It was good to be separated from our motor-car, for which we had conceived a loathing normally reserved for the living, but no sooner were our feet planted on solid earth than difficulties of a ludicrous but nonetheless irksome kind began to pile up around us. The two most memorable were the affair of the Afghan bicyclist and the problem of Hugh’s old cook.
Rather incautiously, but with the best of intentions, Hugh had suggested in one of his letters from South America that we should take with us one of the local inhabitants in order to impart what he called ‘an Afghan flavour’ to our climb, his idea being that it would, if nothing else, convince the authorities of our good intentions. But then he appeared to have forgotten about it – and so had I. Unfortunately he had incorporated his suggestion in the letter he wrote to the Foreign Office when he applied for permission to be allowed to make the journey, but without specifying any particular sort of companion.
On the afternoon of our arrival, suitably clothed, washed and shaved, we presented ourselves to the Afghan Foreign Ministry. There, in the Protocol Department, we met the young hopes of the Afghan Foreign Service, elegant, intelligent young men who treated us with a courtesy, consideration and lack of curiosity superior to that shown by our own side when we had proposed our expedition. The difficulties that had appeared insuperable in London seemed to diminish when dealing with these splendid fellows. Hugh was so overcome with enthusiasm that he, unwisely I thought, raised the subject of an Afghan climber.
‘We should, of course, be delighted if someone nominated by you would like to accompany us.’
‘My dear chap,’ said Abdul Ali, ‘if you take my advice you will forget about it. You are only likely to land yourself with some fellow who will bore you stupid in a couple of days. Besides, no one here knows the first thing about climbing.’
‘I only mention it because I wrote officially.’
‘I should think no more about it if I were you.’
‘What about coming yourself?’ He seemed an excellent companion. We really meant it.
‘Unfortunately, we are extremely busy with the arrangements for the visit of the Pakistan Minister, otherwise I should be delighted.’
He invited us to a splendid tea. Afghanistan is a man’s country, so that it was our host who hovered behind a battery of silver teapots, hot water, cream and milk jugs, handing out dainty sandwiches. Afterwards he spoke of his hunting experiences in some detail, and I fell into a coma from which I emerged refreshed and confident. But the next day brought bad omens.
As a result of our long drive we were extremely unfit. Our three days in Wales had worked wonders with us, like one of those courses in physical culture on which you make a muscle-bound colossus of yourself in next to no time simply by pressing one hand hard against the other. But our fitness, like my knowledge of Urdu during the war, had been acquired swiftly in exceptional circumstances; now, equally rapidly, it had melted away.
‘We must do some climbing,’ said Hugh, as we reeled off to bed that evening after returning from a gramophone recital at one of the Embassies. ‘Ropework, that’s what we need. Mir Samir’s a terrific mountain.’
I was as apprehensive as he was about our appalling condition. It may have been something to do with the altitude but we were finding it almost impossible to keep awake. At the recital, like the rest of the audience, we had both slept solidly through the entire performance. I had woken up with my head nestling on the bosom of a jolly female Turk to find her husband glowering at me; there are other dangers in Afghanistan besides tribal warfare.
Then I remembered Hugh’s last letter from South America. ‘Acclimatization should be no great problem,’ he had written. ‘The Turcoman’s Throne (15,447) just above Kabul can be climbed in a day and we should probably spend a couple of days up there before setting out in earnest.’ But now that the need for acclimatization had become acute, Hugh changed his mind.
‘We’ll climb Legation Hill,’ he said. ‘I’ll set the alarm for five. We’d better wear our windproof suits.’ And fell asleep.
The British Embassy lies beyond the town. Built at the express order of Lord Curzon to be the finest Embassy in Asia, it is strategically situated so far from the bazaars that none but the most heavily subsidized mob would dream of attacking it. Above the compound there is a small hill, perhaps a thousand feet high, up which young secretaries pelt in gym shoes after a heavy night. This is Legation Hill. In the early morning we set out to scale it, laden with heavy boots and all the impedimenta of our assumed trade.
As we marched out of the front gate of the Embassy, roped together and in our windproof suits, the guards saluted.
‘They remember me,’ said Hugh, returning it with satisfaction. ‘Wonderfully faithful fellows, these Pakistanis.’
‘If you made a practice of this sort of thing while you were here, they’d have to be absolutely ga-ga not to.’
As we tottered up the winding track, dripping with perspiration, tripping over the rope, our ice-axes clinking mockingly on the unfriendly soil, I was filled with gloomy forebodings. My legs felt like putty. I had a splitting headache and my tongue was covered with a thick unwholesome rime. It took us twenty-five minutes to reach the top.
‘Archie used to do it in ten,’ said Hugh, as panting and feeling sick, we sprawled on the summit, pretending to admire the extensive view of the suburbs of Kabul spread out below us.
‘He must be a superman.’
‘Not at all. He had to leave the Foreign Service because he drank too much.’
In low spirits we descended for breakfast.
‘We’re certainly going to need those days on the Turcoman’s Throne.’
‘I’m afraid there’s not going to be time. We shall have to limber up on the glaciers of Mir Samir. There’s plenty of scope there.’
Back at the Protocol Department Abdul Ali looked serious.
‘Your permissions have come through.’
‘That’s wonderful. It’s very quick.’
‘I’m glad that you’re pleased. But there’s something else. A man has been chosen to accompany you.’
‘But you said you thought we would be better advised to go alone.’
‘I know. It’s most curious. It’s nothing to do with us here. None of us know anything about it. It came from someone outside our Department, and on the highest level. Until yesterday it was in the hands of the Ministry of Defence.’
‘Ah,’ said Hugh, with a return of satisfaction. ‘It must be the Nuristani I hoped for from the Army. I did mention him in my letter to the Ambassador. Just the man we want.’
‘He isn’t a Nuristani,’ said Abdul Ali. ‘I only wish for your sake he was. The thing’s out of the hands of the Defence Ministry. They’ve passed it to the Olympic Committee. This man’s just come back from riding round the world on a bicycle. He’s never been on a mountain in his life.’
Quite soon, summoned by telephone, the candidate appeared. He was a large, muscular man with a lot of black hair laced with brilliantine, like something out of a Tarzan film. His appearance belied his character, which was retiring. It was true about riding round the world on a bicycle. He had performed this feat on a massive roadster of the sort issued to policemen, carrying with him 150 lb. of baggage. It was difficult to imagine him on the Simplon Pass but he had undoubtedly been there. Against my will I found myself conducting a sort of viva voce examination of this formidable being.
‘Have you had any previous climbing experience?’
‘None at all,’ he said and my heart warmed to him. ‘But I did run in the ten thousand metres in the Asian Games,’ he added modestly.
‘I see.’
Like all similar interviews this one was not a success, owing to the complete lack of qualifications of the interviewer.
‘How did you come to apply for this? It’s going to be very arduous.’ I glared horribly, trying to discourage him.
‘I didn’t apply. The Olympic Committee only told me that I was going this morning.’
‘I see.’
‘Don’t keep on saying that,’ Hugh hissed in my ear. ‘You make it sound like the B.B.C.’
‘Are you keen to come on this trip?’
‘If you wish me to come I shall come.’
Hugh was just about to say yes when I kicked him violently under the table.
‘Everything is a little complicated at the moment. We’ll let you know in the morning.’
‘Of course, we shall have to take him,’ said Hugh as soon as he had gone.
‘But why? He doesn’t want to go. You heard what he said, he’s been ordered to. It’s going to be bad enough with two of us knowing nothing; with one more it’ll be suicide.’
‘You don’t seem to realize that because the Government has selected him, we must take him. If we don’t they’ll be very offended.’
‘But even the Protocol think we’d be better alone. You heard what Abdul Ali said.’
‘That was before he knew about this man. You don’t understand these people at all. A thing like this might have a very bad effect on Anglo-Afghan relations.’
I looked at Hugh closely when he said this but he was quite serious. Here it was again breaking the surface, that massive but elusive entity, the Foreign Office Mind, like an iceberg with most of its bulk hidden below the surface but equally menacing. Hugh had no more wish to take the cyclist than the cyclist had to come with us, but he was not able to see that the machinery that had produced him could be put in reverse. For two hours I argued with him. It was in vain.
‘Sometimes I don’t think you have any sense of moral responsibility at all,’ he said after a particularly heated exchange. ‘This man has virtually been given to us by Protocol.’
‘Well, if he was given to us by Protocol, give him back by Protocol. Perhaps he hasn’t got any boots.’
‘That’s an idea,’ said Hugh, unexpectedly. ‘He couldn’t come if he didn’t have any boots.’
Although it was late he went to telephone. Soon he was back.
‘He hasn’t got any boots.’
‘Then he can’t come.’
‘But I telephoned Abdul Ali and he’s promised to do his best to get some. He’ll let us know in the morning. He’s going to try the Army. I said we’d try the Embassy.’
‘You are an ass.’
‘It’s all right, he’s got very small feet. There’s no one with feet like that in the whole compound.’
‘How do you know?’
‘If you’d lived in the compound for a couple of years you get to know the size of everything.’
The next morning Abdul Ali telephoned.
‘I’m afraid there is not a pair of boots to fit our friend in the whole of Kabul.’
‘Could you lend him a pair yourself? He’s about your size.’
I could have strangled Hugh at this moment.
‘Unfortunately I only have two pairs and I shall be using them myself on a hunting trip quite soon.’
‘I am extremely sorry that he won’t be able to come. Please convey our regrets to him and my thanks to the Olympic Committee.’
‘For a man who has only been in the Foreign Service since the war I must say you’ve made remarkable progress,’ I said as Hugh replaced the receiver. ‘You’re almost inhuman.’
He considered this for a moment before replying.
‘Yes, I think on the whole the training is excellent,’ he said with a smile.
Even more far-reaching in its effects on the welfare of our expedition was the business of Ghulam Naabi, Hugh’s old cook, who had accompanied him on his previous ventures into the interior and had been present at the abortive attempt to scale the mountain.
All the way from Istanbul, a lean period of abstinence from food, chez Carless, I had been upheld in spirit, if nothing else, by a continual flow of reminiscence about Ghulam Naabi; his prodigious appetite that would at least, I thought, ensure the regular supply of victuals that had up to now been denied me; his resourcefulness that enabled him in a rather oblique way to overcome the everyday disasters of the road; the ludicrous misadventures that befell him and which would probably provide us with an inexhaustible supply of anecdote. All gave promise of a sympathetic, fallible character who would lend a certain humanity to the rather austere project on which we were embarking, and be a far more rewarding companion than the young biologist with whom I had been threatened at one stage of our planning but to whom, mercifully, no further reference had been made.
Even Dreesen, the companion of Hugh’s earlier journey whom I had from the outset regarded as a semi-mythical character but who had eventually materialized in the guise of United States Consul at Tabriz in north-western Persia, had spoken well of him, as we sat on the Consular terrace in the gloaming, drinking Perrier Jouet, and recovering from the horrors of our passage through Anatolia.
‘If Hugh takes Ghulam Naabi you’ll have some chance of survival,’ he said when Hugh was out of earshot. ‘If not, God help you.’
I asked him why. These were the early days before Hugh had endeavoured to destroy us with infected food.
‘The man’s a fiend. He never eats. I got so hungry on that mountain I thought I’d die. He doesn’t seem to realize you can’t go charging about at seventeen thousand feet on an empty stomach.’
My heart warmed to Dreesen, but he continued:
‘That’s one of the reasons we’re having champagne this evening. I’m celebrating too; because I’m not going.’
He had been joking but nevertheless I had felt a certain chill of apprehension. If this lean, husky individual who had crossed the Karakorams on foot, had felt the strain, what was it going to be like for me, relatively enfeebled by years in the dress business?
One of Hugh’s first acts on arriving in Kabul was to summon Ghulam Naabi.
‘He’s working for an Australian,’ he explained. ‘But I think he should come on the preliminary reconnaissance before we set off. Besides, he’ll be very useful when we choose our Tajik drivers.’
‘But this man he’s working for. What’s he going to say if you take his cook away from him?’
‘It’s only for a month,’ Hugh said, as if this was some extenuation for robbing a man of his cook. ‘Besides he’s an Australian.’
‘What’s that got to do with it? It doesn’t seem to make it any more legitimate to me.’
‘I mean, being an Australian he’s pretty certain to be an easy-going sort of fellow.’
I thought of some of the Australians I had met and how little I should have liked to deprive them of anything without asking first.
When Ghulam Naabi finally appeared, he seemed a perfect choice. He was round and brown and fat and jolly and resembled a Christmas pudding. His eyes were like shiny currants and he was even done up in something that was like a white pudding cloth but was really an old white mess jacket. He wore a Karakul cap and on his feet were chaplis from Peshawar with soles three inches thick, constructed from the treads of American motor tyres. He was delighted at the prospect of an outing; about the greater scheme he said nothing.
In the afternoon Hugh suggested that I accompany Ghulam Naabi to the bazaar to buy provisions for the journey.
‘We’ve really got plenty for ourselves,’ he said in the particularly off-hand voice he always employed when speaking of food (I thought of the four boxes of army rations that so far constituted our only guard against death by starvation and my blood ran cold). ‘It’s really for the drivers; they expect it, it’s the custom.’
‘I’ve made a list,’ he went on, handing me a minute slip of paper. ‘I think you should go too, to see that he doesn’t overdo it. Besides it will be a good opportunity for you to chaffer for bargains.’
The list was very short:
3 seers of flour
8 pau of sugar
12 pau of salt
6 doz. safety matches
2 hurricane lanterns.
There was no doubt that, whatever sufferings we were about to undergo, Hugh intended that the drivers should participate equally.
‘Aren’t we going to take any rice? I always thought it was a staple food in this part of the world.’
‘Too heavy. We must think of the horses; probably we’ll only have three.’
I was reluctant to ask him to explain the weights and measures. He was already irritated that I had not made any appreciable advances in my knowledge of Persian and I wanted to reserve my interrogations for the journey. It seemed simple enough but, in order not to be entirely at the mercy of the stall holders, I looked up the weights and measures in an official handbook, where they were set out with devilish ingenuity.
‘At Kabul,’ said the book, ‘16 khurds = 1 charak; 4 charaks = 1 seer.’ This seemed straightforward enough. I turned the page expecting to find what the seer equalled and learned that it equalled 7 seers 13½ chittaks British Indian Weight.
‘But at Kandahar,’ it went on triumphantly, ‘20 miskals = 1 seer, which is 85/8 tolas British while at Mazar-i-Sharif, 1 Mazar seer = 1¾ Kabuli seers – that is 14 British Seers.’ There was no mention at all of the pau of which I was supposed to buy 8 of sugar and 12 of salt.
It was obvious that with the limited time at my disposal I was not destined to learn much about the weights and measures of the country, so for the time being I abandoned the attempt and let Ghulam Naabi do the haggling. I only intervened once, when he was about to buy the hurricane lanterns.
‘Ask the man if he’s got any other lanterns. Better lanterns.’ The ones we were being offered had ‘Bulldog Lantern’ marked on them and, less prominently, ‘Made in Japan’. It seemed an appropriate occasion to buy British, or at least Empire.
‘They are very good lanterns. You do not like them? Here everyone uses them.’
‘Haven’t they got any others? Not Japanese.’
The owner of the shop vanished into the dark recesses. After a long interval he reappeared with two more lanterns. They appeared to have been in stock for some considerable time. When he had blown the dust from them, I saw that they were precisely the same as the Japanese lanterns, except that this time the name was ‘Lifeguard’ embossed with a picture of a trooper of the Household Cavalry, and the label ‘Made in Germany’ was more prominent.
The shopkeeper named a price two and a half times the Japanese. I gave up the struggle to support the Empire.
‘It is always better to buy Japanese,’ remarked Ghulam Naabi, when some twenty minutes later he had effected a fifty per cent reduction in the price of the Japanese lanterns. ‘Much cheaper. Everything Japanese comes by railway, through Russia.’
We made one last stop to buy six dozen boxes of Russian safety matches, which effectively undercut in price even the Japanese matches, and our shopping was at an end.
I asked Ghulam Naabi whether we should have enough food. He must have understood where my anxiety lay, for he winked and said, ‘Sahib, all will be well. Do not be worried. Am I not a fat man?’
Readers who are not interested in the history and geography of Nuristan should leave off here and start again at Chapter 8.
The country which was our final goal is still, in the second half of the twentieth century, one of the least known in the world. As late as 1910 Colonel Sir Thomas Holdich, in his book, The Gates of India, could write of Nuristan:
Who will unravel the secrets of this inhabited outland, which appears at present to be more impracticable to the explorer than either of the poles?
Nearly fifty years have passed since the Chief Survey Officer of the Indian Section made this challenging statement but, even allowing for a certain exaggeration, there is no doubt that the means of getting into it have not become any easier; neither the aeroplane nor the motor-car has made the slightest difference. To get there you still have to walk.
But it is not only the absence of roads that makes Nuristan difficult. The Afghan Government has displayed understandable reluctance in allowing travellers to enter it; partly because the inhabitants are unpredictable in their reception of foreigners and partly because potential visitors are suspected of being agents who would stir up trouble.
Nuristan, ‘The Country of Light’, is a mountainous territory in the north-east of Afghanistan, lying between latitudes 34 and 36 north and longitudes 70 and 71–50 east, although some authorities consider that its southern limits extend a few more minutes southwards.
It is walled in on every side by the most formidable mountains. To the north by the main Hindu Kush range, which is the watershed between the Oxus and the deserts of Central Asia and the Indus and the rivers that flow into the Indian Ocean; to the northeast by the Bashgul range, eastwards of the river of that name; to the east and south-east its boundary is the Kunar river to its junction with the Kabul river; and to the south and south-west the mountains which rise on the left bank of the Kabul river.
To the west, the side from which we were approaching it, the boundary is a spur of the Hindu Kush on the east bank of the Panjshir, whose crowning points are Mir Samir and another unnamed mountain to the north-east. The whole of this area including the parts in Chitral has been estimated to cover an area of 5,000 square miles and has been known since early times as Kafiristan, ‘The Country of the Unbelievers’; the larger part, that inside Afghanistan, having been called Nuristan since 1895.
Nuristan is drained by three main rivers. They all have their origins on its northern frontier and they all flow towards the Kabul river, from the great ox-bow bend that the Hindu Kush makes south-west of its junction with the Pamirs and the Karakoram range. The one farthest east is the Bashgul river; in the centre is the Pech and on the west, next to the Panjshir, is the Alingar whose upper waters are called the Ramgul; the Bashgul and the Pech discharging into the Kunar, the Alingar into the Kabul river above Jalalabad. Eventually all are united where the Kunar joins the Kabul and they continue together to the Indus and the Indian Ocean.
These three valleys, all of which have innumerable subsidiary streams pouring into them, are linked indirectly by passes between 12,000 and 16,000 feet high, only negotiable on foot and closed by deep snow between October and March. Many of the valleys are heavily wooded and so deep that in autumn and winter they are said to remain in perpetual shadow.
Each valley is inhabited by different tribes and each speaks its own language. All these languages belong to the group known as Dardic, which is said to be an offshoot from the original Aryan spoken by the inhabitants of the Khiva oasis in Trans-Caspia. But there coherence ends.
It was at one time assumed that, because there were two main tribal divisions within the country, the Siah-Posh or Black-Robed Kafirs and the Safed-Posh or White-Robed Kafirs, who took their names from the dress they adopted, so also there were only two languages. But it is now known that while the Siah-Posh1 who inhabit the north and east all speak various dialects of Bashguli, the language spoken on the Bashgul river, all appear to be able to understand one another. With the Safed-Posh the language problem is so wildly complicated that one’s mind reels. Expressed in the simplest terms the situation seems to be as follows: the Safed-Posh occupy the centre and south-east and consist of three tribes, the Wai, the Presun or Parun and the Ashkun. The Wai live to the south-east of the Bashgul in the mountains above the Kunar river; the Presun on the upper part of the Pech river, and the Ashkun somewhere completely inaccessible in the mountains of the Alingar in the south-west. Of these the Wai and the Presun speak different languages that are mutually unintelligible and unintelligible to all the Siah-Posh, except for one small section of the Wai who speak a mixture of Siah-Posh Bashguli and Parun. To whom they are intelligible is not clear. The Ashkuns are reputed to speak a variant of the language of the Wai but, as no one has ever visited them who was qualified to express an opinion, their language and everything else about them remain a mystery.2
The origins of the Kafirs are uncertain. There is a popular legend that they are descended in the male line from stragglers from the army of Alexander the Great, who skirted Kafiristan on the road to India.
Having passed the winter of 327 B.C. with his army at Alexandreia ad Caucasum (near the present town of Charikar which lies at the junction of the Panjshir and Ghorband rivers at the foot of the Hindu Kush), Alexander dispatched one of his generals, Hephaeston, through the Khyber with the main body of the army to capture Taxila in the Upper Punjab. He himself set off with a lighter force along the north bank of the Kabul river and entered the Kunar Valley, where he defeated a blond, warlike people, the Aspasians, who may well have been indigenous Kafirs. It was in these operations against the Aspasians that Ptolemy, the son of Lagos, who later became King of Egypt, distinguished himself.
Somewhere east of the Kunar, possibly in the province of Swat, at a point that has been the despair of archaeologists in their efforts to determine it, he came to the city of Nysa.
Of Nysa, Arrian speaks as follows:
The city was built by Dionysos or Bacchus when he conquered the Indians, but who this Bacchus was, or at what time or from whence he conquered the Indians, is hard to determine. Whether he was that Theban who from Thrace or he who from Tmolus a mountain of Lydia undertook that famous expedition into India … is uncertain.
Beyond the city was a mountain called Meros where the ivy grew. Being reminded by the inhabitants of the reverence expected of him, Alexander made a sacrifice to Bacchus and his troops made garlands, calling on Dionysos. What a scene it must have been, like some painting of Poussin!3
To this day Nuristan is overgrown with ivy and vines and until lately the inhabitants were notable drinkers. As late as 1857 a missionary, the Reverend Ernest Trumpp, wrote that three Kafirs sent by Major Lumsden as recruits for the Corps of Guides demanded a mashak of wine a day, a leather water bag holding equal to six English gallons. Yet he also says that with this ration they were never drunk. Trumpp’s Kafirs never spoke of Kafiristan, which they regarded as an insulting epithet: they called it Wamasthan.
Whether or not the Nysaeans were pre-Alexandrian invaders from Greece, at the time Alexander crossed the Hindu Kush, the plains of Kabul and the passes over the Hindu Kush from Andarab were certainly held by Greeks, descendants of those transported to Asia by Darius Hystaspes after the fall of Miletus. Equally certainly Kafiristan and its inhabitants in those days covered a far wider area than is occupied by Nuristan today, taking in considerable parts of Badakshan, the Panjshir, Swat and Chitral. The admixture of Greek blood, which gives to many of the inhabitants of Nuristan today a startlingly South European look, had certainly begun long before the arrival of the Macedonian army. All that Alexander’s stragglers did when they encountered the Kafir women, who have the reputation of being sluttish, accommodating and extremely handsome, was to strengthen it.
Travellers in Kafiristan have always been few and far between. From the sixth century onwards Chinese Buddhists make passing reference to Kafiristan on their way to the holy places of India – travellers like Sung Yün who crossed the Pamirs to the Oxus in A.D. 519 and entered India by way of Kafiristan to avoid an even more dreadful crossing of the upper Indus by a bridge constructed from a single iron chain. But for the most part, when entering Afghanistan, they seem to have passed on either side of it.
Genghis Khan refers to the Kafirs in the thirteenth century; Timur Leng fought them in the fourteenth without conspicuous success, although he is reputed to have acquired a Kafir wife; in the fifteenth the Emperor Babur drank their wines without rapture. In 1602 a Portuguese Jesuit, Benedict de Goès, coadjutor to the Superior of the Order in the Mogul’s Empire, set off from Lahore for China (where he died), attaching himself to a caravan of five hundred merchants, and passed through a part of eastern Afghanistan which he calls ‘Capherstam’. He says that the soil was fertile and yielded plenty of grapes: offered a cup of wine he found it very good. Thereafter, as far as I can discover, no travellers through Kafiristan have left any record for two hundred years, although there must have been others.
A most colourful traveller who was supposed to have visited Kafiristan was Colonel Alexander Gardner. He was a soldier of fortune employed as commandant of a picked body of horse by the nephew and deadly enemy of the reigning Amir, Dost Muhammad Khan. According to his own account he went there twice.4
The first time was in 1826 when he had to flee for his life through west Kafiristan on his way to Yarkand after the Amir had slaughtered and mutilated his followers together with his beautiful Afghan wife and small son by way of reprisal. (Gardner had captured her from a caravan in which she had been travelling as lady-in-waiting to a princess who was related to the Amir and had installed her in a castello in the Hindu Kush.)
The second occasion was in 1828 when he returned from Yarkand by way of northern Kafiristan and the Kunar Valley.
Subsequently Gardner entered the service of the great Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh.
A photograph of him survives, taken when he was seventy-nine. He is dressed from head to foot in a suit of tartan of the 79th Highlanders. Even his turban decorated with egret’s plumes is of tartan. With his Sikh’s beard and alert look he is himself rather like an eagle. He died in bed at Jammu at the age of ninety-two, a pensioner of the Sikhs.5
In the 1830s the almost equally remarkable American traveller Charles Masson made his extensive journeys in Afghanistan disguised in the local dress, living with the inhabitants in a way which would be difficult today. Although he did not penetrate far into Kafiristan, he followed the Alingar as far as its junction with the Alishang and then followed the Alishang itself, a journey no European was to accomplish again until 1935.
Less well known is the visit of a Christian missionary, Fazl Huq, in 1864. Fazl Huq was a Pathan, the son of a Mullah, who had been converted to Christianity at Peshawar. To avoid any imputation of changing faith to curry favour with missionaries, he joined the Corps of Guides as a sepoy, a regiment in which Christian other ranks were anathema to the Muslim rank and file and as much in danger of losing their lives as they were in civilian life.
Together with an ex-Mullah named Narullah, who was also a Christian convert, he set off for Kafiristan in September 1864, at the invitation of a Kafir soldier of whom there were several in the Guides, taking with him medicine and presents from the Church Missionary Society. The treatment they received from their own people, fanatic Muslims, on the road through Swat was as disagreeable as anything they were to encounter in Kafiristan itself, but after overcoming the most formidable difficulties they finally reached the Kunar river, floated down it on a raft of inflated skins, and entered Jalalabad disguised as women.
Eventually they reached a place somewhere on the southern marches of Kafiristan where the Kafirs came to barter for salt. Here the two faithful bodyguards they had hired in Jalalabad left them and, having abandoned their disguise, they continued into the country alone.
At the village to which they had been invited by the sepoy they carried on their missionary work for twenty days and were well received, the Kafirs reserving the martyr’s crown for Muslims.
Each day Huq kept a journal, using lime juice as an invisible ink.
Adultery was unknown, he wrote, only the unmarried ever being suspected of immorality which was extirpated with ferocity; married couples having a sort of laisser-passer in such matters. He also noticed that the Kafirs watched their relatives die in silence and that they put them in wooden boxes on the mountain-side with the lids weighed down with heavy stones. Some of the houses he saw were five stories high. During his stay he saw a variety of birds and beasts – crows, parrots, leopards, bears and wolves.
Huq and Narullah stayed in Kafiristan until the first snows fell, then returned by the way they had come. Reaching the Kabul river at Jalalabad they floated down it on a raft as far as Peshawar, which they reached after an absence of two months. It was a remarkable exploit.
It was not until the eighties, when the great game of espionage between Britain and Russia was being played flat out beyond the frontiers of India, that another serious attempt was made to enter Kafiristan. In 1883 W. W. Macnair, an enterprising officer of the Indian Survey, disobeying the strict orders of the Indian Government that no European should cross the frontier without permission, penetrated the eastern marches as far as the Bashgul Valley. Macnair wore the dress of a Muhammadan Hakim and stained himself with a disagreeable mixture of weak caustic soda and walnut juice. He was accompanied by a native ‘known in The Profession as the Saiad’ and two Kaka Khel Pathans, a tribe respected by the Afghans and to some extent by the Kafirs. With him he took an enormous book decorated with cabalistic signs which concealed within it a plane table for mapping and other surveying instruments. As Hakim he was much given to solitary meditation and generally chose high peaks for this purpose.
Macnair reported that the inhabitants were celebrated for their beauty and their European complexions; that they worshipped idols; drank wine from silver cups and vases; used chairs and tables, and spoke a language unknown to their neighbours; that brown eyes were more common than blue; that their complexions varied between pink and a bronze as dark as that of a Punjabi; that the infidelity of wives was punished by mild beating and that of men by a fine of cattle, and that one of their prayers ran:
Ward off fever from us.
Increase our stores.
Kill the Mussulmans.
After death admit us to Paradise.
Macnair estimated the population at 200,000.
On his return to India he was officially reprimanded by Lord Ripon, the Viceroy, and later congratulated in private.
Two years later in 1885 the Bashgul Valley was more fully explored by Colonel Woodthorpe of the Indian Survey when he visited it with Sir William Lockhart on a mission whose object was to examine the passes of the Hindu Kush. But it was not until Sir George Robertson, the British Political Agent in Gilgit, made his prolonged journeys in Kafiristan in 1890 and 1891, visiting the upper reaches of the Bashgul and penetrating farther westwards than any other explorer had so far succeeded in doing into the upper part of the Pech Valley, that any real knowledge was gained of the country and the people. His book The Káfirs of the Hindu Kush gives the only complete picture that has come down to us of the Kafirs living in their pristine state of paganism. And it was to be the final one. Already Robertson was encountering tribes who had been converted to Islam and his was the last opportunity that any European was to have before the old pagan religion of the country was obliterated.
In the twentieth century the names of the countless secret agents of all nations who must have visited Nuristan have so far not been revealed. The first recorded visitors seem to have been two Russians, Vavilov and Bukinitsh, who spent four days in the Pech Valley in 1924.
It is the Germans who have held almost the entire monopoly of travel and exploration in Nuristan during the last thirty years. There is something about the place that appeals to the German character: the dark forests and gloomy valleys; the innate paganism of the ‘grosse blonde vollhaarige Menschen’ whose origins ‘nicht indo-arisches, sondern ein europäisch-arisches Restvolk der Indogermanen sind’.
In 1925 two Germans tried to enter from the southwards without success; one a geologist, Dr Herbordt, the other a Baron von Platen. Both reached the frontier north of Jalalabad but got no farther.
In 1928 Dr Martin Voigt and Herr Seydack, a Prussian State Forester, both of whom were working for King Amanullah, went up the Kunar Valley and the Bashgul, reached the Hindu Kush divide and descended the Pech river to its confluence with the Kunar. They did not, however, visit the western part, the Alingar-Ramgul Valley which no European had so far seen.
In 1935 there came the Deutsche Hindu Kush Expedition. This, like everything else emanating from Germany in the middle thirties, was grandiloquent and slightly less thorough than it cracked itself up to be. It was certainly big. Its members travelled with forty mules specially imported for the job, fifteen mule drivers, three Afghan officers and sixteen soldiers. It worked methodically, establishing supply depots for itself en route. The objects of the expedition were rather ambiguous but its members seem to have spent most of their time, when they might have been looking for the Ashkuns, studying the comparative anatomy of the inhabitants. On their return to civilization they embalmed their findings, the result of the thorough measuring to which they had subjected the inhabitants, in a large almost unreadable volume printed in excruciating gothic type.
After the last war there were the enterprising journeys of von Dückelmann, an Austrian who had spent the last war interned in India, and Hans Neubauer, a botanist in the employ of the Afghan Government.
In November 1951 a young American called Mackenzie spent fifteen days in Nuristan, reaching a point where there was a rock inscribed by Timur Leng.
There was the Danish Henning-Haslund expedition on which the leader Haslund unfortunately died, which visited East and Central Nuristan on several occasions between 1948 and 1954.
And in 1956 it seemed that there was to be the Carless-Newby expedition, consisting of a man from the dress trade and a career diplomat, who were setting off to visit the Ramgul Katirs in Nuristan for no other reason than to satisfy their curiosity.
1. Of the Siah-Posh the most numerous are the Katirs; the Bashgul Katirs, the Kti or Kantiwar Katirs, the Kulam Katirs and the Ramgul Katirs living in the north-west.
2. Anyone wishing to study this formidable, though fascinating, subject may refer to the Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. VIII, Part II, by Sir G. A. Grierson.
3. This interesting theory concerning the origin of the Kafirs is dealt with more fully in Geographical Journal, VII, London, 1896, ‘The Origin of the Kafirs of the Hindu Kush’, Col. T. H. Holdich.
4. Colonel Alexander Gardner by Major H. Pearse. Edinburgh, 1898.
5. According to European Adventurers of Northern India, 1785–1849 by C. Grey and H. L. O. Garrett, Lahore, 1929, he was an Irish deserter from the British Service who never went to Kafiristan and was made a colonel because he was the only man in the Sikh Army who was willing to cut off the right thumb, nose and ears of a Brahmin who had struck an officer.