Full Tilt (23 page)

Apart from the gold-men the only living creature I saw all day was a man who looked like John the Baptist gone to the dogs; I came on him unexpectedly and got quite a fright. He was stark naked with jet black, thick hair down to his knees, a beard to his navel, skin burned ebony by the sun and a mad-looking glint in his eye. What he lives on I can’t think. I was getting out my camera when he gave a sort of insane gurgle and came towards me with hands extended, whereupon I fled – if that is the right word for scrambling through nine inches of sand up a mountainside with a bicycle! When I got to the top of the slope I looked back and saw that the apparition had forgotten me and was now sitting hunched beneath a rock engaged in the contemplation of his toes. Probably he would have been quite harmless, but I didn’t feel like waiting to find out.

I notice that all the men of this village (population approximately 2,000) carry rifles just like the Afghans. They are very friendly folk, now gathered in force round the first bicycle to penetrate to Chilas; it’s very funny to watch the ‘bright boys’ working out how a bicycle operates and then explaining the theory to their companions.

This morning I was told of a boy’s report that when I arrived at the Chilas nullah yesterday, he was there and observed that I had the ‘sun-devil’ – their very graphic term for heat-delirium. Apparently I was talking loudly to myself as I reached the water; the frustrating thing is that the boy doesn’t know English and I’d love to know what I was talking about. It was considerate of him to report on my
condition as this signifies real heat-stroke and you have to watch your diet for a few days afterwards or acute diarrhoea is the result. No fats, eggs or meat are allowed; lots of salted lemon-juice is advised if possible (not possible here) and any fruit, oddly enough,
is
allowed. It’s amazing how our instincts work; I’d had breakfast at 5.30 a.m., before this warning was delivered, but though ravenously hungry I had said ‘No!’ very emphatically to the eggs and had asked for apricots to eat with bread and salted tea. My other meals today have consisted of bread and apricots and gallons of skimmed milk and salt. I spent most of the day writing, sitting on a lawn beside a baby nullah under a vast plane tree. I went indoors for my siesta at 2 p.m. and was wakened at 2.40 by a frantic gale carrying fine sand which penetrated everything. But it was a wonderful relief, because when the wind died down the sky had become completely over-clouded and the temperature had dropped to 92°. A period of intense heat in this area (as in Pindi) is always followed by the temporary ease of a
dust-storm
. The Tahsildar thinks I should stay a few more days here but I feel fine this evening, thank God, and tomorrow Chilas will probably be unbearable again. I’d much prefer to get up to the Babusar hut and stay a few days there before going over the top, which would also help to condition my lungs for the height of the pass.

I’m sitting now beside a crackling fire of pine-logs with a cold gale sweeping through the surrounding forest and big, fat, damp, grey clouds drifting among the peaks and occasional splatters of rain gusting against the windows. The net result of all these delights is that I’m feeling thirty years younger, back in the climate I was born to. This reminds me of a March evening at home and I wonder what point there is in leaving here before October! It’s such a strange sensation to touch things like paper and furniture and not feel them warm to the fingers and I can hardly believe that there’s no sweat dripping off me on to everything. The last movement of the Choral Symphony would be
very
appropriate as background music.

I left Chilas at 3.40 a.m. in a darkness just beginning to be not total
and arrived here at 12.45 p.m., having walked twenty-one miles from 3,000 to 12,000 feet – not bad going on a completely empty tummy – unless you count water! By this stage I’ve got adjusted to going without any breakfast (even a cup of tea), when I make early starts, though at first I found such asceticism a considerable deprivation; evidently the human mechanism can adjust to almost anything but extremes of temperature. Needless to say, my ribs are almost coming through my skin now: two and a half weeks gallivanting around Gilgit on the skin of an onion is the best way to shed superfluous fat.

Today was superb – as good as, though utterly different from, the Indus Valley. The track followed a big nullah all the way up and of course there were none of the vast landscapes of the past few days; the mountains are so close on either side that the sun didn’t reach me till 9.15 – when I was too high for it to hurt – although it rose at 4.50 a.m. Also there were none of the dangers; really the Gilgit–Chilas road
is
terrifying, with those sheer drops as the narrow track goes steadily higher.

This region is quite densely populated now by the Indus Valley folk who have been moving up during the past fortnight, bringing their flocks to the summer pasturage. They have tiny ‘summer residences’, built of stone or wood, perched all over the mountainsides, some of the little houses being on stilts. They grow maize extensively and the terracing on these slopes is awe-inspiring. Usually the strips are too narrow and the slopes too steep for bullocks to plough so all is done by hand, even the five-year-olds helping. The whole valley floor is quite heavily wooded beside the nullah, chiefly with mulberry and walnut trees. The majority of males, from the age of twelve up, go armed, and are much addicted to murdering each other
à la
frontier tribesman, but they’re amiable to me.

Three times today I had to cycle Roz down the hill I had just pushed her up to show a pop-eyed crowd of men, women and children how a cycle works; it’s so easy to give them so much pleasure – they were fascinated by the performance. The men and boys always tried to push her back up the relevant bit of hill at the end of my demonstration but to their astonishment there is considerably more than meets the eye to
pushing a laden cycle up a steep hill and they usually ended lying on the road with Roz mixed up with their legs and the rest of the crowd in ecstasies of laughter. They couldn’t understand why I wasn’t riding her up (!) and it was impossible to explain that bicycles weren’t really invented for transporting people through the Himalayas, but that I’d have my reward on the other side with 120 miles of free-wheeling on a good tarred road.

I would have needed a cine-camera for the whole thing. It was comical to see the pandemonium when I first turned a corner of the road into a populated stretch of valley. From every direction they came pell-mell – down the steep mountainside from their work in the forests, across the valley from tilling their plots, wading waist-deep through the nullah, scrambling up cliffsides, leaping off the flat roofs of their little huts, deserting flocks of goats and donkeys in
mid-journey
, and all ending up standing inside the stone walls that line the road, staring at me in wonder and half in fear, until I smiled and said, ‘Salaam Alaikum,’ which they took as an invitation to jump the walls and crowd around, tinkling the bell, twirling the pedals, feeling the tyres, fiddling with the brakes, opening the saddlebag and asking where I was going to and coming from. Some of them made the Persian mistake of thinking me a boy and the rest called me Begum Sahib – a variation on the ‘Memsahib’ used everywhere else. They were
incredibly
dirty, making the filthy people of other areas seem clean. In Chilas I was told they never wash and I observed today that at least three-quarters of them suffer from a ghastly eye-disease which comes from dirt and has the ghoulish effect of making many of its victims look
dead
in the eyes. The stink when fifteen or twenty of them crowded round made me feel quite ill, despite the fresh mountain air. Thank God this PWD hut is here, as with the best will in the world I couldn’t bring myself to stay in one of their homes, if only because the risk of disease would be too great. I was surprised to notice the great number of pock-marked faces; one would think that here they’d escape smallpox but I suppose their own dirt breeds every known disease. An odd thing was that they kept asking me to feel their pulses and those of their children; I simply can’t understand this, so I must enquire as to
possible reasons. Incidentally, all pulses felt seemed very weak and fast to me, but perhaps this is the altitude and normal for them; my own is racing too. They were continually inviting me into their huts for milk and
paratis
but I had to decline with an inward shudder – though with regret too because (
a
) I was hungry and (
b
) they looked so sad and disappointed! On arriving here I found that the only food suitable for my present condition was a sort of undersised broad bean about as big as a large pea with three to the pod (eaten raw). The other foods available are
paratis
, saturated in the rancidest ghee, and eggs. Quite apart from my diet I wouldn’t have touched the
paratis
after that little brush with rancid ghee in Gupis. People here haven’t even got the fruit on which the peasants of other Gilgit areas depend so much.

I felt the thin air today, from about 9,000 feet, and had to stop every half-mile for a few minutes to calm my heart. (I also have a theory that being undernourished does not help.) From that altitude there was a big change in scene for the pine woods begin here with gigantic trees twice the height of any other pines I’ve seen. I also noticed lots of holly trees and evergreen oaks – which always remind me of Castile – and there was green grass everywhere instead of arid earth. All morning the sky remained a lovely clear blue with a few pure white clouds – in welcome contrast to the brazen, colourless glare over the desert – but at midday it began to fill with grey rain or snow clouds. I’d anticipated being exhausted on arrival and going to sleep immediately, but I’m so ‘toughened up’ by now that I wasn’t a bit tired, apart from shortness of breath, so after a fistful of raw beans I went up the mountain to collect firewood and enjoy the delicious coolness and gusts of rainy wind. From here one can see right down the twenty-mile length of the valley, which remains unclouded, to the Indus Gorge and the infinity of white peaks beyond. I don’t wonder at people risking their lives to climb mountains; even getting up to 12,000 feet and standing looking down at what one has conquered is wonderfully satisfying.

This is a very adequate hut, furnished by PWD, but the summer
chowkidar
(caretaker) must have used the bedding himself as it’s full of bedbugs. I have hurled it outside and I’ll sleep on the floor rolled in the curtains from doors and windows, which are of thick material and
easily taken down. I don’t trust the charpoy – probably it has bugs in the ropes!

In spite of my anti-bug precautions I slept wretchedly because of sandfly bites acquired in Chilas the night after the storm. These take twenty-four hours to get troublesome and then they’re hell. My face, neck, hands and arms are covered with tiny purple lumps, both itchy and sore, and I woke constantly to find myself tearing at them with my nails. It’s so long since I’ve slept under a roof that it was
disconcerting
not to see the stars above me. The night sky here is a most brilliant and beautiful sight and is one of the few consolations of the hot areas. If one opens one’s eyes for a moment the starlight is almost dazzling, and the Milky Way, with ‘coal-sacks’ and nebulae, is quite different from the same spectacle seen through an Irish atmosphere. I spent quite a lot of my first night at Chilas admiring it as the wind off the desert was like a dragon’s breath –
not
conducive to sleep – yet indoors with no fans was even worse.

There were few ordinary flies in Chilas, which made up for a lot; by now I’ve got an obsession about them. It’s not an hygienic obsession about flies on food (if they stayed on the food and kept off me I’d be quite happy) but they drive me mad with their incessant buzzing and tickling hour after hour – I suppose it’s their slick ‘smart-Alecness’ that really infuriates. One
knows
they can’t be killed but after a certain period of persecution one begins to slap frantically at them, hurting oneself in the process and leaving them totally unaffected, which makes one feel even more of a fool than usual. (There are very few here also, Allah be praised!) Personally I much prefer lice, some of which can be captured at intervals and vindictively squashed to death – very gratifying!

This morning I decided to risk eggs for breakfast, as it’s almost three days since the heat-stroke, so I bought four and boiled them. Three were
very
bad and somehow that deadened my appetite for the fourth, causing me to revert to beans instead.

Opinions here vary so much about the state of the pass that I decided
to go up some of the way today by a short-cut and investigate for myself. At 7.30 it was a heavenly morning with warm sun, cool breeze and cloudless sky, like a good May day in Ireland. Progress was slow, with lots of pauses to rest my pounding heart, as the short-cut is naturally a much steeper gradient than the track, but I enjoyed meandering along looking at the very lovely wild flowers in the woods and listening to the birds. Inevitably I got lost and it was 2 p.m. before I came out on the jeep track, 13,000 feet up, amid stony, barren moors. By now the sky was overclouded, thunder was crashing amidst the peaks and it was snowing lightly. (I could hardly believe that
seventy-two
hours ago and only twenty miles away I had been getting
heatstroke
!) I didn’t dare go higher because of feeling a slight nausea – caused by either altitude or starvation or both – so I walked down the six miles of track to here. There are three small glaciers completely blocking the road but on this stretch they will be very easy to negotiate on foot. Probably there are more and wider ones farther up; it was a pity I couldn’t inspect the last two miles to the top for fear of
overtaxing
my ill-treated carcase. (I feel quite sorry for my own body these days, in a curiously detached and impersonal way; I’d like to be able to give it the feed it’s certainly earned.) The delicate question now is whether to stay here another few days and get more acclimatised before pushing Roz up (good for heart) or whether to go over tomorrow and get a square meal on the other side (good for stomach). I think stomach will win because I really would be debilitated after another forty-eight hours on raw beans. (This evening my watch is repeatedly slipping down my wrist.) I have just got another three eggs – all that were available – and about a pint of milk, but the peasants are starving too, pending the delayed arrival of the camel caravans over the pass. They would share their last egg with me and are most reluctant to take money, which makes it all the more awkward. Fortunately the gradient of the track, except on the countless hairpins, is only about one in eighteen for the first six miles anyway. I don’t understand why, when walking briskly down such a slope, one is completely unaffected by altitude, whereas going very slowly up one feels half dead; surely walking is in itself an exertion?