Before the Fall

Long ago and far away I had dinner with a prince. He was a very old man and his palace was frayed around the edges. It stood on a high promontory among the poplars and willows above a wide valley between huge, hard mountains. On the flat roofs of the houses in the village below there were walnuts and apricots drying in the clear October sunlight, and it was already cold at night. Inside the plain rooms of the palace there were cracks in the rammed earth walls and in a damp recess there were mouldering books with titles like “The Sportsman’s Guide to the Beasts of India”. The planking of the veranda was uneven under foot and a preying mantis was hunting lazily under the eaves.

But he was a real prince, of the ul Mulk family who had ruled over the Vale of Chitral for more than a century. Chitral was a locked world: away to the northwest the great rough dagger of Tirich Mir rose white to a pale blue sky; not far from the palace the valleys suddenly tightened into the three purdahed gorges where the last pagans in the Hindukush lived and girls with cowry shells braided into their hair sat playing reed flutes under the walnut trees and the men and the boys burnt fragrant juniper branches in the high goat pastures. And beyond those valleys was a land that everyone had forgotten called Afghanistan, and the whole place was surrounded by mountains.

In the lower rooms of the palace the prince’s two wives lived (he said that the Islamic injunction that allowed a man to have as many as four wives was troublesome – even two was too many, for he was always caught in the middle of their bickering). There were three young retainers in creamy white shalwaar kamises who cooked and cleaned and kept the garden with its tall trees and exotic shrubs just on the right side of wilderness.

We ate at a round, wood-wormed table in an upper room in the flickering light of a low-wattage bulb. The table was broken, and to keep our plates from flying up in our faces we each had to grip the edge with our free hand as we ate (there were three of us: the prince, my father and myself).

The prince had grown up in the days of the Raj when his family ruled the little mountain fastness the way they had done for generations, and there was only a British Resident to watch that they committed no terrible excesses (Chitral was a lonely outpost, but close to such a sensitive frontier the Resdient had to be a capable man, not some exiled failure). The prince spoke fondly of the fair play and order of those days and complained that since electricity had come to the valley the amplified prayer calls from the village mosques disturbed his sleep. We ate pomegranate seeds that someone in a downstairs kitchen had already meticulously picked from the fruit leaving no fragment of yellow pith.

In the morning the light was sharper than broken glass. There was a powdered dust of new snow on the ragged peaks beyond the terraces and poplar-lined irrigation channels across the valley, and though you could still feel the weight of the sun on the back of your neck it was clear that the Indian Summer was beginning to fade and before long Chitral would be bolted shut for six months…

Long ago and far away… except that it wasn’t really so long ago: it was in the last months of the last century.

***

I have a collection of old travel books that I bought in second-hand shops. They have faded cloth-bound covers – green or claret-red mostly – and thick pages marked with rust-red blemishes. The titles embossed on the broken spines, some almost too faint to read, are simple statements for the most part, not the punning witticisms of today: Forbidden Journey, A Year in Marrakech, Travels in Tartary, My Travels…

A few of them – very few – are by people still known today, and you can still buy the books (with bright white pages, and an attractive photograph on the cover); some are by people remembered and revered, but only by true aficionados of travel literature (Peter Flemming, Fitzroy MacLean). Some are masters who somehow missed being designated as such (Peter Mayne – The Narrow Smile is out of print and forgotten, but one of the best travel books ever written), but most are quite ordinary, quite obliterated from any memory but mine.

When the weather is good in august I like to lay a blanket on the uncut grass in the little garden between the hard-faced wall of the house and the crooked apple tree and read those books. I like the way they smell and the way they feel, and I like the way the journeys and people they describe are so very far gone, and so very long ago… and yet…

I am a very, very young man, and I have spent less than a decade wandering around, but when I think about those first journeys, when I think about eating pomegranates with the prince in the Indian Summer at the end of the last century I can see every image, every shadow in the cobwebbed corners of the palace quite clearly, but I can also smell the crushed summer grass under the blanket, and the peel of the orange I ate between chapters, and the soft-rough perfume of the old pages as if the images come from one of those books, written far away and long ago by people who are long, long gone…

© Tim Hannigan 2007