The Places in Between

by Rory Stewart

  It was my tenth straight day of walking and despite the meal, I was beginning to feel run-down. I had had diarrhea for four days, probably a result of giardiasis, and that evening I decided to start a course of antibiotics. My knees were feeling the strain of the hills and I was also preparing to wrap them. I had used all my letters of introduction for this district. The one Haji Mohsin had given me had been pocketed by Seyyed Umar. His illiteracy added a double complication: He could not read the letter and he could not write another one for me.

  Seyyed Umar of Garmao

  Part Four

  The Eimauks are rigid Soonees. In their wars ... they show a degree of ferocity never heard of among Afghauns. I have authentic accounts of them throwing their prisoners from precipices and shooting them to death with arrows; and on an occasion at which a Zooree with whom I had conversed assisted, they actually drank the warm blood of their victims and rubbed it over their faces and beards.

  —Mountstuart Elphinstone,

  The Kingdom of Kaubul and Its Dependencies, 1815

  Day 12—Jam to Ghar

  Day 13—Ghar to Chesme Sakina

  Day 14—Chesme Sakina to Barra Khana

  Day 15—Barra Khana to Chaghcharan

  Days 16 & 17—Chaghcharan

  Day 18—Chaghcharan to Badgah

  Day 19—Badgah to Daulatyar

  THE MINARET OF JAM

  The sun had just hit the valley floor the next morning when I stepped out onto the snow with Babur stepping high beside me. It had snowed all night and virgin powder lay on every side. Seyyed Umar rode on his horse behind me, heavily swathed with blankets. He was puzzled that I refused to ride. The snow was barely a foot deep and the climb up the hill to the pass was an easy one. My staff trembled and creaked in my hand as I moved it through the snow. The crust glittered with shards of light as though fragments of windshield glass had been scattered over the powder.

  Halfway up the slope, Babur paused to sniff a jet-black boulder. His long nose thrust gluttonously through our footprints toward the desert floor, seeking the frozen smells of vanished animals. Having completed his survey, he raised his head, stared solemnly into the distance, and lifted his leg. Then, scuttling soil with his front paws to cover his marks, he walked quickly on, head averted, distancing himself from the act. A minute later another boulder caught his attention. We stopped six times in ten minutes.

  Babur seemed prepared to examine, mark with urine, and take possession of every meter of the next six hundred kilometers. Only once or twice in my eighteen-month walk across Asia had I felt some magical claim to the territory I touched with my feet. But Babur apparently felt it all the time. The warm stream of urine was set like a flag to mark his new empire. All his movement was conquest and occupation. He seemed ready to ponder and possess every place in the world. He was like a canine Alexander. He had never encountered a space so large or a time so small that it was not possible to sniff and ponder every rock. In this mood, his coat bristling with cold and energy, he strode up to the crest.

  The snow was thicker at the pass, and Seyyed Umar was forced to dismount before we descended. At the bottom, in a narrow press of orchards, with smaller tighter hills along a winding river, the scale of the peaks and snowfields was suddenly lost. Here, Seyyed Umar spurred ahead. He was very keen for me to get rid of Babur, whom he thought likely to get us killed by packs of village dogs. He said if I disposed of the dog he'd accompany me all the way to Chaghcharan, but since I insisted on keeping Babur, he regretfully took his leave.

  As Seyyed Umar had predicted, dogs swarmed over every orchard wall, teeth bared, and I turned again and again to drive them back. Swinging at another dog, I accidentally clipped Babur and he cowered whimpering at my feet. The day before he'd helped me by barking at the other dogs and trotting along beside me. But from now on whenever I raised the stick to try to protect him, he lay down terrifled, thinking he'd done something wrong and waiting for me to hit him. This left him vulnerable to the angry packs, and I now had to drag his 140-pound frame with me as I backed up the street throwing stones.

  We left the village, the dogs fell back, and beside the road the cliffs closed in and the river twisted more aggressively. For twenty minutes we walked alone in a maze of narrow gorges, following a small path. Pale yellow cliffs rose on either side. Apart from the brisk clatter of the river, it was silent. There was no human in sight and no sign of the last twenty-four years of Afghan war.

  We came around the edge of a scree slope and saw the tower. A slim column of intricately carved terra-cotta set with a line of turquoise tiles rose two hundred feet. There was nothing else. The mountain walls formed a tight circle around it and at its base two rivers, descending from snowy passes, ran through ravines into wilderness. Pale slender bricks formed a dense chain of pentagons, hexagons, and diamonds winding around the column. On the neck of the tower, Persian blue tiles the color of an Afghan winter sky spelled: GHIYASSUDIN MUHAMMAD IBN SAM, KING OF KINGS...

  Ghiyassudin was the Sultan of the Ghorid Empire who built the mosque in Herat, the dervish domes in Chist-e-Sharif, and the lost city of the Turquoise Mountain.

  I walked around the base of the tower following the tall exuberant chain of polygons that spelled out (though I couldn't follow the geometrical script) the Arabic text of one of the longest chapters of the Koran.35 It was as finely worked as an ivory chess piece. The octagonal base, the three stories, the remains of the balconies, and the ornate complexity of the geometrical surface were all subdued by the clean, tapering lines and the beige fired brick. The snow on the ground was in shadow. Only the narrow blue line of mosaic, lit by the bright sun, stood out from the coffee-colored hills. The shape of the circular tower was reflected in the curve of the surrounding cliffs. Just as in Chist-e-Sharif, the Ghorids had used the natural landscape to emphasize the color and shape of the building.

  Although none of the nineteenth-century travelers to Afghanistan had known of the tower's existence, the Frenchman André Maricq did reach it in 1957 and confirm that it had been the tallest minaret in the world at the time of its construction. Thereafter a number of archaeologists made the difficult journey. But they were unable to decide how the tower related to the mysterious Ghorid Empire, and the Russian invasion of 1979 stopped further visits.

  Some archaeologists concluded it had been part of a mosque, called it "the Minaret of Jam," and looked for the Turquoise Mountain in the valley. They discovered very little except, to add to the mystery, a small twelfth-century Jewish cemetery two kilometers from the tower's base. Others, according to Nancy Dupree in 1976, citing the "smallness of the valley, its inaccessibility and its absence of significant architectural remains [argued convincingly] that the Turquoise Mountain had been at Taiwara, more than two hundred kilometers south." Still others asserted that the valley had been a pre-Muslim holy site and that this was a single victory tower, built by the Ghorids to mark the conversion of a lonely and sacred pagan spot to Islam. The archaeologists did, however, agree on two things: the tower was a uniquely important piece of early Islamic architecture and it was in imminent danger of falling down.

  By the time of my visit, officers of the Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan's Cultural Heritage had had no reliable report on the tower of Jam for eight months. In the previous decade, much of Afghanistan's cultural heritage had been removed or destroyed; the Kabul museum had been looted and the Taliban had dynamited the Bamiyan Buddhas. No one in Kabul was sure whether the tower still stood.

  Leaving Babur to sniff around the base, I clambered into a hole four feet from the ground and dropped into a circular staircase. Narrow skylights had been worked into the design above, but here it was dark and the steps were steep, worn, and narrow. I had not climbed far when I slipped and came accelerating down in the darkness, cracking my head against the staircase and grabbing at bricks to try to stop myself. I tore the skin from my palm, bricks came away in my hands, and the tower seemed to shake as I hit the outer wall. For a moment I
wondered if I would be remembered as the man who died while knocking down the last Ghorid masterpiece. Then I came to a halt and the tower was still. It was quiet at the bottom of the stairwell and cold. When I started to climb again, I did so slowly, pressing my hands against both brick walls. My right leg was shaking.

  After perhaps 120 feet, I came out into a circular chamber from which a second spiral staircase ascended. Here, the smaller brick steps had fallen away from the wall and I had to pull myself up by my arms to get onto a ceiling. I continued, climbing between portions of an old staircase, up over another three chambers, till I emerged just below the lantern. Above me were smoke-blackened wooden beams that must once have supported an external balcony. I looked out from the skylight and saw on the facing ridge two small ruined towers and, to my surprise, a line of trenches cut into the gravel slope.

  When I descended and emerged, I found Babur lifting his leg against the base and a man squatting on the ground, looking warily at him, cradling his Kalashnikov and stroking his long white beard. Standing to greet me, he put his hand to his chest and said, "Salaam aleikum. Chetor hastid? Be khair hastid?" very quickly, while I rapidly spoke over his words, saying, "Jur hastid? Sahat-e-shoma khub ast? Khane kheirat ast? Zjnde bashi...," and other politenesses. I gathered that this man was Bushire, the commandant of the area. I had heard of him before. He had led eighty men against the Russians and during the last five years had fought the Taliban while his old commander supplied them. He had been fighting Seyyed Umar, my host from the previous night. Bushire was not at war at the moment, but he was still called commandant and was a power in the valley of Jam.

  Abdullah, son of Commandant Bushire

  Bushire invited me to stay and led us across the ice on the Hari Rud River and up the western gorge. We passed one of Bushire's cows carrying a live goat in a saddlebag. "We don't have enough grazing land in this valley," said Bushire, "so the goat is too hungry and weak to walk."

  Near Bushire's mud house, Babur sniffed around a curious rock in the snow. I picked it up and found it was a piece of gray marble carved with a floral frieze. Inside the guest room, we sat on carpets while Bushire's son threw twigs into the stove.

  "What are you doing at the moment?" I asked.

  "I am a director of a society that has been set up to protect the tower," Bushire replied. "We get money from foreigners abroad to preserve its history."

  "And have you found out anything about the history of the tower?"

  "Well, we've dug up quite a lot of stuff from the ground."

  "What kind of things?"

  "Oh, we've sold most of them to traders from Herat, but I'm sure there are a few pieces left. Son, go and see what there is next door."

  His son, Abdullah, returned with a tray holding green tea and some objects wrapped in a cloth. There was a marble slab with a floral pattern (the same as the piece that Babur had found outside); a terra-cotta ewer covered with a bold black design of waves and fish eyes; a bronze six-sided dice with five spots on each side; a hemispherical bead carved from bone; and a large clay disk with a peacock in the center.

  "And where are these from?"

  "From all over the mountainside."

  After tea, I climbed up the hill beside the tower. The gravel was loose and the slopes steep and I needed to use my hands. I soon found myself clambering over rough trenches, some almost ten feet deep. Along the rims of the pits were piles of sand and pottery fragments. I passed shards of brilliant yellow porcelain, half a terra-cotta bowl, a section of ancient guttering, and some new spades and pickaxes. Clearly the antique robbers did not steal one another's tools. Those digging had made no attempt to preserve the shape of the buildings they had found; only in a tiny section on the ridge could you even trace the walls of the rooms. The villagers were tunneling as deep and as quickly as possible to reach whatever lay beneath and destroying a great deal in the process. The trenches, invisible from the base of the tower, now stretched across every slope in sight. The villagers had clearly succeeded where the archaeologists had failed and had uncovered an ancient city.

  I was on the ridge looking down at the pits beneath the tower when I heard a shout from Abdullah, Bushire's son, as he pushed up the steep slope to join me. "This was the palace of the princess," he said as he reached me.

  "How do you know?"

  "We found an inscription on an old stone here, which a trader deciphered for us. It said that this palace had been built by the daughter of Ghiyassudin the Ghorid."

  "Where is this inscription now?"

  "Sold. We have found houses on slopes three kilometers up this valley."

  I followed him along the narrow walls of the trenches, sliding down the steep face toward Bushire's house. "Do you want this?" asked Abdullah, pausing to pick up a complete terra-cotta pot.

  "No, thank you. Actually I think these things should be in a museum."

  "Indeed," said Abdullah. "Do you think you could bring us a metal detector next time you visit?"

  That evening, a large group gathered in Bushire's house. Someone had told them I was interested in history and they were hoping for advice on where to dig.

  "When did you move here?" I asked.

  "A year ago. Before that there were no houses in this place. The slopes are so steep that building is difficult, and so narrow that there is very little sun. We cannot grow crops here and the animals are weak from lack of food. We only moved here to dig."

  "How many of you are digging here?"

  "A few hundred. Now people are coming down from all the surrounding villages, two hours in each direction."

  "Do you control this?"

  "No, no, anyone is free to dig," said Bushire, who as the commandant had some authority in the area. "You can have a go yourself."

  "When did you find this city?" I asked.

  "Really only in the last two months. We tried to do some digging during the five years when the Taliban were here, but it was difficult. Some of the Taliban mullahs had good links to the antique smugglers, but they also killed people for illegal excavations. Now it's fine. There is no government anymore, and in any case the snow has closed the passes so no outsiders can interfere."

  I was clearly wrong in assuming American operations had had little effect on this valley—they had freed up the antique smuggling market. As an Islamic site, Jam had been relatively well protected during the Taliban period.

  "And what have you found out about the life of this ruined city?"

  "I don't understand. What do you mean?"

  I tried again. "Have you found out roughly what the plan of the city was ... where the bazaar was, the religious schools?"

  "No."

  "The smaller mosques, the gardens, the military barracks?"

  "No. You are asking difficult questions. We just dig downward and we find a jumble of things. It can be very frustrating—yesterday we dug a pit ten meters wide and didn't find anything worth anything."

  "What did the ordinary houses look like?"

  "Like this house—built from mud, but the rooms were very small and crowded, and many of them were multistoried, perhaps because they were built on such a steep cliff. We can sometimes guess which the better houses were from the state of their foundations. But it doesn't help us find the treasure—many of the houses have nothing in them. Nothing at all."

  Abdullah interrupted, "I think I've found a bathhouse. There were a lot of pumice stones in it and guttering that brought the water up to the ridge from a spring three kilometers away."

  "That is very interesting. Anything else?"

  "No."

  "What do you think about the people who lived here?"

  "Gamesters," said Bushire, and everyone laughed in agreement. "We find so, so many playing pieces like this bronze dice. This old man," Bushire said, pointing to a toothless villager, "found a whole set of beautifully carved ivory chessmen a month ago, in one of the smallest houses on the hill. Our ancestors weren't Taliban." The Taliban banned chess. "And he's just sol
d a wonderful carved wooden door, one and a half meters high, with tigers and hunting scenes, to a merchant from Herat for a lot of money."

  "How much do you sell these objects for?"

  "This," replied Bushire, holding up the twelfth-century ewer with its bold wave pattern, "is worth one or two American dollars—good money. That's why we are here. The door or chess pieces can go for more. But it isn't as much as we would like. The people must have taken a lot with them before the city was burned."

  "Burned?"

  "Yes. There are charred roof beams in most of the houses."

  "There was once a famous city in Ghor called the Turquoise Mountain, which Genghis burned and which has been lost ever since," I said, not sure whether these people, all of whom were illiterate, would have heard of it.

  "This is the Turquoise Mountain," said a man from Beidon, a village eight kilometers away. "We found it here two months ago."

  "But the foreign experts in the seventies?"

  "We remember them," replied the old man who had found the chess pieces. "There was even a hotel by the minaret where they used to stay, which we blew up during the war. I always used to tell the professors that my grandfathers believed the Turquoise Mountain was here. And they never listened. Why do you think our tribe has always been called Firokuhi Aimaq [the Aimaq of the Turquoise Mountain]? The foreigners didn't know how to dig; they worked so slowly, a few centimeters at a time. All they found were the Jewish headstones, which were lying above the ground. They should have worked like us."

  ***

  "We all heard stories about the Turquoise Mountain, the Ghorid capital, when we were children," said another man, the next morning. "There were legends of a causeway built of wooden beams, covering the river for kilometers because the gorges were too narrow and the passes too steep to get the camel caravans in any other way. There was a tunnel that ran under the minaret, beneath the river and up the hill to the princess's palace—"