This was mother’s birthday. We gave her the gifts we had chosen in Lahore, a facsimile of a seal from Harappa, a napkin ring and a Pakistani spoon for her collection. We got up early, got breakfast over and repacked the car and got away quite early. As we got into the car we rushed back for a picture. The place looks like Kashmir with tall cypress trees and lovely cool gardens.
The scenery as we came down out of the Sulaiman mountains was tame compared with our climb up the night before through those mountain gorges and plunging valleys. We wound through rolling hills for quite a while. At one place the road crew signaled to us to stop and asked for sugar for their tea. We should have been generous and given them some but were afraid about getting more for ourselves.
We stopped for a tea break at a lovely little stream which crossed the road, with pink oleanders lining its banks. We got out and bathed our feet. Patty put her cup of tea down in the stream where it crossed the road and when a truck came it ran right over the top of the cup but did not touch it. We drank our tea, fed the huge minnows and felt refreshed.
We got down out of the mountains at last and drove up a long valley, flanked by higher mountains on both sides. It looked almost like desert, rocky and dry with no trees and only very dry grass and bushes. We saw some signs of villages and passed a few Muslim graveyards. Each grave was marked head and foot with stones. From time to time we passed local travellers and gave a couple of them rides. One man, dressed in a voluminous white shirt, beautifully tucked and stitched, rode with us quite a long way.
We tried for a long time to find a shady place to stop for lunch, and finally came to a high domed rock on the right of the road and a little spring on the left, bubbling up out of the ground and winding away in small stream. There were houses and a few trees there. We ate and drank water from the spring. We had our watermelon and were ashamed when the watching children grabbed up the rinds and ate the white right down to the skin. We gave them sweets.
There were fruit orchards once in a while. We stopped at Loralai to buy tea to fill the Thermoses and got some apricots. We stopped for tea by a swift canal under trees and ate apricots while we cooled our feet. Daddy had bought some Pathani chappals (tribal sandals with airplane tire soles) at Loralai.
As it got toward evening we began to climb the ridge of mountains between us and Quetta. We had hoped to reach Quetta by night but were still a long way off and saw we would have to camp for the night. It had been terribly hot all day and we were all wilted.
Again the cool air felt wonderful. There were evergreen trees and lovely woods and we kept going higher and higher looking for a flat place to camp. We wanted a stream too. We finally found a big flat place. It was getting late and would soon be dark. A man came up who must have lived nearby and promised to bring us some water from a spring. He brought a little but it was muddy. Patty had spilt the first bucket or something. Anyway. It was enough.
This was the first time we pitched the tent and the bistar (canvas bedding roll) slipped out of Johnny’s hands while he was unpacking and it tore the tent. [Anyway we did not use that tent very many times after that.] We got into bed fairly quickly. It was getting cold. Johnny slept up on the top of the Microbus and got the coldest but we all froze that night. It turned out we were at an altitude of about 10,000 feet. We started off in the morning we began to go downhill right away. We had spent the night in a pass! We came down to Ziarrat, the “hill station” for Quetta and stopped there for a picture.
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