The women were driving donkeys laden with all their worldly possessions; we stopped the Land Rover to talk to two of them, a mother and her daughter. These women had shaved heads, and wore elaborate beaded jewelry that encircled their foreheads and looped down their noses. Their ears were pierced and stretched, so the lobes hung in long loops; they had a lot of hand-tooled metal, bracelets and necklaces, as well. Flies buzzed around their faces, and crawled over their skin; they didn’t bother to swat them away.
Alongside them were their donkeys, carrying wicker and woven things, articles made of hide. Everything they possessed was simple, made by hand from natural substances.
They chatted happily with the courier in Swahili, we shared chewing gum, and I found myself working to make some kind of human contact with them. I looked again at their shaved heads and the jewelry, and tried to see them as women, as sexual creatures, but I had unexpected difficulty; I worked hard to admire the workmanship of the articles in their possession; I became, in truth, a little panicky as I watched the flies crawling over their faces and recognized that in a moment we would get back into the Land Rover and drive away, and we would leave them here, in this hot, desolate landscape, driving their donkeys with their handful of simple possessions, and suddenly the gulf between them and me became too much, and I found myself thinking, These aren’t people. These aren’t human beings.
I was horrified at my own thoughts. After all, I had studied anthropology in college; I was better prepared than most to perceive the humanity behind the mask of cultural artifacts. But here I was, struggling to see two tribal women as human, as “the same as you and me.” And I was failing. I saw them as animals, creatures who possessed some simple, rather pitiful stuff.
Ordinarily when I think something alarming like this, I worry that other people will somehow pick up on it. I fear they will know that I don’t like them, or that I think they’re stupid, or whatever it is I am thinking. But now I watched these women with complete equanimity. Because I knew: They’ll never figure out what I am thinking.
And so I stared, and took a couple of pictures, and we got in the car and drove away, and pretty soon the women had disappeared behind us in a cloud of dust from the Land Rover. And pretty soon after that, I had forgotten my inability to see the women as people. It all drifted away, and I began to wonder whether the pictures would turn out well, and what my friends would say when I showed them pictures of the Samburu women.
A few days later we were driving in Masai territory, on the way to Lake Baringo. All day we had been seeing Masai people, the men standing in the fields with cattle, the children playing by the side of the road.
Around midday we passed a row of young girls wearing frilly white dresses. The girls had white paint on their faces, too, and they were giggling and laughing, in a festive mood. “Oh, look,” Loren said, “they’re going to first communion.” We stopped the car. The girls clustered around it, smiling and waving to us happily. “Isn’t that sweet?” Loren said. “I remember my first communion.”
Our courier cleared his throat. “It’s not, uh, communion,” he said.
“Really? What is it?” Loren said.
He explained that these girls were going to their ritual clitoridectomy. Masai young women underwent surgical removal of the clitoris in adolescence. Loren listened in shocked silence, staring at the smiling girls. “Why are they so happy?” she said.
Then she wanted to know the rationale for such a mutilation, but of course the rationale made no sense. Masai men said they removed the clitoris to diminish the excessive sexual appetites of the women, but Masai women were known to have excessive sexual appetites anyway; after bearing her first child, a Masai woman was not expected to be sexually faithful at all.
“Then why is it done in the first place?” Loren asked.
“It’s like graduation,” the courier said.
“Some graduation,” she said.
In the early afternoon the Land Rover overheated, so we stopped for a while to top up the radiator and let the engine cool. We broke out our box lunches and had sandwiches. Pretty soon a young Masai boy came over from a nearby field, where he had been tending cattle. I gave him a sandwich, which he accepted gravely.
Then another young boy came running up. I said to Loren, “Brother, now I’ve started something. I’m going to have to feed the whole damned neighborhood.” I started poking around in my box for a piece of sandwich I didn’t want. Where were the cheese sandwiches? I hated those.
But when the newcomer arrived, the first boy tore his sandwich in half and gave a piece to the other boy. He did this immediately, without any reluctance to share. Both children stared at me, each holding half a sandwich. I felt ashamed.
Pretty soon we had a group of kids clustered around the car, and we gave away the rest of the food. The kids were sweet and shy, and mostly just stared in silence. They watched everything we did—how we handled the cameras, how we loaded film, how we kept our sunglasses in a tray on the dash, how we drank our soft drinks from metal containers.
They watched all this with the polite solemnity that I had learned to expect from Africans, and after a while we got used to one another. I sat on the seat of the car with the door open, facing out, and I stared at the kids, and they stared back. And it was like that for a while, and I day-dreamed, and when my attention returned I noticed that they were behaving oddly. One after another, they would bend over, and twist their heads, and look at me sideways.
At first I thought it was a game. I smiled.
They didn’t smile back; they just did this odd sideways looking. And they chattered among themselves.
And then I got it: they were trying to look up my shorts. They had seen I was very tall and they were curious about whether everything was in proportion.
Yet they would never have behaved in that open way unless they were thinking, He’ll never figure out what we are doing.
And I knew only too well what that thought implied. It implied that they were seeing me, and the other occupants of the metal Land Rover, as somehow not quite people, not quite human beings. These aren’t really people; they don’t have the same thoughts and feelings we do, and they won’t understand what we are doing.
Nearing the end of the trek to Baltistan, we returned to Mishoke, the large village nearest the Shyok River. There, in the evening twilight, the people were celebrating an annual ritual in which the women placed lighted candles on the graves of the dead in the village cemetery. It was a beautiful ceremony to watch, even though the men refused to participate, sitting to one side jeering at the women. At Mishoke we also heard that the ferrymen had gone on strike, and now there was no way to cross the river and get back home.
I turned to Loren. She just shrugged and smiled. Loren refused to be worried; she believed that somehow everything would work out. But I was definitely worried. As far as I could tell, our situation was not good.
In less than twenty-four hours, the jeeps were coming out from Skardu to pick us up at Khapulu. If we were not at Khapulu to meet them, no one was sure what would happen. The jeeps might wait for us, or they might not. There was no radio in Khapulu to call them back if they departed. All in all, it seemed best to somehow get to Khapulu.
Only we could not cross the river.
Could the boatmen be convinced to end their strike? No, they were gone. We offered exorbitant bribes. No, the boatmen had left the river and no one knew where they had gone. Could anyone else pole the rafts? No, that was not possible, either. Was there any other way across the river?
Yes, there was a bridge west of Khapulu. It was twenty-five miles from Mishoke, where we were now. However, some people felt the bridge had washed out the previous winter. More inquiries were made. The village people agreed that the bridge had been damaged, but was probably still standing and serviceable.
In any case, we could not walk twenty-five miles in a single morning. More inquiries were made, while we ate our cardboard dinner. It developed that someone i
n the village owned a gasoline-powered tractor, and this tractor had a sort of cart attached to it. Perhaps we could hire the tractor, and ride to the bridge?
Yes, we could hire the tractor. Unfortunately, there was no gasoline for it. That stumped us for a while. More bribes were offered. Eventually people began to show up with small liter bottles of gasoline, like bottles of beer. We purchased them. We inspected the tractor and hired it for the following morning.
So we had a plan, but for my taste there were too many uncertainties ahead. I fretted that night in the tent. Loren was serene. It bothered me that she was so calm; I felt a split between us, a split in our realities. I was worried and thought it correct to worry. She was not worried and saw no reason to be worried. We were out of step with each other in a way that troubled me.
The next day we bounced and jolted on this tractor cart over rugged terrain and several broad rivers. By the end of the journey, we were exhausted, caked in dirt. But we reached the bridge, which was in excellent shape. We crossed it, and on the other side most people pulled off their boots and stuck their feet in the cold river. I was feeling annoyed with Loren, distanced from her, so I went up into the hills with Major Shan to look for the jeeps. Major Shan and I sat in the shadow of some rocks, and waited in the blazing midday heat for the jeeps. From our high vantage point, we could see several miles of the road twisting through the beautiful and desolate landscape. We smoked cigarettes. Shan squinted at the road, which shimmered in the heat. Finally he said, “Good place for an ambush.”
“What?” I said.
“Good place for an ambush,” he repeated. He pointed out that from our high position we commanded the road; a handful of men here could stop a large number of vehicles. The men in the vehicles would have nowhere to go; we could kill them all.
I stared at him. He was completely serious. He was thinking about the best way to kill people. I was surprised that his perceptions of this landscape could be so different from mine.
“We are close to the Indian border,” he said. “As a military man, you cannot afford to deceive yourself. You must see things as they are.”
Then he changed the subject, and asked me how long I had been married.
“Ten months,” I said.
“This is not your first marriage?”
“No. My second.”
“You have children?”
“No. No children.”
“You will have children with Loren?”
“Yes, we plan to.”
“She is a lawyer,” he said.
“Yes. She just finished her training.”
“Ah.” He shook his pack of cigarettes, offered me another. It seemed to end the conversation.
The jeeps finally came, and we rode back to Skardu that night. In the rest house, Loren collapsed on the bed: “Thank God!”
“What’s the matter?” I said.
“I was so worried!”
“I thought you weren’t,” I said.
“Are you kidding? No boats? No way to get back across the river?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said.
“Because,” she said, “you were freaking out, and there was no point in both of us being upset, that would have just made things worse.”
“I wish you had told me, anyway,” I said.
“Why? It wouldn’t have done any good.”
I knew what she was saying, but now I was feeling another kind of isolation, not the isolation of geography, of being in a remote place, but the isolation that existed between people, even between Loren and me. Something unstated, something unclear and perhaps inevitable.
And that was how we left Baltistan.
Shangri-La
Five years after hearing my friend Peter Kann talk about his visit to the fabled place, I, too, was going to Hunza. The tiny mountain state, known as the original Shangri-La and traditionally closed to foreigners, had been opened the year before. It was the place where the people were beautiful, intelligent, and immune to disease; where they lived to be 140 years old on a diet of apricots; where they existed in harmony in a spectacular mountain setting, cut off from everything that was bad and corrupting in the civilized world.
That was Hunza. I was excited to go.
In Islamabad, our group waited two days for a plane to Gilgit, the staging area for trips to Hunza. Two days was nothing to wait; Peter had waited much longer than that, and mountaineering parties had sometimes waited a month for a flight. But we were on a schedule; besides, there was now another way to get from Islamabad, north to Gilgit—the Karakorum Highway.
This extraordinary feat of engineering was a road two hundred miles long, traversing the most rugged mountain range in the world. For most of its length it followed the gorge of the Indus River, one of the great canyons of the world. In fact, the road had been built by the Chinese, and hundreds of workers had died during its construction.
We hired a bus, loaded it with our stuff, and set out. The trip was thought to take fifteen hours, perhaps longer; nobody seemed quite sure. The bus was a typical brightly decorated Pakistani bus, which looked, to the casual glance, like a 1960s psychedelic fantasy. Every exposed surface, inside and out, was covered with signs, woven fabric, bits of mirror, hammered tin, and the whole thing was painted a swirling design in garish Day-Glo colors. It was horrible in a way, but it had the virtues of exoticism—and there was certainly plenty to look at if you tired of the passing view.
Our Pakistani driver had been hired specifically because he knew the road. He brought with him a teenage boy, who sat at his feet, on the steps leading down to the exit door. Every bus driver brought a boy, who received a small wage and did odd jobs for the driver, bringing him his meals and looking after the baggage for the passengers.
For the first few hours, we passed flat wheat fields; neat villages; camels on the road. We stopped for lunch in Abbottabad, a town with many old British colonial buildings, which had once been the farthest outpost of the British Empire in this part of the world. From Abbottabad, the British in the nineteenth century had twice tried to conquer Afghanistan, and twice had failed. This area of West Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan, is populated by Pathan and other tribes. Like the Afghans, they are fiercely war-like fighters; their lives are structured around militance in a way that Westerners do not readily understand.
From Abbottabad, the land became more desolate and more rugged, and we entered the gorge of the Indus River. For the next several hours, we twisted and turned along the river, seeing spectacular views of the plunging river, and the twenty-five-thousand-foot peak of Nanga Parbat on the east.
All morning the driver had smoked cigarettes with the unmistakable odor of hashish, and now, in the warmth of midday, he began to fall asleep. The boy at his side would nudge him awake when his head drooped, but often the bus took the hairpin turns too widely for comfort.
Finally we confronted the driver, who denied anything was wrong. We asked him what would make him feel more alert. He said music. Soon we were listening to Pakistani music blasting through this psychedelic bus as we careened along the Karakorum Highway, along the Indus River Gorge, on our way to fabled Hunza.
After ten hours of driving, we stopped at a little roadside spot for chapatties and a chance to stretch our legs. There we met a British hippie, who told us that the highway to the north was closed because of a landslide. Passage to Hunza was impossible; we would have to turn back. After ten hours, we received this news with disbelief, and many comments on what a dirty little bugger he was, obviously on drugs, obviously wrong.
At the next stop, we asked again. Yes, it was true, a landslide blocked the road. Vehicles were not able to cross to Hunza.
I looked at Major Shan. He didn’t seem concerned: “Perhaps it will be cleared,” he said, shrugging.
I could imagine it would be cleared, for we had been passing landslides all day. They were usually small piles of stone, bulldozed out of the roadway; they did not seem to have presented any great problem. The r
ock of the river gorge was friable, and it seemed that the Karakorum Highway was destined to suffer these small landslides as long as the road existed.
Anyway, after a dozen hours bouncing on the bus, nobody seriously considered turning back. We pressed on, north toward the landslide.
I said, “When did this landslide happen?”
“Two days ago,” Major Shan said. “Perhaps three days ago.”
One of the others on the bus shook his head. “Imagine. The road’s blocked two days ago, and they still haven’t got it cleared. What a country!”
The landscape became flatter, a desert plain. It was extremely desolate, with low hills in the distance. On the maps it was marked “Tribal Territory.”
The light turned softer as the sun descended in the sky. We stopped for gas at a roadside station: a small shack, some pumps, and, for miles in every direction, desert. It was beautiful and desolate.
Major Shan took me aside, and we went to the back of the bus. He kicked the tire with his foot, and seemed reluctant to speak. Behind his dark aviator sunglasses, I could not read his eyes.
Finally he said, “I did not bring a gun.”
“Oh yes?” I said.
“I could have brought one. I thought of it. But I did not wish to alarm any of the tourists, so I did not bring a gun.”
“Is it a problem?”
“Well, now I have no way to get a gun.”
“Why would we need a gun?”
“Soon it will be dark,” he said, looking around. “The landslide is still one hour ahead on the road. It will be too dark to cross when we get there. We will have to camp for the night.”
We all suspected that this might be so, but we were carrying full camping equipment on the bus: food, tents, sleeping bags, the works. It wouldn’t be a problem. Would it?
Major Shan looked around. “This area,” he said, “is not reliable at night.”
The words shot into my brain: This area is not reliable at night.
I tried to control my growing sense of disbelief at what he was telling me. It felt like a scene from a bad movie, the busload of tourists suddenly in trouble. I had a hard time working my jaw, making words come out properly. When I spoke, my voice seemed too thin. “What do you mean?”