The Places in Between

by Rory Stewart

  Zia wore a neat embroidered prayer hat and a fancy acrylic cardigan that looked as though it had come from a Tehran shopping arcade. His face was pale and the first clean-shaven Afghan's I had seen since Abdul Haq's. He opened the conversation. I had listened again and again to ponderous old men delivering speeches—about the goodness of Islam, the glory of the jihad, the need for medicines and development aid, and the fact that Afghanistan was destroyed—while their listeners chimed in, in chorus, on the more familiar phrases. Zia, however, seemed to think as he spoke.

  "We have, I think, to be grateful for the American intervention," he said slowly, "because for a moment at least there is peace."

  "There is peace because the Taliban have gone?" I asked.

  "No ... The Taliban were not a trouble here. They came twice on operations to collect weapons as part of their disarmament program ... but after that they never visited the valley."

  "Then who caused the violence?"

  "We did ourselves."

  "And the Russians," interrupted a young man.

  "Yes, during the 1980s this mosque and the castle were hit by rockets from Russian attack helicopters, but we were not fighting each other. Things began to collapse after that time—people rebelled against their tribal chiefs..."

  "Sang-i-zard," said the man on my right.

  "Yes, in Sang-i-zard, where you stayed last night ... the Begs have lost all their land and power..."

  "But the Begs haven't lost out here," chimed in the young man, and they all laughed.

  Zia the Beg continued, "But there were fights also between different villages in this valley. We have killed thirty men from Sang-i-zard and they have killed ten of us, so we still have a blood vendetta with them. For twenty-five years we have not been able to walk from end to end of the road that you are walking because it has been too dangerous for us. It is only safe for you because you are a stranger. We could be killed if we went to Sang-i-zard. And the same if we walked east. But ... there has been no killing in two months. People are too scared of the Americans."

  "What next?" I asked.

  "We don't know," said a villager.

  "We are waiting to see whether the government will force us to return the land and the flocks that we have stolen from each other over the last twenty-five years," said Zia. "That will be difficult. And yet without it the vendettas will continue."

  "I disagree," said a villager. "Are you a Muslim?"

  No one was afraid to interrupt, tease, or contradict Zia, though he was their feudal lord. Everyone felt free to start their own conversations or ask me a question. It seemed even a decision to rob another village, or kill, would happen after discussion, reasoning, and disagreement. But when dinner was announced, everyone fell silent.

  Zia asked four men to go to the castle kitchen and another to spread a cloth and bread in front of the two of us. They moved immediately. Despite the chatter, Zia was clearly respected. One man entered with a silver ewer and platter, poured warm water over our hands, and dried them with a clean white towel. Others carried in rice, a large bowl heaped with the best cuts of mutton selected for me, a plate with ribs and kidneys, a mound of fresh cold yogurt, and Cadbury's Eclair sweets from Iran. When I finished the yogurt, more yogurt was brought.

  In the last six days and nights in Afghan houses, Babur and I had been fed only bread for breakfast and lunch. We had occasionally had plain rice at supper, but we had eaten no meat, vegetables, or fruit. Now I was tasting the food of a great feudal chief. It was far beyond the means of the men who sat watching. I was very grateful for the generosity and for the protein. I wanted to take some meat to Babur, but meat was very precious and the villagers would have been angry to see it fed to a dog.

  At dawn, the young men remained on their mattresses for an extra half hour while the older men prayed. I stepped outside. The light, in a curving blaze of orange and lurid yellow, reached from the eastern ridge, strong and high, into a mass of gray cloud. A descending magpie swept his wings forward so that he hovered above the snow crust before touching the ground. Everyone was hungry and carried a gun, and I had not seen a bird since Kamenj. For breakfast, because I had mentioned that we ate eggs in Britain, fried eggs were presented on a bed of onions, and two men sat beside me ensuring my teacup was filled and each cup stirred with generous helpings of sugar.

  Zia, nephew of Mir Ali Hussein Beg of Katlish

  For the fourth day in a row, Babur and I walked for eight hours on narrow ice paths hammered by footsteps between three-foot-high walls of snow. This time I was accompanied by Hussein Ali, a broad-shouldered, middle-aged man from the castle. Now that I was farther from the road and deeper into the Sar Jangal valley, every feudal chief seemed to feel it was his obligation to provide me with the escorts I had once been promised. I was passed like a parcel down the line, from one chief to the next. Their men were willing to walk a full day through the snow to accompany me and then a full day back. I always insisted they take some money, but they were doing it as a courtesy for me as a traveler and it was sometimes difficult to persuade them to accept.

  Babur was limping. I stopped to massage his left foreleg and thereafter he moved a little better, but I was again worried for him. I too was feeling lethargic. Because the sun fell to the left of the ice path, melting it, the path sloped to that side—a tendency exaggerated by subsequent travelers. I slipped every few steps over the next eight hours and I didn't like it.

  Hussein wore a thick, quilted coat, a blanket wrapped around his head, huge sunglasses with the manufacturer's sticker still in place in the center of each lens, and a pair of rubber galoshes that did not seem to keep out the snow. He was more tired than either of us and we kept stopping for him to catch up. I gave him some of the Dairy Milk the British soldiers had given me in Chaghcharan, and it seemed to speed him a little, though Babur didn't like it. I was pleased to have Hussein's company. But though I was accompanied by a Hazara, children in every village threw stones at us and called their dogs down on Babur.

  THE SACRED GUEST

  That evening we came down a cliff and across a wooden bridge to the castle of Qala-e-Nau, and Hussein Ali left. I led Babur down to drink in the Hari Rud, terrifying a woman who had crouched under the bridge to relieve herself. When I reached the courtyard of the mosque, men and children appeared and stared at me in silence. I asked to see Haji Nasir, to whom I had a letter of introduction. None of them moved or spoke. I asked if there was somewhere I could put Babur and they replied, "Nowhere."

  "But surely you have animal sheds ... Where are they?"

  Silence.

  "Where is Haji Nasir?" I asked.

  "Perhaps in the mosque."

  I left Babur in the courtyard because he was considered unclean and walked inside. After unlacing and removing my heavy boots in the hall, I found Haji Nasir waiting for me. He was a slender, elderly man. I took out my letter of introduction and gave it to him.

  "I am walking to Yakawlang," I said.

  I waited for him to invite me to stay in his village. He said nothing.

  Finally, I asked, "Can I stay here?"

  "We shall see."

  "I have a dog, is there somewhere I can put him?"

  "Nowhere."

  "Any blanket for him?"

  "No."

  "Please."

  Finally, he told me to take Babur to the cellars of the castle—a catacomb of sprawling chambers occupied by sheep. The men who led me were too scared to approach Babur, but they indicated I could put him in the farthest cellar. He immediately lay down on some straw and fell asleep.

  I reentered the mosque and took off my iced and soaking socks. Haji Nasir watched. He did not suggest I dry them on the stove; he did not offer tea. I clearly needed to persuade him I was worth speaking to. We were eleven days' walk from Kamenj and had just reached a village that had not heard of Haji Mohsin Khan, so I dropped him from my introductory speech.

  "I have walked here from Chaghcharan," I said. "On the first night I s
tayed with Commandant Maududi in Badgah, on the second with Abdul Rauf Ghafuri in Daulatyar, on the third with Bushire Khan in Sang-i-zard, and last night with the nephew of Mir Ali Hussein Beg in Katlish. They have treated me very well."

  Then I took out my notebook and showed him the pictures I had drawn of these men.

  He looked at the pictures and said, "You can stay here tonight and someone will bring you some tea." Then he walked into the inner room of the mosque to pray.

  Haji Nasir Beg of Qala-e-Nau

  In all the countries through which I traveled, I was told with pride, "We [the Iranians, or the Pakistanis, or Indians or Nepalis or Afghans] are famous for being the most hospitable and generous people in the world. It is a religious duty for us. Everyone will welcome you immediately into their houses. You will be treated like a God."

  But this was not my experience. Though most communities, whether Islamic or Hindu, and Muslims talked a great deal about their formal religious responsibilities to a mosafer (traveler), or meman (guest), in practice people often welcomed me reluctantly. This was understandable—they were often very poor, lived tough lives, and were suspicious of the few strangers they met. I was often disappointed by their hospitality. Only later did I begin to see how fortunate I was that they provided me almost every night with shelter and bread to eat.

  Although the snow remained waist-deep on either side of the ice track, it was so hot the following day that I walked in my shirt. The antispasmodic pills had finally slowed my dysentery, but I still felt weak. A couple of young men fell in with me on the path. One shouted, "Give me some money."

  I said I didn't have any.

  "What are you doing?"

  "I am writing a book."

  "Give me your book."

  "I only have notebooks."

  "Give us the notebooks."

  I stepped around him off the path and sank to my waist in snow; Babur fell forward and sank out of sight.

  "Take me to England with you," the boy shouted.

  "You don't have a passport."

  "Give me a passport."

  "I'm sorry." By now I had dug Babur out and staggered past the boy onto the road.

  "Give me your boots."

  I pushed ahead while they discussed what they should ask me for next. They seemed to believe that if they only guessed the right thing I would give it to them, and they followed me for two hours. Finally, I stopped to rest Babur and they sat down beside me. I handed them my last two pieces of Cadbury's Dairy Milk. They chewed a bite before spitting it out, throwing the remains onto the snow, and asking, "Can we have your sunglasses?" They seemed to have a surprisingly developed concept of the tourist for two boys who had never left Afghanistan. Strangers had opened conversations by asking for money and a passport many times in Nepal, but this was my first such conversation in Afghanistan.

  At midday they gave up and left me by a simple mud mausoleum built in honor of a traveler who had died in the snow here. The villagers had found his frozen corpse and decided on the basis of his clothes and books that he was a holy man. They guessed he was a wandering Sufi, but they couldn't tell me whether he had been a Chist-iyah. Pilgrims now came to the shrine to ask for children or cures and to bathe in the hot spring near the shrine, which was called Boiling Blood.

  Here too the villagers found statues of women's heads with exaggerated black eyebrows, like the ones Dr. Amruddin had excavated in Ghar. Although the death of the saint proved what a lonely area it could be in the winter, the heads implied the hot spring had been inhabited for a very long time. The similarity between these heads and those one hundred kilometers west suggested that a single Neolithic culture may once have dominated all the mountains between there and Jam.

  THE CAVE OF ZARIN

  I was told I was now only two or three days from Yakawlang. So far I had been much luckier than either the Emperor Babur or the saint—days of bright sun after the latest snowstorm had left the powder crust only two feet deep and the path through the snow was clear. Babur the Emperor had, like me, relied on the worn ice track as a path, but fresh snow had hidden it and he was unable to find a guide to help him as he continued up the Sar Jangal valley:

  Placing our reliance on God and sending on Sultan Pashai before us, we again advanced by that very road in which formerly we had been stopped and forced to return. In the few days that followed, many were the hardships and difficulties that we endured: indeed, such hardships and sufferings as I have scarcely undergone at any other period in my life. I wrote a poem then:

  There is no violence or injury of fortune

  That I have not experienced.

  This broken heart has endured them all.

  Alas, is there one left that I have not encountered?

  For about a week, we continued pressing down the snow without being able to advance more than a Kos [two miles] or a Kos and a half ... Qasim Beg [his aged chancellor] and his two sons and two or three of his servants dismounted with me and we all worked in beating down the snow. Every step we sank up to the middle or the breast, but we still went on trampling down. As the vigor of the person who went first was generally expended after he had advanced a few paces, he stood still, while another advanced and took his place. The ten, fifteen, or twenty people who succeeded in trampling down the snow, next succeeded in dragging on a horse without a rider ... The rest of the troops, even our best men and many that bore the title Beg, without dismounting, advanced along the road that had been beaten for them, hanging down their heads. This was no time for plaguing them or employing authority. Anyone with any spirit would have worked.

  Given that Babur emerged two days later at the pass to Yakawlang, he must have been near the village in which I was standing—possibly in a parallel valley.

  Three hours before dusk, with the clouds closing in, we climbed steeply up from Shahi into much deeper snow. My pack often threw me off balance. Babur was less sure-footed than me, and we both slipped frequently into the deep powder. We were soon climbing beyond the last house up a long slope that led over a ridge and descended into a large snow bowl. A beggar from the shrine had accompanied us up the path shouting "Uncle" and pulling at the back of my pack. He left us by a thin line of frozen water, beneath a snow-covered rock at the bottom of the slope. This, he said, was the source of the Hari Rud River.

  I had now followed the Hari Rud for nearly a month from six thousand feet below this valley.53 I had seen Abdul Haq carry Aziz through it when it was in a shallow bed between canals and poppy fields. This was the river that flowed past Babur's house. I had crossed it frozen in the narrow gorge beneath the minaret of Jam. We had fallen into it through the ice below the castle of the Hazara chief Mir Ali Hussein Beg. Now we were leaving it behind.

  Before he left, the beggar pointed to a cliff—the only piece of steep bare rock in the snow—and said if I climbed up its face and turned north, I would reach a village after two hours. I stood for a while and watched his tiny dark figure climb out of the bowl, pause for a moment on the ridge, and drop out of sight. It was half past four in the afternoon; it had begun to snow again; and Babur and I were alone. I was not certain we would reach a village before dark and it would be an uncomfortable night outside.

  With my first step toward the cliff, I found myself buried to my chest. I swung my pack off my back, pulled myself out until I was lying flat on the snow, managed two more steps, and sank again. Babur struggled along behind me. Since his shoulder was only two and a half feet from the ground, he had more difficulty extracting himself, and I had to haul him by his scruff. It took us twenty minutes to reach the cliff. At its base, I found a steep slope running up its east side. Babur began to climb ahead of me and I followed. My thigh muscles were burning and I stopped us to rest by the mouth of a cave. We were at the base of the watershed between the Hari Rud and the Zarin valley. I was grateful the snow was gentler than it had been for Babur the Emperor:

  When we reached the cave of Kuti at the foot of the Zarin pass, the storm was terrib
ly violent. The snow fell in such quantities that we all expected to meet death together. We halted at the mouth of it. The snow was deep and the path narrow, so that only one person could pass at a time. The horses too advanced with difficulty over the road which had been beaten and trampled down and the days were at their shortest. The first of the troops reached this cave while it was still daylight. About evening and night prayers the troops ceased coming in; after which every man was obliged to dismount and halt where he happened to be. Many men waited for morning on horseback.

  The cave seemed to be small. I took a hoe and cleared for myself, at the mouth of the cave, a resting place about the size of a prayer carpet ... some desired me to go into the cave but I would not go. I felt that for me to be in ... comfort, while my men were in the midst of snow and drift ... would be inconsistent with what I owed them ... it was right that what ever their sufferings were ... I should share them. There is a Persian proverb that Death in the company of friends is a feast. I continued therefore to sit in the drift in the sort of hole I had cleared and dug out, to myself till bedtime prayers when the snow fell so fast that as I had remained all the while sitting crouching down on my feet, I now found that four inches of snow had settled on my head, lips, and ears. That night I caught a cold in my ear...

  About bedtime prayers a party that had surveyed the cave reported that it was very extensive and was sufficiently large to receive all our people ... I sent to call in such of the people as were at hand ... such as had any eatables, stewed meat, preserved flesh or anything else in readiness, produced them; and thus we escaped from terrible cold and snow and drift into a wonderfully safe, warm, and comfortable place where we could refresh ourselves.