Escorted by Abdul Motaleb, a Mullah (a surprisingly mild Mullah for the Ramgul where the Mullahs had shown themselves extremely hostile) and his grandson, a boy of ten, we set off through Lustagam and downhill past a burial ground full of rough stones set on end with something like a wooden cot for a gigantic baby in the middle of it. I wanted Hugh to ask Abdul Motaleb whether this was something left over from the old religion, but he breathed hard through his nostrils and preserved a grim silence. He had had a provoking morning and in my heart I sympathized with him.
The Mullah and the boy led the way. The Mullah carried a stone bow and from time to time he shot at a lizard to amuse his grandson, making better shooting than the young men of Pushal.
A couple of miles beyond Lustagam a steep valley entered the Ramgul from the east. It led to the Kulam river, a day’s journey away, which rises somewhere near the head of the Wanasgul in the country of the Kantiwar Katirs.
‘We are not at the moment on good terms with the Kantiwar people,’ said Abdul Motaleb. ‘They claim that the grazing at the head of the valley is theirs.’
Here and all the way down the valley the waters of the Ramgul were tapped off into the surrounding fields in ways that made the feats of irrigation accomplished by the Tajiks of the Panjshir seem comparatively insignificant. In the Ramgul when an irrigation ditch came to a place where cultivated land ended and cliffs began, it was carried round the face of the cliff, sometimes as much as thirty feet above the river, in hollowed-out half tree-trunks supported on stone buttresses, like a viaduct for a model train; while at the far side of the obstacle there were complicated junction boxes with two or three wooden conduits branching off from them.
Beyond Pātchāh, a large village of about forty houses built on a sharp ridge of rocks, the inhabitants crowded the rooftops to watch us go by and then trooped down to follow us.
A little beyond the village, rising straight up out of the fields by the river, we came to an enormous rock – Sang Neveshteh (in the Katir, Pshtreal). On the smooth lower part of it was an indecipherable inscription.
‘It reads thus,’ said the Mullah. ‘In the reign of the great Amir, Abdur Rahman Khan Ghazi, in the year 1313 (in the Christian chronology 1895) the whole of Kafiristan was conquered by him and the inhabitants embraced the true and holy religion of Islam. – Righteousness and virtue have triumphed and untruth has disappeared,’ he added sententiously.
Near it he said there was another inscription. To Hugh and myself, with the sun beating on it, it might have been anything or nothing.
‘What is it written in?’ Hugh asked. He had recovered from the bad start.
‘It is in the Kufic script. It is the inscription the Emperor Timur made when he turned aside to come here on his way to invade Hind, in the year 800’ (A.D. 1398).
Whether Timur Leng, the atrocious Mongol, reached the Ramgul or whether it was one of his generals; whether or not any inscription, other than that of Abdur Rahman, even exists has never, so far as I can discover, been properly verified. Until some qualified person visits the Sang Neveshteh even the existence of the second inscription must remain a matter for conjecture. What is certain is that Timur Leng did invade some parts of Kafiristan from the west. His method of crossing the mountains was so novel and his observations on the character of the Kafirs so interesting that it seems worth referring to it briefly.
In March 1398, according to his autobiography, Malfūzāt-i-Timūrī,1 he appointed a viceroy at Samarqand and, having left a garrison to defend it, ‘I placed my foot in the stirrup at a lucky moment and directed my course towards Hindustan.’
With his army he crossed the Oxus at Termez by a bridge of boats and eventually arrived in Andarab, the next valley to Panjshir. There the people were full of complaint, saying ‘Infidel Kators and the Siyah-Poshes exact tribute and blackmail every year from us and, if we fail in our exact amount, they slay our men and carry our women and children into slavery.’
Determined to punish them, Timur left part of his army with his son, Prince Shah Rukh (the same Prince who loved Herat so much and who built the towers I had so miserably failed to photograph), and crossed the Hindu Kush to a place he calls ‘Paryan’, which has been identified as Parwan (the town at the foot of the Bajgah Pass, near Gulbahar at the south end of the Panjshir where we had begun our journey).2 The other wing of his army had already crossed by the Khawak Pass into Panjshir and Timur says he detached a force of ten thousand3 under Prince Rustam and a General with the delightful name of Burhan Aghlan Jujitar, his chief nobles and sent them eastwards into Kafiristan against the Siah-Posh Kafirs in the north.
After ordering most of the nobles and all the soldiers to leave horses, camels and superfluous baggage at Khawak, he began the crossing of the mountains of ‘Kator’:4 the mountains dividing Panjshir from Kafiristan which we crossed at the Chamar Pass. The conditions were very bad. There was a lot of snow and a hot wind made the going so soft that the army could only move by night when it froze hard. There was no sign of the Kafirs who had all taken refuge in inaccessible caves on the mountain-side, rendering themselves even more invisible by blocking the entrances with snow. Some of the nobles who still had their horses with them, with a stubbornness worthy of a British officer refusing to be parted from his bed roll, were forced to send them back.
From the top of the range there was no way down for the army except by sliding down the slopes of snow and ice on their behinds. Timur himself had a wicker-basket prepared with ropes, each 150 yards long, attached to the corners.
‘Since I undertook this expedition against the infidels,’ he wrote, ‘and had made up my mind to undergo all manner of trouble and fatigue, I took my seat in the basket.’
Across the centuries one can detect the unspoken wish that he hadn’t come. The basket was let down to the fullest extent of the ropes, then a platform was cut in the snow for the basket and the lowering party to stand on. This was repeated five times until Timur got to the bottom.
The valley they were in was probably the Upper Alishang. Soon they arrived at a Kafir fort. It was, of course, deserted; the Kafirs were all on the heights above. The Mongols attacked the heights but the Kafirs held out for three days until offered the choice of perishing or becoming Muslims and reciting the creed; they chose apostasy. Timur appears to have been delighted. He dressed some of them in robes of honour and dismissed them. Such examples of his clemency are rare.
That night the Kafirs put in a heavy attack on his position and a hundred and fifty of them were taken prisoner – all were put to death instantly: it is scarcely to be wondered at.
The following day Timur’s troops attacked from all four sides and destroyed the remnant, men and women, ‘consigning them’, as Timur grimly puts it, ‘to the house of perdition’; using their skulls to build towers on the mountains. He also had an inscription cut recording ‘That I had reached this country in the month of Ramazan, May 1398; that if chance should conduct anyone to this spot he might know it.’
There was no news of the army to the north commanded by Burhan Aghlan Jujitar. He had done badly in a previous engagement and Timur had no faith in his abilities. Now Timur dreamt that his own sword was bent, and took it to be an omen of defeat.
With one of his more junior commanders, Muhammad Azad, he sent 300 Tajiks and 100 Tartars to the Siah-Posh country to find out what had happened. After a dreadful journey Muhammad Azad reached the enemy stronghold, to which Burhan Aghlan Jujitar was supposed to be laying siege, to find that the Siah-Posh had deserted it and that there was no sign of any of his own side.
What had happened was as follows: Burhan Aghlan Jujitar had also found the fortress deserted but he had allowed his army to be lured into a defile, where the Kafirs, waiting in ambush, fell on it. He himself had fled and his troops had been defeated, ‘drinking the sherbet of martyrdom’. Now it was Muhammad Azad with his four hundred who counter-attacked and defeated the Kafirs, getting back all the armour and booty that had been lost.
Timur says he found an easier way out of Kafiristan. In eighteen days he reached the fort at Khawak. Burhan Aghlan Jujitar languished in disgrace, having failed to defeat the Kafirs with ten thousand, but Muhammad Azad, who had succeeded with his four hundred, was honoured.
That Timur was in Alishang seems absolutely certain. There is a strong tradition in the district that he visited it. As short a time ago as 1837, when the indefatigable Masson visited Najil, he wrote:
Their malek, Osman, from his long standing and experience, enjoys a reputation out of his retired valley. He boasts of descent not exactly from Alexander the Great, but from Amir Taimur; and when rallied upon the subject and asked how so diminutive a being can lay claim to so proud an origin replies that he has only to put out one of his eyes, and lame one of his legs, and he would become Taimur himself. The tradition goes that Taimur procured a wife in this country.
As we stood there we were surrounded by the inhabitants of Pātchāh who had followed us down to the rock. Some of the men wore domed skull-caps. With their stone bows and wild air it was not difficult to imagine that Timur himself might appear at any moment.
From now on the country became more lush with many more trees. There were two kinds of mulberry, the ordinary sort and one called shāhtūt, the king mulberry. On one tree that had been grafted with the dark ones, both grew together. The shāhtūt were full of juice and with our troubles forgotten for the time being we hung in the branches of the tree stripping it like monkeys, with the Mullah higher than anyone. Besides the mulberries there were plums; small, soft rather tasteless apples; and a sort of sloe called yakmah.
Soon we overtook a man trotting downhill with a big block of salt on a carrying frame. He took us a quick way by narrow paths through thickly wooded country where watermills whirred merrily and wild raspberries and buttercups grew in little meadow clearings. It was like a summer morning in England, but a long time ago.
At midday we came to Jena Khel, a place with only a few scattered houses where there was a circle of stone seats in an apple orchard, a sort of tribal meeting place.
‘We are now in the district of Raro,’ said the Mullah. ‘This is the place of the Alaqadar of Laghman, the magistrate of this part of the Eastern Province. He is under the orders of the Naib ul Hukumah, the Governor, who is a Pathan.’
Here, watched by hordes of children, some of them with blue eyes and striking faces like Slovenes of the Carso near Trieste, we sat waiting for the horses to come up.
I asked Hugh what we should have for lunch. It was a familiar joke that never lost its savour.
‘I would like cold salmon, cold game pie, two bottles of Alsatian wine, a long French loaf and some fresh butter.’
‘We’ve got cold meat loaf, cold Irish stew, if you can face it, and one of those dreadful jam puddings – the sort with no jam in it – and, if you’re still hungry, some of these apples that have gone to sleep.’ I pointed to the windfalls around us.
We had almost reached the bottom of the last provision box. In one of the compartments there was a sheet of official injunctions intended for the troops. They were printed on leprous yellow paper.
‘THIS IS GOOD FOOD,’ it said. ‘DON’T SPOIL IT,’ and across the bottom in very bold type, ‘DON’T FEED FLIES.’
‘If we’d only dropped some of this pudding on Cassino instead of all those bombs, the Germans would have surrendered,’ said Hugh with his mouth full of dough.
I was glad to see that his interest in food was growing.
As the afternoon advanced the woods were filled with an autumnal light. There were masses of hollyhocks from which rose the humming of countless bees. There were grapes too, as yet unripe, growing on trellises sheltered by the walls of the few houses. For some reason the appalling yellow fly had suddenly vanished. With the re-introduction of wine-making the place would have been a paradise. For us this short hour was one of the most idyllic of the whole journey.
But it soon came to an end and the track began to wind up the mountain-side, higher and higher, and we were once again in the wilderness, struggling across places where the track had been washed away bodily by the storms of the last few days, where what had originally been soft mud had dried out with a jagged rocklike surface. After rounding seventeen bluffs, a journey of perhaps five miles that took several hours, we came to Gadval, the Mullah’s village. Like all the other villages we had passed, it was dramatically sited on a cliff and, as at Pushal, the necessary houses were situated over the streams that ran down through it.
The Mullah’s house was directly above the river with a grassy platform in front of it on which we camped.
In the river below a man was fishing, stripped to the waist. He had a weighted net which he cast into the pools, while a boy with a long pole stood by to clear it if it stuck on the rocks.
‘I didn’t think the Nuristanis ate fish,’ said Hugh.
‘The Kafirs, no; the Nuristanis, yes,’ said the Mullah.
‘It’s a strange thing,’ Hugh said. ‘There are no trout on this side of the Hindu Kush, nowhere south of the main range. Yet all the rivers towards the Oxus have huge trout in them.’
For dinner he made a terribly rich soup from half a dozen different Swiss packets, all of which had burst. By now everything we possessed was squashed flat. Unwisely he insisted on administering it to Abdul Ghiyas who, unlike the rest of us, had not benefited by the departure from Pushal. After eating it Abdul Ghiyas complained that his head was going round. So was mine.
Hugh was upset. ‘I can’t find anything wrong with it.’
As soon as he had finished his helping, which was very large as no one else wanted any, he tucked into a big bowl of mast provided by the Mullah’s household; I groped for Alka Seltzer (one of the few treats we possessed now that we were out of tobacco).
It was dark now. As I scrabbled amongst my possessions for the Alka Seltzer, watched by an audience of grave, elderly gentlemen, Hugh continued to pester me about food.
‘What would you like to eat now.’
‘Nothing. Go away!’
‘All right! I won’t ask you again. Personally,’ he said, ‘I’m starving.’
Much later some hot fish arrived. The name sounded like mahseer or it might have been machhli, the Indian word for fish, but, as it was decapitated, there was no means of telling what it was. It was delicious but I was not equal to it. I toyed with it in a half-hearted way by torchlight until it grew cold and unappetizing.
As we continued downhill the next day the people began to dress differently. They no longer wore the strange uniform of the higher valleys; instead they wore white turbans and thin shalvār trousers, and they had a more civilized air.
By contrast the road became more difficult. Frequently it was blocked by huge boulders and there were places where, when the cliff was sheer to the river, instead of climbing over the top it continued round the edge supported precariously on flimsy wooden galleries.
At such places the horses had to cross and re-cross the river, moving from one island of sand or shingle to another or down the opposite bank where dwarf willows grew. With them went Abdul Ghiyas, Badar Khan and the Mullah (after we had spent the night in his garden he had insisted on accompanying us still farther). Shir Muhammad took no notice of his horse, he continued to follow us down the right bank and left her to follow the others as best she could.
Five hours downstream we came to the junction of the Linar, the valley that leads to the Arayu Pass, the route by which the butter runners make the journey into Panjshir. Half-way across, waist deep in the strong current, with our feet slithering on the round slippery stones, we were overhauled by an oldish man carrying a wooden cage in which there was a fighting cock partridge. Having crossed over himself and put down the cage, he came back to help us over as if we were elderly ladies. He was on his way to match his bird in a fight and showed us the curved spurs it wore. They were like razors.
We had to wait a long time for the horses. They had been forced to climb over a bluff two thousand feet high. When at last they came slithering across the river we saw that Abdul Ghiyas was covered in dust and dirt. He was past speech.
‘His horse fell over a cliff,’ said Badar Khan, ‘and he was on it.’
Abdul Ghiyas at this moment seemed on the point of death. Forced to walk because of the difficult ground he had become a shambling wreck, roasting in his windproof suit. Shir Muhammad was an extraordinary sight too with his cotton trousers looped up to show his bandy legs and feet encased in unlaced climbing boots several sizes too large for him. (I had bequeathed him mine, having decided to finish the journey in gym shoes.)
We descended a steep combe where the undergrowth was shoulder high and entered a childhood paradise, a dim and mysterious place where the track, which wound along the top of a high wall, was completely roofed in by trees and so overgrown with vegetation that we could only feel it underfoot but not see it. With the sun filtering down and everything green and cool it was like being under water.
Then all of a sudden we came out into the sunlight on to a high hill above a village that nestled between humps of lichencovered rock. Far below, the river, now wide and slow-moving, wound between green fields until it entered a lake hemmed in on three sides by mountains. This was Lake Mundul. With the curious rocks in the foreground, the winding river and the mountains hemming it in, it was like a landscape drawing by Leonardo.
Eager to reach the water’s edge we raced down the track towards it.
Once by the river, here a hundred yards wide, we crossed a dyke into a field of short, cropped grass that was full of buttercups. It was like the shores of an estuary where it meets the sea. There was a beach and at the mouth of the river there were sandbanks. Far out in the lake itself where it was shallow two solitary willows grew, and closer in to the shore there were beds of reeds with backwaters winding through them. A cool breeze was blowing down the valley bowing the reeds and ruffling the water.
For the two of us it was a moment of sheer delight that was certain to be ruined as soon as the dozen hangers-on from the village caught up with us. On the far bank Badar Khan and the Mullah were moving downstream with the horses, Abdul Ghiyas having been unequal to the crossing, Shir Muhammad disinclined to make it.
‘Unless that Mullah knows a ford, they’ll have to go back,’ Hugh said. ‘I don’t think there’s a way across.’
Horror of horrors, before we could stop him and without a word of warning the Mullah mounted Shir Muhammad’s horse and with Abdul Ghiyas’s on a leading rein plunged them both into the river and began to swim them across.
So far, whenever the horses had forded a river, they had always had all four feet on the bottom and elaborate precautions were always taken to ensure that only the lower halves of the loads would get wet.
Now we watched in silent agony as everything we possessed, with the exception of what was loaded on Badar Khan’s beast, cameras, films, notebooks, clothing, to say nothing of the flour and the Irish stew sank beneath the water.
At first Hugh was paralysed; then he started bellowing at the Mullah to go back, but it was too late, he was already halfway across. Hugh now turned his attention to Badar Khan, but that prudent man had no intention of crossing a river of unknown depth.
When the Mullah emerged from the river, proud of what he had done and smiling, I thought Hugh was going to strangle him. ‘Go away,’ he croaked in fury. ‘You’re a disgrace. You, a Mullah.’ It seemed dreadful after he had entertained us so hospitably, but it was difficult not to be angry. Only my inadequate command of the language prevented me from joining in. ‘And you too,’ he shouted at the twelve villagers, one of whom it turned out was the headman of Mundul, the village we had just come from. ‘Go away!’
To escape from them in our moment of agony, we hastened through a swamp up to our knees in water and took refuge on a little promontory that stuck out into the lake. Soon we were joined by Abdul Ghiyas and the horses and here we made our camp. Shir Muhammad did not appear. If he had been where he should have been, on the other side of the river with his horse, at least part of the disaster would have been avoided. He lurked somewhere out of sight among the oaks that grew down to the water’s edge, waiting for the storm to blow over.
We were not left in peace for long. Soon the headman detached himself from the little group of villagers who surrounded the Mullah like rugger players shielding one of the team whilst he changed his trousers, and came splashing through the shallows towards us.
‘Go away!’
‘We are coming!’
‘Go away! What can you do? The Mullah has ruined a camera costing twenty thousand Afghanis not to speak of everything else we possess.’
‘We are countrymen,’ answered the headman sturdily, ‘and we shall go where we wish.’
‘You are not Muhammadans!’ This from Abdul Ghiyas who had found the Mullahs in the Ramgul excessively devout, even to his taste.
Before his voice finally gave out Hugh resorted to his favourite weapon. ‘If you don’t leave us alone, I shall speak to General Ubaidullah Khan at Kabul and you will be punished.’
In spite of this threat they all moved up the hillside and descended on us from the rear, where they squatted down a few yards away and grumbled among themselves – all except the wretched Mullah, who was far away at the edge of the dyke, alone in his agony.
This disaster had the curious effect of putting everyone in excellent spirits, so that when Shir Muhammad quietly slipped into the camp as though nothing had happened, he failed to get the rocket he deserved.
Everything was soaked, except one camera, which by extraordinary good fortune had been transferred to Badar Khan’s horse at the last moment. It seemed unlikely that any of the film would survive. All the cartons were full of water and we spent a long time emptying them.
‘What about Badar Khan,’ I said, after we had emptied the final carton and hung our bedding up to dry.
‘Let him wait a bit, and the Mullah. We shall have to make peace with the Mullah eventually, but he deserves to suffer.’
After forgiving the Mullah we undressed and crossed the river on foot. It was up to our necks but the bottom was firm sand and we brought all the gear over in two journeys assisted by two men of the Kulam Katirs, who had come over the mountains by a remote route with a consignment of butter.
All this time Badar Khan sat on the bank, watching our efforts and doing nothing to help. He rode across without even getting his feet wet.
While we were returning to the camp the weather began to change; the wind dropped; black clouds formed over the lake and from high in the mountains came a premonitory rumble. In the woods the pigeons rose in alarm; rooks circled above the trees cawing sadly. Suddenly there were hordes of flies and large fish began to rise in the lake. For the first time since leaving the mountain we erected the tent. The villagers left for home at a steady trot.
After the storm had passed there was furious insect activity. The camp site was like some kind of by-pass; not to be deflected from a predetermined destination hordes of ants tramped remorselessly over us.
Towards evening the weather cleared and we set off to explore the lake towards the south with the headman, who had returned and with whom we also made our peace – poor fellow, he had done nothing wrong.
The part of the lake on which we were camped was about three-quarters of a mile long, then it turned sharply in an S bend and opened out into a stretch of water more than a mile in length and four hundred yards broad. At the far end towards the south there were more mountains at right angles to the valley.
‘Last year because the King (Zaher Shah) wished to come here for fishing and hunting he sent his Mīr-i-Shīkari, his head gamekeeper, to see if it were possible for a party of people to get here. The Mīr-i-Shīkari came with horses by the Kotal Arayu out of Parian but he found the way too difficult for a King.’
‘That’s the way we’re going out, over the Arayu,’ Hugh said. ‘But why doesn’t he come from the south?’
‘Because it is very difficult with horses. From here to the Lower Alingar at Nangarāj is three days through the country of the Pashaie people.’
‘Is it possible to do it in winter?’
The headman slipped his shirt off his shoulders to show a scar a foot long which extended from shoulder to elbow.
‘This happened last year in deep winter when there was much snow. It was a black bear that did it; as big as a Nuristani cow. I went down by the Alingar. I was many days on the road to the hospital at Kabul.’
Just before it grew dark two cormorants came flying up the lake and landed on one of the sandbanks. To us it seemed a remarkable place to find them.
‘I think I shall write a piece for the Royal Central Asian Journal about Lake Mundul and seeing cormorants,’ Hugh said when we were wedged uncomfortably in our tent. ‘Very few Europeans have ever been here.’
‘If you do that somebody is bound to write a chilly letter saying that it’s a very well-known lake and that it isn’t at all remarkable to find cormorants on it.’5
In the night as a result of the storm, the river rose three feet. After an unsuccessful attempt to catch fish with an ugly artificial French fish, which I eventually lost, I spent the rest of the morning on one of the sandbanks. It was the sort of place you see from a train or from a ship and can never visit. In the afternoon I visited a valley that led to the west, a deep gorge between high cliffs, full of boulders. Half a mile up there was a bridge over a torrent leading to some small fields at the foot of one of the cliffs. Hidden away behind the Indian corn there was a tiny hovel, with the exception of the aylaq in the high valley the loneliest house I had seen.
The place seemed deserted. Apart from the humming of insects, there was absolute silence. Inside the house there was no one but the tools belonging to the occupants were leaning against the cliff, a wooden hand plough, a long-handled spade and several hoes. Whoever they were had been threshing; there was chaff everywhere and there were flails lying about, long poles with flexible whips on them. All the time I had the uncanny feeling of being watched.
The next day, the twenty-ninth of July and the twentieth of our journey, we left for the Arayu.
1. The following pages are lifted almost in their entirety from this chronicle to be found in Elliott and Dowson’s History of India, Vol. III, London, 1871.
2. Colonel Gardner’s castello was said to be near Parwan. See Chapter VII
3. The tens of thousands employed in the actual campaign against the Kafirs are almost certainly an Oriental hyperbole and must be taken with a large pinch of salt.
4. Probably by the Darra Hazara.
5. Hugh did write his piece and by an uncanny coincidence this is exactly what did happen.