I smelled goats’ shit and woodsmoke, and realised that, high on icy glaciers, there are no smells.We’d dropped to 10,000 feet; the air was heavy with oxygen. I walked up a rough grove lined with injured trees, like one entranced. Tiny fields were creeping towards harvest. From deep inside a crop of peas, I heard a woman cough-cough-coughing. A filthy child clambered up a dry-stone wall, and said, ‘Alo Alo Alo Alo.’ Then she stuck out her tongue and flicked it with a forefinger. Sweets? Got any sweets? Then I was through the fields and in the village proper, following a stream up between stone-walled homesteads. A pall of blue woodsmoke rose through holes in their earthen roofs.
The path took me beside the mosque. There was a lamp burning inside, and the murmur of prayers. Through a house window, I saw a candle burning. It lit the wooden stalls where the people slept.
Then I was in a strange little room, one of a group like figures in a Rembrandt; sculpted faces in unlikely headgear, lit by a single oil lantern. I didn’t know why I had climbed the rough ladder and entered this room. Someone had brought me here. Food was being prepared. There were some young men in caps, bandannas, very tattered anoraks. One began a polite conversation about marriage practices, but I was too tired to connect. Did he tell me he was twenty-five, and had three children by his fifteen-year-old wife? He brought servings of goaty dhal, and said the Haji was away on an ibex-hunting trip. In the corners of the room shadows moved. I thought I remembered being here before, on my first visit to Baltistan in 1984. It was the home of the village elder, Haji Mahdi.
Descriptions of Askole have been written by Europeans for a hundred years: ‘A poor village indeed, and certainly one of the dirtiest in Baltistan.’ That was in 1904. It hasn’t changed. The first explorers reached for the same words as I did now: mountain walls, detritus, disintegrating rock, torrents and oases. De Filippi wrote: ‘Few communities are so cut off from the world as this little population of Askole. Before them lies an infinite extent of glaciers, behind them a desert valley, which for eight months of the year is absolutely blocked.’
The walk down from Snow Lake, on the infinite extent of glaciers, had taken three days. The glacier was stable, so at night my two companions and I had pitched the tent, secured it with ice axes, and slept there. There seemed no point in hauling ourselves over the mounds of moraine into the ablatial valleys, for the sake of a scratch of grass. Although the Biafo Glacier was three miles wide, you could see every stone strewn on it, every bird’s bone. The air was as razor clean.We walked, ate the little we had, slept fully clothed: balaclavas, gloves.
Where the crevasses were too wide to jump, we had to walk in wide zigzags to avoid them. The glacier swept on, in its deep silence. I thought: Far in the future, when all is done, the M1 will look like this: a swathe of ice as far as we can see. It will serve us right.
The events of that morning already felt like an age away. We overshot the route off the glacier, and spent hours retracing our steps on the narrow ridges of moraine. We were in the spoil-heap of the world. The air was so clear that distance and light played tricks: greenish slopes that seemed close enough to touch were a day’s walk away. The grass looks pitiful, but the local people bring goats up here to graze. Time was when the Nagari men would race across the Hispar and Braldo Glaciers to raid Askole. I didn’t want to know.What they could do in hours took us days, and still we missed the cairns that showed the way off the glacier and on to the loose mountainside where a path would – inshallah – conduct us over a col and down to the river Braldo. At its snout, the glacier was no longer icy but black under a burden of rubble which it slowly conveyed to the river. These were the rocks which trundled and banged their way downstream. I thought we would never get off that hideous moraine. ‘Askole by night!’ had become our rallying cry, what we said to each other.
We climbed the col and dropped down, by the narrowest path, to the riverside. It was like being readmitted to paradise. It was a desert. From ice to desert in one day. A lizard on a hot rock, a dog-rose bush, a bird, were like miracles. The Braldo river, a grey mess of glacier-melt, roared in its channel below. In the future, the strange glacial forms, its pillars and wind-sculpted plinths would figure in my dreams; but for now, I wanted only to reach the village.
The path was but a beaten way between rocks. It dropped through a steep nullah and I stopped to drink and wash and just throw water about in sheer exhausted exuberance. The sun caught the water-drops and sparkled them. The path rose through boulder-strewn plateaux. Around the next bend I’d see Askole … the next … the next …
I walked on.We straggled out, Paul and Janet and I, glad to be out of danger and off the ice, glad to be at a lower altitude, and able to walk alone. On the glacier, we hadn’t dared stray more than a couple of yards from each other. Once or twice we even tied ourselves together with a rope.
Often now I rested my pack against a boulder at the side of the path, then carried on a diminishing number of yards. I was very tired. Every bend, I thought I’d see the village, its fields and trees, but every bend revealed new obstacles. Now the path stopped at the foot of a buttress of rock. High above, where the rock was sheer there jutted out man-made galleries of flat stones and thin tree trunks. They looked as if they’d grown by themselves like fungus on a tree. I began to climb the polished route, was conducted around the bluff, high above the river, and gingerly down the other side.Now lowering sun was shining straight into my eyes. When I turned to look back at the tower I’d just descended, the word ‘rookery’ came into my head.
I was so tired – past tired now – that strange images and dreamlike notions floated into my mind, but dissolved again, like snow on water. I kept on through the boulder-fields, boulders the size of cars. Up and down nullahs. Far away, on the opposite side of the impassable river, there was a smear of coarse pasture. By now I could walk only a few yards at a time. Surely, around the next bend I’d see Askole.
In the middle of a boulder-field was a short stone wall. It divided nothing from nothing. Cut into the wall was a gateway of such simplicity it was almost holy, two uprights and a crossbeam of untreated wood, just trunks of slender trees. Then, round the next bend, I was there. Eden, tucked in among the mountains. Tiny terraces and water-ways and poplar trees, the sudden colours, and earthy smells, a woman in a field of peas, coughing.
It was very dark when the others arrived.Where there is no electricity, the people go to bed at nightfall. It might have been 8 p.m., but it felt like midnight. Another European, too tall for the door, dipped his head and entered. He wore a bush hat with a scarf tied round it.His clothes had once been pale, but now took the hue of Askole dust. He was speaking in Balti. When a snarling dogfight broke out in the yard outside, he too could join in the laughing and swearing. He said his name was Ken, a Canadian. He was an anthropologist. He had been here this summer and last. This sounded so interesting, but I couldn’t think for fatigue.When I asked Ken if the food we had received was a gift, or should we offer to pay, he raised both hands and intoned, ‘I am here to observe, not interfere.’ I took that, and what I recalled of the Haji’s business ventures, to mean ‘pay’.
Later, I lay beside the others, in a sleeping bag, in the schoolyard-cum-camp site, far too tired to sleep. In my mind, the stars, which were shining brightly, got confused with the schoolyard where I lay. I thought of the stars as children, tumbling out into the playground. I tried to think of new names for the old constellations: the smoothing iron; the Volvo. Still sleep would not come, but instead two village dogs. I pulled an ice axe close.
I must have dozed, because in the dead of the dark night, when the village turned in on itself and coughed, someone was abroad. He had a strong torch and was shining it full in my face. It penetrated my sleep, and I swam back to consciousness alarmed and ready to yell – what the hell was going on, who was shining that thing in my eyes? But I woke to realise I was challenging the moon.
Because it was summertime no boys came to the earth-walled classroom at the bottom of the yard. The yard was much bigger than before; a bigger camping space. I think that was when I began to feel uneasy, when I saw the little camping yard had expanded three times. Not a blade of grass grew from its packed earth. All this I noted from my sleeping bag, which I couldn’t bear to leave. I tried to find the exact word to describe the way my feet felt. Cambozola. That did it. Now I wanted food. Cheese, fruit, fresh green vegetables. Toast, butter and marmalade. In Skardu, at least there would be egg and chips. But though Paul and Janet were pressing on to Skardu, I opted to stay just for a day or two. Unlike them I had no job, no particular place to go. Later, I walked with them to the edge of the village, along the little earth path between the terraces, and there bid them farewell, watching for a while till they disappeared round the next bluff, then I went back to the village.
Under the single tree in the middle of the schoolyard was a sagging khaki tent.Written on its side was POLice-POST, ASKOLi. In a corner where two mud and stone walls met, a little fire burned. The policeman was preparing his breakfast.
A village man climbed the stile into the yard.He wore layers of ragged clothing and an old cap. His face was wizened, his teeth were small and brown. He held one of our tin plates; a dog had stolen it. ‘Doctor?’ he said. He pointed to his foot, in its little toeless rubber boot. Another man was already climbing the stile, with a lacklustre girl in his arms.
‘Doctor, no?’
None the less, the first in this pathetic queue hunkered down in the dust and began to unwind from his grimy ankle a collection of rags, polythene and leaves, to reveal some open sores. Then came the little dull-eyed baby, in her anxious father’s arms, and a boy whose wounded foot had been treated with the traditional poultice of fresh dung. On the house-roofs, and washing in the stream, were blind old women with goitres at their throats, and I knew that within the homes, with the chickens and the smoke, were those with leprosy and cerebral palsy, who do not come outdoors.
A couple of handsome girls in full Askole attire walked up the lane with spades over their shoulders. They stuck out their tongues and flicked them lasciviously. Give us a sweet! Go on! The man with the bad foot threw his old pus-stained bandage into the stream the people drink from, and grinned.
In the summer, when the paths are open, the Western trekkers come, like another bright summer crop, and the village men go for porters. Askole is the last village on the Braldo Gorge, before the mountains. The Baltoro Glacier, the long Biafo-Hispar system leading west to Hunza, K2, Broad Peak, The Gasherbrums. Trekking groups and mountaineering expeditions pass through the little village, sometimes stopping to erect their tents in the schoolyard and buy a goat for the porters to eat. At dawn, they leave again, the porters dwarfed under the weight of their loads, their legs like rope. Village economies have shifted from subsistence to cash. They make money, but people get tense. I remember seeing a latter-day Italian photographer, some eighty years after de Filippi, being pelted with rocks for photographing women unawares; for jumping on to the flat roofs of the houses and photographing women. The rumour is that the women get it bad, especially down at Chilas, on Nanga Parbat side. The expeditions bring porters from other villages. The men get wary of these off-comers eyeing up their women, and the women are prevailed upon to stay even more out of sight, across the too-short summer.
The village is like a three-dimensional snakes and ladders. Little tight lanes wiggle like snakes between the dry-stone walls. This is the animal layer. Goats look out from windows like gossiping neighbours. So they keep warm the people in the layer above, who reach their homes by ladder. The summers are spent out on the roofs, looking at the mountains, the villages on the other bank of the river, the yellowing terraces. There are summer bedrooms, and piles of drying fodder. The whole village can communicate by means of its roofs, and ladders.
It was strange to be alone. I walked the quarter-mile uphill to where a wall topped with a tangle of briars marked the border of the village. On this side of the wall were grasses and wild flowers, butterflies and dragonflies. There was a copse of trees where the stream entered the village lands in a sparkling sheen. One could worship this laughing water. It is the font of life.
Outwith the wall is a blank face of rock which grew to tower above the village at its feet. It was glorious to wash in the fresh spring water, but I didn’t stay long, because I felt uncomfortable, odd and displaced without the others, yet to grow back into my own skin. It must be how Rashida and Jamila feel on the rare occasions they are alone. From several fields away a man waved to me, cheerfully. He was working with a spade to maintain the irrigation channels. I took care to stand on no crops, but to follow the tiny paths as best I could between the little terraces, stepping from one to the next, following where they led. There were peas growing, fodder choked with wild flowers. Butterflies and bees. In some fields the irrigation stream was running, in others it had been recently diverted and the path was fresh mud. I didn’t feel comfortable wandering between the fields. I felt I was being watched, and rightly: they weren’t mine to wander in.
In the middle of the day a party of Americans arrived and began to pitch tents. They chose to sleep not in the camp site but in another place, where the village petered out into desert. In the camp site they had their cook and guide erect a mess-tent, and there appeared picnic chairs, stoves, kettles, eggs, fruit. They had tarpaulin, polythene: hard currency in the villages. A small and wondering crowd gathered – of boys and ragged men with babes in arms, and a miller’s boy floury from head to toe.
In the evening Ken came over. ‘Do you know who pitched those tents?’ he asked. ‘They’re in the graveyard. The people are upset, eh? This is the camp site here. They’re trying to contain the problem, provide a camp site, and what do they get? Tents in the cemetery.’
Ken lit a cigarette, and sat beside me. A village man leaned over the wall and made some raucous comment. The people had taken to Ken. So the trekkers were a problem to be contained?
‘What do the people think of Westerners?’ I asked.
Ken laughed a hollow laugh. ‘That’s been kinda fun, watching the interaction. Let’s just say there’s misunderstandings on both sides. I’m picking up the language. I learned some when I was here last year. I’m looking at Indigenous Risk Management. I’m looking at these people’s strategies for reducing risks. Every risk, from inbreeding to crop disease.’
As you enter the villages little boys try to sell you a small embroidered pouch, a glorified version of those they wear round their own necks. It is a talisman against evil. They clutch their throats, roll their eyes, fall writhing to the ground, pick up a stone and play at avalanches: a pretty good mime of the awful things that can befall a traveller. For immunity from these dangers, they offer this nicely embroidered talisman. Five rupees. I guess that’s what we think of as Askole Risk Management, at a glance.
Ken needed litle prompting. His own relationship with the trekkers was as uneasy as the villagers’. They brought company, news, a drop to smoke or drink, and at times some decent food.
‘There are three hundred souls in Askole. Four extended families,’ Ken said. ‘One of the families is an off-comer, they’ve only been here a couple of centuries. Their name has some connotation of mental deficiency. They might be right. It’s taboo to marry within the village, you know that?’
Ken said the village was older than the people themselves believed. ‘The Haji says it’s only three hundred years old, but it was mentioned in some Persian manuscript in 1450.’
When the sun began to dip behind the mountains, making pink billowy veils out of the clouds, the mountaintips turned gold. It was inexpressibly beautiful. That sort of optical illusion was happening again. It was paradise until you screwed up your eyes and saw it as a filthy collection of disease-ridden hovels. Ken waved his hand towards the fields, the hundreds of tiny terraced fields. ‘For weeks I was trying to get to understand who owned what. It’s all to do with the question. You’ve got to ask the right questions, the very word. The exact word.’
‘How collective is it?’
‘Not as much as it used to be. I wanted to know how the fields are divided between the families, good fields and bad. How the risk of bad yields is managed. But could I get the word? I just couldn’t trigger it. It was as if no one wanted to tell me. Weeks and weeks I tried. Then the other day I was walking up the fields with this guy, and suddenly he started to tell me. Just like that.’
I had a sudden image of the irrigation systems: how by the simple lifting of one critical stone, the right question, the streams begin to gurgle and flow, splashing from one growing field to the next and the next.
‘And crop disease. How they control that. Diseases are variety-specific, yeah? So to avoid total blight they plant three varieties. Three kinds of peas, for example. The overall yield is less, but if there is a disease, you don’t lose the whole lot. It’s rationale. There’s such a rationale. That’s the thing with development agencies, they come up here and say: You can improve your yield by doing this or that. Get them to plant this strain of wheat or that. They just don’t appreciate the rationale. These people have survived here for centuries. They’ve got to know something.’ Ken’s voice veered between a laconic North American, through excitement, to a sense of urgency.
‘How many fields are there?’
‘I tried counting. I’m mapping them all. But I’ll tell you this: each one has its name. Every one of the tiny fields has its name. And the names are so old, no one knows where they came from or what they mean.’
In the soft evening light, the harsh shadows had gone and one could look about in comfort. Many Askole people have closed-up squinting eyes from so much sun, and the smoke. But in the evening it was beautiful. A goat bleated; the clouds turned mauve, the peaks golden above the darkening valley, and I felt as if Ken was describing a poem. Ancient names and exactitude. Rationale and the precise word, as if the village were as tightly managed as a beautiful poem, so well crafted you could not see the joins, so assumed, wrongly, that there were none, that it was all a happy accident.
People came in from the fields for their evening meal. The Americans camped in the graveyard sat at their table beneath some trees. Ken was going to override the ‘observe, don’t interfere’ principle and have a polite word. ‘Might get supper, too,’ he said.
In the morning he called over the schoolyard wall: ‘Come with me, I’ll show you a photograph.’
He led me to the place we’d eaten the first night. Women looked down from their rooftops as we passed below, bones and dung crunching under our feet in the narrow lanes. Though the men had taken the shalwar-kameez, the women kept traditional homespun tunics and hats. Balti people are of Tibetan descent; they came as nomads in the ninth century, and no doubt they brought their costumes with them. The women wear their hair in many tiny plaits, the way Tibetan women still do, but the Askole hat is a wonder. All that glisters is attached to the upturned peak: shells, date stones, broken zips, buttons, foreign coins are all arranged pleasingly and sewn on. Their tunics too. We stood aside for two women with creels of fodder on their backs. One had a resplendent display of ring-pulls stitched to her shirt. Her companion wore a deep beaded necklace over her tunic. They smelled of woodsmoke. In Askole, there was none of the coy turning away of the purdah-observing women. Maybe they are too much with the beasts and the seasons.Without their work in the fields, the village would surely starve. As she passed, the first woman looked at me, then Ken, and made some raucous remark that needed no translation. A clove of garlic dangled from her hat.
‘I like to think they’re reluctant Muslims,’ Ken said. ‘Do you know, they smashed their musical instruments, fifteen years ago. It was a collective decision, but the Mullah had a lot to do with it.’
I told Ken about the last occasion I was here, six years ago. It was the end of Ramadan, and the end of the fast and the heralding of the Eid would occur at the sight of the new moon. It was a cloudy night, not the best for watching the skies. The village schoolmaster stuck his radio to his ear to hear the official confirmation, the way we mistrust our own watches at Hogmanay and feel we must watch Big Ben on TV. But I remembered seeing some village men, hunkered on a mound, looking up at the sky. And when it came, they greeted the sight of the moon with an eldritch cry, like wolves, a howling and baying like wolves. It made my hair stand on end. Then in the morning, to break the fast, the Haji brought us a dish of sweet noodles.
‘They’re very hospitable people.’
‘Overburdened?’
‘Totally overburdened.’
I tried to imagine the reaction if a bunch of Baltis turned up in an English village, pitched camp in the graveyard, wandered around the village peering into folks’ houses, making comments in some weird tongue. At Christmas, to boot. The poison chalice, because rumour was they could cure your ailing children, and give you rope, clothing, batteries. The Mullah probably didn’t like them, but did they like the Mullah?
We reached the house. ‘A bit more stucco on the wall and it would be a Mexican café,’ said Ken. ‘You want any cheese?’ Here the village headman kept a shop. He dealt in mountaineers’ requisites, buying from one trip and selling to another. In the spare room were extraordinary things: tins of sauerkraut, packets of chocolate mousse, the flotsam left by a retreating tide of trekkers. I was glad to buy a tin of Swiss cheese, and wait in the gloom as Ken disappeared into his lodging and fetched the photograph.
I looked at it by the light of a little stained-glass window. It showed Askole: a few flat-roofed buildings, some trees, and the omnipresent mountains.
‘Taken in 1909.’
‘Nothing’s changed.’
‘Everything. That’s the point. It’s not there now. The whole village has shifted. See the hills? I went to the exact place he must have taken this picture. I could line up the mountains in the background, yeah? These buildings are gone. It’s all gone.’
I couldn’t explain why that was so strange, and interesting. Why Ken felt it too.
‘Are you going to stay here all winter? Down among the animals, four foot of snow on the roof?’
‘Hell, no, hey, I like my car and my computer, you know?’
Ken told me a strange story. He wanted to look at conceptual and perceptual differences. To explain, he pointed to the mountain on the other side of the river which dominates the little village at its feet. ‘One day I saw a strange star thing there.We all saw it, all the village. It was just hanging there. And then it moved, that way, fast. The people were asking me what it was, but hell, I was as freaked as they were. But we got talking about stars, and I started to talk about the solar system and all. What did I get? Blank stares. It’s not ignorance. They perceive things different. I want to find out how.’
A new respect for the villagers was growing on me. Before I’d felt for them a wonder that they survived at all in the most inhospitable of places, but now I was learning how tightly screwed down it all was, how managed. Every tree, Ken said, was spoken for, every shrub and bush belonged to someone. The stream of trekkers and climbers and porters and all was a problem to be contained. And one of the problems with the trekking parties and the expeditions was that they were far too big, far too much of a burden. The incoming porters, hundreds of them, cut the villagers’ trees for firewood, even if the Western boss tried to stop them. And people preferred to go behind rocks rather than use the village latrines. And they camped in the cemetery.
The old men, and a few of the young ones, were sitting in the shade of the mosque. It was a crèche. They held the babies in their laps while the women worked the fields. The babies were grubby and wore little canvas helmets. The old men were making rope from goats’ wool. In the villages, the simpletons are given work. Often they wander the lanes, spinning with a distaff. Grinning and spinning, spinning and grinning. A cloud of grey wool foamed at the feet of the men at the mosque. Backwards down the lane the spinners walked, beside the stream. Chickens fluttered under their feet. They held weighted handles, like football rattles or prayer-wheels, with an end of the wool attached. As they swung the handle, the wool twisted tight into rope. Every other year they replace the bridge across the Braldo, which connects Askole with the village on the other bank. It’s a swooping affair, made of twisted twigs. Three cables of twigs: one to walk on, one on either side to cling to. The whole tips to one side when you put your weight on it, and the thrashing river below upsets your stomach and your mind. If you fall off, you are dead. Therefore you stay on, and shake for the rest of the day.
That evening the Askole policeman emerged from his tent, stretched, scratched and shambled towards us. The Americans had a guide, a big bearded man from Hunza. He’d packed his charges off to bed and sat with us. The policeman came in plastic flip-flops, a notebook in his right hand and a fag in his left. He had two days of stubble on his chin and a striped waistcoat over his shalwar-kameez. He looked like the air-raid warden in ‘Dad’s Army’.He addressed us all, threw back his head and began a great long story of complaint. With his cigarette he pointed north, the notebook he waved towards the south. The story wandered east and west, arrived home, and began again. Anwar the guide understood it.He spoke Burushaski, the Askole people Balti, and between them, Urdu. Anwar made conciliatory noises, and nodded a lot, and tried to interrupt. The complaint was about people who go where they are not supposed to go. Who wander up the Baltoro Glacier without permission, without the required permit to enter militarily sensitive areas, who dodge him, the policeman, and get him into all sorts of hot water. At length he shambled back to his tent and Anwar spat. ‘Police! What do they do? They disturb the people and take their money.’
‘Why do they take their money?’
‘Because they are Muslim! Muslim! All they want is money.’He gave a sly look. ‘You like Benazir?’
He must have got the right answer because he stood to check his people were asleep, then said, ‘Come on, we have coffee, melon, biscuits …’
The cook lay sleeping in the mess-tent and woke rubbing his eyes as Anwar stood the kettle on the stove. Anwar looked about his makeshift kitchen and said with pride, ‘Now I am guide! Before, printing works.’ He chopped melon into little tin bowls. It was unspeakably pukka. I understood the wonderment of the villagers.Melons! Coffee! Efficient gas stoves!
‘I like foreigners. I would like to marry with European. Is possible? My one friends is marry with German girl. I like European girls. They are in smiling condition. You are marry? Boyfriend? Childrens, no childrens?’
‘Would you like to go to Europe?’
He nodded his great bear head. ‘But I am only son. You understand? My parents … I cannot go.’
It occurred to me that Anwar and Ken were like each other. Both worked in other cultures which threatened – promised – to absorb them utterly. Ken would have no problem readjusting to his car and his computer, but Anwar …?
‘In Pakistan it is difficult to get a girlfriend. So I no married. My parents say:Why you no marry with her, with her? But I say no.’
‘Why?’
He shrugged. They were simple village girls, but he was no longer a simple village lad.
‘I have someone, but she is lost. Married, you know. Gone USA. In Pakistan, for one night only is possible to get a girlfriend. Pay some money for a girlfriend, you know? No good. But you know what I think? I think sex is part of life.’
He cocked his head. I felt sorry for him, a man between two cultures, two consciousnesses.
‘You sleep lone?’ he said.
‘Lone.’
I slept lone, thinking of all the things Ken had told me. Things before Islam. Of the winter tales, sagas of old Tibetan kings the people recite in the dark cold nights; of the suppressed mythology; of the one old man in the village with it all in his head; the smashing of the instruments, and the fairy culture that persists, especially in the high pastures, and the jinn – the jinni-mother who came to the village with her feet on backwards, who covered her baby in earth and vanished it. And that was only a generation ago; they could just about remember.
A dog in the village barked. I turned to sleep.With my ear to the ground I could hear the river-roar vibrating through the earth, resonant and deep.
I took some mail out for Ken, and left him in his village. In autumn he would leave for Ontario, and the people would prepare for winter. By then the day would have come when it would all be too late. The costumes, the rationale, the jinn. Ken seemed resigned. ‘I’ll be sad to see them go,’ he said, and laughed. ‘I was born in the wrong century.’ In another month, the little community of Askole would no longer be so utterly cut off. The road-builders would have arrived.
The next was a fragile and delicate morning. Though it was still summer, the rosehips would soon turn a burning red. I walked out to the edge of the village by the little track which crosses the cemetery, where square graves are marked with white stones. Then, beyond the fields, there’s a copse of bushes and trees. There are enchanting flour mills, fairy-tale stuff.Wooden gutters conducted the water from a stream on to the flat wheel that drives the creaking machinery. Once I lifted the latch of the little wooden door and peeked inside. It smelled of flour and earth, and a shaft of sunlight fell through the tiny window, and the flour-dust danced in its light. The rhythmic creaking and turning had worked magic on the miller, who lay asleep on a pile of sacks, flour in his hair and beard and ragged clothing.
There were two other walkers this morning, coming upriver. One wore a pink shalwar-kameez and a fine astrakhan hat. Teachers, they were, coming to begin term. It was just that sort of day, the end of the holidays. The teacher would climb the stile into the village; the holidays would be over.
So I reached the stream that led to Chakpo, another shitty little Eden full of thin hens and flat-roofed houses. There was a shout, and I turned to see an old man running behind, making gestures with his hands as if he was opening a book. I thought of the policeman and his book, and groaned. Was I supposed to sign something? He shouted again. There was a thick low wall just a few feet long; I waited for him to catch up. It was nothing to do with books, it was his hands.
‘Doc-tor?’ he said.
His barrel chest rattled as he breathed.He opened his hands as if in supplication; they were in a sorry and useless state. Once the skin had been as thick as the sole of a boot, and as dry; now it had fissured and split and peeled from the quick in strips, like old wallpaper. The flesh beneath wept pinkly. I thought at first it was rope burn, but he said not. A little inadequate handcream was all I could do. He wasn’t impressed. He’d run for a mile to catch up, with his heart full of hope, and now he sat on the wall and looked unhappily at his useless hands.
Ken had said ‘the villagers don’t believe in hot water’. That means they don’t come to the hot springs above the village. They don’t strip and lie luxuriating in the hot smelly pools. They never gasp with shock and delight, after a hot day’s labour. Or feel themselves buoyant, having walked for days.What a treat they miss! I wonder why.
For a hundred yards around the springs the turf and stones are crunchy with crystals, and at the pool itself there are bits of clothing and rags, dropped and turning to stone. On the air is a whiff of sulphur. The pools are on a slope and you may lie there, as if in a jacuzzi, gazing out at the snowcapped mountains and the clouds passing in a blue sky. Cleopatra, eat your heart out. Was it she who bathed in milk? A yellowish spillage has seeped and hardened on the hillside in front of the pools, more eggy than milky, but the story goes that in the old days this was a land of giants and this, a giant’s palace. But an earthquake shook it down, and turned everything to milk. You can see strange forms poking through the milky deposit. Earthquakes, giants, hot springs, and jinn. The old man I’d just turned away – was he the one with it all in his head, rags on his back and his mind full of giants and jinn? His head full of lore and rationale, and his hands turning useless in front of him?
This village sits upon a ledge overlooking the river. There’s a steep mud-bank down to the water’s edge. The water is a filthy grey mess of glacier-melt, gravel and mud. Two girls with creels on their backs were looking down as if over a precipice from which they might just fall.
The girls were watching the old bridge across the Braldo, which is a crate dangling on a pulley wheel. It was still there, but beside it a team of labourers were at work, building plinths to take the steel ropes of the suspension bridge that will carry the jeeps to Askole. The girls who watched had undoubtedly never seen a vehicle, or a light bulb. Road is coming! There was already a queue at the wire bridge. An old man sat like an oracle on the rock the wire was wrapped round.He wore an orange balaclava and sucked a cigarette through cupped hands. He had a ghee tin full of black grease and a paintbrush. Every time the crate swung back across the river to him and its passenger clambered out, he assumed a very serious expression and dabbed the pulley wheel with grease.
The bridge was here because at this point the river narrowed and the span was not so great – it’s hard to say, maybe 200 feet. The river’s wrath was up, though, at being forced through this bottleneck, and at its edge you could be splashed by waves as if at the sea. A land of giants indeed.We were dwarfed even by the river-banks. Two by two people were ferried across in the dangling crate, until they joined the group of tiny figures on the other side. I’d heard a story, maybe apocryphal, of a French expedition who were there for ten days, conveying their thousand porters and equipment. A thousand porters. Ten days.
The box swung in and, madly, I thought of the sweet chariot in the song, coming for to carry me home. One of the floor planks was missing. I told myself it was like going to the shows – think of the fair, the Ferris wheel – and clambered in. To counterbalance me, a man piled in too and we hunkered together with our knees at our chins as the box was swung out over the dizzying river. Two men on the far side began to heave the rope, and the pulley wheel jerked out over the water. Once we were clear of the banks, a freezing updraught blew and we could hardly hear ourselves speak above the roar.
‘I AM ENGINEER!’ the man shouted. I could tell by his clothes and compexion that he was a downsider. He wasn’t gnarled and his teeth were white and whole.
‘FROM LAHORE WE ARE BUILDING THIS BRIDGE IT IS THE LAST BRIDGE.’
The last bridge on the last valley in Baltistan.
‘ONE MONTH ONLY!’
I began to enjoy the ride on the last bridge. I had faith in the steel cable and the crate, and the strong men on the bank heaving away on the rope. We swung into land, and many leathery hands held the box steady as the engineer and I climbed out. The men around us laughed a lot and smelled strongly of goats. Here, on this side, the jeep track was already laid out. It had brought the bridge-engineers and their equipment. All that was missing was the last bridge.
I could see the old track, the precipitous narrow path that swooped like a bird across the faces of the mountains, which had served for centuries. I could remember walking to Askole by that way in fear and wonder six years ago, with the smell of wild thyme catching in my dry throat. I remembered the terrible heat, the dust and rocks you had to cling to with both hands. Three days it had taken to reach Askole; I thought it the most extraordinary place on earth. I thought at once of Skara Brae on Orkney, the prehistoric village.We had walked in from the then roadhead, at the top of the Shigar valley, where the gorge narrows. It was like walking into a funnel, upriver.
Now the road was coming, would the old path fall into disrepair? Fall out of people’s memories, become a thing the old ones remembered, like jinn-mothers. Like how to play a pipe or drum. Like how to build a home-made bridge out of twisted twigs. I remembered Ken’s unsentimental maxim: Observe, not interfere. But: if any youngsters remained in the village, after the road came to take them away, would they be told about the days before the road? Before the road, the hotel, before the electricity came and people stayed up at night. Before the girls’ school, and the clinic?
I sat at the edge of the raw new road, looking across the river at the old path. I was beginning to torture myself about this business of implication. Don’t interfere. Of course we interfered. Why were they building the last bridge, if not to bring the tourists in, in jeeps? Was it built for my betterment? No!
Janet had joked that one day, Balti women would have jobs driving tourists in jeeps to K2 base camp. But Ken retorted that we’d be able to beam ourselves around, like on Star Trek, before that day came. But Askole was on the brink of the biggest change. Had I done this? Had we all done this? And was it good? If you got the trekkers out of the graveyard and into a nice little hotel, and a regular shipment of kerosene, so the trees went undamaged, wouldn’t it be the last word in problem-containment? I had a sudden mad image – of a trekker in full flashy gear, the kind of gear we think it necessary to wear in a land where the folks subsist in rags, climbing over the village stile, hand in hand with a black-swathed mullah. Here we are, we have arrived.
Now it was a short walk to Hoto, where the new road had already arrived. There, a scabby-faced lad was selling cardboard cartons of fruit juice, aggressively, from a wooden kiosk. The stumps of the trees felled to make the kiosk were still raw. The ground was already littered with cartons.
‘Doctor?’ he said, pointing to the sores. And what was I to do, wag my finger in his scabby face and tell him he shouldn’t cut down trees to make shops, shouldn’t litter his yard with used cartons, shouldn’t harass people, shouldn’t … shouldn’t …? Because, despite myself, I bought some juice.
Four military porters passed, noticeably better dressed than other village men. They had fine moustaches, the coveted tracksuit bottoms, warm jumpers. In the afternoon, two army helicopters unzipped the sky. And I remembered it wasn’t just the tourists who brought roads and opened up remote areas. There was a war on, the Kashmir face-off, up at the Siachen Glacier. There, it was said, more men died of frostbite than of enemy fire. They said a yak-track had been constructed up the Baltoro Glacier, for the army. They said there was a Pakistani woman up at Gasherbrum base camp. They said, ‘It is very change.’
There seemed little point in hanging around. An engineer’s jeep was leaving for Skardu, and I got on. For hours and hours we drove down bluffs and rock, round switchbacks.We could see on the other side the villages where the men were less than pleased about the road. If you could drive to Askole, their services as porters would no longer be required. They would be thrown back on their tiny fields and herds of goats. And without the expeditions, the trekkers and the military, there would have been little portering in the first place. For a century it’s been part of their lives; for the last twenty years, their mainstay.
The jeep passed gangs of navvies, with flat dishes of rubble on their heads, and officious-looking gaffers with hennaed beards. Down the track, in the miserable village of Apolygon, there was a crate of Coca-Cola cooling in the irrigation stream.
I can claim the uncertain honour of being one of the first people to have travelled from Askole to Skardu in a single day. I can’t claim to have done it in style, but lying on the back of the jolting jeep. This was culture shock. The glaciers were far away; instead there were smells of the town in the smoky darkness; fumes, and fairy lights. There was a grainy TV in the hotel, showing loud reruns of the World Cup, and adverts for cigarettes and soap. To be in a room with harsh electric lights was so uncomfortable I had to go and stand out on the roof, under the stars. The walls of Skardu were daubed with signs of dubious welcome. Down with Israel! Down with USA!