Caravans

by James A. Michener

  “Don’t lug that stuff in here!” I protested. “What shall I do with it?” he asked.

  “Leave it in the jeep,” I said.

  “In the jeep?” Nur gasped. “They’d steal everything we own.”

  “You hired two men with shotguns,” I argued.

  “They’re to see that nobody steals the wheels,” Nur explained. “Miller Sahib, if we left these spare tires in the jeep, the guards would sell them in ten minutes.”

  I was disgusted and said, “I’m hungry. Let’s go out and get some food.”

  “We can’t both go,” Nur replied.

  “Why not? The mullahs know you’re here as my friend.”

  “I mean the room. We can’t leave it unguarded. One of us has to stay.”

  I looked out the back window, a mere slit for rifle fire, and pointed to the two big, bearded guards lolling in the empty jeep. “Let’s put one of them in the room.”

  “Them!” Nur exploded. “They’d steal everything we have and shoot us when we got back.”

  “Then why are you paying them?” I demanded.

  “To keep the wheels on the jeep,” Nur repeated.

  I couldn’t hide my irritation, so Nur took me to the front window, another rifle slot, and showed me the hotel courtyard, where forty or fifty hungry-looking tribesmen had gathered. “Miller Sahib,” Nur whispered, “they’re just waiting for us to leave this room.”

  It was decided that I should eat first, and it was about three in the afternoon when I returned to the square seeking a restaurant. I use the word loosely, for all I could find was the filthy corner café I had seen earlier. It contained one rickety table, three chairs and a water bottle whose sides could not be seen for flyspecks. Its aroma, however, was another matter, for I had grown partial to Afghan food and this café had some of the best. The waiter, a man in an unbelievably tattered overcoat and green turban, brought me a chunk of nan, a kind of thick, crunchy tortilla made of coarse, nutritious flour and baked in slabs the size of snowshoes. It was, most of us thought, the best bread we had ever eaten, for it was baked in clay ovens over charcoal and tasted of the fields where the wheat had grown. The waiter also plopped down a large dish of pilau, a steaming mixture of barley, cracked wheat, onions, raisins, pine nuts, orange peel and shreds of roast lamb. On these two dishes, nan and pilau, I would exist during my entire trip, and I would never tire of either.

  As I ate, men with whom I had been talking earlier reassembled about me. Two sat on the frail chairs. Others stood behind me, and from time to time I offered them chunks of nan, which they used as scoops to attack the pilau. Perhaps seven or eight men thus dipped their fingers into my meal with me, and we developed that camaraderie which is so marked a feature of Afghan life. As I was paying for my meal and bidding my guests good-by, some men in long coats ran across the square, shouting. I did not understand their words and was about to return to the hotel so that Nur could eat, when the men around me became very excited and tugged at my sleeve. I was to follow them. Together we trailed the first men across the square and out of the gates of the city. I remember thinking that I should return to Nur Muhammad, but some evil genius kept me running and soon I was in the midst of a mob converging on a spot outside the gates where a heavy stake had been driven into the earth.

  On the far side of the stake, which rose to a height of seven feet, stood four mullahs, including the two who had accosted me earlier. They were mournful, aloof and terrifying. In their beards and turbans they seemed like patriarchs of old, and I was assailed by the uneasy feeling that I had intruded upon some Biblical scene which should have terminated twenty-five centuries ago. The lean, angry mullahs were from the Old Testament The string of camels placidly grazing by the crumbling walls were of an ancient time, and the crowd of turbaned men, their faces brown from sun, their beards gray with desert dust, could have been waiting for some religious rite in Nineveh or Babylon.

  As I looked hurriedly about I could detect only one note that indicated we were in the twentieth century. Outside the gates of Ghazni, jammed into a crumbling fragment of wall that may once have formed part of a fort guarding the imperial city, stood a telegraph pole which carried three precarious wires from Ghazni to Kabul. What I was about to witness could thus have been telegraphed to the whole world in a matter of minutes, but no one in Ghazni, except perhaps Nur Muhammad, would have considered it worthy of report.

  The mullahs were praying, and the declining afternoon sun threw handsome shadows athwart their faces. The prayer stopped. From the nearby gates marched four soldiers bearing carbines and bandoleers, leading between them a hesitant, barefooted figured covered by a coarse white chaderi. In Kabul I had seen pleated chaderies of exquisite cloth with embroidered peepholes for the eyes, and the savageness of the custom was temporarily overlooked; but in Ghazni this chaderi was a coarse, dirty white shroud and the opening no more than a tiny square of cheap mosquito netting.

  I was not told who hid inside the chaderi, but it had to be a woman, for so far as I knew men never wore the shroud. Whoever it was must have seen the looks of bitter hatred that greeted her as she passed.

  When the soldiers reached the stake, they inexpertly drove several nails into it and lashed their prisoner’s hands to these nails, at the same time securing her ankles to the bottom of the stake. When they stepped back, the dirty white chaderi fell completely over the bare feet and the prisoner was wholly masked. She was still free, however, to look out upon the world of hate-filled faces.

  Now the four mullahs prayed, and the crowd responded in a ritual I did not understand; but this was followed by a speech from one of the mullahs who had accosted me in the square, and what he said was in Pashto, and this I understood clearly, though what it signified I was not then competent to guess. He shouted mournfully, “This is the woman taken in adultery! This is the whore of Ghazni! This is the raging insult to all men who revere God!” He ended and I stared at the shrouded figure, trying to anticipate what her punishment was to be. If she heard the charge, she did not tremble.

  Another mullah stepped forward and cried, “We have studied the case of this woman taken in adultery and she is guilty. We submit her to the judgment of the men of Ghazni.” His companions assented, and the first mullah led the bearded men back through the gates of Ghazni and we saw them no more.

  I had turned to watch the mullahs and did not see what happened next, but I heard a thudding sound and a gasp. I looked around quickly in time to see that a rather large stone had apparently struck the woman and had fallen at her feet. The gasp must have come from her.

  Now the men at my right, the ones who had eaten with me and brought me to the scene, knelt to find stones, and the smaller rocks they discarded, but soon all were armed, and with the same skill that I had seen directed at the dog, they began throwing at the shrouded figure. From all sides stones whizzed toward the stake, and most struck, and it was obvious that punishment for adultery in Afghanistan was severe.

  The woman refused to cry out, but a cheer soon rose from the crowd. One powerful man had found an especially good stone, large and jagged, and he threw this with force, aiming it carefully at her body, and it struck so violently in her abdomen that soon the first blood of the afternoon showed through the chaderi. It was this that brought the cheer, but I remember thinking how indecent it was that a human body which none could see should send its blood through the interstices of a shroud and deposit it in sunlight as testimony of punishment

  Another stone of equal size struck the woman’s shoulder. It brought both blood and cheers. I felt sickness in my throat and thought: Who halts the punishment?

  Then I almost fainted. A large man with unerring aim pitched a jagged rock of some size and caught the woman in the breast Blood spurted through the torn chaderi and at last the woman uttered a piercing scream. I wanted to run away, but I was hemmed in by maniacs and I had been warned by many accounts that for a foreigner to make one mistake at such a scene might lead to his being killed. I pra
yed that the men had had enough, and then I saw why the soldiers had hammered the nails in the stake. They kept the ropes from slipping, and when the prisoner fainted, her bloodstained chaderi going all limp, these nails prevented her from falling to the ground.

  Surely, I thought, the soldiers will release her now. But they watched impassively while men from all sides gathered fresh ammunition.

  The sagging body was struck eight or nine times in the next fusillade, but mercifully the woman could not have known. Now a burly man shouted that he had found the perfect rock and others must stand clear. The crowd obeyed and watched breathlessly as he took careful aim, whirled his arm, and launched his missile with ugly force. It flashed across the fifteen yards separating the men from their target and sped accurately as intended, striking the unconscious woman in the face. Quick blood marked the spot and the crowd cheered.

  The blow was so terrible that it wrenched the prisoner’s hands from the nails and allowed her to collapse in a heap about the stake. As she did so the crowd broke loose and rushed to the fallen body, smashing it with boulders which no man, however powerful, could have thrown from a distance. Again and again they dropped the huge rocks on the fallen body until they crushed it completely, continuing the wild sport until they had built a small mound of stones over the scene, as a pauper family in the desert might have marked a burial.

  In a state of shock I returned through the gates of Ghazni. I passed the restaurant where the fellowship had been so congenial and was greeted by the men who had thrown the largest rocks. They were gathering to discuss the execution and congratulate each other upon expert performances. I got to the hotel to find that Nur Muhammad, realizing I had been sidetracked, had sent a boy for some pilau, which he had eaten with greasy fingers. He was now asleep on the Persian rugs, but when I entered the room he wakened like a prudent guard.

  “Why are you so white?” he asked.

  “A woman taken in adultery,” I mumbled.

  “Stones?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  Nur beat the rugs, then put his hands over his face. “What a terrible disgrace! My poor country!”

  “It was horrible,” I said weakly. “How can you permit it?”

  He sat up, cross-legged on the rug, while I sank down on the spare tires. “Don’t you suppose we’re ashamed?” he asked. “Moheb Khan … the king? If they’d seen this …”

  “Why don’t they stop it?” I demanded angrily.

  “If they tried to stop it, Miller Sahib, the men you watched today and their brothers in the hills would storm Kabul and kill you and me and Moheb Khan and the king, too.”

  “Impossible!” I cried.

  “They’ve done so in the past,” Nur insisted. “In Kabul we have perhaps two thousand educated Afghans who know that things like this must end. In Kandahar maybe five hundred. But in Ghazni none. We’re outnumbered twelve million madmen to three thousand … perhaps five thousand. I’m not sorry you saw the execution, Miller Sahib. You’ll understand my country better.”

  “Will things go on like this indefinitely?” I asked.

  “No,” Nur said firmly. “Across the Oxus people just like us used to behave the way you saw today. Public executions supervised by mullahs were common in places like Samarkand. But the Communists from Moscow and Kiev said they had to stop. The chaderi was outlawed. Women were freed. Miller, we have ten years to halt these terrible things. If we don’t … Russia’s going to come down and stop them for us.”

  “Does the government realize this?”

  “Of course. Do you think men like Shah Khan are stupid? The government knows it. But twelve million citizens don’t.” Nur rose and stamped impatiently about the room, picking his way through our scattered gear. “Don’t you understand the problems that face a man like me? Right now in Ghazni, a few hours’ journey from Kabul, every man who participated in that stoning fully expects to continue doing so for the rest of his life. If you told them tonight that you were going to halt all this, they would kill you.”

  I was suddenly assaulted by a terrifying premonition and I leaped off the spare tires to grab Nur by the arm. “Is this what happened to Ellen Jaspar?”

  Nur relaxed and started laughing. “No, Miller Sahib. If that had happened we’d have known in Kabul.”

  I said, “I feel sick. Let’s take a walk.”

  “I can’t leave the goods,” he protested.

  “Call one of the guards,” I said sharply. “I’ve got to get out of this town.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll stay here and guard the things.”

  “I’m afraid to go alone,” I said honestly.

  “You’re wise,” Nur agreed, and against his better judgment he started to summon one of the guards. Then he paused to ask, “You assume responsibility for this?” I said I did.

  Nur told the bearded warrior, with gun and bandoleer, “If one thing is missing when we return, you’ll be shot. Understand?” The fierce renegade nodded and when we left we heard him piling our goods against the door to keep out would-be intruders.

  We walked through the square, where the enthusiastic executioners hailed me again, and down to the gate, where I could see the ominous stake rising from the mound of rocks. Dogs were nosing at the blood.

  “How long will the body remain?” I asked.

  “They’ll take it away tonight,” Nur assured me. Then he said fervently, “One thing you must understand, Miller Sahib. Today’s execution must have looked like a riot. It wasn’t. Mullahs study these cases with care and no decision is reached casually. Strictly speaking, what you saw was a planned, legal act of justice. But a horrifying one.”

  We turned away from the funeral mound and walked south along an old caravan route until we had lost sight of Ghazni. We must have covered four miles when I saw off to the east an unfamiliar sight: something that looked like a flock of large black birds assembled on an empty plain, and I expected the huge birds to take wing; but as we moved closer I saw that we had come upon a tribe of nomads who move back and forth across Afghanistan with the seasons.

  “Povindahs!” Nur exclaimed with marked excitement. Running ahead, he called, “Look at those women!”

  From a distance I watched the nomad women, dressed in black with flashing jewelry. They moved with fierce grace—I can call it nothing else—and wore no chaderi. They were free, the wild nomads who traveled the upland plateaus of Asia. The sun was setting now, and its red rays illuminated their dark faces, lending them an animal quality of absorbed preoccupation with the world about them. For more than three thousand years their ancestors had moved back and forth across the boundaries of Asia and no one had found a way to stop them.

  In their annual passage across Afghanistan the Povindahs must have looked with disgust at the way the Afghans imprisoned their women, hiding them in sacks and treating them like chattels, while at the same time the Povindah women were free to move about as they wished.

  “They’re an insult to your whole system,” I told Nur.

  “You’re right,” he agreed. “But the price they pay for this freedom is appalling.”

  “They look fairly happy to me.”

  “They’re completely ostracized. When they move through our country they remain a people apart.”

  “Then why were you so excited when you spotted them?”

  Nur laughed. “Afghan men are lured to these black tents like flies to honey. Many of my friends have tried to spend the night in there.” He pointed to the tents where the women moved. “But the Povindah men are watchful to keep us away.”

  One such nomad rode up to us now, on a brown horse. He was a tall dark-faced man with mustaches and a flowing turban. Across his chest were bandoleers and with one arm he pointed a rifle at us casually and said in Pashto, “Keep away!” Nur spoke with him for a moment and he replied graciously, but at the end he repeated his warning. “Keep away!” Spurring his horse, he rode back to the tents.

  “He suspected we were government officials.”


  “Where do they go from here?” I asked.

  “They follow the melting snow.”

  We started to leave when I saw from the corner of my eye a figure in red dart out from one of the tents and disappear behind another, as a bright-colored bird will flash through trees in spring. I turned to look more carefully and was rewarded when a young girl, dressed all in red and bangles, reappeared chasing a goat, but before I could see her well, she disappeared again and I thought: She reminds me of Siddiqa. Like Shah Khan’s grand-daughter she seemed a person of unusual grace and sexual suggestion.

  Nur Muhammad, who missed little, which was why the Afghan government employed him to be employed by the American government, chuckled and asked, “Fascinating, isn’t she?”

  “Why does she wear red?”

  “Shows she’s not married …”

  “Look!” I cried. From behind the tent nearest us the wayward goat burst free and ran directly at us. Hot after him came the determined girl, and some forty yards from where we stood she tackled the animal, rolling him in the dust. I saw her dark skin, her flashing eyes, and two long pigtails which swung in the sunlight as she wrestled with the goat. I could understand the fascination felt by the Afghan men for such a person, and as we watched she skillfully led the goat back to its tether.

  “Makes me feel good to know that such people are also a part of Afghanistan,” I observed as we walked away.

  “They’re not our people,” Nur corrected. “In the winter they go to India. In the summer they go north. They use us only as a corridor.”

  “What country do they belong to?” I asked.

  “I never considered the matter,” Nur replied. “Legally, I suppose they’re Indians.”

  It was night when we approached the Ghazni gate, on whose ramparts flickering lights moved back and forth. It was a solemn moment, at the end of the day, when the ancient city was settling down for sleep, and we paused to watch the towers etched in the glow from some improvised fire where travelers outside the city were roasting a sheep. In after years, whenever I have thought of an Afghan city it has been Ghazni, looming in the darkness.