Where the Indus is Young E-Book

Dervla Murphy

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 502

Beschreibung

In Where the Indus is Young , Dervla Murphy's indomitable will is matched by that of four-footed Hallam and her six-year-old daughter Rachel. Together they make a mockery of fear, trekking through the awe-inspiring Karakorum mountains not only in the heart of winter, but close to Pakistan's disputed border with Kashmir. They work their way up beside the perilous gorge carved through the mountains by the Indus, lodging with locals and eating, sleeping and bargaining with the Balts, who farm one of the remotest regions on earth. Despite the hardship, Dervla never forgets the point of travel, retaining enthusiasm for her magnificent surroundings and using her sense of humour to bring out the best in her hosts, who are often locked into the melancholic mood of mid-winter.

Leseprobe

Where the Indus is Young

A Winter in Baltistan

DERVLA MURPHY

To Diana and Jock – most steadfast of friends, in good times and bad – with deep affection

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Maps

Preface

Prologue: Waiting on the Wings

1 Gilgit in the Jeep Epoch

2 Dropped in the Indus Gorge

3 Alarms and Excursions

4 Enter Hallam

5 Urban Life in Baltistan

6 Pain and Grief

7 A Veterinary Interlude

8 Skardu to Khapalu

9 The Nurbashi Influence

10 Vanishing Paths

11 Kiris to Skardu

12 Spring comes to the Shigar Valley

List of Equipment

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Plates

Copyright

Acknowledgements

This journey would have been impossible without the imaginative cooperation of the Pakistani authorities, who made no attempt to restrict my movements despite the present political sensitivity of their Northern Areas. It would also have been impossible without the stoicism, adaptability and sheer guts of my daughter Rachel, who never once complained, however tough the going. And it would have been far less pleasant without the friendship and practical help given so generously by the Raja of Khapalu and by Abbas Kazmi of Skardu.

For editorial help I am indebted to Jane Boulenger, Diana Murray and John Gibbons, while Alison Mills and Daphne Pearce typed heroically from a manuscript that would have been deemed totally illegible by weaker spirits.

Sketch-map showing the author’s expeditions into Baltistan

Preface

In his account of the 1913–14 Italian Expedition through the Karakorams, Giotto Dainelli sowed the seed of this book: ‘… a district – Baltistan – which all the old travellers recognise as the extreme western part of Tibet …’ At present no one has any hope of getting into Tibet proper, under acceptable conditions – and I am not sure that I would want to go there now – but the prospect of travelling through that ‘extreme western part’ was very attractive indeed. So I hastened off to the Pakistani Embassy in London, to seek further information.

During the previous fourteen months I had been having an intense relationship with India. This was based not merely on the writing of a travel-book about that country but on the making of a concentrated effort to achieve some degree of understanding of Hindu culture. I had spent part of the time in India and the rest of it reading, thinking, writing and feeling about India, almost to the exclusion of everything else. It had been a challenging, stimulating, exhausting, enjoyable time – and then suddenly it was over. My book was finished, and less than twenty-four hours later I entered the Pakistani Embassy.

At once, while chatting to a group of Punjabis on a dilapidated landing, I was afflicted by a mild version of what the Americans call Culture Shock. This most probably would not have affected me had there been even a week’s interval between my disengagement from India and my involvement with Pakistan. As things were, the abrupt change, on several levels, was too much.

Within the preceding weeks I had often visited India House, which gives a somewhat incongruous, not to say misleading impression of elegant affluence. The Pakistani Embassy in Lowndes Square is very different. (Or was, in November 1974.) No doubt some rooms had been kept up to embassy standards, but the many corridors, hallways and stairs traversed by me were very evidently the property of a poor country. And the staff – in contrast to all those svelte, impeccably-trained Indians at India House – were so amiably clueless that they had me trotting to and fro from building to building for half an hour before I found the man I wanted. Yet that morning I was conscious of a wonderful feeling of relaxation, of at homeness – an absence of barriers.

It is perilous to venture into comparisons between India and Pakistan but sometimes one has to risk offending both sides, for the sake of readers totally unfamiliar with the subcontinent.

Most Europeans find it easier to form uncomplicated friendships with Pakistanis than with Indians; we instinctively sympathise with the underdog and Pakistan has always been the underdog vis-à-vis India. At the time of Partition India inherited a well-equipped administrative capital in good working order, while the new Karachi Government scarcely had a typewriter or a telephone to its name and was operating not from Lutyens’ stately buildings but from tin huts and cramped private houses. Moreover, those vast quantities of military stores which had been allocated to Pakistan under the Partition Agreements were being withheld by the new Government of India, and Field-Marshal Auchinleck’s HQ in Delhi was abolished before it had time to supervise their distribution. Also, most ordnance factories and army schools, apart from the famous staff college at Quetta, were in India. Yet the rougher the going became, during those early years, the more guts the Pakistanis showed, though they lacked that outside support they had somewhat naively expected. India, being far more influential, got proportionately more consideration from the Big Powers.

All this naturally engenders sympathy for Pakistan. Yet our ease of communication with Pakistanis probably owes most to the obvious affinities between Christianity and Islam, though nowadays this religious factor is two-edged. Theocracies are unfashionable in the West and Pakistan initially alienated many foreigners by presenting herself as an Islamic Republic. This meant not merely that all her people were Muslim (i.e., willing to say ‘There is no God but God and Mohammed is his Prophet’), but that they were fully prepared to accept the Koran, the Sunna (traditional customs) and the Sharia. The Sharia is a formidable collection of complex laws devised by theologians more than a thousand years ago and ever since guarded against change by the Ulema, an even less flexible institution than the Vatican. It was plainly absurd to pretend that the majority of Pakistanis fully accepted the Sharia – individuals can be selective about these laws, while remaining good Muslims – and the 1962 Constitution dropped the description ‘Islamic Republic’. Since 1960 various steps have been taken of which the Ulema could not approve, notably President Ayub Khan’s ‘Muslim Family Laws Ordinance’, which restricted polygamy and divorce.

Certainly the visitor is aware of no stifling conservative theocratic presence in Pakistan, which feels considerably less religion-conscious than the officially secular Republic of India. And having fairly recently visited a number of old-established Christian institutions, in both India and Pakistan, I can vouch for it that since 1947 Christian missionaries have had a much smoother ride in Pakistan than in India. I can also vouch for the fact that even the most powerful Pakistani mullahs have far less influence than the average Irish Catholic bishop.

The leaders of India’s Muslim Revival, during the seventy years or so before Partition, were vigorously unorthodox reformers whose efforts to modernise Islam permanently antagonised the mullahs. While the idea of Pakistan was developing in the minds of some of these reformers, the mullahs opposed it almost unanimously – and not just because its advocates were unorthodox. Nationalism frustrates the Islamic ideal of a world in which all men are brothers, regardless of race, colour, class or occupation.

Baltistan covers an area of 10,000 square miles and was ruled from about 1840 by the Maharaja of Kashmir; therefore it is now part of the Disputed Territory between Pakistan and India. The UN Cease-Fire-Line forms its semicircular north-east, east and south-east border, running from the Chinese frontier almost to the Burzil Pass and making it a very ‘sensitive area’. (As one semi-inebriated Sindhi solemnly explained to me in Karachi, ‘It is the reverse of an erogenous zone – it makes people hate not love.’) I was therefore prepared to wage a long and probably unsuccessful battle for a Balti permit. The Indians, I knew, allowed no foreigners anywhere near their Himalayan frontier and why should the Pakistanis be any more accommodating?

When I eventually found the relevant office in the embassy and made my request a cheerful gentleman behind a wide desk beamed at me and said, ‘You require no visa or permit for our Northern Areas. If you hold a valid Irish passport you may travel anywhere you like in Pakistan for as long as you like.’

‘No permit?’ I echoed, dazed. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Quite sure,’ replied the cheerful gentleman. ‘We have nothing to hide. Every traveller is welcome to every part of Pakistan. According to UN regulations you must keep ten miles away from the Cease-Fire-Line. Otherwise there are no restrictions.’ He pulled open a drawer and handed me a large glossy brochure in glorious technicolor. It was entitled ‘Gilgit–Hunza-Skardu’ and my heart sank. Was I too late? Had even Baltistan, of which Skardu is the capital, been dragged somehow on to the beaten tourist track? But I need not have worried. The Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation is a young organisation, as yet more given to promise than performance. Its information about Baltistan may be accurate by 1984 but was a mere Ministry of Tourism dream in 1974. Baltistan is still one of the least developed inhabited areas of Asia.

The PTDC also failed to give reliable advice about the approaches to the Northern Areas. According to their brochure, ‘A new 302-mile, all-weather road now connects Gilgit with Saidu Sharif in the Swat Valley’. On the basis of this information I planned, before leaving London, to buy a riding-pony for my daughter in Saidu and trek into Baltistan from there, turning off the new Indus Highway near the confluence of the Indus and Gilgit rivers. But in Pindi my plan was thwarted; otherwise I might not have lived to tell this tale. Towards the end of December several thousand people were killed and a forty-mile stretch of the Indus Highway was demolished by the Swat earthquake.

When we left for Pakistan Rachel was not yet six and some eyebrows were raised at my taking such a small child into the Karakorams for the winter. But she was no amateur, even then, having spent four months in south India during the previous winter, undergoing her Asian initiation. Had that journey not been so successful, from her point of view, I would never have contemplated taking her to Baltistan. Our daily life there was obviously not going to be entirely devoid of hardship, and our style of travelling would demand a high level of endurance – by six-year-old standards – while there would be few playmates for a foreign child. But I already knew that Rachel is a natural stoic, and a muscular and vigorous little person, well able to walk ten or twelve miles a day without flagging. Moreover, as an only child she is accustomed to amusing herself for hours on end, and, though by temperament gregarious, she had then the extraordinary powers of adaptability common to most six-year-olds.

To me it seems that the five-to-seven-year-old stage is ideal for travelling rough with small children. Under-fives are not physically mature enough for exposure to the unavoidable health hazards, while over-sevens tend to be much less philosophical in their reactions to the inconveniences and strange customs of far-flungery. By the age of eight, children have developed their own (usually strong) views about how they wish life to be, and are no longer happy automatically to follow the parental leader. This is how it should be. I have accepted that our next joint journey – if there is one – must be something that appeals equally to Rachel and to me, rather than something imposed on Rachel by me.

On the morning of 22 November we boarded our Aeroflot plane for Karachi. Although neither of us was using our full free baggage allowance we seemed to be diabolically burdened; the essential equipment for two people who hope to survive a winter in the Karakorams cannot but seem heavy if one is obsessed about travelling light. A list of this equipment is given on page 261.

17 July 1975

Prologue: Waiting on the Wings

The large notice over the reception desk in Rawalpindi’s fashionable Flashman’s Hotel was exactly as I had remembered it from 1963: ‘Visitors are requested to leave their weapons at the desk before entering the restaurant.’ Those are the little touches that make one feel spiritually back in Pathan-land, though Pindi itself belongs to the Punjab and the Frontier Province lies west of the Indus.

The Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation has its head office at Flashman’s, presided over by the Director of Tourism – a tall, youngish Pathan with auburn hair, green eyes and no great interest in people who want to do untouristical things like spending a winter in Baltistan. However, he courteously explained that the Indus Highway had been closed to foreigners months ago because of Chinese pressure and that we would have to fly to Gilgit, if we could manage to get seats on one of the few planes that do the trans-Himalayan trip during winter. I heard later that an American couple, travelling to Gilgit by jeep, had stopped – in defiance of Islamabad instructions – to photograph the Chinese soldiers who are building the road and who deeply resent being photographed. As a result the Chinese insisted on all foreign travellers being banned.

From Flashman’s I proceeded down the Mall to Pakistan International Airways’ imposing offices. A side entrance leads to a special Northern Areas department and the staff here works in an atmosphere of permanent crisis, with which I was to become only too familiar during the weeks ahead. But I never heard one of them utter an impolite or impatient word to even the most slow-witted peasant or peremptory army officer. The passengers seen in this booking-office are very unlike the affluent Pakistanis who frequent the main part of the building. Most are fair-skinned, with a scattering of Mongolian types. Some have racking coughs, a few have huge goitres, too many have an eye missing or useless. The majority wear woollen, roll-rimmed Chitrali caps, that may be turned down to protect forehead and ears from frost, and quite a few are self-consciously proud of their high-class mountaineering garments, acquired from some expedition and not really the most appropriate garb for the plains. Others wear loose shirts and baggy trousers; an occasional youth sports a cheap lounge-suit tailored in the bazaar; a few elders from Gilgit look regal in gaily-embroidered ankle-length robes of homespun wool. And the Baltis often carry heavy goat-hair blankets neatly folded and draped over one shoulder.

While awaiting met. news one sits for hours in this large room on long back-to-back seats, upholstered in jade-green leatherette, and all around cigarette-ash accumulates on the grey tiled floor, and some men eye the lone foreign woman a little uneasily. I never saw another female in that booking-office. Women of the Northern Areas rarely come down-country and the few women who do fly – the wives or daughters of government officials or army officers – invariably send servants to attend to their tedious ticket business.

On my first visit a very tall and debonair official behind the high counter shook his head and said smilingly, ‘I’m afraid you’ve left it too late. We can’t take tourists into the Northern Areas during winter – you might not get out till April!’

‘But we don’t want to get out before April,’ said I. ‘We mean to spend the winter in Baltistan.’

The young man stared at me – a trifle apprehensively, as though he fancied I might at any moment become violent. ‘Do you know where Baltistan is?’ he asked. ‘Even the Baltis wouldn’t spend the winter in Baltistan if they could help it!’

‘Never mind,’ I said soothingly, ‘we have lots of warm clothes. How soon can you get us into Gilgit?’

‘You are travelling with your husband?’

‘No, with my daughter. So I want one half-fare please. She’ll be six next week.’

The young man shrugged, conveying that this further evidence of instability removed me from those realms in which rational discussion is possible. He glanced down at a thick ledger. ‘You will be number 287 on our waiting-list. You have no chance of a seat before 10 December. And it could be 10 January, if we get the winter rains now.’ I paid then for our tickets which cost only five pounds because flights to and from the Northern Areas are subsidised by the government.

Walking back towards our host’s house, near the National Park, I decided to go to Saidu Sharif in two days’ time. Swat stood high on the list of places I wanted to revisit, eleven-and-a-half years after my first journey through Pakistan.

We were staying with Pathan friends a few miles outside Pindi. Their village lies well west of the Indus, their luxurious, brand-new city-house stands on a hilltop, in the shadow of an old fortified dwelling. From its flat roof we looked down on level farmland, and the evergreen trees of the National Park, and a wide stretch of reddish, fissured wasteland which daily becomes more fissured as earth is removed for making bricks. At the end of a November which had provided no winter rains the land looked ominously parched, yet our friends’ new garden was an exuberant, improbable dazzle of colour. Like most peoples of Central Asian stock, the Pathans are ardent gardeners: an unexpected and disarming trait in a race of warrior tribesmen. Equally unexpected is their interest in poetry, though even today the majority are illiterate. Pushtu is a rich, flexible language and over the past three or four centuries almost every tribe has produced a major poet, whose descendants or followers are still highly regarded.

In Karim Khan’s household I had an uncanny sense of being at home again, rather as though I had been a Pathan in some previous incarnation. In my experience Pathan hospitality is unique. Its blending of complete informality with meticulous attention to every tiny need makes one feel simultaneously an honoured guest and a loved member of the family.

Our host had himself designed his rambling, flat-roofed mini-palace, every detail of which bespoke enormous wealth regulated by instinctive good taste. ‘We don’t often stay in houses like this,’ observed Rachel, standing ankle-deep in an olive-green carpet and looking from the carved walnut doors of our bedroom to the gilded moulding on the ceiling. Every mod con was available, from a huge box of Lego on Rachel’s bedside table to the latest type of Swiss electric hair-drier in the bathroom. Here, one might think, was a family that in all essentials had completed its transition from East to West; but in fact this transition affects only the inessentials. Behind the façade of Westernisation, Pathan life proceeds as usual with rifles to hand, women in purdah, children married to first cousins, prayers said regularly, goats in the backyard, feuds simmering, bodyguards on the alert, and dozens of poor relations from the village being given food, shelter and affection. But ‘façade’ was an ill-chosen word, since one of the Pathans’ most attractive characteristics is their utter lack of pretence. When they can afford the material comforts and conveniences of modern civilisation they seize them with both hands, yet even the younger generation – with few exceptions – is not concerned to appear Westernised on any other level. To me, this seems both remarkable and consoling in the 1970s.

Next morning Rachel was taken to visit the family village near Nowshera and I went shopping. A riding-cum-pack saddle cost the exact equivalent of £6, plus £1.50 for a girth and crupper, all new. The leather was inferior, and the saddle’s mulberry-wood frame had a few woodworm holes, but as these purchases would have cost at least £60 in Ireland I was not disposed to complain. (From England we had brought a hard riding-hat, with safety chin-strap, and irons suitable for a six-year-old.) I also bought a large canvas zip-bag, which could be worn as a rucksack if necessary, five yards of strong rope, a Chitrali cap for myself, a woollen balaclava for Rachel, a kerosene-stove (£1.25), a kettle, a saucepan and two electric-blue plastic bowls out of which to eat. Only our emergency supply of tinned food was expensive: over £7 for a dozen small tins of meat, fish and cheese.

These purchases took up most of the day; bazaar shopping is an essential antidote to staying with a family whose wealth and education set them apart from 95 per cent of their countrymen. I collected much fascinating gossip – especially from the young leather-merchant, who claimed to have a cousin working on the international telephone exchange. His scandalous stories about the love-lives of Asia’s leading politicians (and their wives) would undoubtedly involve me in several libel actions if repeated here. For over two hours I waited in that tiny shop, surrounded by piles of suitcases, handbags and saddlery, while finishing touches were being put to the cotton-padded girth. The smell of new leather mingled with the smell of spices and frying onions from a small, shadowy eating-house across the way, and at intervals our detailed consideration of cosmopolitan sex was interrupted by the arrival of customers. Many were tall Pathan tribesmen from the hills, with splendid hawk faces and untidy turbans. These carried perfect Afridi-made copies of Enfield rifles over their shoulders and invariably wanted to purchase holsters, bandoliers or tack. They were very hard bargainers. The merchant spoke Punjabi, Urdu and English but most of the tribesmen spoke only Pushtu, so there were occasional misunderstandings during which Pathan eyes flashed. Then the little merchant would look nervously around at me – sitting in the background between cliffs of suitcases – as though I were a remnant of the Raj and somehow capable of defending him from his unpredictable compatriots.

We left for Swat at noon next day, having spent two hours sitting in a full bus that had been supposed to start at ten-thirty. Pakistan’s bus-services are less well-organised than India’s. By this stage our gear formed a daunting pile: my big rucksack, Rachel’s small rucksack, that large canvas bag, a cardboard carton securely roped, a heavy saddle made of wood, iron and leather and a two-gallon plastic jerrycan. For the first time in my life I was travelling with more luggage than I could carry single-handed and a great nuisance I found it. But in that battered bus, full of Swatis on their way home, everybody was extra helpful because we had been driven to the bus-stand in a friend’s car – and that friend was Aurangzeb, son and heir of the recently deposed Wali of Swat.

Between Pindi and Nowshera the countryside looked like a semidesert – grey-brown, cracked, parched. The farmer sitting beside me stated with curious precision that if no rain came within six days next year’s wheat crop would be ruined. For me this journey awoke many memories. On my way to India from Ireland, I had cycled along the Grand Trunk Road in June 1963, against a scorching headwind that kept my speed down to five m.p.h. And now my daughter, undreamt of then, was sitting beside me excitedly pointing out various objects of interest along the route – which she had travelled over the day before on her way to and from our friends’ village.

The attraction of the Frontier Province is quite extraordinary. As the red-brown-grey landscape became more broken and rugged and harsh, and the mountains became more distinct along the horizon, and the houses became more fort-like – their windows mere slits, the better to fire through – I felt a surge of nostalgic excitement.

At Nowshera we turned north towards the Malakand Pass and beside an octroi post stood a freshly painted notice saying – among other things – ‘Foreigners are advised not to travel by night and to carry no valuables in this territory’. I had cycled over the Malakand through a deluge and seen nothing, but now we enjoyed a dramatic bronze and smoky-blue sunset as our overloaded bus chugged slowly into the hills. From Pindi to Mingora is 165 miles so it had been dark for half an hour when we arrived at the bus-stand, loaded everything into a covered motor-cycle rickshaw and went bouncing noisily off through the cold black night.

At the empty Waliahad – all Aurangzeb’s family were in Islamabad – I was touched to find myself remembered and warmly welcomed by the senior servants. Since my last visit a lot of water had passed turbulently under Pakistan’s political bridges. In 1963 Swat’s legal status was that of a princely state within Pakistan: the Central Government had a right to intervene only on foreign policy and the Wali administered justice according to custom, Islamic law and his own common sense – which was abundant. I had stayed with Aurangzeb and his wife Naseem, eldest daughter of the late Field-Marshal Ayub Khan, who was then at the height of his power as Pakistan’s benevolent military dictator. And I had been impressed by the efficiency of Swat’s non-bureaucratic administration and by the state’s comparatively high level of prosperity.

In April 1974 Ayub Khan died in Islamabad, five years after the collapse of his régime and his resignation as President of Pakistan. Meanwhile the new parliamentary government had abolished all the princely statelets: Swat, Dir, Chitral, Hunza, Nagar, and the numerous tiny chieftainships of Baltistan. Hunza, Nagar, Baltistan and the former Gilgit Agency are now known as the Northern Areas, while Swat, Dir and Chitral are administered by a District Commissioner who has his headquarters at Saidu, just across the road from the Waliahad. Aurangzeb still represents Swat in the National Assembly – as a member of the opposition, naturally – and is on the friendliest terms with Captain Jamshed Burki, the very able and charming DC who has been appointed by Mr Bhutto to replace the Wali. To me this seems a measure both of Aurangzeb’s fair-mindedness and Captain Burki’s tact.

I have no head for politics and I cannot pretend to any deep understanding of political developments in Pakistan over the past decade. But most knowledgeable commentators seem to agree with Gilbert Laithwaite’s assessment that ‘Ayub was concerned to establish for Pakistan a halfway house to democracy – a democracy that could be understood and worked. His eleven years as President were marked by substantial achievements in the fields of economic advance, of Pakistan’s standing in world affairs, of order combined with progress …’

However, many Pakistanis deny the ‘benevolence’ of Ayub’s régime and will accuse me – no doubt correctly – of being biased. I cannot deny feeling a natural sympathy for the Pathans, a deep admiration for what Ayub Khan tried to do and a great personal affection for his widow and family. He certainly made mistakes, but often these were based on military forthrightness and an impatience with the sort of humbuggery that distinguishes too many of the subcontinent’s more successful politicians. A good example of this sort of ‘mistake’ was his uncompromising commitment to Family Planning. He even appeared on television in an attempt to counteract a widespread campaign of anti-contraceptive rumours which was being cleverly organised by unidentified groups. Probably these groups were led by Muslim equivalents of Ireland’s more unsavoury bishops, whose fanaticism had been harnessed by Ayub’s political opponents. The President’s determination to lower Pakistan’s birthrate was a most valuable stick with which to beat him, in a country mainly populated by illiterate, gullible, hidebound peasants. Indeed, many observers believe that it contributed even more to his downfall than the charges of corruption – much publicised but never proved – that were brought against his immediate family. At any rate, it is perhaps worth recording that one of India’s most distinguished public figures – a man full of years and wisdom – said to me in March 1974, shortly before the Field-Marshal’s death: ‘If only India had had one leader like Ayub Khan!’

To everybody’s relief, it rained heavily throughout our first night in Swat and until noon next day. After lunch Rachel and I explored under a grey sky patched with blue. As the cloud was not low we could enjoy the craggy mountain walls that enclose Saidu on three sides, but the snow-peaks to the north remained invisible. Near the Waliahad hundreds of flat-roofed stone and mud hovels cover the steep hillsides and between them run narrow alleyways or flights of steps. Purdah is strictly observed in Swat and because I looked male to local eyes our progress was marked by the scurrying indoors of numerous veiled figures, some of whom abandoned heavy water-jars in their flight. Even little giggling girls of eight or nine completely covered their faces while peeping at us around corners.

A deep, dry, stony nullah-bed wound between the slopes and was in a disgusting state; being a general dump and public latrine, it stank most abominably after the night’s rain. Having spent the previous winter in India, I caught myself constantly making odious comparisons – for instance, between the filth of many Muslim villagers and the scrupulous personal cleanliness of even the poorest-caste Hindu.

I spent that evening with the lively-minded Burkis, and as I was leaving Mrs Burki invited Rachel to play with her three children next day.

Back at the Waliahad the chowkidar in what used to be the sentry-box was still rapidly knitting, as he had been when I left five hours earlier. The men of Swat are keen knitters and at first one is slightly taken aback on seeing six-foot sentries standing with rifles over their shoulders and incessantly clicking needles in their huge hands. They turn out an endless number of sweaters, scarves, socks, caps and gloves for themselves and their families – an aspect of Pakistani life that Women’s Lib would surely applaud.

We woke next morning to a cloudless sky; thick frost sparkled on the burnt yellow lawn outside our window and a glorious glisten of new snow lay on the long, jagged line of the Himalayas, now clearly visible to the north. At nine o’clock I deposited Rachel on the Burkis, where I suspect she found the forceful Pathan young rather disconcerting after her malleable south Indian playmates of the previous winter. Then I spent a happy day climbing a mini-mountain, revisiting some of Swat’s Gandhara sites and gossiping around Mingora bazaar. Thirteen out of the fourteen English-speaking men with whom I discussed local politics were decisively pro-Wali and said so openly. I thought it an important point in favour of Mr Bhutto’s government that they felt free to criticise it thus to a total stranger.

An innovation called the Tourist Wagon Service has recently appeared on Pakistan’s roads. These fast minibuses, each seating eleven plus the driver, operate non-stop between cities and are used by the less poor Pakistanis rather than by tourists. Our tickets for the 112 mile journey to Peshawar cost Rs.16 (eighty pence), whereas the ordinary bus fare would have been Rs.4.50. As females we were entitled to the two roomy front seats beside the driver; in all Tourist Wagons these, and the back seat if necessary, form the Ladies’ Compartments.

When we left Mingora the valley looked superb in sparkling sunshine, with autumn colours still glowing on poplars, elms, birches and planes. Under a cloudless sky the Swat river was a gay ribbon of blue, tossed across the landscape, and hundreds of multi-coloured goats were grazing on the tawny mountainsides. We met three buses coming up the Malakand Pass on the wrong side, their roofs piled with a singing, waving overflow of passengers and their wheels inches from lethal drops as they swung around hairpin bends. Our driver seemed to keep his right hand permanently out of the window, in order to squeeze his bulbous rubber horn; no doubt he reckoned that negotiating such bends without a horn would be even more dangerous than steering with one hand.

In my first book, Full Tilt, I described Peshawar as being ‘like an English city with a few water-buffaloes and vultures and lizards thrown in’. Those words were written the day I came over the Khyber Pass, after months of cycling through the remoter regions of Persia and Afghanistan. But in 1974, having come straight from the fleshpots of Karachi, Islamabad, Pindi and Saidu, I found this ‘Paris of the Pathans’ – Lowell Thomas’s phrase – a very special place. It seemed less a city in the modern sense than an agglomeration of medieval bazaars inhabited by attractive rough diamonds of many races. It is one of the three Pathan cities – the others are Kandahar and Jellala-bad, in Afghanistan – and since my first visit it has become one of the hippies’ main junctions.

In 1963 the great eastward Hippy Migration had not yet started and Full Tilt has frequently been accused of increasing its momentum, which suggestion troubles my conscience more than it flatters my vanity when I see groups of drugged wrecks dragging themselves around Asia. However, Peshawar’s attitude to strangers has been only slightly modified by the hippy influence. Pesh Awar means ‘Frontier Town’ and for at least 4,000 years this city has been dealing with invaders of many types. The hippies are merely a source of local amusement – and of course profit, for the many drug-peddlers in the bazaars.

We stayed on the outskirts of Peshawar with the Khanzadas, who in 1963 had entertained me at their Abbottabad home and nursed me through a devastating attack of dysentery. But having been unable, from Saidu, to warn Begum Khanzada of our arrival, we spent our first night in a doss-house.

By five-fifteen it was dark and beneath a gold-flecked sky we set off through crisp frosty air to explore some of the ancient bazaars. Rachel was enthralled as we wandered from one narrow, dimly-lit alleyway to another. Above us loomed tall stone and wood houses, centuries old, and we passed butchers and bakers and candlestickmakers (literally: one coppersmith was at work on a candlestick). Often we paused to watch men weighing huge chunks of marble, or carving wood or mending transistors or cobbling shoes or beating brass or tailoring shirts – all by the light of lanterns hanging from the roofs of their little stalls. A flour-covered baker gave us a length of hot nan from his underground mud oven, and we were invited into one eating-house for juicy kebabs, and into another for small bowls of delicious tangy curds, and into two primitive tea-houses for little red and blue china pots of green tea – gahura, the Pathans’ national drink – which filled me with an almost unbearable longing for Afghanistan. As we sat cross-legged on filthy matting in one teahouse a small boy came strolling up the alleyway, noticed us, hesitated a moment, and then stood on tiptoe to hand up to Rachel a glorious pink rose bud, about to unfold. Before we could thank him he had disappeared into the surrounding shadows, his impulsive gesture having completed the perfection of our evening.

A few days later we returned to Pindi to see how flights to the Northern Areas were faring. ‘No hope for you until the sixteenth,’ I was told. ‘Weather’s been terrible this past week.’

As I turned away from the counter a young Punjabi army officer, stationed in Skardu, suggested that if I were to exert a little pressure the waiting-list might be cooked. I was uncertain what sort of pressure he meant – whether moral or financial – but I did not doubt that my debonair PIA friend would be genuinely insulted if offered a bribe. In any case, looking around at all the wretched men who had been stuck down-country for weeks, and were longing to get back to their families, I felt it would be unforgivable to jump this queue.

We spent the next three days in Islamabad, as guests of Begum Ayub Khan. This was only seven months after the Field-Marshal’s death and his family were still mourning a beloved husband and father. Begum Ayub vividly reminded me of my own mother after my father’s death. My mother, too, was a woman of exceptional fortitude; and though such people tend not to give way outwardly to grief, its effects are all the more lasting for that.

The Ayubs’ spacious new house is on the extreme north-eastern edge of Islamabad. Just behind it lie green, rounded hills, on which patches of light-brown earth or grey rock make an irregular pattern, and behind them rises the high blue ridge of the Murree Hills. We found the house and garden full of sons, daughters, in-laws, grandchildren, nephews, nieces and various unidentified relatives from the village. Yet Begum Ayub’s motherly hospitality is so boundless that within those walls we felt not merely accepted but cherished.

Aurangzeb and Naseem live about a mile away, down a long straight road bordered on one side by the homes of diplomats or rich Pakistanis and on the other by miles of open scrubland. Over this wide expanse at the foot of the mountains are scattered the National Assembly buildings, the Prime Minister’s residence-cum-government-offices, the Bank of Pakistan’s Headquarters, a colossal United Nations building, a colony of suburban villas for the British Embassy staff – looking as though it had strayed from Bexhill-on-Sea – and several of the larger embassies, including the Russian, Canadian, British and Chinese.

I remember cycling past Islamabad while it was being built and thinking how frightful it would soon look – another Chandigarh. But in fact Pakistan’s new capital is an agreeable place of wide, bright boulevards, many trees, brilliant gardens, no high-risery and much attractive domestic architecture that is original without being ‘way-out’. Despite its official status it feels like an elegant, cosmopolitan suburb of Pindi – some fifteen miles away, but very close in spirit – and one hopes it will remain so. When Ayub Khan planned it he specified ‘no industrial development nearby’ but his successors may have cruder ideas.

A more immediate threat than industry is basic Asian squalor; it does not take the Orient very long to impress itself on the latest in Occidental architecture and town planning. Islamabad is disfigured by too many areas from which builders’ rubble was never cleared and where men squat around relieving themselves in the shadow of imposing banks, embassies and shopping arcades. Even amidst the diplomatic residences some corners are piled with rubbish and occasional houses already show symptoms of jerry-building, while throughout the less affluent quarters squalor is gaining fast. In ancient Asian cities this sort of thing seems tolerable – even picturesque – but there is something peculiarly unprepossessing about disintegrating new buildings. And inevitably Islamabad has its beggars, though far fewer than any Indian city I know. These piteous bundles lie on the ground, hidden by a thin sheet of filthy cotton or a ragged burkah, and one would never suspect their humanity but for a stick-like arm and motionless begging palm outstretched on the pavement beside the fine new buildings of a new country with very old problems.

Tourist Wagons constantly ply between Islamabad and Pindi; passengers get on and off anywhere they like at either end, or in between, and pay a fixed rate of one rupee per ride. One rarely has to wait more than a few minutes before being picked up, but if a bus is almost empty its driver may cruise around the streets for half an hour, filling enough seats to justify a journey. Even when one starts out from the most swinging quarter of Islamabad, most women come aboard wearing burkahs. To discover what sort of person is sitting beside you it is necessary to study the hand that will soon appear to grip the dashboard bar as the driver swings recklessly around corners. From that hand and its adornments quite a lot may be deduced about the age, physique, social status and approximate ethnic origins of the shapeless figure lurking silently within those folds of (usually black) cotton or nylon.

Despite their looking so spick and span, these buses, like most Asian vehicles, will accommodate on the roof virtually anything that is capable of somehow being hauled up there. Enormous bales of hay and bundles of firewood, pyramids of stainless steel cooking-pots, trussed-up, frantically bleating goats, a plastic kitchen table, a day-old buffalo calf, a sack of wheat, two geese in a wooden crate – up they all go, and are deftly secured to the roof-rack by the driver’s mate, who is usually a good-natured adolescent anxious to help everybody. Rachel’s favourite Islamabad anecdote concerns a goat belonging to one woman passenger who got at a bale of hay belonging to another woman passenger. When the goat’s perfidy was revealed, on our arrival at Pindi, the two women exposed their faces, the better to tear each other’s eyes out, and order was not restored until a passing mullah, outraged by this display of nudity, belaboured both with his walking-stick.

Around Islamabad, the daily life of the peasants remains unchanged by the proximity of their sophisticated new capital. I spent a day walking alone over the nearby hillsides and the villagers’ astonishment on seeing me indicated that Islamabad’s foreign colony does not often take to its feet. A still, grey day it was, reminiscent of late autumn in Ireland, and I reflected gloomily that in such weather there would certainly be no flights to the Northern Areas.

During the afternoon two young women shyly invited me into a stone hut – the first Aryan invader of the subcontinent would have found it familiar – and insisted on refreshing me with green tea, which took almost an hour to brew. Only a few villagers have acquired a little newfangled cement to mix with the mud normally used to pack crevices in stone walls.

From one hilltop I watched a line of ten women slowly ascending the path below me, each balancing two ochre pitchers of water on her head whilst helping to drive a communal herd of goats and kids – the goats wearing ‘bras’, to conserve their milk. Then I looked from the low, oblong huts nearby, over a furlong of level grazing land, to a wide, smooth ring-road along which sleek CD cars were swiftly purring past ingeniously-designed villas incorporating every conceivable mod con. Between these villas, lining the distant streets of Islamabad, stood hundreds of slender poplars, their branches retaining enough orange-yellow leaves to make them seem like rows of giant candles glowing through the late afternoon greyness. I returned home across an expanse of thinly-wooded land where the sound of axes rang out from every side as branches were lopped off for evening fires. By five o’clock a long band of crimson was flaring above the western horizon – a startling sight, after the uniform dullness of the sky all day – and moments later it was dark.

From Islamabad we went up to Murree for two days. Murree is the only one of British India’s hill-stations to have gone to Pakistan; it is 7,500 feet above sea-level and we found it thickly covered in snow. We stayed in a ramshackle hotel which charged Rs.5 a night for what might be hyperbolically described as ‘a double room’, and on our return to Islamabad one of my young Pathan friends, who takes an unusual interest in the world beyond her own circle, asked me wistfully what it felt like to stay in a doss-house. The undertones of envy in her voice made me consciously value, as nothing else had ever done, my own freedom of movement. We European women take this completely for granted. Yet no Pakistani woman, however independent-minded or strong-willed, could possibly travel alone through her own country sharing the life of the poor. Granted, not many Pakistani women would ever want to do such a thing. But suddenly I found the fact that they could not strangely disturbing. Antipathetic as I am to Women’s Lib, its indirect influence may yet do some good in Asia.

Early on 15 December we got back to Islamabad from Taxila, where we had spent five days exploring what was once the centre of Gandhara civilisation. During the previous night the longed-for rains had at last come and we were reminded of the worst sort of cold, wet, dark, Irish winter’s day, with the added disadvantage of mud hock-deep throughout the city. Obviously we were not going to get to Gilgit on 16 December. This time we were staying with the Aurangzebs and on the seventeenth I set off alone – in brilliant sunshine – for a day’s scrambling through the foothills.

I followed an ancient, precipitous path not much used in this motorised age, when peasants go forty miles around by bus instead of ten miles over on foot. Until one has crossed the first ridge urban noises ascend through the still, clear air in an almost uncanny way: the blaring of horns, the high-pitched cries of street vendors, the preaching of some modified Trade Union gospel from a van with a loudspeaker. Then suddenly the city becomes invisible and inaudible. All day I saw only two people – carrying huge loads of firewood on their heads – and this rare degree of silence and solitude gave me a chance to try to sort out the impressions I had received since landing at Karachi three weeks earlier.

The previous evening I had met an elderly gentleman who, on hearing that I had recently visited India, asked eagerly for news of Delhi. An hour and two whiskeys later he was confessing that the older he gets the more he longs to see once more the Moghul capital. For over five centuries his family had lived in Delhi and on one level he spoke of the city with nostalgia and love: but on another level it was the enemy capital. Tangled are the roots of Pakistani nationalism.

He declared that to his children’s generation, too, Pakistan must always be to some extent a place of exile; and I was reminded of my West Punjabi friends in Delhi, who still speak of Lahore as ‘home’. But there is one significant difference. ‘Pakistani’ Indians tend to regard Pakistan’s creation as a massive robbery, organised by the British and the Muslims and condoned by the world. ‘Indian’ Pakistanis, on the other hand, tend to regard partition not angrily but sadly. They have no wish to see it undone, but some of them still deplore that spectacular deterioration in communal relations which made it essential. As Ian Stephens has more than once stressed, in his thoughtful books on Pakistan, ‘something describable as a joint Hindu–Muslim or Indian culture did exist, both under the British régime, and more genuinely perhaps in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries … The point needs emphasising, to keep a correct balance. Over long periods, the two religious systems have functioned alongside one another without overt antagonism, and sometimes with mutual sympathy.’

Sitting on a level ledge of ground under a clump of pines, I found myself wondering, ‘Should Pakistan exist?’ A silly question, in the 1970s. Yet it continues to occur to foreigners more often than they could tactfully admit to their Pakistani friends. Does this indicate that the ‘joint Hindu–Muslim or Indian culture’ is stronger than anything an exclusively Muslim state can create on its own in the godless twentieth century? Or does it simply mean that no hastily improvised new nation can give a convincing impression of nationhood after less than thirty years in existence?

It is easy to forget just how hastily Pakistan was improvised: for years Jinnah was as opposed to the idea of Partition as any Hindu. In 1916 he became known as the ‘Ambassador of Hindu–Muslim unity’; twenty years later he was being commended by the Governor of the Punjab for having successfully reconciled warring factions of Sikhs and Muslims, and not until 1940 did he accept the inevitability of Pakistan. So there was no long historical gestation, no era of frustration during which the Muslims of the subcontinent dreamed impatiently of their own Islamic state. And this must be why one senses so little genuine regret, in present-day Pakistan, about the loss of Bangladesh. The ordinary man in the bazaar naturally resents the humiliation implicit in that loss and spits fire when he thinks of the part played by India. But his emotions seem not to have been seriously involved – as they are on the Kashmir issue – when half his nation was amputated. There was never much mutual sympathy, interest or wish for understanding between the ordinary peoples of East and West Pakistan. They were of different ethnic stock, they wore different clothes, ate different foods, spoke different languages, built different houses, grew different crops, kept different animals and lived against utterly different cultural and geographical backgrounds. Only religion united them, and even their interpretations of Islam – the results of quite different historical experiences – were not identical.

Many Pakistanis said outright to me – and there was no tang of sour grapes in their voices – that they feel their country is better off without Bangladesh, that now they can get down to making something worthwhile of what remains. I was surprised by this widespread willingness to admit that Pakistan, as originally conceived, had been a mistake. One young army officer said to me, ‘You can’t found a nation just on a great big ugly negative – the inability of Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus to live peaceably together. There has to be something more positively unifying, even if it’s just geographical.’

However, the change in Pakistan’s mood that struck me most on this return visit was not very positive. It has come about through the growing-up of a generation with no lingering shred of affection for the rest of the subcontinent, nor any awareness of being linked to it by countless bonds forged throughout centuries of shared history. I met many members of this first-born generation of Pakistanis – doctors, farmers, laywers, merchants, teachers, bank-clerks, journalists, civil servants – and the majority seemed to feel for India only a contemptuous, uncomprehending hostility. Unlike their parents, they have no memories of growing up with Hindu neighbours, taking part in Hindu festivals, seeing pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses in the bazaar. I found them disquieting, for they represent a considerable increase in the world’s sum of hate. They were enormously disconcerted when told that we had spent the previous winter in India and met there with nothing but kindness. They did not really want to know that beyond the border were other ordinary men and women, as generous and helpful as themselves.

One might expect embittered prejudices from those who have personal memories of murderous clashes with Hindus or Sikhs, but in fact the older generations show much less animosity towards India. They knew the Indians as human beings, capable of ferocity and compassion. Nor have they forgotten that when the chips were down there was little to choose between the ungovernable savagery of Muslim and Hindu mobs. Their children, however, know Indians only at second hand, through prejudiced media, and so merely see them as dehumanised symbols of greed, cunning, injustice and cruelty. It was this development which occasionally tempted me to wish that Pakistan had never been created, that some other way had been found out of the 1947 impasse. But of course that was over-reacting. It is understandable that while the Kashmir dispute continues Pakistani chauvinism will flourish. And perhaps the flowering of that noxious weed is an inevitable stage in Pakistan’s cultivation of a national identity.

At noon, as I was walking along the crest of a ridge, the Gilgit plane passed directly overhead. Looking up, I could see its propellers revolving in whirrs of whiteness against the deep blue sky. It was the third plane to have taken off that morning for the Northern Areas, so I began to feel hopeful about our chances of getting away on the nineteenth.

1

Gilgit in the Jeep Epoch

All travelling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.

JOHN RUSKIN

Gilgit – 19 December 1974

I can hardly believe that at last we have arrived. And it is good to be back, despite the many changes that have overtaken Gilgit town since 1963.

The fifty-minute flight from Pindi is complicated by a rule forbidding planes to take off unless they can be sure of returning at once: otherwise they might be lying idle here for weeks. So two hours of clear weather are needed, allowing twenty minutes for unloading; and on every ‘possible’ day one has to wait at Pindi airport because there is rarely time to telephone would-be passengers when Gilgit signals ‘Take-off!’

This morning we sat for five suspenseful hours in the newly-built Northern Areas Waiting Room. It is a desolate, dusty hall, permeated by the stench of its own neglected latrine, and just outside a concrete-mixer was mixing and a pneumatic drill was drilling. Cascades of electric wires poured from holes in the walls and flowed across the floor, restricting Rachel’s movements. Occasionally two worried-looking young men dashed in, fiddled vaguely with these cascades, abused each other vehemently and dashed out again. Soon our mouths seemed full of concrete dust but as there was no loudspeaker system we hesitated to go to the far-away restaurant. When at last we risked it the worst would have happened but for a young Hunzawal who pursued us across acres of builders’ chaos and dragged us on to the plane seconds before the door shut. All our fellow passengers were male: soldiers, government officials, merchants and several schoolboys starting their long winter holiday.

This flight is said to be the second most dangerous in the world – after Skardu – but PIA has a proud record of only two crashes in twenty years. Today, in clear winter light, I found it both more beautiful and more comfortable than on my very bumpy midsummer trip eleven years ago. But my feelings have not changed since I wrote – also here in Gilgit town, on 4 June 1963 – ‘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 …’

We picked out Murree and Abbottabad as we droned at 16,000 feet and 300 m.p.h. over a crumple of brown foothills. Then quickly the hills became higher, sharper, whiter and nearer – much nearer – until we were not over but among the mountains. Soon Nanga Parbat appeared, another 10,000 feet above us, half-hidden by her personal veil – the only cloud in the sky. And along the horizon stretched the almost unbearable beauty of the Karakoram-Himalaya, the greatest concentration of high peaks in the world.

I pointed out to Rachel the Babusar Pass, scarcely 3,000 feet below us and already snowbound. ‘You must have been dotty to cross that on a bicycle!’ said she scornfully. Then we were over the barren Indus Valley – a fearsome sight from the air – and I gazed down at that threadlike track along which I had bicycled to Chilas, where I collapsed with heatstroke and was tended by the locals with never-forgotten kindness. Minutes later we were descending towards a width of flat, cinnamon fields only varied by dark clumps of leafless trees and by the olive-green Gilgit River, which we had just seen joining the Indus.

About fifty men – plus countless children – were awaiting the plane and everybody stared curiously at us. The first change I noticed was a severe airport building of grey stone which seemed to have grown out of the sheer mountain behind it. As we stood on the sandy edge of the airstrip Rachel surveyed the giant surrounding rock-walls and said, ‘This place is like a cage!’ She was a little disappointed not to find herself at once waist-deep in snow. It rarely snows here and only a few white summits are visible above the walls of the cage. But one splendid, sharp, triangular peak shone to the north-east like a silver torch against the cold blue sky. It was catching the sunlight that already, when we landed at 2.25, had been cut off from the valley.

Most people wait to watch the plane’s departure. Flying out of Gilgit is even more difficult than flying in and from the airstrip one fancies the little machine is heading straight for a towering mountain. Then suddenly it climbs, seeming to be on the precipice like an insect on a wall, and moments later it has turned sharply and disappeared into a narrow cleft between two other towering mountains.

A PIA minibus took us into the bazaar, past a neat new signpost saying: ‘Islamabad 400 miles: Chilas 90 miles.’ Then we saw two petrol pumps, a gaily painted Peshawar trader’s truck, a motor-van, several tractors and many jeeps being driven at criminal speeds. What a transformation! Yet the changes are not so drastic as I had feared. To travel on the embryonic Indus Highway is still precarious and so something survives – at least in winter – of Gilgit’s traditional remoteness. Moreover, the many additions to the bazaar and its environs are of well-cut local stone and perfectly acceptable. For the foreseeable future transport costs seem likely to preserve this region from multi-storeyed monstrosities.

On the outskirts of the bazaar we found a ‘Tourist Hotel’ built in dak-bungalow style around a dusty quadrangle. At first Rs.60 were demanded by the smooth young manager who speaks passable English and is obviously dedicated to fleecing tourists. As every room was vacant he soon climbed down and for Rs. 30 we have a cell with dirty bedding, no table or chair, a fifteen-watt bulb, no water for the reeking Western loo and no heating. (A few moments ago I had to stop writing to sit on my hands for long enough to thaw them.) The PTDC unwisely encourages this sort of overcharging. In their Tourist Bungalow near the airstrip a basic room with no mod cons costs Rs. 75 a night.

On the plane we had met a doctor who knew a man who might have a pony for sale. So our first concern was to find Abdul Khan, who lives in one of Gilgit’s agricultural suburbs. But alas! the pony was bartered last week for 300 litres of Punial water (a strong local wine). To console myself for this near miss I bought one litre – good value at Rs.10. Abdul, using his adolescent son as an uncertain interpreter, said that few non-polo ponies remain in the Gilgit area. Oil and petrol are government subsidised so it is cheaper to hire jeeps than to feed ponies. How quickly men abandon what has served them so well for so long!

Abdul’s home was one of a group of small but substantial dwellings built of mud and stone and surrounded by seven-foot-high compound walls. Near the crudely-made wooden door in each wall stood a tall, gnarled, leafless tree packed with golden maize straw for winter feed. Not even the most enterprising animal can pilfer these ‘storage trees’ and no more elaborate ‘barn’ is needed where rain so rarely falls.

Walking along narrow alleyways, with quick-flowing irrigation channels at one side, we attracted a delighted mob of children – laughing, curious, ragged and unwashed. They were wildly excited to see Rachel and eager to touch her silky hair and examine her fur-lined boots and feel her fat rosy cheeks – so unlike their own pinched, pale little faces. She found their boisterous attentions a bit much. Clearly she is not going to mix as well with her contemporaries here as she did in south India. South Indians make gentler playmates and in any case six-year-olds are less spontaneous than five-year-olds.

As we returned to our hotel the sun was close to setting and that magnificent triangular peak swiftly changed from pale to deep gold – and then to a faint rose-pink.