Where the Indus is Young

by Dervla Murphy

  I led Hallam at his own pace – he prefers to deal with such paths fairly quickly – and in places the rock overhang was so low that I had to bend my head. I never looked behind, having once warned Rachel to keep close to the cliff. (She has a perverse tendency to walk along the edge of precipices, no doubt the better to savour the depths below.) At the head of the ravine, where the path did a V-turn on to the snowy mountain, it was blocked by a small landslide. But the slope below the V-turn was of course not sheer and a dozen careful steps took us on to a path no longer crumbling but hair-raisingly slippy with frozen snow. Here I began to have nasty feelings in the pit of my stomach and these did not abate when we turned a corner to find a forty-yard avalanche sprawled across the path. By now the drop was again sheer but the yak’s deep, definite prints were our salvation. Actually the sloping mass of snow was quite firm and safe, though it looked as if it were about to go thundering down into that unbelievable chasm. Soon we were climbing steeply and another hundred yards took us away from the ravine on to a plateau so high that it seemed almost level with the lonely peaks of the Ladak Range.

  Here, Hallam and I waited for Rachel – a tiny red figure toiling gallantly up the steep white slope, with frequent pauses to lean on my dula and regain breath, for the air was exhaustingly thin. At that moment I felt very proud of my daughter. She may talk too much at all the wrong times, but she’ll do …

  We walked on across a billowing snowfield, to which slanting rays of pale golden light gave a magical sheen. Ahead we could see no end to it, but it was scarcely half a mile wide. On our right rose the rocky lower slopes of an invisible snow-peak and on our left was a long, rounded, snowy ridge, cutting off our view of the valley – but not of the Ladak peaks. These were so beautiful, against the paling blue of the evening sky, that I could scarcely bear to look at them. And the configuration of this landscape, with its long enclosing walls of brown cliff and white ridge, reinforced that unique sense of isolation and tranquillity felt only on such heights.

  Rachel, again in the saddle, suddenly exclaimed, ‘Doesn’t Hallam look like a fiery steed!’ – which he did, with the golden radiance of that hour on his light chestnut coat. Then we saw a black dot ahead and had soon overtaken the yak, a superb specimen with a tremendous spread of horn. His elderly companion, who had hidebound feet and wore only a ragged homespun shalwar-kameez, stared at us as though we were ghosts and was too startled to return our greeting.

  I had been worrying slightly lest we might find ourselves on some lethal precipice as darkness fell but the descent was comparatively short because Kuru is only halfway to river level. I scarcely noticed our surroundings as we struggled downwards; my whole attention had to be given to the narrow path. When not wriggling between high, jagged rocks that threatened to catch the load it was winding around slopes where an ill-judged step might well be one’s last. The final stretch was so steep that the load slipped on to Hallam’s neck: this is becoming a familiar crisis. As I was dismantling it on the outskirts of the village a marvellous old character appeared on the roof of his house and a moment later was beside me, offering help and hospitality.

  While the family conferred about their unprecedented guests Rachel and I sat in a little yard, on a flight of steps that led up to the latrine, and watched Hallam munching vigorously. I could see that we were exactly opposite, but much higher than, our Gwali hotel, which was invisible because of an intervening foothill. The sun had just set and the whole south-western sky was a strange dusty pink, through which Venus glowed golden. As Orion appeared overhead our host opened a low wooden door in an otherwise blank stone wall and beckoned us into a pitch-dark stable from which an even lower door led to this windowless room. It is about ten feet by eight and strips of woven goats’ hair cover half the floor space. The other half is bare mud and under a hole in the roof is a ‘fireplace’ of three stones on which a dechi can be balanced. One wall is lined with handsomely-carved wooden cupboards – the only furniture, apart from a pile of filthy bedding. These are the living quarters of our ancient but sprightly host and his endearing old wife; the younger generations live upstairs. On arrival we found another old man squatting in the dark by a tiny fire of twigs, meditatively smoking a hookah. But we have been spared the usual throng of curious locals and I had just room to get our own ‘kitchen’ organised by candlelight and cook a dechi of rice on our oil-stove. This was transformed into rice pudding by the addition of a little sugar and our last tin of Dutch condensed milk; and no meal ever tasted better.

  It is wonderfully convenient to have a child with a small appetite; this evening was the first time I have ever heard Rachel saying, ‘I’m hungry!’ Despite her big frame and formidable expenditure of energy she seems to flourish on about two hard-boiled eggs every thirty-six hours. She was already in her flea-bag as we ate and the instant she had put down her empty bowl she turned on her side and went out like a light. I envied her then: diary-writing at the end of a strenuous day severely tests one’s will-power. As Alexander Cunningham noted, while exploring Baltistan some 125 years ago: ‘The generality of travellers get too much fatigued with their exertions by day to be able to make any observations at night.’ But having brewed myself a kettle of strong black tea I came to and now I feel quite lively.

  This is a very Tibetan-looking family and our host has a splendidly benign face, wrinkled and browned by wind and weather, with a wispy grey beard, bright humorous eyes and a big smile that shows a mouthful of sound, even teeth. His wife – who has borne twenty-two children, of whom sixteen survive – suffers greatly from rheumatism but is nonetheless a cheerful character and full of concern for our welfare. We have been given the carpeted half of the floor and two hours ago the old couple spread tattered goat-hides on the mud half, laid their wretched bits of bedding over these and went to sleep. Just now another elderly couple and three adolescent girls came in and took their bedding from the pile in the corner. So we have a full house and are not likely to feel cold – as we might have done, during the small hours, had there been only four (or three and a half) people sleeping in a room of this size.

  Kiris – 1 March

  My night was mildly disturbed; sandflies are not the only Balti insects to have come out of hibernation and we were both bitten all over.

  I woke at 5.45 to hear a familiar sound which I could not immediately identify. Then I poked my head out of my aptly named flea-bag to see by firelight our host churning Tibetan tea in a hollowed-out tree-trunk. The Baltis add a little milk as well as rancid butter, salt and bicarbonate of soda, but the result is much the same. Although we had enough rice left over for breakfast, the old couple insisted on my sharing their tea and tsampa. For themselves they poured four cups of tea, two for mixing with their satu and two to be taken straight. As an Instant Food tsampa wins; apart from its convenience it is much more palatable and very much more sustaining than rice. The despised (by conservative foreigners) butter-tea is also sustaining on its own, and extraordinarily warming; it has an almost whiskey-like effect on one’s inside. But unfortunately Rachel’s adaptability breaks down when it comes to food. She is one of the conservative foreigners who won’t touch Tibetan tea or tsampa, bored as she is by the monotony of our diet.

  It would not have done to tip our host so I tried to think of some suitable gift and was inspired to give him my gloves, which I am unlikely to need again, and one of our two hideous orange plastic mugs, which his wife much admired last night. Then off we went at 7.30, when the sun was already warm and the sky cloudless.

  The first hour was tricky as the steep narrow track wound between dwellings or five-foot stone walls, neither of which left an adequate margin for Hallam. In our host’s house, on the periphery of the settlement, I had not grasped Kuru’s size; when he told us that in British days it offered a one-room Rest House (now demolished) I had diagnosed delusions of grandeur. But this morning I reckoned the whole settlement – scattered over many high ledges, separated by narrow gullies – probably supports five
or six thousand people. It is a savagely beautiful place, with its bewildering network of ravines, dark overhanging crags and loudly leaping torrents. As in Saling, I had the impression that it was once a good deal more prosperous. These right bank villages must have been much livelier when on the main trade route; now they rarely see even a Balti outsider.

  Platoons of men, women and children were briskly carrying manure to the fields and I find that as the sun gains strength the aroma of human manure becomes less and less romantic, even on a fine spring morning. When at last the track began to level out – going towards the next mountain-flank instead of towards the invisible river – I sighed with relief to have Rachel and baggage still in situ on Hallam. (Despite the gradient Rachel had not dismounted because then the load might have again come forward on to Hallam’s neck; if she sits on the connecting rope across the saddle this helps to keep it where it should be.) But my relief was premature. Just beyond Kuru the track has to traverse a horrifying bulge at the base of a 20,000-foot mountain. It overhangs the Shyok for a quarter of a mile about 700 feet above the water and is worse than anything else we have met in Baltistan; I remember looking at it from the left bank and deducing that it could only be a goat-track. On a good day it would be demoralising and today was not a good day; during the night two landslips about fifty yards apart had blocked the path. Luckily there were plenty of people around to warn us and we were taken under the wing of a kindly mullah, who was also going to Kiris and spoke a few unexpected words of English. He beckoned to two of the many youths who had accumulated behind us and told them to unload Hallam and carry the load across the slips, which were about half a mile further on. I followed with Hallam, leaving Rachel in the care of the mullah and his party. This consisted of another mullah, who was (oddly) a deaf-mute, his veiled sixteen-year-old daughter, a wiry little Mail-Runner with ginger hair and two gloomy elderly peasants entirely lacking in oriental fatalism. They were convinced that Allah had it in for us and that we would all be pulverised by falling rocks long before we reached Kiris. Personally I have stopped worrying: once embarked on a trek in Baltistan one becomes either a fatalist or a nervous wreck. Towing the faithful Hallam I strode across the two slithery new slips as though in an Irish field, and then looked back to see Rachel standing in the middle of one gazing earnestly up at the mullah and saying, ‘No, not Holland – it’s Ireland – a small island called Ireland.’ If being rescued from a blazing building she would hold up the firemen to have a chat.

  Beyond the slips we all continued together across the bulge, Rachel still walking (and talking) with the mullah. The Mail-Runner trotted ahead as our scout and once had to hold us up while a minor rock-fall went hurtling from the heights far above to the river far below. (It might not have seemed minor had we been in its way.) Where we came off the bulge the path at once widened to jeep-track proportions as the mountains receded, leaving us on a wide ledge of undulating semi-desert not far above river level. Here we said goodbye to our companions as Hallam had not yet had his breakfast.

  Kiris is only ten miles from Kuru and the rest of the way was comparatively easy going, apart from a few stretches of soft sand or skiddy mud, and one tough climb to the village of Gone, three miles short of Kiris.

  This fertile oasis lies a mile upstream from the confluence of the Shyok and the Indus. Three young men returning from their fields and reeking of excrement guided us to our destination across a brown expanse of squelchy, muddy ploughland. Evidently this Rest House has been used rarely (if at all) since Partition. The chowkidar could not be found, and there seemed to be some confusion about his identity, but eventually an ancient little man came fumbling along with an enormous key and admitted us to a building which, apart from its British fireplaces and glazed windows, might be one of the larger village houses. Our room, approached by an outside stone stairs, is directly over Hallam’s stable and has bare boards, a small table and chair and one unsteady charpoy. Off it is a totally unfurnished bathroom with a door leading on to another roof, equipped with four circular holes. As this latrine lacks even a token surrounding wall one has to bare one’s bottom in full view of the entire village – which of course matters not at all, in a society where such behaviour seems decent and normal. One of our windows overlooks a small courtyard, dominated by six poplars far higher than the house, and from the other we can study local life, which this afternoon consisted mainly of a few yak and many male cross-breds with spring in their blood. There is something wonderfully comical about a frisky yak. With their heads down and their great bushy tails curved over their backs they go bounding and racing around like so many lambs – until they meet a female. Breeding seems completely uncontrolled, though cattle-products are important in Baltistan.

  We have just heard that last night the track between here and Gol was blocked by a massive rock-fall. The Kiris PWD coolie-gang does not expect to have it clear in less than three days but this leaves me undismayed. I am very willing to linger in Kiris, which seems a most attractive and friendly village.

  11

  Kiris to Skardu

  The dryness of the climate is such that in the whole of the Trans-Himalayan region there are barely six inches of rainfall in the year. Were it a plain it would be like the Sahara. Fortunately, however, the highest ridges condense into moisture whatever snow escapes being caught upon the Himalaya, so that, whenever the exposure and the slope of the mountains allow it néves and glaciers are formed which permit the scanty population to support life in spite of their inhuman surroundings.

  FILLIPO DE FILLIPI (1909)

  Kiris – 2 March

  I hate writing the word ‘March’: it reminds me too forcefully that our days in Baltistan are numbered. I have over the years become attached to many places and peoples, but I realised this morning, as we climbed high above Kiris, that my feeling for Baltistan is less an attachment than a passionate love-affair. And it is emphatically a feeling for the place rather than for the people. The Baltis are likeable, dependable, cheerful, welcoming and pathetically generous with what very little they have. But they lack that complex quality inadequately described as ‘personality’. This may be because they are neither ethnically homogeneous nor culturally distinct: not truly a race, but a mosaic of many different strains, none of which has been strong enough to impose its character on the whole area. Comparing them only with the peasants of other regions, they seem to lack the vigour of the Pathans, the graciousness of the Persians, the serenity of the Tibetans, the dignity of the Amharas, the subtlety of the Hindus, the enterprise of the Nepalese. Their struggle to survive in these merciless valleys has left them with nothing to spare for the evolution of arts and crafts, apart from essential skills, such as terracing. And their geographical remoteness, combined with the absence of a rich leisured class, has prevented the development of even the most rudimentary intellectual life. Things may of course have been different in the pre-Islamic era; Cunningham quotes a persisting tradition that at the beginning of the seventeenth century all the temples and monasteries of the country were destroyed and their libraries thrown into the Indus. Now the nearest thing to ‘an educated class’ consists almost entirely of bigoted, power-loving mullahs, adept at distorting Islamic theology to suit their own ends. And so, as I have said, it is with the place that one forms a relationship. Sir Francis Younghusband spoke for a lot of travellers when he said, ‘The more you see of the Himalayas the more you want to see.’

  Behind Kiris we ascended a narrow nullah and passed many busy water-mills, attended by groups of friendly women who presented us with fistfuls of satu. The powerful torrent sprang noisily from ledge to ledge and was being joined on our side by sparkling streams of newly-melted snow. Yet the opposite precipice was hung with sheets of ice like plate glass, and with icicles the size of telegraph poles – one of which killed a goatherd yesterday, when the ledge under which it had formed collapsed. The natural hazards of Baltistan are gruesomely varied.

  At noon we overtook a herd of seventeen goats
and sheep, attended by three small boys. We were now in an oval valley scattered with hay-shelters, massive boulders and a few ‘summer residences’. Sitting in the sun by the torrent, we watched the little herd being directed across a slender tree-trunk ‘bridge’ to the far bank, where patches of short yellow-brown grass have just been exposed. Then the three boys tentatively approached us and for ten minutes stared in perplexed though not unfriendly silence. But they never forgot their responsibilities; every few moments one of them found it necessary to shout a warning or an order to some member of his flock, and I was fascinated by the promptly obedient responses of individual animals. These long-distance commands explain why three children are tending so few animals at this busy season: obviously remote control can only be exercised by a member of the animal’s own family. There is more to shepherding than meets the eye.

  It will break my heart to leave the beauty, the silence and the endless variety of these mountains. Yet I shall be taking with me some of this strangely fortifying Himalayan peace. And it will endure. There is nothing ephemeral about the effects of a journey such as this.

  Kiris – 3 March

  A fascinating day, despite disagreeable weather – grey with a harsh wind, like a nasty March day in Ireland.

  To explore an area of weird, pale brown clay cliffs, noticed en route from Kuru, we took a path beside an irrigation channel built around the base of a mountain. Here we came on a puzzling sight; three men, using a crowbar, a mallet and all their strength, were hewing long, flattish slabs of rock off the cliff-face. With so many thousands of tons of loose rock lying all over the place I should have thought there was no need for such exertion. But when one looks more closely at these terraced fields one sees that their embankments are constructed not of any old stone that comes to hand, but of neatly shaped wedges. The labour involved in making and maintaining each tiny patch of fertile land is quite staggering; and often at this season, when all the labour-force is needed for fertilising, embankments collapse as part of the general thaw havoc. Then the unfortunate cultivator has quickly to repair the damage before his precious patch of earth is washed away. Those down-country folk who scornfully refer to ‘the lazy Baltis’ should try farming here for a few seasons.