Where the Indus is Young

by Dervla Murphy

  ERIC SHIPTON

  Animals are such agreeable friends – they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.

  GEORGE ELIOT

  Satpara – 25 January

  When I walked Hallam to the stream at sunrise he appeared to be moving normally and by 9.30 we were on our way. The track was two feet deep in crunchy, squeaky snow, and the thin, dry, cold air had that exhilarating quality which makes one rejoice simply to be alive and footloose. A violent glare made tinted goggles necessary until we reached the narrow Satpara Gorge. From the edge of the Skardu Valley the track descends abruptly to river-level between sheer, jagged mountains, and then climbs towards the high moraine that closes the mouth of the Satpara Valley. In the sun we felt almost warm but out of it the air seemed to freeze our very lungs. The Satpara River falls 1,300 feet in less than six miles and is noisy out of all proportion to its winter volume; the only sound we could hear was its roar – and sometimes an echo of that roar, weirdly resounding where cliffs overhang the track. The riverbed boulders were beautifully encased in glittering ice and wore ermine capes of snow, and when we lifted our eyes to the heights we saw peaks like giant white swords, or colossal squared battlements, filling the sky in every direction. We met nobody and observed no trace of human or animal life; within that hidden gorge one feels totally isolated from the rest of the world, despite Skardu’s nearness.

  The gradient was so severe, the path so icy and the terrain so fascinating that we took two hours to cover four miles. I thought of Fillipo de Fillipi, whose Karakoram and Western Himalaya I finished last night. He wrote: ‘Walking is really the only kind of locomotion that puts us on equal terms with the world about us. Our modern mechanical methods of transportation tend to make us lose sight of our relative importance.’ Thus, travelling on foot in 1975 is not the pointless eccentricity it may appear to be; when we ‘lose sight of our relative importance’ everything else in life becomes to some extent distorted. And ‘mechanical methods of transportation’ prevent one from forming a relationship with the landscape. The motorist can admire it, in a restricted and detached way, but a steep hill is merely an occasion for changing gears, a storm merely an occasion for shutting the window, a village merely an occasion for reducing speed. And yet with what alacrity do people like the Baltis avail themselves of motor transport, once it comes within reach! Soon there will be few people left, anywhere, who have not lost sight of their ‘relative importance’.

  On foot in Baltistan, one becomes increasingly aware of its landscape as a ‘temporary arrangement’. This morning, walking up that short, steep, narrow valley, we were surrounded by the marks of recent violence and drama: everything seemed to have been born out of some cataclysm. Our whole visible world was a mad jumble of crags, cliffs, rocks, boulders, stones, pebbles and sand. In the river-bed detritus of all shapes and sizes had been flung down by avalanches to mix with enormous accumulations of alluvial deposits, and avalanche scars were plain to be seen on the awesome slopes beyond the river. From these slopes occasional stones broke loose even today, despite the intense frost, and bounded thousands of feet to the valley floor; and directly above the track were precipitous broken cliffs whose fractured façades promised further disintegration in the near future. Below the track some boulders were smooth and shiny – ancient works of Nature’s art – while beside them lay gigantic sharp-edged chunks of rock, newly riven from their parent crags. The scene we looked on this morning has changed a great deal since de Fillipi looked on it in 1909, yet in geological terms sixty-five years are but an instant. As he himself wrote: ‘Geological evolution is proceeding [in the Karakoram] … with such activity and on such a scale that nothing elsewhere can be compared with it.’

  Just before Satpara Lake comes into view the steep climb ends and a few stunted willows and fruit-trees appear on the far side of the river, and then one small stone dwelling. By stages the lake was revealed: first a corner of dark shadowy water at the foot of a snowy slope – then a wider sheet of jade, with a low islet near the eastern shore – and finally the whole expanse, half a mile wide and a mile long, with not a ripple stirring its sheen of clear green as it reflected the snowy flanks of its guardian mountains. There was enchantment there, in the brilliance and silence of that noon hour, with golden light pouring from a dark blue mountain sky and the lake a steady mirror full of the beauty of glittering peaks. Rachel stood up in the stirrups, her face transformed with joy, and her delight helped to compensate for the hours of tedious chatter one has to endure in the company of a small child.

  Evidently Satpara Lake was formed when a high moraine closed the valley’s mouth. Its shape is unusual – almost rectangular, apart from two slight indentations on the east shore, in one of which is the new Rest House. Before continuing, we examined the remains of an ancient dyke on the north shore, some thirty yards from the track. The buttress is about sixteen feet high and there are many traces of what presumably were locks and floodgates. One local tradition says the dyke was built by the last Buddhist ruler of Skardu, who was slain by Mongol invaders. If this is true, the remains must be almost six centuries old. But a conflicting tradition attributes them to the last independent Raja of Skardu. However, it is known that until about 1885 the lock gates were decorated with Buddhist carvings on stone, which were carried off to Nepal by Buddhist troops serving in Skardu. The remains certainly look more than 130 years old and I gazed at them with some awe. In a land where Nature dominates so inexorably and Man seems incidental, existing only on sufferance, the traveller rarely comes on any enduring monument of human endeavour.

  As we continued around the lake, some 100 feet above the water, Hallam began to limp again. I knew the Rest House was close so we kept going and soon could see it below the track on a ledge overlooking the islet, which is only about 100 yards in diameter and boulder-strewn, with low shrubbery growing around its shoreline. Having unloaded and unsaddled Hallam I turned him loose. Normally he would have made straight for the few accessible clumps of thyme but today he began to wander around in circles, moving as though he had lost control of his hindquarters and repeatedly shaking his head. Tears sprang to Rachel’s eyes and she hurried up the slope to fetch him nourishment. I wasn’t feeling too happy myself, though it cheered me to see him eating what little thyme Rachel’s small hands could wrench from the frozen earth. As I was tethering him to a mulberry tree, two young men emerged from a ruined dwelling that stood close to the Rest House and was the only other building in sight. I assumed one of them to be the chowkidar, but as they scrambled up a steep embankment I saw that both were barefooted and clad in loosely-associated patches of homespun cloth reaching to their bony knees. One was a semi-idiot and the other almost totally blind: definitely not chowkidar material, even in Baltistan. When they had been given time to digest our arrival the blind young man agreed to fetch the chowkidar and went off – guided by the semi-idiot – towards the solitary house we had passed near the mouth of the valley.

  Half an hour later the chowkidar arrived and said Hallam would be dead by morning. He may well be right – I know too little about equine ailments to dispute the point – but the satisfaction he appeared to derive from making this announcement annoyed me intensely. In other ways, too, he is tiresome. He tried to persuade me to return to Skardu at once because of Hallam’s imminent demise (an odd reason for making a horse walk another six miles), and he insisted that there was no stabling within reach, though I could see a roofed shelter attached to the broken-down shack. He also said there was no firewood available, and no water. When I replied that we have our own kerosene, and a whole lakeful of water on the doorstep, he was visibly put out. His reluctance to admit us to the Rest House made me suspicious: and sure enough, this new bungalow has no charpoys. Clearly these have been appropriated for his own use during the winter season, when visitors of any kind are unheard of in Satpara, and I cannot say I blame him for this peccadillo; it was his evasiveness that irritated me. With luck our astronaut’s blanket will preserve u
s from pneumonia.

  I was about to demonstrate the adequacy of the next-door stable when the chowkidar’s likeable brother arrived (probably a stepbrother, since he looks at least twenty-five years older) and invited Hallam to a cosier stable down the road. So off we went, leaving the chowkidar sulkily fetching a tin of water from the lake. He is a young man much given to being put out and he had not approved of his brother’s intervention, possibly because it has deprived him of a chance to overcharge us for hay.

  To get to his lodgings Hallam had to ford the Satpara River, at this point a shallow, very fast stream scarcely ten yards wide. I crossed on a home-made ‘bridge’ of two thin, ice-coated tree-trunks, vaguely tied together, and as Rachel sensibly showed no desire to use this contraption I left her playing with king-sized icicles by the water’s edge.

  Our friend’s dwelling, at the foot of an 18,000-foot mountain, had looked minute from the track, but seen close to it proved quite substantial in its primitive way. A few summer tourists must now visit Satpara annually, yet my advent sent the women and children fleeing indoors and a red-brown mastiff had to be intercepted on his way to my jugular vein – which is so wrapped up these days that his arrival would not have mattered very much. Coaxing Hallam into an unfamiliar stable was a more difficult task than usual, no doubt because of his indisposition, but once through the low, narrow entrance he enthusiastically made for his lunch. There is now a perceptible swelling on his near flank, but I feel that as long as he continues to eat well he is unlikely to expire as forecast.

  Rejoining Rachel, I found that she had slipped into the glacial torrent and was soaked to the waist – a major disaster, when we have no clothes to change into and no means of drying anything, apart from our kerosene stove. She was suitably penitent – I had emphatically warned her about this risk – but to my annoyance seemed to feel no retributive cold or discomfort on the way home. Small children are almost unbelievably durable. It was only 3 p.m. when we got back but we had to waste both kerosene and sunny hours drying her padded snow-suit trousers, flannel slacks, woollen tights, woollen stockings and fur-lined boots. The chowkidar, the semi-idiot and the blind man were all delighted to find our stove going and came to squat in a row against the wall while Rachel sat wrapped in our united bedding, morbidly drawing pictures of jeeps falling over precipices.

  Satpara – 26 January

  Last night I was wakened by cold for the first time on this trip – not surprisingly, at 9,000 feet in mid-winter, lying on a concrete floor in a room with very ill-fitting doors and windows and a temperature 35º below freezing outside. An astronaut’s blanket has its limitations. However, it did save me from being kept awake; I merely surfaced occasionally for long enough to register that I was not warm. Although the stove was burning all night a small lump of snow, deposited on our floor at 4 p.m. yesterday, had not even tried to melt by 7 a.m. today. Yet Rachel reported having slept soundly and snugly.

  At 8 a.m. I set out to visit Hallam, leaving my daughter sitting up in her fleabag happily doing sums: by some genetic freak she enjoys arithmetic. Last night there was a heavy snowfall, and then it froze hard. The savagely cold early air hurt my face and the sky was completely clouded over – a pewter lid on the valley.

  I found Hallam eating a hearty breakfast, though his swelling is larger. We would not in any case have worked him today as the track beyond the Rest House is no longer ghora-worthy. Nor is it bungo-worthy, the chowkidar informed me when I got back here. So I felt justified in setting off alone for Satpara hamlet, in search of kerosene. I had not reckoned with drying clothes and keeping the stove going all night.

  By ten o’clock clouds were enclosing the whole valley in opaque walls of silver vapour. Then snow began to fall swiftly in minute, dry crystals and every moment the air grew warmer. The lake today was bottle green and the reflections of its guardian peaks were not the sharp ‘photographs’ of yesterday but pale smudges on the surface, like the ghosts of snowy mountains.

  For two miles the icy track switchbacked along precipitous slopes; then it descended to a wide snowfield stretching from the shore of the lake to the head of the valley. Here the stones used to mark the track were not tall enough for present conditions and I was soon floundering about in three feet of fine, dry, sugary snow, which concealed many streams and the Satpara River (it flows through the lake). All these streams were frozen over and I used my dula to test the strength of the ice before committing myself to it. When I came on the unfrozen Satpara – hardly five yards wide – I crossed by an exquisitely beautiful but not very reliable-looking bridge of solid ice. Then I saw two small dark figures coming towards me across the whiteness, bent in a familiar posture that meant they were carrying firewood – the chief product of Satpara hamlet. I altered course to meet them, intending to use their tracks, and as we approached each other they looked so startled I thought for a moment they were going to drop their loads and run away.

  Satpara is marked by the usual lines and groups of pale brown, leafless fruit-trees, sheltering grey stone hovels on a steep mountainside. As I struggled up an ice-covered path no sign of life was visible and one could imagine the place had long since been abandoned. Then three small boys came tentatively around a corner, clad in coarse homespun brown shalwars and ragged bits of blanket. They had pinched, lined, filthy faces and were poised for flight should I seem menacing. When I appealed for help they recovered their nerve and led me through a shadowed labyrinth under tall trees between huddled dwellings. Like all these settlements, Satpara is much bigger than it seems from a distance. The Baltis, accustomed for centuries to conserving their meagre arable soil, can squeeze an astonishing number of hovels on to a small rocky ledge, or build them on to almost vertical slopes in apparent defiance of the law of gravity.

  We paused at the foot of a long, crudely-made step-ladder and one boy led me up to a five-foot-high doorway. Bending to enter, I stumbled over the raised stone threshold and fell on to the horns of a ruminating dzo. She made indignant noises as she scrambled to her feet and my guide gave an alarmed squeal; but she hadn’t really taken umbrage and was in any case tethered to a roof-support. Half this room was filled with neatly stacked firewood and sweet-smelling hay. My guide beckoned me on through an even lower door into a dark, smoky living-room, very hot and crowded, where my head just touched the roof-beams when I stood erect. In the centre was a wood-stove and sitting cross-legged on the floor beside it was an elderly man, with a small face under a big turban, running up a kamiz on a sewing-machine. I peered around as the womenfolk shrank back against the wall, modestly drawing their cloaks over their faces and protectively clutching their whimpering small children. The tailor stared at me, unsmilingly, while continuing to operate his machine. When I held out my container and asked for kerosene he stood up, still without any change of expression, and led me through the lowest door of all into an adjacent cubby-hole – his ‘shop’. It was stocked with two jerrycans of kerosene, half a sack of ata, four bars of soap, a cardboard carton of tea-dust, a bag of rock-salt and a small cluster of nylon socks hanging from a nail. (I fail to see the point of nylon socks in the Karakoram, but they have probably become a status symbol.) This, I felt, was as far from Harrods as one could get.

  By now the news of my arrival had spread and as I held my container steady the room beyond filled with excited, curious youths. They jammed the tiny doorway, fighting to see me and talking rapidly in Shina, the Gilgit language. At some unknown date this settlement was either founded or conquered by Gilgitis and their descendants still speak Shina. The linguistic barrier has caused them to lead an exceptionally isolated life, even by local standards, and the consequent in-breeding has produced a type regarded by ‘true’ Baltis as undesirable.

  When I left Satpara’s Supermarket I was followed by the youths – a wild, tough-looking lot, all in brown homespun and disposed to jeer at the foreigner rather than to attempt conversation. They deliberately led me astray and laughed raucously when I found myself on the edge of
an impassable chasm. Then they ran away, leaving me to rediscover the right path as best I could – an exasperating delay, for the snowfall had become much heavier and there is a limit to even Rachel’s self-sufficiency. Back on the valley floor I searched for my own footsteps, but already these had been obliterated. However, I could more or less remember the route and I thoroughly enjoyed the return journey. There is nothing more solitary and soothing than a walk across a deserted landscape of undefiled whiteness, where the only movement is the silent dance of the snowflakes.

  Near the Rest House I overtook the two firewood carriers, sitting on a rock, and with friendly grins they applauded my speed. But then I am not permanently undernourished (only temporarily), nor was I carrying sixty pounds on my back. When I had passed them it struck me that the only three people out in the valley today were all concerned with the basic Balti problem of keeping warm.

  I got back at two o’clock to find that Rachel had just cut the thumb and forefinger of her left hand with a razor-blade, while trying to sharpen colouring-pencils. The place looked like a slaughter-house and I – typically – had left our First-Aid box (unopened since leaving London) in Skardu. Luckily the chowkidar arrived then and redeemed himself by tearing a strip off his shirt-tail, burning it over the stove and rubbing the charred cloth into the cuts, which he then wrapped in tinfoil from his cigarette-packet. The St John Ambulance Brigade might not approve but the patient is now comfortable. And so is Hallam, whom I visited after a late luncheon of dahl and salt. (The onion supply has petered out.)

  Skardu – 27 January

  It snowed all yesterday afternoon and all through the night, and it was still snowing when I visited Hallam this morning. The western half of the lake was covered in ice which was covered in snow, and when I found that Hallam could move without limping I decided on an immediate return to Skardu lest we might find ourselves snowbound with neither food nor fuel. Loading was extraordinarily difficult, standing thigh-deep in snow with numb fingers, and either through stupidity or ill-will nobody made the slightest attempt to help. But at last all the vital knots had been tied, Rachel was in the saddle and we were off.