A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (25 page)

They were extraordinary and their clothes were extraordinary too. All but those who were bare-headed wore the same flat Chitrali cap that Hugh had worn ever since we had left Kabul, only theirs were larger and more floppy, and the colour of porridge. Worn on the back of the head the effect was Chaucerian.

They wore drab brown, collarless shirts, like the Army issue, and over them loose waistcoats or else a sort of surcoat – a waistcoat without buttons. Their trousers were brown home-spun, like baggy unbuckled plus-fours. They reached to the middle of the calf and flapped loosely as their wearers pounded up the meadow. They seemed to wear some kind of loose puttee around the lower leg, and some of the younger men wore coloured scarves knotted loosely around their necks. All were barefooted.

‘It’s like being back in the Middle Ages.’

It was the only coherent remark Hugh had time for. The next moment they were on us, uttering strange cries. Before we knew what was happening we were being borne towards the
aylaq
with our feet barely touching the ground, each the centre of a mob, like distinguished visitors to a university.

I had a blurred vision of a heap of ibex horns and a row of distended skins hanging on the wall of the bothy (inside out they looked like long-dead dogs), then I received a terrific crack on the head as we hurtled in through the low opening – we were inside.

The floor was bare earth but on it were spread several very old rugs made of something that looked like felt, with a pattern of black and orange diamonds on them, brought up here to end their days at the
aylaq
. In the centre of the floor there was a shallow depression in which a dung fire smouldered. Over it, balanced on two rocks, was a cauldron in which some great mess was seething. There was no chimney or opening of any kind and the walls were blackened with smoke.

We were made to sit on the floor and our hosts (for that was what they turned out to be – up to now it had not been apparent what their attitude was) brought in two round wooden pots full of milk which they set before us, together with a couple of large ladles. The pots held about half a gallon each, and seemed to be made from hollowed-out tree-trunks. They were decorated with the same diamond pattern I had noticed on the rugs. Both vessels and cutlery were of heroic proportions, fit for giants.

We were extremely thirsty. Hugh was already dipping into his pot.

The bothy was crammed to the point of suffocation with people all jabbering an unknown tongue. I wondered if it were Bashguli. It was certainly unlike any other language I had ever heard but there was no way of discovering what it was.

After drinking nearly a quart of icy milk (the pots had just come out of the river), I felt as if I were going to burst. I put down my tree-trunk. Sitting next to me was one of the hairless Espresso boys. He picked up the ladle. ‘Biloogh ow,’ he grunted (at least that was what it sounded like) and began to forcibly feed me as though I were senile.

Here in the summer months, men of the tribe lived without their women, looking after the flocks and cattle, making curds and butter to store for the winter and for trade with the outside world and every so often sending down some of their number to the valleys far below with the heavy goatskins I had seen hanging outside – a journey of from one to five days according to the destination – a sort of grim compassionate leave.

All the time this recital was going on we were being ransacked. I could feel inquisitive fingers prying about my person, opening button flaps, groping in my pockets for my handkerchief, scrabbling at my watch-strap.

We had already passed round several packets of cigarettes and a fight had developed for the empty packets. It was the silver paper they wanted. But what they really longed for were binoculars. They loved my camera, until they discovered that it was not a pair of binoculars, but they soon found Hugh’s telescope and took it outside to try it.

In a world that has lost the capacity for wonderment, I found it very agreeable to meet people to whom it was possible to give pleasure so simply. Thinking to ingratiate myself still further with them, I handed over my watch. It was the pride of my heart (I, too, am easily pleased) – a brand-new Rolex that I had got in Geneva on the way out from England and reputed proof against every kind of ill-treatment.

‘Tell the headman,’ I said to Hugh, ‘that it will work under water.’

‘He doesn’t believe it.’

‘All right. Tell him it will even work in that,’ pointing to the cauldron which was giving off steam and gloggling noises.

Hugh told him. The headman said a few words to the young existentialist who had the watch. Before I could stop him he dropped it into the pot.

‘He says he doesn’t believe you,’ said Hugh.

‘Well, tell him to take it out! I don’t believe it myself.’ By now I was hanging over the thing, frantically fishing with the ladle.

‘It’s no good,’ I said. ‘They’ll have to empty it.’

This time Hugh spoke somewhat more urgently to the headman.

‘He says they don’t want to. It’s their dinner.’

At last somebody hooked it and brought it to the surface, covered with a sort of brown slime. Whatever it was for dinner had an extraordinary nasty appearance. The rescuer held it in the ladle. Though too hot to touch, it was still going. This made an immense impression on everyone, myself included. Unfortunately, it made such an impression on the man himself that he refused to be parted from it and left the bothy.

‘Where’s he going?’

‘He’s going to try it in the river.’

When the time came to leave there was no sign of Hugh’s telescope or my watch.

‘I want my telescope,’ Hugh told the headman.

‘What about my watch?’ I asked, when his telescope was finally produced from somewhere round the corner.

‘He says the man who had it has gone away.’

‘Well, tell him that he must bring him back.’

There was a further brief parley.

‘He says the man wants to keep it.’ Somehow Hugh contrived to make this sound a reasonable request.

‘WELL, HE CAN’T! GET IT BACK FOR ME! MAKE AN EFFORT!’

‘It’s
you
who should make the effort. It’s really too much having to do your work
all
the time.’

I could have struck him at this moment.

‘Damn it, you can hardly understand the man yourself and you speak fluent Persian. How the devil do you expect me to make him understand anything?’

Just then I saw the man who had taken my watch skulking behind one of the walls of the
aylaq
. I went round the building the other way and came up behind him, and took hold of his wrists. Although he was without any apparent muscle, he was immensely strong. He radiated a kind of electric energy.

‘Tok-tok,’
I said. At the same time I looked down at my own wrist and nodded my head violently.

He began to laugh. I looked into his eyes; they were strange and mad. He had about him an air of scarcely controlled violence that I had noticed in some of the others inside the hut. An air of being able to commit the most atrocious crimes and then sit down to a hearty meal without giving them a further thought. The man was a homicidal maniac. Perhaps they were all homicidal maniacs.

I saw that his right hand was clenched and I forced it open. Inside was my beautiful watch. He had washed it in the river. It was still going and it continued to do so.

As we left the
aylaq
three more Nuristanis came running up the valley, moving over the ground in short steps but with unbelievable swiftness. All three had full brown beards, they wore short fringed overcoats of a very dark brown – almost black, perhaps the last vestiges of the glory of the Black-robed Kafirs; on their backs were slung empty pack-frames.

‘They have come up from the Ramgul to take the place of those who will go down with butter tomorrow morning,’ said Abdul Ghiyas, our Tajik driver.

No one said good-bye to us. Some of the Nuristanis had already gone loping up the mountain-side towards the flocks; the rest had retired into the bothy. It was a characteristic of these people that their interest in strangers was exhausted almost as quickly as it was born.

After a month on the march we finally climbed out of Nuristan by another 16,000 foot pass – the Arayu.

All of us, proprietors and drivers were now ill. For this reason our caravan presented a curiously scattered appearance, as it wound its way up the dreadful slope, exposed to wind and sun and the whistles of the marmots who were out in force among the rocks. As one or the other of us succumbed, a ruthless atmosphere prevailed; no one waited for anyone else and those who had fallen out had to catch up as best they could when they finally emerged, green-faced, from behind the inadequate boulders that covered the lower slopes.

The climb began in earnest at a quarter to ten and took three hours. The last few hundred feet were
moraine
and the way through it was marked by cairns, two stones on top of one another. But it was worth all the suffering. Once again, as on the Chamar, we stood on the great dividing ridge of the whole massif. To the left the ridge plunged down in snow-covered slopes straight into a glacial lake; to the right of the
col
the mountains were smoother, more rounded. Ahead was Mir Samir.

Here on the Arayu, one of the lonely places of the earth with all the winds of Asia droning over it, where the mountains seemed like the bones of the world breaking through, I had the sensation of emerging from a country that would continue to exist more or less unchanged whatever disasters overtook the rest of mankind. This was long before the days of Soviet helicopter gunships.

We went down towards the north, following the cairns and later the stream from the top of the watershed, with the cold yellow mountains all about us standing alone, like sentinels.

It was mid-afternoon before we stopped. In spite of everything, I was mad with hunger. Hugh, having a queasy feeling, was more finicky.

‘It’s your turn to cook,’ he said. ‘I want green tea and two boiled eggs.’

‘Well, I want a damn great meal.’

There was a screaming wind. Boiling water at 15,000 feet or thereabouts is a protracted operation using nothing but solid fuel. Whilst I was waiting for the egg water to boil, I fried two eggs in thirty seconds and ate an entire apple pudding, cold.

Hugh looked like death but he was in a fury. At first I thought he would have some kind of seizure.

‘Look at you. Hogging it. You only think of yourself. When are you going to cook something decent for
me?’

‘You asked for boiled eggs. I can’t think of anything more difficult at this height. You can cook them yourself and anything else you want in the future.’

I set off over the green grass down the valley alone.

In spite of this ridiculous tiff, rarely in my life had I felt such an ecstatic feeling of happiness as I did coming down from the Arayu. The present was bliss beyond belief; the future looked golden. I thought of my wife and children; I thought of the book that I had already written; I even thought about the Everest Foundation and the grant that up here seemed certain to materialize (it didn’t – one can hardly blame them).

I went down past high, cold cliffs already in shadow where the first tented nomads were, down and down for two hours.

Eventually I came out in a great green meadow with a river running through it like a curled spring. The sun was just setting, the grass that had been a vivid green had already lost its colour, the sky was the colour of pearls.

Under the wall of the mountain on the left there were four rocks, each forty feet high and fifty long; built out from under them were the stone houses and pens of the summer
aylaq
. Women and children dressed in white were standing on the roofs watching the herds come slowly down from the fringes of the mountain. Standing in the river two bullocks were fighting.

Before going to the
aylaq
I waited for Hugh to appear.

‘You know I’ve had the most extraordinary feeling coming down,’ were his first words when he appeared. ‘As if there was never going to be anything to worry about again.’

‘I expect it’s the altitude.’

The night was a bitter one. The wind howled over the screes but we dined on rice pudding (the rice was provided by the headman, our own provisions were exhausted) and, although we were blinded by the smoke of the wormwood,
artemisia
, root, we were content to be where we were.

All through the next day we still had the same feeling of extreme happiness. Until late in the afternoon we went down; always with the great bone-coloured mountains on either side and valleys choked with the debris of glaciers, leading to regions of snow and ice and to rocks too sheer for snow to cling to them.

We came to cornfields and a village called Arayu, full of savage dogs and surly-looking Tajiks and mud houses like those of Egyptian
fellahin
.

This patch of cultivation was succeeded by a mighty red-cliffed gorge where there were caves in which we sheltered from the midday sun. But not for long. The path to Parian and Shāhnaiz led up out of it high over the mountain. At the watershed we turned still more to the north going downhill again now and into a final narrow valley where the wind threw the spray from a river in our faces. It was spray from the Parian, the Upper Panjshir. We had made it.