A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

by Eric Newby

  Their Chitral caps were ornamented with top-knots of coloured beads, their red scarves were tied with terrific dash and their puttees were laced with black and purple cords. They all wore faded blue cotton trousers.

  Seeing me with a camera they at once began to strike attitudes. They were as vain as peacocks. Great group photographs were taken.

  On the way back to the house at Asnar, we met two strangelooking middle-aged beings with blond beards and pale patchy complexions. Like the mandares, they were dressed in white, but of a different sort. They shook our hands wetly but when I tried to photograph them, they yelped and went off headlong down the hill screaming at the top of their voices.

  ‘It’s we who should be running,’ Hugh said when the extraordinary creatures were out of sight. ‘That’s about all we’ve got left to catch.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Leprosy. They’re lepers.’

  Everyone in the party, with the exception of Shir Muhammad, was now suffering from dysentery. We all munched sulphaguanadine tablets but even these failed; instead of getting better we began to get worse.

  It was only when returning from a particularly trying excursion into the Indian corn that I discovered the reason.

  ‘You know those little huts they build over the streams,’ I said. There was one outside our house, built over the stream from which the drinking water was fetched. It was a pretty little hut; Hugh had particularly admired it. He called it a gazebo.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘I’ve found out what they’re for. No wonder we’re getting worse.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  I told him to go and look for himself. Presently he tottered back into the room with a ghastly smile on his face.

  ‘It’s true. But I still can’t understand it. You only drink sterilized water, yet you’ve got it as badly as any of us.’

  ‘Abdul Ghiyas makes the soup with it.’

  ‘But boiling kills germs.’

  ‘You’d have to boil that stuff for a long time to kill anything. If the germs are as tough as the children, you’d need sulphuric acid.’

  ‘There’s only one thing to do,’ Hugh said. ‘We must get out of here tomorrow.’

  How the children ever survived the first five years of their lives in the Ramgul Valley was a mystery. There were some of them outside on the platform now. Mostly wizened, undernourished creatures, they tottered precariously about on the edge of it, a fifteen-foot drop on to sharp rocks, butting one another in the stomach with their little bullet heads. Assuming that they did this sort of thing every day of their lives, it seemed inevitable that the death rate must be enormous. Yet I never saw a serious disaster.

  It seemed impossible too that they could ever grow into the robust giants that their fathers were or the beauties that the women became, at least until they were fifteen or so. As Abdul Ghiyas said, quoting an old proverb in a rare moment of confidence when speaking of them, ‘The most precious possessions that man can desire are a mare of Qatagan and a young Kafir slave girl.’

  The children were covered with sores, but then so was everyone else, and as time passed so were we: attacked by an abominable fly, a small yellow-backed variety that drilled holes in us, making a sort of bridgehead for larger filthier flies. This fly had the facility, like a fighter attacking out of the sun, of being able to pick a blind spot and alight on one’s nose without being observed. For some reason known only to themselves they were particularly attracted to Hugh’s. Soon it was covered with craters that gave him a particularly dissipated appearance of which he was acutely conscious.

  On this, our last evening in the village, I spent several hours haggling with the Company Promoter for a complete male costume. At last a bargain was struck. At the same time Hugh concluded a deal with the Captain in which he, Hugh, was to receive two exquisite Gardener tea bowls in exchange for a silk scarf from Meshed and a pack of playing-cards.

  All the time the negotiations were going on Aruk and a ruffian wearing a red scarf lay about in a dark corner fondling one another; a manifestation of affection that revolted us all, particularly the Captain.

  ‘If you wish to behave thus, go out!’ he shouted in a parade-ground voice. They went out. Later the brute with the red scarf returned and fell asleep in a corner. It was a curious capacity the Nuristanis had for being able to fall asleep anywhere without bothering whose house they were in.

  At three in the morning we were woken by loud crashing sounds coming from the field below the house, followed by a series of tremendous explosions. We rushed out on the platform. There was pandemonium. Dogs were barking; people were rushing among the trees waving resinous torches, shouting excitedly; while standing on the platform outside his front door Abdul Motaleb was firing shot after shot from his Martini-Henry as fast as he could load it into the field below, from which rose a ferocious threshing noise.

  ‘What is it? What’s an itz?’ All I could hear was ‘Itz itz itz itz.’

  ‘A bear. There’s a bear in the Indian corn.’

  All at once the noises in the field ceased. There was silence.

  ‘The itz is dead,’ announced Abdul Motaleb.

  ‘Why don’t you go and look,’ Hugh said to him, ‘if you’re so sure.’

  In the daylight, the Indian corn, which had been twelve feet high, looked as though a hurricane had been through it. There were some impressive footprints but no bear.

  There was not much more sleep that night. At four Hugh started blundering about in the dark. I asked him what he was doing.

  ‘Getting ready to leave, of course.’

  Knowing that it would make not the slightest difference to what time we left, I remained in the comparative comfort of my sleeping-bag for another hour. One of the surprising things about the country was that, while outside in the open Nuristan was a perfect hell of insect life, inside the houses there seemed to be no bugs or vermin.

  In spite of my unwillingness to rise, an early start seemed possible. But it was not to be. Abdul Ghiyas went off to wash in the river, where he must have engaged in some kind of ritual for he stayed away two hours. Hugh himself had sent his boots to be repaired the previous day but by eight o’clock they had still not arrived at the house. Driven nearly frantic by these reverses he raged up and down bootless and finally dispatched Badar Khan to look for them – he also failed to return.

  At last, when everybody was finally gathered together, just as we were leaving, a messenger arrived from the Captain. In his hands he held the Meshed scarf and the pack of cards.

  ‘The Captain’s wife refuses to part with her tea bowls,’ he said. Then he whispered something to Abdul Ghiyas who looked serious.

  ‘Seb,’ said Abdul Ghiyas. ‘The Captain’s wife says that if the bowls leave Asnar, she will cut off his supplies.’

  * * *

  1. According to Robertson, The Kafirs of the Hindu-Kush, the Wai, one of the Eastern tribes, owned a cannon.

  2. Jarib – a quarter of an acre.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Disaster at Lake Mundul

  Escorted by Abdul Motaleb, a Mullah (a surprisingly mild Mullah for the Ramgul where the Mullahs had shown themselves extremely hostile) and his grandson, a boy of ten, we set off through Lustagam and downhill past a burial ground full of rough stones set on end with something like a wooden cot for a gigantic baby in the middle of it. I wanted Hugh to ask Abdul Motaleb whether this was something left over from the old religion, but he breathed hard through his nostrils and preserved a grim silence. He had had a provoking morning and in my heart I sympathized with him.

  The Mullah and the boy led the way. The Mullah carried a stone bow and from time to time he shot at a lizard to amuse his grandson, making better shooting than the young men of Pushal.

  A couple of miles beyond Lustagam a steep valley entered the Ramgul from the east. It led to the Kulam river, a day’s journey away, which rises somewhere near the head of the Wanasgul in the country of the Kantiwar
Katirs.

  ‘We are not at the moment on good terms with the Kantiwar people,’ said Abdul Motaleb. ‘They claim that the grazing at the head of the valley is theirs.’

  Here he left us.

  Here and all the way down the valley the waters of the Ramgul were tapped off into the surrounding fields in ways that made the feats of irrigation accomplished by the Tajiks of the Panjshir seem comparatively insignificant. In the Ramgul when an irrigation ditch came to a place where cultivated land ended and cliffs began, it was carried round the face of the cliff, sometimes as much as thirty feet above the river, in hollowed-out half tree-trunks supported on stone buttresses, like a viaduct for a model train; while at the far side of the obstacle there were complicated junction boxes with two or three wooden conduits branching off from them.

  Beyond Pātchāh, a large village of about forty houses built on a sharp ridge of rocks, the inhabitants crowded the rooftops to watch us go by and then trooped down to follow us.

  A little beyond the village, rising straight up out of the fields by the river, we came to an enormous rock – Sang Neveshteh (in the Katir, Pshtreal). On the smooth lower part of it was an indecipherable inscription.

  ‘It reads thus,’ said the Mullah. ‘In the reign of the great Amir, Abdur Rahman Khan Ghazi, in the year 1313 (in the Christian chronology 1895) the whole of Kafiristan was conquered by him and the inhabitants embraced the true and holy religion of Islam. – Righteousness and virtue have triumphed and untruth has disappeared,’ he added sententiously.

  Near it he said there was another inscription. To Hugh and myself, with the sun beating on it, it might have been anything or nothing.

  ‘What is it written in?’ Hugh asked. He had recovered from the bad start.

  ‘It is in the Kufic script. It is the inscription the Emperor Timur made when he turned aside to come here on his way to invade Hind, in the year 800’ (A.D. 1398).

  Whether Timur Leng, the atrocious Mongol, reached the Ramgul or whether it was one of his generals; whether or not any inscription, other than that of Abdur Rahman, even exists has never, so far as I can discover, been properly verified. Until some qualified person visits the Sang Neveshteh even the existence of the second inscription must remain a matter for conjecture. What is certain is that Timur Leng did invade some parts of Kafiristan from the west. His method of crossing the mountains was so novel and his observations on the character of the Kafirs so interesting that it seems worth referring to it briefly.

  In March 1398, according to his autobiography, Malfūzāt-i-Timūrī,1 he appointed a viceroy at Samarqand and, having left a garrison to defend it, ‘I placed my foot in the stirrup at a lucky moment and directed my course towards Hindustan.’

  With his army he crossed the Oxus at Termez by a bridge of boats and eventually arrived in Andarab, the next valley to Panjshir. There the people were full of complaint, saying ‘Infidel Kators and the Siyah-Poshes exact tribute and blackmail every year from us and, if we fail in our exact amount, they slay our men and carry our women and children into slavery.’

  Determined to punish them, Timur left part of his army with his son, Prince Shah Rukh (the same Prince who loved Herat so much and who built the towers I had so miserably failed to photograph), and crossed the Hindu Kush to a place he calls ‘Paryan’, which has been identified as Parwan (the town at the foot of the Bajgah Pass, near Gulbahar at the south end of the Panjshir where we had begun our journey).2 The other wing of his army had already crossed by the Khawak Pass into Panjshir and Timur says he detached a force of ten thousand3 under Prince Rustam and a General with the delightful name of Burhan Aghlan Jujitar, his chief nobles and sent them eastwards into Kafiristan against the Siah-Posh Kafirs in the north.

  After ordering most of the nobles and all the soldiers to leave horses, camels and superfluous baggage at Khawak, he began the crossing of the mountains of ‘Kator’:4 the mountains dividing Panjshir from Kafiristan which we crossed at the Chamar Pass. The conditions were very bad. There was a lot of snow and a hot wind made the going so soft that the army could only move by night when it froze hard. There was no sign of the Kafirs who had all taken refuge in inaccessible caves on the mountain-side, rendering themselves even more invisible by blocking the entrances with snow. Some of the nobles who still had their horses with them, with a stubbornness worthy of a British officer refusing to be parted from his bed roll, were forced to send them back.

  From the top of the range there was no way down for the army except by sliding down the slopes of snow and ice on their behinds. Timur himself had a wicker-basket prepared with ropes, each 150 yards long, attached to the corners.

  ‘Since I undertook this expedition against the infidels,’ he wrote, ‘and had made up my mind to undergo all manner of trouble and fatigue, I took my seat in the basket.’

  Across the centuries one can detect the unspoken wish that he hadn’t come. The basket was let down to the fullest extent of the ropes, then a platform was cut in the snow for the basket and the lowering party to stand on. This was repeated five times until Timur got to the bottom.

  The valley they were in was probably the Upper Alishang. Soon they arrived at a Kafir fort. It was, of course, deserted; the Kafirs were all on the heights above. The Mongols attacked the heights but the Kafirs held out for three days until offered the choice of perishing or becoming Muslims and reciting the creed; they chose apostasy. Timur appears to have been delighted. He dressed some of them in robes of honour and dismissed them. Such examples of his clemency are rare.

  That night the Kafirs put in a heavy attack on his position and a hundred and fifty of them were taken prisoner – all were put to death instantly: it is scarcely to be wondered at.

  The following day Timur’s troops attacked from all four sides and destroyed the remnant, men and women, ‘consigning them’, as Timur grimly puts it, ‘to the house of perdition’; using their skulls to build towers on the mountains. He also had an inscription cut recording ‘That I had reached this country in the month of Ramazan, May 1398; that if chance should conduct anyone to this spot he might know it.’

  There was no news of the army to the north commanded by Burhan Aghlan Jujitar. He had done badly in a previous engagement and Timur had no faith in his abilities. Now Timur dreamt that his own sword was bent, and took it to be an omen of defeat.

  With one of his more junior commanders, Muhammad Azad, he sent 300 Tajiks and 100 Tartars to the Siah-Posh country to find out what had happened. After a dreadful journey Muhammad Azad reached the enemy stronghold, to which Burhan Aghlan Jujitar was supposed to be laying siege, to find that the Siah-Posh had deserted it and that there was no sign of any of his own side.

  What had happened was as follows: Burhan Aghlan Jujitar had also found the fortress deserted but he had allowed his army to be lured into a defile, where the Kafirs, waiting in ambush, fell on it. He himself had fled and his troops had been defeated, ‘drinking the sherbet of martyrdom’. Now it was Muhammad Azad with his four hundred who counter-attacked and defeated the Kafirs, getting back all the armour and booty that had been lost.

  Timur says he found an easier way out of Kafiristan. In eighteen days he reached the fort at Khawak. Burhan Aghlan Jujitar languished in disgrace, having failed to defeat the Kafirs with ten thousand, but Muhammad Azad, who had succeeded with his four hundred, was honoured.

  That Timur was in Alishang seems absolutely certain. There is a strong tradition in the district that he visited it. As short a time ago as 1837, when the indefatigable Masson visited Najil, he wrote:

  Their malek, Osman, from his long standing and experience, enjoys a reputation out of his retired valley. He boasts of descent not exactly from Alexander the Great, but from Amir Taimur; and when rallied upon the subject and asked how so diminutive a being can lay claim to so proud an origin replies that he has only to put out one of his eyes, and lame one of his legs, and he would become Taimur himself. The tradition goes that Taimur procured a wife in this country.

/>   As we stood there we were surrounded by the inhabitants of Pātchāh who had followed us down to the rock. Some of the men wore domed skull-caps. With their stone bows and wild air it was not difficult to imagine that Timur himself might appear at any moment.

  From now on the country became more lush with many more trees. There were two kinds of mulberry, the ordinary sort and one called shāhtūt, the king mulberry. On one tree that had been grafted with the dark ones, both grew together. The shāhtūt were full of juice and with our troubles forgotten for the time being we hung in the branches of the tree stripping it like monkeys, with the Mullah higher than anyone. Besides the mulberries there were plums; small, soft rather tasteless apples; and a sort of sloe called yakmah.

  Soon we overtook a man trotting downhill with a big block of salt on a carrying frame. He took us a quick way by narrow paths through thickly wooded country where watermills whirred merrily and wild raspberries and buttercups grew in little meadow clearings. It was like a summer morning in England, but a long time ago.

  At midday we came to Jena Khel, a place with only a few scattered houses where there was a circle of stone seats in an apple orchard, a sort of tribal meeting place.

  ‘We are now in the district of Raro,’ said the Mullah. ‘This is the place of the Alaqadar of Laghman, the magistrate of this part of the Eastern Province. He is under the orders of the Naib ul Hukumah, the Governor, who is a Pathan.’

  Here, watched by hordes of children, some of them with blue eyes and striking faces like Slovenes of the Carso near Trieste, we sat waiting for the horses to come up.

  I asked Hugh what we should have for lunch. It was a familiar joke that never lost its savour.