The Places in Between

by Rory Stewart

  "Here he is at last," said Qasim to the headman, seeing me enter. "Now's your chance to tell Agha Rory what you want. I have told Agha Rory what a poor village this is. Is there anything you need, headman?"

  "A tarmac road."

  "Well, that shouldn't be too difficult, should it, Rory?" said Qasim.

  Before I could reply, the headman, thoroughly excited, shouted, "If you'll excuse me, money for a new mosque."

  Another villager joined in, "And money for crops, if you please."

  Qasim beamed and nodded and said, "Keep going. Rory has thousands of dollars to spend."

  "If you please, hand pumps ... more hand pumps..."

  "And a tube well, if you please."

  Silence.

  "Well," I replied, playing my role for Qasim, "I will present a report on your requirements to Kabul."

  "Why, Agha Qasim, are you accompanying Agha Rory? Are you there to protect him from wolves and bandits?" asked the headman.

  "No, no," replied Qasim. "We are with him because we are the greatest of friends. We are walking with him all the way to Chaghcharan."

  I smiled and nodded, hoping our destination was also a lie; otherwise, we'd be together for the next four weeks.

  Qasim took my photographs out of my diary and showed them to everyone, saying my sister was my mother and I was my (nonexistent) brother. I admired a Herat studio photograph of the host's sons. They were dressed in red shirts and white cowboy hats.

  The next morning we set out into the same flat desert. The earth was parched and bare, and only the slight mounds of rectangular field boundaries were visible. We were about a hundred kilometers outside Herat. The scenery would not change until we reached the hills. As before, we walked alongside the Hari Rud River. Had it been snowing or raining, the river would have been a seething mass. Villages had been built on the alluvial floodplain for thousands of years. But now the Hari Rud was just a thin stream, running east-west at the bottom of a flat gravel bed.

  I felt quite detached from the landscape. I wondered how I might connect my Afghan walk to my walks in Iran and Pakistan. I was thinking in phrases that resembled the names of motor rallies: "Isfahan—Herat," "Kabul—Multan," "Istanbul—Hanoi." I designed a journey around the world that would finish where I began in Turkey.

  I thought about evolutionary historians who argued that walking was a central part of what it meant to be human. Our two-legged motion was what first differentiated us from the apes. It freed our hands for tools and carried us on the long marches out of Africa. As a species, we colonized the world on foot. Most of human history was created through contacts conducted at walking pace, even when some rode horses. I thought of the pilgrimages to Compostela in Spain; to Mecca; to the source of the Ganges; and of wandering dervishes, sadhus, and friars who approached God on foot. The Buddha meditated by walking and Wordsworth composed sonnets while striding beside the lakes.

  Bruce Chatwin concluded from all this that we would think and live better and be closer to our purposes as humans if we moved continually on foot across the surface of the earth. I was not sure I was living or thinking any better.

  Before I started, I imagined I could fill my days by composing an epic poem in my head or writing a novel about a Scottish village that would become more rooted in a single place as I kept moving. In Iran, I tried earnestly to think through philosophical arguments, learn Persian vocabulary, and memorize poetry. Perhaps this is why I never felt quite at ease walking in Iran.

  In Pakistan, having left the desert and entered the lush Doab of the Punjab, I stopped trying to think and instead looked at peacocks in trees and the movement of the canal water. In India, when I was walking from one pilgrimage site to another across the Himalayas, I carried the Bhagavad Gita open in my left hand and read one line at a time. In the center of Nepal, I began to count my breaths and my steps, and to recite phrases to myself, pushing thoughts away. This is the way some people meditate. I could only feel that calm for at most an hour a day. It was, however, a serenity I had not felt before. It was what I valued most about walking.

  It was a cool, overcast day. As we entered the third hour, we were walking in a line and in step to the Hindi music from Abdul Haq's radio.

  Aziz caught my eye, smiled shyly, and said, "We are brothers."

  I said, "Yes, four brothers," and smiled back.

  The others no longer questioned me about my life. I seemed almost to be accepted.

  We saw a young boy drawing water and Abdul Haq threatened to kill him. The boy cried. Then Abdul Haq laughed and said, "I drove over the edge of this road three years ago, in a jeep. We crashed into the ditch where that boy is whining. The other six people in the car were killed. But I was thrown over a wall and survived because God loves me."

  An hour later we had to cross the Hari Rud. I took off my boots and overtrousers, tied them around my neck, and waded into the cold water. The river—which in a year of normal rainfall would be impassable without a ferry boat—was now barely two feet deep. Without speaking, Abdul Haq stopped on the bank and stooped, and Qasim climbed onto his back. Then Abdul Haq stepped into the stream, roaring like a bullfrog with delight at his strength and the shock of the cold. Having deposited Qasim on the farther shore, he returned and Aziz clambered on. Midway across, Aziz dropped the sleeping bags. Abdul Haq put him down in the water and charged after the bobbing sacks. When he caught them, he spun and danced on the shore like a paper puppet caught in the wind, shouting, "Man Ghaatar Hastam" (I am a mule). On the flats ahead, a camel loped easily across the sharp gravel.

  I opened a packet of Iranian orange cream cookies and offered them to Qasim. He took one, sighed heavily, said, "Allah-u-Akbar" (God is Great), and put it in his mouth.

  Abdul Haq looked at me and winked. Qasim, the oldest and least open of my three companions, was also it seemed the most religious. Abdul Haq described himself as a Mujahid, a holy warrior, and his leader, Ismail Khan, had fought an Islamic crusade to expel the atheist Russians before implementing Sharia law in Herat. But Abdul Haq was not very religious. In Iran young city types had talked to me about Nietzsche and said they were atheists. I never met an Afghan who called himself an atheist and Abdul Haq had never heard of Nietzsche. But during the time I was with Abdul Haq, he never prayed, never fasted, never paid a religious tithe, and had no intention of going on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Generally I only heard him refer to God when he fired his Kalashnikov. Then he would sing "Allah-u-Akbar" like a full-throated muezzin in the dawn call to prayer.

  Abdul Haq took the packet of cookies from my hands, tipped it out onto a cloth to encourage us to eat more, and threw the wrapper over his shoulder. It was the only piece of trash on the desert plain and the silver foil glittered fiercely among the gentler colors of the soil.

  We reached the village of Dideros in the early afternoon. It stood on the south bank of the river, surrounded by walled orchards and divided by well-maintained canals and avenues of young poplars. We stayed with Moalem Jalil (schoolteacher Jalil) in a house set in a large vineyard. Our host had just heard on the new Herat radio station that an Englishman called Agha Rory was walking alone to Chaghcharan and would be paid two million dollars to complete the journey. He was worried this might encourage bandits to attack his friends.

  "Don't worry," said Qasim, "we are only taking him to the edge of the plain, then he's on his own. I'm doing it to learn English. A translator can make a hundred U.S. dollars a day." When we were walking, Abdul Haq talked as much as Qasim but inside houses Qasim still dominated conversation. Aziz rarely said anything in either environment.

  Qasim whispered to the schoolteacher, ran his tongue quickly over his chapped lips, and said, "Rory. I've spent all the money you gave me. You must pay me another two hundred dollars." The other men looked at me.

  "How did you manage to spend two hundred dollars in four days?" I asked.

  "For food."

  "How much is food?"

  "Two dollars per meal per head."

>   "We've mostly been eating bread."

  "Bread costs two dollars."

  "In Kabul it costs five cents."

  "This isn't Kabul—it is more expensive here."

  "Given that the average wage is less than a dollar a day, how can you afford to eat then?"

  "I've told you we can't—we are very poor."

  A young man with a soft face and full red lips who had been staring at me for some time intervened. "You must believe us. It is two dollars per person, if you are traveling."

  The five people in the room nodded solemnly.

  "Whatever the price," I said, "I am not giving any more money for food. If you leave me at Darai-e-Takht I might add an extra gift."

  Qasim left the room without speaking. I smiled at the man with the red lips but he just continued to stare. I took out my notebook and sketched Abdul Haq, who was sleeping on his back with his rifle across his thighs, his large chest slowly rising and falling. He had a clear, honest face. I found my fondness for him difficult to reconcile with what I knew of his enthusiasm for killing people and making small children cry.

  Abdul Haq resting

  Then everyone stood up, woke Abdul Haq, and left—taking him with them and leaving me alone in the room. When after an hour they had not returned, I walked out as well.

  The overcast day had given way to a lemon yellow sunset. In the distance to the north I could see above the round tops of the shale hills a succession of tiny peaks bright with snow. Teacher Jalil appeared. He seemed happy to see me. I asked him to show me his land and we walked out of the village.

  The plowing was finished. One of Jalil's uncles was standing on a split tree trunk, which was pulled by oxen to flatten the soil. He stepped off because he was tired and I asked if I could take over. He stepped back and I took his place, holding the tail of the left ox and prodding the right one with a stick. The ox on the left moved more quickly than the other and we went in a circle while I struggled to keep my balance. It took me some time to learn how to drive them straight using my voice. When I had finished a furrow Jalil called me. He was standing by a wall of open brickwork enclosing a large tomb. A bare tree had been placed at the head and foot of the tomb.

  "This is my father's grave," said Jalil.

  Tombs like this are frequently on the edges of settlements and most are revered as shrines, even when the occupants' names and deeds are forgotten. The most famous shrine in Herat is that of Ansari, the eleventh-century Sufi mystic and Abdul Haq's call sign. His tomb is still believed to have magical powers. The courtyard around his shrine is filled with curious marble headstones of men who wished to honor some of his holiness. In the alcoves old men sit reciting the Koran from end to end. Babur visited it and his cousins decorated its walls with rare Chinese motifs. Ansari's tomb is one of many. The rulers of Ghor built a shrine to the son of one of Ansari's friends at Chist, while recent Pakistani presidents have built gold gates and marble courtyards around the tomb of Ansari's contemporary, Data Ganj Baksh,12 in Lahore. The tombs are supposed to have magical powers. A medieval saint who entered Multan riding on a lion and whipping it with live snakes is still believed to put his hand out of the tomb to greet pious pilgrims.

  More orthodox forms of Islam are very suspicious of saints' shrines and the superstition associated with them.13 The Wahabi movement in Saudi Arabia, perhaps the strongest theological influence on al-Qaeda, was famous for destroying them. Babur, too, was skeptical about shrines. In 1504, when visiting the ruins the Ghorid rulers left in sacking Ghazni, he wrote:

  I was told that in one of the villages of Ghazni there was a mausoleum, in which the tomb moved itself whenever the benediction on the Prophet was pronounced over it. I went and viewed it and there certainly seemed to be a motion of the tomb. In the end, however, I discovered that the whole thing was an imposture, practiced by the attendants of the mausoleum. They had erected over the tomb a kind of scaffolding, contrived so that it could be set in motion whenever any of them stood upon it, so that a looker-on imagined that it was the tomb that had moved; just as to a person sailing in a boat, it is the bank which appears to be in motion. I ordered the scaffolding to be removed and strictly enjoined the servants of the tomb not to dare to repeat this imposture.

  Villagers were less skeptical and often assumed that each mausoleum contained a holy man or a descendant of the Prophet. There was a decent chance that the grave of Jalil's father, who was neither a religious teacher nor a descendant of the Prophet, would be prayed to in three generations' time. It sat oddly beside Jalil's grandfather's grave, which was merely an unmarked earth barrow.

  "From this line of trees to that was my father's and is now mine," said Jalil. He appeared to own nearly a hundred acres of fertile ground.

  "You are a big landlord," I said.

  "There are two bigger in this village. I have just dug this tube well with a mechanical drill. It cost five hundred dollars." He pointed to a pit running a hundred feet into the ground, lined with concrete. Beside it was an imported Indian pump. At first I was surprised he had gone to this expense with the Hari Rud River so close and with the village and fields lined with flowing irrigation canals. There was surely enough water for wheat. Opium poppies, however, will die if they go five days without water.

  "Do you grow poppies?" I asked.

  "I used to under the Taliban but not now because Ismail Khan has banned their cultivation."

  He may not have been lying but I assumed he was. Ismail Khan was not stricter than the Taliban on opium and heroin production. The Taliban had stopped production in the valley during the last two years14 and it was their departure that had allowed growing to start again. By the spring of 2002, with foreign drug enforcement agencies focusing on the Helmand basin, the Hari Rud valley—with or without Jalil's contribution—had one of the largest poppy harvests in Afghanistan.

  I returned to Moalem Jalil's guest room. The village men had just come back from evening prayers and were flushed from the cold walk from the mosque. Three small boys were stoking the iron stove with twigs. It was a large room, laid with fine carpets, and the walls were hung with clocks and prayer rugs. Again I wondered how much Jalil made from his poppy fields. About thirty men were seated against the walls, enjoying the warmth, smoking, and playing cards. It looked from the relaxed progression of the game as though many of the people were here every night—relatives, clients, and allies all dining at Jalil's expense. At the end of the room, in the senior position, was a fat old man in a turban and a faded pin-striped suit. He was sucking on a water pipe, chuckling and singing along to a tune playing on the cassette recorder beside him. I had a friend in Kabul who was from the Pashtun Ahmadzai nomadic tribe of the southeast and I thought I recognized the tune as being Ahmadzai. Jalil confirmed that it was.

  I looked around the room, meeting the eyes of the men who were staring at me, following the marks on the mud walls and the borders of the bright carpets and the smoke that seeped from the stove. I could feel my calf muscles and I was grateful to be sitting down. I stretched my bare foot over the rug and dug my toes into the thick wool.

  "Where are these carpets from?" I asked, half out of habit.

  "That one is from the shrine of Abdullah in Mazar-e-Sharif."

  "And the silk cloth on the wall, with the picture of Medina?"

  "It was bought in Saudi when my father visited the shrine of the Prophet in 1983."

  "The kilim?"

  "Is from the mountains east of Chaghcharan."

  "And this?" I pointed toward my feet, at a bright red rug with a design of minarets and Soviet attack helicopters.

  "From Farah in the south."

  The Uzbek and Hazara rugs and the Pashto music suggested a sense of Afghan national identity that transcended their own Tajik province. I was about to ask jalil what he thought of Afghanistan when the old man with the water pipe looked at me and roared, "Hey, American!"

  Five or six of the men stopped playing cards and waited for my response.

&nb
sp; "I'm not American," I said.

  Directly opposite me was the soft-featured, red-lipped man who now in his white turban and prayer robe was unmistakably a mullah. He leaned slightly toward me. "You are an American," he said.

  "No, Scottish."

  "Foreigners should stay out," he replied.

  More people were listening now, including an expressionless Qasim.

  "I understand. What do you think of Americans?" I asked an old man by the door.

  "We will accept development money from America, but not soldiers."

  "Excuse me, I wish to make a statement," said the mullah. He spoke in slow pompous phrases, as though he were at a pulpit. "Unless I am mistaken, you are a British spy."

  "No, I am not," I said, turning away from the mullah and addressing the room. "I am a historian, following in the footsteps of Babur, the first Mughal emperor..."

  The mullah sat back, muttering, "We know who Babur Shah is."

  I ignored him. "He came down this road five hundred years ago. I am walking on foot to Kabul to write a book. I have been traveling in Iran and Pakistan, where I was treated very well because Muslims know how to treat guests."

  Various people murmured to each other, "Of course we treat guests well..." "Because we are Muslims..." "We honor travelers."

  Jalil said, "I met an Englishman twenty-five years ago in Nimruz, who was doing a journey like yours. He was crossing Afghanistan with a camel. I think he's written about in one of my history books."

  "I have a history book," said Qasim. No one paid any attention to him.

  "What do you think of your new leader Karzai?" I asked the mullah.

  "Good." A pause. He smiled. "Up till now."

  "Up till now?"

  He shrugged. "Al-Qaeda was good at the beginning." He raised his hands to the sky. "Al-Qaeda was very good at the beginning."