The Places in Between

by Rory Stewart

  "Shoma Ghor miravid?" (Are you going to the province of Ghor?) he shouted.

  "Yes."

  "Shoma be ghabr miravid" (You are going to your grave), he replied. I shook his hand and walked on as he repeated the pun "Ghor miyayid ... ghabr miyayid" and laughed.

  HUMA

  When I reached his office, Yuzufi stood, smiled, fastened his double-breasted jacket very slowly, and came round his large desk to embrace me. As I sat down, a dozen people barged through the door. I recognized them from the hotel—Wall Street Journal, Guardian, Deutsche Allgemeine Zjeitung—but none of them acknowledged me. Young Kabuli translators in pleated leather jackets and baggy trousers formed their train. As they approached Yuzufi's desk, they spoke over the top of each other in English: "Can we see him?" "Can we make an appointment to see him?" "But His Excellency said...," "There is no higher authority," "With no letter?" "What happens if?" And as though it were a comic opera, Yuzufi's deep bass voice broke in, in harmony: "It is not known ... Worry not ... All will be fine..."

  The journalists were demanding access to a Taliban prisoner. Yuzufi was promising to look into it. This overture had been rehearsed many times. Some of the journalists had been in town for a fortnight without getting inside the jail. Now, confronted by Yuzufi's patient obfuscation, they snapped at their translators who, being far from Kabul, were almost as confused as the journalists. Finally, Yuzufi still talking, they all wheeled around and flowed out without saying good-bye, leaving only me and the row of peasants by the door.

  Yuzufi smiled. He was meant to be searching for the letters of introduction I had acquired with trouble in Kabul. I waited for him to say that he had found them. He didn't. Instead, he said, "I was thinking about you last night, Rory. You are like a medieval walking dervish."

  He compared me to Attar, who lived in the twelfth century under the dynasty of Ghor. When Genghis Khan invaded, Attar was killed for making a joke, and Rumi, whom Attar had held as a baby, walked to Turkey to found the whirling dervishes.

  "What you will see on your walk," he continued, "is that we are one country today just as we were in the twelfth century under the Ghorids, in Attar's day."

  I smiled. Whereas the new governor was learning the jargon of a postmodern state, Yuzufi had an older view of an Afghanistan with a single national identity, natural frontiers, and ambassadors and a culture defined by medieval poetry. The Security Service saw my walk only as a journey to the edge of Ismail Khan's terrain. The Hazara area was as foreign to them as Iran. But for Yuzufi my walk was a journey across a united country. Perhaps this was why he was one of the only people who thought the walk possible.

  "I," Yuzufi sighed, "would love to come with you, but I am like the birds that refused to join the sacred quest." Then he quoted some poetry that may have been Attar's description of the birds' excuses for staying at home:

  The owl loves its nest in the ruins,

  The Huma revels in making kings,

  The falcon will not leave the King's hand,

  And the wagtail pleads weakness.2

  Finally a soldier marched in and, holding his right hand to his chest, said, "Salaam aleikum. Chetor hastid? Jan-e-shoma jur ast? Khub hastid? Sahat-e-shoma khub ast? Be khair hastid? Jur hastid? Khane kheirat ast? Zjnde bashi."

  Which in Dari, the Afghan dialect of Persian, means, "Peace be with you. How are you? Is your soul healthy? Are you well? Are you well? Are you healthy? Are you fine? Is your household flourishing? Long life to you." Or: "Hello."

  He was a small man in his mid-forties with bandy legs, a wispy chestnut brown beard, and pinched purple cheeks. In a webbing pouch he carried a military radio, his link to headquarters; a pen, suggesting he was literate; a packet of pills, showing he could afford antibiotics; and a roll of pink toilet paper, a more subtle status indicator.

  Yuzufi did not stand up to greet him, but he moved three files on his heavy wooden desk and replied with his nine greetings. Against the far wall of the office, four Afghan villagers sat uncomfortably straight on plastic chairs, their rubber galoshes planted squarely on the linoleum. Beneath frayed shalwar pajama trousers, their narrow brown ankles were covered with white hairline cracks and scars. They had been waiting for hours to speak to Yuzufi.

  "I am Seyyed Qasim," continued the soldier, emphasizing the title Seyyed, meaning descendant of the Prophet, "from the Department for Intelligence and Security."

  "Indeed. Seyyed Qasim, I am His Excellency Yuzufi," Yuzufi, who was also a seyyed, replied. "This is His Excellency Rory, our only tourist, standing by, ready for you to walk with him."

  My escort did not glance in my direction.

  "Salaam aleikum," I said.

  "Waleikum a-salaam," the small man replied. He turned back to Yuzufi. "Well, Your Excellency, we have a Land Cruiser outside."

  "Please understand," I interrupted, "I am walking to Chaghcharan."

  "To Chaghcharan? No." Seyyed Qasim stood straight and made firm statements, but he did not seem comfortable in this office. He kept looking around the room. His eyes were small and blue, his eyelids puffy.

  "Not just to Chaghcharan," said Yuzufi, "to Kabul."

  "He will be killed. What is this foreigner trying to do?"

  "I am a professor of history," I said.

  Qasim squinted at my shabby clothes and frowned.

  The door swung open and a younger soldier marched in and saluted. He was about six feet tall—nearly seven inches taller than Qasim—and much broader than Qasim in the shoulders. Unusually for an Afghan who came from a rural area, he had shaved his beard, leaving a drooping mustache that made him look like a Mexican bandit. Visible in his webbing were five spare magazines, three grenades, a packet of cigarettes, and again a bundle of pink toilet paper. Qasim introduced him as Abdul Haq.

  Yuzufi, who had been skimming two files, now looked up and spoke to them at length. Turning to me he added, "I have told these two that you have met His Excellency the Emir, Ismail Khan, and that he wished you luck on your journey. They are to do what you instruct and you will record their bad behavior. Your walk starts now." He stood up from behind his desk and gravely enfolded my hand. "Record me in your book. As the Persian poet says: 'Man's life is brief and transitory, Literature endures forever.'"

  He smiled. "Good luck, Marco Polo."

  FARE FORWARD

  We walked down the corridor and pushed through the crowds still waiting to present petitions to the governor. When we reached the street, rather than turning west to the hotel, we turned east toward the desert and the mountains. The sun had come out, casting a harsh clear light over the sand-caked brick and sharpening the shadows of tired men pushing handcarts. As we walked, I adjusted the straps of my pack and wondered what I had forgotten to buy and would therefore have to do without for the next two months. I felt the familiar unevenness in the inner sole of my left boot, stretched my toes, and paced out. My companions were carrying only automatic rifles and sleeping bags, and had no food or warm clothing.

  I felt a little ludicrous in my Afghan clothes, shrugging my shoulders under the weight of the pack. Qasim, the older man, was wearing neatly pressed camouflage trousers made for someone much larger. He had gathered the loose waist in pleats beneath his belt, but the thigh pockets reached his midcalf. Although he was the senior man, Qasim seemed much less comfortable than Abdul Haq. He kept his red, pockmarked face down, his eyes flickering nervously as though he were waiting for something to erupt from the pavement. Abdul Haq had an upright stance and looked very tall beside Qasim. He took two paces for every three of Qasim's.

  Nobody on the street even glanced at us and neither Qasim nor Abdul Haq looked at me. They didn't speak English. I guessed that they had only an uncertain idea of the walk ahead, that they had not dealt with a foreigner before, and that they were relatively junior. Since their uniforms looked as though they had just been unpacked from an American consignment, I also assumed they were new to their jobs. But they handled their weapons comfortably. We walked side by
side, or almost, for the street was crowded and Abdul Haq stopped a couple of times to adjust the circular magazine on his Kalashnikov. The sand on the rough asphalt became thicker and the crowds thinned.

  I looked into the blank eyes of a crow sitting on a wall. Beneath it an antique shop's wares were displayed on a tray. Beside a nineteenth-century Gardener teapot and two Lee Enfields with splintering stocks were a tile from the Musalla Complex, a Gandharan head of a Buddha, and a mythical bird shaped in clay: objects from Babur's Herat and the civilizations of Bamiyan and Ghor baldly presented in the dust for trinket hunters. I doubted the seller cared any more for them than did the crow. We passed pastry shops and pharmacists and dust-caked fruit in boxes and the last gas station.

  Finally, Abdul Haq looked at me with his dark eyes and asked, "You're not a journalist, are you?"

  "No."

  "A pity; otherwise you could write a story about us."

  Fragment of an ancient vase from Ghor

  At the edge of the city, we sat on a table in the street to eat lunch. We had a choice of eggs, bread, and yogurt but I had had enough eggs for the day. Qasim pulled his small legs up underneath him, carefully took my bowl of yogurt, stuck in his small finger, and licked it before handing the bowl to me. It seemed he was showing his concern for his guest by checking for poison. Poisoning was common in medieval courts. Babur once disemboweled a cook for it. Qasim's gesture, however, was merely a show of good manners. I thanked him and smiled. For the first time, he smiled back.

  Opposite our food stall stood elaborate medieval mud towers, built to house pigeons because their droppings fertilized the vineyards. The Taliban had burned the vineyards and banned the keeping of birds. The ornate balconies of the towers were crumbling and pigeonless. In the past, the pigeons were kept for pleasure too. Like Hussein Mirza, the fifteenth-century ruler of Herat, Babur's father owned pigeons trained to somersault in the air. When his city was being invaded and he was on the verge of defeat, he went to his pigeon tower, which stood on a cliff. Babur writes that the land slipped, the cliff collapsed, and "the pigeons and my father took flight to the next world."

  After lunch, we walked on. At the outskirts of town, we passed one of the traditional junctions for the Silk Road, where the caravan route turned north to China or south to India—the route taken by the hippies in the 1970s. We continued east. I was just beginning to feel that I had left Herat and started on my journey. Then a jeep clattered up and stopped beside us. It was David from the Los Angeles Times, who had run out of stories and wanted to know if he could interview me.

  I liked David. He had allowed me to use his satellite phone to call my parents. This was a privilege, for there would be no phone in the next six weeks of walking. Now he asked me why I was walking across Afghanistan.

  I told him Afghanistan was the missing section of my walk, the place in between the deserts and the Himalayas, between Persian, Hellenic, and Hindu culture, between Islam and Buddhism, between mystical and militant Islam. I wanted to see where these cultures merged into one another or touched the global world.

  I talked about how I had been walking one afternoon in Scotland and thought: Why don't I just keep going? There was, I said, a magic in leaving a line of footprints stretching behind me across Asia.

  He asked me whether I thought what I was doing was dangerous. I had never found a way to answer that question without sounding awkward, insincere, or ridiculous. "Surely you can understand," I said, "the stillness of that man, Qasim. The Prussian blue sky—this air. It feels like a gift. Everything," I said, warming to my theme, "suddenly makes sense. I feel I have been preparing for this all my life."

  But he wrote none of this down. Instead, while Loomis, his photographer, shot pictures of me from a ditch, he apparently scribbled, "20—27 miles a day every day—living on bread—'the hunger belt.' Babur loses men and horses in the snow. One change of clothes. Thin with a wispy beard." When Loomis gave me a plastic-wrapped hand warmer, I tried to explain that the physical side didn't matter to me, that it was more a way of looking at Afghanistan and being by myself.

  Loomis nodded. "Have you read Into the Wild. . . that book about the wealthy young American who headed off into the Alaskan wilderness to find himself and then died on his own in the snow? ... It's a great piece of journalism."

  They returned to Herat and we continued. Abdul Haq pushed his baseball cap onto the back of his head, smoothed down his long Mexican mustache, shrugged to throw his American camouflage jacket back on his shoulders, and moved five yards in front of me, leaning so far forward that he was forced to walk quickly just to stay on his feet. A cloud of apricot sand billowed around his boots. It mingled with the gray smoke trailing from his cigarette, which he hid by his thigh in the traditional pose of a soldier smoking on duty. Beside me, Qasim took smaller, pedantic steps, bringing his heel down sharply on the edge of the road.

  Our shadows lengthened on the gravel: Abdul Haq's the largest, Qasim's the smallest, mine with a hunchback formed by my pack. The desert grew around us and the three of us diminished in size. I kept thinking of David's article as a distorted obituary, and it took some time for my muscles to warm and to settle me into the familiar rhythm of another day's walk. When I caught up with him, Abdul Haq flashed a smile, stuck the barrel of his rifle into the sand, and performed a miniature pole vault, shouting "Allah-u-Akbar" (God is Great) as he landed. Qasim scowled at the younger man. I wondered how much control he had over his deputy.

  I was used, apart from my weeks in the Maoist areas of western Nepal, to walking in relatively peaceful areas. Although I walked about forty kilometers every day, I met few people, and the scenery, at five kilometers an hour, changed very slowly. I was accustomed to concentrating on details: the great shisham trees in the Punjab, leopard tracks in the lowland jungle, the pale green brahma flowers of the Himalayas. I recorded all the objects in village guest rooms. I examined battery chicken farms and truck stops in Iran; in Nepal I watched men plowing with white oxen, flails striking the threshing floor and the clouds of chaff in the sun. I recorded people's experiences as manual laborers in Saudi Arabia and their conspiracy theories about America. I tried to uncover traces of ancient history along the Indian-Nepali border, following a line of battered stones—carved with cavalry and the sun god—that was, I thought, an ancient imperial Malla footpath.3

  Suddenly there was an explosion, the ground trembled under our feet, and acrid black smoke rolled from the field on our left. I had not imagined how loud a land mine could be. The others didn't turn their heads.

  We were in a gravel desert stretching bare to low hills on either side. There were no trees to deliver variety of height and color. The gravel and sand would not alter with the seasons. In the Iranian desert, there would have been marks in the soil made by the plow, vertical lines formed by pylons, drab eagles on power lines, and scraps of plastic bag. Because of the drought and the poverty in Afghanistan even such bland signs of human occupation were missing.

  But the road was flat, the day was cool, my feet were comfortable, and my pack didn't feel too heavy. The pace of my legs began to transform the rhythm of my breathing and of my thinking, although I still felt unusually nervous. I wondered whether, after fifteen months of walking across Asia, my luck was running out. I had promised my mother that this would be my last journey and that if I made it safely to Kabul, I would come home.

  I began to take longer and faster strides, half racing along the dirt track. My anxiety faded and I reveled in the movement of my muscles, remembering that in forty days the walk might be over. I had left the offices and interviews in Herat behind and I was once again pushing east. I watched the pebbles flashing past beneath me and felt that with the strike of each heel step I was marking Afghanistan. I wanted to touch as much as possible of the country with my feet. I remembered why I had once thought of walking right around the world.

  After two hours, we arrived at a bazaar, Herat Sha'ede, consisting of a short line of mud shops on eithe
r side of the mud road, eight kilometers outside Herat.

  "Here," said Qasim, "is our night's halt."

  "But there are three hours of daylight left. We can do another fifteen kilometers."

  "Ahead is only the desert. We must stop here for the night. We can cross the desert tomorrow."

  At this pace I wouldn't reach Kabul in six months. But I had no map with which to contradict him and I didn't want to start an argument on the first day, so I reluctantly agreed. Qasim handed his sleeping bag to Abdul Haq, tugged a crease out of his camouflage jacket, and turned toward a mud house. I followed him. We took off our boots on the threshold, stooped beneath the arch, and entered a dark room. I could just make out twenty men in camouflage uniforms, sitting on the carpet. They all stood to greet Qasim. I pushed clumsily through the crowd with my pack, laid it in the corner, and then went through the formal greetings—"Salaam aleikum. Chetor hastid? Be khair hastid?..."—and sat and drank tea with them. It was an infuriatingly short day and I hoped to get rid of my companions soon.

  When the men began to chat, I took Qasim aside and put two hundred dollars into his hand, asking him to use it to buy our food. This was six months' wages for some Afghans, but I wanted to keep Qasim on my side. I told him I would give him some more as soon as he let me continue alone. He said nothing, but he folded the bills and put them in his breast pocket. Then a squinting, dark-faced man with a patchy beard pushed into the room. He was even smaller than Qasim and was introduced to me as Qasim's brother-in-law Aziz. Qasim told me that Aziz wanted to walk with us. We were now to be a group of four.