At the bottom of the third meadow, sitting cross-legged on the thick green grass beside the river, Abdul Rahim was waiting for us. He had already been down to the aylaq and returned, and we wondered what had brought him back to meet us half-way up again. He had been waiting for several hours, news of our failure on the mountain having reached him by the mysterious system of communication, part telegraphy, part telepathy, that operates all over Asia. With him he had brought a loaf of bread for each of us. It had been cooked in butter and was just sufficiently burnt to make it delicious, far better than the awful stodges produced by our drivers.
‘I baked it for you myself,’ he said, and waited politely for us to finish it before telling us what he had come about.
‘There has been an accident. This morning, while it was still dark, Muhammad Nain, my brother’s son, went out from the aylaq with his rifle to shoot marmot. He was high on the mountain waiting in kaminagh [ambush] on a needle of rock. At the fifth hour I heard a shot and looking up saw Mani [this was how Abdul Rahim contracted his name] fall from the top. Like an ibex I ran up the hill and found him lying like a dead man. I carried him on my back to the aylaq. He is badly hurt; I fear that he will die. Only you with your medicine can save him.’
Abdul Rahim had seen Hugh dressing the deep cut on the foreleg of Shir Muhammad’s horse; also the saddle sores which that feckless and brutal man had allowed to develop by neglect. Watching Hugh as he had applied ointment and lint, gently as though to a sick child, he had commented dryly:
‘If Shir Muhammad was ill he would never receive such treatment as his horse does today.’
We set off at a tremendous pace, pains in feet and stomachs forgotten, to catch up with the drivers who were an hour’s march ahead and prevent them going on down the Parian Valley with the medicines. Soon we came to the rock wilderness where Abdul Rahim, who had up to now been travelling barefooted with his shoes slung round his neck, stopped to put them on. I could see no difference in the going, most of the way the track itself had been equally rough. Perhaps like Irish peasants who are reputed to carry their boots to the church door, he sensed that he was nearing civilization.
At this point I was forced to a halt by an overwhelming necessity and the other two pressed on ahead without me. Thence I had to follow the trail of Abdul Rahim’s shoes in the dust. Soled with American motor tyres they left the imprint ‘Town ‘n Country’ in reverse – yrtnuoC n’ nwoT, yrtnuoC n’ nwoT. On and on it went until by repetition it acquired an almost mystic quality, Town ‘n Country, Town ‘n Country, Town ‘n Country, and I became bemused by it like a Buddhist saying om mani padme hum om mani padme hum, as he tonks along the road to the holy places. As a result I lost myself high above the main track at a dead-end fit for ibex only with a descent as difficult as the descent from the glacier had been a few hours before.
I was tired and the track seemed to go down and down for ever; past the defile where we had had such difficulty with the horses on the way up; past nomad tents that had not been there three days previously; past a woman who crouched like a scared rabbit by the side of the track, face averted until I passed; past mountain men, Tajik and Pathan, who clasped my hand silently but in a friendly way; down until I reached the aylaq where I found Hugh with the horses all unloaded and the medicine spread over the path blocking the way.
He was in a filthy temper. ‘Couldn’t find the—medicine chest; had to unload every—horse before I could find it. Never realized we had so many packets of soup in my life. Do you know where it was? In the last box, on the last—one.’
‘Should I have given him morphia?’ he asked anxiously. Hugh’s attitude to medicine was always a little vague, reflected in the curious collection of drugs he had assembled for this journey.
‘What have you done up to now?’
‘Cold compresses, washed the cuts I could get at.’
‘You haven’t told me what’s wrong with him yet.’
‘I’ve seen him,’ Hugh said. He was calmer now. ‘I went with Abdul Rahim. He was lying in one of the bothies under a pile of quilts. It was very dark, difficult to see anything inside and the place was crowded with people. He must be about sixteen; his moustache was just beginning to grow. I could only see his face. It was covered with flies. His nose and his lips were so swollen he looked like a Negro. The women had shaved his scalp; it was all bruised and covered with bloody patches. He was very restless, moving under the quilts and groaning.’
‘Lucky you didn’t give him morphia: he’s probably got concussion. It would have finished him off.’
‘I didn’t. His eyes were sealed up with congealed blood. We washed his head and face. Gradually he managed to open one eye and part of his lips. He groaned a lot. Then everyone began to shake him. “Mani, Mani, can you hear us?” they began to shout but he couldn’t answer. Then the most extraordinary thing happened. The time had come to dress his other wounds. Abdul Rahim pulled the quilt back and uncovered his arms and chest. It was the most devilish thing I have ever seen. The boy had the body of a goat. He was completely encased in a thick black goatskin. It fitted close up under his arms and sticking up above his chest were two grey nipples. I asked Abdul Rahim what was the meaning of it.
‘“When our people are sick,” he said, “we always put them in this goatskin. Its heat draws the poison out of the body and into the skin.”’
It was a strange story. Was Mani’s goatskin a last vestige of the kingdom of the goat-god Pan who, having been driven from the meadows by the sword of Islam, still retained some influence in the sick room of the nomad peoples?
Back in the poplar grove at Kaujan we were too tired to eat much. Abdul Ghiyas and his men cooked the lamb they had bought from the Pathans in the top meadow, boiling it for an hour and a half in a big iron pot with salt, pepper and the fat of the tail until it was ready to eat. The meat was rather tasteless and peppery, but the smell of fat was almost unendurable after such a day. We had been on the go since half past four, climbed to 17,000 feet and had now come down to 9,000. Thinking to please me, for I had kept my views about the tail of ovis aries to myself, Abdul Ghiyas dug into the wooden bowl from which we were eating communally and fished out the most esteemed gobbets of fat which he presented to me. Not daring to hurl them away, I chewed them with grunts of appreciation for some minutes and then, when no one was looking, put them inside my shirt to be disposed of later.
During the night the Lord of the Waters played his joke with the dykes for the second time and once again we were flooded out. I woke to find myself in an attitude of prayer, completely lost, having forgotten which way round I was sleeping.
The next morning we lay around after breakfast but apart from repairing our punctured air-beds and taking pills for bad stomachs we did very little. In the compo. boxes I found several bottles of water-sterilizing tablets and made a solemn vow that I would not drink a drop of water that had not first been treated with them. Sterilizing water is tedious work: from now on, I was a more than usually remarkable sight on the march as I swung my water bottle like an Indian club in an effort to dissolve the tablets, which were as hard as lead shot and far less appetizing. There was another little pill that was supposed to take away the bad taste but sometimes this failed to operate and I was left with an Imperial pint (the contents appropriately enough of my water bottle) of something that reeked of operating theatres.
But it was not until late the following afternoon that we summoned enough energy to set off.
To get to the south side of Mir Samir we had to go right round the base of it. At Kaujan we crossed the river by a wooden bridge. Ahead of us going through the village were a band of Pathan nomads on the way up to their tents, members of the Rustam Khel, a tribe who spend the winter in Laghman, what they call the garmsir (warm place) near Jalalabad, kinsmen of the tented nomads we had met in the Samir Valley.
The eyes of the young men were coloured with madder. Some of them carried sickles made from old motor-car springs. With the tribe there was an old blind woman and when they crossed at the next bridge, a single pole over the river, she went over hanging on to the tail of a donkey.
We were accompanied up the Chamar Valley by a Tajik to whom some strange mutation had given pink eyes and a blond moustache. With this Albino, the Thanador (literally the Keeper of Nothingness) of the Nawak Pass, the keeper of the Pass retained at a salary of 500 Afghanis a year to over-see it, we never got on good terms. He came at his own request, ‘to protect us from brigands’ as he put it. How he was to do this unarmed without recourse to bribery was not clear.
His name was Abdullah, The Slave of God (it was unseemly, as he backfired like an early motor-car all the way up the valley). Shir Muhammad and Badar Khan ragged him unmercifully at the frequent halts he insisted on making at the nomad encampments to eat mast, for he was a greedy man.
‘Look at his face.’
‘Look at his hair.’
‘Look at his eyebrows.’ He had no eyebrows.
‘Like a bastard German.’
‘O, Abdullah, who was your father?’
And so on.
Abdul Ghiyas took little part in these pleasantries. He was in his element. Down by the river the Pathan women, beautiful savage-looking creatures, were washing clothes. Now as Hugh had predicted he vanished into the tents on one pretext or another, ostensibly to gather information, having first warned the laundresses to veil themselves.
The Chamar was a wide glen, more colourful than the Darra Samir, with grass of many different shades of green and full of tall hollyhocks in flower. The nomad tents were everywhere and there were sheep high on the mountains. At seven we rested at a small hamlet of bothies, Dal Liazi. Behind us, above Parian, we could see the way to the Nawak Pass with Orsaqao, the big brown mountain which it crossed, with a serpent of snow wriggling across it.
It was an interrupted journey. At the instigation of Abdullah we had stopped at seven, at eight we stopped again and this time everyone disappeared into the tents for half an hour, leaving Hugh and myself outside with the horses, fuming and sizzling in the heat. But when he wanted to stop at nine, even Abdul Ghiyas protested.
‘O thou German,’ said the drivers.
‘My mother was a Kafir.’
‘Ha!’
Like small boys at prep school, they mocked him. From now on he sulked.
As we climbed, the country became more and more wild, the tents of the Chanzai Pathans, in which the drivers had been assuaging themselves, less frequent. From the rocks on either side marmots whistled at us officiously like ginger-headed referees. Here the horses stopped continuously to eat wormwood, artemisia absinthium, a root for which they had a morbid craving.
After five hours on the road we came to the mouth of a great cloud-filled glen stretching to the west.
‘East glacier,’ said Hugh, ‘we’re nearly there. Pity about the cloud.’
As we stood there peering, it began to lift. Soon we could see most of the north face of the mountain as far as the rock wall, and the summit, a snow-covered cone with what seemed a possible route along the ridge to it. Our spirits rose. ‘If we can only get to the ridge we can make it,’ we said.
With the cloud breaking up and lifting fast, the whole mountain seemed on fire; the cloud swirled like smoke about the lower slopes and drove over the ridge clinging to the pinnacles. From out of the glen came a chill wind and the rumble of falling rock. It was like a battlefield stripped of corpses by Valkyries. In spite of the heat of the valley we shivered.
‘If the south face is no good we can always come back and try here,’ said Hugh. As always he seemed unconscious of the effect he created by such a remark.
Ahead of us in the main valley a waterfall tumbled down over a landslide of rocks; climbing up beside it we rounded the easternmost bastion of the mountain and entered the upper valley of the Chamar.
We felt like dwarfs. On our right the whole southern aspect of Mir Samir revealed itself: the east ridge like a high garden wall topped with broken glass; the snow-covered summit; the glaciers receding far up under the base of the mountain in the summer heat; and below them the moraines, wildernesses of rock pouring down to the first pasture, with the river running through it, a wide shallow stream fed by innumerable rivulets. To the east the mountains rose straight up to a level 17,000 feet, then, rising and falling like a great dipper, encircled the head of the valley, forming the final wall of the south-west glacier where we had made our unsuccessful effort among the ice toadstools on the other side only two days before.
‘On the other side of that,’ said Hugh, pointing to the sheer wall with patches of snow on it to the east, ‘is Nuristan.’
It was a lonely place; the last nomad tents were far down the valley in the meadow below the waterfall. Here there was only one solitary aylaq, a wall of stones built against an overhanging rock and roofed over with turf, the property of the headman of Shahr i Boland, a Tajik village we had passed in Parian on the way to the Chamar. The shepherd was the headman’s son. As we came, more dead than alive with our tongues lolling, to the camping place on a stretch of turf hemmed in by square boulders, he appeared with a bowl of mast, wearing long robes and a skull cap, the image of Alec Guinness disguised as a Cardinal.
It was midday. The light was blinding. To escape it we crawled into clefts in the rocks and lay there in shadow, each at a different level, in our own little boxes, like a chest of drawers.
As soon as he had eaten, the Thanador of the Nawak Pass went off without a word to anyone.
‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘He’s in a huff because they kept calling him a German.’
‘Well, it is rather insulting. I wouldn’t like it myself.’
‘But he was a bore.’
All through the afternoon we rested, moving from rock to rock to escape the sun as it spied us out. Hugh read The Hound of the Baskervilles; I studied a grammar of the Kafir language. Apart from the pamphlets on mountaineering, this was the only serious book the expedition possessed. (Put to other uses our library was disappearing at an alarming rate.) Both of us had already read all John Buchan, who in the circumstances in which we found ourselves had been found wanting, the mock-modesty of his heroes becoming only too apparent, the temptation to transport them in the imagination to the Hindu Kush too great to resist. Remarks something like ‘Though I say it who shouldn’t, I’m a pretty good mountaineer, but this was the hardest graft I ever remember,’ cut very little ice with people in our position about to embark on a similar venture with no qualifications at all.
Notes on the Bashgali (Kāfir) Language, by Colonel J. Davidson of the Indian Staff Corps, Calcutta, 1901, had been assembled by the author after a two-year sojourn in Chitral with the assistance of two Kafirs of the Bashgali tribe and consisted of a grammar of the language and a collection of sentences. I had not shown this book to Hugh. He had been pretty scathing about my attempts to learn Persian, no easy matter in my thirty-sixth year, confronted by Tajiks who at any rate had their own ideas on how it should be spoken.
I had schemed to memorize a number of expressions in the Kafir language and surprise Hugh when we met up with the people, but, in the midst of all our other preoccupations, the book had been lost in one of the innumerable sacks; now with Nuristan just over the mountain, it was discovered in the bottom of the rice sack, where it had been ever since I had visited the market in Kabul.
Reading the 1,744 sentences with their English equivalents, I began to form a disturbing impression of the waking life of the Bashgali Kafirs.
‘Shtal latta wōs bā padrē ū prētt tū nashtontī mrlosh. Do you know what that is?’
It was too late to surprise Hugh with a sudden knowledge of the language.
‘What?’
‘In Bashgali it’s “If you have had diarrhoea many days you will surely die.”’
‘That’s not much use,’ he said. He wanted to get on with Conan Doyle.
‘What about this then? Bilugh âo na pī bilosh. It means, “Don’t drink much water; otherwise you won’t be able to travel.”’
‘I want to get on with my book.’
Wishing that Hyde-Clarke had been there to share my felicity I continued to mouth phrases aloud until Hugh moved away to another rock, unable to concentrate. Some of the opening gambits the Bashgalis allowed themselves in the conversation game were quite shattering. Inī ash ptul p’mich ē manchī mrisht wariā’m. ‘I saw a corpse in a field this morning’, and Tū chi sē biss gur bītī? ‘How long have you had a goitre?’, or even Iā jūk noi bazisnā prēlom. ‘My girl is a bride.’
Even the most casual remarks let drop by this remarkable people had the impact of a sledgehammer. Tū tōtt baglo piltiā. ‘Thy father fell into the river.’ I non angur ai; tū tā duts angur ai. ‘I have nine fingers; you have ten.’ Ōr manchī aiyo; buri aīsh kutt. ‘A dwarf has come to ask for food.’ And Iā chitt bitto tū jārlom, ‘I have an intention to kill you’, to which the reply came pat, Tū bilugh lē bidiwā manchī assish, ‘You are a very kind-hearted man.’
Their country seemed a place where the elements had an almost supernatural fury: Dum allangitī atsitī ī sundī basnâ brā. ‘A gust of wind came and took away all my clothes’, and where nature was implacable and cruel: Zhī marē badist tā wō ayō kakkok damītī gwā. ‘A lammergeier came down from the sky and took off my cock.’ Perhaps it was such misfortunes that had made the inhabitants so petulant: Tū biluk wari walal manchī assish. ‘You are a very jabbering man.’ Tū kai dugā iā ushpē pâ vich: tū pâ vilom. ‘Why do you kick my horse? I will kick you.’ Tū iā dugā oren vich? Tū iā oren vichibâ ō tū jārlam. ‘Why are you pushing me? If you push me I will do for you.’
A race difficult to ingratiate oneself with by small talk: Tō’st kazhīr krui p’ptī tā chuk zhi prots asht? ‘How many black spots are there on your white dog’s back?’ was the friendly inquiry to which came the chilling reply: Iā krũi brobar adr rang azzā: shtring na ass. ‘He is a yellow dog all over, and not spotted.’
Perhaps the best part was the appendix which referred to other books dealing with the Kafir languages. One passage extracted from a book1 by a Russian savant, a M. Terentief, gave a translation of what he said was the Lord’s Prayer in the language of the Bolors or Siah-Posh Kafirs:
Babo vetu osezulvini. Malipatve egobunkvele egamalako. Ubukumkani bako mabuphike. Intando yako mayenzibe. Emkhlya beni, nyengokuba isenziva egulvini. Sipe namglya nye ukutiya kvetu kvemikhla igemikhla. Usikcolele izono zetu, nyengokuba nati siksolela abo basonaio tina. Unga singekisi ekulingveli zusisindise enkokhlakalveni, ngokuba bubobako ubukumkhani namandkhla nobungkvalisa, kude kube igunapakade. Amene.
‘It does not agree with the Waigul or Bashgalī dialect as recorded in any book which I have seen,’ the Colonel wrote rather plaintively. ‘There are no diacritical marks.’
But later in a supplementary appendix he was able to add a dry footnote to the effect that since writing the above a copy of the translation had been submitted by Dr Grierson, the distinguished editor of the Linguistic Survey of India, to Professor Khun of Munich who pronounced that it was an incorrect copy of the version of the Lord’s Prayer in the language of the Amazulla Kaffirs of South Africa.
1. M. A. Terentief, Russia and England in Asia, 1875. Transl. by Dankes, Calcutta, 1876.