. With clotted tongues and halfclosed eyes we were forced to haggle with them. What they asked in exchange seemed ridiculous. Neither wanted one of the daggers Hugh had brought out from England. They wanted Hugh’s telescope. But perhaps in terms of the journey involved to fetch these tubes of cloth, their demand was not altogether unreasonable.
Glad to escape from the house and these interminable negotiations, we set off for the funeral with a party of twenty men, all in their best clothes. They sauntered along, while in the fields the women worked, bent double at their allotted tasks or else staggered past us loaded with four Kabuli seer of butter on their way to a boiling-up place.
‘A bullock is to be slaughtered,’ said Abdul Ghiyas. There was quite a feeling of holiday in the air. It was not like a funeral at all.
The path by the river was suicidal. I wore gym shoes, the only things my feet could endure. Walking along in a daze I stepped in a puddle and fell over a precipice, landing miraculously unhurt on a small ledge ten feet below the track, which itself overhung the river by fifty feet. Twenty-four faces, mostly bearded, looked down at me in surprise to find that I was still alive.
As I was being hauled up the cliff a Mullah appeared.
‘They must not go to the funeral,’ he said, pointing at us rudely, and went on to say some unpleasan
t things about Christians in general.
We had no strength to argue with him. We let the others go on without us. Instead we crossed the river by a tamarisk trunk and sat under a walnut tree.
Here we experienced a rare moment of peace. The air was full of butterflies: humming-bird hawk moths; clouded yellows; small blues; painted ladies; Hugh reeled off their names, remembered from his schooldays. Behind us in among the oaks a woodpecker was drilling a hole; flying upstream were a couple of kingfishers.
On the opposite bank was a small village called Lustagam. It was built into the side of a cliff and of the same stone, so the houses looked more like caves.
Hidden from the track by a large rock, we were able to observe the passers-by without ourselves being observed, a rare privilege in Nuristan. They were nearly all women carrying triangular baskets stacked with firewood, so heavy that we could see their fingers trembling with the effort as they walked.
The older women all had their hair parted in the centre but the younger ones wore it in a becoming fringe. In terms of years it was difficult to say when they ceased to be young. Perhaps the worn-looking ones were in their middle twenties.
Pushal, to which we presently returned, was completely deserted, except for a few old women like witches and small children. The doors of the houses were all shut, so we went into a low stone hut which was without a door. It was a public washplace. Inside it a spring gushed into a hollowed-out tree-trunk set in the ground which had circular basins cut in it at intervals. It seemed an unsatisfactory arrangement, the last person at the end of the line getting the dirty water from all the others.
Gradually the men of Pushal drifted back from the funeral. Not one but three bullocks had been slaughtered and shots fired. It had been a great day. Their faces were slightly greasy from the funeral baked meats but they made a brilliant spectacle. They wore striped and checked shirts, mostly red, European waistcoats but with dozens of added pearl buttons, and charms and sacred amulets together with military medals with the lettering erased by years of polishing. Perhaps the medals came from India but their origins had long been forgotten. ‘My father gave them to me,’ was what the owners said.