Where the Indus is Young (8 page)

It is difficult to describe the Headman’s house; here dwellings, stables and barns are virtually indistinguishable – and, I suspect, interchangeable. We were led through a conglomeration of dark little rooms unevenly built of wood, mud and stones, all huddled together anyhow and smelling strongly of livestock. Then our host ushered us into the twilit ‘parlour’, which had a strip of frayed matting on the earth floor, a pile of bed-rolls in one corner and no furniture apart from a small tin stove – in itself of course a
considerable
status symbol. As many neighbours as could squeeze in followed us and sat on the floor. They helped each other to untie children from backs while our host and I talked basic Urdu, in which language we proved to be about equally fluent. Tea took half an hour to prepare and was poured from a tarnished and battered silver teapot into grimy tumblers – it was very sweet but milkless. With it we were ceremoniously offered three small biscuits (imported from Pindi) on a large tin plate. Looking at the starving children all around us, I quietly told Rachel to restrain herself.

I have my own system of grading poverty and today I concluded that the local level is not ‘acceptable’. I don’t at once deduce poverty if I see people studying the sun because they have no watches, or drying their hands at tea-house fires because they have no towels, or staring at themselves in jeep mirrors because they have no looking-glasses. But I
do
deduce poverty when almost everybody in a village is obviously permanently underfed. I have to admit, most reluctantly, that the opening up of this area may be a good thing. If only that process didn’t always involve the destruction of local traditions, the
debasement
of taste and the stimulation of greed. It is tragic that
living-standards
in remote regions cannot be raised without drawing people into the polluted mainstream of our horrible ‘consumer society’.

On the way back to Thowar we passed Ronda’s tiny new
police-station
and were invited to drink more tea by the Head Constable and his senior officer, a gloomy native of the fertile Shigar valley who plainly resents his exile in this grim gorge. Both men were very polite but still seemed worried by our unprecedented invasion of their district. Ghulam apologetically produced a virgin ledger; across the top of one page he had painfully written in pencil –
NAM AND DRES ⁄ PASPOR DETALS AGE ⁄ WORK ⁄ PARPAS OF VIST ⁄ DAT.
He looked much happier when I had supplied all these ‘detals’, inventing our ‘paspor’ numbers which I can never remember. The ways of
bureaucracy
are wonderful. In a dozen countries I have solemnly inscribed fictitious passport numbers in the appropriate column without ever suffering any ill-effects.

This evening Mazhar told me that crime of any sort is virtually unknown here so the main function of these two officers is to settle quarrels between husbands and wives. Apparently the locals, on finding themselves with a superfluous police force, decided forthwith to transmute it into a Marriage Advisory Council. And it seems that Ghulam is at present out of favour with the Hotel patrons because last week he took the wrong (female) side in a domestic dispute involving one of their number.

Carrying a thermos of soup for lunch we rambled down the Gorge and after an hour’s walking and rock-scrambling found the picnic site to end all picnic-sites – and to end all picnickers, unless they are
very careful. Sitting on a colossal, rounded rock, itself the size of a Wicklow mountain, we were overhanging the Indus some 1,000 feet below, where it has worn a narrow channel between sheer brown rock-walls that rose to 13,000 feet directly opposite us. From where I sat drinking my Batchelors oxtail soup I could and did drop a stone straight into the green water that flowed so smooth and silent so far below. Looking up that melodramatic corridor, hewn by the river, one sees a glittering array of sharp white peaks soaring above the sombre-hued cliffs of the Gorge. I could not estimate the height of these giants but to raise one’s eyes from the river to their summits gives a sense of sheer vastness such as I have never experienced before, not even in Nepal.

It was warm in the sun when we sat down at 2.15, but beginning to be chilly when we stood up half an hour later. Gazing around, Rachel suddenly remarked, ‘This landscape looks terribly
untidy
’ – an excellent description of the Indus Gorge, where it seems as if some cataclysm had occurred only yesterday, leaving everything scattered and unsettled. The mountainsides are either perpendicular walls of cracked and jagged rock, on which even goats can’t venture, or smooth expanses of loose, grey-brown sand and scree littered with boulders of every size and shape that look as if about to roll down the slopes – which of course they frequently do. The fact that landslips and rockfalls are almost a daily occurrence makes the building and maintenance of irrigation channels and tracks (never mind
motor-roads
) a discouraging task.

We came home by another route, high above the jeep-track, following a dry irrigation channel around the contours of two mountains and then sliding down a hair-raising gradient to the Rest House.

I must admit that I am beginning to find my daughter’s
companionship
rather trying. When one is sitting adoring the high Himalayas it is almost unendurable suddenly to be asked ‘How
exactly
does radar work?’

Early this morning the weather looked unpromising, with lots of
grey cloud low enough to be touched and light snow whirling through the Gorge. But it soon improved and at ten o’clock we set off in brilliant sunshine for what Rachel calls ‘an explore’. About a mile down the track towards Gilgit we turned away from the Indus to follow an ice-bound tributary up a side-valley. The sun had not yet penetrated to this ravine, yet round one corner we came on a dozen men and boys who had broken the ice and were standing knee-deep in the torrent washing their pantaloons and apparently aware of no discomfort. Our intrusion was untimely; few Baltis own two shalwars, so these unfortunates were caught with their pants not merely down but off. In fact the decencies were being adequately safeguarded by their long shirts, but they leaped out of the water with yelps of dismay and sat on a slab of rock, legs stretched out straight and knees together – the very personification of Primness. I cannot believe that clothes dry quickly in such a shadowed valley; they must be put on while still damp, which helps to explain why so many of the locals are contorted by rheumatism.

The valley was a study in grey: grey dusty track, grey boulders in the river-bed, grey slopes on either side from which twisted grey crags jutted out of the shale like the skeletons of prehistoric monsters. All around were signs of recent landslips and soon our track ended abruptly, obliterated by countless tons of fallen mountain. We could see its continuation above us and to reach this we followed a
goat-trail
, sending cascades of loose pebbles and soil flowing from our footsteps. The gradient was so severe that Rachel had to be helped and we were both feeling ‘panted’ when we regained the track near the top of the ridge. But our rewards were many. First, a trail of fresh snow-leopard pug-marks in the fine dust; second, a majestic eagle with a wing-span of at least four feet sailing below us over the stream; and third a superb view of many previously unseen snow-peaks on the far (southern) side of the Gorge.

We found another way home and were greeted by Mazhar with an invitation to Sunday lunch. This was the first I knew of its being Sunday. Diary-writing keeps me straight about dates but I don’t even try to remember the days, which are entirely irrelevant here.

I had fondly imagined that Rachel would relax after lunch but
she insisted on an ‘explore’ down the long, wide, steep slope in front of the Rest House. This slope is covered by an extraordinary array of angular black rocks, as though an army had come along with sledgehammers and smashed up a whole mountain on that spot. Across these boulders we went leaping like goats – Mazhar tells me the locals have quite decided we’re off our heads – and I got a close-up view of a magnificent fox. He was half as big again as an Irish fox, with a glowing marmalade coat and a thick white-tipped brush. Rachel missed him and was very aggrieved; I couldn’t resist telling her that if she talked less she might see more.

At last we were again overlooking the Indus, from the verge of a fearsome precipice of friable, pale brown clay. The matching cliffs beyond the river had been weirdly eroded and looked like giants’ rib-cages; it seems likely that quite soon – geologically speaking – the Indus will have undermined all these cliffs. In the Himalayas one becomes very conscious of the elements as creative forces.

Directly opposite was the village of Mendi. Its stone hovels merge into their background of small brown fields and would have gone unnoticed but for occasional wisps of blue smoke and the oddly toy-like movements of black cattle and brown and white sheep and goats. Above the broad ledge supporting Mendi rises another sharp, snowy mountain, and looking downstream we could see one of those ‘beaches’ which so tantalise Rachel – smooth crescents of fine silver sand lying untrodden and forever inaccessible beside the emerald swiftness of the Indus.

On our way home we sent several flocks of
chikor
(partridges) whirring into the sky. There are mysteriously numerous here: I cannot imagine what they eat during winter.

It is now half-past ten and I have just been out to look at the full moon over Ronda. There was no movement throughout all that brilliant wilderness, and no sound but the distant song of the Indus. In a powder-blue sky few stars showed and from every side came the magic radiance of luminous snows. Towards Skardu a remote peak shone above all the rest, like a tiara suspended over the world, and the nearby mountains seemed ethereal turrets of light, almost eerie
in the flawlessness of their glory. Such overwhelming experiences of beauty change one; though they may last only for moments, they permanently reinforce the spirit.

At 7 a.m. I found our waterfall frozen solid, despite its speed, and chunks of ice had to be broken off to fill the kettle. Last night the temperature fell to 38º below freezing, yet by ten o’clock this morning we were sitting in
hot
sun at 9,000 feet. We are not feeling this dry cold nearly as much as I had expected; Ireland’s penetrating damp cold is far less easy to combat. But our skins are suffering from the complete lack of moisture in the air, though I frequently plaster Rachel with high-altitude lotion. (My own tough old hide is past worrying about.)

Our target for today was the mountain overlooking Ronda village and for the first hour we were climbing gradually through tiny, terraced fields bounded by glistening, frozen irrigation channels. Here were many apricot, apple, mulberry, walnut and plane trees, some with ancient vines twining around their trunks, or linking tree to tree, like fabulous serpents. Near the edge of a precipice we rested in the sun while looking down on yesterday’s ‘grey valley’ and on the Indus still further below. Then we turned to gaze over the roofs of Ronda village at our objective. We were not aiming for the 14,000 foot summit – an unclimbable buttress of fluted rock – but for a point some 2,000 feet lower, to which a goat track led from Gomu hamlet, beyond Ronda. This path could be seen running like a
pencil-line
straight across a vast expanse of scree, and then climbing through a jumble of broken brown rock in the midst of which it seemed to peter out.

As we approached Gomu, those inhabitants who had been sitting in the sun along the edges of their stone-walled terraces quickly stood up, shaded their eyes, and for some moments stared at us unsmilingly with mingled incredulity and alarm. But this
understandable
unease soon subsided and then we were made to feel most welcome. Each of us was given a sweet juicy green apple – an exotic delicacy, during mid-winter in Baltistan – and the women
had no objection to being photographed. The Baltis were converted from Buddhism to Islam some 500 years ago, but it seems the Prophet’s message has not yet been clearly heard.

Gomu is a scattering of perhaps a hundred dwellings, built on different levels amidst many fruit-trees. On the outskirts is a small new mosque, constructed in the pleasing traditional style with alternate layers of granite and wood (poplar and mulberry). It differs from a dwelling only in having a carved wooden façade and fretwork eaves. The Baltis rarely bother to decorate secular buildings but some local craftsman has made a great effort for the glory of Allah.

I noticed many Tibetan-type faces and the locals also show a Tibetan-type cheerfulness, though to us it might seem they have little enough to be cheerful about. Yet Baltistan is very much an ethnic hotch-potch. Even in a small hamlet one sees fair, blue-eyed people, and others who could be of Kashmiri, Afghan, Turkish or Persian descent.

Most Gomu women wear silver headdresses, often inset with coral, and some also wear collars of large turquoises set in silver. Men and women alike dress in dingy, sack-like, homespun gowns and during winter spend much of their time spinning wool as they sit in the sun. Between mid-November and mid-March no farm-work can be done apart from tending livestock, which means providing fodder and letting them out for a couple of midday hours to sun and water themselves.

Our taking the goat-trail onwards from Gomu caused some
consternation
. Nobody could understand why we were making for a cul-de-sac and a score of men, women and children good-naturedly pursued us to point out our ‘mistake’. I pretended that my motive was photographic, but they remained worried and puzzled. Naturally enough, toiling up steep slopes is not their idea of fun. As we walked on, revelling in the glory all around us, I reflected that to the average Balti this splendour probably means no more than walking through my home town would mean to me.

Where the path petered out we could see, on a level with us beyond the Gorge, those immense, smooth, spotless snowfields which gather
on the shadowed slopes south of the Indus. We were directly
overlooking
Ronda village but so far above it that the people seemed like ants. Yet as we sat on a rock enjoying tomato soup the village sounds rang out through the still, thin, clear air and I was struck by their happy note. Undoubtedly there is a collective village sound, a dominant note expressive of the nature of the people. In many regions of India it is peevish, in Eastern Turkey it is quarrelsome, in highland Ethiopia it is jovial in a subdued way – and here it is gay, gossipy and bantering, for the Baltis are much given to teasing one another.