The Muslim
tribes used to have a reputation for ferocity; they fell upon each other, as
well as upon outsiders, with great enthusiasm, a fact that effectively
prevented the exploration of the area and the high passes surrounding it until
the late 19th century. Slave trading and caravan raiding were
important sources of income.
Even to
their own people, the tribes were savage. Jean Fairley quotes a British officer
who tracked down the meaning of the local saying ‘’the father’s basket for the
son’’.
‘’When a man
became too old to work, his son was supposed to carry him to a precipice above
the Indus in a basket and tip him over. There is a legend attached to this
saying, related to Alexander the Great. A young man was sadly carrying his
father up the cliff in a basket when he heard the old man chuckling. He was remembering,
he told his son, how he had taken his own father to the precipice and hurled
him over, and now he laughed to think that ‘’in turn your son will put you to
death. The father’s basket is for the son, too’’. Clearly such a brave and
humorous father could not really be tipped over and his son hid him in a cave
high above the Indus. Then Alexander arrived and asked for directions to the
‘’waters of life’’ which, he had heard, were somewhere near by. All the old men
had been killed so nobody could tell him, but after consulting his father the
young man gave Alexander the answer. ‘’How could he possibly have known?’’ asked
Alexander. The father was finally produced. ‘’The custom of destroying the old
people must stop at once’’, said Alexander, ‘’for now I see that though courage
and strength lies in the body of the young, knowledge and wisdom is to be found
only in the heads that are grey’’. The story goes that from that time on the
old people were spared, although criminals were still thrown from cliffs into
the Indus’.
Jean
Fairley, "The Lion River"
