Where the Indus is Young (28 page)

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.

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.

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.

The hamlet near the clay cliffs had a startling Middle Eastern look, being built of mud-bricks instead of the usual Balti stone. Some dwellings stood on the cliffs, apparently growing out of them, but most of those were in ruins, their foundations having been partially eroded – a measure of how rapidly these curious cliffs are
disappearing
. They are honeycombed with exciting-looking caves which seem to have been troglodyte dwellings in the not too distant past. Rachel longed to explore these but I was less keen, in a region where the landscape is so mobile. This hamlet was also remarkable for the most gigantic vines I have ever seen – fantastic growths, some like a multitude of serpents intertwined, some growing right
through
the roofs and walls of houses, some forming footbridges over the broad
irrigation channel and some extending for fifty or sixty yards, linking several apricot and mulberry trees.

Beyond the cliffs we found ourselves on an uncanny little plain, still partly snow-covered, where the uncultivable spongy soil was strangely resilient and broken up into many dark chasms too deep to be fathomed with the eye. Some were circular pits, at least 100 feet in diameter, others were long, narrow cracks and all had crumbling edges. Between these scores of death-traps the barren ground wobbled underfoot, like a bog, and I suddenly noticed that not one path crossed it at any point. I decided then that I did not like the feel of the place, either literally or metaphorically, so we departed from it as speedily as was prudent, sliding on our bottoms down a 500-foot cliff to an area of orchards and fields just above river level.

The district of Kiris is about sixteen miles long by ten miles wide and like every Balti oasis of any consequence it has a Raja – who I believe speaks some English, but unluckily is at present in Skardu. On our way back to the Rest House we passed his Palace, a square, three-storeyed house on the very edge of a cliff overlooking the Shyok. Apart from its being by far the largest building in Kiris it is unremarkable, and a young policeman from Shigar, who saw us walking around it, explained that ‘most good house in Kiris is big mosque – you come, I show’. So we went and were shown.

This mosque is close to Kiris bazaar – if six small stalls with
three-quarter
empty shelves can be so described – and by Balti standards it is indeed magnificent. In design it resembles the ordinary stone village mosque, which is square, flat-roofed and usually rather wretched-looking, with a wooden portico. But its scale and
proportions
give it a simple sort of grandeur, despite its state of
disrepair
. A close row of high wooden pillars supports the portico, and the spacious interior, which we were allowed to glimpse from the doorway, is divided into naves by austere, symmetrically arranged columns. Straw mats are scattered on the earth floor and four lamps hang from the high ceiling. Shiahs and Nurbashis – who interpret the Prophet’s teaching so very differently – worship here together. Northern Ireland Christians please note.

In an enclosure near the mosque are two broken-down tombs which at one time must have been quite impressive; the remains of their carvings show a degree of skill quite alien to modern Baltistan. Our guide identified them as the tombs of those intrepid missionaries who converted the Baltis to Islam. Maybe. But I am cautious about accepting as fact the historical data on offer hereabouts.

We saw five major rock-falls today and heard several more. At present there is little traffic on the jeep-track, visible from here across the river; otherwise accidents would be frequent because jeep-drivers, unlike riders or walkers, cannot hear the warning rattle of pebbles. The steep, smooth slopes above this stretch of track are classic
rock-fall
sources and massive boulders hurtle down from the heights at meteoric speeds.

Kiris is rich in rats. I am sleeping on the wooden floor and last night as I lay reading by candlelight they had the audacity actually to scamper over my flea-bag. Then when I blew out the candle they came along to eat the wax and I could hear them gnawing by my ear.

We woke at dawn to see a world newly white under three inches of snow, but by 8 a.m. this had turned to the first rain we have seen for three months. It continued all day, occasionally becoming sleet, and the cold damp kept everyone indoors. By 5 p.m., when the sky began to clear, Kiris must have had most of its annual ration. Rachel spent the day painting and doing sums while I attended to my customary bad-weather chores.

Our toughest day. The weather compelled us to do a forced march of twenty-six miles in seven and three-quarter hours with one
five-minute
stop. From which you may rightly deduce that Hallam and I are pretty fit by now, despite (or because of?) the limitations of the Balti cuisine.

At dawn the weather was difficult to judge but by 7.30 the sky had begun to clear and at 9.15 we set off. As we approached Gol more
cloud could be seen gathering around the peaks ahead but for the next six or seven miles conditions remained tolerable – dry
underfoot
, and not too cold. The track switch-backed across a wide ledge between a dark chaos of mountains on the left and the deep gorge of the Indus on the right. When we came this way a month ago the whole area was white but now the thaw is complete. Beyond the Indus stark cliffs rose sheer from the water and at a little distance seemed to have the texture of brown velvet. We watched three spectacular rock-falls on these but our track was rarely at risk. Over the uninhabited twelve-mile stretch from Gol to Gomo Thurgon we saw only one other person – a mail-runner jogging along with a small sealed sack on his back. He looked at us with a strange expression, as though he didn’t believe it was true, and never for an instant altered the rhythm of his jog-trot.

I feared rain when the clouds thickened and sank lower and the wind blew more strongly and coldly against us. However, as we turned into the Skardu Valley it began to snow instead; not the attractive dry snow to which we have become accustomed, but dreary wet ‘Irish’ snow that melted as it landed. With every mile we became wetter and colder and soon visibility was down to fifty yards and liquid mud lay six inches deep on the track. Frequently through the gloom we heard the uncanny booming of avalanches and despite the extremity of my discomfort I rejoiced to have known Baltistan in this mood, too. One doesn’t expect one’s beloved to be always amiable. Sadiq tells us that throughout the Skardu Valley it has been snowing thus for four days and nights non-stop.

It was exactly 5 p.m. when we arrived back at Skardu and I thrust Rachel – soaked and shivering – into our cold little room. First I got Hallam unloaded (not easy with numb fingers), rubbed down and fed. Next I unpacked the load, got the stove going, undressed Rachel, wrapped her in a quilt, made tea – and discovered that our bedding, too, had been saturated. Therefore I had to settle down at once to the excessively laborious task of drying our flea-bags by the stove. And so to bed – not a moment too soon.

Today in Skardu nobody could walk ten yards without becoming mud to the knees and I found a stick essential to keep upright. The grey sky hung low and our ceiling has sprung so many leaks that there is hardly space between them for charpoys, while our floor has become a milder version of the ground outside; and poor Hallam’s ceiling is even worse. Four schoolboys spent the afternoon on the roof but I fear their shovelling will have further damaged the disintegrating mud. Many Skardu households have the same problem at present.

We spent the day calling on friends, all of whom warned us against leaving for Shigar before the weather improves. Despite Skardu’s unattractiveness just now, it feels good to be back in our Balti ‘
hometown
’ where we are welcomed so warmly by so many families – and by traders in the bazaar, and neighbours met at the stream, and policemen on the barrack verandah. Skardu may lack the Instant Friendliness of Khapalu, but once it has accepted you all is well.

There was a great improvement in the weather today, with disastrous consequences for us. The hot sun melted so much snow on our roof that when we got back from a kerosene-hunt we found all our bedding sodden. But it soon dried when hung outside. The early afternoon was repeatedly punctuated by the cracking and booming of
avalanches
. Rachel spent the forenoon at the local girls’ school with some of her young friends; she finds it very difficult to keep upright while walking around Skardu under these conditions. The kerosene shortage is now acute because no jeeps are able to get through from Juglote, the track having been blocked by seven major landslides.