by Steve Ralph

“The Karakoram Highway is like a cassette tape strewn across a building site” Robin Dennell.

We stood on the side of the road. Our driver was on his back at the front of the vehicle with only his legs protruding. We wished that he would fall asleep and stay asleep for at least another four hours, but our hopes were dashed by the occasional grunt and the tinkle of a spanner. Our driver was of the opinion that no sleep for two days was no problem.

Brightly lit vehicles moved up and down the artery, the vivid patterns on their flank like an arcane genetic code. A thousand or so feet below, the waters of the Indus waited greedily for a driver to make one last mistake.

The second vehicle arrived, and within minutes the wheels spun on the gravel creating a huge dust cloud which attached itself to the back of the van.

One hour from Islamabad there was a crunch and it broke down. As the driver walked back to Islamabad to get a part, we went in search of breakfast but found a Buddhist Temple instead. The Moslems had knocked the heads off the Buddhas. Even though we didn’t look like Buddhists we decided not to take any chances and beat a hasty retreat. Apart from that,temples didn’t do eggs. The culture shock was setting in. After little sleep on the plane and only a day in Islamabad and the British Embassy Club, we had hardly acclimatised.

Our driver returned with a new transmission link and we knew that this one was OK because it did not have a welded fracture down the middle. We progressed towards the mountains, through a strange land where everybody wore the same clothes and there were no women in the streets and it was even hotter than Skegness. Our driver’s techniques in built up areas began to arouse our interest. Foot on accelerator, hand on horn, it is the Will of Allah if you don’t move out of the way.

After a tea stop in a place called Beshum, things changed abruptly. The road along the bottom of the pleasant valley, with steep crumbling sides above, suddenly became the road half way up the mother of all gorges, with steep crumbling slopes below. The road twisted and turned like a demented python. Our driver’s cornering technique foot down, horn on… began to cause serious concern, as did his tendency to race anything that overtook. Occasionally he would stop, point down and say “Ten men” or “Five men”. I wondered why we were never driven over the edge of the Karakoram Highway.

The Indus gorge is huge by European standards. The initial section of the Highway travels up this immense feature for maybe a hundred miles. It has a distinctly temporary in geological terms feel to it and at many places we encountered landslips. Time has used the sharp blade of the Indus, swollen with glacial melt, to slice through the moraine rubble, leaving a great chasm to drain the Western Karakoram. Then somebody decided that a road along its walls would be a good idea.

Respite came at last when we found ourselves at a village. We stopped and went into a restaurant. “Ah” said Uncle Tom, “It’s the restaurant at the end of the Universe.”

We ate our curry and chappaties. The curry was delicious.

We set off again foot down, horn on… We told our driver to drive more slowly. He agreed and promptly accelerated. The next hour is indelibly etched in my memory. The Highway has a grand rhythm. An experienced driver senses the rhythm and will drive safely at a good pace. Ours was simply going too fast. The motion was becoming unstable. Each swing, each last second braking, each overtaking, brought us closer to the point of final instability. Somebody’s comment, that with a good launch we could expect between five and six seconds of free fall before impact, did not help. The drop to our left took on the aspect of the Reaper’s Scythe. Each of was in a private hell, convinced we would never see our beautiful peak, let alone climb it.

“Slow down,” we shouted. “Yes,” he cried and accelerated again.

We careered round a double bend to meet a lorry like a squat brightly coloured bug coming towards us. The resulting manoeuvre made the back of the van drift. The string snapped and as one, we leapt up in our seats screaming “STOP!” He refused.

Suddenly there was an awful noise from the back. Rickets, the retired at twenty one coal miner from Barnsley was obviously in severe pain. His features contorted, he grasped his stomach in agony and made awful retching sounds. This did finally convince the driver to stop. Rickets recovered suddenly and leapt out, quickly followed by the rest of us. Things got very fraught when we refused to travel any further until the driver had rested - it emerged that he hadn’t in fact slept for two days - and he said he was going on with or without us, as he consumed a huge lump of local “medicine”.

Eventually we reached a compromise. We would travel in a lorry we had flagged down and the van would travel behind us. Our friend The Survivor, being brave, would stay in the van for security’s sake. Ten seconds after starting, the van overtook and the Survivor screamed for help out of the window with a pleading look on his face.

“No worry” said the lorry driver, “Soon he sleep.” We enquired as to the source of this insight. “We gave him opium cigarette!”

A few miles later we found a shaky Survivor, a van, and the driver trying to mend the fan belt with a piece of string. This is in fact impossible, but he refused to be beaten. A spare from a passing van eventually cured it. We were leaving the gorge now and entering a strange desert plateau, ringed with arid mountains. The free fall time was now down to half a second but by now we were too numb to feel any terror.

Eventually he pulled into the side of the road. “I sleep.”

He was out for five hours. We dozed in the desert, watching the miracle of the dawn we had scarcely expected to see.

Arriving in Gilgit we parked in the main street. A fierce man came towards us and grabbed the driver by the throat. He dragged him out of the cab and the last we saw of him was his being punched and kicked down the street. The fierce man returned and drove us carefully, sedately and with consummate skill to the refuge of the Hunza Inn. The story of how the Sahibs had gone on strike had travelled on ahead of us.

Well, Rickets and his climbing partner The Cowboy made the first ascent of our beautiful peak and The Sheffield Karakoram Expedition was a resounding success, but that is another story.