Where the Indus is Young

by Dervla Murphy

  At last we were again overlooking the Indus, from the verge of a fearsome precipice of friable, pale brown clay. The matching cliffs beyond the river had been weirdly eroded and looked like giants’ rib-cages; it seems likely that quite soon – geologically speaking – the Indus will have undermined all these cliffs. In the Himalayas one becomes very conscious of the elements as creative forces.

  Directly opposite was the village of Mendi. Its stone hovels merge into their background of small brown fields and would have gone unnoticed but for occasional wisps of blue smoke and the oddly toy-like movements of black cattle and brown and white sheep and goats. Above the broad ledge supporting Mendi rises another sharp, snowy mountain, and looking downstream we could see one of those ‘beaches’ which so tantalise Rachel – smooth crescents of fine silver sand lying untrodden and forever inaccessible beside the emerald swiftness of the Indus.

  On our way home we sent several flocks of chikor (partridges) whirring into the sky. There are mysteriously numerous here: I cannot imagine what they eat during winter.

  It is now half-past ten and I have just been out to look at the full moon over Ronda. There was no movement throughout all that brilliant wilderness, and no sound but the distant song of the Indus. In a powder-blue sky few stars showed and from every side came the magic radiance of luminous snows. Towards Skardu a remote peak shone above all the rest, like a tiara suspended over the world, and the nearby mountains seemed ethereal turrets of light, almost eerie in the flawlessness of their glory. Such overwhelming experiences of beauty change one; though they may last only for moments, they permanently reinforce the spirit.

  Thowar – 30 December

  At 7 a.m. I found our waterfall frozen solid, despite its speed, and chunks of ice had to be broken off to fill the kettle. Last night the temperature fell to 38º below freezing, yet by ten o’clock this morning we were sitting in hot sun at 9,000 feet. We are not feeling this dry cold nearly as much as I had expected; Ireland’s penetrating damp cold is far less easy to combat. But our skins are suffering from the complete lack of moisture in the air, though I frequently plaster Rachel with high-altitude lotion. (My own tough old hide is past worrying about.)

  Our target for today was the mountain overlooking Ronda village and for the first hour we were climbing gradually through tiny, terraced fields bounded by glistening, frozen irrigation channels. Here were many apricot, apple, mulberry, walnut and plane trees, some with ancient vines twining around their trunks, or linking tree to tree, like fabulous serpents. Near the edge of a precipice we rested in the sun while looking down on yesterday’s ‘grey valley’ and on the Indus still further below. Then we turned to gaze over the roofs of Ronda village at our objective. We were not aiming for the 14,000 foot summit – an unclimbable buttress of fluted rock – but for a point some 2,000 feet lower, to which a goat track led from Gomu hamlet, beyond Ronda. This path could be seen running like a pencil-line straight across a vast expanse of scree, and then climbing through a jumble of broken brown rock in the midst of which it seemed to peter out.

  As we approached Gomu, those inhabitants who had been sitting in the sun along the edges of their stone-walled terraces quickly stood up, shaded their eyes, and for some moments stared at us unsmilingly with mingled incredulity and alarm. But this understandable unease soon subsided and then we were made to feel most welcome. Each of us was given a sweet juicy green apple – an exotic delicacy, during mid-winter in Baltistan – and the women had no objection to being photographed. The Baltis were converted from Buddhism to Islam some 500 years ago, but it seems the Prophet’s message has not yet been clearly heard.

  Gomu is a scattering of perhaps a hundred dwellings, built on different levels amidst many fruit-trees. On the outskirts is a small new mosque, constructed in the pleasing traditional style with alternate layers of granite and wood (poplar and mulberry). It differs from a dwelling only in having a carved wooden façade and fretwork eaves. The Baltis rarely bother to decorate secular buildings but some local craftsman has made a great effort for the glory of Allah.

  I noticed many Tibetan-type faces and the locals also show a Tibetan-type cheerfulness, though to us it might seem they have little enough to be cheerful about. Yet Baltistan is very much an ethnic hotch-potch. Even in a small hamlet one sees fair, blue-eyed people, and others who could be of Kashmiri, Afghan, Turkish or Persian descent.

  Most Gomu women wear silver headdresses, often inset with coral, and some also wear collars of large turquoises set in silver. Men and women alike dress in dingy, sack-like, homespun gowns and during winter spend much of their time spinning wool as they sit in the sun. Between mid-November and mid-March no farm-work can be done apart from tending livestock, which means providing fodder and letting them out for a couple of midday hours to sun and water themselves.

  Our taking the goat-trail onwards from Gomu caused some consternation. Nobody could understand why we were making for a cul-de-sac and a score of men, women and children good-naturedly pursued us to point out our ‘mistake’. I pretended that my motive was photographic, but they remained worried and puzzled. Naturally enough, toiling up steep slopes is not their idea of fun. As we walked on, revelling in the glory all around us, I reflected that to the average Balti this splendour probably means no more than walking through my home town would mean to me.

  Where the path petered out we could see, on a level with us beyond the Gorge, those immense, smooth, spotless snowfields which gather on the shadowed slopes south of the Indus. We were directly overlooking Ronda village but so far above it that the people seemed like ants. Yet as we sat on a rock enjoying tomato soup the village sounds rang out through the still, thin, clear air and I was struck by their happy note. Undoubtedly there is a collective village sound, a dominant note expressive of the nature of the people. In many regions of India it is peevish, in Eastern Turkey it is quarrelsome, in highland Ethiopia it is jovial in a subdued way – and here it is gay, gossipy and bantering, for the Baltis are much given to teasing one another.

  Our Gomu friends were delighted to see us returning safely from our inexplicable peregrination. They had tea ready for us in a tall pewter jug with an ornate handle and lid. To my sentimental delight and Rachel’s gastronomic horror it proved to be Tibetan tea, complete with rancid butter. Everyone rejoiced to find me so appreciative of their regional delicacy and we were shown the goat-skins which serve as churns and the sheet of yak-skin in which a few pounds of this precious butter, which had already been smoked for some months, was about to be buried under the snow. Several long strips of dried and salted yak-meat were hanging from the rafters above the fire. The Baltis, unlike the Tibetans, do not relish rotten meat; perhaps the local climate is not cold enough for this taste to be practical.

  On the way home we met our first pure-bred yak, an already massive two-year-old. I had not previously realised how very dissimilar yak are to all other domestic cattle; they have feet like a ballerina’s and forequarters like a bison’s. This youngster took a great fancy to me. As I photographed him he approached to try to eat the camera and he was ecstatic when I scratched between his horns, already some eighteen inches long. But when Rachel appeared in her scarlet snow-suit he at once lowered his head, blew menacingly through his nostrils and began to paw the ground. I got out my camera to distract him and quietly told Rachel to walk out of sight … Mercifully the camera distraction worked.

  We got home at 3.30 and I continued alone to the Hotel to buy chapattis for our supper. The strong wind that had risen a few hours earlier was still blowing down the Gorge, driving fine sand into everything. Yet all the few bony, shrivel-faced children I passed were wearing only cotton shifts and shalwars – the shifts open to halfway down their chests. Rachel would be dead in twenty-four hours if thus exposed to such a wind.

  Outside the Hotel stood several groups of timid-looking, shaggy-haired, ragged men, many with goitres like rugger-balls. They were patiently awaiting their monthly ration of government-subsidised wh
eat, which they grind themselves in their village water-mills. When a man’s share had been carefully weighed – with stones as weights – the precious grain was poured into sacks of sheep- or goatskin, some still with the wool on. Each man then sat on the ground and when a friend had harnessed him to his heavy load, with hide thongs, he struggled to his feet, grasped his stick and set slowly off on the long trudge home to some hidden hamlet in a crevice of the mountains. Watching them go – bent under their burdens and flayed by that savage wind – I remembered Sir Francis Younghusband’s summing-up: ‘Baltis have a careworn, depressed look at first sight. But they are a gentle, likeable people, and whenever the care of feeding themselves is off their minds they brighten up and unloose their tongues.’

  This subsidised food scheme is an act of great humanity on the part of Mr Bhutto’s government; in such an area it cannot reasonably be considered a vote-catching device. Some Pakistanis argue that the Baltis don’t deserve it because their poverty is largely their own fault. It is said that they are bone-lazy and that the Hunzawals, with no greater natural advantages, have always managed to achieve a modest level of prosperity. I have never been to Hunza so I cannot dispute this point. I only know that all the scientific and mountaineering expeditions with experience of Balti porters have praised them warmly for their industry, endurance, loyalty, patience, gentleness, cheerfulness and scrupulous honesty.

  Thowar – 31 December

  Today we went down instead of up and at last found a spot where the Indus is approachable. For five miles we followed the jeep-track towards Skardu and though the sun shone all day it never reached us because we were descending to river-level. Moreover, a knife-edged wind was cutting through the Gorge so we needed balaclavas, gloves and snow-goggles – these last to protect our eyes from the clouds of stinging dust frequently whipped up by the wind.

  The grandeur, weirdness, variety and ferocity of this region cannot be exaggerated. We sometimes paused to gaze up at boulders the size of a three-storey house which were poised above the track looking as though a mouse could topple them. Rachel found these slightly intimidating and when for no reason a few pebbles came rolling down just behind us she jumped like a shot rabbit. Undeniably the potential hazards of this terrain give a special flavour to daily life. We are used to thinking of our physical surroundings as stable and long since tamed, but here the land is blatantly untamed and untameable.

  The last stage of our descent, when we left the track, was down a grey, sandy slope strewn with grey stones and aromatic grey clumps of dried thyme. Between this slope and the river rose a grotesque hill of black rock with a rounded summit of golden sand; from the track it had looked like an island.

  Reaching the water, we found it lapping gently on a small silver beach. It felt quite odd to be beside it, having so often during the past week gazed at it from such heights. To celebrate the occasion we solemnly drank some Indus from our thermos mug and wrote our names on the sand with my Ethiopian dula. But very soon the wind had erased us – which would make a good starting-point for a philosophical digression.

  Near the water’s edge was a tumble of toffee-coloured boulders, large and small, which had been polished, as though with wax, by the action of the wind and the sand. The effect was most striking: these rocks gleamed like pieces of well-kept furniture.

  Altogether different was the 2,000-foot cliff beneath which we lunched in a cave. This grey-black wall of jagged, fissured rock (our cave was one of the fissures) extended up and up and up in diagonal layers and looked as if the mildest earth tremor could send the whole improbable mass crashing into the Indus. I felt ridiculously uneasy while drinking my pea soup – a form of nourishment that inevitably provoked several of those cloacal puns to which Rachel’s age-group is so vilely addicted.

  By two o’clock the wind had reached gale-force so we turned our tails to it and made for home. There was one hamlet on a ledge not far above the river about half a mile downstream from our beach, but all day we saw nobody; the ill-clad Baltis detest this wind.

  It really is extraordinary how humans come to terms with such areas, showing infinite resourcefulness and determination in their efforts to sustain life. The local irrigation channels are a marvel of primitive engineering and take a lot of time and thought to keep in order. As the rainfall is practically nil, glacial streams have to be led, often for miles, along precarious mountainsides and across the faces of almost sheer cliffs to the rare oases of soil. Then, to receive this hard-won water, the soil has to be built up by hand into level terraces. If the Baltis were as lazy as some Pakistanis allege, they would long since have become extinct.

  The construction of animal shelters also requires ingenuity. Even from close to, their roofs sometimes look like fields: which indicates how tiny many of the fields are. Then suddenly you realise that you are standing on a stable, and peering over the edge you see a minute wooden door in what had seemed to be the field’s stone embankment. Such shelters are occupied during spring and autumn nights by goats and sheep, and are used for storing winter fodder. Cattle are almost always stabled in the villages.

  Every fertile patch of ground supports a variety of trees including many young poplars, which are planted as building-material; in winter these look very frail, standing tall, slender and naked between stalwart Asian planes, with their jigsaw-puzzle barks of silver and brown, and sturdy vine-entwined mulberry or apricot trees.

  It is now ten o’clock and bedtime for me; I could not possibly stay awake to see the New Year in. Nor is there anything but tea with which to greet it. I find it very odd that one completely forgets about alcohol as soon as it is not available, though at home an evening without a drink would seem intolerable.

  3

  Alarms and Excursions

  For upwards of a hundred miles, the Indus sweeps sullen and dark through a mighty gorge in the mountains, which for wild sublimity is perhaps unequalled … The Indus raves from side to side of the gloomy chasm, foaming and chaffing with ungovernable fury. Yet even in these inaccessible places has daring and ingenious man triumphed over nature. The yawning abyss is spanned by frail rope bridges, and the narrow ledges of rock are connected by ladders to form a giddy pathway overhanging the seething cauldron below.

  ALEXANDER CUNNINGHAM (1854)

  Thowar – 1 January 1975

  A sad start to the New Year. After breakfast we went to Dambudass for more kerosene and there met Syed M. Abbas Kazmi, one of the leaders of Skardu society, to whom we had been introduced in Gilgit. He arrived here last evening, on his way home, and told us of an appalling earthquake in the Swat area of the Indus Valley on 29 December. We are probably among the last people in the world to have heard of it, though it took place scarcely 150 miles away. The Aurangzebs moved up to Saidu on 21 December, but presumably are safe: the wireless would surely have mentioned it had they been involved. An estimated 7,500 have been killed and 14,000 left homeless. Some forty miles of the new Indus Highway have been demolished and repairs are likely to take a few months, during which no supplies can come through to the Northern Areas by road; therefore serious petrol and kerosene shortages are forecast.

  Abbas Kazmi looks incongruous here. A slight, pale young man of Kashmiri – originally Persian – extraction, he was born and bred in Skardu but wears spotless, well-cut European-style clothes and speaks fluent English. It would not be unfair to call him a dandy; he objected to five hens sharing the charpoy on which we were sitting outside the chi-khana ‘because they will spoil our clothes’. Then he glanced at my grimy husky-suit and commiserated with me on the lack of dhobi facilities in Baltistan. I replied dryly that to us the dhobi situation is irrelevant as we have no change of outer garments. Despite his sartorial foibles Abbas Kazmi is a most likeable character, very knowledgeable about Baltistan and extremely kind. In Gilgit he had heard that I was planning to rent a room in Skardu for some weeks and today he assured me that this will not be necessary as we can use the empty house of a friend of his who winters down-coun
try. In Asia it is always a good idea to broadcast one’s plans.

  Here no subsidised kerosene is available and two gallons, sold by weight, cost Rs.25 instead of Rs.7 – not too unreasonable, considering the transport difficulties: moreover it is unadulterated, so this evening our room is at last free of noxious fumes.

  The merchant Zaffir Khan, whom we regularly patronise, today invited us into his home to meet his family. He is a Pathan, as are the owner of the chi-khana and the proprietor of the Hotel. The locals are as yet too unworldly to take commercial advantage of their jeep-track and Abbas Kazmi explained that all along it Pathans are to be found running stores or hotels. Often these are relatives of the jeep-drivers who in summer regularly carry loads to Skardu. Both Pathans and Punjabis are disliked throughout Baltistan, partly because of the normal antagonism felt towards meddling outsiders by isolated communities, and partly because many immigrants cheat when financially innocent villagers wish to exchange chickens, eggs or fruit for tea, sugar or cloth. However, not all immigrants exploit and despise the rough rug-headed Balti kerns. Some, including Zaffir Khan, are sympathetic, condoling with them on the recent loss of their ‘Rajas’, who were really petty chiefs traditionally subject to the Raja of Skardu.