Travels (32 page)

After three months of visiting psychics, the movie was finished, and it was time to leave London.

“Well?” John King said to me. “What have you decided?”

I hadn’t decided anything. I didn’t know what to think. I was certain that some people, whether by an accident of birth or by some peculiarity of training, could tune in to another source of information and could know things about people we didn’t think were possible to know.

I was less sure that the future could be foretold. Maybe, maybe not, was my opinion. And I was mindful of the reckless example of Conan Doyle. I promised myself I wouldn’t make his mistake.

All this was symbolized for me by the plane flight home from London. After I checked in, British Air announced the flight was delayed, and the passengers were held in the lounge for several hours.

Finally BA decided that the flight would leave after repairs were completed, so they boarded everyone and served drinks. By now it was dark outside. Sitting in my seat with a drink in my hand, reading a book and glancing out the window at the blackness, I felt as if I were actually flying. Then a forklift truck drove past my window, and the illusion was shattered. If I didn’t see any ground vehicles, the illusion crept back.

I felt a little like that about psychic experiences. It seemed as if we were flying, but I felt I’d better wait a while, and make sure I was not still on the ground.

Baltistan
 

A trek into Baltistan followed the mountaineer’s route toward Masherbrum Peak, at 25,660 feet a major climbing peak in a remote area of Pakistan’s Karakoram Mountains.

There was much I did not know about the Karakoram Mountains. On the map, they are a part of that great crumpled range of mountains that runs from Afghanistan to Burma, a range pushed up as the Indian continent drifts north into Russia—a range I always called the Himalaya. But it turns out that “the Himalaya” refers only to the eastern section of the range. To the west, the mountains are called the Karakoram, and, still farther west, the Hindu Kush.

I had also thought the Himalaya was the highest range in the world, but it is not. The Himalaya boasts Everest, the single highest mountain, but the Karakoram is the highest mountain
range
, claiming the second highest peak, K-2, as well as three other peaks above twenty-six thousand feet. All together, ten of the thirty highest mountains in the world are strung along the small Karakoram Range, which extends barely two hundred miles, little more than a tenth the length of the Himalaya.

Finally, I imagined the Karakoram to be green and forested, like the American Rockies. I did not understand that the major Karakoram summits were an average of two miles higher than those of the Rockies, and that they were in essence desert peaks rising above a high desert floor—
possessing a remarkable windswept, bleak grandeur, but desert peaks nonetheless.

All this I could see from the PIA airplane, flying from the capital city of Rawalpindi north to Skardu. These jagged, sharp peaks had no counterpart in the New World; they made the American Rockies look like tired old foothills, while the greatest of the mountains, like Nanga Parbat, were positively stupefying.

And when we landed at the airfield in Skardu, we stepped out into a desert setting: suffocating heat, convection waves shimmering off the tarmac, distorting the rugged, bare peaks in a bowl all around us. Skardu was our staging place for the trek; we collected some final supplies from the bazaar, and met our military liaison, a handsome twenty-eight-year-old Pathan major named Shan Affridi. Every tourist party in Pakistan had to be accompanied by a military liaison.

We drove all the next day in jeeps, following the Indus River on a road cut into the cliffs, and camped for the night at Khapulu, a large village of four hundred houses, which is how villages are sized in this part of the world. Our leader, Dick Irvin, hired porters for the coming trek. This was an elaborate negotiation that continued into the evening. It was complicated by the fact that we did not have good maps for the area we were entering. Accurate maps of Pakistan are difficult to obtain in any case; Dick carried Xeroxed notes from someone who had made the trek a couple of years earlier. That was all we had. Thus we weren’t very clear about the order in which we would pass villages; some of the Khapulu porters intended to quit at one village or another, and so there were arguments, still more negotiations. The porters insisted we didn’t know where we were going. It was obvious to me they were right.

Major Shan maintained a discreet silence throughout the negotiations. I felt he was sure we didn’t know where we were going, either.

I talked to Loren about it. Loren and I had married the previous winter; this trip was to be a deferred honeymoon. Loren had just finished law school, and her attitude was especially carefree.

The next morning we cross the Shyok River on a
zak
—a raft of inflated goat intestines tied under a platform of wooden poles, pushed by local boatmen. The morning sunlight reaches down into the river canyon, and the temperature soars above a hundred degrees, although it is only eight o’clock. We open umbrellas, and start to walk. Our destination for the first
night is Mishoke, a small village we believe lies between the villages of Kande and Micholu.

We are now in the region called Baltistan. High, rocky gray mountain peaks and, in the valley where we walk, terraced yellow wheat fields and small villages with clumps of apricot trees. The landscape is starkly beautiful and filled with contradictions. In this region, Muslim women are instructed to cover their faces and flee if they see a strange man. All day long, as I walk on the road, I see women running from me in the yellow fields. It makes me feel strange, as if I were some kind of leper. But then I hear the women giggling as they run away, and the whole business becomes a cultural game, a sort of formality, like shaking hands but in reverse.

You could not photograph the women, and of course, as a man, you could not talk to them. In Muslim Baltistan the sexes are strictly separated. Sometimes in the evenings, the women in our party would go off to sit with the village women. Loren’s blond hair invariably provoked astonishment. Women clustered around her, touching her hair. Often they assumed she was ill. Young children hid from her, thinking her a ghost. The women were also interested in Loren’s clothing, since she wore trousers. Sometimes they squeezed her breasts, to verify her sex.

Balti customs concerning the separation of sexes produced unexpected difficulties. When we arrived at a village in the evening, we would have to wait to go to the well for water, because if strange men were seen at the well the women would stay away for the next hour or so, fearing that the men might come back unexpectedly. This would delay their evening dinner and upset village life, so we waited until all the villagers had drawn their water before we went to get our own.

After several days on the trail, Loren went upstream to take a bath near a village. She went alone, since to be accompanied by me would insult local custom; she was advised to bathe as quickly as she could, an unnecessary injunction in an icy mountain stream. Soon after, she came running back to camp, clutching her clothes, her hair foamy with shampoo. While she had been bathing in her underwear, a group of village women had come upon her, and stoned her until she fled.

In another village, the women grew angry when Loren refused to nurse their infants; even when Major Shan (standing a discreet distance away) called out to explain Loren had no milk, the women remained surly. They could not believe that a woman of Loren’s age did not have a child, and was not nursing.

* * *

During the day, temperatures reached 120 degrees. Sweating beneath our umbrellas, we developed a new obsession: water. I had never had any particular interest in water before. It was something that came out of a tap, always available, always plentiful. Water was not something you thought about. But here, each morning before we set out, Dick Irvin would consult his notes and tell us where, during the day, we could expect to find water. There was always water in the villages, of course, but the villages were several miles apart. We had to watch for streams and irrigation ditches in between. We each carried two quart bottles, and whenever we saw water, we filled our bottles.

The water was always polluted, and so we purified it with iodine crystals, which turned the water reddish brown and made it taste medicinal. The purification process required time and was a function of the coldness of the water. We had to keep track of how long the iodine had been in the water before we drank it. Because the consequences of drinking polluted water were too dire to contemplate.

In this, and in other ways, we were always made aware of our isolation. Isolation brought its own reality. Even mundane events became worrisome.

For example, we had to ford some rivers—not raging torrents, but ordinary, slippery, icy, fast-moving rivers. Normally I wouldn’t have thought twice about crossing these streams, but here you were forced to recognize a new reality. If you slipped and broke your leg while crossing the river—and if you suffered a compound fracture—the chances were that you would die before you could get out to civilization. If you slipped and just twisted your ankle, then a couple of porters would have to carry you back, and you’d have a painful time, and your trip would be ruined.

So: Faced with a simple river to cross, you felt a lot of pressure not to injure yourself in any way. Faced with polluted drinking water, you felt a lot of pressure to make sure you treated it properly, because you didn’t want incapacitating diarrhea. And so on.

That was one aspect of the isolation. Another was the nature of the villages themselves. Balti villages were sometimes just a couple of dozen wooden houses clustered along the main road. The villages were about five miles apart, and we were walking about twelve miles a day, so we would generally leave one village, pass another around midday, and camp for the night near a third. Considering how close the villages were, they varied sharply. Even my untrained ears could hear the difference in speech patterns from one village to the next, and I could see the variations in the architecture of each village’s wooden houses. Each village had its own distinctive style. This degree of variation was astonishing to me; but these
were mountain villages, and for most of the year they were isolated from one another by deep snow—as isolated as if they were hundreds of miles apart.

As the days of trekking continued, it became known that there were
ferengi
walking on the road. At each village there would be shouts announcing our arrival, and people would turn out to see us. Parents would take their children by the hand and lead them to the road to show them the foreigners; people would stand on the roofs of buildings and look down on us as we passed by below. This open curiosity was entirely friendly, but it was odd, too.

Only a handful of tourists ever came up this way; there had been a party of Japanese climbers making the ascent to Masherbrum the month before, but since then, nobody much.

Again and again we were confronted by the facts of isolation. We were eating freeze-dried camper’s food, but it was hard to boil water at altitude, and our dinners frequently tasted like soup with colored bits of cardboard. Someone asked Dick Irvin to bargain for fresh food from a village.

“I don’t think we should,” he said. He explained that in these remote villages the Baltis grew wheat and apricots and a little livestock, and that whatever they grew they would need to get through the hard winter. They had no extra food to sell visitors.

“Even if we paid them?”

“Well,” he said, “they don’t really have much use for money.”

“What do you mean?” someone asked. How could people have no use for money?

“Well, there isn’t a bank or a bazaar anywhere around here except in Skardu, and that’s a hundred miles away. Most of these people have never been to the next village, five miles away, let alone to Skardu. If you pay them money, they just keep it somewhere in the house, and never do anything with it.”

He explained that, when the government changed the currency a few years ago, it had sent word to all the villages to bring in their old money before it was declared valueless. Years later the old money was still turning up, and village men were enraged to be told it was no longer worth anything.

After two days of walking, we could see good views of Masherbrum Peak before us. I walked ahead of the rest of the party, enjoying being alone on the trail. Around four o’clock, I arrived at a village, drowsy in the hot
sunlight. I suspected this was Kande, where we would camp for the night.

A gang of children came running out to greet me. They clustered around me, touching me, my backpack, my camera. They were asking me something, over and over, but I didn’t pay much attention, since I spoke no Urdu and wouldn’t have been able to understand.

I pointed to their village and said the name I thought it was, Kande. I pronounced it “Candy,” and hoped it was right. They paid no attention to me, I suppose for the same reason—they assumed that whatever I was saying would be unintelligible to them. I tried to get them to understand I was asking the name of their village, but I didn’t have much success. I gave up, frustrated.