Yerkinpa Ki Talash Main
By Muhammad Abduhu
Green Heart Publishers, Faisalabad
144pp.

It is not known when the route first came to be used, but a learned conjecture is that, at least a thousand years ago, the people of Shigar Valley (northeast of Skardu) in Baltistan were travelling up the glaciers leading to what modern maps label as the Muztagh-Karakoram region to cross the 5,300-metre high glaciated Muztagh Pass.

Across the pass, the Sarpo Laggo (actually Sarfa Laggo — New Pass or Top) Glacier empties its meltwater into the Shaksgam River that winds around tortuous rocky mountains to slake the desert region in the Chinese province of Xinjiang. In the upper reaches of the Shaksgam, a narrow wind-swept gully leads to the 4,800-metre-high Aghil Pass, from where the route descends into the Surukhwat Valley, to eventually reach Yarkand after a long and tedious journey. We do not know what the Baltis of old times would have called this route but to British explorers and map-makers, this was the Muztagh Pass route.

Maps printed after a survey as late as the 1950s show the dotted line marking the border between Jammu and Kashmir and the China ‘Sinkiang [Xinjiang] Province’, passing over the Aghil Pass. However, since the 1963 border adjustment with China, in which Pakistan ceded a large slice of land to that country, the border now runs over the head of the Sarpo Laggo Glacier and the route was thus cut even before it reached China’s new possession.

Some time in the late 18th century, the route on our side was closed because, so it was believed, of an accumulation of a greater quantum of snow. In or about 1810, the dynamic Raja Ahmad Shah of Baltistan ordered a reconnaissance to beat a new route across the Asiatic Divide. Sixteen kilometres west of the old and then blocked Muztagh Pass, another saddle was found feasible and called the New Muztagh Pass.

A book by an accomplished trekker about his 10-day journey to the mountainous border of Pakistan with China is more erudite than most Urdu travel books

Since the turn of the century, this new pass has been visited by a few Pakistanis, while some Europeans have trekked and even skied across it. However, as the international border now runs across its head, it has only once been crossed into China — and that too illegally — by a German trekker, who made a big thing of it. At least one party of Pakistani trekkers made it to the foot of the New Muztagh in 2006 and, fearing Chinese military presence on the other side, did not cross.

In the summer of 2024, Muhammad Abduhu, an accomplished trekker, led a party of five other members, including two girls, to the West Muztagh Pass. A gruelling 10-day glacial traverse brought this group to the top of the New Muztagh, to give them the honour of being the only Pakistanis so far to have reached this far. Obviously they were not fired upon by Chinese border guards, because there were none.

The outcome of the traverse is a short book in Urdu titled Yerkinpa Ki Talaash Main [In Search of Yerkinpa]. The author does not discuss the wherefore of the title in the book, but tells us in his foreword that yerkinpa is one of the varieties of apricots grown in Baltistan. And that the name signifies that this particular kind came from Yarkand in Xinjiang, mispronounced in Balti as Yerkin.

The book contains a good deal of the history of exploration in the Karakoram region, giving the reader little nuggets, such as the British explorer and mountaineer Eric Shipton photographing in 1951 a strangely misshapen five-toed footprint in the snow on a mountain in Nepal, or of Godwin-Austen’s epic meeting with four Balti travellers coming down the New Muztagh in August 1861. These men had migrated to Yarkand some years earlier and were on their way home to meet relatives. Godwin-Austen noted that, going by the high quality of their clothing and footwear, the Baltis seemed to have done well in Yarkand. For those who are intrigued by crypto-zoology, Abduhu has added a bit on yetis as well.

Between descriptions of the party’s progress up the glaciers to the top of New Muztagh, Abduhu discusses the work of early explorers. However, he is in error when he iterates Godwin-Austen’s theory that the old route had fallen into disuse because of an excess of snow. Though Abduhu quotes from Shipton’s masterful work done in this area in 1937 and his conclusion that it was a diminishing of snow and ice and not an excess that made glacial travel difficult and even dangerous, he misses to pass on this reality to his readers.

Abduhu’s book is a pleasant departure from the run-of-the-mill Urdu travelogues that paint the author as the ‘Greek god’ forever being swooned over by every woman he comes across — there is zero sensible information in normal Urdu travel books. Nor does the book under review corrupt place names, which is the norm in Urdu travel writing. But since that distortion has, over the past 40 years, become the accepted form of travel-writing, one wonders how many readers will find this new form engaging, when it talks of the history of mountaineering and exploration and the geography of the region.

That having been said, it irks a good deal when Abduhu uses English words like “shirt”, “food” etc when the Urdu word is readily available. But I suppose that is how writing in the vernacular is taking shape nowadays.

In all, Muhammad Abduhu has done well with his new book. However, he will need to keep at it if he wants to wean readers away from what has come to be accepted in Urdu to real travel writing.

The reviewer is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and author of several books on travel. X: @odysseuslahori

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, May 25th, 2025