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Updated: July 20, 2025
On Wednesday afternoon the ten ponies, carefully ordered a week before from the outlying villages, were congregated on the weedy slope which falls away from our verandah, picking up a scanty sustenance from decaying ragwort and such like. Secure in the possession of the necessary transport, Jane and I strolled forth for a last look at Nanga Parbat, should he haply deign to be on view.
They were little men, and very dark-skinned, and one of them had his face and bust painted red, while the other was painted black. Whether these were gods or men our fathers did not tell us, but it was they who taught our people the Nanga. Anthrop. Arch. f. The little people make their dwellings either in the interior of a stone or amongst stones.
The man entered, dressed in the usual Wanyambo costume, looking a wild, excited creature. After resting his spear against the roof of his hut, he took a nanga from under his arm and began playing, his wild yet gentle music and words attracting a number of admirers. It was about a favourite dog, and for days afterwards the people sang that dog song.
and each dawn saw us up and out to watch these sunrises, whose splendour cannot be expressed on paper. This morning it was more than usually wonderful, the whole flank of Nanga Parbat and his lesser peaks, turning from clear lemon to softest rose, stood radiant above the purple shades of the great range which lies around Gurais.
A single pool, temporarily formed on the slopes of the mighty Nanga Parbat by the melting of the snow in 1850, was a mile and a half long by half a mile wide and three hundred feet deep just so much devastation "cocked and primed." The modern state of Kashmir dates from 1846, when the Sikh empire, of which it was a part, was overthrown by the British.
The rains drench the country till the latter end of December, when the Nanga or "little dries" set in for two months. The latter also are not unbroken by storms and showers, and they end with tornadoes, which this year have been unusually frequent and violent.
Up and up, till only pines waved over me, and the track, leading along the edge of a deep khud, opened out at last upon a plateau, hot and sunlit; here an entrancing panorama of Nanga Parbat and the whole range of mountains round Haramok caused me to stop "at gaze" until a mundane desire for breakfast sent me scurrying down the dusty and slippery descent to Larch, where I found, as I had hoped, the rest of the party assembled expectant around the tiffin basket, while the necromancer, Sabz Ali, had just succeeded in producing the most delightful stew, omelette, and coffee from the usual native toy kitchen, made, apparently, in a few minutes with a couple of stones and a dab of mud!
We are within unpleasantly easy reach of the western and north-western frontier now; for the opposite slope of Nanga Parbat and the ridge to which it belongs is held by the independent Mohammedan tribes of Yaghistán, born marauders since the beginning of tradition. They have a republican form of government, one of the fierce democracies numbering only seven houses.
There is another stringed instrument, called the zeze, somewhat similar to the nanga. They have two wind instruments, one resembling a flageolet, and another a bugle. The latter is composed of several pieces of gourd, fitted one into another, in telescope fashion, and is covered with cow-skin. Rumanika's band was composed of sixteen men, fourteen of whom had bugles, and the other two hand-drums.
Now Haramukh, and Nanga Parbat, and all the other hills that stood in a vast circle round great Westarwan, as courtiers waiting on their king, grew vexed because he treated them as nought; and when the summer cloud that soared above their heads hung on his shoulders like a royal robe, they would say bitter, wrathful words of spite and envy.
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