The Chitral supporters simply disappear at this point, streaming off the mounds and emptying the stands. Their departing cars send up columns of dust that blow over the ground as if bringing down a final curtain over their team’s efforts.
The departure of these fair-weather supporters seems, perversely, to spur on the Chitral team and they pull back two goals in an unexpectedly nail-biting finish.
Gilgit have made it a hat trick of wins and won best player award. For Chitral there is the consolation of Best Horse, won by a tireless grey called Computer, and not much else but a night-time skulk back down the mountain.
I’m sure someone somewhere will claim it’s been a victory for black magic.
Day Nineteen : The Karakoram Highway
The view from my hotel window in Gilgit is an exercise in contrasts. Immediately outside is a carefully tended rose garden, of the sort you might see in a Best Kept Village in the Cotswolds. A half mile further away, this tidy view swells into a stupendous wall of mountain scenery, rising from the muddy cliffs carved out by the River Gilgit.
Soon we’re running north, deeper into these mountains, along the road that bears their name - the Karakoram Highway, also known as the Eighth Wonder of the World.
A collaboration between the Chinese and the Pakistanis, the road winds 800 formidable and majestic miles, from Kashgar in western China almost to the Pakistan capital, Islamabad. It first took traffic in 1978 after 20 years of construction. Considering the obstacles in its course - some of the highest and least stable mountains in the world, fierce winds, temperature extremes ranging from icy cold to blazing summer heat - 20 years is pretty quick, but the human price paid was considerable. Between 500 and 800 Pakistanis and untold Chinese died in its construction, roughly one life for every kilometre.
Before there was the KKH there was the Silk Road, a network of trails and passes that led from Persia and Turkey through Afghanistan and into China, a commercial conduit following and enriching the precious routes through the mountains.
Apart from the increased prosperity brought by the road itself, many projects round here bear the name of the Aga Khan, spiritual head of the Ismaili Muslims, a Shiite sect who believe their leader to be a direct descendant of the Prophet’s son-in-law. The Aga Khan Foundation provides money for education (especially girls’ schools), healthcare and agricultural schemes. The results can be seen in the communities through which we pass. The settlements are tidy, with solid communal buildings and ingenious irrigation systems flowing between immaculately built dry-stone walls.
In the Hunza valley, believed to be the model for many Shangrilas and the inspiration for James Hilton’s book Lost Horizon, the Karakoram Highway is quiet as a country lane, running beside neatly planted fields of spinach, potatoes and cabbage and sundappled orchards of apricot, apple, peach, pear and plum. Yet this is one of the geomorphic hot spots of the world. This tranquil countryside lies above the epicentre of a titanic geological upheaval. Around 50 million years ago India collided with the rest of Asia, or rather the great mass called the Indian plate drifted north and ran into the much larger mass of the Eurasian plate. The force of the impact pushed one over the other and thrust them both skywards, creating a momentum that is still at work, carrying India deeper into Asia at the rate of two inches a year. The Hindu Kush, the Karakoram, the Pamirs and the Himalaya are all, in a sense, wreckage from one of the great head-on collisions in the history of the planet.
A sign outside a modest little town reads simply, ‘Chalt. Where Continents Collide’. Which certainly puts ‘Artichoke Capital of the World’ in its place.
There are few spots where the consequences of tectonic trauma are more dramatically visible than at the Rakaposhi View Restaurant in Ghulmet. Rakaposhi is one of the most imposing peaks of the Karakoram, rising to 25,500 feet (7772 m). As we sit at a table beneath a willow tree eating fresh-picked cherries we are looking at the highest unbroken mountainside on earth. From the River Hunza, just below us, to the summit of its western face far above us, a single slope rises 18,000 feet (5486 m). Three and a quarter miles of rock, glacier and gravity-defying terraces of snow and ice.
And the lavatory’s spotless.
The KKH, like an earlier engineering marvel, the Forth Railway Bridge, needs constant attention as the road climbs higher and the ice cracks the rock and the snowmelt sends the rubble slithering down onto the highway. So it’s no great surprise to hear that a landslide has blocked the road between here and the 16,000-foot (4877 m) Khunjerab Pass which leads into China. Even if we got there we couldn’t go further, as the frontier has been closed due to the SARS epidemic. We detour up to the village of Altit.
The Altit road is not one for faint hearts; it’s just an unfenced track of flattened debris dug across the middle of a 3000-foot spill of scree. Halfway along it someone tells me that the word Karakoram means ‘crumbling rock’ in Turkish.
I’m much relieved when we drop slowly down through the tree line, but just as I’m feeling secure we have to cross a slatted bridge of warped and bent timbers, between which I can see a lot more of the raging waters of the Hunza than I’d like to. Under the weight of each vehicle it bounces up and down as if it were made of elastic. Never have I been so happy to reach the other side of a bridge.
On the way back to Gilgit, the sun hits the eastern spires and ridges of the mountains and turns their tips the colour of molten metal. I only hope the Himalaya can live up to the magic of the Karakoram.
Day Twenty : Gilgit to Skardu
We have been given the go-ahead by the Pakistan military to join one of their helicopters on a service flight from Skardu in Baltistan, to Concordia, close to the Chinese border, where ten of the world’s top 30 peaks are clustered, including K2 (Karakoram 2), the second highest mountain in the world.
It’s mountaineering made easy but not to be sniffed at for all that. Last night I called my friend Hamish MacInnes in Scotland for the reactions of a world-class climber. He gave me various words of encouragement, among them the fact that the road to Skardu is known as ‘the road that eats jeeps’.
Skardu is only 99 miles (160 km) from Gilgit, but we’re told it will take most of the day. Progress is slowed down by rock falls and land-slips at roughly one-mile intervals. Some bring us to a halt, some have to be negotiated with infinite care. Road gangs, muffled like mummies against the dust and heat, stop to watch us pass, then resume the Sisyphean task of fighting landslides with spades, shovels and wheelbarrows.
We turn off the KKH and stop for refreshment. Across the road a large man sprawls across the threshold of a very small shop. He’s sunk deep in an armchair and has one leg up against the door-post. A sign above him announces ‘Ahmad, Gems and Minerals. We Deals In Precious Stones’. Up here, mineral seams are routinely exposed by the massive geological upheavals. As they bring our tea they tell us we’ve had one big piece of luck. The road that eats jeeps reopened only two days earlier after unusually heavy spring rain closed it at 126 separate places.
As we set off along yet another gorge I’m aware that this is a significant moment for us. Dominating the mountains on the far side of the Indus is the westernmost bastion of the Himalaya. Nanga Parbat, an uncompromising, irregular giant of a mountain, rises to 26,650 feet (8125 m). It has wide flanks and a bad reputation. It’s known as Killer Mountain, claiming 50 lives before it was first scaled by an Austrian, Hermann Buhl, in 1953. According to Hamish, Buhl was a very hard nut indeed. Those who came on his expeditions were issued with one-way tickets only.