Looking for Traces of
George Hayward and 19th centruy geopolitics in Northern Pakistan
Originally published in Humsafar, inflight magazine of Pakistan International Airlines, January 2012
The
minibus turns another corner on the narrow mountain road, and the valley opens
ahead. The Ghizr River is a turbulent, cobalt-blue streak between smooth
boulders; stark, iron-grey slopes rise on either side to snow-streaked ridges,
and long lines of poplar trees line the irrigation ditches. The clear sky,
arching over everything, is the colour of lapis lazuli.
From
my seat in the minibus I peer out at the hard, stirring landscape. I am deep in
Gilgit-Baltistan, heading west towards Gupis and the Yasin Valley. This wildly
remote region, where the world’s three highest mountain ranges – the Himalayas,
the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush – lock together in a knot of sparring ridges,
is Pakistan’s mountain fastness.
For
decades trekkers, mountaineers, photographers and cultural tourists have
journeyed here to take on testing trails and perilous peaks, or to seek out
warm welcomes and old traditions in remote villages. But I am here in search of
history, for Gilgit-Baltistan was the crucible of one of the most fascinating
chapters of the 19th century, an episode steeped in romance, intrigue and
adventure. I am heading deep into the Hindu Kush to trace echoes of the Great
Game.
***
The
Great Game – a term popularised by Rudyard Kipling – was the period of imperial
rivalry between Britain and Russia in Central Asia when spying, soldiery and
science were stirred together into a heady brew of adventure. From the early
1800s both powers expanded their reach into the region, by stealth as much as
by outright conquest. The area that now forms Gilgit-Baltistan lay at the very
crux of the entire Asian mountain system. It was a wildly remote region, but to
have knowledge of its rivers, its passes, and its chieftains was to have the
upper hand in the colonial game-play. And so a steady trickle of European and
local travellers snuck into the region with hidden compasses and secret orders.
They were spectacularly hardy men who crossed mountains with minimal equipment,
shrugged off the threat of assassination, and spent months or even years away
from home, just to bring back some titbit of information of interest to
politicians and geographers.
The
Great Game was a wildly adventurous episode, a boys’ own adventure story made
real. And today, more than a century after the game came to an end, a hint of
the old romance still endures in the mountains of Pakistan’s far north.
***
My
journey had begun in Gilgit, the town that has always been the hub of these
mountains. Today it is the place where the Karakoram Highway meets other
tenuous roads, east to Skardu, and west to Chitral. It is also the terminus for
one of the world’s most spectacular air journeys – PIA’s mountain-hopping
flight from Islamabad.In the heyday of the Great Game, however, getting here usually
required a 22-day trek from Srinagar, across the Burzil Pass and the Deosai
Plateau, and down the hair-raising Astor Valley. The first foreigner to record
a visit came in 1866. He was a gloriously eccentric figure called Dr Gottlieb
Leitner. A short-statured German academic, he had arrived in the area to study
the languages, and made it to Gilgit with nothing more than three jars of
Bovril in his pockets. Leitner was the first to sample the hospitality which
still makes Gilgit-Baltistan legendary amongst travellers today. The locals
treated him to a feast of roast sheep, and a rousing display of traditional
music and dance; it was enough to convince him, and he spent the rest of his
career championing their cause against the machinations of the distant masters
of the Great Game.
Gilgit
has grown exponentially since Leitner’s day, but wandering its bustling
bazaars, I discovered that the frontier atmosphere and the old hospitality
still endured. At every turn burly men with fair skin and pale eyes – a legacy,
the locals like to claim, of lost legions of Alexander the Great – called me
aside to drink sweet milky tea and chat.
The
streets were a colourful chaos of gloriously decorated Suzuki minivans and
buzzing motorbikes. Vendors pushed carts loaded with apples and pomegranates,
and the smell of fresh bread and sizzling kebabs wafted out from the smoky
chaikhanas. Here and there a stern, upright soldier or policeman trotted
through the crowds on an elegant polo pony – for Gilgit is a stronghold of the unruly
mountain version of the Game of Kings.
***
In
the decades after Leitner a long litany of eccentric travellers, most of them
British, visited the area around Gilgit. There was John Biddulph, the first
British resident of Gilgit, who spent several lonely years there compiling
reports and laying out rose gardens in the 1870s; he was followed by the
Lockhart mission, a military expedition of stern men with plus-fours and
magnificent moustaches, who sketched and surveyed their way up and down the
same valleys that would tantalise trekkers of later generations. And then there
was one of the best known of all Great Game figures, the mighty Sir Francis
Younghusband.
Younghusband
entered Gilgit-Baltistan through the back door, scraping across the Muztagh
Pass in the Karakoram. He wrote of the view from the top of the pass that “For
mountain majesty and sheer sublimity that scene could hardly be excelled”.
Anyone who sees the high peaks of this upland wilderness today would have to
agree with him.
Younghusband
was bound for the fabled kingdom of Hunza for negotiations with its ruler, the
Mir. His visit perhaps marked the highpoint of the Great Game – a Russian
agent, Grombchevski, was loitering in the same area, and had also been courting
the Mir, and the stakes were high. Ultimately it was the British who gained the
upper hand. By the turn of the 20th century the Great Game was over, and the
Gilgit region had been thrown under the rule of the Maharaja of Kashmir and his
British suzerains.
But
even so, in the villages and on the mountainsides of Hunza it is still easy to
imagine the era when shadowy groups of men crept over the passes with small yak
caravans and hidden map-making equipment.
***
My
own journey into Gilgit-Baltistan was in the footsteps of one of the most
mysterious of all Great Game figures. Three years after Leitner a strange,
intense 31-year-old Yorkshireman named George Hayward arrived in the region. He
had been sponsored by London’s Royal Geographical Society to explore the Pamir
Mountains, but his previous attempts to get there – through the Northwest
Frontier and Xinjiang – had been thwarted. Now he was trying to get through the
passes beyond Gilgit. After wanding into the stormy political waters of the
region Hayward found himself on the wrong side of just about everyone – the
British, the Maharaja of Kashmir, and the locals. He was murdered in
circumstances that have never been properly explained at the head of the Yasin
Valley, west of Gilgit in 1870.
And
so now, many decades later, I am tracing his final journey. It has taken me
deep into some of the most beautiful landscapes I have ever seen, along the
banks fo the Ghizr River, west from Gilgit towards the Shandur Pass, and then
north into the remote, otherworldly Yasin Valley.
In
Hayward’s day this was an independent kingdom; today it is still a world apart.
The lower regions of the valley are thick with poplar and willow trees, their
autumnal leaves glowing like molten copper in the sharp mountain sunlight. As I
explore the small, stone-walled villages that dot the valley, the local people
welcome me into their homes. I am treated to a spot of traditional culture at a
village wedding, with the same kind of music and dance Leitner saw almost 150
years ago, and given sweet pomegranates and juicy apples at every turn.
The
very last part of the journey takes me north along the valley to the tiny
village of Darkot. This was the place where Hayward died – and the exact
location of his death is still remembered by the locals: they call it Feringhi
Bar, “the Foreigner’s Valley”. Hayward’s visit may have ended in catastrophe,
but mine turns out very well indeed, with a warm welcome that Leitner would
have enjoyed, and a mountain view that Younghusband would have appreciated.
Sitting
high above the valley I look out on a sweep of rugged peaks, the white curve of
a glacier, and a series of tantalising passes – west to Chitral, east to
Ishkoman and Hunza, and north towards the Pamirs. History may have moved on,
and the Great Game may be over, but the mountains have not changed.
©
Tim Hannigan 2011
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