In a few minutes we came to a hamlet of rude houses, the ragged inhabitants of which were strangely at variance with the clean air of the valley itself. This was Shahnaiz: the place Hugh and Dreesen had reached on their first day’s march, forty miles from Omarz.
Beyond it the road climbed again high up the side of the hills, but we kept to the banks of the river, in the water-meadows of soft spongy grass. After the confined close air of the gorge it was good to be in the open with a cool breeze fanning us. Soon the water-meadows ended at the bottom of a crumbling cliff.
The river was quite shallow but running very fast. We decided to cross it. It was a hazardous operation. The water was only thigh deep but the current was immensely strong and the bottom was formed of stones the size of footballs slippery with weeds. Half-way across we were forced to abandon the attempt; if a man slipped in such a place he would be gone for good. We should have known better than to attempt a short cut.
We splashed back through the meadow by the way we had come and ascended the side of the hill where we met our drivers who had been watching our efforts with some amusement.
‘In Panjshir and in Parian there is only one way and that is the way of the road,’ remarked Abdul Ghiyas. ‘The roads were made long ago; if there were another way we should use it.’
Together we went on until we came to a suicide bridge with a village beyond it, the houses nothing more than heaps of stones, but down by the river there was a grove of poplars, an ideal camping place, at which we looked lovingly.
By now we were both a little tired of one another’s company. Hugh continued along the west bank and I, following the road as Abdul Ghiyas had advised, crossed the bridge with the horses and scrambled up through a labyrinth of alleys into the village which was more primitive than anything I had yet seen. It seemed deserted; the doors of every house were padlocked with half a handcuff, made, I was glad to see, in Birmingham. The alleys were blocked by great boulders over which the horses were moved with the greatest difficulty. Outside the village we floundered ankle-deep in a maze of water lanes which wound round the fields.
A mile away, now far ahead of us striding out stiffly high above the river, I could see Hugh. He looked very solitary marching through Asia without attendants. But it was already clear that he had quite literally chosen the path of wisdom. As for the rest of us, at times we seemed to be making progress but then the track, which was nothing more than a morass between stone walls, would wind round the property of some landowner and land us back where we had started. Nor was there anyone to guide us; like the village the fields, too, were completely deserted.
‘Everyone is at the Aylaq,’ said Abdul Ghiyas, ‘gone to the summer pastures.’
In two hours we reached a camping place at the mouth of the Darra Samir. It was a grove of poplars near the river. Hugh was already there. ‘In Parian there is only one way and that is the way of the road,’ he said meaningly to Abdul Ghiyas, who blushed.
Too tired to be hungry we forced ourselves to eat the noxious bread that Badar Khan had got from Shahnaiz and between us ate a tin of jam from the compo. ration boxes that we had now broached. The rations were a bit of a shock: all four boxes were the same. They were of a particularly rare kind, without biscuits. Most of the tins contained Irish stew. The future that stretched before us looked unrosy.
Although far from the next village, Kaujan, we had already been smelled out, in the mysterious Asian manner, by a number of elderly inhabitants who were too decrepit to make the ascent with the others to the high pastures, some of which were as high as 14,000 feet, but were ready for a good jaw.
Here, in Parian, a valley twenty-five miles long extending to the Anjuman Pass on the main divide of the Hindu Kush, the people were still Tajiks but with flatter, heavier faces, due perhaps to a mixture of Uzbeg blood from the north. They were poorer and more primitive than the people in the lower valley, living a semi-nomad existence, taking their sheep, goats, cattle and ponies (for they are fond of horse coping) up to the high valleys in the spring and staying there until the first snows in September. In Parian there is no fruit and few trees except poplars and willows and these only close to the river. From their fields these people get beans, barley and corn; from the high pastures milk and butter.
As the sun set it became very cold with a nasty draught blowing down the Darra Samir, ‘The breath of Mir Samir’, as one of the old men picturesquely described it. It made us huddle over the fire which, in addition to dung, was now fed with a sweet-smelling root called buta, and we talked of Panjshir Tajiks and the mountain. One of the old men opened the conversation.
‘Panjshir,’ he piped, ‘is sarhadd, the frontier.’
‘The frontier of what?’
‘The Jadidi and of the country to the north. The Panjshir road is the road to Turkestan.’
‘Ah,’ everyone said, nodding, ‘that is what we call it. “The Road to Turkestan”.’
‘Who are the Jadidi?’
‘The Jadidi are the Nuristanis. Until the great Emir (he meant Abdur Rahman) converted them by the sword they were pagans and great robbers.’
‘They still are,’ said someone.
‘We Tajiks had five leaders to defend the valley. They were the panj shir, the five tigers, holding the eastern passes against the Jadidi; the way to Turkestan (he meant the Anjuman Pass) against the Badakhshanis, the Khawak and the Salang against the Turkis (Uzbegs) of Andarab and the Jabal us Siraj (at the southern end of the Panjshir) against the Shi’a Hazaras. That is the meaning of Panjshir.’
‘Not so,’ said Abdul Ghiyas, who had been listening with rising impatience. ‘Shir is “tiger”; in the old times there were many tigers in the valley. Even now on the summit of the Til, going into Andarab, there is a tiger. People have seen it.’
‘But the great Amir says that Panjshir is called after the tombs of five saints of Islam.’ This from Hugh.
‘Where are the tombs?’
‘I don’t know.’ At this all the old men grunted. This was not a subject to be discussed by a stripling of thirty-five, an unbeliever, from outside the valley.
‘But it has also been said that Panj-sher are the five lion sons of Pandu,’ he went on.
‘Who says this?’ they all asked.
‘The Hindus of Hind. I have read it in a book of an Amrikai.’1
‘An Amrikai!’ It was obvious that this was acceptable to no one. ‘And the people of Hind, what do they know of Panjshir? Those that have made the journey to it have perished by the sword.’
‘It is none of these things. It is from shirmahi, the tiger fish that is in the river,’ said another.
‘Pah,’ everyone said.
But about the name Mir Samir no one had any idea at all.
‘No man has been there,’ was all they could say, ‘even the bozi kuhi, the ibex, has only once trodden there. That was in the time of Tufan-i-Nūh, when Noah’s Flood covered the earth. Then the waters rushed up the valley destroying everything, and so up the Darra to Kuh-i-Mir Samir itself. And there the last ibex took refuge on the very top. And the water followed up to the very belly of the ibex. Then it rose no more and after a while began to sink; ever since that time the belly of the ibex has been white. This is how it came to be.’
A mist had risen from the river enveloping us like smoke. The old men rose to go. One of them was the water bailiff, the Mirab, ‘Lord of the Waters’. On his way home he opened the sluices in the higher fields, so that by three o’clock we all woke to find ourselves lying in a puddle, the whole wood swimming in water. Later still there was a terrific crashing outside the wood where a wild pig had got into a field of Indian corn and was churning it up. All night the horses were restless, pawing and snorting. I had dreadful dreams.
After the horrors of the night the dawn had an almost mocking beauty, the mist had risen, a gentle wind blew and the tops of the poplars waved gently against an apple-green sky. At six we set off.
The mouth of the Darra Samir was very narrow and the path by the torrent blocked by boulders the size of a small house. Twice the horses had to swim the river with the lower part of our gear underwater; Shir Muhammad’s grey cut one of its forelegs badly, an inauspicious beginning to the day.
Once past this bottleneck the valley rose steeply, flanked by gigantic hills, with little terraced fields of barley, blue vetch and clover half-hidden among the rocks. Here the irrigation ditches were of a beautiful complexity and I thought how my children would have liked them; the water running swift and silent until it reached a place where the dyke had been deliberately broken by the ‘Lord of the Waters’, allowing it to gurgle through into some small property and continue its journey downhill on a lower level as a subsidiary of the main stream.
The track followed the line of the main ditch, never more than two feet wide. Along the dykes there were beds of thick greer moss, sedge, golden ranunculus, and bushes of wild pink and yellow roses were growing, all now, in the early morning, thickly covered in dew. Strung between the bushes the webs made by a very large sort of spider were as complex as wire entanglements and, when the sun rose over the hill ahead, they glistened like thick white cords. Only the limp and dying wild rhubarb that covered the lower slopes of the hill, like the flags of the losing side after a battle, imparted an air of melancholy to the scene.
In an hour and a half of hard climbing we came to a collection of round stone huts, like bothies in the Hebrides but roofed with earth and wild rhubarb stems. Among the rocks on the hillside on the far side of the torrent they were almost invisible, only the smoke that hung over them in the still air showed that they were human habitations. The fuel for the fires was spread out on flat rocks to dry in the sun, pieces of dung the size and shape of soup plates at which Shir Muhammad looked longingly.
Down by the water a large herd of black and white cattle, smallish beasts with humps, were feeding on the grass that grew in round pin-cushions among the stones. There were also flocks of fat-tailed sheep high up on the hillsides and some angry-looking goats.
‘The aylaq of the Kaujan people,’ said Abdul Ghiyas. This was the summer pasture of the people of the village whose elders we had entertained the previous night. Without another word all three drivers drove their long iron pins into the ground, picketed the horses and sat down cross-legged in the excruciating position that Hugh found second-nature and that I was still only able to endure for minutes at a time.
‘One of the great advantages of travelling in this part of the world is that, if you wait long enough, something happens,’ said Hugh, after we had been sitting for ten minutes without anything happening at all. ‘You can’t imagine doing this in England, squatting down, outside a village. You’d starve to death.’
‘I can’t see much point in doing it here.’
But I was soon to be confounded. Gradually, our arrival began to cause a disturbance. Women and children came to the doors of their houses, making gay splashes of colour in the sombre landscape and uttering long, wailing cries that were taken up and echoed by men, up to now unseen, high up on the mountain-side. There was a sudden baying of dogs and a wild stream of curs and hounds came leaping from rock to rock across the river and up towards us, ravening for flesh and blood, to be beaten off with volleys of stones and appalling blasphemy. They were followed by two men; one short and stocky, the other taller, with brown eyes, strong neat beard, a straight nose, a man with an air of dignity. Abdul Ghiyas seemed to know him, for he embraced him warmly. His name was Abdul Rahim.
They had brought with them an earthenware pot containing dugh,2 boiled and watered milk, some qaimac in a wooden bowl, the thick yellowish crust that forms on cream, and some bread to mop it up. Our drivers tucked in with gusto. For us it was no time to be stand-offish, it was vanishing down their gullets far too quickly for that; we joined them. The dugh was cool, slightly sour and very refreshing; the qaimac, mopped up with bread that was still hot from the oven, was delicious.
We went on our way, Abdul Rahim accompanying us. The going was really hard now, very steep over landslides of flat slab lying loose on the mountain, now almost red hot in the sun. Abdul Rahim led, picking his way easily, while far behind the expedition wallowed and hesitated. The air was full of the sounds of slithering as the horses struggled up, and the sounds of walloping and awful curses. All of us had eaten and drunk unwisely at the aylaq and now we burped unhappily, like windy babies, as we toiled upwards.
We were crossing the head of a deep defile. Above us the mountains swept back in screes of the same slab on which we were making such heavy weather. Above these screes were great bulbous outcrops of what looked like limestone and behind them, seen through clefts, were pinnacles shining with ice and snow. Every now and then one of the slabs underfoot would start to move, gain momentum and slither downhill like a toboggan, over the precipice and into the invisible river.
Finally, at half past nine, we rounded the last bend, climbed a steep wall of debris and saw at the end of a long, straight valley, an enormous mountain.
‘Mir Samir,’ said Hugh.
It was about six miles off, and seeing it from the west against the morning sun and at this distance, it was an indistinct brown pyramid, flecked with white, veiled in haze, the base in deep shadow.
It was an exciting moment, but it was not the mountain, but the prospect immediately before us, so enchanting was it, that held our attention.
We were in a great meadow of level green grass, springy underfoot and wonderfully restful to my battered feet. Winding through it was the river, no longer a torrent but peaceful between grassy banks, with a maze of backwaters forming narrow promontories and islands, all coming together in a small lake at the foot of which we were now standing. A cool breeze was blowing, rippling the water. It was a place to linger, making the programme ahead seem even more unattractive than usual.
The valley was full of magnificent horses, the joint property of the people in the aylaq and some Pathan nomads, still higher up. Now, terrified, they went thundering away in single file, weaving through the maze of channels and up on to the mountain-side, manes streaming in the breeze.
This meadow was succeeded by a second in which the Pathan nomads were camped in black goatskin tents, an altogether fiercer, tougher bunch than the Tajiks and more mobile.
The third and highest had the same beautiful grass, and the same labyrinth of watercourses. At the far end, by the foot of a moraine that poured down into the meadow in a petrified cascade of stone, there was a large rock, covered with orange lichen, which offered some slight shade from the heat of the sun. Here we unloaded our horses. In the chronicles of any well-conducted expedition this would have been called the ‘base camp’.
All through the afternoon we lay close in under the rock, our heads and shoulders in shadow, the rest of our bodies baking in the sun. In the intervals of dozing we studied the mountain through Hugh’s massive telescope, which he normally carried slung in a leather case and which gave him a certain period flavour. From where we were at the foot of the moraine that ended a hundred yards away, it was obvious that there was a lot of what the military call, often with only too great a regard for accuracy, ‘dead ground’ between ourselves and the actual base of the mountain. We were in fact in almost the same position as we had been on the Milestone Buttress: at the ‘start’ but not at the ‘beginning’.
What I could see was awe-inspiring enough. Mir Samir, seen from the west, was a triangle with a sheer face. It was obvious, even to someone as ignorant as I was, that at such an altitude not even the men whose kit reposed in the ‘Everest Room’ back in Caernarvonshire would be able to make much of the western wall. The same objections seemed to apply to a sheer gable-end directly facing us, which we had already christened with that deadly nomenclature that has a death-grip on mountaineers, the North-West Buttress. More possible seemed another more distant ridge of the mountain that appeared to lead to the summit from a more easterly direction.
‘That’s our great hope,’ Hugh said. ‘You can’t see it from here but out of sight under the buttress there’s a glacier running down from a rock wall that joins up with the buttress itself. That’s the west glacier. This moraine comes from it.’ He indicated the labyrinth in front of us. ‘On the other side of the wall is the east glacier under the east ridge. My idea is to get up on the wall and either down on to the east glacier or round the edge of the buttress and up on to the ridge that way. It’s difficult to explain when you can’t see it,’ he added.
‘It’s impossible.’
What I could see was a continuous jagged ridge like a wall running from Mir Samir itself directly across our front and curling round to form the head of the valley.
‘Pesar ha ye Mir Samir, the sons of Mir Samir,’ was how Abdul Rahim picturesquely described the outriders of this formidable rock. He had promised to accompany us to the high part the next morning, though not to climb. Now he started to talk as any squire might of the hunting and shooting.
‘When I was a young man I could run through the snow as fast as an ibex and caught three with my bare hands. The winter, when the snow is deep, is the best; then the partridge and the ibex are driven into the valleys and with dogs and men we can drive them against a rock wall or into the drifts. But now I am old [he was thirty-two] and have grey hairs in my beard and sometimes my heart hurts like a needle. I have been many things. I was two years a soldier and when there was the uprising of the Safis I fought against them.’3
He went on to tell us about his married life. ‘I have had three wives. The first two were barren but the third had three children. They were suffocated because she slept on them each in turn. She is a heavy woman. I would like to take another but they cost 9,000 Afghanis [at the official rate of exchange 50 to the pound about £150 in our money; at the bazaar rate of 150, about £50]. That is in money. In kind, two horses, five cows and forty sheep. After the wedding perhaps three hundred people come for a whole week of feasting. They must be given rice; so you see it is not cheap.’
It was time for the evening prayer and the four men made their devotions, orientated, I thought, rather inaccurately, towards Mecca.
‘I expect Abdul Ghiyas will be saying a few extra ones this evening,’ Hugh said as the ceremony, moving in its simplicity, came to an end. ‘I’ve asked him to come with us as far as the rock wall tomorrow.’
For the first time I noticed that planted in the meadow in front of Abdul Ghiyas where he had been saying his prayers was an ice-axe.
As the sun went down, the wind began to blow, dark clouds formed behind the mountain and the whole west face was bathed in a ghastly yellow light that in the southern oceans would be the presager of a great gale. The heat of the day had rendered the mountain remote, almost unreal; now suddenly the air was bitterly cold and I tried to imagine what it could be like up there on the summit at this moment. We issued the windproof suits. Shir Muhammad rejected his, as did Badar Khan and Abdul Rahim; only Abdul Ghiyas accepted one.
The sun was setting behind the Khawak Pass. At this time I should have been leaving Grosvenor Street after a day under the chandeliers. Instead we were cooking up some rather nasty tinned steak over a fire that was producing more smoke than heat. The smell of burning dung, the moaning of the wind, the restless horses, the thought of Abdul Ghiyas saying his prayers, dedicating his ice-axe, and above all the mountain itself with its summit now covered in swirling black cloud, all combined to remind me that this was Central Asia. I had wanted it and I had got it.
When it was quite dark the noises began.
‘Ibex,’ said Hugh.
‘I think it’s damn great rockfalls.’
‘In the spring a panther took three lambs from this place,’ said Abdul Rahim.
‘Brr.’
We got up at four and huddled grey and drawn over a miserable fire of dung and the miracle root, buta, at this hour not readily combustible, and which never got going. The arrival of two barefooted Pathans, one wearing nothing but a shirt and cotton trousers, the other an ancient tottery man of eighty, a walking rag-bag, did nothing to make us feel warmer. Abdul Ghiyas was a fantastic sight in a rather mucky turban he had slept in all night, a windproof suit in the original war department camouflage and unlaced Italian climbing boots. He no longer looked like a nurse, more like a mad sergeant.
After drinking filthy tea and eating some stewed fruit, we set off, leaving Badar Khan to look after the horses. It would be tedious to enumerate the equipment we took with us; it was much the same as anyone else would have taken in similar circumstances: there was certainly less of it than any other expedition I have ever heard of. Each of us carried about forty pounds, all except Shir Muhammad who had a large white sheet with all the ropes and ironmongery in it slung across his shoulder. In the grey light we looked for all the world as though we were setting off for an exhumation. Even our ice-axes looked more like picks. I wished Hyde-Clarke could have seen us now.
‘I wonder what the Royal Geographical Society would think of this lot?’ said Hugh, as we splashed through some swampy ground in ‘Indian file’.
‘Doesn’t matter what they think, does it? We’re not costing them anything.’
‘They’ve lent us an altimeter.’
‘It’s nice to think they’ve got an interest in the expedition.’
Beyond the meadow that wetted our feet nicely for the rest of the day, we reached the moraine, grey glacial debris up which we picked our way gingerly. Above us the long ridges were already brilliant in the rising sun. We were three quarters of an hour to the head of the moraine. Here we rested. Abdul Ghiyas had a splitting headache brought on by the altitude; his face was ash-grey.
By seven the sun was blinding on the snow peaks. We were off the moraine now and on sticky mud where the torrents spilled over the edge of the plateau. Higher up, in the pockets of earth between the rocks, Abdul Rahim showed us fresh tracks of ibex and wolf. Then, suddenly, there was a terrific fluttering as birds got up in front of us and Abdul Rahim was off, dropping his rucksack, his chapan looped up, running like a stag at over 15,000 feet and disappearing over the edge of the hill.
There was an interval, then he reappeared half a mile away. Originally there had been five birds; now there were only two but he was on the trail of one flying ten yards ahead of him, going towards a lake which it splashed into. Whether he wanted to or not his impetus carried him into the water in a flurry of spray and he scooped the bird up.
Very soon he came loping towards us, the bird under his arm.
‘Kauk i darri,’ ‘I’m going to tame it,’ he said. It was a white snow cock, half grown. It seemed completely unafraid, nestling close to him. It was a remarkable achievement, particularly for one who had only the night before been telling us that he suffered from a weak heart.
Shir Muhammad chose this moment to unsling his sheet full of ironmongery and drop it with a great clang on the stony ground. Like a child out shopping with its mother, bored with the conversation over the baskets, he too was fed-up with standing around at 15,000 feet doing nothing in particular; kauk i darri taken by any means were commonplace to him. His action settled our camping place. It was as suitable as any other.