A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

by Eric Newby

  Travellers in Kafiristan have always been few and far between. From the sixth century onwards Chinese Buddhists make passing reference to Kafiristan on their way to the holy places of India – travellers like Sung Yün who crossed the Pamirs to the Oxus in A.D. 519 and entered India by way of Kafiristan to avoid an even more dreadful crossing of the upper Indus by a bridge constructed from a single iron chain. But for the most part, when entering Afghanistan, they seem to have passed on either side of it.

  Genghis Khan refers to the Kafirs in the thirteenth century; Timur Leng fought them in the fourteenth without conspicuous success, although he is reputed to have acquired a Kafir wife; in the fifteenth the Emperor Babur drank their wines without rapture. In 1602 a Portuguese Jesuit, Benedict de Goès, coadjutor to the Superior of the Order in the Mogul’s Empire, set off from Lahore for China (where he died), attaching himself to a caravan of five hundred merchants, and passed through a part of eastern Afghanistan which he calls ‘Capherstam’. He says that the soil was fertile and yielded plenty of grapes: offered a cup of wine he found it very good. Thereafter, as far as I can discover, no travellers through Kafiristan have left any record for two hundred years, although there must have been others.

  A most colourful traveller who was supposed to have visited Kafiristan was Colonel Alexander Gardner. He was a soldier of fortune employed as commandant of a picked body of horse by the nephew and deadly enemy of the reigning Amir, Dost Muhammad Khan. According to his own account he went there twice.4

  The first time was in 1826 when he had to flee for his life through west Kafiristan on his way to Yarkand after the Amir had slaughtered and mutilated his followers together with his beautiful Afghan wife and small son by way of reprisal. (Gardner had captured her from a caravan in which she had been travelling as lady-in-waiting to a princess who was related to the Amir and had installed her in a castello in the Hindu Kush.)

  The second occasion was in 1828 when he returned from Yarkand by way of northern Kafiristan and the Kunar Valley.

  Subsequently Gardner entered the service of the great Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh.

  A photograph of him survives, taken when he was seventy-nine. He is dressed from head to foot in a suit of tartan of the 79th Highlanders. Even his turban decorated with egret’s plumes is of tartan. With his Sikh’s beard and alert look he is himself rather like an eagle. He died in bed at Jammu at the age of ninety-two, a pensioner of the Sikhs.5

  In the 1830s the almost equally remarkable American traveller Charles Masson made his extensive journeys in Afghanistan disguised in the local dress, living with the inhabitants in a way which would be difficult today. Although he did not penetrate far into Kafiristan, he followed the Alingar as far as its junction with the Alishang and then followed the Alishang itself, a journey no European was to accomplish again until 1935.

  Less well known is the visit of a Christian missionary, Fazl Huq, in 1864. Fazl Huq was a Pathan, the son of a Mullah, who had been converted to Christianity at Peshawar. To avoid any imputation of changing faith to curry favour with missionaries, he joined the Corps of Guides as a sepoy, a regiment in which Christian other ranks were anathema to the Muslim rank and file and as much in danger of losing their lives as they were in civilian life.

  Together with an ex-Mullah named Narullah, who was also a Christian convert, he set off for Kafiristan in September 1864, at the invitation of a Kafir soldier of whom there were several in the Guides, taking with him medicine and presents from the Church Missionary Society. The treatment they received from their own people, fanatic Muslims, on the road through Swat was as disagreeable as anything they were to encounter in Kafiristan itself, but after overcoming the most formidable difficulties they finally reached the Kunar river, floated down it on a raft of inflated skins, and entered Jalalabad disguised as women.

  Eventually they reached a place somewhere on the southern marches of Kafiristan where the Kafirs came to barter for salt. Here the two faithful bodyguards they had hired in Jalalabad left them and, having abandoned their disguise, they continued into the country alone.

  At the village to which they had been invited by the sepoy they carried on their missionary work for twenty days and were well received, the Kafirs reserving the martyr’s crown for Muslims.

  Each day Huq kept a journal, using lime juice as an invisible ink.

  Adultery was unknown, he wrote, only the unmarried ever being suspected of immorality which was extirpated with ferocity; married couples having a sort of laisser-passer in such matters. He also noticed that the Kafirs watched their relatives die in silence and that they put them in wooden boxes on the mountain-side with the lids weighed down with heavy stones. Some of the houses he saw were five stories high. During his stay he saw a variety of birds and beasts – crows, parrots, leopards, bears and wolves.

  Huq and Narullah stayed in Kafiristan until the first snows fell, then returned by the way they had come. Reaching the Kabul river at Jalalabad they floated down it on a raft as far as Peshawar, which they reached after an absence of two months. It was a remarkable exploit.

  It was not until the eighties, when the great game of espionage between Britain and Russia was being played flat out beyond the frontiers of India, that another serious attempt was made to enter Kafiristan. In 1883 W. W. Macnair, an enterprising officer of the Indian Survey, disobeying the strict orders of the Indian Government that no European should cross the frontier without permission, penetrated the eastern marches as far as the Bashgul Valley. Macnair wore the dress of a Muhammadan Hakim and stained himself with a disagreeable mixture of weak caustic soda and walnut juice. He was accompanied by a native ‘known in The Profession as the Saiad’ and two Kaka Khel Pathans, a tribe respected by the Afghans and to some extent by the Kafirs. With him he took an enormous book decorated with cabalistic signs which concealed within it a plane table for mapping and other surveying instruments. As Hakim he was much given to solitary meditation and generally chose high peaks for this purpose.

  Macnair reported that the inhabitants were celebrated for their beauty and their European complexions; that they worshipped idols; drank wine from silver cups and vases; used chairs and tables, and spoke a language unknown to their neighbours; that brown eyes were more common than blue; that their complexions varied between pink and a bronze as dark as that of a Punjabi; that the infidelity of wives was punished by mild beating and that of men by a fine of cattle, and that one of their prayers ran:

  Ward off fever from us.

  Increase our stores.

  Kill the Mussulmans.

  After death admit us to Paradise.

  Macnair estimated the population at 200,000.

  On his return to India he was officially reprimanded by Lord Ripon, the Viceroy, and later congratulated in private.

  Two years later in 1885 the Bashgul Valley was more fully explored by Colonel Woodthorpe of the Indian Survey when he visited it with Sir William Lockhart on a mission whose object was to examine the passes of the Hindu Kush. But it was not until Sir George Robertson, the British Political Agent in Gilgit, made his prolonged journeys in Kafiristan in 1890 and 1891, visiting the upper reaches of the Bashgul and penetrating farther westwards than any other explorer had so far succeeded in doing into the upper part of the Pech Valley, that any real knowledge was gained of the country and the people. His book The Káfirs of the Hindu Kush gives the only complete picture that has come down to us of the Kafirs living in their pristine state of paganism. And it was to be the final one. Already Robertson was encountering tribes who had been converted to Islam and his was the last opportunity that any European was to have before the old pagan religion of the country was obliterated.

  In the twentieth century the names of the countless secret agents of all nations who must have visited Nuristan have so far not been revealed. The first recorded visitors seem to have been two Russians, Vavilov and Bukinitsh, who spent four days in the Pech Valley in 1924.

  It is the Germans who have held almost th
e entire monopoly of travel and exploration in Nuristan during the last thirty years. There is something about the place that appeals to the German character: the dark forests and gloomy valleys; the innate paganism of the ‘grosse blonde vollhaarige Menschen’ whose origins ‘nicht indo-arisches, sondern ein europäisch-arisches Restvolk der Indogermanen sind’.

  In 1925 two Germans tried to enter from the southwards without success; one a geologist, Dr Herbordt, the other a Baron von Platen. Both reached the frontier north of Jalalabad but got no farther.

  In 1928 Dr Martin Voigt and Herr Seydack, a Prussian State Forester, both of whom were working for King Amanullah, went up the Kunar Valley and the Bashgul, reached the Hindu Kush divide and descended the Pech river to its confluence with the Kunar. They did not, however, visit the western part, the Alingar-Ramgul Valley which no European had so far seen.

  In 1935 there came the Deutsche Hindu Kush Expedition. This, like everything else emanating from Germany in the middle thirties, was grandiloquent and slightly less thorough than it cracked itself up to be. It was certainly big. Its members travelled with forty mules specially imported for the job, fifteen mule drivers, three Afghan officers and sixteen soldiers. It worked methodically, establishing supply depots for itself en route. The objects of the expedition were rather ambiguous but its members seem to have spent most of their time, when they might have been looking for the Ashkuns, studying the comparative anatomy of the inhabitants. On their return to civilization they embalmed their findings, the result of the thorough measuring to which they had subjected the inhabitants, in a large almost unreadable volume printed in excruciating gothic type.

  After the last war there were the enterprising journeys of von Dückelmann, an Austrian who had spent the last war interned in India, and Hans Neubauer, a botanist in the employ of the Afghan Government.

  In November 1951 a young American called Mackenzie spent fifteen days in Nuristan, reaching a point where there was a rock inscribed by Timur Leng.

  There was the Danish Henning-Haslund expedition on which the leader Haslund unfortunately died, which visited East and Central Nuristan on several occasions between 1948 and 1954.

  And in 1956 it seemed that there was to be the Carless-Newby expedition, consisting of a man from the dress trade and a career diplomat, who were setting off to visit the Ramgul Katirs in Nuristan for no other reason than to satisfy their curiosity.

  * * *

  1. Of the Siah-Posh the most numerous are the Katirs; the Bashgul Katirs, the Kti or Kantiwar Katirs, the Kulam Katirs and the Ramgul Katirs living in the north-west.

  2. Anyone wishing to study this formidable, though fascinating, subject may refer to the Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. VIII, Part II, by Sir G. A. Grierson.

  3. This interesting theory concerning the origin of the Kafirs is dealt with more fully in Geographical Journal, VII, London, 1896, ‘The Origin of the Kafirs of the Hindu Kush’, Col. T. H. Holdich.

  4. Colonel Alexander Gardner by Major H. Pearse. Edinburgh, 1898.

  5. According to European Adventurers of Northern India, 1785–1849 by C. Grey and H. L. O. Garrett, Lahore, 1929, he was an Irish deserter from the British Service who never went to Kafiristan and was made a colonel because he was the only man in the Sikh Army who was willing to cut off the right thumb, nose and ears of a Brahmin who had struck an officer.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Panjshir Valley

  Panjhīr is another tuman; it lies close to Kafiristan, along the Panjhīr road, and is the thoroughfare of Kafir highwaymen who also, being so near, take tax of it. They have gone through it, killing a mass of persons, and doing very evil deeds, since I came this last time and conquered Hindustan. (932 A.H. – A.D. 1526.) Mem. Bābur, p. 214

  We left Kabul on 10 July (‘Probably for ever,’ we said, jesting in the tedious fashion that explorers employ to keep up their spirits). Our destination was the Panjshir Valley and The Mountain.

  The last hope of recruiting an expert mountaineer had now expired. During our short stay in the capital we had been extremely discreet about our capabilities, or rather the lack of them, but still no one had come forward, except the cyclist, and he could scarcely be regarded as anything but a liability. It is true that we had met several people of different nationalities who said that they were just about to set off for Nuristan; so often did they say it that our project began to seem almost commonplace. However, we were reassured by an old inhabitant.

  ‘I’ve lived here thirty years,’ he said, ‘and I can’t remember a time when someone from the town wasn’t threatening to go to Nuristan. But it’s all talk – and then only when they’re in their cups,’ he added picturesquely. ‘You’re not likely to find it overcrowded.’

  With us in the vehicle were Ghulam Naabi and one of the private servants from the Embassy, a fine-looking, bearded man with loyal eyes. This is nearly always a bad sign in Asia where fine-looking, bearded men with loyal eyes have a habit of leaving you in the lurch at the most inconvenient moments – but this particular specimen really was faithful. He was to drive us to the Panjshir Valley and return to Kabul after dumping us there. It was a tight squeeze with all our equipment and the four of us sweated morosely.

  The road climbed a pass where gangs of Hazaras, slit-eyed, round-headed Mongols in the uniform of the Afghan Labour Corps, were widening it, using Russian steamrollers with cruellooking spiky projections on the rolling part. Immediately the lugubrious air that hangs over the visitor to Kabul in an almost visible cloud was dispelled, and we entered the Koh-i-Daman, rich upland country. Our spirits rose.

  In spite of being hot it was a beautiful day and puffs of white cloud floated at regular intervals in a deep blue sky, as if discharged by a cannon. Mulberry trees, loaded with fruit, shaded the abominable surface of the road from the heat of the afternoon; vines grew in profusion and everywhere there was running water, dancing in the sunlight and gurgling in the irrigation ditches on whose banks minute, bare-bottomed nomad children from the encampments that were everywhere along the road risked death happily.

  To the west the more distant prospect was magnificent. The high crest of the Paghman range formed an imposing backcloth with the Takht-i-Turkoman, on whose summit we should already have planted our ice-axes, rising impressively at its southern end. It was from this range of mountains that the richness of the land proceeded, the parallel rivers which flowed down from it forming a series of oases, rich with orchards, in the plain between the road and the mountains.

  Of these oases, the oasis of Istalif is reputedly the most beautiful.

  ‘Istalif produces pottery of a delightful blue colour,’ Hugh remarked, whetting my interest. ‘The name comes from stafiloi, the vine – from the time when the Koh-i-Daman was Greek-speaking.’

  ‘He who has not seen Istalif has nothing seen,’ said Ghulam Naabi. Nevertheless, true to our policy of stopping for nothing, we thundered past the road that leads to it.

  Presently we reached Charikar (Alexandreia ad Caucasum) where Alexander spent the winter of 327 B.C. with his army before moving on to Nikaia (a city on the site of modern Kabul), and the conquest of India. Now, ahead of us, the Hindu Kush mountains rose spiky and barren-looking out of the plain. Nesting under them was a small town built at the junction of two rivers, both emerging from narrow defiles, the Shatul and the Panjshir itself, which comes racing out of a great gorge and spreads over banks of grey shingle on its way to join the Kabul river and eventually the Indus and the sea. This was Gulbahar – ‘The Rose of Spring’.

  Not far from Gulbahar, on the eighteenth of August 1519, the Emperor Bābur, the remarkable soldier-poet and founder of the Turk dynasty in India who was descended in the male line from Timur Leng and through his mother from Genghis Khan, embarked on a raft for a picnic with some companions.

  Just where the Panjhīr-water comes in, the raft struck the maze of a hill and began to sink. Rauh-dam, Tīngrī-qulī and Mir Muhammad the raftsman were thrown into the water by the shock: Rauh-dam
and Tīngrī-qulī were got on the raft again; a China cup and a spoon and a tambour went into the water. Lower down, the raft struck again opposite the Sang-i-Barīda (the cut-stone), either on a branch in mid-stream or on a stake stuck in as a stop-water. Right over on his back went Shāh Beg’s Shāh Hasan, clutching at Mīrza Qulī Kūkūldāsh and making him fall too. Darwīsh-i-muhammad Sārbān was also thrown into the water. Mīrza Qulī went over in his own fashion! Just when he fell, he was cutting a melon which he had in his hand: as he went over, he stuck his knife into the mat of the raft. He swam in his tūn aūfrāghī (long coat) and got out of the water without coming on the raft again. Leaving it that night we slept at raftsmen’s houses. Darwīsh-i-muhammad Sārbān presented me with a seven-coloured cup exactly like the one I lost in the water.1

  Descending stiffly from our vehicle, we drank tea on the balcony of a chaie khana which hung on stilts over the little Shatul river, which came purling down into the town between narrow banks. The tea place was beside the bridge at the junction of three roads and from its shelter we could watch the life of the little town.

  Sitting with their backs to us on the wall of the bridge five ancient men, old Tajiks, with dyed beards, sat motionless. On the opposite side of the river, twenty feet away from us in another tea-house a band of Pathans, their eyes dyed with an extract from the plant called madder, carried on an animated conversation, passing a water pipe from hand to hand until, feeling themselves watched, they glared at us suspiciously.

  The air was full of cries, outlandish smells of smoke and animals, dust and excitement. A bus gaily painted like a fantastic dragonfly and laden to suffocation point with passengers, failed to make the sharp turn and became jammed at the entrance to the bridge just at the moment when a flock of sheep, several hundreds strong, coming from the mountains also debouched on it. The noise was deafening as the sheep, mad with fear, tried to nuzzle the old men over the pediment of the bridge and into the water below, but they sat stolidly on.