The Places in Between

by Rory Stewart

  On this slope Babur lay down and wouldn't move. The weather was closing in again and the snow came harder. I leaned over him. He was shivering and sucking air into his lungs in an asthmatic wheeze. I held him for two minutes while he trembled and panted and fought for breath, and then the fit passed and he was able to stand again. I thought we should turn down the hill, but I could see no promising path.

  We were both tired and cold and we would be pressed to reach Daulatyar by dusk. We were supposed to be traveling east so I set off on a traverse across the slope, dragging Babur behind me and hoping there were no crevasses. After half an hour of stumbling through more deep powder, we came over a lip. The fog lifted and I could see on the next ridge a line of footprints heading downhill. We began to follow the prints and a little later, to my delight, saw an arrow of dark purple rock pointing into a village and tiny figures moving among the stands of poplars on the bank of the Hari Rud. We ran and slid down the snow slopes into the broad valley of Shinia.

  From the village, I kept moving east. I walked across two half-frozen streams, jumping the cracks, but Babur was reluctant and I struggled to drag him across the ice. We were now walking through hard sleet. Fog descended, hiding the low hills on either side.

  We came onto a vehicle track. Tires had gouged a glutinous dark brown strip, twenty feet wide. My boots stuck to the mud, so I walked on the ice in the roadside ditches. This was better, except when the ice broke and my feet plunged into cold water. Babur was now coated in black mud. We had been walking for nine hours.

  Daulatyar was only fifteen kilometers away and there were probably two hours of daylight left, but I had forgotten how much deep mud and wet snow slowed my pace. I felt muffled in the snow-fog and imprisoned by the rain hood I was wearing. I threw back the hood. I could hear and see again. The day was very silent and the plain seemed very large. The snow driving into my eyes at a forty-five-degree angle made me feel much freer, but my left foot seemed frozen to a cold iron plate.

  Exhaustion and repetition created within the pain a space of exhilaration and control. And at this point, I saw two jeeps, their headlights on, weaving slowly toward us through the fog. They were the first vehicles I'd seen since Chaghcharan. When they reached me, an electric window went down. It was the Special Forces team from the airstrip.

  "You," said the driver, "are a fucking nutter." Then he smiled and drove on, leaving me in the snow. I had seen these men at work when I was in the army and in the Foreign Office and I couldn't imagine a better compliment. I walked on in a good mood.

  We reached Daulatyar just after dark. This was the last Aimaq village before the Hazara areas. Its headman was Abdul Rauf Ghafuri. Everyone had spoken of him in Chaghcharan, emphasizing his feudal background,44 his position on the frontier, and his connections with the Hazara. "He knows the Hazara Begs [chiefs]," they said. They implied that dealing with the Hazara was a strange and dangerous thing. They made him sound like a Yankee colonel on the edge of Sioux territory.

  Abdul Rauf Ghafuri did not enter the guest room immediately, and when he did it was with an air of condescension I had not seen since I left Haji Mohsin Khan. The room held a number of other men, all of whom leaped to their feet. He shook my hand with the others but did not attempt to speak to me. I went outside to check on Babur.

  My relationship with Babur was developing. He was never a playful dog and he growled if I came near his food, but he was beginning to trust me. If anyone else approached he backed away. That night I was able to lift him into a manger and tuck a blanket around him, and in return he rubbed his great head against mine.

  I was very proud of him. Although he had drunk the water that had given me dysentery, he had just walked twelve hours without a break, crossing a ten-thousand-foot pass through snow four feet deep. But I was still not certain he would be strong enough to complete the journey. I did not think he was designed to walk thirty to forty kilometers every day.

  He was a type of mastiff, bred to fight and guard against wolves, dogs, and humans. In build he resembled the Tibetan mastiffs the Romans had imported along the Silk Road, and in temperament the English mastiffs the Celts had used to fight the Romans. The mastiff is perhaps the oldest breed of dog in the world. There are mastiffs on early Egyptian wall paintings and on the friezes of the Assyrians. His closest living relative is the Anatolian mastiff shepherd, a breed that spread across the kingdom of Alexander from Turkey, where they are called Kangal or Karabash (meaning black-faced), to Uzbekistan. The British Museum holds a copy of a Greek statue of a mastiff of the period of Alexander. It is two and a half feet high at the shoulder and sits with its great paws in front of it and its hindquarters folded sideways. It has cocked its head. Its ears and tail, like Babur's, have been cut off.

  From now on people would refer to Babur as a Sag-e-Aimaq (an Aimaq dog)—with some awe—recognizing from his size that he came from Ghor. The dogs of Ghor are mentioned in the earliest descriptions of the province and were always regarded as particularly special mastiffs. According to the Seljuk chroniclers of the eleventh century, there was "a remarkably fine breed of dogs in Ghor so powerful that in frame and strength every one of them is a match for a lion."

  The king of the Turquoise Mountain had owned two Ghor dogs, one named after him and one after the ruler of Ghazni, and he would make them fight. It was dangerous to be around him on days when his namesake lost. Babur's breed of dogs formed part of the Ghorids' tribute to the Seljuk and became such proverbial parts of Islamic culture that a medieval scholar is recorded as saying "Avicenna could not fight with a dog from Ghor."

  The next morning, having pulled on two pairs of wet socks and my wet boots, I walked outside to the manger and called. Babur didn't come. He was lying in his own vomit, pus filling his bloodshot eyes and thick saliva flapping from his muzzle.

  I couldn't bear to leave Babur so I waited, hoping he would recover, and drew a picture of Abdul Rauf Ghafuri. Unlike my other sitters, he insisted on keeping the portrait. I also gave the commander a cigar. He hadn't seen one before but put it hastily in his pocket without thanking me, which was a kind of compliment.

  Part Five

  The country of the Hazaurehs ... violent Sheeahs ... is still more rugged than that of the Eimauks. The sterility of the soil and the severity of the climate are equally unfavourable to husbandry. Their women ... have an ascendancy unexampled in the neighbouring countries ... there prevails a custom called Kooroo Bistaun by which the husband lends his wife to the embraces of his guest. The Hazara are very passionate, and exceedingly fickle and capricious.

  —Mountstuart Elphinstone,

  The Kingdom of Kaubul and Its Dependencies, 1815

  Day 20—Daulatyar to Sang-i-zard

  Day 21—Sang-i-zard

  Day 22—Sang-i-zard to Katlish

  Day 23—Katlish to Qala-e-Nau

  Day 24—Qala-e-Nau to Siar Chesme

  Day 25—Siar Chesme to Yakawlang

  NAME NAVIGATION

  Four hours later, having slept, Babur looked much better, and the various villagers who inspected him agreed he could manage a short day. At about eleven, Babur and I left the vehicle track behind and turned into the long Sar Jangal valley.45 Babur was walking well. In the early afternoon we entered a settlement where, for the first time, I saw women in the streets. They wore bright pillbox hats and clothes decked with silver. Rather than covering their faces, they stood still and watched me. I noticed how pale their skin was and their slender Mongolian eyes, unusual for Afghans. One of the girls smiled. In the central square were stocky men with broad ruddy faces and high cheekbones. They immediately invited me into the mosque. It was the first mosque I had been invited to in Afghanistan. These people were the Hazara.

  Their ancestors were probably colonists from Mongolia who arrived in central Afghanistan with the armies of Genghis Khan, displacing the previous occupants.46 When Babur the Emperor encountered the Hazara, they dominated a large area between Ghor, Kabul, and Ghazni. Some still used Mon
gol, but they were mostly Persian-speaking. Their heartland was ruled by the chess-mad Zulnun Arghun.

  Babur had probably been in a village close to this one, about fifty kilometers beyond Chaghcharan, when he sent a party of sixty or seventy men to find Hazara who might guide him. They returned alone, probably because the Hazara feared and hated him—and with reason.47 This is Babur's diary from the previous winter:

  The Turkoman Hazara had erected their winter habitations in the valley of Kesh and we now pushed forward to fall on them.

  A fat hairless camel belonging to the Hazara was found, brought in, and killed. We ate part of it roast, part of it sun-dried. I never ate such fine-flavored camel's flesh. Many could not distinguish it from mutton...

  In a narrow defile, the Hazara fortified and strengthened a ford with branches of trees ... But Qasim Beg [Babur's old chancellor] discovered a ford and having gained a footing on the opposite side, no sooner charged with his horse than the Hazara, unable to keep their ground, took flight. The party that had got in among them, followed in close pursuit, dismounted and cut down large numbers of them ... We fell in with the sheep and herds of horses of the Hazara near their winter habitations, I collected for my own share to the number of four or five hundred sheep and twenty or twenty-five horses ... The wives and the little children of the Hazara escaped on foot to the snow-covered hillocks and there remained. We were rather remiss in following them.48

  Although the Hazara number three and a half million, they are the least-known people of Afghanistan. This is in part because they are concentrated in the high, isolated central mountains. Until the late nineteenth century, despite the efforts of rulers such as Babur, Hazarajat was in practice an independent country. In the 1880s an intensive military campaign by the Afghan king Abdul Rahman finally conquered them and incorporated them into Afghanistan. He gave much of their land to the Pashtun, made many of them slaves, and left them as the poorest of the four ethnic groups in Afghanistan.49

  For the next hundred years, the Hazara were commonly described as ineffectual, cowardly, and irrelevant. During the Russian war, foreign journalists—who tended to enter Afghanistan from Pakistan in the east—could usually only reach the Tajik or Pashtun communities and, therefore, their reporting hardly acknowledged the Hazara's existence. Then, in the mid-1990s, the Hazara seized parts of Kabul, and other Afghan ethnic groups began to describe them as vicious and inhumane. "They are Mongols," one said to me, "and therefore they are as cruel as their ancestor Genghis Khan."

  The Taliban evicted the Hazara from Kabul in 1996, and in 1998 seized the Hazara capital at Bamiyan, forcing the Hazara resistance into the hills or into Iran. The Hazara were once again the victims, and the Taliban treated them with particular brutality, in part because the Hazara were mostly Shia. The Taliban and the majority of Afghans are Sunni Muslims. The Hazara Shia saw themselves as more civilized, more mystical, more tolerant toward women and other faiths. The Taliban saw the Shia as heretics or infidels.50 They thought the Shia reverence for saints' shrines and pictures of the Prophet's family, and their respect for the twelve Imams (or leaders), was idol worship. They believed the wailing and self-flagellation in Shia processions, and the small clay disks that Shia placed beneath their foreheads when they prayed, were signs of superstition.

  Hatred between Shia and Sunni is not uniquely Afghan. I had watched the Pakistani military manning truck-mounted machine guns to stop Sunni radicals from attacking Shia Moharram processions in Sahiwal in the Punjab. In Hazarajat, though, the religious violence had a strong ethnic and cultural component. The Taliban, who were mostly Pashtun, despised the Hazara for their Mongol features, their traditions, and their behavior in Kabul.51

  No Sunni ever invited me into a mosque on my walk, but in Hazarajat I was usually asked into a mosque well before I was invited into a home. This had been true in Shia areas in Iran. In this case, an old Hazara man sat me on the prayer floor and went to get tea. As we sipped and chatted, three men were praying in the corner and another three were sleeping. I asked the old man about the route ahead and he listed the villages and the distances between them.

  "How far have you come from and where are you going?"

  "I am walking from Herat to Kabul."

  "By foot? You are at the very midpoint. I was told by my grandfather that it is fifteen farsang from here to Herat and fifteen days on foot from here to Kabul. My grandfather could recite every night's halt of the month's journey. I'm sorry he is no longer alive to speak to you."

  I was not carrying a detailed map because I did not want to be thought a spy, and I was troubled to read that Babur the Emperor had lost his way on the stretch between Chaghcharan and Yakawlang. Three days earlier in the teahouses in Chaghcharan, I had discussed routes and distances with Aimaq men, who knew all the villages on the main road from Yakawlang through Lal.

  An old man, overhearing us, said, "Are you really walking?"

  "Yes."

  "Then forget the road," he said, "because you don't want to go to Lal at all ... It will add two days to your journey at least. You should turn off the vehicle track at my home at Daulatyar, which is only two days' walk from here, and walk on the ancient path straight up the Sar Jangal valley and then cross the high pass into Yakawlang. You could do it in a week."

  "Have you done this route?" I asked.

  "Not all of it, but I was told about it by my father."

  "It would not be safe for us. We have been fighting the Hazara," added a young Aimaq man.

  I turned back to the old man. "Can you give me the names of the big men in that valley?"

  "Mir Ali Hussein Beg is the greatest man in the Sar Jangal valley."

  "Can I reach him in a day's walk from Daulatyar?"

  "No," he laughed, "he is three days beyond Daulatyar. In a day you could get to Mukhtar, the place of Mirza Beg, and then to Charasiab, home of Abdul Rezak Khan."

  "No, no, Hamid Khan at Dahan Gulamak," shouted another old man from the other end of the room.

  "Then Mir Ali Hussein Beg at Katlish," continued the first man.

  Everyone nodded in agreement and repeated, "Yes, Mir Ali Hussein Beg."

  "Then Ghulam Haider Khan at Shahi Murri," continued the old man.

  "No," interrupted another, "Wakil Hadim Beg at Espiab first."

  I looked at the old man. He shrugged.

  "Wakil Hadim?" I asked, writing it down.

  "Perhaps I have that wrong ... not Wakil Hadim ... Wazir Beg."

  "Then Shahi Murri," repeated the old man, "one day and then you are in Yakawlang."

  They were describing more than a hundred kilometers passing through villages they had been unable to visit in twenty-five years. Much of the route they knew only from tales told in their fathers' guest rooms. But everyone had memorized a chant of names and villages along footpaths in every direction. This was a very useful map. It specified everything in terms of a man on foot: the best tracks, the distances that could be walked in a day, whom you should speak to in each village. It was less accurate the farther you were from the speaker's home. (In this case he said it was only one day from the castle of Mir Ali Hussein Beg to Yakawlang, when it was four, because he didn't know the names of the villages in between.) But I was able to add details from villages along the way, till I could chant the stages from memory:

  Day one: Commandant Maududi in Badgah. Day two: Abdul Rauf Ghafuri in Daulatyar. Day three: Bushire Khan in Sang-i-zard. Day four: Mir Ali Hussein Beg of Katlish. Day five: Haji Nasir-i-Yazdani Beg of Qala-e-Nau. Day six: Seyyed Kerbalahi of Siar Chesme...

  I recited and followed this song-of-the-places-in-between as a map. I chanted it even after I had left the villages, using the list as a credential. Almost everyone recognized the names, even from a hundred kilometers away. Being able to chant them made me half belong—reassuring hosts who were not sure whether to take me in and suggesting to anyone who thought of attacking me that I was linked to powerful names. But they were the names of living men and different
names provoked different reactions. "How do you know Mir Ali Hussein Beg? Who told you to call Haji Nasir 'Beg'?"

  All the men on the list lived in mud forts, mostly on the valley floor by the Hari Rud River but occasionally high on the slopes above their villages. They were the old tribal chieftains of the Hazara people and the most senior of them were called "Begs" like Babur's ancient chancellor Qasim Beg, a Turkic word for a leader.

  THE GREETING OF STRANGERS

  The Aimaq had frequently complained about Hazara hospitality, but I had been very impressed by the welcome in the mosque at Daulatyar. That afternoon I met a group of ten-year-old boys on the outskirts of a village and asked one where Sang-i-zard was. He said he didn't know, which surprised me. It was supposed to be close. As soon as I turned he flung a stone, which hit me on the back of the head.

  I shouted, "How dare you? Where is your father?"

  "I don't have one."

  I tried to catch him, but he ran up the hill followed by his friends. When I turned again, they all threw stones at me and howled the Aabag wolf cry to make their dogs attack Babur, sending a pack in full tongue streaming down the slope toward us. And while Babur raged and I lashed out with my stick, an old man from the village sat calmly watching.