The morning of June 11 this year saw me waking up to a new dawn in Musa Khel in the company of my Zimri Pashtun amigos. Having been beaten by luck in my attempt to scale my first three-thousander mountain, I was stranded in Raghzai, aching with the urge to get out of this Pashtun country. The weather, visibility, in fact all environmental factors seemed to have ganged up against me.

To add insult to injury, my friend Izzat Gul seemed to be leading me into the wrong houses for overnight stays.

Since the time he had accidentally led me to a Mullah’s house in Raghzai, I was kind of angry with him. Thanks to his imperfect navigation skills, instead of a friend’s house, here we were; at the mercy of a Mullah who seemed to have an issue with everybody who deserved a regular Zakat dole. This Mullah’s personality and the constant rambling of unintelligible Pashto killed my penchant for food.

I had to get out as soon as possible.

We left Raghzai early next morning. With Izzat Gul in the lead, we were now treading the bed of the Kaura hill torrent. Around a kilometre and a half from the Mullah’s house, we alighted upon the first signs of spring water in the last three days. It was hard to resist them, so we stopped for a dip and then moved on.

Izzat Gul had ideas for me even though I had the urge to get back to Tibbi Qaisrani. He led me past Sarghasai Wasta, from where I was to catch a wagon home, without letting me know of it. He offered to show me some interesting sites in his hills on the way to his home in Sakht Ragha, a proposal to which I had to consent, albeit reluctantly.

The first wondrous sight of the Kaura torrent bed was the coloured springs. In the torrent bed, Izzat Gul found me three springs with remarkably different qualities. One was oozing oil alongside water, which was obvious from the quantum of the commodity that was floating on a nearby pond’s surface. A second spring was discharging striking red coloured water, while the third one was flowing orange-yellow coloured water, both rendering their corresponding pools of the same colour. I promptly attributed the red coloured water to the presence of iron at its source, but could make little of its other two cousins.

At one turn in the bed, the barren hillside sloping vertically into the torrent bed suddenly transformed into a great green wall through which drops of water dripped down into a small reservoir. For once, the dull brown of bare sandstone was replaced by something that was pleasing to the eye.

Here Izzat Gul asked me for a special picture of his in front of this ‘out of the heavens’ scenery.

If some of Izzat Gul’s interesting sights were so wonderful, others were equally pointless. Take a huge boulder that had developed a long crack in the middle. Izzat Gul began narrating this boulder’s story, which began on the day a large gold nugget showed up in the torrent bed and ended on the day the nugget was welded into this rock by the government of Pakistan to keep it hidden from the world! The only thing that seemed more fantastic than his ludicrous story was the firm faith he had in its veracity.

As we were treading the torrent bed discovering the wonders, I had forgotten the fact that I had begun the walk without a formal breakfast. I came to remember it only once an ascent was begun to leave the torrent bed for good.

We crashed into a house located on a hillside overlooking Palosin in search of a breakfast of sorts. Although it was way past breakfast time by Pashtun standards, we were generously given a duly cooked onion curry along with my specially requested mug load of lassi, which I had asked for to beat off the dehydrating effects of the sweltering mid-June sun.

Hardly had we reached half way through our freshly cooked meal when a young boy delivered us some interesting news. A sacrifice was made in a nearby graveyard, and that too of a lamb. We were now in a dilemma; if we carried on with our cooked meal, we’d miss the tasty lamb being doled out in the graveyard and if we left and yet missed the lamb, we’d have no chance of returning for the already served meal. A quick decision had to be taken.

Izzat Gul and I gave up on the cooked breakfast and made a rush for the graveyard. Once there, all we could find were the scattered remains of a poor old lamb, and interspersed amongst them a few heartily laughing Pashtun not-so-gentle-men, with a large pot in one corner. As if they had had divine visions of our arrival, they had sucked the pot bone dry by the time we got there!

I wanted to make the best of this sudden opportunity of hill walking to better my previous best walk of 17 kilometres, which could only be done by extending the walk up to Ramak. The next couple of hours on the trek were eventless, till we made it to a Syed’s house. It was here that I discovered the one thing I was missing most.

Adorning the Syed’s hujra was a plastic chair, something I had not seen and expected in this tribal land. Three days of walking the hills, sitting on nothing but rocks had destroyed my hind side. To Izzat Gul and the host Syed’s amazement, the hour we stayed at his house, I could not for one minute get off that kursi!

Incidentally, this is also how I discovered the mystery behind the everlasting attraction a kursi has that is so evident in our land.

Another half hour’s walk got us to Izzat Gul’s maternal uncle’s house in Shin Kach (The Green Vale). This was to be the last stop before Izzat Gul’s own house in Sakht Ragha (Hard Plateau).

After waking from an hour’s slumber here, it was discovered that the relentless sun of mid-June that had made our walk up till here miserable had disappeared from the sky and was replaced by dark clouds raining cats and dogs. Although the rainy spurt lasted only half an hour, it was enough to fill up the local bone dry streambeds with muddy torrents. This meant that not only was I to lose the attempt to better my previous best walk, I also couldn’t make it to Sakht Ragha that day. The day had to be ended with a short walk to a hilltop nearby to watch the majestic sun hide behind the magnificent Mizri Ghar (3111m), as the eventful day was now to become night.

I was able to make rough estimates of my walk only once I was back from the hills. On that day, if I had managed to walk my way to Ramak from Raghzai, I would have done a good 21km. If I had been content with a walk to Sakht Ragha, the walk would have totaled 17km, equal to my previous best. Since I could only reach Shin Kach on that day, Izzat Gul and I managed 15km in this one day’s walk in his hills.