“Oh no, not dirty, not dirty baby. Only I know what kind of ideas even supposedly decent people get when gold's at stake.”—The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, by B. Traven (1927)
Rivers in the glacial valleys of the Karakoram, the towering mountains of northern Pakistan, swirl ice cold and the color of slate. Along the banks of some of these remote waterways, patchwork tents huddle like flotsam. Inside the tents live nomad families who wander from current to current, panning the dark sands for glints of gold. These are the Sonewal.
“We are good at pulling gold from the pockets of the river,” boasted Izzat Khan, a grizzled prospector who has been living off the hardscrabble wealth of the Karakoram range for more than 25 years. “You have to look hard at a river to do this. You watch how its water flows. You pick the places where it turns quiet. This is where the gold settles.”
Kahn’s wizened brother, Jahangir Khan, was using a crowbar to pry up watermelon-size boulders alongside the Gilgit River to get at the wet sand underneath. “It isn’t easy,” he said, panting. He held up work-nobbled palms. “By the end of each day my fingers are bleeding.”
Out of Eden Walk
Children and women also toiled at the river diggings north of the town of Gilgit. Izzat Khan’s teenage granddaughter, Hafiza, and his 12-year-old son Obeid took turns hauling sacks of sand on their backs. A young daughter-in-law, Nisha, shook a wooden rocker for hours, ladling river water on the sand to sift out heavier flecks of gold. As with many families of the Sonewal mining caste, none of the children attended school. Later, at their camp, Khan would use highly toxic mercury to purify their day’s take: a tiny bead of raw gold worth about $40. “A good day,” Khan beamed.
Gilgit-Baltistan, the rugged Himalayan district in Pakistan where the Sonewal gold panners toil, has been fabled for millennia as a region rich in minerals.
More than two thousand years ago, the Greek historian Herotodus described “giant ants the size of foxes” somewhere in what may have been Gilgit-Baltistan: mythical insects that tunneled into the landscape, digging up piles of gold dust that traders then secretly carted away with camel trains while the ants slumbered during the noonday heat. (A modern researcher suggests that the animals actually were marmots.) Medieval travelers along the Silk Road trails through the Karakoram later gushed about the mountains’ riches in rubies and gold. And today the Pakistan government estimates that there are at least 11 commercially viable gold deposits in the region. Some $46 billion in new Chinese investment in the country—highways, communications, dams, and other infrastructure being built as part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor—will likely spur industrial mining in the region.
Obaid Alam Khan, 12, helps seek his family’s rough fortunes in the icy glacial waters of Gilgit-Baltistan.
Paul Salopek
But for now the Sonewals work the rivers mostly alone, sloshing the silty waters for flakes of shining placer, one wooden panning dish at a time.
“The Sonewals are a strange race,” William Brown, a British officer posted to the isolated highlands in the 1940s, wrote with colonial-era stereotyping in his book, Gilgit Rebellion. “They . . . wander up and down the banks of the Indus and wash gold dust from the silt and sand. Occasionally a lucky strike may bring in a small fortune; normally existence is pretty precarious. They are a happy little inoffensive community, fond of singing and dancing, and personally I think they are of Romany stock and akin to gypsies.”
No evidence links the Sonewal to the Roma people, as Brown suggested. But they they still roam as before. Few of the surrounding townspeople marry into their ranks. Their children remain mostly uneducated.
“This is the life we know,” Khan said, wrapping a minute dollop of gold in a torn hank of plastic to sell later to jewelers in Gilgit.
