I’ve always found the myth of the lonely, haunted mountain in Pakistan’s deserted, sparsely populated Balochistan province to be one of the most captivating myths of our country.
Balochistan is a largely empty province with small pockets of settlements in extremely remote areas. The capital city of the province is Quetta and was once a dusty frontier town (some would argue that not much has changed).
Quetta city is in a valley and as kids we would go out to play in the evenings under the watchful eye of the large, wild and untamed mountains that surrounded us. I could walk out the door and just walk to base of one of these mountains. Quetta is the embodiment of a frontier city, far from the settled areas to the north and east of the country side and sitting in a lonely desert perch between Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The land around it is sparse, empty and isolated compared to the dense population of the Punjab and so on.
Quetta’s mountains too are not like the picturesque, family friendly, tourist friendly and welcoming natural beauties like the ones we have in our northern areas. They are brown, dusty, murky behemoths with an unwelcoming, unnerving aura. I remember when the Dusk time, Maghrib prayers would sound and we would all walk home from our play sessions. How i’d look over my shoulder to those mountains in the distance, ever present and ever watching. No lush green skin covered them and no bright lights to mark elevated restauraunts. Just the mountain, pure and wild and untamed. Brown, dusty, marked with gashes and scars. Unusually shaped and isolated, their very visage a kind of tyranny upon the entire city. Like a silent colossus that watches a city but never interacts with it or gives any sign of it’s intentions.
It would therefore make sense that the myths that surrounded these mountains also gave off the same sense of unease and macabre as the mountains themselves.
- Koh-e-Chiltan (The Mountain of Forty Bodies)
The story has different forms but this is a generally accepted version:
A frugal couple, married for many years, were unblessed with offspring. They therefore sought the advice of a holy man, who rebuked the wife, saying that he had not the power to grant her what Heaven had denied. The priest's son, however (also a
mullah), felt convinced he could satisfy her wishes, and cast forty pebbles into her lap, at the same time praying that she might bear children.
In process of time she was delivered of forty babies rather more than she wished or knew how to provide for. The poor husband at his wits' end ascended to the summit of Chehel-Tan with thirty-nine and left them there trusting to the mercy of the Deity to provide for them while the fortieth baby was brought up under the paternal roof.
One day, however, touched by remorse the wife unknown to her husband explored the mountain with the object of collecting the bones of her children and burying them. To her surprise, they were all living and gambolling among the trees and rocks.
Wild with joy she ran back to her dwelling brought out the fortieth babe and placing it on the summit of the mountain left it there for a night to allure back its brothers but on returning in the morning she found that the latter had carried it off and it was never seen again. It is by the spirits of these forty babies that Chehel-Tan is said to be haunted.
Koh-i-Chiltan - Wikipedia
The haunted Koh-e-Chiltan in Quetta – beauty with a legend - News Pakistan
2.
Koh-e-Murdar (The mountain of the dead)
Koh-e-Murdar, or the mountain of the dead/mountain of the corpses, is perhaps the most easily identifiable of the mountains around Quetta.
Perhaps because of it’s strange peaks. Koh-e-Murdar has 4 peaks in close formation that make it look extremely different from the rest of the mountains and lends it an unusual shape.
To me, it always looked like teeth on a lower jaw.
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Koh-e-Murdar’s legend is told orally by the people of the city as well as the surrounding villagers.
It tells of a Witch who lives in the mountain, half beast like a sickly horse and half human with deformed teeth, tongue, arms and grey filmy eyes.
At Dusk, whenever the sun would set, the witch would make her way out of the jaws of Koh-e-Murdar and crawl across the mountain side to make her way into the outskirts of the city. There she would hunt stray animals and lost little children, not killing them outright, but seizing them and taking them back into the mountain.
There, the witch would lick the soles of the children’s feet till their skin and muscle peeled away and they were unable to escape. All the while staring at you with her dead, grey eyes. Those unable to escape would slowly be eaten piece by piece till there was nothing of you left and the witch would set out for her hunt one more time.
I can’t tell you how many times, walking back home as a kid, light fading around us as the sun set, i’d look over to the mountain again and again. Straining my eyes to see if i could see a black shadow emerge from the jaw of the mountain and make it’s slow, crawling descent to the base. This is not a mountain i could turn my back on.
Pakistan has plenty of upbeat, colorful myths involving romance like Sassi - Panno ( A Romeo and Juliet type story) and so on. And sure, if you wanna have a good time, you can tell that around a campfire and reenact it in school plays.
But i can never forget Quetta’s mountains and the myths that surrounded them. As an adult, I've theorized that maybe those myths got made up to stop children in ancient and recent times from going to the mountains to explore them (as children are prone to do). The mountains have several dangerous crevices, predators and venomous insects that could easily cripple or kill a child. The stories could also be a reflection of the difficult geography of the land. The harsh living conditions with little food or water and constant threats from bandits and predators in old times may have resulted in tribes losing children and members to the harsh elements. The myths could simply be reflections of this. Geography shaping culture and lore as it were.
The 40 souls of the Koh-e-Chiltan may just be the number of children lost to the mountain’s perilous falls and terrain, or children lost during droughts. The witch of Koh-e-Murdar may just be the ancient lions, cheetahs and leopards that once roamed this land and preyed upon the lost tribesmen.
Pretty good, rational explanations. I often congratulate myself for having deduced them.
And yet, even while typing this answer, i can barely recall any of the other Myths of Pakistan. I can’t even remember what the hell Sassi-Panno was all about.
What i can remember are my velcro-strapped shoes crunching in the sand as i walked home at dusk, the day light dying around me. My cricket bat slung over my shoulder. The cold valley air on my neck. The quick, furtive glances at Koh-e-Murdar trying to see if i could make out a moving shadow across it’s purple visage in the dusk light. Straining my ears to see if i could hear children laughing as the wind blew towards me from Koh-e-Chiltan, carrying the sounds of the mountain. All i could hear was the low pulsing sound of the wind. Somehow, the silence was always worse. It’s been nearly decades since I've gone back there. But I've never forgotten those mountains, those stories and how they made me feel as a child. How they still make me feel as an adult.
balochistan
Our blue sierras shone serene, sublime,
When ghostly shapes came crowding up the air,
Shadowing the landscape with some vast despair;
….
And all was still save for the vesper chime
From far, faint belfry bathed in creamy light,
And the soft footfalls of the coming night
Usama Ahmed .
