The Places in Between

by Rory Stewart

  We followed a footpath leading from the young boys' caravanserai toward Buriabaf. It was presumably the old road. The newer "vehicle" road was two kilometers to our north but, perhaps because its upper reaches were blocked by snow, we could see no vehicles on it. After two hours the black-bearded commander left us. On our right was the Hari Rud River and on either side a line of low rounded shale and lime hills. The gravel stretched flat in front of us for another hundred kilometers across the floodplains to Chist, the ancient base of the Chistiyah dervish and the edge of the Ghor province. There, I hoped, the others would leave me. I would continue alone into the hills of Ghor.

  The route would take me up the Hari Rud River to its source, over high passes, and then down the Kabul River to the capital. It passed through four provinces: Herat, Ghor, Bamiyan, and Wardak. They represented, very roughly, four different landscapes and four different ethnic groups. I had asked an interpreter in Herat what the differences were and he replied, without hesitation:

  First, you are with the Tajik of Herat, who are the ancient Persians. Their farms are on the flat plains of the Hari Rud. Second, you will reach the Aimaq, a tent-dwelling tribal people, who live in the hill country of Ghor. There was the center of the ancient Ghorids who invaded India. Two hundred kilometers farther east are the high mountains of Bamiyan. There the Hazara live who are descended from Genghis Khan. They look like Chinese, are dangerous, and are Shia Muslims. Finally, after weeks with the Hazara, you will descend again to the valleys and the desert, where you will meet the Pashtun tribe of Wardak. All the other peoples you will meet speak Dari [the Afghan dialect of Persian], but the Wardak do not speak Persian, they speak Pashto. They support the Taliban.9

  This central route was unpopular with travelers. Had it been popular, Herat would not have existed. But the caravans wanted to avoid the center, so they used Herat as a junction, turning either north onto the Silk Roads to China or south onto the Spice Roads to India. In the center the passes were fourteen thousand feet high and ancient travelers believed their camels would begin to bleed from the nose because of the altitude.10 In the winter, temperatures could drop to minus forty, blizzards were frequent, navigation difficult, and the snow often nine feet deep. In 1976, Nancy Dupree's impressive guidebook was "reluctant to recommend this route without the gravest reservations" and the hippie buses continued to take the flatter, warmer route to Kandahar.

  The central region, therefore, remained largely unknown. The ancient Persians excluded it from the provinces of their Empire. The medieval Arab geographers mocked it as a backwater and the last pagan region of the Persian-speaking world. Even in the twentieth century those who used this route did so in midsummer, prepared carefully, and rarely strayed from the track. As a result they did not see much of the interior. The first foreigner known to have followed the Hari Rud River 150 kilometers due east of Herat to the village of Jam was a Frenchman, André Maricq, who did it in 1957. He was rewarded by discovering on the riverbanks a magnificent minaret, sixty meters tall, and previously unknown in the West. The archaeologists who came later were unable to make much sense of it.

  "Qasim, what do you do?" I asked. Abdul Haq and Aziz had fallen behind us—Abdul Haq because his radio was not working, Aziz because he could not walk fast. Qasim seemed to have recovered his energy.

  "I am a commander in the Security Service of Ismail Khan."

  "But what do you do?"

  "Amniat" (Security).

  "And why are you walking with me?"

  "Amniat."

  "Perhaps we should leave each other at Darai-e-Takht. You don't need to go all the way to Chaghcharan. Darai-e-Takht is much closer."

  "We were told to take you to Chaghcharan."

  "Perhaps we can negotiate."

  He said nothing. We walked on a little farther.

  "I did not tell those people who walked with us that you were a writer," said Qasim.

  "What did you tell them?"

  "I told some of them that you were in the United Nations. I told the others that you were an American soldier."

  "That's not a good idea."

  "It's a great idea. Now they are frightened. I told them that your dang walking stick was a beacon for summoning helicopters."

  Abdul Haq appeared beside us, laughed, raised his rifle to his shoulder, and fired a round next to my ear. I called a halt for a drink.

  "We don't have time," said Qasim.

  I ignored him, sat down, and, remembering my Persian manners, offered my bottle to the others first. Aziz drank gratefully and when he had finished unleashed a rattling consumptive cough that concluded with a thick gobbet of phlegm, green from his tobacco. I decided not to drink. A little later, Abdul Haq stopped by an irrigation ditch to drink from a brackish puddle. Qasim wouldn't drink and I asked him why.

  "Because this is the spot where I was ambushed two years ago in the Taliban era."

  "By the Taliban?"

  "No, no, two men from Gawashik, looking for money," said Qasim. "I was in a jeep and they stepped out from behind that boulder so I shot them both through the windshield, dragged their corpses back behind the boulder. That's where I also found their motorcycle. I still have it."

  "But I thought road security was good under the Taliban."

  "Yes," he replied. "Road security was very good under the Taliban. The Taliban were very good people; al-Qaeda foreigners were bad but Taliban were good."

  Five hundred yards farther we came to a large stretch of bare black gravel. Red-painted boulders lined the path. "That is a minefield," said Qasim. There was no building in sight. I had been told to expect minefields in strategic areas, near military posts and towns. I could not see any reason for a minefield here and I would not have stayed on the path without his warning. Qasim said it had been laid by the Russians to prevent the Mujahidin from coming onto the road from the hills. I noticed there were no sheep droppings on this patch, though droppings were scattered elsewhere across the plain.

  That afternoon we stopped to rest near a dark green Russian armored personnel carrier and another caravanserai. We had completed one farsang, or day's stage for a caravan, from where we had spent the night. An old man watched us from the caravanserai doorway.

  "That man is Taliban," said Abdul Haq. "You're going to get me killed." Then he laughed. Each of us thought the other would get us both killed and he found that funny. So did I. But I could not grasp his view as an Afghan of the history of this featureless landscape. "That's a Russian APC, isn't it?" I said as I stood up.

  Abdul Haq grunted, "P sixty-six."

  "What's that building?"

  "Nothing," Abdul Haq replied.

  "It's a caravanserai, isn't it?"

  "No."

  I walked over to look at it. Abdul Haq was not interested. Instead he pointed to a low mound and said, "There is the grave of a Taliban. Our group ambushed them here six months ago, killed five of them."

  "Qasim, were you part of the ambush?"

  "No, I participated in an ambush two kilometers farther on."

  "I missed that one," said Abdul Haq.

  Abdul Haq's landscape was composed of violent events in the recent past. Despite his laconic manner, his continual clowning, and his unpredictable threats, Abdul Haq was an intelligent and literate man. He knew that this was Babur's route and that ahead lay remote mountain regions that had once contained two ancient civilizations: the Buddhist culture of Bamiyan and the now-lost Islamic capital of the Turquoise Mountain. But he didn't care. These were the things politicians talked about in their speeches about the historic greatness of Afghanistan.

  He saw Afghanistan as a poor, superstitious country with corrupt leaders and nothing to gain from looking backward. His sympathies were with baseball caps, not caravanserai. When he denied the building was a caravanserai, I do not think he was being ignorant. He was saying that whatever the building had once been, it was nothing anymore. He doubted it had ever been much in the first place. He was probably right. We were farthe
r from the main Silk Road, nearing impassable peaks. The building had probably never attracted many traders and was likely never filled with precious gems or even the everyday goods that Babur describes being traded in Afghanistan: "slaves, white clothes, sugar-candy, refined and common sugar, drugs and spices."11

  Qasim was limping when we set off again. He suddenly seemed very small and old. Just before dusk we saw a village on our right.

  "Where do you plan to stop tonight?" I asked Qasim.

  "At Dideros."

  "How far is that?"

  "Near."

  "How many hours' walk?"

  "Three perhaps."

  "If this road is as dangerous as you say, we cannot walk in the dark. We must sleep here," I said.

  "Are you too weak to walk?" snapped Qasim. His voice was more high-pitched than usual. "This is the desert."

  "There is a village there."

  "We don't know anyone in that village. It would be too dangerous to just walk in."

  It was more dangerous to walk at night. I said so and turned off the road. The others followed me.

  GENEALOGIES

  Like most in the valley, this village, Buriabaf, was perhaps half a kilometer from the path—in contrast to the Indian subcontinent, where houses cling to the edge of the road. Perhaps this was to discourage visitors. A farmer with a rifle on his shoulder directed us to the headman's house. We walked single file beside a canal flowing with clean water and lined with a double row of bare poplars. The water had picked up the last pale intensity of the evening sky and the reflections of the silver trees trembled in the water. There was no one in the street.

  We crossed a bridge, turned down a narrow lane, and found a dark wooden door. We knocked. The headman appeared. He was a young man with an incomplete beard. Qasim brought his heels together, leaned forward on the balls of his feet in an approximation of a salute, and then, after lengthy greetings, said, "Our car has broken down."

  "Where?"

  "In the desert," said Qasim. "We are officers of the Security Service." He produced a bundle of letters from his jacket. The headman summoned another young man from the compound and they gazed at the letters together.

  "His Excellency Rory," continued Qasim, "gives international financial assistance to villages in Afghanistan."

  The headman glanced skeptically at my faded woolen blanket, stick, and pack, but he asked us in.

  We entered a compound arranged above a sunken courtyard ten feet deep. At one corner was a ruined tower with battlements. Beside it ten men, mostly armed, stood watching us. Qasim didn't even glance at them. The headman stood back politely at the guest room door and Qasim pushed past with a patronizing smile. The rest of us removed our shoes at the door and followed; a sockless Abdul Haq complained loudly about his feet. It was a small, unfurnished mud room. We sat on the earth.

  "Where have you walked from?" asked the headman.

  "From Herat," said Abdul Haq, "we're shattered."

  "But I thought you said that your car..."

  "Could you get someone to massage my men?" asked Qasim. He was lying on his back with his feet up on the wall.

  "Of course," said the headman, summoning one of the boys staring at us from the door. He was put to work on Aziz's leg muscles.

  "This is a very poor village," said Qasim loudly to me. "The headman is a very poor man." Then he winked at the headman, who looked perplexed.

  I retrieved a Steinbeck novel from my pack, hoping to read it. It was the only English book I'd been able to find for sale in Herat. Qasim took it from me and began to mumble over it.

  "I can read English," Qasim said to the headman, pointing to a phrase. "This says 'Ox-kew-lee.'" He turned to me and asked, "'Ox-Kew-Lee,' chi ast?" (What is Ox-Kew-Lee?)

  I looked at the phrase. "It means 'khosh amadid' but we normally pronounce it 'You're welcome.'"

  Abdul Haq, perhaps jealous of this learned conversation, took off his Chinese baseball cap, turned on his military radio—which gave its normal static hiss—and barked, "Ansari, Ansari" into it.

  In fifteen months of sleeping in village houses I had seen countless interiors, but it was difficult to decipher much from the uniformity of cheap rugs, Koran boxes, and family photographs. I rarely had a chance to look properly at a village. I said I'd go for a walk.

  "No, you won't," said Qasim.

  The headman and the other villagers looked at me to see if I would accept this order.

  "Why not?"

  "It's too dangerous for you to go out alone."

  "I'll be fine," I said, smiling and standing up.

  "Aziz will have to go with you."

  "Aziz is too ill," I said.

  "What can he do if you insist on going for a walk?" asked Qasim.

  Aziz staggered to his feet and we walked outside together. Aziz carried a rifle and wore a black bandanna and a checked Arab scarf. He looked—deliberately perhaps—like a Palestinian fighter. He rarely smiled and was always the first to point his weapon at passersby. When we were with the other two I couldn't get him to speak.

  "How are you?" I asked.

  "Very sick," he said. "I don't know how much farther I can continue." Although his legs and his chest had been getting much worse in the past three days, he was still forced to carry Abdul Haq's and Qasim's sleeping bags as well as Qasim's rifle.

  Entering the village I had seen little of interest. As in most villages everything was hidden behind high, blank courtyard walls. There were no squares, gardens, or restaurants. The only public place was the mosque, and in Sunni areas villagers wouldn't let me enter a mosque. Now as I walked in the dusk I noticed how the mud varied from coarse, dove gray bricks to pink, waxy plaster on the walls, the path, and the canal banks. Towers and domes were silhouetted against a darkening, cloud-troubled sky. One of the thick walls of an old fort had crumbled inward, revealing an overgrown rose garden in a courtyard sunk twelve feet below the level of the street and fed by a slender waterfall. I could see a mulberry tree through a half-open gate. Firelight played around the thick frame of a high window. The deep courtyards and the old arches and windows that rose just a foot above the street had been parts of substantial houses built long before, now folded into the foundations of the village.

  "Do you agree with Qasim that this is a poor village?" I asked Aziz.

  "No," said Aziz, "this is a good village with good water. A rich village. People live well here—avenues, gardens, a big mosque."

  "But Qasim said..."

  Aziz laughed, "This is not poor. I am poor." And he leaned his shoulder against mine.

  We walked back to the headman's house in silence. A young man was waiting to let us back into the compound. The gate closed behind us and that was all I ever knew or saw of that village. Perhaps the villagers knew who had first dug the canals and who had built the corner tower. They might have told me who had resisted or collaborated with the Russians or the Taliban. But I was tired and I doubted I would learn much in a single evening.

  I was generally confused when villagers talked about history. Entering the guest room, I remembered how a Muslim Turkish host in Iranian Kurdistan had talked about his village a year earlier.

  "Goz Hasle is a very old village, God be praised," the Turk had said. "My father was born here and my grandfather was born here. We were always here."

  "What does Goz Hasle mean?" I asked.

  "It means 'cross-wearing girl.' "

  "So it was a Christian village?"

  "No."

  "But then why is it called 'cross-wearing girl'?"

  "My grandparents did not live alongside Armenian Christians. The Armenians left a very, very long time ago."

  "When?"

  "When my father was a child."

  Faced with these contradictions I assumed, perhaps unfairly, that his family had helped the Ottomans drive the Armenians out.

  "Where was the Armenian church?"

  "I don't know."

  I left it at that. Only when thinking bac
k months later did I remember that my host had kept his horse in a long building with a tall door, a base of neatly dressed masonry, and a wooden roof soaring thirty feet high; in the south side was the trace of an arched window.

  Every night, in over five hundred villages, I interviewed people about their possessions, communities, and history. I was not in control of these conversations. I was often tired, and as I interviewed others I was also defending myself against suspicious questions and trying to be polite to my host.

  My notebooks were filled with facts about places I could rarely find again on maps. I had made sketches of medieval mosques, accounts of previous visitors, lists of people's possessions and their incomes, copies of feudal genealogies, and diagrams of arrow-making or weaving. I had recorded claims about recent killings, descriptions of possible Neolithic burial mounds, and short biographies. I had speculated on pre-Islamic or pre-Hindu religions suggested by a burial practice or a carving on a stone pillar.

  Writing for two hours in my diary each night had become a fixed habit. I looked at the importance of mass-produced imported goods, foreign missionaries, and development agencies in remote communities. I considered the journeys men had made on pilgrimage or for work in cities. I observed how religion, language, and social practices were becoming homogenized, and how little interest people took in ancient history. I noticed all of this but I was not sure whether writing it down was any more than a cover story to justify the journey to myself. I was certainly motivated by more than anthropological curiosity.

  LEST HE RETURNING CHIDE...

  In the guest room an old man was making a long speech to the villagers. Five boys sat wide-eyed and silent, perhaps too young to understand the sense but awestruck by the modulations in his voice, his whispers, his laughs and gestures. Their eyes never shifted. Afghan toddlers never interrupt in the guest room.