by Rory Stewart
The Places in Between
Rory Stewart
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
...
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Epigraphs
THE NEW CIVIL SERVICE
TANKS INTO STICKS
WHETHER ON THE SHORES OF ASIA
Part One
CHICAGO AND PARIS
HUMA
FARE FORWARD
THESE BOOTS
Part Two
QASIM
IMPERSONAL PRONOUN
A TAJIK VILLAGE
THE EMIR OF THE WEST
CARAVANSERAI, WHOSE PORTALS...
TO A BLIND MAN'S EYE
GENEALOGIES
LEST HE RETURNING CHIDE...
CROWN JEWELS
BREAD AND WATER
THE FIGHTING MAN SHALL
A NOTHING MAN
Part Three
HIGHLAND BUILDINGS
THE MISSIONARY DANCE
MIRRORED CAT'S-EYE SHADES
MARRYING A MUSLIM
WAR DOG
COMMANDANT HAJI (MOALEM) MOHSIN KHAN OF KAMENJ
COUSINS
Part Four
THE MINARET OF JAM
TRACES IN THE GROUND
BETWEEN JAM AND CHAGHCHARAN
DAWN PRAYERS
LITTLE LORD
FROGS
THE WINDY PLACE
Part Five
NAME NAVIGATION
THE GREETING OF STRANGERS
LEAVES ON THE CEILING
FLAMES
ZIA OF KATLISH
THE SACRED GUEST
THE CAVE OF ZARIN
DEVOTIONS
THE DEFILES OF THE VALLEY
Part Six
THE INTERMEDIATE STAGES OF DEATH
WINGED FOOTPRINTS
BLAIR AND THE KORAN
SALT GROUND AND SPIKENARD
PALE CIRCLES IN WALLS
@afghangov.org
WHILE THE NOTE LASTS
Part Seven
FOOTPRINTS ON THE CEILING
I AM THE ZOOM
KARAMAN
KHALILI'S TROOPS
AND I HAVE MINE
THE SCHEME OF GENERATION
THE SOURCE OF THE KABUL RIVER
TALIBAN
TOES
MARBLE
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Footnotes
A HARVEST ORIGINAL • HARCOURT, INC.
Orlando Austin New York San Diego Toronto London
Copyright © Rory Stewart 2004
Illustrations copyright © 2006 by Rory Stewart
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
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Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work
should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact
or mailed to the following address:
Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,
6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
www.HarcourtBooks.com
Maps by Susie Knowland, created from original maps by www.ml-design.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by Picador in 2004
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stewart, Rory.
The places in between/Rory Stewart.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: London: Picador, 2004.
"A Harvest Original."
1. Afghanistan—Description and travel. 2. Afghanistan—Social life and customs.
3. Stewart, Rory—Travel—Afghanistan. I. Title.
DS352.S74 2006
915.8104'47—dc22 2005032213
ISBN-13: 978-0-15-603156-1 ISBN-10: 0-15-603156-6
Text set in Baskerville MT
Designed by April Ward
Printed in the United States of America
First U.S. edition
A C E G I K J H F D B
This book is dedicated to the people of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, who showed me the way, fed me, protected me, housed me, and made this walk possible. They were not all saints, though some of them were. A number were greedy, idle, stupid, hypocritical, insensitive, mendacious, ignorant, and cruel. Some of them had robbed or killed others; many of them threatened me and begged from me. But never in my twenty-one months of travel did they attempt to kidnap or kill me. I was alone and a stranger, walking in very remote areas; I represented a culture that many of them hated, and I was carrying enough money to save or at least transform their lives. In more than five hundred village houses, I was indulged, fed, nursed, and protected by people poorer, hungrier, sicker, and more vulnerable than me. Almost every group I met—Sunni Kurds, Shia Hazara, Punjabi Christians, Sikhs, Brahmins of Kedarnath, Garhwal Dalits, and Newari Buddhists—gave me hospitality without any thought of reward.
I owe this journey and my life to them.
Contents
Preface [>]
The New Civil Service [>]
Tanks into Sticks [>]
Whether on the Shores of Asia [>]
Part One [>]
Chicago and Paris [>]
Huma [>]
Fare Forward [>]
These Boots [>]
Part Two [>]
Qasim [>]
Impersonal Pronoun [>]
A Tajik Village [>]
The Emir of the West [>]
Caravanserai, Whose Portals ... [>]
To a Blind Man's Eye [>]
Genealogies [>]
Lest He Returning Chide... [>]
Crown Jewels [>]
Bread and Water [>]
The Fighting Man Shall [>]
A Nothing Man [>]
Part Three [>]
Highland Buildings [>]
The Missionary Dance [>]
Mirrored Cat's-Eye Shades [>]
Marrying a Muslim [>]
War Dog [>]
Commandant Haji (Moalem) Mohsin Khan of Kamenj [>]
Cousins [>]
Part Four [>]
The Minaret of Jam [>]
Traces in the Ground [>]
Between Jam and Chaghcharan [>]
Dawn Prayers [>]
Little Lord [>]
Frogs [>]
The Windy Place [>]
Part Five [>]
Name Navigation [>]
The Greeting of Strangers [>]
Leaves on the Ceiling [>]
Flames [>]
Zia of Katlish [>]
The Sacred Guest [>]
The Cave of Zarin [>]
Devotions [>]
The Defiles of the Valley [>]
Part Six [>]
The Intermediate Stages of Death [>]
Winged Footprints [>]
Blair and the Koran [>]
Salt Ground and Spikenard [>]
Pale Circles in Walls [>]
@afghangov.org [>]
While the Note Lasts [>]
Part Seven [>]
Footprints on the Ceiling [>]
I Am the Zoom [>]
Karaman [>]
Khalili's Troops [>]
And I Have Mine [>]
The Scheme of Generation [>]
The Source of the Kabul River [>]
Taliban [>]
Toes [>]
Marble [>]
Epilogue [>]
Acknowledgments [>]
Pr
eface
I'm not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan. Perhaps I did it because it was an adventure. But it was the most interesting part of my journey across Asia. The Taliban had banned posters and films, but I arrived six weeks after the Taliban's departure and saw the Herat arcade hung with posters of the Hindi film star Hrithik Roshan standing on a cliff at sunset, his bouffant hair ruffled by the evening breeze. In the courtyard where al-Qaeda men had gathered to chat in Urdu, students were waiting to practice their English on war reporters. I found The Man in the Iron Mask among a pile of DVDs on a handcart. It had been touched up for the Afghan market so that Leonardo DiCaprio, as Louis XIV in seventeenth-century dress, brandished a Browning 9mm. Herat—which had been a great medieval market for China, Turkey, and Persia—was now selling Chinese alarm clocks, Turkish sunglasses, and Iranian apple juice.
It was the beginning of 2002. I had just spent sixteen months walking twenty to twenty-five miles a day across Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. I had wanted to walk every step of the way and I had intended to cross Afghanistan a year earlier. But in December 2000 the Iranian government took my visa away. They may have discovered that I had been a British diplomat and become suspicious of my motives. The Taliban then refused to allow me into Afghanistan, and the government of Pakistan barred me from Baluchistan. As a result, I had to leave a gap between Iran and the next stage of my journey, which started in Multan in Pakistan and continued in an unbroken line to eastern Nepal.
Just before Christmas 2001, I reached a town in eastern Nepal and heard that the Taliban had fallen. I decided to return by vehicle to Afghanistan and walk from Herat to Kabul and thus connect my walk in Iran with my walk in Pakistan. I chose to walk from Herat to Kabul in a straight line through the central mountains. The normal dogleg through Kandahar was flatter, easier, and free of snow. But it was also longer and controlled in parts by the Taliban.
The country had been at war for twenty-five years; the new government had been in place for only two weeks; there was no electricity between Herat and Kabul, no television and no T-shirts. Villages combined medieval etiquette with new political ideologies. In many houses the only piece of foreign technology was a Kalashnikov, and the only global brand was Islam. All that had made Afghanistan seem backward, peripheral, and irrelevant now made it the center of the world's attention.
The country is quite covered by darkness, so that people outside it cannot see anything in it; and no one dares go in for fear of the darkness. Nevertheless men who live in the country round about say that they can sometimes hear the voices of men, and horses neighing, and cocks crowing, and thereby that some kind of folks live there, but they do not know what kind of folk they are.
—The Travels of Sir John Mandeville,
c.1360, Chapter 28
THE NEW CIVIL SERVICE
I watched two men enter the lobby of the Hotel Mowafaq.
Most Afghans seemed to glide up the center of the lobby staircase with their shawls trailing behind them like Venetian cloaks. But these men wore Western jackets, walked quietly, and stayed close to the banister. I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was the hotel manager.
"Follow them." He had never spoken to me before.
"I'm sorry, no," I said. "I am busy."
"Now. They are from the government."
I followed him to a room on a floor I didn't know existed and he told me to take off my shoes and enter alone in my socks. The two men were seated on a heavy blackwood sofa, beside an aluminum spittoon. They were still wearing their shoes. I smiled. They did not. The lace curtains were drawn and there was no electricity in the city; the room was dark.
"Chi kar mikonid?" (What are you doing?) asked the man in the black suit and collarless Iranian shirt. I expected him to stand and, in the normal way, shake hands and wish me peace. He remained seated.
"Salaam aleikum" (Peace be with you), I said, and sat down.
"Waleikum a-salaam. Chi kar mikonid?" he repeated quietly, leaning back and running his fat manicured hand along the purple velveteen arm of the sofa. His bouffant hair and goatee were neatly trimmed. I was conscious of not having shaved in eight weeks.
"I have explained what I am doing many times to His Excellency, Yuzufi, in the Foreign Ministry," I said. "I was told to meet him again now. I am late."
A pulse was beating strongly in my neck. I tried to breathe slowly. Neither of us spoke. After a little while, I looked away.
The thinner man drew out a small new radio, said something into it, and straightened his stiff jacket over his traditional shirt. I didn't need to see the shoulder holster. I had already guessed they were members of the Security Service. They did not care what I said or what I thought of them. They had watched people through hidden cameras in bedrooms, in torture cells, and on execution grounds. They knew that, however I presented myself, I could be reduced. But why had they decided to question me? In the silence, I heard a car reversing in the courtyard and then the first notes of the call to prayer.
"Let's go," said the man in the black suit. He told me to walk in front. On the stairs, I passed a waiter to whom I had spoken. He turned away. I was led to a small Japanese car parked on the dirt forecourt. The car's paint job was new and it had been washed recently. They told me to sit in the back. There was nothing in the pockets or on the floorboards. It looked as though the car had just come from the factory. Without saying anything, they turned onto the main boulevard.
It was January 2002. The American-led coalition was ending its bombardment of the Tora Bora complex; Usama Bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar had escaped; operations in Gardez were beginning. The new government taking over from the Taliban had been in place for two weeks. The laws banning television and female education had been dropped; political prisoners had been released; refugees were returning home; some women were coming out without veils. The UN and the U.S. military were running the basic infrastructure and food supplies. There was no frontier guard and I had entered the country without a visa. The Afghan government seemed to me hardly to exist. Yet these men were apparently well established.
The car turned into the Foreign Ministry, and the gate guards saluted and stood back. As I climbed the stairs, I felt that I was moving unnaturally quickly and that the men had noticed this. A secretary showed us into Mr. Yuzufi's office without knocking. For a moment Yuzufi stared at us from behind his desk. Then he stood, straightened his baggy pin-striped jacket, and showed the men to the most senior position in the room. They walked slowly on the linoleum flooring, looking at the furniture Yuzufi had managed to assemble since he had inherited an empty office: the splintered desk, the four mismatched filing cabinets in different shades of olive green, and the stove, which made the room smell strongly of gasoline.
The week I had known Yuzufi comprised half his career in the Foreign Ministry. A fortnight earlier he had been in Pakistan. The day before he had given me tea and a boiled sweet, told me he admired my journey, laughed at a photograph of my father in a kilt, and discussed Persian poetry. This time he did not greet me but instead sat in a chair facing me and asked, "What has happened?"
Before I could reply, the man with the goatee cut in. "What is this foreigner doing here?"
"These men are from the Security Service," said Yuzufi.
I nodded. I noticed that Yuzufi had clasped his hands together and that his hands, like mine, were trembling slightly.
"I will translate to make sure you understand what they are asking," continued Yuzufi. "Tell them your intentions. Exactly as you told me."
I looked into the eyes of the man on my left. "I am planning to walk across Afghanistan. From Herat to Kabul. On foot." I was not breathing deeply enough to complete my phrases. I was surprised they didn't interrupt. "I am following in the footsteps of Babur, the first emperor of Mughal India. I want to get away from the roads. Journalists, aid workers, and tourists mostly travel by car, but I—"
"There are no tourists," said the man in the stiff jacket, who had not yet sp
oken. "You are the first tourist in Afghanistan. It is midwinter—there are three meters of snow on the high passes, there are wolves, and this is a war. You will die, I can guarantee. Do you want to die?"
"Thank you very much for your advice. I note those three points." I guessed from his tone that such advice was intended as an order. "But I have spoken to the Cabinet," I said, misrepresenting a brief meeting with the young secretary to the Minister of Social Welfare. "I must do this journey."
"Do it in a year's time," said the man in the black suit.
He had taken from Yuzufi the tattered evidence of my walk across South Asia and was examining it: the clipping from the newspaper in western Nepal, "Mr. Stewart is a pilgrim for peace"; the letter from the Conservator, Second Circle, Forestry Department, Himachal Pradesh, India, "Mr. Stewart, a Scot, is interested in the environment"; from a District Officer in the Punjab and a Secretary of the Interior in a Himalayan state and a Chief Engineer of the Pakistan Department of Irrigation requesting "All Executive Engineers (XENs) on the Lower Bari Doab to assist Mr. Stewart, who will be undertaking a journey on foot to research the history of the canal system."
"I have explained this," I added, "to His Excellency the Emir's son, the Minister of Social Welfare, when he also gave me a letter of introduction."
"From His Excellency Mir Wais?"
"Here." I handed over the sheet of letterhead paper I had received from the Minister's secretary. "Mr. Stewart is a medieval antiquary interested in the anthropology of Herat."
"But it is not signed."
"Mr. Yuzufi lost the signed copy."
Yuzufi, who was staring at the ground, nodded slightly.
The two men talked together for a few minutes. I did not try to follow what they were saying. I noticed, however, that they were using Iranian—not Afghan—Persian. This and their clothes and their manner made me think they had spent a great deal of time with the Iranian intelligence services. I had been questioned by the Iranians, who seemed to suspect me of being a spy. I did not want to be questioned by them again.
The man in the stiff jacket said, "We will allow him to walk to Chaghcharan. But our gunmen will accompany him all the way." Chaghcharan was halfway between Herat and Kabul and about a fortnight into my journey.
The villagers with whom I was hoping to stay would be terrified by a secret police escort. This was presumably the point. But why were they letting me do the journey at all when they could expel me? I wondered if they were looking for money. "Thank you so much for your concern for my security," I said, "but I am quite happy to take the risk. I have walked alone across the other Asian countries without any problems."
