Abdul Ghiyas was first up the next morning (not that I think he had ever been to bed) harrying and chivvying us like a nurse in a superior household. ‘We should have started at the third hour,’ he said, but Shir Muhammad and Badar Khan were not of the same opinion. It was, at any rate, the fault of their masters, who lay in their bags waiting for the tea that never arrived, growing more and more bad-tempered because each knew that he was behaving badly and storing up trouble for the rest of the day.
It was a quarter to six before we finally moved off. For the Panjshir Valley the day was already far advanced. Beyond the village we crossed a torrent that boiled out of a defile. Once across it, out of the shade of the village, the sun was hot and growing stronger every minute. We travelled packless and this time in step with the others to avoid the comments from the rooftops.
The valley was the scene of ceaseless activity; in the groves of mulberry trees close to the road, beyond the crumbling walls, the Tajiks were gathering the fruit. Like apprentices up in the rigging, the boys were shaking the branches while underneath, like charming firewomen waiting to catch someone from a burning building, their beautiful sisters held striped homespun blankets extended at each end by a bow-shaped wooden stretcher. The mulberries descended in an endless shower and the air was full of a soft pattering. There were mulberries everywhere; round every tree there was a depression scooped out to receive them and the ground was swept clean with brooms for the windfalls. They were on the road too, little drifts of them like newly-fallen hail. They were on the roofs of the houses, spread out to dry in the sun, alternating with piles of apricots, a staple food to be exported out of the valley or else stored for the winter, much appreciated in a place where sugar is a luxury that is rarely available and never used in tea.
A strong wind began to blow, curling the Panjshir back on itself where it flowed less violently in these wide reaches between banks of shingle that were littered with broken trees and rounded boulders, the debris of the river in spate. Here the valley was perhaps a mile wide. The fields rose in terraces as far as the screes of fallen stones that streamed off the steep sides of the valley. Even these high fields, several hundred feet above the river, were irrigated by water drawn off from the Panjshir many miles higher up and carried along the hillside by brilliant engineering, a silver ribbon glittering in the sun.
In the fields the harvest was far advanced; whole families worked happily together threshing the wheat, the chaff rising on the wind in ragged clouds; children in charge of the bullocks which plodded blindfolded round and round the threshing floor; men in waistcoats worn over white shirts, and wide trousers, wearing on their heads turbans of black or white or navy blue; girls beautiful but unforthcoming, drawing their head cloths tightly across their faces and turning their backs as we approached in such a manner that we began to feel ourselves the vanguard of a whole cohort of sexual maniacs come to this paradise to violate and destroy. Perhaps one of the most disagreeable features of fanatic Islam is its ability to make people of other faiths feel impure in thought, word and deed.
There were no large villages: only an occasional hamlet or a solitary farm standing in its own fields of wheat or Indian corn, ten feet high – enchanted forests in which little children played hide and seek; fields of barley, maize, bright fields of clover, creeping vetch, beans and tobacco. There were compact orchards of apples and magnificent groves of walnut and clumps of poplars, the wind sighing in their high tops. Here in the middle part of the valley the houses were of stone, sometimes faced with mud. At the mouths of the valleys that descended from the frontiers of Nuristan there were watch towers with farms clustered about them. The few bridges were crazy cantilevers of tree-trunks and turf.
The first of these valleys, Darra Ghuzu, was reached after an hour on the road from Omarz. Sitting by the side of the track, looking up it, was an old man dressed in a long coloured cloak of striped material and a close skull-cap. Seeing our interest he pointed to a peak, a snow-covered pinnacle that must have been well over 18,000 feet high, glowing pink where the sun was now reaching it.
‘Ghuzu,’ he said, ‘under it there is a great river of ice.’
He asked us where we were going.
‘Kuh-i-Mir Samir. We are going to climb it.’
‘Ghuzu,’ he said, pointing to the impressive pinnacle, ‘is nothing but a child. Kuh-i-Mir Samir is a great mountain. It is quite vertical. No man can reach the summit.’
For some time we plodded on in silence while I digested this unpalatable information.
‘If it’s worse than Ghuzu he’s probably right.’
‘It’s higher, that’s all. We’ll do it somehow,’ said Hugh. Somehow his confidence was infectious.
‘We’ll do it all right,’ I said.
Another two hours and we were in Khinj, a shady place where the men were building a mud wall, happily puddling the stuff like schoolboys. Beyond the village the road was full of people: shepherds coming down out of Badakshan with big flocks of fat-tailed sheep, a thousand at a time, following the track nose to tail, all trying to edge us over the precipice; mountaineers out of Andarab; wild-looking Pathan traders; men loaded with blocks of brownish rock salt. To all, except the sheep, we mumbled the obligatory greetings and replies that by now, as the morning advanced, had become almost an incantation.
‘Mandeh nabashi.’
‘Salamat bashi.’
‘Khush amadid.’
‘Khub hasti.’
‘Jur hasti.’
‘Che hal dari.’
More rarely we received voluntary invitations to rest and refresh ourselves, ‘mehrbani kho’ and ‘nush i jan ko’: all in Kabuli Persian which resembles the dialect of Khurasan, the Meshed province, rather archaic and with some Turki expressions.
After four hours on the road, we came to the village of Safed Jir. Here the doorways of the houses were high with pointed arches, the wooden doors decorated with fretted work and painted cabalistic signs. We rested on a low wall and were soon surrounded by a horde of old men and children. Some of the children had blue eyes. Not all the women veiled themselves and some giggled archly, like girls inviting attention in a high street. But all this pleasantry came to an end when Abdul Ghiyas arrived, shouting to them to veil themselves in the presence of idolatrous unbelievers, and we were known for what we were, unrighteous, ungodly men.
‘Sometimes I could strangle Abdul Ghiyas,’ Hugh said. ‘He’s worse than a mullah. When he gets out of the Panjshir into the summer pastures he spends most of his time in the nomad camps with the women, but he takes good care that I don’t see any. He’s what you might call a religious man.’
‘You surprise me. He seems more like a nanny to me.’
‘He’s more like Rasputin.’
For whatever other reason the women giggled, our appearance alone would have given them good cause. On his head Hugh wore a Chitrali cap, not itself in this region an object of mirth but worn flat like a pancake, together with a khaki bush-jacket and trousers, the dress of an officer of the Eighth Army, rather more bizarre. He still carried his ice-axe, whereas I had long ago consigned mine to the baggage train. He had, too, a certain straight-backed rigidity of movement as he passed on always a few yards ahead of me. I, too, contrived to look ridiculous with a hat from Bond Street which was a sort of Anglicized version of something from Kitzbühel, blue jeans from Petticoat Lane and a camera slung round my neck with an attendant host of supplementary lenses, exposure meters and filters of varying degrees of intensity. I also carried a large notebook – already I was being introduced to the people we met on the road as Motakhasses Seb, ‘The Specialist’.
By eleven o’clock we were really done in. All the fires of hell seemed concentrated in my monstrous feet. At every small rill we washed our faces and rinsed our mouths but it was no good. We sucked gum drops but they only filled our mouths again with thick, lime-flavoured mud.
We had outstripped the horses. It was difficult to gear ourselves to their leisurely progression.
On the right of the road an orchard sloped gently to the river. Like men about to commit a felony we crept into it, took off our boots and steaming socks and shamelessly drank the water that a young man brought us unasked. There we lay like dead men until the drivers came up and passed us by, Shir Muhammad looking down on us with a lack of respect that even in our ruined state was none the less extremely disagreeable.
‘Last time I was in the Panjshir with Dreesen we did forty miles the first day, Marz Robat to the upper Valley,’ Hugh said as once again we took the road. He looked dreadful. I asked him what was wrong.
‘Diarrhoea. It’s most unusual.’
‘I’m not a bit surprised. It’s all this filthy water we’re drinking.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with the water.’
‘Perhaps we’re not strong enough for it.’
‘You have to get used to it.’
‘Like old women drinking meths?’
In spite of the halts that became more and more frequent, we overtook the men.
‘Vaqt i tup. The gun has sounded,’ said Abdul Ghiyas spitefully. In Tajik parlance this meant that it was noon and we should by now have arrived at our destination.
‘How far to the next chaie khana?’
‘One and a half kro.’1
‘What’s a kro?’ I could see that the heat and our conversation about water had made Hugh testy. The fact that it was he who had to do most of the interrogation was already driving him into a state of despair.
‘One kro equals half an Iranian farsak.’
It was some time before I was able to pluck up courage to ask what an Iranian farsak was.
‘The distance a man travels over flat ground in an hour – about three and a half miles. And, quite frankly, I think you should have made more progress with your Persian by now.’
In Panjshir each bay of cultivation is succeeded by a great bluff up which the track winds, sometimes leaving the river a thousand feet below in the gorges, overhanging it in hair-raising fashion. Now, when we had been going for five hours we made the worst crossing so far. On this bluff there were no trees, there was no vegetation and, therefore, no shade; the earth was red and burning hot and the dust swirled about us. The sun seemed to fill the entire sky like a great brass shield. In the gorge below us the river was a dirty, turgid yellow. Frequently Hugh had to stop, consumed by stomach trouble, to take what solace he could on the barren hillside. Fortunately there were no other travellers. Our men were far behind; all others had long since taken refuge from the heat of the day.
The descent from the col was long and slow. It was like walking on red-hot corrugated iron. In exactly an hour and a half as Abdul Ghiyas had predicted, we rounded a bend and there was a village, close to the river, green, cool and inviting. Dasht-i-Rewat, ‘The Plain of the Fort’, the last village before the gorges leading to Parian. Better still, even at a distance, we could make out two samovars belching steam.
In the village we collapsed in front of the wrong samovar, one that was not patronized by our drivers, so that when they arrived we had to get up and totter bootless to the next establishment. There we spent the rest of the day in the shade of a huge walnut tree, horses tethered round us.
It was a charming spot, like something from a painting by Claude Lorraine. We were in a natural amphitheatre of green grass deeply shaded by mulberries and walnuts. At the far end there were some curiously eroded cliffs over which a waterfall came bouncing down. At the foot there was a spring where the water bubbled up through silver sand into a little natural basin. The only sounds in this paradise of rock, water and green turf came from superabundant nature: the roar of the distant river, the splashing of the waterfall, the chattering of the little stream that led down from it, the buzzing of flies, the noise made by Abdul Ghiyas’s stallion as it tried to mate with Badar Khan’s little mare, and the clucking of the hens that had gathered about us attracted by the breadcrumbs.
We bathed in a pool below a mill. It was very deep and cold. Out in the main river the stream was running at twenty knots. Above us at least a hundred men and boys watched us silently from the cliff. Presently some of the boys came in, too, swimming with a curious dog-paddle-cum-breast stroke.
Feeling infinitely better, we returned to the walnut tree, trailing behind us a whole tribe of schoolboys. At first they surrounded me whilst I went through the grisly ritual of dressing my feet, but the smaller ones got clipped on the ear by older, hairier schoolboys, who were themselves clipped by Shir Muhammad, leaving only a half-circle of nosey men, the minimum audience that we were resigned to playing to wherever we went. We were hourly thinking more highly of Shir Muhammad; already, sure sign of popularity, he had received a nickname Sar-i-Sargin, ‘Head of Horse Dung’, from the immense amount of this material which he accumulated whenever we lit a fire on the way.
Again we slept hemmed in by our belongings. Some time after midnight I woke up. A great moon was shining down on the road. As I lay there, a number of men, closely wrapped in dark cloaks, went by silently and quickly on horses, going up in the direction that we were following.
We left early the next morning and it was still dark when we took the road. By five o’clock we had left the last houses in the lower valley behind and were beginning the long climb from the lower to the upper Panjshir. Soon we were abreast of the Darra Rewat, away to the east over the river, leading to a pass of that name into Nuristan.
‘We’re coming to the last samovar before Parian,’ said Hugh.
But he was wrong. When we reached the top of the pass, really the crest of a big bluff, there was nothing; only some forgotten fields and what Hugh had remembered as a chaie khana which was now ruined and deserted. Far below, scarcely moving, was the river, covered with a thick green scum, confined between high cliffs of eroded sandstone, choked with rocks at the lower end and only escaping through a narrow sluice into the broad cultivated valley of Dasht-i-Rewat.
‘Why did they have a chaie khana here anyway?’
‘It’s a junction,’ Hugh said. ‘Up there’ – he pointed up the hillside to the north-west – ‘is the way to the Til Pass into Andarab. The country’s drying up. The glaciers are receding every year.’ He pointed to the ruined fields. ‘Four years ago there were beans growing there. All the earth’s dropping into the river, blowing away in dust. That’s why they’re abandoned. Nobody will live here any more.’
Two Tajiks appeared, driving before them a herd of goats. They offered us dried mulberries made into a cake with walnuts, which they called talkhan. They themselves took green snuff, placing it under the tongue.
‘You know,’ Hugh said, ‘for the first time since we left England I’m beginning to feel fit. I can actually feel my legs under me.’
It was true. In spite of the fearful liberties we had been taking with our insides, we were undoubtedly becoming stronger.
‘I can feel my legs all right,’ I said. ‘The only trouble is I can feel my feet, too.’
By this time Abdul Ghiyas had come up, closely followed by the others.
‘How long is the gorge?’
‘Twelve kro.’
‘That’s about twenty-one miles on flat ground.’
‘But is it flat?’
‘Not a bit.’
‘Golly!’
‘More than twice a farsak-i-ghurg, a wolf’s farsak,’ said Abdul Ghiyas with relish.
The road swooped downhill to the river. Soon the horses were battling across a deep torrent, which swept at right angles into the main river.
Waiting for us on the far bank, as we emerged dripping from the torrent, was a band of Pathans going down to Dasht-i-Rewat; father, mother, two sons and a sulky-looking girl on a pony, an evil-looking bunch, the men armed with rifles. As we went past they mumbled something to Abdul Ghiyas.
‘What did they say?’ Hugh asked him when we were clear of them.
‘That there are robbers on the road between here and Parian who have just taken everything from a man travelling.’
A couple more miles and we came to a place where the river swirled round the base of a cliff and another torrent came racing down from the left to join it.
‘Ao Khawak,’ said Abdul Ghiyas, ‘the meeting of the waters; where it comes in from the Khawak Pass. The way of Timur Leng.’
This was the place where Timur Leng’s wild cavalry crossed the Hindu Kush on their way from the Oxus to India in 1398.
The bridge over the Khawak consisted of two parallel treetrunks, one higher than the other, with the gap between filled with rocks and turf. The trunks were loose and as we trod on them they rolled apart and chunks of rock and turf crashed into the torrent below.
The fording of the river itself was not easy for the horses. They staggered through the torrent with their drivers perched on top of the loads, but it was nothing to what they were to be called on to do later.
Beyond the river we found the traveller who had had everything taken from him. He was a young man of about twenty and he was lying face downwards in the shadow of a boulder with his skull smashed to pulp. Whoever had done it had probably struck him down from behind while someone else had engaged him in conversation. The instrument was lying some yards away – a long splinter of rock with blood on it. He was only very recently dead.
‘What do you think we should do?’ Hugh asked Abdul Ghiyas. His suggestion was so eminently suitable that we adopted it.
‘Let us leave immediately,’ he said.
Above our heads hovered a large bearded vulture, a lammergeier, a whitish bird with brown wing markings. As we stood there it was joined by another.
‘We call them “the burnt ones”,’ said Abdul Ghiyas.
After placing a large flat stone over the head of the corpse we went on our way.
Now the road became even more desolate, the gorge narrower still, filled with a wild chaos of granite blocks. We could see the flood level of the river, thirty feet above its present course. High on the cliffs above where there were slabs of limestone, we could see the mouths of dark caves. Higher still granite cliffs overhung the track and from time to time a slab of granite would detach itself and fall with a clang into the gorge. It was no place to linger.
Yet down by the water’s edge, wheat was growing in minute fields hemmed in by rocks, and the water sparkled as it ran swiftly in the irrigation ditches. There were many birds; rollers, black and white Asian magpies and a beautiful bird whose feathers had a blue or green sheen according to the way the light fell on them. It was hot but the wind was blowing down the gorge, bringing with it a cool green smell of water. In spite of its air of solitude, the track was well used. In the dust beneath our feet beetles were at work cutting up and carting away newly-dropped horse dung to some private storehouse. On the steep eastern side of the valley 400 feet above us an irrigation channel slowly descended, flowing in the opposite direction to the river and giving the curious illusion of flowing uphill. Perhaps it was flowing uphill. In this place anything seemed possible.
Finally after two hours’ march, during which we constantly drank from the river and bathed our faces in it, we came out of the gorge. The valley broadened out; to the east the hills rolled back, covered in mustard-coloured grass like grass which has had snow on it. Beyond these hills a range of big jagged snow peaks rose up shimmering in the sun.
‘Parian,’ said Hugh. ‘This is the upper valley and those peaks are the outriders of Mir Samir. Tomorrow we’ll see it at last.’
1. Kuruh.