AFGHANISTAN: from love to hate ... TWO WEEKS OF MOUNTAIN TRANSITION Edward Adrian-Vallance, England The road went up and up, from the village of Sarhad, past the last signs of civilization in the form of rare lone huts of mud and stones and fields of irrigation, who reluctantly clung to the edge of the village at the end of the 200-kilometer road which goes from the town of Ishkashim on the east. Sarhad is at 3300 meters above sea level, and the pass, we had to cross today, even at 1000 meters above. However, all thoughts or feelings of fatigue and altitude sickness has replaced the excitement because I finally begin my journey on the road the Afghan Pamirs. After some time we reached the saddle, which proved to be a small, relatively flat, grassy space at the intersection of which took us 10 minutes. His red shaggy head marmots emerged from burrows to the right, then left of us. They whistled to each other in his strange squeaky language, which in the past few days, I mistakenly took for the birds. When we reached the other end of the plateau, the ground ends abruptly and went down at a dangerous angle. The trail is somehow continued to walk on the almost vertical rock until until they reached the river about 1000 feet below, where again immediately went up on the other side of the valley on the edge of which we were then. - The Road? - I asked Said Fakir, the owner of a donkey, laden with my bags, pointing to a thin line, which was an incredible way to canyon wall in front of us. In a huge empty space that separates us from dizzyingly complex paths, lazily circling eagle. - Yes, - he answered. - Problems? - No, no problem - I answered. Pass about an hour later we were raised on this hillside, the trail was just such a complex, which seemed far away. I tried to look strictly to themselves, but, as often happens in such cases, some unhealthy recklessness attracts the eye to a huge chasm lurking nearby, on my right. At times the path was wide enough and was not worried about anything, but she suddenly became fuzzy, turned into a strip of compacted land width of only a few centimeters, which hovered over the abyss at an angle of 30 degrees. Rose a strong wind that blew in his face, forcing me to hold my hat to avoid being killed somewhere very far away. - Eat! - I cried Said, coming up to him and trying to shout down the wind. Although I was hungry, needed a halt at my feet rather than the stomach. I'm already tired of the order. - No! Problem! - He shouted back, waving his arms, trying to depict the wind. - Eat! - He shouted, pointing somewhere ahead. I thought he meant that the camp will be on the other side of the mountains, where not so windy. Slope of the mountain on which was a trail, after about two-thirds of the way has leveled off, and now we're probably strayed from side to side than rose to the top. Chasm on our right was still huge, and the wind went crazy and but half an hour after we entered the new path, the right of it, we discovered a large boulder, behind which one could hide from the wind. In the end, a no shelter. True, we realized this only after it unloaded the donkey, took bread, and sat down to eat. Mountain River After a while, breaking the two mountain pass, we began to descend the steep winding path down to the unusually green bottom of the gorge, a small platform, covered with trees and shrubs. Immediately murmuring stream. She descended from the mountain to our left, and then, on the right side, ran a few miles to a large river Langar, which can be seen from the mountain. - Shauro! - Said said, pointing to the green. I knew it was called a lonely place, where we had to spend the night. It is somewhere between Sarhadov and the first village of the Pamirs. The beauty of the Afghan Pamirs muscles on the legs, which are more or less stayed the whole day, during a steep and difficult descent to Shauro began seriously ill. Eventually, the pain became so bad that I had to ask Sayid to a halt when we reached the valley. - Her-EET, sleep! - He said. I looked in the direction where he pointed out, and a few hundred meters ahead I saw some stone structure - perhaps the shepherd's shelter - partially hidden trees. I continued to walk despite the pain in his shin, and after 2 minutes, we jumped over streams and waded through the trees on the rocky valley floor. Even here, the vegetation was sparse, but I felt that I got into a luxurious oasis in the desert, a small bastion of life and hope in the middle of an endless deadly emptiness barren land on which we walked all day. Read more:
No comments:
Post a Comment