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Dropped in the Indus Gorge
I felt like a man feels when the motorcar at last stops and he can get out and stretch his legs, and look at the view and … really see life, instead of being at the mercy of a machine and a mechanic, rushed through life without a chance of enjoying the beauties on the way.
SIR FRANCIS YOUNGHUSBAND
Juglote – 25 December
I doubt if Rachel will ever experience an odder Christmas Day. At sunrise the band of the Northern Scouts (whose parade-ground was nearby) began to play Auld Lang Syne very loudly and quickly and continued to play it for half an hour without pausing to draw breath. Whether this was a sentimental salute to the memory of Christian officers, or a military way of celebrating Id, no one seemed to know. It was a dark, cold morning, with low cloud, and at 7.30 a sudden thundering of hooves, accompanied by blood-curdling war-whoops, brought us rushing to the restaurant door. Twenty fast little polo-ponies, wearing gay, tasselled saddle-cloths, were charging past like the Light Brigade in fancy dress. Their riders – the Northern Scouts polo team – wore mufti but carried long lances with pennants. Nobody else took the slightest notice of the team, or knew where they were going, or why, and quickly they disappeared into the foggy greyness of the morning.
Not long after, the sky cleared and we enjoyed a brisk walk down the left bank of the river while waiting for Mohammad. At four minutes past noon he appeared, to my considerable astonishment, but then the key to the jeep-yard could not be found; it was thought probable that the yard-owner had taken it to his village, seven miles away, not expecting it to be needed over the Id holiday. I volunteered to break the lock and replace it (a new one would have cost all of Rs.2.50) but this immoral suggestion was ill-received. I then insisted that Mohammad should take action and for forty minutes we stood staring frustratedly at our vehicle through the wooden slats of the yard gate.
By the time a panting youth arrived with the key Mohammad had of course vanished. When at last he reappeared a fire had been lit under the engine to thaw it, our gear had been taken aboard and we were in our seat – but then the jeep refused to move, though the engine started willingly enough. Mohammad jumped out, looking unperturbed, and a number of hammered screws and knotted pieces of wire were ‘done hast’, to replace what the makers would undoubtedly describe as vital parts. These ‘re-pears’ had the desired effect and at 2.10 we moved off, along a track I well remember following on my bicycle Roz. Despite its being now called the Karakoram Highway it remains so rough on this stretch that I had to hold Rachel very firmly on my knee and forbid her to talk lest one of the more violent bumps might cause her to bite her tongue off.
Deeply as I deplore the building of motorways through the Karakoram, I could not but admire the gangs of young Chinese soldiers, hundreds strong, whom we passed at frequent intervals. Seen toiling against the barren immensity of this landscape they seem true ‘Heroes of the Revolution’. (In deference to Islamic custom, no Heroines of the Revolution work here.) Their task is one that makes the combined Labours of Hercules seem trivial and they are tackling it with the minimum of machinery. Today we saw only one electric generator on the back of a truck, to drill holes in the cliffs for dynamite, and an occasional wheelbarrow – if wheelbarrows count as machines. Most of the work is being done with shovels, picks, wicker baskets and naked hands. It is impossible to recognise foremen or gang-leaders; they wear the same denim-blue, high-collared, patched boiler suits as the rest and do the same work. This last fact enormously impresses (and sometimes disconcerts) the Pakistanis, whose own foremen would scorn to touch a shovel and wear clothes chosen to distinguish them from ‘mere coolies’.
If this road-building corps has been hand-picked to make a good impression on decadent capitalists, it certainly succeeds. After a week in Gilgit town these young men – all from Sinkiang – seem exceptionally healthy, well-built, well-fed and well-equipped against the cold. To us the majority look below average stature but otherwise – with their bright brown eyes, happy bronzed faces, plump, ruddy cheeks and strong white teeth – they might be older brothers of Rachel. Their formidable task is being accomplished according to schedule, yet they seem singularly unhurried and unharried. They laugh and sing as they chop up the Himalayas and often a youth may be observed relaxing on a rock with a cigarette, like road-workers the world over. They were obviously astonished to see Rachel staring out at them, yet they showed no sign of friendliness and spared us not even one of their many jolly smiles. This saddened me disproportionately; or perhaps not disproportionately, when one considers the personality-warping necessary to make these good-humoured lads freeze up when non-Communists appear.
At four o’clock we reached Juglote, a few miles beyond the confluence of the Gilgit and the Indus. Not far away are two of the huge Chinese camps and we stopped to load the jeep where a small Pakistani army camp stands on one side of the road, opposite a supply depot for Baltistan. Here down-country trucks, which have precariously got thus far on the new highway, deposit petrol, kerosene, sugar, flour, rice, dahl, cigarettes, tea, tinned milk, cloth and the few other goods that are imported into a region accessible only to small jeeps in good weather.
By this stage Mohammad was looking a little tense and one could see why. The forenoon sun had long since disappeared, clouds were curling among the harsh heights all around us and the darkness of snow lay over Baltistan. Mohammad’s depot friends are pessimistic about the chances of any jeep getting to Skardu in the foreseeable future so he proposes taking his passengers and load as far as the track is clear and then dumping the lot in some unspecified hamlet – a plan I like immensely. As neither he nor any of his friends speaks a syllable of English I wonder now how we achieved all these explanations and arrangements. At times I suspect myself of understanding more Urdu than I realise, when the pressure is on.
We have both fallen for Mohammad. Tall, lean and handsome, he wears baggy Pathan pantaloons, an oil-stained anorak and a woollen scarf wrapped turban-wise around his head; yet he has that commanding and distingué air which marks so many Pathans, whatever their apparel or occupation. He is one of those taciturn but not at all unfriendly people with whom I feel a certain affinity. Even among his friends he speaks only rarely and briefly and he never needlessly addresses us. I can think of no more reassuring driver for a trip through the Indus Gorge.
Jeeps can carry a lot, if cleverly packed, and Mohammad was taking on two large barrels of kerosene, six sacks of flour, two sacks of sugar, several bales of cotton and sundry crates of tinned milk (from Germany), tinned ghee (from Holland), biscuits, soap and cigarettes from Pindi. The securing of such a load, to withstand the unimaginable jolting involved on this route, takes hours of hard work. Apart from the financial loss, should anything fall into the Indus, a loose load could cause the jeep itself to go off the track on a dangerous bend. Rachel and I therefore had plenty of time for our Christmas afternoon walk, though there was no Christmas fare to be digested. We watched a cockfight in the depot compound, where a score of men had gathered to enjoy this ‘entertainment’. The army put in a brown bird and the depot civilians a speckled bird and the pair sorted it out bloodily against a background of rusty barrels marked ‘White Oil. Made in the People’s Republic of China’. The army won and then both birds were killed for Id dinners.
As dusk fell we all squatted around a smoky little oil-stove on the verandah of the stone depot building. The manager invited us to spend the night on charpoys in a store room but for some obscure reason Mohammad insisted on driving another two miles away from the Gorge track to this doss-house in the village of Juglote. I have stayed here once before, on 15 June 1963, when I slept on a charpoy by the roadside because it was too hot to remain indoors.
Tonight it is too cold to remain outdoors for longer than it takes to pee. It was pitch dark as we bumped along the village street, where the only light came from a dim kerosene lantern hanging in the cavernous tea-house behind which we are now accommodated. The pro
prietor-cum-chef is a gnarled ancient wearing a greasy, gold-embroidered skull-cap, a henna-streaked grey beard and three long, protruding brown teeth in the left corner of his mouth. He genially invited us in from the freezing tea-house to the comparative warmth of the kitchen where his culinary feats are performed on a mud stove built up to waist-level and fuelled with bright yellow mulberry wood. Here the only light came from the leaping flames and our only fellow-guest was a wordless character with an Early Man brow and a rifle on the table by his tin plate. He ate squatting on his haunches on a wooden bench, wrapped in a thick brown blanket, and when he stood up to go out into the icy night I saw that his feet were bare.
Our Christmas dinner consisted of chapattis and a watery dahl gruel, followed by watery tea. Seemingly they never rise to meat in Juglote, even for Id. But as this was our first meal in twelve hours it tasted remarkably good.
Then the proprietor led Rachel and me across a narrow yard to a room in which no progressive Irish farmer would keep pigs. The stone walls are smeared with dung and mud and for ventilation we have a tiny, high-up unglazed window and a ‘chimney’ hole in the roof. (There are signs on the sanded floor that some guests bring their own wood and make their own fires.) One corner is occupied by a tall pile of quilts, for hire to those without bedding, and we are sharing this suite with Mohammad at a cost of Rs.3 for each sagging charpoy, which is expensive by local standards. To get to bed everyone has to clamber over everyone else’s charpoy and two of my ropes collapsed as Mohammad was on his way across, just a few moments ago.
Earlier, as I was reading Rachel her bedtime story (a ritual which unfailingly takes place in the most unlikely surroundings), we heard through the gloom weird, unhuman movements and utterances close beside us in this supposedly empty room. Rachel went rigid with fright and even I was momentarily unnerved. Then I resolutely swung my torch towards the sound – and discerned a speckled hen settled for the night on that pile of quilts and engaged in a vigorous flea-hunt.
? – 26 December
Tomorrow the question mark will be replaced by a name, when I have found out precisely where Mohammad has dropped us. So far I have been given three totally dissimilar names for this hamlet in the heart of the Indus Gorge, but none of them appears on my detailed map of Baltistan – which perhaps uses a fourth. Anyway, what’s in a name? The important thing is that I can imagine no more desirable place in which to be marooned by snow for an indefinite period.
The seventy-eight miles from Juglote took eight and a half driving hours. Presumably Mohammad has little imagination and much fatalism; otherwise he could never summon up enough courage to drive an overloaded, badly-balanced and mechanically imperfect jeep along a track where for hours on end one minor misjudgment could send the vehicle hurtling hundreds of feet into the Indus. As the river has found the only possible way through this ferociously formidable knot of mountains, there is no alternative but to follow it. Without having travelled through the Indus Gorge, one cannot conceive of its drama. The only sane way to cover such ground is on foot.
Apart from one’s own nervous tension – which is not fully appreciated until the journey is safely over – there is an intrinsically intimidating quality about this landscape such as I have never encountered elsewhere. Its scale, colour and texture combine to create an impression of the most savage and total desolation. None of the adjectives usually applied to mountain scenery is adequate here – indeed, the very word ‘scenery’ is comically inappropriate. ‘Splendour’ or ‘grandeur’ are useless to give a feeling of this tremendous ravine that twists narrow and dark and bleak and deep for mile after mile after mile, with never a single blade of grass, or weed, or tiny bush to remind one that a vegetable kingdom exists. Only the jade-green Indus – sometimes tumbling into a dazzle of white foam – relieves the grey-brown of crags and sheer precipices and steep slopes. Many of these slopes are strewn with sharp, massive hunks of rock, often the size of a cathedral yet seeming mere boulders. Soon the river begins to have a hypnotic effect and, appalled as one is by the sight, one peers constantly down at that beautifully untouchable green serpent which is usually so far below it looks no more than a stream. We passed two of those steel rope ‘bridges’ across which the locals propel themselves in small wooden boxes and glimpsed one man so occupied. Rather him than me …
Naturally most of this area is uninhabited. But at rare intervals, where the gradient permits terracing, or a ledge of rock has allowed some soil to defy erosion, clusters of rectangular stone hovels stand amidst apricot, mulberry, plane and poplar trees. In summer these oases must look very lovely. Now, observed in the fearful sterility of mid-winter, they simply seem improbable. One wonders why and how people ever came to settle in such a violently inhospitable region, where climate and terrain are equally opposed to human survival.
This jeep-track was built less than ten years ago and based on an ancient footpath. At present the Pakistani army are trying to convert it into a conventional motor-road that will take buses, trucks and ‘auto muboils’, but tough as is the Chinese task theirs is incomparably tougher. One cannot see them ever succeeding, unless their methods and morale are radically changed. Yet Mr Bhutto expects them to have completed the job by the beginning of 1977. One vignette I shall never forget. A colossal boulder had been blasted to the edge of the track and was being imperceptibly shifted by a quartet of elderly privates. All four were sitting on the ground – two facing the boulder, endeavouring to push it over the edge with their bare feet while leaning against their mates’ backs. How not to build roads in a hurry … This was a sight to gladden any motor-hater’s heart.
We met only one jeep all day – near here, where the track was slippy with snow. When it backed to let us pass my stomach felt sick for I swear at one point its outside wheels were hardly four inches from the edge: and I wondered how often that day our own had been similarly placed. Inevitably on such a track drivers get into the habit of regarding four inches as an ample safety margin, despite the crumbly nature of many of these cliffs. Otherwise the traffic consisted entirely of large herds of goats being driven, I surmised, to some less barren area, for here not even an Asian goat could last without supplementary feeding. Their shepherds were among the wildest-looking men I have ever seen, wearing collections of patches rather than garments, and skull-caps decorated with pieces of coloured glass, and leather strips wound around their feet and halfway up their calves. Many looked very like Dolpo Tibetans or Ladakis – not surprisingly, since Baltistan is also known as Little Tibet. Yesterday we saw similar types, driving towards Gilgit a large herd of crossbred cattle; each animal wore a coat of sacking despite its yak-like wool, which indicated that they had descended from a great height, sleeping out en route.
When we arrived here at 4.30 it was already dusk because of low, thick cloud and flurrying snow. At this point the Gorge widens for a few miles and the track leaves the river to cross a wilderness of grey, boulder-strewn sand, riven by narrow minor gorges. Brand-new wooden bridges, barely wide enough for a jeep, span these deep cracks which allow swift torrents to roar down to the Indus, their noise amplified by echoes from their own rock-walls.
Mohammad stopped outside a ‘hotel’ ingeniously built on to a huge outcrop of rock by the roadside. The boulders that were already in situ are used as seats, and as supports for the mud fireplace, and as a table on which the cook prepares chapattis. As the Connemara-type stone walls admit icy blasts from every angle, guests huddle close to the great glowing pile of wood over which tea is brewed in a cauldron-like dechi and stringy fowl are simmered in dark brown gravy tasting only of chillis. Beyond the kitchen-cum-dining-room is a dormitory containing twelve charpoys, without bedding, which are rented out at Rs.4 a night to passing travellers – who are few at this season. The locals unselfconsciously refer to this establishment as ‘The Hotel’ and it serves as a depot for those Skardu-destined supplies which during winter often get so far and no further. (Between here and Skardu the track is reputed to be far mor
e dangerous than between here and Juglote – something I find impossible to imagine.)
The little group of men and youths sitting by the fire received us noncommittally. While Mohammad was unloading they made no friendly overtures but discussed our inexplicable arrival in an uncomfortably derisive way. This was my first sample of Balti; it is an archaic dialect of Tibetan and I could understand a few words. However, I don’t take our cool reception too seriously. It simply means the ball is in my court and I feel relations will quickly improve once the initial shock to the social system has worn off.
When Mohammad reappeared in the doorway he beckoned us and uttered his first words of English – ‘Rest House!’ We had been quite resigned to sleeping in the Hotel and I stared at him, bemused. Surely, I thought, even the Raj didn’t get around to building a Rest House here! I was right. The jeep crawled back the way we had come, through lightly falling snow, and eventually, having climbed a short, sharp hill, we found ourselves on the verandah of a small Rest House built only last year to accommodate government officials on tour. It is modelled on the Raj’s dak-bungalow, though at its worst the British PWD would never have put three large windows with ill-fitting frames in one smallish room at 8,500 feet.
Our room, with adjacent bathroom, is known as ‘the VIP suite’ and sports a thick wall-to-wall carpet on its concrete floor. The other, larger room has been occupied, since October, by a down-country team of three medical workers, of whom I shall have a lot more to say tomorrow. As we dragged our gear on to the verandah I was astounded to be greeted in fluent English by their leader, Dr Mazhar Javaid, a slim and handsome twenty-four-year-old who obviously regards the arrival of fellow outsiders as a gift from Allah. We have already had a long talk, but I am too tired and cold to record it now.
Where the Indus is Young Page 6
