A large black vulture sat perched atop the headquarters of the IMF. Dick and I burst into laughter, puzzling the taxi driver, who saw nothing funny in the spectacle of this ominous creature, settled with such proprietorial assurance on the very pinnacle of the fortress-like building which is the starting point for nearly every expedition to the Indian Himalaya. But for us it was a marvellous moment of black comedy – one of the many absurdities which enlivened a week of mundane drudgery.
We had just returned from a morning’s shopping in the bazaar and the taxi was crammed with boxes of food. We humped the boxes into the IMF building, relieved to return to the showers and electric fans which provided a cool haven from the relentless humid heat of Delhi. The chokidar brought tea and we ordered our lunch.
In the afternoon we rested in the dormitory, sprawled under the fans. I had almost fallen asleep when the IMF secretary came in to introduce our liason officer. Reluctantly I got to my feet, yawning dopily, but just conscious enough to be aware of the fact that Dick and I were dressed in nothing but underpants. Our LO was seconded to us from his duties in Garhwal with the India-Tibet
Border Force, the paramilitary group responsible for patrolling India’s long Himalayan border with China. He was a big man in his early thirties, his hair immaculately groomed and he wore a freshly laundered shirt, tailored trousers and shiny black shoes. I shook hands, smiled through the yawns and let Dick do the talking. Everything was very polite and formal, underpants notwithstanding, and it was rather daunting to think that this pukkah man was to be our constant companion for the next few weeks. A sense of awkwardness was accentuated by communication problems: he had a very thick Indian accent and had to repeat everything he said several times, so that it took some time to establish that his name was Patial. He found us equally incomprehensible and when in doubt said yes to anything we said. He could be excused, though, for incomprehension, because Dick is notorious for his sotto voce mumbling and my articulation often isn’t much better.
After a few minutes of confused small talk, Patial started to work round to the moment we had dreaded:
‘May I see the equipments?’
‘We’ve packed all the equipment in those bags.’
‘Yes – I am packing the equipments?’
‘No – that is already done. It is ready.’
‘Yes – I am ready.’
We decided on a different tack:
‘Perhaps we should go to the bazaar now – there is more shopping to do.’
‘Yes …’
There was another pause, Patial looked perplexed; he tried again:
‘I shall be seeing personal LO equipments?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Sorry … ?’
‘Can you repeat what you said, please?’
‘I am wanting to see personal LO equipment articles.’
The message had finally got through and Dick and I exchanged shifty glances. We knew that every LO joins a foreign expedition with high expectations of LO perks. We had brought a motley selection of clothing and camping equipment, which just complied with the IMF regulations and which would be more than adequate for Patial’s requirements at Base Camp; but he had friends who had worked for heavily sponsored Japanese expeditions, lavishly equipped with all the latest in mountaineering fashion and technology. He made no attempt to disguise his disappointment when we produced a well-used rucksack containing an old tent of my parents, my brother’s walking boots and a down jacket of Dick’s which was extremely warm but had a slightly déjà vu appearance. Patial fingered our offerings disdainfully. However, our sponsors had kindly provided a few compensatory items – a brand new karrimat, pristine thermal underwear, some luxurious loopstitch socks and a gleaming red Swiss penknife – which seemed to cheer him up a little. We also assured him that we had packed the regulation ice axe, crampons and climbing harness – items which we knew he was unlikely to use, but which we were glad to have with us as spares.
We repacked the rucksack and handed it over to Patial, promising to buy him some denim jeans and a transistor radio. Dick and I put on trousers and shirts, then the three of us went into the glaring heat outside. In the course of another laboured conversation we explained that Dick and Patial would continue with the shopping, while I took an auto-rickshaw to the tourist office near India Gate to reserve berths on the following day’s night train to Jammu.
I met Dick again in the evening. Patial had returned to army quarters. Dick looked disconsolate and I asked how the shopping had gone. He had procured the extra rice, flour and dried fruit, but apparently Patial had been little help.
‘He was useless!’ Dick exclaimed in his bluntest Yorkshire accent. ‘I had to carry all the heavy stuff on my own, while he just watched. He didn’t seem to have a clue what was going on – did nothing but ask about his bloody jeans. It’s going to be awful stuck with him, prancing round Base Camp in his new Levis … ’
It was depressing and we were both worried that Patial was going to be a terrible liability. However, as so often happens, our first impressions were wildly inaccurate: within a few days Patial had accepted the fact that he had been consigned to two slightly eccentric Englishmen with very little spare cash and he was trying to make the best of a disappointing situation, obviously doing everything he could to be helpful. As the expedition progressed, we often heard his favourite aphorism – ‘Communications Is Must’ – and by dint of meticulous articulation and growing familiarity we built up a good rapport. By the end of the trip we were agreed that Patial had coped most cheerfully and efficiently with what must have been an exceedingly boring job, acting as negotiator, interpreter and Base Camp guard for two foreigners who were neither willing nor able to take him on the mountain.
We had arrived in Delhi on a Saturday morning, hoping to leave for the mountains the following Monday. However, Patial’s late appearance delayed us slightly and we didn’t leave until the evening of Tuesday 9 August. We had now bought all the basic foodstuffs to supplement the rations donated in England, and it only remained to find paraffin and cooking utensils in Jammu and fresh vegetables in Kishtwar. Three taxis came to the IMF to take us and our eighteen pieces of luggage to the railway station and we left, driving through the spacious avenues of New Delhi, past all the embassies and India Gate and Lutyens’ grandiose presidential palace and on into the borderland of New and Old Delhi, seething with a noisy mass of people, cars and cows. The station porters in their uniform red shirts welcomed us with an outrageous price for carrying our luggage to the platform and they seemed in no mood for negotiation. So Dick and I astounded them all by picking up two twenty-five-kilo loads and setting off ourselves. It was a long journey, across the lethal taxi stand, through the teeming entrance hall, up over a footbridge and down to our platform. Patial guarded the diminishing pile of luggage outside while Dick and I alternately humped loads and guarded the growing pile on the platform. After half an hour of hard labour we had stubbornly relayed all the loads and could rest, sweaty and exhausted.
The Frontier Mail was two hours late. Unlike British Rail, the Delhi station authorities do not announce publicly the late arrival of their trains. The expected time of arrival remains a subject for rumour and conjecture, while the public address system is used for more educational purposes: every few minutes its impeccable tones would cut through the hubbub, exhorting people to be sensible, asking them to refrain from carrying too much luggage or riding on the footplates or entering an air-conditioned carriage without an AC ticket. The best announcement went something like this:
‘Please do not sit on the platforms, which is uncomfortable, and a nuisance to other people; instead, please use the seats provided.’ It seemed an unreasonable request, when our platform boasted perhaps four small bench seats for a waiting crowd of hundreds of passengers, not to mention the scores of people who just happened to live there, sprawled on the platform in dense mounds of sleeping bodies.
The train arrived. We had treated ourselves to the luxury of an air-conditioned carriage, where a small bribe to a porter enabled us to stow all the luggage, illegally, in the compartment. It was wonderful to retreat into the delicious coolness of the carriage, settle into comfortable bunks and wait for the gentle swaying motion of the train to rock us to sleep, as it trundled through the night across the immense plains of Northern India.
Jammu lies right at the foot of the Himalaya, at the southern extremity of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. We arrived in the late morning and once again had to shift all the luggage, a tedious process which seems to be repeated endlessly during the early days of every expedition. It was a day of heat and drudgery and that evening I summed it up in my diary:
Sitting in ‘retiring room’ No 9 at the bus station, trying to write by the dingy light of a single yellow bulb. The constant din of scooters, auto-rickshaws, taxis, lorries and buses, and the frenetic shouting of thousands of people, the smell of cow shit and stale urine and curry and rotting mangoes. The smell of sewage in our shower room and the sweet little brown rats scurrying in the rubbish cupboard … all this is starting to make us just a little weary. In the morning a skinny mangy horse pulled a cart with our 300+kg of luggage to the bus station. Staring at its festering fly-infested sores and watching its pathetic attempts to shake its head, I felt depressed by the hopeless cruelty of it all – the horse, the people in the squalid huts by the station, the grotesque head of a man perched on a tiny legless torso on the floor of the bus station, the coolies carrying 100kg loads to our room, the soft-eyed scrawny cow ambling nonchalantly round the bus station, oblivious of all the noise – it all seemed utterly hopeless and futile.
The romance of India seemed to be eluding us.
Of course, it hadn’t all been as bleak as my diary suggests. We had completed the first part of our journey and we were booked on to the next day’s bus to Kishtwar. We had managed a successful shopping trip to the bazaar, buying paraffin, pots and pans, a large polythene sheet for our Base Camp kitchen and a transistor radio for Patial. There had even been moments of beauty like waking up at dawn to stare out of the train window at the gold and green fields of the Punjab and, in the evening, escaping from the bazaar to the twilit peace of a Hindu temple, where children played in the courtyard, while their parents prayed. Now we were back in our room, about to go to bed. There was a loud knock on the door and Dick went to open it, to find an enormous beturbanned man prowling around the corridor with an axe in his hand. Dick said hello and hastily shut the door, but Patial told him not to worry, assuring us that the man was just a resident security guard doing a check of the rooms.
Every long-haul bus in Jammu and Kashmir is adorned with one of two mottos, either ‘Trust in God’ or ‘Best of Luck’. I cannot remember which ours was, but it negotiated without incident the first stretch of the journey into Kashmir, along a road decorated liberally with road safety slogans: ‘Better late than never’; ‘Dazzle him and he may dash you – Puzzle him and he may crash you’; ‘Keep your nerves on sharp curves’.
We climbed up through pine forests and over a mountain pass, crossing the Pir Panjal range to Batote, where the main road continues north over another pass to Srinagar, and a rougher road winds its way tortuously eastward, following the twists and turns of the Chenab river to Kishtwar. We were to take the latter road, but first we had to stop overnight at Batote. I am always glad of a chance to sleep, but at Batote I was disappointed. Just after we had settled into our beds in a five-rupee hotel, giant fleas began to advance at high speeds from every chink and crevice in the beds and the surrounding walls of the room. The three of us fled downstairs, to balance precariously through the night on narrow benches, islands in a sea of voracious bugs; but they had already done their worst in the bedroom and we were all suffering from furiously itching red weals.
In the morning we continued on the long road to Kishtwar, bouncing for most of the day along the rough track high above the Chenab. We had almost reached Kishtwar when the bus stopped abruptly at a bend. Several other buses and trucks were also waiting. Round the bend, a section of the road had disappeared, swept down in a great slice of rain-loosened earth and rock into the turbid waters of the Chenab, 200 metres below. Landslides are a constant expected hazard during the monsoon and already a bulldozer was at work, trying to re-excavate the track. It was obviously going to take some time, so I settled in the shade beside the bus to continue reading V.S. Naipaul’s tale of darkest Africa, Bend in the River. After two hours little progress had been made and people were starting to carry their luggage across the breach. Reluctantly we took down from the bus roof our packing cases, kit bags, rucksacks and scratchy hessian sacks, to start on yet another luggage relay. It was frightening work, stumbling across a fifteen-metre stretch of boulders, glancing nervously up at more boulders poised precariously above, imagining what it might be like to be crushed and swept down the steep gully into the river.
Once all the luggage was across we were safe; but by now a queue of trucks had built up on the far side for several hundred metres, and as evening drew in we had to trudge back and forth, humping load after load past a long line of old Bedfords. Although we were now about a thousand metres above sea level and the air was less humid, it was still very hot and I was developing a raging thirst. As I put down the last load, I thought how nice it would be if we could all go off to the pub to drink several well-earned pints of cool dark beer, and I remembered sitting in Wasdale, only three weeks earlier, doing just that. However, this was the Chenab valley and all we had was suspect water, which Dick was boiling on the primus, and I had to content myself with scalding tea.
We slept by the road and in the morning a relief bus took us to Kishtwar. The first Westerner to visit Kishtwar was an Englishman called Godfrey Vigne (pronounced Vine), who came here in 1839, in the course of extensive explorations which took him along the length and breadth of Kashmir. His Travels in Kashmir, Ladak and Iskardoo describes how he found a town of about one hundred houses, containing a mixed population of ‘Mussalmen’ and ‘Hindoos’. The Rajah of Kishtwar had once controlled all the land to the north and east to Ladakh. By Vigne’s time it had all been swallowed up in the expanding empire of Gulab Singh, the Rajah of Jammu. The Kashmiris of Srinagar held the region of Kishtwar in ridicule, and their contempt was illustrated by Vigne in a translation of one of their songs: ‘Kishtwar is the causeway of distress, where people are hungry by day and cold by night; whoever comes there, when he goes away is as meagre as the flagstaff of a fakir.’
Kishtwar perhaps lacks the lush abundance of the country round Srinagar, but it is a pleasant enough town, situated on a broad shelf of land above the Chenab, surrounded by fields and wooded hills. We saw no signs of gross malnutrition, and people seemed to be as prosperous and thriving as they had been in 1979. The town, which has grown slightly since Vigne’s day, is the trading and administrative centre for a large area of isolated villages. Villagers may travel over a hundred kilometres on foot, to visit the bazaar’s thriving tailors, ironmongers and chemists. There is a police station, post office, District Commissioner’s office, offices for forestry and agricultural officials, and both mosques and temples to cater for a mixed population of Muslims and Hindus, who in the 1980s were still living peacefully side by side.
Three hotels surround the main square in Kishtwar. When Dick, Patial and I arrived in the morning we heard that there would be no bus to the roadhead until the next day, so we asked to stay at one of the hotels and crammed all our luggage into a tiny room upstairs.
An irritating roughness at the back of my throat was developing into a cold, and now the familiar ache of flu was seeping through my body, intensifying as the day wore on. I lay on my wooden bed, feeling sorry for myself, while Patial took Dick to the police station to report the expedition’s arrival. In the evening they persuaded me down to a smoky cafe, where I struggled unsuccessfully with chapattis and a leguminous mush stewed in searing chilli juice. I returned to bed and dosed myself to sleep with Paracetamol and Piriton; but in the middle of the night I woke again, aching, shivering and filled with a loathing for the canine population of Kishtwar. Himalayan dogs bark like no other dogs, and on this night every hound, bitch and puppy for miles around was competing in a frenzied howling that echoed relentlessly around the mountains.
I lay awake, hating dogs, hating India, hating the Himalaya, and wondering why I had come on this horrible expedition. Of course I knew that flu makes people miserable, that travelling through India in August is always hot and difficult, that drudgery and discomfort are unavoidable elements of any expedition; I knew that we had in fact come to climb a wonderful mountain and that these little irritations would pass; but at the time it was hard to believe that there was enjoyment ahead.
Near Kishtwar-Shivling there is a village called Machail. In the village there is a temple. We were told that the temple is dedicated to a goddess called Chendi. The name is unfamiliar and I have not been able to trace it, but it may perhaps be a local name for one of the celebrated Hindu goddesses like Parvati or Lakshmi. Whoever she is, a large group of women and girls were setting out on Sunday, 14 August, to pay homage at her temple. Like us they were taking the bus from Kishtwar to Galhar, where the road ends and we would have to start walking. The pilgrims were accompanied by a gentle, courteous, grey-haired man, who appeared to be their group leader and chaperon. It was he who persuaded the bus driver to leave for Galhar. The road was undergoing repairs, so was officially closed and in an even worse state than usual. The driver refused to leave until the chaperone had done a whip-round among all the prospective passengers, collecting enough money to bribe him on his way.
As we rumbled out of Kishtwar the pilgrims started to sing Hindu songs. The youngest girl, who looked about ten, sang with boisterous enthusiasm, never flagging during the five hours it took to cover the twenty kilometres to Galhar. She had a shrill powerful voice and seemed to be trying to sing an octave above the others, but she usually only managed something like a seventh, adding a wonderfully discordant descant to the songs. The women’s exuberant singing made a delightful antidote to my brooding hypochondria. It was also heartening to see people going contentedly about their business as we drove out of town, past the spacious maidan (the Indian equivalent of the municipal park or village green) bordered with majestic plane trees. Bumping along at ten miles an hour in billows of dust, we passed men with saws, boys leading donkeys laden with firewood, a woman bowed under bundles of maize leaf fodder and a tethered ram being dragged reluctantly past a group of bewildered ewes. All along the track there were road- menders at work with pickaxes, crowbars and shovels. Many of them were children, glad of the chance for a brief rest while the bus passed through. Frequently we all had to get out and walk, while the driver inched the straining vehicle over a particularly rutted stretch of earth and boulders; then we would all climb back on board and the singing would start again.
Galhar was as I had remembered it: dusty, smelly and buzzing with flies. We drank sweet sticky tea outside one of the huts, while Patial entertained the locals. He was entering thoroughly into the spirit of things, acting as our self-appointed PR man, proudly telling everyone about the Shivling Expedition and brandishing our one photo of the mountain. Neither Dick nor I spoke more than a few words of Hindi, so we were glad to have an interpreter, and as Patial talked with two old men he translated for our benefit. Apparently they came from the Darlang Nullah, a remote valley to the south of Shivling. One of them claimed to have climbed part of the way up the mountain: metal in his boots had stuck to the magnetic rocks … the mountain had glowed iridescent with many changing colours … he had heard the sound of melodious voices and the music of conch shells … He also knew of a sadhu, a holy man, who had left his cave one day, to walk towards Shivling. At nightfall he had lain down to sleep at the foot of the mountain, but the following morning he had woken to find himself back in his cave. Later, reading Vigne’s account of his visit to Kishtwar in 1839, I found an almost identical story. Vigne writes about ‘the Brimah … a very lofty range, covered with eternal snow’ – another holy mountain, now usually spelled Brammah. He was told about a fakir who made numerous attempts to climb Brammah. The fakir would always make his first bivouac beside a little lake, part of the way up the mountain; but he invariably woke to find himself right back at the bottom. Dick and I were slightly concerned that there might be objections to our aspiration to set foot on the summit of the holy Shivling, but both the two old men from the Darlang Nullah and other local people we met later seemed to have no objections; they were, on the contrary, amused and curious at our plans. There was also business to be done. We had to transport 410 kilos of supplies to Base Camp, seventy miles away. Patial opened negotiations with a muleteer called Mohammed Ikbar, who reckoned that he could handle the job by using his five mules and subcontracting a genial older man, Ruph Singh, to provide two ‘little mules’, which appeared to be ordinary donkeys. After a heated discussion, during which we realised what a hard-hitting negotiator Patial was, we arrived at a price of 2,600 rupees (about £170) for the five-day journey. (Mohammed was a mean obstreperous man and we were infuriated to hear later that he had only paid Ruph Singh a niggardly 300 rupees for his share of the work.) Patial concluded negotiations, securing at our insistence a written contract, and then announced proudly that ‘Tomorrow, after packing all the articles, we shall proceed to our destination.’
By evening the repacking of all the articles was complete. Mohammed had sewn all the loads into special double hessian sacks to be slung across the mules’ backs, and had agreed to appear with Ruph Singh and the animals at dawn the next day.
Kishtwar-Shivling lies just south of the Himalayan crest. To the north of the Himalaya lies Ladakh, the arid region once known as Central Tibet, ethnically and culturally very close to Tibet proper, but politically part of India. Through Ladakh flows the Indus river, dividing the Himalaya from the Karakoram range further north. The Indus actually rises some way east, in Tibet, to flow north-west through Ladakh, along the southern flank of the Karakoram, which feeds the river every day with millions of tons of glacial meltwater, swelling it to a mighty swirling torrent before it carves its way south, round the western bastion of the Himalaya, Nanga Parbat, and on inexorably down to feed the great fertile plain of the Punjab, the land of five rivers, where the Indus is swelled by its five main tributaries – the Beas, Chenab, Jhelum, Ravi and Sutlej.
Since we left the fleas at Batote, Dick, Patial and I had been travelling up the Chenab. From Galhar we had to continue east up the same valley for another thirty miles to the village of Atholi, where we would turn north along a tributary river called the Bhut.
The journey to Atholi takes two days – two days of walking high above the river, constantly climbing up and down the beautifully engineered hairpins of the mule track, which consists in places of steps and gangways built out from sheer cliffs. Occasionally one hears the muffled roar of the river, enclosed thousands of metres below by the steep walls of the valley, but for most of the journey one is alone with the sounds of the forest – crested tits twittering among the pine cones, the occasional screeching of a flock of emerald parakeets, monkeys scampering through the undergrowth and branches above, the strange tongue-clicking, whistling and grunting of muleteers driving their laden beasts along the path, and the polite ‘Good-morning-what-is-the-time-by-your-watch-please?’ of a government official, stopping to say hello, before continuing on his way, briefcase and furled umbrella in hand. The river gorge is densely coated with an abundant forest of chestnut, holly oak and deodar – the Himalayan cedar, with its inimitable heady scent – and the forest floor is carpeted with pungent wild cannabis.
Walking peacefully through the filtered green light of the forest, it seemed no less wonderful than it had done four years earlier, and I was able for a while to forget the wearying ache and chesty cough of the flu. On the second day we descended to river level and walked through terraced fields of rice, maize, beans and potatoes. Children played in the shade of ancient walnut trees. Three girls, smiling coyly, worked a revolving mustard seed press. At this point, the confluence of the Chenab and Bhut rivers, the valley opens out, and Atholi lies on a gently sloping plain, in the midst of fields and orchards, encircled by wooded hills. We camped just outside the village and in the evening children came to stare wide-eyed through the door of our tent.
We continued up the Bhut Nullah (‘nullah’ is Hindi for river valley), enclosed again by steep walls of forest, which hid the high snow peaks from view. We passed a forestry camp, where labourers were felling cedars and adzing the timber into square-cut beams. It was heartening to learn that this tree felling is carefully controlled and that the Indian forestry department, in this area at any rate, seems to be avoiding the kind of devastation that has wreaked such havoc in many parts of the Nepal Himalaya. (Like the road authorities, they exhibit a penchant for educative slogans and I remember one charming plaque nailed to a wayside tree, proclaiming ‘Wood is good but tree is better.’) They are helped by the fact that there is as yet no road, so all the timber has to be felled by hand and floated down the river to Kishtwar – a slow process which has hardly affected the luxuriant abundance of this silvan paradise.
The villages, too, make little impact on the forest, isolated as they are in small clearings of terraced fields. Children stared at us from the flat earthen roofs of timber houses with exquisitely carved doorposts and lintels. Later, on the way home, we stayed at one of the houses, sitting on the large verandah, facing out over the valley, while our host plied us with food, maize spirit and hashish. After supper he took us into the inside room, where a fire was burning in the hearth. We coughed and spluttered in the acrid fumes, understanding painfully why so many of the people suffer from eye and lung infections. Our host explained that during the winter the whole family lived round the fire in this one room. Huge wooden-lidded bins lined two walls and were being stocked with food for the long winter, when the house would be half-buried in snow. Animal fodder was already being stacked on the roof and later more would be piled up on the verandah, helping to insulate the house. The animals themselves would live in the house, penned behind wooden rails on two sides of the room, adding another layer of insulation.
After returning to England I sometimes thought of that family, incarcerated through four or five long winter months in their dark smoky house, totally self-sufficient and isolated, with nothing much but cooking, sleeping and weaving to keep them occupied. The fourth day of our walk-in was interminable. A cold grey drizzle turned the path into a quagmire. Mohammed was surly and irritable, threatening to turn back when we were confronted by an avalanche chute left from the winter, and we had to cross a great mound of old grey snow, embedded with the splintered remains of pine trees. The mules baulked at one greasy slippery tree trunk that blocked the way, and the five of us had to heave it down into the river. As the day wore on I lagged far behind the others, sneezing and coughing, reluctantly dragging my wobbly legs and pausing frequently for ever-longer rests. However, at least the rain stopped in the afternoon I tottered into Machail, to find Dick and Patial waiting with tea. The beautiful pilgrim women were also there, garlanded with flowers, dancing and singing their way through some joyful religious ceremony. Not restricted to the pace of a mule train, they had travelled quickly to Machail, arriving there before us. They looked healthy and happy and the sixty-mile walk through the forest had not blemished their immaculate saris. In comparison, I felt a very feeble specimen of humanity –ill, haggard and splattered with mud.
On the morning of Friday 19 August, two weeks after leaving England, we left Machail on the last leg of the journey to Base Camp. We walked east for three miles to the entrance of the Darlang Nullah, but then turned north up another nullah which would take us round to the north side of Shivling. Towards midday we stopped at a tiny hamlet, whose name I didn’t know but which I called Potato Village, because four years earlier Philip and I had been treated here to a meal of new potatoes, flavoured with lumps of rock salt. The people in this and the last village, Sumcham, are Tibetan Buddhists, who must originally have crossed the Himalaya from the north, to settle in this high valley on the south side. We halted outside the house I remembered which now had an extension in progress – new walls made from layers of rock and mud, sandwiched between lateral timbers. Members of the family appeared, their round slit-eyed faces smiling warmly. I recognised one of the girls, who was now about fourteen, and then her mother appeared. The mother had aged very slightly, but there was still the same welcoming twinkle in her eyes and the same elaborately jewelled pendant hanging from her nose. She didn’t recognise me until I spurred her memory by producing an envelope of photos. Suddenly the family were all crowding round, laughing and giggling and pointing excitedly at their pictures. Possibly it was the first time they had ever seen photographs and they were clearly delighted with the present. For my part it was good for once to be giving instead of taking: giving something in return for the hospitality that I had so often received in the Himalaya. However, the lady of the house would not accept our present without giving us one of their precious goat cheeses to take to Base Camp.
At Sumcham the bridge over a side river had been washed away and replaced by a single plank. A few days earlier a mule had drowned trying to cross this plank, and Mohammed was certainly not going to subject his mules, his livelihood, to the same risk. The alternative course was to cross the main river below the village, where a mound of old hardened winter snow had formed a bridge; but Mohammed didn’t like that either.
‘We halted for an hour, while Patial tried to cajole Mohammed into action, and Dick and I walked back and forth across the snow bridge, pointing out how safe it was. Eventually Mohammed agreed to proceed to our destination and brought the mules across.
However, he was now in a surly intractable mood and the minor obstacle of a small wood of silver birches was cited as another reason for stopping. I remembered the phrase coined by the Oxford Agyasol Expedition, ‘stubborn as a muleteer’. Mohammed was clearly hoping to set off home at the first opportunity, without completing his contract, and it was left to Dick and me, bemoaning the bad industrial relations which seem to taint every expedition, to rush back and forth through the trees, alternately reconnoitring the route and rushing back to help Patial cajole our caravan forward. After a weary afternoon of ill-humoured argument, we reached a suitable campsite, unloaded the mules and paid Mohammed his 2,600 rupees. Ruph Singh, the older muleteer, was his usual charming self-effacing self, almost apologising for Mohammed’s behaviour, for which he was in no way responsible, and giving us his address so that we could meet him in more congenial circumstances in Kishtwar, at the end of the expedition. It was only then that we learned how shamefully he had been treated by Mohammed.
We could not have asked for a better Base Camp. A stream burbled down from a copse of silver birches on to a level meadow, where we pitched our three tents. A large granite boulder formed the back wall of our kitchen, supporting one end of the roof, the large polythene sheet we had bought in Jammu. The other end of the sheet was supported on birch posts, held tight by guylines.
After the constant travelling of the last ten days, it was a relief to settle into a permanent home, and the three of us spent a contented evening pitching tents, unpacking loads, building the kitchen, lining the floor with hessian sacks and moving in to prepare rice, lentils, onions, spices and potatoes for an enormous supper. We were granted a rain-free evening, but the monsoon was still very much in evidence and low cloud was hanging over the valley when we retired to bed. Shivling remained hidden, lurking, unseen, somewhere above us.