Hunza is an emerald in a setting of browns, greys and dazzling white, an oasis in the heart of a mountain desert of soaring ice peaks and sun-blasted rock. They say its inhabitants live to ages of anything up to 130 and that they are descended from the soldiers of Alexander the Great.
Nicholas Monsarrat and I were trying to find out how far reality lived up to legend. In London this remote Himalayan valley had seemed almost too accessible: VC10 to Karachi, a connection to Rawalpindi and the next morning a local plane to Ghilgit in the heart of the mountains. A tourist brochure assured us that there was a jeep road through spectacular scenery into Hunza itself, and it seemed we could be there within forty-eight hours of leaving London.
I should have been disappointed if this had proved true. Our first delay was in Rawalpindi where we waited for three days in the anonymous cloying luxury of the Hotel Intercontinental, while storm clouds scurried over the foothills to the immediate north. The plane could only fly to Ghilgit in perfect conditions.
Monsarrat and I must have made an unlikely looking pair. He, urbane, charming when he wanted to be, yet with a caustic wit that could lash out unexpectedly, had come equipped with dinner jacket and clothes for every social occasion. I had two rucksacks full of boots, ropes and climbing gear.
The flight from Rawalpindi to Ghilgit must be one of the most impressive in the world. The twin-engined Fokker Friendship ridge-hops over the tree-covered tentacles of the great peaks – one second the plane is barely clawing its way over a ridge and the next it is suspended over the abyss of a deep-cut valley, brown waters swirling far below. The gigantic mass of Nanga Parbat towers over the plane with its complex of ice falls, snow fields and rocky buttresses.
Approaching Ghilgit the plane dives through narrow valleys, giving the impression of driving flat out along a narrow country lane. We overshot the runway once, caught a glimpse of mud-roofed houses and upturned faces, seemed to fly straight for the rock wall of the valley, banked at the last minute and touched down at Ghilgit airport. The following day an air force plane crashed on its way out to Rawalpindi with the loss of twenty-two lives, a grim reminder of the dangers of flying among high mountains.
Ghilgit itself is a dusty garrison town, surrounded by bleak rocky hills, but the bazaar has a feeling of Kipling’s North-west Frontier, of being the threshold of something more strange and exciting. Jeeps jostle with pedestrians and donkeys, bearded holy men stride through the teeming streets, and the shops, like open-ended boxes, are crammed with brightly coloured trashy goods. It is a world of men, and the few women in sight are heavily veiled by the hideous burkha. The muezzin calls the faithful to prayer over the loudspeaker, harsh and metallic. Here is an uneasy, at times ugly, marriage between progress and tradition.
We spent the night in the rest house and the next morning were ready to start the final stage of our journey by jeep to Hunza. Our party had now grown. The Pakistan Press Information Department had put at our disposal one of their officials, a Mr Mir. At times one felt he had the role of an ‘Intourist’ guide, deflecting us from anything that might not show Pakistan at its best. At Ghilgit we were joined by another guide from Hunza, who had with him his seven-year-old son. With the driver and his mate, six of us, with all our baggage, were crammed into the back of the jeep.
At first the road ran up a wide flat valley – weeping grey clouds clinging to its rocky flanks, the road, a dirt strip marked by cairns of stone; and then the valley began to narrow, the road crept up its side, wound in and out through tottering pinnacles of rock, clung to precarious slopes of scree. The jeep was now permanently in bottom gear; each meeting with an oncoming vehicle became a battle of wills between the drivers as to who should go back to the nearest parking place. The road was like a switchback gone mad, as it bucked from valley floor, over spurs, round re-entrants and down again. And as the rain fell, water rushed down every gully, eating away the road, carrying little avalanches of stones that built up into drifts across it. I have never known a journey like it. I was perched on the outside of the jeep and seemed to overhang the creaming torrent hundreds of feet below. The jeep snarled and skidded on the loose stones and mud, brushed the precarious outer wall, teetered past giant bites that had been eaten from the road.
After forty miles, with another twenty-five to go, we were finally brought to a halt: the entire road had been swept away. We spent the night in the rest house at the nearest village. There were no amenities and the only available food was a few hard-boiled eggs and leathery chuppaties, which we ate under the assembled gaze of the inhabitants. I could see Nicholas Monsarrat’s sense of humour beginning to wear a little thin, and that night he began to mutter about returning to London to meet his publishers’ deadline on a new novel he had just finished. By morning, his mind was made up – he was determined to return; Mr Mir was eager to volunteer his services as escort – his winkle-picker shoes and sharp city suit were hardly suitable for a trek into the lost valley of Hunza.
I decided to walk on into Hunza. Apart from anything else, I have always preferred being on foot to being in a vehicle. In a jeep one is separated from the people of the land, not only by the speed of one’s passing, but also by the barriers set up by one’s relative affluence. The rain still poured down, but I had a feeling of freedom as I plodded on with my interpreter, his son and an elderly mail-runner who volunteered to carry my gear.
That night we reached the village of Hindi – we were on Hunza territory for the first time. Hindi is a tiny oasis of green clinging to the arid rocks and sand of the gorge. Houses like little mud boxes are scattered among a mosaic of terraced fields and irrigation channels. Everywhere are trees, straight rows of poplar, clumps of apricot, little jungles of lavender.
We stopped at the rest house, a mud hut with a gaping square in the roof to let the smoke out and the rain in; there was no sign of beds or food but we just sat and waited. You have got to be patient in a place like Hunza; things move slowly but eventually something happens.
One of the village elders arrived and made a courtly little speech which was translated to me:
Just as the sun has been hidden by the clouds for over ten days, so the British have left Pakistan for many years. I am very glad to welcome you, a Briton, back to Hunza.
He then produced a rather dirty cloth full of dried apricots and apples. I had barely recovered from my last attack of dysentery, but did not see how I could refuse, so shoving my fears into the background, I tucked into the dried fruit. Another long pause and we were invited to supper.
Our host, Ali Murad Khan, was seventy but looked fifty, and lived near the edge of the cultivated area. We picked our way along narrow paths by the side of irrigation channels to his house. It was typical of a moderately prosperous Hunza home, flat roofed with two storeys; the lower one, a dark dungeon, they live in during the winter, while the upper storey is for summer. There are no windows and all the light comes from a hole in the roof.
Ali Murad Khan owns two small fields, twenty sheep, two cows and an ox. He, like all Hunza people, is almost entirely self-sufficient – has to be, for there is practically no money coming in to buy food, furniture or clothing. From his farm he gets fruit in season, apricots, grapes, apples, peaches and mulberries; he owns a few poplar trees for timber and some lavender for firewood. He also grows wheat and potatoes. His clothing comes from the wool of his sheep.
He apologised to me that this was the lean season; they were waiting for their fruit and wheat to ripen. There was little food to be purchased from the shops in the bazaar, and what there was, was expensive. The only income that Ali Murad Khan had was from selling cloth woven from the wool of his sheep and from making Hunza wine from his grapes. Although they are Muslims, the people of Hunza take a liberal view on the subject of drinking. His eldest son, who lived with him, had a pension of fifteen rupees a month from serving for fifteen years in the army. No family in Hunza could survive without sending some members down into Pakistan to earn a living either in the army or as servants or porters, thus bringing some hard cash back into the valley. In many instances men spent ten months of the year in the lowlands, leaving wives and families to look after their farms.
That night Ali Murad Khan brought out some mutton that had been hung in the cellar for the past three months; the spices barely disguised its pungent flavour. We sat on the floor round the big communal pot and, using bits of chupatti as a spoon, shovelled meat, gravy and curried vegetables into our mouths. For the first time in the week I had been in Pakistan I began to feel part of the land and people in a way that I would never have done if Monsarrat, or any other European, had been with me. The two wives sat in the background, waiting for us to finish, for they could not eat in front of a stranger.
Next morning we finished our walk into the valley of Hunza; another six miles up the gorge, and we came round a low spur that had barred our view. Suddenly the valley opened out into a great basin, about eight miles long and four wide, paved in brilliant green, yet dominated by stark rocky sides that stretched up into ramparts of snow-clad peaks.
This oasis in the midst of a mountain desert is entirely dependent on glacier melt water, which is channelled into irrigation canals by a complex system of channels and sluices, and shared out amongst the separate villages and then amongst the individual fields in strict rotation. A wide stony river splits the valley in two, dividing the State of Hunza from Nagir. At the end of it, you can just see the Mir of Hunza’s palaces. His old one is a white painted eyrie, perched high on a crag, while the new, in grey granite, nestles below.
There are many theories about the origins of the people of Hunza. That afternoon, walking through the valley, I couldn’t help noticing how many of the inhabitants had fair skins, blue eyes and blond hair. Hunza is on the old caravan route between the interior of Asia and the Indus Valley, one of the most important trade routes of the old world, and an area where there must have been a constant intermingling of peoples. Besides the theory that the Hunzas are descended from soldiers of Alexander the Great, there is one the Mir suggested to me: that they originally came from a place called Hunz in the Caucasus, and were driven into their present home during the reign of Tamerlane. Their language, Brushaki, bears no relation to either the Indian or Iranian language families.
The women of Hunza do not hide under the burkha, like most of the women of South Pakistan, and by Muslim standards they have a great deal of freedom. They wear an attractive embroidered pill-box hat, held in place by a scarf, brightly coloured tunic and baggy trousers. The girls are deliciously pretty, but there is one snag: under no circumstances would they allow themselves to be photographed. My guide told me that this had not always been the case, but a Brazilian film company had made a film in Hunza some years before and had then inserted into it a childbirth sequence shot somewhere else. This had so incensed the sensibilities of the ladies of Hunza that they had spurned all forms of photography ever since.
That night, and for the next ten days, I stayed at the Hunza Hotel; it was hardly four-star, except for the prices. A pot of tea cost two rupees (approximately eight pence) and a vegetable curry, the standard meal, was seven rupees. I had a bare, but clean, room furnished with a bed and a small table, with a commode next door.
Each day I explored the valley, took pictures and talked to as many people as I could. At times I could not help being painfully aware that I was in a place that was on the threshold of becoming a tourist resort, when every form of goodwill becomes a marketable commodity.
Certainly, no Alpine valley could compare with Hunza for sheer, devastating beauty – it is the contrast more than anything else, green upon arid brown all capped with white. To the south-west, Rakaposhi, a huge complex of writhing snow ridges and hanging glaciers; to the north, the soaring wall of the Passu peaks that jumps 16,000 feet to a turreted ridge of ice and rock spires. To the east, more mountains, glaciers, rock and snow.
On my first morning I attended the Court of the Mir of Hunza; it was an informal affair. At ten o’clock, the Mir, an absolute monarch with complete control over the internal affairs of his 20,000 people, walks from his palace to the Durbah, a courtyard with a verandah down two sides. The Mir sits on a small rostrum, and his Court, in strict order of precedence, squat on carpets in two lines on either side of him.
The Court consists of the headman and elders of Hunza; they are appointed by the Mir, but he is careful to choose men who are respected by the villagers. They meet every day and spend an hour or so hearing disputes, giving judgement or just gossiping. This is Parliament, High Court and Cabinet, all rolled into one. There is no civil service, taxation, army, or even police force.
Anyone can walk into the Court without appointment, and state his grievance. On this particular morning there was one case. The servant of a villager called Dadu complained that he had not been paid his wages. On the other hand, Dadu claimed that the boy had stolen a goat worth 120 rupees and had drunk his entire stock of wine. Everyone had a say in the case, sometimes everyone speaking at the same time, but eventually the Mir raised his hand and pronounced judgement.
‘If Dadu makes an oath on the Koran in the presence of his headman, I am quite sure he will be telling the truth. It is therefore only fair that you lose your salary. Do you agree to this?’
The boy agreed and the case was closed.
There is little violence in Hunza. The only murder committed in recent years was two years before, when Nadir Aman, a farmer, had a dispute over the position of a poplar tree in one of his fields. By custom, trees cannot be closer than fourteen yards to another man’s field. Nadir Aman was told by the village elders to cut down the tree, but he took no notice. His neighbour finally cut it down himself and, in a rage, Nadir Aman went to his house and shot him. At Court, the Mir had sentenced him to be banished from Hunza, the most serious punishment possible, for there is no death penalty or prison.
That afternoon I had tea with the Mir. A short, fairly portly man, he looks rather like an English country squire, favours tweeds and visits Europe every year.
‘I always stay at the Savoy in London. I don’t like those modern hotels where you do everything over the telephone; it’s so impersonal and the service is so bad,’ he told me. ‘This is a very happy country; there are no rich or very poor. Money can bring many problems and here in Hunza there is very little. I still pay all my servants in kind, with food or cloth. People grow their own produce; if someone is building a new house, everyone gives a hand. There is no question of payment, for they all help each other and eventually it balances out.
‘A few years ago the Pakistan Government started their system of basic democracy to give villagers more say in their affairs. I offered it to them here in Hunza, but the Elders turned it down. We already have a democracy.’
As I explored Hunza, I felt he was right. What other state exists without police force or prison?
It was certainly difficult to tell rich from poor. When I went to see Zafarulla Beg, who has the reputation for being the wisest man in Hunza, I found him working with a pick and shovel, alongside his servant; and yet he is headman of Hindi, a fairly big landowner and eighty years of age. As he showed me round his orchards, he was giving me a hand over walls, rather than the reverse.
He is also respected for being a skilful physician. Until comparatively recently, there were no medical facilities in Hunza, and even today there is only a small hospital run by a medical orderly without a doctor, but it is rarely used and the people prefer their own home cures. They make concoctions of herbs for illness and set simple fractures or dislocations. I saw Zafarulla Beg at work on one of his servants, a man who had dislocated his foot. He strapped it to a split piece of wood and then tapped in a wedge, which forced the dislocated joint back into place. It looked very painful, but effective.
The Hunzas have a reputation for longevity, but on this score they do not seem to be in the same class as the inhabitants of the Caucasus, who also claim they live to ages up to 130 years. The oldest man in Hunza is said to be 106 years old, and I was able to talk to the 102-year-old grandfather of my guide. He still does a little farming and showed no sign of senility. It wasn’t so much the great age of the people of Hunza that impressed me, but rather the vigour and obvious happiness of the old people.
This might partly be accounted for by the balance of their diet which is frugal, yet highly nutritious. They eat meat only on special occasions, and the staple diet is wheat chuppatis with potatoes or vegetables, washed down by sour milk. In season, there is any amount of fruit, and they dry all the surplus for consumption during the remainder of the year. In addition, the family is still a strong unit, and the old are both respected and cared for. The elders of the village have a tranquillity and pride that one seldom sees amongst old people in the West.
During the day there is always a rattle of tin drums and the squeal of whistles played by the children. At weddings, house-moving and religious festivals, the men perform their traditional dances. This is still very much part of their lives and not just a money-earner for the benefit of the tourists.
One night I was invited to a prayer evening and feast at the home of Ghullam Mohammed. There were eight of us altogether, seated round the floor of his living-room. Most of them had come straight from the fields where they had been working all day. Jan Mohammed, the priest of the Jamal Khana, their place of worship, was dressed just the same as everyone else; he received no salary, and earned his living by teaching the girls of the village and running a small farm.
That night he conducted the prayers and singing. His face was cadaverous, with a huge beak of a nose jutting from it. He needed a shave, and his bare feet were none too clean, but when he sang in a strong grating voice that pulsated with rhythm and an unbelievable happiness, it hit deep into one’s emotions. They all joined in for the choruses, and I was told they were singing love songs to the prophet and ballads of their own religious experience. It made the best folk-singing in Britain sound a bit insipid.
Hunza is a place of sounds, of water hurrying through irrigation channels, a donkey braying in the night, children crying or the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer from the palace roof – there is no loudspeaker system and his voice merges with the grandeur of surrounding mountains and the peace of the evening.
That night I met my first tourists; the road from the outside world had at last been opened. They were very disappointed that I was not Nicholas Monsarrat – ‘He must be such a gorgeous man.’ They boiled and sterilised all their water, even when it had already been boiled once by the cook – ‘You just can’t trust anything out here.’ They grumbled, probably with good cause, about the amount they had been charged for sightseeing.
I couldn’t help resenting their presence, and everything that tourism stands for. One has an instinctive and selfish longing to preserve places that are strange and picturesque, but beyond that, Hunza seemed a tranquil and contented island in the midst of a sea of violence, corruption and poverty. A new road has been built into the valley that links it with China. This might bring in some industry and hotels, but with it must inevitably come all the other attributes of a more sophisticated society – crime, graft, political strife, a police force and prisons.
There is no answer to the problem, and anyway there is very little anyone can do about it. Progress is a runaway monster whom no one seems able to control.