Salman Rashid
"Seh ghwari?" says the man sitting at the mouth of the tunnel: "What are you looking for?" "I am looking for the old railway," I reply in broken Pushto as I huff up the hill. The man does not smile, and he is not even trying to be funny when he asks if I don't think I am a trifle late to be looking for the railway -- the last train on this line had run exactly fifty one years and eight months earlier. I smile and pass on and he tells my friend I must be mad. Three hundred metres away lies the yawning maw of the Chapper Rift that has been the raison d'etre for the journey; a journey that I had dreamt of for the last seven years.
When, around the early years of the 19th century, the Raj became paranoid with the fear of a Russian invasion of India there was, among other things, a great flurry of railway building to reach Afghanistan and eventually Central Asia in order to pre-empt Russian influence in those countries. And as Russian railways inched across trans Caspian desert regions, sub continental railways reached on the one side into the Khyber Pass and on the other across the treeless Kachhi desert on the border between Sindh and Balochistan on its way to Sibi at the foot of the Bolan Pass en route to Quetta. Simultaneously another line went north from Sibi to Harnai and Khost where it turned west to reach Quetta via Bostan. This was the Kandhar State Railway (KSR), for that is where it hoped to reach before skirting the mountainous regions of Afghanistan to Herat and head north for Merv in modern Turkmenistan.
But the KSR never crossed the frontier: the buffer stops in the dusty town of Chaman virtually tread on the Durand Line. And even before it got as far as the border the railway was a stop and go affair that was to change names twice. In a Victorian attempt to fool the Russians into believing that they were up to anything but sneaking by railway into Afghanistan, the government of India gave this project the ridiculous title of "The Harnai Road Improvement Scheme". Subsequently the idea of crossing the frontier was dropped and the railway was renamed The Sind Peshin (sic) State Railway (SPS) and the first train to run this route arrived in Quetta in March 1887. All that remains of this line today is a sleepy branch between Sibi and Khost with a twice daily service carting Marri tribesmen to remote homesteads and Pathans working the coal mines at Sharig.
Seven years ago in Khost at the end of a free wheeling jaunt I had been offered a ride to the Rift by the friendly Station Master. In the end, however, the jeep was not available and I had to make do with a graphic description from the talkative man. That and the words of Berridge (Couplings to the Khyber) had been my only knowledge of the place: "An extraordinary freak of nature, it is a gigantic crack cutting at right-angles across a series of synclines and anticlines. The whole mountain range has been split open with this great crack athwart of its contours, and down the chasm thus formed flows the river from the valley on the higher end of the rift to the lower."
I knew I had to see the Rift for myself when my father, himself a railway engineer who had worked in the area, talked of what he called "the most outstanding feat of railway engineering in the sub continent", and so together with my friend Shahjehan Panezai I set out to retrace the defunct line. But while the railway was pushed out on a northwesterly bearing from Sibi to Khanai and then southwest to Bostan and Quetta, we choose to drive in the opposite direction.
Khanai is deserted and the line, not broad gauge but tiny narrow gauge, stretches eastward across the treeless expense into oblivion. This is the disused Zhob Valley Railway that once connected Bostan and Zhob and was the highest narrow gauge line in the world and the longest in the sub continent. Another rare distinction it had was that between the stations of Bostan and Khanai both broad and narrow gauges were interlaced on the same sleepers. But today even the narrow gauge has lain disused for almost eight years -- a victim of improvement road transport and official inefficiency.
Beyond the station we turn east on the road to Ziarat. If there was ever a station at the little village of Kach, it has gone but the men in the bazaar point us in the direction of the B & R rest house and say it originally belonged to the railways which changed hands after the closure of the line. This seems a little hard to believe for it is not the design prescribed by some long forgotten engineer and faithfully followed for all railway rest houses.
Outside the village a pair of stone pillars stand in the small stream. The bridge is no more but across the stream an angular cutting in the rock marks the route of the railway; indeed, across the stream we are following the alignment of the old railway which, in turn, had followed the ancient Kandhar-Chapper Rift-Sibi caravan route. We go through tunnel number 15 (built in 1886, says the dado in the middle) and shortly afterwards the rocky landscape on our left gives way to the wheat fields and fruit trees of legislator Noorjehan Panezai's village, Manrang. On our right we are hemmed in by the first of the anticlines which is simply an elongated hill folded above the earth's crust like pastry giving it a rounded rather than a jagged crest.
The dirt road becomes black top as it rises through the folds of these hills and soon we are on the crest looking into the wide valley at the bottom. We can see the embankment that was once the railway line but Shahjehan tells me that nothing remains of the stations of Mudgorge and Mangi. As we go over the top onto the other side we see the embankment coming in from the lower valley. Then the tunnel becomes visible -- a dark semi circle in the bleached limestone, and soon we are in the dry river bed with its six stone columns; once again without the bridge.
Here as the line comes up from the lower or Sibi side of the valley it makes a wide loop to gain height, goes through the tunnel and over the bridge before it climbs into the Rift. But the rounded sides of the anticline do not even afford the narrowest shelf for the line to be laid on therefore a "shallow gallery-like tunnel" is cut into the hard limestone. Six hundred and seventy six metres of this gallery give way to a proper tunnel 197 metres long, which Shahjehan dissuades me from entering for fear of snakes and, he believes, porcupines. Beyond the tunnel is the yawning crack of the Chapper Rift -- the artistry of some prehistoric earthquake, and stitching this tear is the spectacular Louise Margaret bridge named after the Duchess of Connaught who opened it in March 1887.
From tunnel onto bridge into tunnel trains once made their way across the Rift and down a conglomerate slope, for this was the only way a train could have ever crossed this landscape. But if it was the Rift that made this line possible it was eventually the Rift itself that put paid to it: on the night of 11 July 1942 a rain storm sent a roaring torrent through the crack. Even in the best of times regular patrolling was required on this lonely five km stretch of line in the Rift and when on the morning of the 12th the patrolling team arrived they found a 30 metre length of line festooned over a gap in the embankment.
As it was the Rift had a long list of minor accidents and washouts and now the authorities knew that they had finally and irrevocably been defeated by nature. The line was abandoned. Since Europe was fighting its Great War every single steel fixture between the stations of Zardalu and Khanai was taken up to be put to "better use" as munitions and all that remains today of this spectacular piece of railway engineering are the embankments, tunnels and piers for bridges. Few people visit this Victorian relic and even fewer pause to marvel at the tenacity and dedication of those brave men who first pushed through this hostile country armed with plane table and theodolite to plot the course of the future railway.
We drive on to the deserted station of Zardalu which comes to life only when contractors from neighbouring coal mines ask for wagons to collect their loads. Khost, end of the line for modern trains, is made just after midday. Idrees Chaudri, the Station Master, orders tea and sends for old Haji Gul Mohammed, who claims to remember the dismantling of the Louise Margaret bridge. He says the complexity of the problem defeated the best railway engineers until a Sikh offered to do it.
However, the passage of five decades has simplified the memory of a highly complicated engineering job and the old man says that the Sikh ordered half a dozen wagons filled with rocks to be taken into the tunnel at the mouth of the Rift. The bridge was tied to them and the wagons allowed to roll down the slope, bridge and all. Of course the story cannot be complete without the grisly oriental twist and Gul Mohammed tells us that in order to prevent the Sikh from undertaking similar assignments the authorities had his hands chopped off! Berridge writes that a certain "Harnam Singh was the bridge inspector in charge at site", and he also tells us of the difficulty of the dismantling job -- a far more intricate problem than old Gul Mohammed would like.
We decline the Station Master's offer to stay for lunch and return the way we had come. At the mouth of the Rift we pause once again and Shahjehan says this must have been the most dramatic railway journey in the country, something that he would love to have experienced. I cannot but agree with him, but the best would be to do it as Berridge describes it: With the closing of the upper reaches of the SPS, Baluchistan lost one of its most impressive show-pieces. In its heyday, the railway often used to fit a seat on the front of the locomotive for visitors, and in 1922 the Prince of Wales, later to become the Duke of Windsor, traversed the Chapper Rift on a silver-plated push-trolly.
Salman Rashid is author of eight travel books including jhelum: City of the Vitasta and The Apricot Road to Yarkand
No comments:
Post a Comment