Where the Indus is Young

by Dervla Murphy

  One could easily pass this hamlet without noticing its few hovels high above the track. Unusually, the minute terraced fields go down almost to river-level, forming an amphitheatre which is wonderfully beautiful under thick snow as it leads up and up and up, for thousands of feet, to the vertical black crags of this summit – or rather, series of summits, each bejewelled by immensely long icicles hanging from ledges and glittering in the setting sun. (Earlier today we saw cliffs festooned with gold and green icicles as thick and long as telegraph poles – quite fantastic. I am so sleepy now that I can’t remember details in the right order.)

  Our kindly companions were so bewildered by the mere fact of our existence that it was impossible even to attempt a conversation with them. However, when we were about halfway across the amphitheatre they suddenly gestured towards the crags and indicated that Rachel should dismount. The youngest man gave her a pick-a-back while I led Hallam up from terrace to terrace, on paths that only a native pony would consider tackling. The load was repeatedly threatened as we passed between trees or jagged rocks and eventually our friends removed it and divided it between themselves. Then at last we were directly beneath the crags of the summit – coal-black in the brief twilight, against a faintly green sky – and some way ahead I saw Rachel’s red snow-suit disappearing into a stone rectangle a good deal smaller than most of the boulders around it. She had arrived at the headman’s home.

  A dark, narrow hallway runs through this dwelling and on one side is a kitchen, unfurnished apart from the central fireplace, and two stables for goats and cattle. On the other side is the large living/ sleeping room, where we are being entertained, and three small storerooms, for firewood, food and fodder, and another stable for sheep and hens. The inner walls are of woven willow-wands and the outer of thick stone neatly plastered with mud.

  On first entering this room I could see nothing – the two tiny unglazed windows are blocked against the cold – but soon my eyes got used to the gloom, and to the swirling smoke from the wood-stove’s leaking pipe, and I saw Rachel sitting on the floor facing an astounded semicircle of family on whom she was fruitlessly practising her Urdu. I also saw that half the floor-space, furthest from the stove, is occupied by several wickerwork coops covered with bits of blanket and containing delicate new-born kids and lambs who frequently emit plaintive cries and, as I write, are being fed maize gruel off spoons by two children. At the humans’ end of the room the floor is covered with goat-hair matting which seems not to have been cleaned since the place was built. On this we have spread our flea-bags, beside an apparently old couple (who may be no older than myself), their son and daughter-in-law, two unmarried daughters, and a filth-encrusted baby with an ominous cough. The whole family is coughing dreadfully and I fear our host is dying. He lies propped against a sheepskin full of straw and is horribly emaciated, with enormous bright eyes and hot dry hands. In Balti he begged for some medicine, but nodded understandingly when I unhappily explained that I had none. Then he asked his daughter-in-law to take one large white pill from a little wall cupboard and showed it to me, anxiously enquiring if it was any good; I could only say I didn’t know, while feeling hopeless and helpless. Our hostess is not in much better condition. She seems to have bronchial asthma and is now moaning and gasping on the floor beside me, after an exhausting bout of coughing.

  Yet this wretched family welcomed us most warmly, though naturally a little timidly. Food was offered, but everybody seemed relieved to see that we have our own; for supper they had only one thin chapatti each with a sauce of weak dahl gruel. They watched, fascinated, while I opened a tin of tuna fish for Rachel and made myself a mug of Complan and glucose with mouth-numbing glacial water. No meal has ever tasted better to me, I felt so ravenous.

  The loo arrangements are as in Tibet: a flat mud roof just outside the ‘hall-door’ has four holes in it and when one squats the result falls into a little house from which it is taken in the spring – having been mixed with wood ash – and spread on the fields.

  On arrival here Hallam was at once undressed, except for his namdah, and led off to a cosy stable. But he took agin it, though his sweet-smelling supper was already within, and refused to ascend the three rounded boulders that serve as steps. It seemed unlikely that he would heed me, when he was ignoring the sort of Balti urging he is used to, but I felt bound to make an effort. At the scene of the deadlock I found him with ears laid back and eyes rolling, yet the moment he heard my voice his ears came forward. I took the halter and waved all the cursing, kicking men away and he followed me up those boulders like a lamb. He has been with us only three days but a little love goes a long way.

  Katchura – 10 January

  We had a disturbed night, there was so much coughing and groaning, and for hours on end the baby was crying weakly. Luckily Rachel slept soundly through everything while I read by torchlight from 4 a.m. until the family rose at 6.30. Then we breakfasted: tinned corned beef for Rachel, more Complan and glucose for me, futile guilt for both of us because we are being so well-fed.

  At nine o’clock we ventured out into a world that seemed to have been throttled overnight by the violence of the cold. It took thirty minutes to slither and scramble down to the jeep-track on precipitous pathlets of solid ice. A boy went first to show us the least hazardous route, I followed with Hallam, two men carried Hallam’s load and Rachel brought up the rear, helped by our host’s son. I shall always remember that hamlet with a mixture of gratitude and despair – the welcome so warm and the destitution so extreme.

  It was an intoxicating morning – the sun dazzling on new snow, the sky half-veiled by milky, wispy clouds, the Indus sparkling like a cascade of emeralds. The track was so icy that it took us over three hours to cover six miles and Rachel grew rather impatient. I could see her point: it’s not much fun riding at less than 2 m.p.h. For much of the way we were on another sheer rock-wall directly above the river, and as Hallam gingerly picked his way along Rachel caused me to reflect on the perversity of human nature. When I was six I used to lie in bed secretly dreaming about galloping across unspecified steppes on fiery steeds, or riding undaunted through lonely, frowning mountains infested with cougars. And now my daughter, aged six, while riding along perilous paths hundreds of feet above a roaring torrent, through the most spectacular mountain gorge in the world, says – ‘Let’s have a pretend game! Let’s pretend I’m grown up and married to a doctor in Lismore and we have two children and now we’re moving to a new bungalow and I’m going shopping to choose all the colours for wallpapers and carpets …’

  This village is near the beginning of the Gorge and below it we crossed the Indus by a 300-foot-long suspension bridge built twenty-four years ago, in three months, by the Pakistani Army. At first it felt quite odd to have the river on our left instead of on our right. And it was even odder to look ahead and see a flat, snow-covered plain, some five miles wide, with a solid wall of soaring mountains rising abruptly from the far side. This is the western end of the Skardu valley and after a slow journey through the Gorge it creates an impression of endless spaciousness.

  From the bridge the track climbs steeply, leaving the river, and because it was already noon we had to cope with fast-melting slush on sticky, red-brown mud. This new handicap, combined with the fearsome gradient, made me sweat as though in the tropics. Neither of us could make out what route the track was about to take – whether it was going over the next mountain or around the one we were on or down to the valley floor. Eventually we saw that it was going to the top of the one we were on – a sunny, dazzling world covered in two feet of new snow. From this point we could see both the length of Gorge we had just travelled and the Skardu plain, very far below. The broad Indus looked lazy and tame as it meandered slowly across that plain towards the narrow mouth of the Gorge, so directly below us that we could not see it. Here we were at last beyond earshot of the river’s powerful roar and that silence made us lonely.

  Katchura straggles over a low mountain-top, rive
n by deep clefts and overlooked by snowy, rock-tipped higher mountains. Two ‘hotels’, two hucksters’ shops and a police-station line the jeep-track; so perhaps, being equipped with police, it is technically a town. At the more awake-looking hotel we asked the way to the Rest House; but it is closed, we were told, and the chowkidar has gone to Skardu for the Muharram ceremonies. Constable Hamad Hussain then took charge of us, saying we must on no account stay in an hotel run by thieving Pathans. He installed us in an annexe to the police-station and Hallam was stabled nearby. Hamad has a hectoring manner and I don’t care for him. Nor, understandably, does the friendly Pathan from whose establishment we were ‘rescued’. This windowless cell, eight feet by eight, has the usual tin wood-stove in the centre of the earth floor and two broken-legged charpoys.

  After a lunch of tea and chapattis we set off to explore an inviting side-valley above the village. The snow was a miracle of pure brilliance, stretching softly away on every side in unflawed billows, and at one stage Rachel had to be given a pick-a-back lest she disappear into a drift. Often we turned to marvel at the immense height of the mountains along whose ankles we had been crawling in the Gorge. We also noticed a wonderful cloud-formation: one slender length of diaphanous vapour coiling unbroken from the mouth of the Gorge for as far as one could see towards Ronda. It was at eye-level, so the blue-brown-black mountain mass against which we viewed it seemed to be wearing a silver belt.

  Back in our room, we had a meal of chapattis and harsh dahl curry. I have long since realised that during winter in Baltistan privacy is unattainable; the Baltis are attracted by heat as wasps by jam. Seven men, cloaked in blankets, are now sitting on our charpoys, stretching their hands towards the heat, coughing incessantly and frequently spitting or blowing their noses on to the floor. (‘People have different customs here,’ commented Rachel.) They watch my pen as though hypnotised and are, I must confess, irritating me slightly. Yet to turn them out, in this temperature and with fuel so dear, would be unforgivable.

  One of our visitors was a Skardu youth who introduced himself as ‘a government officer’ and spoke a version of English. He had a neat, almost pretty little face, and wore a cheap-smart leather jacket with a London label which he proudly showed me. ‘My bust friend is smuggler,’ he explained. ‘He know Europe well. He have many friends of Europe. He work London–Karachi–London. Drugs to London, Scotch to Karachi. He is very rich man and my bust friend. Can I be of service to you?’

  ‘No thank you,’ I said firmly, just as the door opened to admit Hamad Hussain’s senior colleague. This tall, slim, unsmiling character had long, oiled, ebony moustaches, a livid scar on his left temple and a general air of having strayed from the cast of some opera bouffe dealing in handsome villains. He did not greet us but squeezed himself on to a charpoy as the Skardu youth asked me, ‘Do you like chess?’

  Feeling vaguely surprised that the conversation should have taken such an elevated turn, I replied regretfully, ‘I’m afraid not; it’s too highbrow for me.’

  ‘You think it is bad habit?’ pursued the youth.

  ‘Of course not!’ I said. ‘I’m told it’s very good for the brain – it’s just that I’ve never been able to cope with it myself.’

  ‘But here you can try!’ exclaimed the youth. Then he leant across the stove and said something in Balti to the policeman, who at once produced what looked like a pellet of cow-dung. Holding this up between thumb and forefinger, and addressing me for the first time, the Head Constable said, ‘I give you, you give me Rs.50.’

  I took the pellet to examine it, and Rachel and I felt it and smelt it: it was odourless. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Chess,’ replied the youth. ‘My bust friend sell this much for Rs.500 in London, but here it is cheap.’

  I handed his property back to the Head Constable and caused a gale of incredulous laughter by informing the company that in my country people are gaoled for selling ‘chess’. Then, having failed to do business, the policeman sombrely rolled a joint which he shared impartially with all his friends.

  Near Skardu Airstrip – 11 January

  We were charged an outrageous Rs.25 for our cell in the police-station and the atmosphere generated this morning by the jostle of men around me indicated that argument would be ill-received.

  It was snowing lightly as we left Katchura and we were the only moving objects on a landscape innocent of even a bird’s footprint. Overnight every angle had been rounded and every sharpness blunted, and now every tiny sound of nature was muffled. Clouds full of the radiance of unfallen snow hid the high peaks and one could stare at the sun through veils of gently drifting flakes, while a curiously diffused light glinted hesitantly on the sweep of the Indus, far below.

  Our track, having descended to the base of the mountains, ran just above the valley floor – an unbroken expanse of glittering crystals. When we paused to rest on clumps of thyme, two slowly moving dots appeared, far away on the track towards Skardu. The first jeep to draw level with us stopped and the moment the driver unmuffled his face we recognised our taciturn friend, Mohammad, on his way back (he hoped) to Gilgit. Then the second vehicle stopped and Rachel squealed with joy on recognising Mazhar, on his way back (he hoped) to Thowar. He was accompanied by his senior medical officer, who also got out of the jeep and, as we shook hands, asked smilingly, ‘Do you remember?’

  I studied his cheerful, slightly plump face, but had to say ‘No.’

  His smile widened. ‘Chilas!’ he exclaimed. Incredibly, this was the man who, as a just-qualified army doctor, tended me so effectively in June 1963, after my heatstroke collapse in the furnace-like depths of the lower Indus Gorge. When Mazhar had told him about the Irishwoman with the child and the horse he had immediately declared, ‘It can only be the same one – unless all Irishwomen are mad!’

  Soon after, the track left the base of the mountains to run between a succession of little hamlets and neat apricot and apple orchards where the trees had been carefully pruned – a sure sign of government agricultural advisers in the background. At one point we were joined by two fellow-travellers. The man wore a threadbare beige blanket and had a type of face often seen here – blunt-featured, kindly, not very bright. He was leading a frisky, woolly young dzo who plainly did not approve of the rope tied round her long, sharp horns. His small son followed, tramping through ice, snow and slush in pale blue broken plastic sandals on otherwise bare feet. Our first Balti dog brought up the rear – a black, heavily built, shaggy creature, with a square head. When a third jeep noisily approached us the dzo knocked her owner flat and went careering off over the snowy waste at a speed altogether inconsistent with her bulk. The dog promptly gave chase, followed by his humans, and as far as we were concerned the entire party was lost to sight forever.

  By this time a windsock was visible, hanging motionless and unlikely against the valley’s eastern rampart of blue, cloud-enmeshed mountains. Then we saw Skardu’s squalid ‘airport’, a landing-strip nine miles from the town, surrounded by broken-down bits of road-building machinery, rusty jeep skeletons, barbed wire enclosures containing petrol-barrels, an army camp and supply depot, and sundry other disagreeable phenomena recalling travellers to the 1970s. (Oddly, between Gilgit and here one comes to accept jeeps – not to regard them as vile mechanical intrusions on the landscape. I suppose this is because of their daring feats in the Gorge, which earn one’s grudging respect.)

  The eleven miles from Katchura had taken us over six hours and both Hallam and I were flagging for lack of adequate food, while Rachel was stiff with cold, having been in the saddle all day because of conditions underfoot.

  Our hotel is new, like most buildings around the airstrip, but not offensive because constructed of local materials in the local style. It is opposite the enormous Military Supply Depot for Baltistan, so our arrival at once attracted the attention of several junior army officers who have proved most helpful, though the Pakistani Army is strictly forbidden, throughout the Northern Areas, to frate
rnise with foreigners. One Pathan lieutenant produced a bucket of pulse for Hallam and another told me not to order an evening meal because at six o’clock he would bring us mutton stew from the Mess. Hearing the words ‘mutton stew’ Rachel and I could scarcely control our salivary glands and sure enough at five minutes past six our friend reappeared, followed by his batman bearing a laden tray. We could now smell the mutton stew – but alas! the proprietor barred the doorway and began a tirade of abuse in Urdu, with Balti asides to his cronies who were sitting near us by the stove. I could gather approximately what was being said: that the military were a lot of idle, interfering intruders, that his khana was as good as anything produced in their rotten Officers’ Mess, that when he had a chance to make money on a foreigner they had no business to queer his pitch, that he and his friends would beat up the lieutenant and his servant if they didn’t go away fast, taking their tray with them. (The proprietor would need a lot of help to beat up anybody; he is a mere wisp of a man, with a leathery face lined more by ill-temper than by age.) I felt very sorry for our friend, who had been put in a most humiliating position, especially for a Pathan. To help him save face I pretended to notice nothing and sat with head industriously bowed over notebook. Rachel of course was aching for mutton stew but when I fiercely whispered ‘Tact!’ she remained silent. This is a codeword meaning ‘Be quiet now and I’ll explain later’. It is invaluable on the many occasions when if she said anything it would be the wrong thing. I must say I admired her stoicism this evening. The poor child hasn’t had a decent meal for weeks and had been looking forward to her mutton stew with pathetic eagerness. Yet when it was removed from under her very nose, and I had explained why, she accepted the inevitable – in this case yet another fistful of dried apricots – and went to bed without a word of complaint.