Where the Indus is Young

by Dervla Murphy

  Thowar – 27 December

  I have at last established the name of this hamlet which, on the recent invention of the Northern Areas, was chosen as administrative centre for the Ronda region – more phonetically spelt ‘Rongdo’ by Cunningham and other nineteenth-century travellers. Ronda is about forty-five miles from east to west and thirty-two from north to south. The name means ‘district of defiles’ and the local Raja has always been subject to the Raja of Skardu.

  Thowar’s newborn importance explains our Rest House, where we have the absurd and unnecessary luxury of a foam-rubber mattress for my bed, a well-sprung couch as Rachel’s bed, two easy-chairs, a table for our literary activities (Rachel is on page seven of her diary), and a hand basin and lavatory in our bathroom. Naturally there is no running water, but ‘sanitary fittings’ look good even if they smell otherwise. These luxuries irritate because the effort of getting them to Thowar is out of all proportion to their usefulness. Locally made furniture would have served the purpose just as well, looked a lot better and cost a lot less.

  Behind the Rest House a glacial stream forms a waterfall as it jumps eight feet from the terrace above. A sheet of ice, about ten feet wide and two feet thick, has to be crossed to reach this waterfall and the first time I approached it its tremendous power knocked the kettle out of my unprepared hand. All around stand glittering pillars and mounds and giant globules of solid ice, their irrational shapes and arrangements seeming to belong to another planet.

  The three windows which make it so difficult to heat our room overlook an exhilarating complexity of high peaks, many snow-covered, and the Gorge is visible far below if one knows where to seek for it amidst a shambles of dark, shattered rocks and sheer brown cliffs. This morning at eight o’clock we walked through this shambles to the Hotel, for tea and paratas, treading cautiously on new snow over old ice. Then we continued on for another half-mile to the Dambudass bazaar, where three Pathan hucksters between them sell flour, rock-salt, tea, sugar, tinned milk, kerosene, cigarettes, matches, cloth and soap. (Judging by the appearance of the locals this last item is not in great demand.) Another tea-house-cum-doss-house completes the ‘bazaar’ and is run by a charming old man with a face like an elongated walnut, under a cap of gay, glass-decorated brocade. He squats on top of his mud-stove, ready to prepare chi and chapattis on request, and he refused to accept payment for the two cups of tea we drank while waiting for a merchant to provide us with a packet of tea and a tin of milk. Now we are equipped to brew tea on our own kerosene stove.

  Unfortunately the kerosene sent to the Northern Areas is often adulterated with diesel oil by unscrupulous down-country dealers and the result does nothing for either one’s health or one’s temper. The powerful fumes from our stove – which works perfectly and cannot be blamed – give me a small nagging headache and make my eyes sore and watery. The candles I brought from Pindi are also eccentric; they behave in a most uncandlelike fashion, hissing loudly and spitting grease all over the page as I write.

  On our way back from Dambudass, as we were passing the Hotel, a scowling young man appeared at the door and beckoned us in. He wore a Chitrali cap, baggy pants and a blanket, and his long pale face was disfigured by acne. Evidently he was a person of some local importance, for he had that smattering of English which is worse than none because it can lead to so many complicated misunderstandings. For some reason he seemed to be in a foul temper and sullenly antagonistic towards us. There was an odd atmosphere in the Hotel, where we sat on the only piece of furniture – a charpoy – looking down at a firelit semi-circle of faces around the blazing logs. This time the young man was the object of covert derision and he seemed determined to take it out on us. Making no attempt to introduce himself or define his status, he asked where we came from, why we were in Baltistan, how long we were staying and where we were going. He said we had no right to stay in the Rest House, or anywhere else in Ronda, and must leave immediately. (For where? And how?) His aggressiveness became more marked as our conversation exposed more fully the limitations of his English and I soon realised that he understood almost nothing of what I was saying, despite my efforts to speak slowly and clearly. Every now and then he turned to his companions and harangued them in Balti, apparently defending himself. It was all very odd. But I could sense the rest of the assembly inexplicably veering to my side as the conversation proceeded and I began to feel quite sorry for the young man, who obviously was at some sort of disadvantage in the community.

  It began to snow again, quite heavily, as we continued back to the Rest House, and we have been weather-bound since noon. Dr Mazhar Javaid called on us after lunch and we went to the medical team’s room for tea. The doctor’s helpers are a good-looking, but very shy young nurse from Pindi, and an elderly Skardu woman who acts as chaperone and interpreter. (There is no resemblance whatever between Balti and any of the languages spoken in Pakistan.) All three sleep on a row of charpoys; Muslims have no convention forbidding the sexes to share sleeping quarters. Their Russian-type tin stove, on which all water is heated and all cooking done, burns very expensive wood. To us the room seemed uncomfortably overheated, but Pakistanis naturally feel the cold more than we do – and the doctor comes from Multan. He is a most endearing young man and already Rachel worships him.

  This ‘Medical Pioneers’ scheme is a gallant attempt to scratch the surface of Baltistan’s health problem. It will be impossible in the foreseeable future to provide normal medical aid for the Northern Areas, so a few unselfish volunteers come to such places as this to teach elementary hygiene to carefully chosen groups of young villagers. These are selected for their natural intelligence and because they are likely to remain always in Baltistan, where it is hoped they will gradually spread the light of hygiene. They are also taught how to treat dysentery, worms, bronchitis and other common local complaints.

  We had just returned to our room and lit the stove when Mazhar reappeared, followed by our spotty antagonist of the morning. Instead of his blanket he now wore a frayed olive-green sweater and a red arm-band saying PPP – Pakistan’s People’s Police.

  ‘This is Wazir Ghulam Nabi,’ explained Mazhar. ‘He is the Head Constable of Ronda and would like to see your passports.’ Later Mazhar admitted that Ghulam was the only constable of Ronda but said he so appreciated the title of Head Constable it seemed unkind not to use it.

  Ghulam spent the next twenty-five minutes poring perplexedly over our passports. Presuming his slow scrutiny of every page and health document to be a quest for visas, I asked Mazhar to explain in Urdu that Irish citizens need no visas. But Ghulam shook his head impatiently and continued to peer in a baffled, unhappy way at those green pages with the harp in the middle. Then suddenly he became very agitated because of stamps revealing that we had been in India earlier this year. It took Mazhar and me ten minutes to calm him down. By this stage I had begun to feel quite fond of him; away from the tea-house milieu, which had so put him on the defensive, he seemed just an unsure youth terrified of slipping up in his new job. Before leaving he smiled suddenly, shook hands warmly, thanked me for helping him and said we must call on his brother when we got to Khapalu. So despite our unsatisfactory passports, he has apparently decided to accept us.

  Thowar – 28 December

  A glorious morning after the snow – all white and blue in clear gold sunshine. I stood outside the Rest House at eight o’clock and looked up at the nameless 20,000 foot peak directly above to the north – a peak dazzling and sharp as a knife against the blue – and I knew no other part of the world could so exalt me. Up the Gorge towards Skardu cloud still hung about the tangled summits and as we set off to find the village of Ronda the mountain-side was crisp with a thin layer of frozen snow, while the swift stream beside our path was invisible – though audible – beneath a lid of ice. We went slowly, for Rachel is having altitude trouble. ‘I feel panted!’ she exclaimed graphically and plaintively as her mamma bounded along, feeling as always more energetic at 8,000 feet than at sea
-level. So I had to reduce my pace.

  Our path took us between brown, oblong, terraced fields with neat stone banks, and past apricot trees hung with vines, and through a cluster of small square stone hovels. Then we came out on a wide, snowy ledge at the foot of a sheer dark precipice at least 1,000 feet high: the scale of everything here is fantastic, dream-like. And there was Ronda, the only place-name to appear between Gilgit and Skardu on Bartholomew’s map. Yet it cannot be described as even a small town. It is simply a jumble of wood and stone dwellings, some almost neolithic, scattered in groups over a ledge about one mile long by three furlongs wide. Many houses have animal shelters built on their flat roofs, to evade the snow and catch as much sunlight as possible, and crude stone steps lead up to these. The most conspicuous building was a large and very ancient square two-storey dwelling, standing on its own with four unglazed upper-storey windows whose carved wooden panels reminded me of Tamang houses along the Nepal–Tibet border. Indeed, the whole place recalled the photographs one has seen of Tibetan towns and villages.

  We were soon surrounded by puny, silent children, too astounded by our appearance to speak or even smile. Many were so fair they could have been Irish; there were even two red-heads with bright blue eyes. Ginger hair and blue eyes are quite common hereabouts. Then the adults appeared, including three extraordinarily beautiful young women with delicately moulded, triangular faces, clear fair skins, rosy cheeks and bright eyes. Most women wear ornate headdresses of silver ornaments attached to round brocade caps and all were carrying on their backs at least one filthy baby or toddler. They were no less friendly than their menfolk and trooped after us, excitedly laughing and chattering, when we were invited to the Headman’s home. The Headman himself was away in Dambudass so we were entertained by his eldest son, a tall, handsome man of about thirty, whose wife and sister were two of the local beauties.

  It is difficult to describe the Headman’s house; here dwellings, stables and barns are virtually indistinguishable – and, I suspect, interchangeable. We were led through a conglomeration of dark little rooms unevenly built of wood, mud and stones, all huddled together anyhow and smelling strongly of livestock. Then our host ushered us into the twilit ‘parlour’, which had a strip of frayed matting on the earth floor, a pile of bed-rolls in one corner and no furniture apart from a small tin stove – in itself of course a considerable status symbol. As many neighbours as could squeeze in followed us and sat on the floor. They helped each other to untie children from backs while our host and I talked basic Urdu, in which language we proved to be about equally fluent. Tea took half an hour to prepare and was poured from a tarnished and battered silver teapot into grimy tumblers – it was very sweet but milkless. With it we were ceremoniously offered three small biscuits (imported from Pindi) on a large tin plate. Looking at the starving children all around us, I quietly told Rachel to restrain herself.

  I have my own system of grading poverty and today I concluded that the local level is not ‘acceptable’. I don’t at once deduce poverty if I see people studying the sun because they have no watches, or drying their hands at tea-house fires because they have no towels, or staring at themselves in jeep mirrors because they have no looking-glasses. But I do deduce poverty when almost everybody in a village is obviously permanently underfed. I have to admit, most reluctantly, that the opening up of this area may be a good thing. If only that process didn’t always involve the destruction of local traditions, the debasement of taste and the stimulation of greed. It is tragic that living-standards in remote regions cannot be raised without drawing people into the polluted mainstream of our horrible ‘consumer society’.

  On the way back to Thowar we passed Ronda’s tiny new police-station and were invited to drink more tea by the Head Constable and his senior officer, a gloomy native of the fertile Shigar valley who plainly resents his exile in this grim gorge. Both men were very polite but still seemed worried by our unprecedented invasion of their district. Ghulam apologetically produced a virgin ledger; across the top of one page he had painfully written in pencil – NAM AND DRES ⁄ PASPOR DETALS AGE ⁄ WORK ⁄ PARPAS OF VIST ⁄ DAT. He looked much happier when I had supplied all these ‘detals’, inventing our ‘paspor’ numbers which I can never remember. The ways of bureaucracy are wonderful. In a dozen countries I have solemnly inscribed fictitious passport numbers in the appropriate column without ever suffering any ill-effects.

  This evening Mazhar told me that crime of any sort is virtually unknown here so the main function of these two officers is to settle quarrels between husbands and wives. Apparently the locals, on finding themselves with a superfluous police force, decided forthwith to transmute it into a Marriage Advisory Council. And it seems that Ghulam is at present out of favour with the Hotel patrons because last week he took the wrong (female) side in a domestic dispute involving one of their number.

  Carrying a thermos of soup for lunch we rambled down the Gorge and after an hour’s walking and rock-scrambling found the picnic site to end all picnic-sites – and to end all picnickers, unless they are very careful. Sitting on a colossal, rounded rock, itself the size of a Wicklow mountain, we were overhanging the Indus some 1,000 feet below, where it has worn a narrow channel between sheer brown rock-walls that rose to 13,000 feet directly opposite us. From where I sat drinking my Batchelors oxtail soup I could and did drop a stone straight into the green water that flowed so smooth and silent so far below. Looking up that melodramatic corridor, hewn by the river, one sees a glittering array of sharp white peaks soaring above the sombre-hued cliffs of the Gorge. I could not estimate the height of these giants but to raise one’s eyes from the river to their summits gives a sense of sheer vastness such as I have never experienced before, not even in Nepal.

  It was warm in the sun when we sat down at 2.15, but beginning to be chilly when we stood up half an hour later. Gazing around, Rachel suddenly remarked, ‘This landscape looks terribly untidy’ – an excellent description of the Indus Gorge, where it seems as if some cataclysm had occurred only yesterday, leaving everything scattered and unsettled. The mountainsides are either perpendicular walls of cracked and jagged rock, on which even goats can’t venture, or smooth expanses of loose, grey-brown sand and scree littered with boulders of every size and shape that look as if about to roll down the slopes – which of course they frequently do. The fact that landslips and rockfalls are almost a daily occurrence makes the building and maintenance of irrigation channels and tracks (never mind motor-roads) a discouraging task.

  We came home by another route, high above the jeep-track, following a dry irrigation channel around the contours of two mountains and then sliding down a hair-raising gradient to the Rest House.

  I must admit that I am beginning to find my daughter’s companionship rather trying. When one is sitting adoring the high Himalayas it is almost unendurable suddenly to be asked ‘How exactly does radar work?’

  Thowar – 29 December

  Early this morning the weather looked unpromising, with lots of grey cloud low enough to be touched and light snow whirling through the Gorge. But it soon improved and at ten o’clock we set off in brilliant sunshine for what Rachel calls ‘an explore’. About a mile down the track towards Gilgit we turned away from the Indus to follow an ice-bound tributary up a side-valley. The sun had not yet penetrated to this ravine, yet round one corner we came on a dozen men and boys who had broken the ice and were standing knee-deep in the torrent washing their pantaloons and apparently aware of no discomfort. Our intrusion was untimely; few Baltis own two shalwars, so these unfortunates were caught with their pants not merely down but off. In fact the decencies were being adequately safeguarded by their long shirts, but they leaped out of the water with yelps of dismay and sat on a slab of rock, legs stretched out straight and knees together – the very personification of Primness. I cannot believe that clothes dry quickly in such a shadowed valley; they must be put on while still damp, which helps to explain why so many of the locals are contort
ed by rheumatism.

  The valley was a study in grey: grey dusty track, grey boulders in the river-bed, grey slopes on either side from which twisted grey crags jutted out of the shale like the skeletons of prehistoric monsters. All around were signs of recent landslips and soon our track ended abruptly, obliterated by countless tons of fallen mountain. We could see its continuation above us and to reach this we followed a goat-trail, sending cascades of loose pebbles and soil flowing from our footsteps. The gradient was so severe that Rachel had to be helped and we were both feeling ‘panted’ when we regained the track near the top of the ridge. But our rewards were many. First, a trail of fresh snow-leopard pug-marks in the fine dust; second, a majestic eagle with a wing-span of at least four feet sailing below us over the stream; and third a superb view of many previously unseen snow-peaks on the far (southern) side of the Gorge.

  We found another way home and were greeted by Mazhar with an invitation to Sunday lunch. This was the first I knew of its being Sunday. Diary-writing keeps me straight about dates but I don’t even try to remember the days, which are entirely irrelevant here.

  I had fondly imagined that Rachel would relax after lunch but she insisted on an ‘explore’ down the long, wide, steep slope in front of the Rest House. This slope is covered by an extraordinary array of angular black rocks, as though an army had come along with sledgehammers and smashed up a whole mountain on that spot. Across these boulders we went leaping like goats – Mazhar tells me the locals have quite decided we’re off our heads – and I got a close-up view of a magnificent fox. He was half as big again as an Irish fox, with a glowing marmalade coat and a thick white-tipped brush. Rachel missed him and was very aggrieved; I couldn’t resist telling her that if she talked less she might see more.