A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

by Eric Newby

  All this time the crowd had been quietly slipping down off the wall and closing in on us; now they were all round us gorging with their eyes. We were the cynosure. Hugh was the first to crack.

  ‘—!’ He got up and stalked to the far end of the garden, tripping over his chapan. The crowd followed him but he barked at them so violently that they sheered off and settled on me.

  With the intention of splitting them, I made for the only available corner (the other was occupied by the Mirgun and his friend), but as soon as I started to walk I found that there was something very wrong with my feet inside the Italian boots. It was as if a tram had gone over them. I sat down hastily, took the boots off and found that my socks were full of blood.

  It seemed impossible that such damage could have been done in the space of three hours and some ten miles. My feet looked as though they had been flayed, as indeed they had.

  How it had happened was a mystery; the boots were not tight, rather there was an excess of living-room inside them. The real trouble was that they were slightly pointed, whether because pointed shoes were the current Italian fashion and the designers thought that the appearance was improved or whether to facilitate rock climbing was not clear. What was certain was that for me pointed boots were excruciatingly painful.

  Hugh tottered over to look and the villagers made little whistling sounds when they saw the extent of the damage. All of them knew the value of feet in the Hindu Kush. For some time Hugh said nothing. There was nothing to say and nothing to be done until Abdul Ghiyas arrived with the horses and the medicine chest.

  ‘They’re very bad,’ he said at last. ‘What do you want to do, go back to Kabul?’

  To return to Kabul was useless; yet to go on seemed madness.

  There was no question of my feet healing, the daily quota of miles would ensure that. I thought of all the difficulties we had overcome to get even as far as Marz Robat: the children uprooted from school; our flat let; my job gone; the money that Hugh and myself had expended; his own dotty dream of climbing Mir Samir to be frustrated at the last moment; my own dream, equally balmy, of becoming an explorer in the same way going up in smoke. I thought of the old inhabitant at Kabul. ‘They’re always setting off,’ he had chuckled, ‘that’s as far as they get.’ Were we to join this select body who had travelled only in their cups? There seemed to be no alternative but to go on. The fact that there was none rallied me considerably.

  ‘We might be able to get you a horse,’ Hugh said.

  He could not have said anything better. I am completely ignorant of horses. The last time I had attempted to mount one I faced the wrong way when putting my foot in the stirrup and found myself in the saddle facing the creature’s tail. Worse, being nervous of horses, I emanate a smell of death when close to them so that, sniffing it, they take fright themselves and attempt to destroy me. A horse would certainly have destroyed me on the road we had traversed that afternoon. At some places it had been only a couple of feet wide with a sheer drop to the river below.

  ‘I think I’ll carry on as I am. Another horse means another driver.’

  ‘It would be your horse. We wouldn’t need another driver.’

  ‘If I walk they may harden up.’ It was a phrase that I was to use constantly from now on.

  It was fortunate that Abdul Ghiyas chose this moment to arrive with the rest of the party. Drivers and horses came lurching into the garden, all our gear banging against the stone walls in an alarming way. If this was what had been happening all along the road at the narrow places, most of it must have been shattered long ago.

  All three were in a filthy temper, having been uprooted from their afternoon siesta and made to travel in the heat of the day. In an instant they cleared the garden of the crowds that milled about us and began to unload the horses, banging the boxes down like disgruntled housemaids and mumbling to themselves with averted eyes. It was not a propitious beginning to our life together.

  ‘Are they always like this?’ Watching this display of temperament I expressed my fears to Hugh.

  ‘We haven’t discussed terms with them yet. They’re building themselves up for a good set-to about how much they’re going to be paid. Then they’ll quieten down a lot.’

  ‘They’re rather like vendeuses. Can’t we put them out of their misery?’

  ‘You can’t hurry things in this part of the world. They’ll do it in their own way. Besides we don’t want an audience. Wait until it gets dark. I should get on with dressing your feet.’

  As it grew dark Abdul Ghiyas moved all the equipment of the expedition close-in around us, hedging us with boxes and bundles so that we resembled ambushed settlers making a last stand. ‘For fear of robbers,’ as he put it. Within this enclosure we ate stewed apricots with lots of sugar, the only food that we could stomach in our debilitated condition. Almost at once, as Hugh had prophesied, we started to wrangle over wages.

  ‘For the journey we offer thirty Afghanis a day. Also we will provide the food for your horses,’ Hugh managed to make the part about the food sound like a benediction. At the bazaar rate of exchange thirty Afghanis is about four shillings.

  The larger of the two drivers, whose name was Shir Muhammad, a surly-looking brute, said nothing but spat on the ground. To dispose of him at this delicate moment in the negotiations Hugh sent him to get sugar.

  ‘Sugar, what do you want with sugar? If you come to our country why don’t you live like us,’ he mumbled, throwing the bag down in an ungracious way. ‘This is a country of poor men.’

  ‘What a noble animal is the horse,’ said Abdul Ghiyas, striving to inject a more lofty note into a conversation that was in imminent danger of degenerating into an affair of mutual recrimination. ‘The way is stony and hard for our horses. No man will take you to this mountain for thirty Afghanis a day.’

  ‘… and food for the men,’ said Hugh.

  ‘That is the custom. Besides, who knows what perils Carless Seb will lead us into. Where will he take us after the mountain? Mir Samir is very close to Nuristan.’

  ‘Thirty-five Afghanis.’ Abdul Ghiyas had struck a subject that neither of us wanted to discuss at this stage. It was a shrewd thrust.

  The silence that followed was so long that I began to think the discussion had lapsed completely.

  ‘The horse is the friend of man,’ he said at last. ‘The road is a difficult one. There are many perils on it, robbers and evil men. We are all married men. I am married, Shir Muhammad is married, Badar Khan1 is married …’ he indicated the smaller driver, the one with a thin moustache, who began to giggle.

  ‘He looks like a pansy to me,’ said Hugh in English. ‘Forty Afghanis. Not one more.’

  ‘Our children are numerous,’ Shir Muhammad leered horribly. ‘Who is to look after them when we are gone?’

  ‘This is your own country. Surely you’re not afraid of Tajiks.’

  ‘There are Hazaras, heathen Shias …’

  ‘But the Hazaras of the Darra Hazara are your brothers, Sunnites.’ This was one up to Hugh but Abdul Ghiyas ignored it.

  ‘I have heard from the mullah at Jangalak,’ he went on, ‘that only two days ago a Nuristani going down to Kabul to stay with his brother in the army was robbed of everything, his cloak too, by the Gujaras.’

  I asked who the Gujaras were.

  ‘Hill shepherds; partly nomad, from the Frontier, originally from the Punjab. There are some in Nuristan. They’re semi-criminal – forty-five Afghanis.’

  Finally, we settled for fifty Afghanis. Hugh grumbled a lot, ‘don’t know what the country’s coming to’, but to me it seemed remarkable that we had secured the services of three able-bodied men and their wiry little horses for the equivalent of six and eightpence each.

  Now that all was concluded satisfactorily, the water pipe was circulated and Shir Muhammad heaped the fire with the fuel that the horses were producing at a greater rate than it could be consumed, an unusual experience for anyone used to living in Britain.

&
nbsp; All night I was racked with pains in the stomach, the result of drinking water that was both ice-cold and dirty. Hugh, of course, was completely unaffected. Each time I got up I encountered Abdul Ghiyas. He was not asleep but squatting in the moonlight, ghostly in his white chapan, brooding over the kit, listening to the roar of the river.

  * * *

  1. Pronounced Bādar, but, as we later discovered, written Bahādar.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Finding our Feet

  Abdul Ghiyas was first up the next morning (not that I think he had ever been to bed) harrying and chivvying us like a nurse in a superior household. ‘We should have started at the third hour,’ he said, but Shir Muhammad and Badar Khan were not of the same opinion. It was, at any rate, the fault of their masters, who lay in their bags waiting for the tea that never arrived, growing more and more bad-tempered because each knew that he was behaving badly and storing up trouble for the rest of the day.

  It was a quarter to six before we finally moved off. For the Panjshir Valley the day was already far advanced. Beyond the village we crossed a torrent that boiled out of a defile. Once across it, out of the shade of the village, the sun was hot and growing stronger every minute. We travelled packless and this time in step with the others to avoid the comments from the rooftops.

  The valley was the scene of ceaseless activity; in the groves of mulberry trees close to the road, beyond the crumbling walls, the Tajiks were gathering the fruit. Like apprentices up in the rigging, the boys were shaking the branches while underneath, like charming firewomen waiting to catch someone from a burning building, their beautiful sisters held striped homespun blankets extended at each end by a bow-shaped wooden stretcher. The mulberries descended in an endless shower and the air was full of a soft pattering. There were mulberries everywhere; round every tree there was a depression scooped out to receive them and the ground was swept clean with brooms for the windfalls. They were on the road too, little drifts of them like newly-fallen hail. They were on the roofs of the houses, spread out to dry in the sun, alternating with piles of apricots, a staple food to be exported out of the valley or else stored for the winter, much appreciated in a place where sugar is a luxury that is rarely available and never used in tea.

  A strong wind began to blow, curling the Panjshir back on itself where it flowed less violently in these wide reaches between banks of shingle that were littered with broken trees and rounded boulders, the debris of the river in spate. Here the valley was perhaps a mile wide. The fields rose in terraces as far as the screes of fallen stones that streamed off the steep sides of the valley. Even these high fields, several hundred feet above the river, were irrigated by water drawn off from the Panjshir many miles higher up and carried along the hillside by brilliant engineering, a silver ribbon glittering in the sun.

  In the fields the harvest was far advanced; whole families worked happily together threshing the wheat, the chaff rising on the wind in ragged clouds; children in charge of the bullocks which plodded blindfolded round and round the threshing floor; men in waistcoats worn over white shirts, and wide trousers, wearing on their heads turbans of black or white or navy blue; girls beautiful but unforthcoming, drawing their head cloths tightly across their faces and turning their backs as we approached in such a manner that we began to feel ourselves the vanguard of a whole cohort of sexual maniacs come to this paradise to violate and destroy. Perhaps one of the most disagreeable features of fanatic Islam is its ability to make people of other faiths feel impure in thought, word and deed.

  There were no large villages: only an occasional hamlet or a solitary farm standing in its own fields of wheat or Indian corn, ten feet high – enchanted forests in which little children played hide and seek; fields of barley, maize, bright fields of clover, creeping vetch, beans and tobacco. There were compact orchards of apples and magnificent groves of walnut and clumps of poplars, the wind sighing in their high tops. Here in the middle part of the valley the houses were of stone, sometimes faced with mud. At the mouths of the valleys that descended from the frontiers of Nuristan there were watch towers with farms clustered about them. The few bridges were crazy cantilevers of tree-trunks and turf.

  The first of these valleys, Darra Ghuzu, was reached after an hour on the road from Omarz. Sitting by the side of the track, looking up it, was an old man dressed in a long coloured cloak of striped material and a close skull-cap. Seeing our interest he pointed to a peak, a snow-covered pinnacle that must have been well over 18,000 feet high, glowing pink where the sun was now reaching it.

  ‘Ghuzu,’ he said, ‘under it there is a great river of ice.’

  He asked us where we were going.

  ‘Kuh-i-Mir Samir. We are going to climb it.’

  ‘Ghuzu,’ he said, pointing to the impressive pinnacle, ‘is nothing but a child. Kuh-i-Mir Samir is a great mountain. It is quite vertical. No man can reach the summit.’

  For some time we plodded on in silence while I digested this unpalatable information.

  ‘If it’s worse than Ghuzu he’s probably right.’

  ‘It’s higher, that’s all. We’ll do it somehow,’ said Hugh. Somehow his confidence was infectious.

  ‘We’ll do it all right,’ I said.

  Another two hours and we were in Khinj, a shady place where the men were building a mud wall, happily puddling the stuff like schoolboys. Beyond the village the road was full of people: shepherds coming down out of Badakshan with big flocks of fat-tailed sheep, a thousand at a time, following the track nose to tail, all trying to edge us over the precipice; mountaineers out of Andarab; wild-looking Pathan traders; men loaded with blocks of brownish rock salt. To all, except the sheep, we mumbled the obligatory greetings and replies that by now, as the morning advanced, had become almost an incantation.

  ‘Mandeh nabashi.’

  ‘Salamat bashi.’

  ‘Khush amadid.’

  ‘Khub hasti.’

  ‘Jur hasti.’

  ‘Che hal dari.’

  More rarely we received voluntary invitations to rest and refresh ourselves, ‘mehrbani kho’ and ‘nush i jan ko’: all in Kabuli Persian which resembles the dialect of Khurasan, the Meshed province, rather archaic and with some Turki expressions.

  After four hours on the road, we came to the village of Safed Jir. Here the doorways of the houses were high with pointed arches, the wooden doors decorated with fretted work and painted cabalistic signs. We rested on a low wall and were soon surrounded by a horde of old men and children. Some of the children had blue eyes. Not all the women veiled themselves and some giggled archly, like girls inviting attention in a high street. But all this pleasantry came to an end when Abdul Ghiyas arrived, shouting to them to veil themselves in the presence of idolatrous unbelievers, and we were known for what we were, unrighteous, ungodly men.

  ‘Sometimes I could strangle Abdul Ghiyas,’ Hugh said. ‘He’s worse than a mullah. When he gets out of the Panjshir into the summer pastures he spends most of his time in the nomad camps with the women, but he takes good care that I don’t see any. He’s what you might call a religious man.’

  ‘You surprise me. He seems more like a nanny to me.’

  ‘He’s more like Rasputin.’

  For whatever other reason the women giggled, our appearance alone would have given them good cause. On his head Hugh wore a Chitrali cap, not itself in this region an object of mirth but worn flat like a pancake, together with a khaki bush-jacket and trousers, the dress of an officer of the Eighth Army, rather more bizarre. He still carried his ice-axe, whereas I had long ago consigned mine to the baggage train. He had, too, a certain straight-backed rigidity of movement as he passed on always a few yards ahead of me. I, too, contrived to look ridiculous with a hat from Bond Street which was a sort of Anglicized version of something from Kitzbühel, blue jeans from Petticoat Lane and a camera slung round my neck with an attendant host of supplementary lenses, exposure meters and filters of varying degrees of intensity. I also carried a larg
e notebook – already I was being introduced to the people we met on the road as Motakhasses Seb, ‘The Specialist’.

  By eleven o’clock we were really done in. All the fires of hell seemed concentrated in my monstrous feet. At every small rill we washed our faces and rinsed our mouths but it was no good. We sucked gum drops but they only filled our mouths again with thick, lime-flavoured mud.

  We had outstripped the horses. It was difficult to gear ourselves to their leisurely progression.

  On the right of the road an orchard sloped gently to the river. Like men about to commit a felony we crept into it, took off our boots and steaming socks and shamelessly drank the water that a young man brought us unasked. There we lay like dead men until the drivers came up and passed us by, Shir Muhammad looking down on us with a lack of respect that even in our ruined state was none the less extremely disagreeable.

  ‘Last time I was in the Panjshir with Dreesen we did forty miles the first day, Marz Robat to the upper Valley,’ Hugh said as once again we took the road. He looked dreadful. I asked him what was wrong.

  ‘Diarrhoea. It’s most unusual.’

  ‘I’m not a bit surprised. It’s all this filthy water we’re drinking.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with the water.’

  ‘Perhaps we’re not strong enough for it.’

  ‘You have to get used to it.’

  ‘Like old women drinking meths?’

  In spite of the halts that became more and more frequent, we overtook the men.

  ‘Vaqt i tup. The gun has sounded,’ said Abdul Ghiyas spitefully. In Tajik parlance this meant that it was noon and we should by now have arrived at our destination.

  ‘How far to the next chaie khana?’

  ‘One and a half kro.’1