Full Tilt (18 page)

I prefer to try to forget the sights I saw in hospital, particularly in the children’s wards. Infants a month old weighing only a pound and a half, fitting on to the palm of my hand –
not
premature – and that was the least of it …

Father O’Leary told me that this is one of the few dioceses where Roman Catholics can get dispensations from the Bishop to marry Muslims. From the Islamic angle, if a Muslim girl marries a Christian
he
must become Muslim, but if a Muslim man marries a Christian girl, she can keep her own faith. (Christians and Jews are the only non-Muslims the sons of the Prophet may marry.)

Another fabulous dust-storm is performing now and all electricity has gone off again, so I’m writing by oil-lamp in a bath of sweat.

I was up at 5.30 a.m. to see the sky overcast and feel the temperature down to a cool, delicious 85°. I then rang the airport to ask about flights to Gilgit but the weather is so cloudy in the Himalayas that none is going till Tuesday afternoon at the earliest: a disappointing development, yet in the relief of today’s coolness nothing else seems to matter very much. Now it’s 1 p.m. and the temperature is only 89° – I’m still dripping sweat but without that awful feeling of complete physical and mental exhaustion.

At breakfast we had an interesting discussion on the various Christian workers in Pakistan. I was understandably gratified to notice that everyone to whom I have spoken is very appreciative of the fact that no attempt at conversion is ever made by the Catholic teachers or
medical workers. In the past thirty-five years, during which they have educated thousands of Muslim girls, the Presentation nuns haven’t had
one
convert; I’ve spoken by now to over twenty of their past pupils and the nuns are universally loved and admired. On the other hand, all the Protestant Missions (educational and medical) stink in Muslim nostrils because their teaching and medical treatment is always accompanied by what the Muslims call ‘insulting propaganda’. In their schools the children have to study the Bible and Christian doctrine and with their medicines they also dispense leaflets and pamphlets on the ‘Good Path to God’. I know that this is true because I visited a Protestant Mission Hospital the other day and the matron showed me the ‘literature’ they distribute – awful sickly stuff that would put a Pope off Christianity for life. My host summed it up pretty well this morning when he said, ‘The Protestants seem to come here because they hate Islam and the Catholics because they love God.’ No doubt it’s a matter of opinion which attitude is correct, but personally I’m entirely with the Catholics who have the good sense and good manners to admit in practice, if not in theory, that Islam is a different, but not necessarily inferior or wrong ‘Path to God’. And, of course, the result is that in Pakistan a genuine good feeling exists between educated Muslims and Catholics, though here, as elsewhere, the semi-illiterate Mullahs hate any form of Christianity.

I suppose you’ve been reading and hearing about the cyclone disaster in East Pakistan. Many people I’ve met take the attitude that it’s Allah’s way of cutting down the population and there’s no sense of a ‘National Calamity’ in the air, though the President has declared it to be such. What happens in East Pakistan is no more or less important to the average West Pakistani than what happens in Madras or Hyderabad. By now I’ve met very many Pakistanis who regard India as their home and who complain of not being able to go back to see their relatives there or of not being accepted by the
real
natives of this area, or of having lost all their property at the time of Partition, as well as most of their friends, who were either Hindu or Sikh. I asked several such people why they chose Pakistan when India is so much nearer and dearer to them and they said, ‘for the sake of the children’. Apparently,
although in ordinary Indian social life the various religions (at least among the cultured classes) meet and mingle without bigotry,
officially
the Muslim youth in the new India are discriminated against – or so they say here. I’ll investigate that situation as best as I can when I get to India. What a tragic muddle it all is.

I spent the afternoon taking advantage of the coolness and the consequent return of my brain to (what I consider) normal to work on an article and after dinner went out to observe the scene in the streets. This is the end of the Shia’s Muharram period, when they mourn the murder of one of the Prophet’s followers by another and do penance most masochistically by lashing themselves with whips and sometimes cutting their own bodies with knives. It’s supposed to be a dangerous time for women to go unprotected through the country, as the end-result of the penance is often an uncontrollable sexual frenzy, but of course there’s no danger in a well-policed and (over-) civilised city like Pindi. I saw many coming from mosques carrying their whips and two men with blood actually seeping through their shirts. There are not many Shiahs in Pakistan and most of these are around Gilgit, where there’s also one area populated by the Ismailis (followers of the Aga Khan). Tomorrow is a holiday in the Muslim world – their religious holidays are legion – and I’ve discovered that’s why there’s no flight to Gilgit. Anyway, the Himalayan forecast is bad; also the local forecast for tomorrow is bad – a rise in temperature! The weather here in summer is regarded as a National Emergency, with two-hourly broadcasts to tell the populace what the temperature is so that they can act accordingly and not die of heat-stroke. As far as discomfort goes there’s very little difference between 100° and 110°, but from a health point of view 110° is lethal and one daren’t take risks under such a sun; hence the broadcast warnings that now is the time to go in and stay in. Naturally enough, nothing much gets done at this season. There are five servants here but apart from providing meals they lie asleep on the marble floors all day and no one has the heart to point out that the whole house is coated with dust. I’m very impressed by the way Pakistani family servants are treated. In every household where I’ve stayed the relations between family and staff are a credit to
all concerned. There’s no insurance stamp nonsense and no need for it, because when a servant falls ill the family pays all expenses and some member visits them daily in hospital. When they are old and retired, and their places filled by their children and grandchildren, the servants continue to live in the household till they die and the younger members of the family love and respect them as though they were elderly relatives, and go to them with their various problems for advice and consolation. The average wage is £2 per month but they are clothed free and get the same food as the family. At first I found it very difficult to adjust myself to the business of ringing a bell when I wanted a drink or had forgotten to bring my cigarettes from another room, but now that I’ve got the feel of the set-up I don’t mind. It outrages the staff’s sense of propriety if Memsahib goes to fetch her own cigarettes, and I must admit that in this sort of weather Memsahib is damn glad to have someone else fetch them. (I’ve become addicted to chewing betel-nut and my teeth are being ruined – must really abandon the habit.)

One of the unsettling things about local customs is that servants never knock before entering a room. As I’m prone to nudity this weather, in what I regard as the privacy of my boudoir, the result is that all concerned are unnerved – me grabbing a bath towel at the sound of any footsteps and the bearers leaving my tea-tray outside the door in terror of what they might behold if they entered.

Never,
never
again will I allow myself to be persuaded to leave Mother Earth, and bounce in a nightmarish way through the Himalayas. If I have to stay here in Gilgit until August, waiting for the pass to open, I am
not
going back in that unspeakable little plane over that monstrous route to Pindi. I had expected the flight to be fairly
bloodcurdling
but it was beyond my worst imaginings.

I got to the airport at 1.30 p.m. and after the six-mile cycle run out from the city I needed to drink every drop in my six-pint water-bottle. Today was the hottest yet, with the sky an ugly colourless arc and the sun fiendishly scourging the city and its surrounding dust-suffocated plain.

There were only two other passengers waiting on the verandah – a couple of young men from Karachi named Mukhtar and Rifat, who thought the combination of a woman and a bicycle flying to Gilgit was the weirdest thing that had ever happened.

‘But
why
are you going?’ asked Mukhtar.

‘To get away from all this,’ I replied, watching the sweat trickle briskly down my arms and cascading off at the elbows on to my already saturated shorts.

They both considered this reply very witty indeed and chuckled with delight. Mukhtar said provokingly, ‘You don’t like our weather?’

I diverted a torrent of sweat from my eyes and answered savagely, ‘I
hate
your weather,’ adding, ‘but it’s the only thing in Pakistan I don’t like, and no country can be perfect.’

Rifat then ordered a round of Coca-Colas and remarked, in a
friendly, reproving voice, ‘You must know that Gilgit is a very interesting and historical place – it should be taken seriously.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed wearily, ‘once upon a time I had lots of positively erudite reasons for wanting to visit Gilgit, but now I can only think of one moronic reason.’

Rifat sighed, ‘I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed,’ he said, ‘because Gilgit itself is quite hot.’ (He was right, as I now know.)

At 2 p.m. a few figures moved lethargically across the tarmac, towards our plane, pushing a hand-cart loaded with supplies for Gilgit – plus Roz. By 2.20 p.m. I was inside the little Dakota which had been standing exposed to the sun for hours, and was so hot inside that I would have fainted if I hadn’t been too afraid. Somehow it seemed even more likely that I’d be killed if I was not fully conscious when hurtling through the Himalayas in a contraption like this. As I tied my safety belt, one of the crew handed me a newspaper to distract me from my worries. On the front page I read ‘Twenty-three killed in Indian Himalayan Air-crash’.

We took off punctually at 2.30 p.m., when the heat was rising up so frenziedly from the plain that we fell, rather than bumped, in and out of air-pockets, until I didn’t know whether my tummy was in my head or my head in my tummy – but I thought I knew that the next time we fell, we’d fall all the way. Yet at that point I almost longed for the crash; at least my tummy would then remain
in situ
, or, if it didn’t, the matter would be of no importance to me.

Soon the plain was left behind and we passed over the terrain I had cycled through on the Azad Kashmir detour. Then this region of brown, rounded foothills and deep green valleys was replaced by a landscape of naked rock peaks, giant glaciers and vast sweeps of loose shale. We were flying so low that it was, in a sense, the next best thing to trekking through this area, which even the hardiest tribes have never attempted to inhabit and which has been trodden by no more than a few of the bravest traders and mountaineers. Yet only in one sense was it the next best thing; when we passed the 26,000-foot Nanga Parbat, whose triple peak dominated the thousands of snow mountains which stretched to the horizon in every direction, I
suddenly became acutely aware that this was the wrong approach to a noble range. One should
win
the privilege of looking down on such a scene, and because I had done nothing to earn a glimpse of these remote beauties I felt that I was cheating and that this nasty, noisy little impertinence, mechanically transporting me, was an insult to the mountains. You will probably accuse me of a tiresome outburst of romanticism – but I’m not sure you’ll be right. The more I see of unmechanised places and people the more convinced I become that machines have done incalculable damage by unbalancing the
relationship
between Man and Nature. The mere fact that we think and talk as we do about Nature is symptomatic. For us to refer to Nature as a separate entity – something we admire or avoid or study or paint – shows how far we’ve removed ourselves from it. Marco Polo saw it as the background to human adventures and endeavours – a healthy reaction possible only when our lives are basically in harmony with it. (Granted that Roz is a machine and that to be logical I should have walked or ridden from Ireland, but at least one exerts oneself cycling and the speed is not too outrageous and one is constantly exposed to the elements.) I suppose all our scientific advances are a wonderful boost for the superior intellect of the human race but what those advances are doing to us seems to me quite literally tragic. After all, only a handful of people are concerned in the excitement and stimulation of discovering and developing, while millions lead feebler and more synthetic lives because of the achievements of that handful. When Sterne toured France and Italy he needed more guts and initiative than the contemporary traveller needs to tour the five continents; people now use less than half their potential forces because ‘Progress’ has deprived them of the incentive to live fully. All this has been brought to the surface of my mind by the general attitude to my conception of travelling, which I once took for granted as normal behaviour but which strikes most people as wild eccentricity, merely because it involves a certain amount of what is now regarded as hardship but was to all our ancestors a feature of everyday life – using physical energy to get from point A to point B. I don’t know what the end result of all this ‘progress’ will be – something pretty dire, I should
think. We remain
part of Nature,
however startling our scientific advances, and the more successfully we forget or ignore this fact, the less we can be proud of being men.

During the last fifteen minutes of the flight, however, I had no time for such quasi-philosophical speculations, for by then we had left behind the prosaic world of passenger transport and had entered the sphere of aerial acrobatics. Here the mountains are far too high for a Dakota to fly over them, so we were confined to a rock-strewn gorge which in my opinion is far too narrow for a Dakota to fly
through
. It is said that at this point even hardened air-travellers begin to think of alternative routes back to Pindi. The sensation of looking out to see rough
rock-walls
apparently within one and a quarter inches of the wing-tips is not a pleasant one. I am assured that there are twenty yards to spare on either side, but I stick to it that from the passenger’s point of view this is, morally speaking, one and a quarter inches! When we came out over the valley we descended so abruptly that I got an excruciating pain in my right ear – it was so severe that I could think of nothing else and forgot to be afraid of the landing, which usually reduces me to a bundle of craven terror. Before I’d even registered the touchdown, Roz and I were being hurled out with the rest of the cargo and I found myself in the charge of a young lieutenant of the Gilgit Scouts who had been sent with a jeep to meet me. Ten minutes later I was being welcomed to the headquarters of the Scouts by Colonel Shah, who obviously thought he had a lunatic on his hands and immediately began to dissuade me from attempting to cross the Babusar Pass with Roz. But fortunately he is a perceptive man and he soon realised that every time he uttered ‘impossible’ my perverse determination hardened. So we changed the subject and discussed the Gilgit Agency from more impersonal angles.

My host told me that the first jeepable track from the Kagan Valley to Chilas was constructed about four years ago and is now frequently used during those three summer months when the Babusar Pass remains open. The arrival of the first jeep in Chilas was an historic occasion. Everyone turned out to see it and with characteristic thoughtfulness the peasants provided a large meal of freshly-cut grass for this strange new animal. They were then quite convinced that a jeep is the offspring of
two of those curious creatures so often seen in the sky over the valleys and they assumed that it would be able to fly when mature. This, of course, is not an original story – all over the world primitive peoples react thus on first meeting machines. Nor, to my mind, is it a funny story, though it is so often told as a joke at the expense of ‘ignorant peasants’.

Colonel Shah went on to inform me proudly that work is now in progress on an all-weather jeep road, which, within a few years, will greatly improve communications with the rest of Pakistan – always referred to as ‘down-country’ by the English-speaking residents of Gilgit. You can imagine how unenthusiastically I received this information. Granted something must be done to improve this area’s economy – after even a few hours here I can see that for myself – but as usual I fear that the disimprovements will outweigh the improvements when the Twentieth Century comes bustling along the New Road. If only someone could think of a way to utilise Gilgit’s natural resources – chiefly a superabundance of fruit – without destroying her individuality! After all, this region has only recently become impoverished and forgotten. Before international tensions made their terrible impact on the ordinary man’s life Gilgit Town was an important trade centre on the Sinkiang–India route and was a thriving market for the sale and exchange of Central Asian, Chinese and Indian wares – a sad contrast to its present importance as a Military Centre.

It was very pleasant sitting on the smooth lawn of the officers’ mess beneath plane trees so tall and graceful that it was impossible to associate them with their sooty London cousins. An orderly served us with frequent orange drinks to which everyone automatically added quantities of salt, because it
is
hot here, with an average June temperature of 94° in the shade – which I’d consider hellish if I hadn’t come direct from Pindi. Behind us, almost overhanging the mess buildings, rose a 9,000-foot mountain wall of stark, grey rock which was repeated on the other side of the narrow valley; it’s this confinement which keeps the temperature so high despite an altitude of nearly 5,000 feet. Down the valley snow-capped peaks of over 20,000 feet were sharply beautiful against the gentle evening sky and as the
setting sun caught the valley walls they changed colour so that their pink and violet glow seemed to illuminate the whole scene.

While we were having dinner on the verandah a full moon rose and by the time the meal was over the valley looked so very lovely that I took myself off for a walk – to the unspoken disapproval of all those present! Having descended steeply for about half a mile my path turned west along the valley floor, leaving the shuttered stalls of the bazaar behind. Tall mulberry and apricot trees laid intricate shadows on the sandy path and the silence was broken only by the
snow-enraged
Gilgit River. The sky was a strange royal-blue with all but the brightest stars quenched, while on either side the mountains were transformed into silver barricades, as their quartz surfaces reflected the moonlight. I walked for over an hour and that walk alone made the horrors of the flight here seem well worth while.

My bed for tonight is a charpoy under a plane tree and I’ve written this by moonlight-cum-cycle-lamplight. Yesterday, as you may have noticed, there was no entry. I should have gone out to watch the Muharram procession at 10 a.m. but I simply hadn’t the guts to leave my air-conditioned room – even within it I hadn’t the energy to put pen to paper. However, atonement has now been made at the expense of my eyesight.

I set out at 6 a.m. to climb the mountain directly overlooking Gilgit Town from the south. The path went through a tiny farming hamlet which, if Gilgit were a city, might be described as its suburb, and filthy pot-bellied children collected in groups to stare at me. The Gilgitis are white-skinned (or would be if they washed themselves) though they are of different origins, none of which has been definitely established. Probably some have Pathan ancestors, as Afghan raiders periodically crossed the border in the past, and Afghan traders still bring their camel-caravans over the Babusar Pass during the summer months. A tradition which, as far as I am aware, has no supporting evidence, claims that the valleys were first populated by a detachment of Alexander’s army which went astray in the course of his Indian
campaign. Despite the lack of evidence there is, of course, nothing inherently ridiculous about this legend, and it is pleasingly romantic. Another theory refers to Arab ancestry – doubtless a lost detachment of the Arab army which invaded Afghanistan in the 9th century – but this theory is supported only by the fact that the Gilgitis carry all loads on their backs, not on their heads as in the neighbouring countries, and such tenuous support invites disagreement more than does the lack of any support for the Alexandrian theory.

I was told yesterday evening that many mutually incomprehensible languages are spoken throughout the Gilgit Agency, and most of them are unwritten. The majority of the people understand neither Pushto nor Urdu, and are of course illiterate, though every village of any size now has its school. However, throughout rural Pakistan the standard of intelligence of the average village schoolteacher is incredibly low and the children’s help is needed by their farming parents – a
combination
of circumstances which makes it extremely difficult to cope with rural illiteracy. Many Western observers find this quite shocking, yet I must admit that it leaves me undisturbed; we have yet to prove that universal literacy as we know it advances the mass of the people in any worthwhile direction.