Hisper: fortress of ice and snow
05 May 2017
The Biafo-Hisper glacial system, extending ninety-eight kilometres in a gleaming white line of ice clenched within the jaws of the most dramatic granite spires, is among the longest ice stream outside of the polar regions. Its southeast end rests a few kilometres from the Balti village of Askole while in the northwest the houses of Nagar feel the icy blasts of wind scudding down its surface.
Right in the middle, equidistant from both ends of the glacier, there sits the gentle saddle of the pass that the people of Nagar know as Hisper. For the people of Baltistan, this is R’Dzong La (Pass), however. Now, R’Dzong in Balti signifies a small defensive turret. The question is: why should anyone need a fortification 5230 metres above the sea on a glacier?
Labels: Book of Days 2011, Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan, Roads Less Travelled
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Khunjerab: the upstart pass
11 January 2017
As renowned passes go, the 4730 metre-high Khunjerab is an upstart. Until the building of the Karakoram Highway it was a nonentity. For as long as humans have travelled, and they have travelled since the beginning of time, they sought the shortest route between two points. Consequently, to enter the habitable parts of Gojal and Hunza from the north or to travel the other way, they used the direct line over the Mintaka Pass.
Indeed, the Khunjerab Pass was no crossing point at all. Here in the wide open upper reach of the Hunza River valley the shepherds of Gojal herded their cattle in summer. Here the yak, so used to the arctic winds, fattened well on alpine grasses and flowers. But when the first snows fell in September, the herders withdrew, livestock and all, to the more amenable climes of their permanent villages lower down the valley. For the next seven months, the snow-swept uplands of Gojal remained inviolable.
Read more »Labels: Book of Days 2011, Northern Pakistan, Roads Less Travelled
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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West Muztagh: bearer of the Balti footprint
29 May 2015
In the heart of the glacial web of the central Karakoram Mountains where the snow leopard stalks Himalayan ibex and the golden eagle quarters the skies for snow partridges, the terrain seems all but impassable for humans. Even in that ice-bound fastness of towering peaks, there lies a breach that for long served as a connection between the Baltistan capital of Skardu and Yarkand in Turkistan.
Accessible from the village of Askole by way of the Panmah Glacier, this is the New or the West Muztagh Pass, 5300 metres high and glaciated the year round. West Muztagh plays a junior role to its sister pass, however. Long before this pass was discovered, the people of Baltistan were travelling by one they simply called the Muztagh Pass. About the year 1790, snow and ice conditions made travel over that pass difficult and the route fell into disuse. On the orders of the Raja of Skardu, reconnaissance was carried out and the West Muztagh route was opened around 1800.
Labels: Book of Days 2011, Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan, Roads Less Travelled
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Jhao: forerunner to Makran
24 May 2013
In September 325 BCE, Alexander the Macedonian had settled the affairs of Patala (Hyderabad) and started on his journey westward. His route lay southwest to what is now Karachi and then north to Lasbela. The ancient histories tell us that Rhambakia lying on his route was the home of the Oreitai tribe, and their ‘largest city’. We know today that the remnants of Rhambakia very likely sleep under the high mound on which the modern houses and bazaars of Lasbela town stand.
As the Oreitai received word of his impending arrival they put up small pockets of resistance along the way. But being no match for the great host of the Macedonian forces, they were routed until the invaders reached Rhambakia.
Read more »Labels: Alexander, Balochistan, Book of Days 2011, Roads Less Travelled, Turbat
posted by Salman Rashid @ 10:16,
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Shandur: where Kelly and his Punjabis fought nature
09 May 2013
Most people know Shandur Pass on the highroad between Gilgit and Chitral only for its annual July polo festival. The reader of history is, however, also aware of this being a lonely byway for travellers of a long-gone era on their way between Central Asia and Punjab through Swat.
No archaeological record of travellers has so far been discovered on the Shandur itself, but absence of such record does not necessarily record absence of human activity. Lying almost at the foot of a frequently used pass between Central Asia and Chitral, Shandur was the easiest and shortest connection with Swat and eventually the Peshawar valley. In the thousand years between the advent of the Common Era and the beginning of the Turkish incursions that brought an end to Buddhism in our part of the world, a trickle of Chinese Buddhist pilgrims passed regularly down this way.
Read more »Labels: Book of Days 2011, Northern Pakistan, Roads Less Travelled
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Shimshal: the elusive pass
07 May 2013
By the middle of the 19th century Britain had dug in well and settled for a long rule in the Indian subcontinent with eyes on Central Asia. The primary British interest was to tap the vast commercial potential of the marts on the far side of the mountain barrier formed by the Hindu Kush-Karakoram-Himalayan chain.
As early as the 1820s, British agents had explored and discovered the main artery for such trade: the route north from Srinagar and Kargil through Leh and over the Karakoram Pass to Karghalik and Yarkand. By about the middle of the century when British and Indian trading caravans were busily streaming back and forth along this ancient road, a periodic irritant came into the notice of the authorities.
Labels: Book of Days 2011, Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan, Roads Less Travelled, Shimshal
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Babusar: Passage of the Pious
03 May 2013
In the last years of the 2nd century BCE, Maues the Scythian king led his tribe from Central Asia down the Hunza valley and into the Indus Gorge near Chilas. There he pitched his army against the forces of Gopadasa, the local king. The Scythians prevailed and a faint carving on a rock by the bank of the Indus outside Chilas town pictorially records that far away event: Scythian soldiers leading a corpulent Gopadasa in chains to Maues sitting in a chair.
Historians would argue over the route taken by the Scythians from their Central Asian homeland to Chilas. Of the two possible routes, the one across the Mintaka Pass takes precedence for selection because of the absence of the difficulty of glacier crossing and ample pasturage all along. And so, having bested the king of Chilas, Maues marched on to make his home in Taxila.
Labels: Book of Days 2011, Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan, Roads Less Travelled
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:30,
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Mintaka: ancient byway into the subcontinent
26 April 2013
Sitting at the head of Misgar Valley (Gojal, north of Hunza), the 4760 metre-high Mintaka Pass has one of the most evocative and tantalising names: in the Wakhi language, it is the Pass of a Thousand Ibex. Sometime in the latter Middle Ages, the Wakhi people who speak an archaic form of Persian came down this way from Tajikistan and Wakhan to make the valleys of Gojal their home. Their hunters’ instinct would have been greatly titillated by the sight of herds of Himalayan ibex browsing on the slopes around them and they gave the high, wind-swept saddle a name that stuck.
The Wakhi tribes were not the first comers on Mintaka, however. Nearly a millennium and a half before them, in the latter half of the 2nd century BCE, a great horde of horse-riding northern peoples followed their leader down this pass on their way to become masters of much of modern-day Pakistan. The chief was called Maues and his people were the Scythians. Driven out of their home by drought and the pressure of a more powerful tribe, they sought the fertile plains of the Indus Valley whose fame by this time had spread far.
Labels: Book of Days 2011, Gilgit–Baltistan, Mintaka, Roads Less Travelled
posted by Salman Rashid @ 01:00,
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Moola: pass of the King’s Highway
20 April 2013
On the exit march after his ‘Indian Campaign,’ Alexander the Macedonian fetched up in the city of Patala (Hyderabad) in September 325 BCE. It was time for him to shed some of his old pensioners. And so the aged general Krateros was given charge of ten thousand veterans to lead home to retirement. The route Alexander wanted Krateros to explore and map was the direct Barbarikan-Arachosia highroad.
Now, Barbarikan was the famous and prosperous mart on the Sindh seaboard by a mouth of the Indus River. We today know it as the ruined city of Bhambor; Arachosia was the Helmand Valley of Afghanistan. This ancient route lies sandwiched between the modern Indus Highway to the east and the great barrier of the Khirthar Mountains to the west and was in use until the 1940s when the new black top highway was laid. Now only local camel caravans ply its ancient and arid loneliness.
Labels: Balochistan, Book of Days 2011, Moola Valley, Roads Less Travelled
posted by Salman Rashid @ 10:16,
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Bolan: where the Brahuis hold sway
19 April 2013
Mach (the name means Date Palm in Balochi), sits 980 metres above the sea amid barren hills that glint the colour of burnished gold in the sun. Twenty-six kilometres away to the northwest, Kolpur lies at 1790 metres above the sea. While the former is known to be among the hottest places in Pakistan during the summer, the latter gets a goodly fall of snow most winters. Between the two, the tortuous windings of the Bolan Pass follow a stream through a landscape whose timeless desolation is scarcely offset by the modern lorries, cars and trains that speed along its contours.
The river carrying its burden in subterranean channels and dry for the most part, every now and again releases the water in the form of springs. Where that happens, villages sprout up and verdure makes for a pleasant counterpoise to the starkness of the rocky gorge. But in the distant past, greater precipitation meant a greener Bolan and a perennial river. And so, six thousand years ago, when the cities of the Indus Valley engaged in a brisk trade with Mesopotamia, the Bolan Gorge formed the northern branch of the great three-pronged east-west highway.
Read more »Labels: Balochistan, Book of Days 2011, Roads Less Travelled
posted by Salman Rashid @ 08:00,
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Chhappar: born of an earthquake
18 April 2013
About a hundred and fifty kilometres north of Sibi, there sits on a roughly east-west axis an elongated hill the shape of a gigantic Swiss Roll. At some remote point in time, much beyond the span of human memory, a cataclysmic earthquake split this hill into two almost equal halves. Down this roughly hundred-metre wide crack known as the Chhappar Rift there now flows a small stream from the north to the south. Depending on the weather, this can either be a raging torrent during the rains or a mere trickle otherwise.
Throughout the long and creative passage of time, this great crack was part of a byroad from the plains of Sindh in the south to the valley of the Zhob River in the north. For an ancient traveller heading from a Sindhi town through Sibi for, say, Gardez or Ghazni, this was the shortest route. Closer to our times, we know that from about the middle of the 18th century, the Hindu merchants of Shikarpur, celebrated for their diligence and honesty, were trading as far away as Bokhara, Samarkand and Saint Petersburg. The Chhappar Rift, being the shortest connection between Sindh and those northern towns, was a frequent route.
Read more »Labels: Balochistan, Book of Days 2011, Roads Less Travelled
posted by Salman Rashid @ 08:00,
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Khyber: Pass of the Pathans
17 April 2013
Cutting across the Suleman hills to connect the fertile Peshawar valley with the Afghan highlands, the Khyber Pass is arguably one mountain conduit in Pakistan to have seen the most protracted unfolding of human history. From the dawn of time to the modern age, it has formed a major entry point from the Afghan highlands into the vast and fertile Indo-Gangetic plains. On the one hand, it reverberated again and again to the tramp of booted feet, clink of armoury and the whinnying of war horses. On the other, its walls have absorbed the sound of softly murmured prayer of the pilgrim and the trader on a long and lonely journey in search of nirvana whether spiritual or temporal.
Though it was not the only entry point to the subcontinent – there being no fewer than half a dozen other conduits within eighty kilometres along the border on either side of it – the Khyber was the easiest route because it could take wheeled traffic. It is as though nature had purposefully cleaved a clear trough through the range to afford trouble-free passage.
Read more »Labels: Book of Days 2011, Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, Roads Less Travelled
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Roads Less Travelled
16 April 2013
The most primordial act of the human race is walking. Hundreds of thousands of years before they formed societies and built their cities, humans walked. They walked from end to end of the great land masses of the planet, discovering their world as they went. For the walker, there was no road too difficult, no obstacle insurmountable. The walker went everywhere. And then, some five thousand years ago, humans domesticated the horse and the world suddenly grew smaller.
There were straightforward journeys across the easy geography of the plains. But there were others across mountainous terrain that could only be traversed through gaps or passes. In some cases, these passes were ordinary conduits across low mountain barriers; in others these were high altitude, ice-bound gaps in walls of rock, ice and snow. While man’s facility in discovering the first kind is understandable, the heroism of discovery and the subsequent travel over glaciated mountain crossings is truly admirable. The stories of these passes speak of man’s hardihood and determination.
Read more »Labels: Book of Days 2011, Roads Less Travelled
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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