The Places in Between

by Rory Stewart

  "Sixteen of them?" I asked.

  "Sixteen? No, eighteen. I killed eighteen myself one afternoon, in an ambush, with my Kalashnikov." He lifted his rifle to demonstrate and shouted, "Baah ... Baah ... Baah ... I kept five of the prisoners alive and took them with me into the hills ... walked two days and two nights, living off snow. One man died in the snow. Nineteen dead because of me." He tilted his baseball cap farther back on his head.

  Farther on, in a grove of trees, we caught up with a nine-year-old boy on a donkey. Abdul Haq gave the boy a cigarette and balanced his rifle on the moving animal. Then he tried to climb on. The donkey set off at a trot with Abdul Haq clinging on, one knee hooked over its bony back and a long leg bumping along the ground. Then the boy left us. At dusk the hills closed in around us, the rain stopped, and we could see no villages. We looked up at the bare ridgeline.

  "If there was someone up there...," said Abdul Haq.

  "We'd be in trouble," I said. We were on a narrow track between a steep hill on our left and the Hari Rud running fast below us on the right. On the far bank was a flat exposed gravel beach. There was no cover.

  "Here I am," Abdul Haq roared at the wilderness. "No problem. I am a man. I'll get them." He turned to me. "Qasim is a woman, right? He can't walk. In fact, he is a queer." He turned to me to illustrate the kind of things Qasim did with other men. "In fact," he continued, "when we get back I'm going to fuck him. Ahhh," he roared, "what a woman."

  Silence. Neither of us spoke for some time. I noticed that we were walking and breathing more quickly than usual. A loose stone fell and we both spun around.

  "You're not afraid, are you?" I asked.

  "No. Are you?"

  "No." Although I was nervous, I was reveling in the beauty of the low hills and the pale dusk. Everything was very still and silent. The long line of cliffs continued above us and we could see no one on the track. Abdul Haq stopped, looked up, and suddenly fired at the ridge. His rifle's muzzle flashed and the sharp explosion echoed around the valley.

  "That will frighten them away ... all of them—bandits, villagers, wolves."

  We continued, barely able to see the path. It began to rain again. A country without electricity is dark on an overcast night. Then, all at once, there was barking and dogs sprinted toward us, angry and invisible. Abdul Haq pulled at the cocking handle of his Kalashnikov; I shouted and threw stones. The dogs followed us, enraged, to what must have been the edge of a hamlet. The rain increased, soaking our boots and jackets. The four-year drought had clearly ended. After another forty-five minutes, Abdul Haq spun around and grabbed at something in the dark. It turned out to be a man who had been standing behind a tree. I was impressed by Abdul Haq's reflexes. I had not noticed the man.

  Abdul Haq cocked his Kalashnikov, placed it against the man's head, and demanded to know what he was doing. The man didn't move but replied very slowly that he was relieving himself. Abdul Haq searched him thoroughly and released him with a warning.

  A fog had closed in around us and the rain continued; we could see nothing. Five minutes later I took a step into thin air. As I fell, I managed to grab a thornbush, which came away in my hand but slowed my drop down the cliff. I ended up on the riverbank, spread-eagle about fifteen feet below the road. Abdul Haq shouted down and I shouted back, "Man khub hastam ... man khub hastam" (I'm fine, I'm fine), while he laughed. I found a chimney cut into the cliff wall and climbed up with difficulty to join him.

  We had been walking for over five hours from Obey, it had been dark for a couple of hours, we were both now shivering, and the rain was turning to snow. Our destination was on the other side of the Hari Rud River, which had swollen with the downpour and was moving very quickly. It would be difficult to cross without ropes. We had heard a truck moving behind us, the first since morning. Abdul Haq suggested we ask it to drive us across the ford. I was reluctant because I didn't want to travel a single step in a vehicle on this journey, but I knew that Aziz had probably been waiting two hours in the snow already and it didn't seem worth the fight.

  The truck came around the corner. Abdul Haq stepped into the road and stood in the glare of the truck's headlights, pointing his rifle at the windshield. The driver stopped and drove us through the ford to the other bank. Aziz was waiting with a flashlight. I stumbled beside him through the snow, falling a couple of times into drifts. At the door to a house, I took off my wet boots and brushed the snow from my hair and coat. Then we entered. Our host sat me by the fire and I put my white, peeling feet as near the flames as I could and gratefully accepted a cup of tea. It was ten o'clock at night. For once I was too tired to write in my diary, so I played a game of chess with our host.

  Abdul Haq had entered shouting at Qasim, "You're a woman. Too scared to walk. But we made it. No one even dared to try to kill us. And now, as I promised Rory, I am going to bugger you. Didn't I, Rory? You are a woman." Qasim did not reply.

  Abdul Haq continued, "Rory was very reluctant to get in the truck ... and now we have to go back to walk from the same point on the beach tomorrow ... Well, I'm sleeping in ... Aziz, you can do it ... Best of all just before that we were tiptoeing along in the dark and the snow and suddenly there's a sound of something tearing and then rocks clattering down into the river. Then there's a thump and from as deep as a well below this small voice saying in an English accent: 'Man Hoob Hass-tam. Man Hoob Hass-tam.'"

  A NOTHING MAN

  When Aziz and I went the next morning to retrace our steps on the right bank, he told me he was leaving me now and Qasim was leaving the next day and Abdul Haq the day after that. I would be walking the next six hundred kilometers alone. This was a relief but not a surprise. Qasim's blister had swelled, burst, and swelled again inside his red boots. He was exhausted and humiliated by the walking and was happy for me to continue alone, as I had suggested earlier, from Darai-e-Takht, the frontier of Ghor. He was no longer going to Chaghcharan.

  The snow had continued during the night, covering my stumbling tracks to the house. The air was cold and dry; the sky was a dark blue; and the snow crust glittered. Sheets of ice spun across the surface of the swollen current.

  "I am poor," said Aziz.

  "I know," I said.

  "I need some money."

  "I was going to give you some—here is a hundred dollars. Thank you for your help."

  Aziz took it, smiled briefly, and put it in his pocket. "I am very ill," he said. "I am going to stay in bed for a month after this journey."

  "Thank you for coming with me. I hope you get better soon."

  "I have a difficult journey to get back to Herat."

  "Good luck," I said.

  Aziz did not reply.

  We went inside for some walnuts with our bread and sweet tea. After breakfast, Abdul Haq and Qasim said good-bye to Aziz and we walked on through the hills on the south bank of the Hari Rud. Half an hour later, I heard a cry from a hidden valley to our left. It rose quickly in an ascending ululation, "lalalalalala..." It was made by more than one voice. The sound ceased and returned ten minutes later punctuated by howls and whistles. Then a dog pack streamed past, baying over the crest, followed by a hundred villagers stumbling through the snow.

  "A wolf hunt," said Qasim. "They are crying the 'Aaabag' to drive their hounds onto the wolves." More figures appeared on the ridge-line on the other side of the river. One of them shouted and the pack wheeled east and dropped from sight.

  Qasim said we had left the stretch around Obey that had worried him most.

  "God loves you, Rory. That is why you have made it this far alive."

  "Thank you for bringing me here safely."

  "No. Thank God, not me. From here to Chist you will be fine—they are good men."

  "And the men beyond Chist?"

  "Men? Beyond Chist they are donkeys."

  We stopped for lunch in a village ten kilometers outside of Chist. Water dripped through the mud roof into a bucket that stood on a dark rug in the middle of our host's guest room flo
or. A poster showed a yellow convertible sports car parked outside a Swiss chalet with flower-decked balconies. Printed below in capital letters in English was: ANYONE WHO HAS EVER STRUGGLED WITH POVERTY KNOWS HOW EXTREMELY EXCITING IT IS TO BE POOR. Our host had bought the poster in Herat and asked me to translate it. I told him I could not understand the inscription.

  Qasim said he was leaving. I asked him to take ten days going back to Herat and to tell the Security Service that he had taken me to Chaghcharan.

  "That is fine," said Qasim. "We will take it slowly, staying a long time with all our friends and eating well on the way back. They will never know. Please give us some money now. We are very poor."

  "Of course," I said. "Thank you for everything."

  "You don't have to if you don't want to—you are my brother," said Qasim. "Even if you give us nothing, of course we will be pleased."

  I gave each of them one hundred and fifty dollars.

  Qasim seemed particularly disappointed. There was a pause.

  "Please could you give us some money for Aziz as well? He is very poor and very sick."

  "I have already given him some."

  "How much?"

  "A hundred dollars."

  Abdul Haq interrupted, angrier than I had ever heard him. "That is completely wrong. He is nothing. A nothing man. He stopped two days ago. He only came with us because we invited him.

  "If you gave him one hundred dollars you should give us three hundred," snapped Abdul Haq. "Why did you give him that money?"

  "Because he is very poor and very sick."

  "He told me you had given him nothing," said Abdul Haq.

  "I gave him a hundred dollars."

  "Then I will kill him," said Abdul Haq.

  I said nothing.

  "You do not believe me, do you?" he continued. He unclipped his magazine and pushed five rounds onto the carpet. "These are for Aziz. He told me you had given him nothing. I was going to give him some of my money. He tried to steal from me. From a friend. He will die when I meet him next."

  "Please don't," I said.

  "It is too late—you should not have told me."

  "Don't. I gave him that money and then told you—I will be responsible for his death."

  "There is nothing you can say. He lied. He betrayed a brother. He is dead."

  We continued to discuss this throughout the night but Abdul Haq would not change his mind. Qasim, who was Aziz's brother-in-law, said nothing.

  The next morning, Qasim embraced me and his face broke into his warm, paternal grin, which I had never learned to interpret. I wished him luck. He nodded but like Aziz did not wish me luck in return. In Pakistan and Nepal, men who met me for ten minutes wanted to add my address to scraps of paper on which couples from industrial towns outside Stockholm had written their best wishes. Qasim, however, did not ask for my address. He said good-bye and went inside for some tea.

  Part Three

  The country of the Eimauks is reckoned less mountainous than that of the Hazaurehs; but even in it, the hills present a steep and lofty face to Heraut. Their tents are almost universally of the kind called Kirgah ... all the Eimauks keep many sheep...

  —Mountstuart Elphinstone,

  The Kingdom of Kaubul and Its Dependencies, 1815

  Day 7—Chist-e-Sharif to Shir Haj

  Day 8—Shir Haj to Dahan-e-Rezak

  Day 9—Dahan-e-Rezak to Kamenj

  Day 10—Kamenj to Garmao

  Day 11—Garmao to Jam

  HIGHLAND BUILDINGS

  After six and a half farsang [days' walk] from Herat you reach the boundary of the hill-country of Ghor, at a place named Chist.

  —Ibn Haukal of Arabia, The Geography, A.D. 976

  At sunset on the sixth day, Abdul Haq and I climbed the first hill across our path. We had reached the mountains. From the hill's crest, we looked down on a neat plateau set between symmetrical rows of white peaks. There was no electricity in the village below, only the small lights of fires and candles. Caught by the north wind, scraps of snow danced and glittered like white fireflies in the setting sun. Snow had closed the roads for two days now, and the only sound was our boots on the thin mud and the creak of my pack. Then two shattered domes, framed by the twilight, rose above the skyline of the plateau. This was Chist, at the frontier of the province of Ghor, the ancient site of a dervish order and an empire that had conquered India.

  Ahead lay the greatest mountain massif in the world—brooding, in the shape of a mythical bird, over four thousand five hundred kilometers of Asia. Chist was the bird's head; the Hindu Kush was its neck; its chest the Himalayas; its body the Tibetan plateau; and its plumage spread over the coast of China. Ghor was one of the poorest and most obscure provinces in Afghanistan. It was not on the way to anywhere. There were no lapis mines and no great cities. It was one of the only places in the classical world not to be named or recognized by either the Persians or the Greeks. Aristotle believed that from the mountains we had just reached, the Paropamisus, one could see the eastern edge of the earth.15

  Elsewhere in Asia, ancient rulers could travel at astonishing speed. Genghis Khan's "arrow messengers" could travel 450 kilometers a day. This speed was the key to conquering or governing a large ancient empire.

  Everything changed at Chist. In the mountains, travelers were reduced to the speed of men on foot. Here, the ancient English sense of journey, "a day's travel" (French journée), meant the same as the Old Persian word farsang, "the distance a man could travel on foot in a day," and the territory was in effect ungovernable. In the month it would take me or Babur to journey from Herat to Kabul through these mountains, Alexander could get from Herat to Athens. He could reach Jerusalem from here before he could have reached Yakawlang, Cairo before Bamiyan. A Mongol arrow messenger would have been in Baghdad in the time it had taken Abdul Haq and me to walk from Herat to here. Little wonder that, with one exception, the ancient world left Ghor well alone.

  I climbed up to see the domes on the plateau of Chist-e-Sharif the next morning. Powder snow covered the ground and lay in wedges on the crumbling shoulders of the buildings and the external silhouettes of the squinches. But the vertical faces of pale yellow brick were warm in the morning sun.

  The western dome was decaying with age but seemed largely unharmed by the war. The eastern dome had been struck by a tank shell. Its rear wall had disappeared and the facings had fallen from the front. What remained was an isolated arch, set like a triumphal portal to the mountains beyond, and a fragment of the roof set with splinters of dark blue sky.

  The locals called them the madressah, or school buildings, but their shape resembled the tombs whose prototype is in Bokhara in central Asia and whose culmination is the immense mausoleum of Genghis Khan's grandson in Iran. I could see no trace of a tomb under the domes, but beneath the covering of snow the plateau was scattered with graves.

  Over the next two days I met two people who claimed family connections with the buildings. One was a fat, middle-aged man with a broad beard, dyed bright red with henna, and a little puppy. When we arrived at his house at Shir Haj, one day's walk beyond Chist, the puppy tried to bite Abdul Haq. Abdul Haq took off around the building with the puppy in pursuit and our host, who had been badly wounded during the wars, limping heavily after it, entreating it to stop.

  "Such a good dog," he said when we had slammed the guest room door behind us. "Always tells me when someone is coming."

  Then, having never met us before and without any introduction, he sat us by his warm stove and fed us eight boiled eggs.

  His name was Agha Ghori (His Excellency man of Ghor). Everyone from Chist to Chaghcharan called him His Excellency so automatically that it had become part of his name. But it was not because he had any power or wealth. He lived in a small mud hut by the side of the Hari Rud River and he had no job anymore.

  Agha Ghori had lost both his sons. One had been killed fighting the Russians; the other had been killed fighting Najibullah. Whenever anyone mention
ed their deaths to Agha Ghori, a broad smile emerged from his hennaed beard.

  During the war he had commanded the eastern Chist forces. Before that, he had been the manager of a hydroelectric project on the Hari Rud River. People still talked of it with awe.

  "It cost a billion dollars to build," Abdul Haq had told me.

  "It would have given money and electricity to everyone in Herat," Qasim had said.

  But the war had come before it could be completed. Earlier that day we had passed what remained of it. A tunnel thirty feet high was cut two hundred feet through the rock and flooded with water, and girders thrust out over the gorge. Twenty-five rusty yellow JCBs stood in a line next to a group of collapsing concrete buildings. Around these ruins hung tales that might be told of the capital of a lost civilization. Villagers spoke of the fabulous wealth of the Japanese engineers. They talked of a three-thousand-strong workforce and machines that could cut through walls of rock. They said the plain we had walked across would have become a lake, ten kilometers long and heavy behind the dam walls.

  Agha Ghori did not call himself a Tajik or an Aimaq. He was, he said, a Ghorid, a descendant of the rulers of the province of Ghor who had built the Chist domes in the twelfth century to honor a local sect of dervishes. He had grown up beneath their great fort at Taiwara. But he said he knew little about his ancestors.

  These Ghorid rulers were the one exception in the otherwise obscure history of Ghor. They had begun as chieftains of the inhospitable terrain of central Afghanistan, surrounded on every side by dynasties of nomadic horsemen. Because horses were the foundation of military success and Ghor was too mountainous to support many horses or allow them to move at speed, the Ghorids seemed unlikely ever to defeat their neighbors.16