Where the Indus is Young (20 page)

Looking up the steep Kharmang Valley from the bridge, one sees the Indus rushing through a narrow gorge – and the sun caught it where it leaped into sight around a sharp bend, so that the water glowed like molten metal. Then suddenly it calms down and broadens, as though composing itself for its union with the Shyok, which at their confluence looks the more important river. A traveller without maps or local information would assume the Shyok to be the continuation of the Indus, and the Indus a major tributary.

As we continued east, the Ladak Range was on our right and on our left flowed the Shyok, broad and deep. Then for a few miles it vanished, as the track climbed to avoid land that is under water during summer, and when it reappeared it was shallow and frisky, racing and sparkling over pebbles between spotless expanses of snow.

At noon we came to one of those intimidating stretches where the track has been built up on stakes driven into a rocky wall rising sheer out of the Shyok, which swirls rapidly past, hundreds of feet below. Here a jeep came over the highest point of the track, some twenty yards above us, without warning. (We had been unable to hear it over the roar of the river.) Hallam snorted with terror and reared up and I looked around to see him on his hind legs with Rachel poised over the water far below. Even to recall that vision now makes me feel sick. There has been no nastier moment in my entire forty-three years. As the jeep-driver jammed on the brakes Hallam recovered himself, Rachel dismounted and I beckoned the driver to help me unload, since a loaded animal could not pass the vehicle. Then I slowly led Hallam – still trembling and with ears laid back – along the edge of the precipice and over the top. There the track mercifully widened, allowing us to reload in safety. Meanwhile Rachel had dissolved into tears of fright and if ever an occasion called for loving maternal reassurance this was it. But I am deeply ashamed to relate that I rounded savagely on the poor child and told her to stop behaving like a baby. Human nature can be very unattractive.

On regaining level ground we stopped for lunch and found that in Gol the chowkidar had mistakenly included our picnic-bag in the load, so it was now out of reach. Therefore while Hallam complacently munched his barley – carried in my nylon waterproof anorak, for lack of anything more suitable – we feasted our eyes instead of filling our bellies.

Four miles further on, the track descended to the broad valley floor and passed through acres of ancient orchards: we haven’t seen so many trees together since leaving home. A hamlet of stone cubes adhered to the dark mountain directly above us and beyond the orchards, towards the again invisible river, many poplars and willows
grew between huge, snow-sheathed boulders. Here we saw a magpie flying purposefully with a beakful of cow-hair: another sign of spring.

The next climb took us up a colossal spur of rock that thrusts out from the towering southern mountain wall towards the Shyok, forcing it into a U loop. On this ‘plateau’ we rested briefly, looking back the way we had come to the confluence of the rivers, now ten miles away, and picking out our track which from here seemed like a thin line feebly scratched along the snowy base of the mountains.

Even by local standards the descent to Gwali was extraordinarily steep, besides being mud-slippy. Again I felt very aware of our own puniness, in relation to the gigantic surrounding confusion of mountains, gorges, cliffs and crags. I thought of myself as an ant as I slithered along beside a faltering Hallam, whose loud breathing marked his disapproval of such an outrageous gradient. There were groups of dwellings on various unlikely ledges, and two startled inhabitants stared wordlessly at us as though we were ghosts.

Having heard that Gwali offers a ‘
chota
hotel’ I was looking for something like The Hotel in Thowar, but instead we found an isolated new building at the foot of the spur, where Gwali’s long oasis begins. This ‘Hilton’ was opened last month and has two rooms: a small kitchen and a large dining-room/dormitory/lounge containing four charpoys with comparatively clean bedding, two crudely-made wooden benches, an unsteady small table and the statutory tin stove. It has thick stone walls, an untreated earth floor and a flat mud roof. Safarhad, the proprietor, is an agreeable
middle-aged
man who has lived in Gilgit and may therefore be considered much-travelled. He is slim and brisk, with bright eyes, naturally good manners and a quick smile. He also seems an excellent cook, though admittedly our palates were not critical today. When Hallam had been unloaded and watered we each drank four large cups of tea and I wolfed three thick, grease-sodden
paratas
while Rachel devoured a six-egg omelette.

Then Safarhad produced a ‘host’ for Hallam – a pleasant young man named Hussain, with Mongoloid features, who led us across two snowy fields to his home. This dwelling consists of one long, windowless living-room and three stables on the ground-floor,
while an outside ladder leads to a loggia with three walls of woven willow-wands, ineffectually mud-plastered. Many Balti houses have these roof-shelters, open to the south, which enable the maximum benefit to be derived from the winter sun’s light and warmth.

In one corner of the loggia Hussain’s sister-in-law was trying to cook
roti
over a few reluctant flames which were being fed with twigs and shells of apricot kernels; absolutely nothing is wasted here. In another corner his wife sat rocking to and fro, her face distorted with grief, her eyes reddened and swollen by hours of weeping. It was explained to me that her baby died last night – a three-month-old son. The bereavement seems to have left Hussain unmoved, though he shows much affection towards his other children. These, aged about two, four and six, were crouching near their aunt and staring at their stricken mother with bewildered, frightened eyes. All wore threadbare, shapeless, homespun shifts that left them naked from the waist down, and they were shivering wretchedly from a combination of cold and distress. Their round little Mongoloid faces, with infected eyes and malnutrition sores, took me right back to the Tibetan refugee camp at Dharamsala where I once worked as a helper. Both women have rosy cheeks and wear their hair Tibetan-style, in countless thin braids. If clean and not so haunted by misery they would look most attractive. Nobody spoke a word of Urdu but the Gwali dialect of Balti seems much more like modern Tibetan than the Rondu and Skardu dialects. As we sat on two mangy fox-furs, which formed the seat of honour beside the pathetic fire, our unhappy hostess suddenly pulled herself together and, though still shaking with sobs, reached out for a large wad of sheep’s wool and began to spin with
automatically
nimble fingers. At once, as though reassured by this resumption of normal activity, the toddler rushed to his mother and buried his face in the folds of her filthy gown. When he stood up I could see his grotesquely distended belly – obviously crammed with worms. Yet despite this family’s acute poverty Hussain presented us with two eggs, and filled Rachel’s pockets with apricot kernels.

On our return to the ‘hotel’ we found four fellow-guests who
have just settled down for the night on two of the charpoys, leaving the other two for us. They each have a rifle, so perhaps are soldiers or police in mufti. All were much puzzled by my industrious scribbling; one forgets what a weird habit diary-writing must seem to members of an illiterate society. Now I can hear a rat rustling loudly among the dried leaves of the ceiling – or perhaps it’s a mongoose, fancying a drop of Irish blood for supper.

At 6.15 I was roused by Safarhad lighting the stove a couple of feet from my head. Then our room-mates got up, loudly slurped tea, shouldered their rifles and were on the road before seven o’clock. As eggs are gloriously plentiful here we each had a monster omelette and two
paratas
before setting off to explore Gwali.

It was snowing lightly and pale clouds were low on the mountains; but I love this Himalayan world seen through a flimsy, mobile curtain of falling snow. The great gaunt peaks appear and disappear through drifting cloud, while the nearer crags and precipices and gullies and cliffs and ravines all have a new sort of mysterious, softened beauty. We climbed high, using as our starting point that massive rocky spur we crossed yesterday, but however high we went there were always a few more minute hovels around the next corner, the majority indistinguishable from the stony mountainside until one was almost beside them. At our highest point, which cannot have been lower than 10,000 feet, we came on an inexplicable sight. We had been following a frozen irrigation channel around and around the contours of a succession of mountains, when suddenly we saw six men, young and old, standing up to their knees in green glacial water treading on blankets. Their
dhobi
-pool was artificial and had a three-foot stone wall on which they leant, with heads down, while stamping vigorously. We watched them for some moments before they noticed us: then they roared with laughter when I conveyed by pantomime that it gave me cold feet even to look at them. Snowflakes were whirling around us, while icicles six feet high and as thick as oak-trees stood all about the pool: and naturally we wondered why these representatives of a spectacularly
filthy race had chosen to wash their woollies so enthusiastically and masochistically on this insalubrious morning. Such baffling details make the language barrier very frustrating.

Gwali extends over an area some five miles long by two miles wide and there are about a dozen quite separate groups of dwellings, on various levels. A few houses have splendidly carved windows and doorways but most are primitive structures from which the inhabitants were just beginning to emerge as we strolled past. Many babies and toddlers were being carried out – tied Tibetan-style to the backs of parents or older siblings – and held over the snow to do their morning duty. I fear we seriously disrupted this routine for they tended to panic at our approach, yelling and wriggling in a manner not conducive to the functioning of the lower bowel. I cannot say that we were made to feel welcome. Everybody was too overcome by astonishment to do more than stare silently and our greetings were rarely returned. Apart from a few derelict ex-army sweaters, used as smocks by small children, the entire population wears home-spun garments and I noticed a number of Tibetan-style felt boots.

At lunchtime it stopped snowing but the afternoon was
exceptionally
cold, with a penetrating rawness in the air. We explored upstream by the Shyok, often leaping from boulder to boulder to avoid the deep snow. On the far side we saw that a recent landslip has obliterated a quarter of a mile of the old trade route, which we hope to use on our return journey from Khapalu. But perhaps there is an alternative route, or an easy fording spot nearby, or the track may have been re-made by then. The Baltis have long been renowned as the best, bravest and fastest road-builders in the Western Himalayas, possibly because they have had more than their fair share of practice.

Not far from our hotel we came on a scene of great activity around seven little watermills, now just beginning to work again, having been frozen since early December. Each consists of a low, circular, stone shelter built over the millstone, which is rotated by water from a nullah caught in a hollowed-out tree-trunk set at an acute angle to the wheel to increase power. Above the wheel hangs a conical wicker basket with an appropriate hole in its base. This contains a curious
species of barley, without chaff, which grows from 8,000 feet upwards and at lesser heights resumes the characteristics of ordinary barley. Marco Polo mentioned finding this convenient variety in Afghanistan; no cleaning is necessary and the Baltis, like the Tibetans, parch the grain in special furnaces as soon as it has been threshed. Thus the flour is pre-cooked and an ideal form of nourishment for long journeys through terrain where no fuel is available. The Tibetans and Ladakis mix it with butter-tea to form a tasty and sustaining dough known as
tsampa
, which is their chief food; but in this region of meagre soil it is a delicacy, known as
satu
. It smells like toast and our mouths watered as we bent to peer through the four-foot high entrances into the noisy gloom. No doubt it was just a coincidence that each mill was being tended by an aged, bearded man and a young girl. The man supervised the flow of water into the tree-trunk, clearing away extraneous matter caught by a wooden grille, while within the shelter the girl crouched – a figure made ghostly by
flour-dust
– rhythmically gathering the precious
satu
into a dirty square of cloth. The mills of Gwali ground slowly today, for the thaw is only beginning, and every mill-watcher wore that look of pinched misery peculiar to those who accept that there is no alternative to being cold.

Near the mills, on a sandy level space that had been shovelled clear of snow, a young woman squatted beside a rug-like expanse of sheep’s wool which she was beating energetically with two thin willow-wands some three feet long. Occasionally she stopped to sprinkle the wool lavishly with fine sand and I deduced that this ritual cleans it without removing the natural oils. She was still tirelessly beating and sprinkling as we were on our way back an hour later: but time is among Baltistan’s few plentiful commodities. And at least wool threshing keeps one warm. I get the impression that here women feel the cold more than men, possibly because of excessive child-bearing on a poor diet.

I wished today’s trek could go on for ever; I have never anywhere enjoyed a day more. It puzzles me that so many of the early
travellers in Baltistan complained about the monotony of the landscape.

There was quite a blizzard last night and we set off at 8.15 into the unique silent brightness of a world freshly laden with snow. The sky was dove-grey but a patch of blue to the southeast rapidly widened as we climbed towards the Khardung La. Safarhad and Hussain had insisted on tying the load
their
way so when it fell off halfway up the pass I was not surprised, though considerably dismayed. It takes two people to lift it into place and in this context Rachel cannot yet be counted as a person – or so I thought. Since leaving the hotel we had not even glimpsed a fellow-being in the distance, nor was there any possibility of jeep-traffic today, with new snow deep on the pass. Cursing myself for having been too polite to Safarhad and Hussain, I undid their idiotic knots and re-roped the load according to the system I had been taught in Thowar. Then I somehow dragged it on to a flat-topped rock, halfway between ground-level and saddle-level, before manoeuvring Hallam into position beside the rock and enlisting Rachel’s aid. Without her unsuspected strength I could not possibly have coped: she took much of the sack’s weight at that crucial moment when I was pushing the canvas bag over the saddle. Hallam’s cooperation was no less important: had he moved an inch at the wrong time we would have been back to square one. But he is an animal of great understanding. From his point of view it is obviously much nicer to have the load lying by the wayside, yet he stood as still and steady as any of the surrounding rocks while I heaved and swore and struggled, leaning against him like a
back-row
forward. His physical condition may leave a lot to be desired, but temperamentally he is a jewel. When I at last got the bag over the saddle, after a final prodigious effort, he looked around at me with what seemed very like a congratulatory gleam in his eye.