‘And those quails, Michael. They are not from a farm. They are shot in the forest.’
A countryman to the last.
Day Seven : Peshawar to the Kalash Valleys
It’s a few minutes after five and just getting light as our convoy negotiates the suburbs of Peshawar. By the end of today, all being well, we should be off the plain and experiencing our first taste of big mountain scenery in the heart of the Hindu Kush range.
In the soft morning light pony and traps loaded with produce head for the city markets, boys cross a river on a gently undulating wooden bridge, a thin strip of black smoke drifts from a brick kiln, and in the fields figures are already at work bringing in the harvest.
We rumble across the wide and powerful waters of the River Kabul, swelled with snowmelt and curling back against the stanchions of a long steel bridge. It’s joined in turn by the River Swat, creating a green and fertile plain, with fields of sugar cane and tobacco interspersed with orchards of plums, apricots and pears.
We pull off the road for something to eat at a hotel of very few stars but quite a lot of what the guides call charm. Along a wide verandah, tables with wonky legs are set out on a mud floor. Instead of chairs there are the ubiquitous charpoys, bedsteads with rope bases that are quite uncomfortable to sit on, but as soon as you pull your legs up and stretch out, make absolute sense.
Bleary staff appear from dark rooms and I realize that, although we’ve been on the road for more than two hours, it’s still only half-past seven.
After a breakfast of bananas, hard-boiled eggs, green tea, fresh chapattis and malaria tablets I’m back in the jeep and climbing out of the plain and up to the Malakand Pass.
Here, on the endemically war-like North-West Frontier, almost any pass or prominence bears a fortification of some kind, ranging from fully-fledged fortresses to barricaded look-out points they call picquets or pickets. The best known of these is still called Churchill’s Picket, where the great man, then a reporter for the Daily Telegraph, was holed up in 1897. A force of 1000 British and Sikh soldiers was defying an army of 10,000 Pathans, led by one Hajji Shaib Balee, whom the British press quickly, if predictably, christened the Mad Mullah. Young Winston sent back a blood-curdling account of the dangers they faced. ‘Death by inches and hideous mutilation are the invariable measure of all who fall in battle into the hands of the Pathan tribesmen.’
I can hear him saying it.
The sun is well up now, but the roads badly kept and progress increasingly slow. My feeling of good fortune in being here at all is tempered by constant bumping and jarring and an enveloping cloud of dust and exhaust fumes from the vehicle in front.
Maqsood Ul-Mulk, who has organized our journey today, is a comfortably built man in his early forties with an amused air of quiet contentment, which may well come from being a member of the family who’ve ruled the Chitral Valley for several generations. He points across at the far bank of the River Panjkora, which runs beside us at a fast, muddy grey lick. The road is better over there, because it used to be a big poppy growing area. The central government, under a new policy headlined Poppy-Free Pakistan, offered new roads and houses if the locals agreed to change from opium to less controversial crops. They accepted the offer.
‘What do they grow now?’ I ask.
Maqsood gives the hint of a smile.
‘Onions.’
A bad road becomes atrocious as we wind up to the 10,000-foot Lowari Pass. Closed by snow for six months of the year, this lifeline to the Chitral Valley has only just reopened and the soft-top track has wilted badly under the weight of over-loaded trucks struggling to restock the valley after the long winter.
The rapidly decomposing track climbs tortuously up above the snow line, slicing through sheer ice walls at the end of dirty brown glaciers, negotiating fast flowing streams of melt-water that tumble across the road before being flung into waterfalls below. The sun is blotted out by drifting grey clouds and hailstones scatter across the windscreen. With much blasting of horns and squeezing past trucks stalled on perilous precipices, we eventually obtain the top of the pass, marked by a small stone hut and a low wall of plastic-wrapped soft drinks.
Our drivers can’t celebrate yet, for the road on the other side is even worse, a sheer plunge, which we ease down with the help of 47 sweaty-palmed hairpin bends. Tree trunks stripped bare by avalanche dot the route like tombstones.
Thirteen and a half hours after leaving Peshawar, we are down into the valley and gliding onto tarmacked road again.
By now it’s dark and though it’s frustratingly hard to see what’s out there, I have a sense of being somewhere special. The stars are white as pearls and homes are lit by single lamps and the flicker of wood-fires.
A further three hours later one of the most spectacularly beautiful and consistently uncomfortable journeys I can remember draws to an end as we reach our home for the night, a plain and simple guesthouse above the tumbling waters of a young mountain river. And I was right. It is somewhere special. There are women without veils and wine to drink and villagers with clear blue eyes. This is a very unusual part of Pakistan.
Day Eight : The Kalash Valleys
All night long the river keeps up a light roar, which, in my semi-sleep, becomes transmogrified into the rumble of an ancient air-conditioner. Finally woken by sunlight as hard and bright as Excalibur, I take in the simple tongue and groove walls, flimsy curtains and bare floor of the cabin I’m sharing with Basil, and conclude that this is not air-con territory. Through the window I have my first glimpse of a narrow twisting valley and an extended village of stone-walled houses squeezed along it.
The village of Rumbur takes its name from the river that runs through it, one of a number of steep and vigorous torrents cutting down through the mountains that separate the Chitral Valley from Afghanistan, chiselling out well-concealed canyons that have for centuries been the refuge of a tribe quite distinct from the rest of Pakistan. They have their own language, dress, customs and religion and because they are non-Muslim they have been historically known as Kafirs (Infidels), and this tight little land of theirs as Kafiristan.
Today they are better known as the Kalash (‘black’) after the colour of their clothes, despite the incidence of light skin, fair hair and blue eyes, which some say marks them out as descendants of Alexander the Great’s soldiers.
Pale faces look curiously at us over the dry-stone wall that divides our compound from the lane outside. The fact that some of them are women is a great contrast with the rest of the North-West Frontier, where the rule of purdah is so strictly observed that no woman will look you in the face in public.
The Kalash ladies who peer so frankly at us, often dissolving into giggles at what they see, wear wide black dresses, tied with woollen scarves with multicoloured threads attached and strips of coloured ribbon on hems and cuffs. Their hair, which they never cut, is braided or plaited tight against the scalp and a long headdress, decorated with beads and cowrie shells, runs down from their crown to below their waist.
Saifullah Khan, a man of around 40 with grey threads in his thick dark hair and a face broad and olive-skinned as a Spanish farmer, is proprietor of the guesthouse and spokesman for the community. He’s the only one of the Kalash to have received an education outside the village and after a breakfast of walnut bread he takes us on a walk around, pointing out this and that and constantly hitching up the pants of a grubby brown shalwar-kameez as he does so.
We’re at 6500 feet (1980 m) and as the Kalash live in a largely pre-industrial state, with almost no modern gadgetry of any kind, the air is clear and fresh. Two small hydroelectric generators provide what electricity is needed; otherwise, life is entirely based around agriculture. The women till the fields in traditional costume while the men look after the livestock. The houses, stout and stone-walled, are tiered up on top of each other to save space, with one person’s roof another’s front porch. They have neither gabled roofs nor chimneys and the smoke from the open fires has to find its way out of a hole in the ceiling.