The Frozen River

But the road was certainly coming and indeed was well on its way. It had taken over ten years to reach Panikar and now it was slowly snaking its way over the Pense La. The road workers used picks and shovels – two men, one shovel. One with the handle, the other with a rope on the business end. They worked in synchronised motion. ‘All is pick and shovel.’ One dug, the other pulled to one side. Ingenious. Plus the occasional compressor to power pneumatic drills to cut holes in vast boulders prior to blasting. A long, slow process. But all the workmen had gone home for the winter to Nepal and Bihar.

There was one bottle of orange gin, as well as one bottle of XXX rum bought in Kargil, no doubt liberated from the army. That rum was a godsend. But only one bottle, which had to last six months. Emergencies only. The food would also have to last six months till the passes re-opened in June.

Added to all this were two large cardboard boxes filled with fruit: thirty-six red Himachal apples and thirty-six oranges. I had wrapped them individually in sheets of newspaper, copies of last week’s Times of India and Hindustan Times. News indeed, with Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency still in full swing.7 Journalists had to be careful what they wrote. Many were still banged up in prison, but the newspapers kept rolling just the same. Government propaganda in full swing too. ‘Foreign minister returned from Moscow’; ‘Mrs Gandhi to celebrate her fifty-ninth birthday with tribals in Guwahati’; ‘Tito sends his regards’.

My fruit ration allowed one item of fruit each day for seventy-two days, which would see me through the first half of winter. An attempt to stave off scurvy. The apples and oranges all froze upon entry in Ladakh as I crossed the Zoji La, as did the cabbages. So in Padum I thawed the fruit out beside the makeshift stove, while the cabbage was best attacked with a small saw. Even hard-boiled eggs froze. I also heated old batteries up on the stove to extend their life, but if they got too warm they would explode and send bits of hot graphite flying round the room like shrapnel. It concentrates the mind when you have to think six months ahead. Like being stranded on a desert island, only there were no palm trees, no coral reefs and it was decidedly colder.

After gathering my supplies, I then boarded the last bus of the year for Ladakh. It had required a visit to the chief of police to secure a seat. The ticket wallah told me that there were no seats – he then demanded 100 rupees extra up front as bakshish … which I did not have to spare. The whole expedition could have ground to a halt, so I got in a taxi and went to see the chief of police to make an official complaint. I just happened to mention Tyndale Biscoe and Mr Ray … in passing … and that did the trick. The very mention of John Ray’s name sorted everything out. The chief of police made a brief phone call, berated the man on the other end of the line, saying something about no room for ‘monkey business’ at this time of the year. He put the phone down and smiled. His charm had worked wonders. I was very grateful.

I was given the best seat on the bus, next to the driver.

My last telegram was sent from the small and delightful post office with its ‘rose beds and cosmos’ on the bund. ‘ZOJI LA OPEN LEAVING TOMORROW’.

Getting over the Zoji La to the frontier town of Kargil was only the beginning. I had to get into Zangskar before the passes closed. The snow was already late. I also had to find horsemen willing to cross the Pense La into Zangskar – roughly a week’s walking, which was cutting it very fine indeed. I could not waste a single minute.

We passed Dal Lake, shimmering in the early morning light, then wound up through cedar forests to Sonamarg. One passenger intrigued me. He wore army uniform, a red beret and looked Tibetan. He was a Khampa8 and belonged to the ‘22s’,9 a semi-official guerrilla unit that patrolled behind Chinese lines in Tibet. At one point they were supported by the CIA and operated though Mustang in Nepal, but the CIA had recently pulled the plug on them so they had regrouped in Ladakh and were operating under Ngari Rinpoche, the Dalai Lama’s younger brother. I had a letter of introduction to Ngari Rinpoche, but had just missed him in Dharamsala.

There are many stories about the Zoji La. The pass is often spoken about as if it is a living person, inspiring fear and admiration in the same breath. Some still call the pass the Shurji La after Shiva, the all-powerful Hindu god who creates, protects and transforms the universe. Shiva – god of destruction; highly appropriate if your vehicle goes over the edge.

Very slowly, army convoys crawl up the steep hairpin bends. You wait for hours and then it is like a rodeo, as gaily coloured trucks and overloaded buses jostle for position. Some lorries break down and are simply dragged to the side of the road. If brakes fail, that’s it. ‘Trust in God’ and military engineers. The pass is only open for half the year.

Below the road you could see the old trade route, just wide enough for two laden animals to pass and a single telephone line. There were stories of whole caravans being wiped out in late spring. The first caravans of the year always got the highest prices down in Kashmir. Avalanches were frequent and heavy. These days it was army convoys that got caught. Far below in the valley bottom you could see the mangled remains of several lorries and buses that had gone over the edge. In winter, snowploughs keep the pass open as long as possible. Road construction was a dangerous job and in these places close to the front line it was always undertaken by military engineers. All the way up there are wayside shrines and memorials to soldiers.

Early intimations

As the bus wound its way up the Zoji La my mind drifted a little, half tired, half hypnotised, almost in a dream state as the cedar trees flashed past and the views of snow-clad mountains opened out. I now had time to think about where my own journey had really started, where I was going and what I was looking for.

Travels often begin much earlier than you realise, usually in childhood. My grandfather, my mother’s father, was an excellent navigator and was on convoys in both wars. According to his small, slim, blue P&O diary, I was born at the beginning of a very cold spell in January 1954. His entries were sparse: ‘V Cold’; ‘VV Cold’. So my first inkling of the outside world was of a vast white landscape inhabited only by snow and ice. If the photographs are anything to go by, the trees were white with hoar frost. A magical entrée into a cold, glistening winter world.

I was then brought up on the western edge of Dartmoor in south-west England. A fine, wild place with its granite tors and bevy of fast-flowing rivers. When I was eight years old there was a very bad winter. Dartmoor was covered in snow and ice for three months, like a polar ice cap. Temperatures went down to -20°C and rivers froze.

I lived alongside one. School was cancelled and there was a slight feeling of anarchy. You could pick up quite bit of speed tobogganing down main roads on old fertiliser bags and tin trays. Farms and villages were cut off for weeks on end, even months.

Snow creaked underfoot. Rivers became like glaciers. The maps in our minds now had crevasses. Avalanches were common. Like Zen monks we entered a closed order, went up to the moor and observed its pale face, a vast moonscape upon which we walked slowly, like small gods. Silence and isolation were constant companions. Even the sea froze over.

These images became deeply embedded in my young mind, as if snow and ice were the natural order of things. The idea of being cut off from the outside world for half the year was therefore very appealing, a subconscious desire to return to that vast, white, endless space. If it involved mountains, even better. And so it was that the seeds of winter exploration were sown.

Wild places

But there were other layers of meaning, other images that sprang to mind. Other wild places that had original flavours, landscapes that were rugged, barren and untouched by human hand. It was the effect of the mountains on the mind that interested me most of all. Dangerous on your own or when caught out in bad weather. The beauty is within and without.

You lead a mountain life even when away from them. You are drawn to the mountains by their stark sculpture, their angular geology, the network of glaciers and snowfields. It is the nature of the rock that shapes them and gives them their individual topography. High-altitude ecology is very fragile. Certain zones can change with increased temperature, snowfall or over-grazing. Glaciers can retreat and some villages have had to be abandoned. It is something you feel within your bones. An unspoken understanding, a reverence, a deep respect.

I was also fascinated by rock in more immediate ways. By scaling cliff faces, clinging on by your fingertips, dancing on your toes, balancing on lips, cracks and ledges, struggling up chimneys, negotiating overhangs, seeking new routes up vertical walls. Rock climbing had its own strange satisfactions, but danger always lurked in your shadow. Sea-cliff climbing was a particular pleasure. I had several narrow escapes. Eventually rock climbing gave way to mountaineering.

I joined the army and signed on the dotted line for what was supposed to be a permanent career. They positively encouraged exploration. I was in the Royal Engineers, whose colonels, according to Kipling, were either ‘Methodist, married or mad’. Well, I wasn’t married or Methodist, so that left only one option. Scotland in winter had its interesting moments, ice gullies, ice climbing, blizzards and snow holing, crampons and ice axes. But deep down I needed a very different sort of challenge. Something timeless. In another dimension.

Travelling became a way of life. In their infinite wisdom the army posted me to Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean, and so each summer I travelled further east. My apprenticeship – first in Turkey, then Iran and then Afghanistan. Hugging borders, crossing mountain ranges and deserts, testing altitude. Testing myself. Nosing around bazaars and backstreets, finding nomads and their black tents, entering restricted areas, evading army patrols and customs posts. The Cold War hotting up. The Middle East, or, as James Joyce probably would have called it, ‘The Muddle East’.

I had tasted deep silence on Mount Ararat10 and in the Dasht-e-Lut – the Desert of Emptiness.11 Mountain silence and desert silence. One cold, one hot. Each had its own flavour. Such silence was addictive. On Ararat I was held up by Kurdish communist bandits at 13,000ft just below the snowline. They were on horseback and wore bandoliers and waistcoats, as well as Kurdish black and white chequered headdresses. A very different sort of silence when you realise that four carbines are trained on you.

A year later the army turned a blind eye and I crossed the Hindu Kush on foot, through Badakhshan and Nuristan. ‘A Long Walk in the Hindu Kush’. Newby territory. I was held hostage for two days by a local tribesman, then snow came down on the fifth pass and not for the first time I sensed the extraordinary power of winter in the mountains. It gave me ideas.

Unfortunately I also contracted typhus in Afghanistan – ‘Afghan fever’. Sweating hot and cold, semi-delirious at times. I was put in a darkened isolation ward all on my own with the blinds pulled down. When I was able to open my eyes again and my mind eventually settled, I started reading Walden – Henry Thoreau’s classic account of living beside a lake in Concord, Massachusetts. Walden was good for the soul, and slowly I began to see the world through different eyes. Why not take a leaf out of Thoreau’s book? Why not spend a year alone deep in the mountains? Afghanistan was a stepping stone. Fever the catalyst. Ladakh – a mountain desert.

In my letter of resignation to the army I mentioned something along the lines that ‘studying early Tibetan Buddhist wall paintings might be more useful than bridging on the Rhine …’. My contribution to the Cold War had not been very significant. The general was not amused, but to his credit my old adjutant was brilliant and managed to get me out of the army in three weeks flat, which was quite a record.12 But it cost me £1,946, no mean sum in those days.

Uncle Kenny

As the road climbed up the Zoji La, the pass became steeper and steeper and trees slowly began to peter out. The bus only just squeezed round each tight hairpin bend. As I looked over the edge, I began thinking about Uncle Kenny, an eccentric uncle whose family had been out in India for four or five generations. He was something of a legend, and it was his colourful stories of India that had drawn me inexorably further east.

Earnest and brilliant, Uncle Kenny’s knowledge and enthusiasm for Indian art was infectious. He was one of those uncles who with a deft flick of his freckled hand talked in secretive whispers about the Great Game on the North-West Frontier. He had been born at a hill station at the beginning of a particularly early and tempestuous monsoon, and was ‘milk brothers’ to Pathan tribesmen. He always saw India from the inside. Eccentric even by Indian army standards, he was a man of many layers, quixotic, highly intelligent and brusque. He didn’t suffer fools gladly, but if he liked you and you were keen on your subject and asked the right questions, the doors of the ‘Wonder House’ began to open one by one.

When I was twelve I wanted to be an archaeologist and had already been on a dig. So my grandmother had a natter down the telephone line to her sister in Kent and arranged for Uncle Kenny to give me a conducted tour of the British Museum. K de Burgh Codrington was a real live professor and for many years he had also been Keeper of the Indian section at the V&A. I thought being a keeper was like a timekeeper, goalkeeper or a zookeeper, which was not far off the mark. He had indeed looked after one old Bengal tiger, ‘Tippu’s Tiger’, a French-inspired mechanical wooden tiger captured at Seringapatam in south India. When you turned a handle, the tiger growled as it mauled an East India man, who let out a plaintive, muffled scream. Pride and joy of the V&A. Très jolie.

Uncle Kenny was indeed a keeper. He kept time with India. He kept India under his cloak and up his sleeve. He kept the flame of Indian artistic knowledge alive in London with wonderful exhibitions that helped change people’s perceptions of Indian art. He loved museums and was also an avid keeper of secrets.

We met at the entrance to the BM, as the grown-ups called it, with all its pillars and capitals. Uncle Kenny looked me up and down as if I were a recruit for Lumsden’s Guides or Hodson’s Horse. He shook my paw and took me on a whistlestop tour of all the ancient carvings and Buddhist statues, pointing out any artefacts that came under his gaze, all the time telling me not ‘What they knew’ but ‘What they did not know’. A revelation to me that ‘grown-up’ knowledge had black holes in it. Sometimes he would stand in front of a Buddhist statue and just absorb its beauty, then touch the statue gently as if it were a real person and move on with a slight nod of his head. These were his friends, colleagues and inspiration. This was his office, his temple, his spiritual home.

Then Uncle Kenny took me upstairs, where there were other smaller statues: gold and bronze Tibetan Buddhas and even a small, squat crystal goose from the ancient city of Taxila, thought to contain a small bone relic of the Buddha.13 The goose flying over the mountains, a migratory path so beloved of Buddhists to the lake beyond, the flight path of the soul.

So before going to Ladakh I visited Uncle Kenny in his lair. Lunch, roast chicken. Rose Cottage, Appledore, on the edge of Romney Marsh. This time he was sorting through a great pile of Kushana coins that lay scattered on his table, with elegant Kharoshti script that danced around the Greek heads. Uncle Kenny had pepper and salt hair and a large pair of professorial horn-rimmed glasses. He spoke in sentences and half sentences. He showed me another small Buddha head. It left a deep impression. Peaceful, wise, intelligent, aristocratic, refined. The fusion of early Buddhist sculpture with Greek aesthetics; ancient Gandhara, the ‘perfumed land’ – a sacred place in his heart. He was always talking about Taxila, Peshawar and Kapisa, names of ancient cities that started to reverberate around my mind.

Uncle Kenny’s ears pricked up when he heard that I was going to Ladakh. In spring 1942 he had tried to climb the Zoji La at night with guides, porters and burning torches. There was no road, only a slender track. He was optimistic and wanted to see the ancient Buddhist wall paintings at Alchi beside the Indus. But Shiva had other ideas and hampered his attempt to cross the pass. There had been a heavy fall of snow, and the avalanches were unpredictable and dangerous. Eventually in the early hours, when up to his waist in powder snow, he had reluctantly turned back.

Uncle Kenny’s deep interest in Tibetan Buddhism had been sparked by a chance encounter as a boy in Simla when he saw a Tibetan salt trader in a rough woollen cloak squatting down outside Viceregal Lodge flanked by two British sergeants. Something was rather odd about the salt trader. He looked very refined, had long fingernails and pointed ears. When Kenny asked who he was, one of the sergeants replied, ‘That, Sah, is the Dalai Lama.’ His Holiness had fled Tibet to India to escape the attentions of the Chinese and was in secret talks with the British Viceroy. Must have been the 13th Dalai Lama in about 1910.

A rare historical moment as they both looked at each other …

My ‘task’ was therefore to continue Uncle Kenny’s journey into Ladakh, to explore the culture, to decode Zangskar and to decipher the language of silence. That was quite a challenge. Creating a museum of the mind. To record as best I could a living Buddhist culture with a continuous thread going back to the time of Gandhara. That was the sort of challenge I was looking for.

When I left Appledore, Uncle Kenny wished me luck and simply said, ‘Beware avalanches.’ He shook my paw. I had been given my marching orders.

Dried apricots

The summit of the Zoji La was an anti-climax – a few scrappy buildings, a toll barrier and an army snowplough detachment. Sikh engineers stood around in green padded jackets and dark blue turbans, just waiting to get their snowploughs stuck in. They banged their hands together and stamped their feet. Snow swirled around ominously.

Paperwork was checked and tolls paid. Eventually the Sikh sergeant raised the red and white barrier, waving us through, then brought the bar back down again with a clang. We were in. The doors were shutting one by one. The password was no word at all. The Tibetan Khampa smiled as he looked out of the bus window. He was coming home to his family – Tibetan Buddhist territory that he understood.

Next day in the town of Kargil, right on the Pakistani front line, I bought ten kilos of dried apricots, each kilo of wizened nuggets carefully weighed out on a hand-held balance with a single smooth, rounded stone salvaged from the river in the other pan.14 Old-style weights and measures. Brass pans. Equilibrium. Each kilo tipped into a small, dusty hessian sack. Apricots, gemstones of the mountains. Rich flavours of summer. Orange tinged with red. Blushing. Apricot oil was used in lamps. Medicine. Gives a good sheen to dark hair and is rubbed onto the skin when hands become chapped with cold. I was interested in the taste. A rich, complex sweetness that filters through your mouth. Anchors you into warmer times. Best soaked the night before and then warmed up.

Apricot wood is also used for musical instruments. In China the expression ‘expert of the apricot grove’ is used to refer to a good physician. Apricots are used in traditional Tibetan amchi medicine. Almost as sacred as juniper. Ten kilos of apricots would last me most of the winter, I reckoned. Useful down the frozen river. Luxury.

Kargil was a key town strategically.15 In the old days you could go north to Skardu and Baltistan. But since Partition in 1947 it had been the scene of bitter fighting. In three wars the town had changed hands several times. It was even said that soldiers in the Pakistani OP (observation point) on the mountain that overlooked the town could, with a powerful pair of binoculars, see what the Indian brigadier was having for breakfast on the veranda of his army bungalow down by the river. A masala omelette and a chapatti or two, washed down with masala chai, this information no doubt relayed to the generals in Rawalpindi for analysis. One day the Indians put in an airstrike, followed by an uphill assault to reclaim the OP so that the brigadier could enjoy his breakfast in peace.

To get to Suru I took a lorry. There had been a very hard frost that morning, and to get the engine started the boy lit a fire with straw under the sump to get the sluggish oil moving and the engine turning over. Eventually the diesel spluttered into life. I travelled in the back with my baggage, a few goats and thirty men standing on sacks of flour. I hung on for dear life. This valley had once been Buddhist. Near Sanku, there was still a tall Buddha statue.

Six hours and forty miles later, after many halts, the lorry arrived at the roadhead – Panikar. I offloaded my possessions and watched the lorry going back down the valley, changing gear as it negotiated stream beds and rode over large ruts. I listened intently, maybe for half an hour, as the engine noise became fainter and fainter, slowly receding until it disappeared altogether. The silence that followed had such extraordinary depth and breadth to it. You could almost touch it. This was what I had come for. Then the dust storm hit.

The roadhead

Walking into Zangskar from Panikar in the middle of November on the very edge of winter presented its own problems. It is still a hundred-mile walk to Padum, but it felt more like a hundred years. At night I kipped out in the engineer’s compound, sleeping on the concrete floor of an open lean-to shed, surrounded by all the baggage I had brought up from Kashmir – two large hampers, half a dozen hessian sacks, an assortment of bags and holdalls, two sets of skis and snowshoes, ice axes and crampons, as well as two hurricane lanterns and a Primus stove.

The local teacher helped me to find horses. To get horsemen to go to Padum on the edge of winter was not easy. They had worked on caravans all summer and were exhausted. I needed four horses. For two days we walked from village to village asking anybody we saw, without success. There were many excuses, all of which were valid.

It was too cold

Horses had been worked all summer.

Snow might come at any time

Snow on the pass was often very deep.

It was too far

There was no grazing.

The men were tired

Horses were tired.

Horses needed shoeing

They needed extra grain.

The men were wary

Their wives did not want them to go.

What if there was a blizzard?

Men had died on the pass.

What if they were trapped in Zangskar?

What then?

What if the horses were trapped

Who would pay for fodder?

How would they even get fodder?

It was too late in the year.

Where would they stay?

There were wolves.

There were bears

There were snow leopards.

There had been trouble in Zangskar

Some kind of uprising.

Rumours that people had been killed

That is what they are saying.

It is too cold

None of them want to go.

In the end, I negotiated directly with two brothers in their forties, Fazal Din and Jamal Din. We agreed a price, based on double the government rate because their return journey would be unladen.16 It seemed reasonable enough in the circumstances as it was a seven-day journey: seven days there and seven days back, which made a journey of fourteen days. If they did the journey quicker then they kept the extra money, which was a good incentive. Fifteen rupees to the pound.