A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby

Author:Eric Newby [Eric Newby]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780007508143
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

* * *

1. The American traveller Charles Masson. Narrative of Various Journeys, etc., London, 1842.

2. Pronounced oog not ugh.

3. This little-known campaign against the Safi tribes of the Kunar Valley took place some time between 1945 and 1947.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Round 1

We were in an impressive and beautiful situation on a rocky plateau. It was too high for grass, there was very little earth and the place was littered with boulders, but the whole plateau was covered with a thick carpet of mauve primulas. There were countless thousands of them, delicate flowers on thick green stems. Before us was the brilliant green lake, a quarter of a mile long, and in the shallows and in the streams that spilled over from it the primulas grew in clumps and perfect circles.

The lake water came from the glacier of which Hugh had spoken; we were in fact in the ‘dead ground’ that I had been trying hard to visualize during our telescope reconnaissance. From the rock wall that was our immediate destination, the glacier rolled down towards us from the east (to be accurate E.N.E.) like a tidal wave, stopping short a mile from where we were in a confusion of moraine rocks thrown up by its own movement, like gigantic shingle thrown up by the sea.

The cliff at the head which divided it, according to Hugh, from a similar larger glacier flowing down in the opposite direction, looked at this distance, about two miles, like the Great Wall of China; while above it, like a colossal peak in the Dolomites but based at a far higher altitude, the mountain itself zoomed straight up into the air to its first bastion, the pinnacle of the north-west buttress. Above the buttress there was a dip, then a second ridge climbing to another pinnacle, twin to the first, then another ridge that seemed to lead to the summit itself.

The cliff joined the buttress low down on its sheer face. Vast slopes of snow or ice (in my untutored state there was no way of knowing the difference) reached high up its sides. To more skilful operators they might have offered an easy beginning; no one could have found the rock above anything but daunting.

For some time we considered our task in silence.

‘It’s nothing but a rock climb, really.’

‘I can see that.’

‘Just a question of technique.’

‘What I don’t see is, how do we get on to it.’

‘That’s what we’ve got to find out.’

The west wall that had filled me with such awe when the sun set on it was now scarcely to be seen at all; only the apex of that fearful triangle was visible with a light powder of snow on it, far less than I had imagined.

The lower part was obscured by pesar ha ye Mir Samir, ‘one of the sons’, a mountain loosely chained to the parent at a great height, 18,000 feet high, rising from the pediment of snow slopes above the glacier and running parallel with it across our front. From the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.