The Places in Between

by Rory Stewart

  When we reached the top of the cliff, we found ourselves, after days in the valley bottom, suddenly looking down on snow-covered ridges and slopes peppered with the marks of miniature avalanches. A band of brilliant turquoise light stretched along the crest of the eastern hills. We continued south. When the light had almost entirely faded and the snow was falling more heavily, I began to think about digging a snow hole for the night, but ten minutes later I saw lights to our right. We walked toward them and in half an hour reached a small hamlet, where some men were sitting on the roofs. This was, it seemed, Siar Chesme, where I had been told I would find a headman called Seyyed Kerbalahi.

  "Peace be with you," I shouted up.

  "You have a war dog?" they said, apparently uninterested in why we had just come off the mountain at dusk.

  "No, I am looking for the house of Seyyed Kerbalahi ... I am a traveler and I need shelter."

  "How about a fight now? Our dogs against yours ... come on...," and they put up the wolf whistle.

  "This dog is not a fighting dog," I snapped. "If you try a fight, I'll kill your dogs with my stick." Perhaps sensing I was tired and angry enough to fulfill my threat, the men held the dogs back. I walked to the headman's courtyard and stood shivering and waving my letter of introduction. He shouted down, "Why are you here? The village mosque is twenty minutes back down the hill. You should go there..."

  As on many previous nights, I was anxious to get Babur fed and housed and to find warmth myself. I emphasized my distinguished hosts and grand introductions. Eventually he allowed me in.

  DEVOTIONS

  Di Muezzin shab-e-vasler

  Azan pechle rat.

  Ai! Kum bakht,

  Kia wakht he khoda yad Aya?

  —Mirza Ghalib

  From the Muezzin, on the night I lay first with my girl,

  The call to prayer broke night into dawn.

  Aagh, foolish wretch! What time is this

  To remind a man of God?

  Seyyed Kerbalahi's guest room was large and decorated with some of the most expensive carpets I had seen. He said he was too busy praying to speak to me. An old servant brought supper consisting of soup made from rotten meat, which I could not stomach, and bread. Seyyed Kerbalahi then sent his wife with some tea but he did not join me. I wondered if he was having a better meal next door.

  This was a remote area. The servant who brought the soup had been to the nearest bazaar at Yakawlang but he had never seen Chaghcharan or any place of that size, and in a later conversation Seyyed Kerbalahi's nephew had to explain to him what an airplane was. The Seyyed's wife asked me about my journey, but she had not heard of any of the places I had walked through that day.

  "Where have you been?" I asked.

  "I was born in this village. I am the fifth and only surviving one of Seyyed Kerbalahi's wives, and I have never been more than an hour's journey by foot from this village in the forty years I have been alive."

  She explained that the Seyyed's father had moved to this place in the mountains from Yakawlang in the 1940s. His family seemed to have prospered. All the Seyyed's brothers were senior mullahs and his son was studying in Tehran.

  Although the Seyyed's wife was a grandmother she was not comfortable being alone with a man, and after five minutes of conversation she left. Seyyed Kerbalahi joined me after dinner. His real name was Rasul. He was called Kerbalahi, he explained, because he had been to Kerbala in Iraq to visit the sacred Shia shrine of Imam Hussein twice in the late 1950s, once for three months and once for five.54

  I asked him why he had not completed the Haj by going on to Mecca.

  "It would have been too expensive."

  "But Mecca is quite close to Kerbala by the time you have gone from Afghanistan to Iraq."

  "It would have been a seven-day trip so I came home."

  He tuned the radio to a Pakistani channel broadcasting in Urdu.

  "Can you understand Urdu?" I asked.

  "No," he said. "I have put it on for your benefit."

  He then began praying. Every minute or so, he interrupted his prayer to throw out a comment such as, "Later I will arrange for someone to dry your socks." Then he would start his prayers again from the beginning. I suggested gently that he finish his prayers before we spoke.

  "But a guest is ordained by God," he said reprovingly.

  "Thank you," I replied. "Well, there was something I wanted to ask you..."

  "I am praying. We should talk later."

  When he had finished, he picked up a large Koran and began to mumble over it and then glanced up and asked if I had any photographs.

  I handed him the pictures of my family. He frowned at them briefly and handed them back.

  "I have walked here from Herat," I said.

  "I'm reading the Koran and your Farsi is not good enough for a conversation," he replied.

  We sat in silence till I decided to lie down and sleep.

  At dawn he began his lengthy prayers again. By the time he had finished, a crowd of villagers had gathered in the guest room. Seyyed Kerbalahi picked up my Dari-English dictionary and began looking at it a page at a time. Usually people who wanted to be seen reading my dictionary knew which way up to hold it. Seyyed Kerbalahi didn't.

  He then moved to another position in the room, carefully opened a sandalwood box, and unwrapped a different copy of the Koran. The morning continued with rambling prayers, a little browsing of the Koran, and occasional bad-tempered visits to his balcony to tell anyone who wanted to see him that he was too busy with his religious devotions to be disturbed. I imagined this was the pattern of most of Seyyed Kerbalahi's days.

  Finally I took my leave. On my way out I noticed two faded aquatint photographs on the guest room wall.

  "They are my brothers," he said, "martyrs... One was killed in Lal and one on the path to Yakawlang." They were not dressed like most martyrs as Mujahidin but in neat Russian dress uniforms.

  Seyyed Rasul Kerbalahi of Siar Chesme

  THE DEFILES OF THE VALLEY

  Seyyed Kerbalahi had told two men to accompany me. I was glad to have them because another foot of snow had fallen during the night, covering all tracks. We had to break trail up the steep slope behind the village, and in the loose new powder we slipped back one step for every three we gained.

  Babur enjoyed it far less than I did, and I had to drag him a great deal of the way. We came onto the ridge after two hours. This was the central watershed dividing western Hazarajat from the province of Bamiyan, and we could see bare cliffs thirty kilometers east below us along the edge of the Zarin valley. This valley, the men said, marked the entrance to Yakawlang—my destination that day. The clouds were moving quickly in a cold wind, giving occasional glimpses of a pale sun.

  Samarakot lay at the bottom of the slope. After I had taken Babur to an ice hole below the village for a drink, Hassan Zargon came to greet us. He was a kind, welcoming, and respectful host. He gave me two soft-boiled eggs and sent food out to Babur. Like Zia in Katlish, he provided a man with a white cloth and warm water to wash my hands, and he illed my tea glass and poured in sugar. Since it was snowing again, he said I should stay the night with him. I told him I wanted to reach Yakawlang that evening. He said it would not be possible. The town was two or three days' walk away. When I insisted, however, he told his seventeen-year-old son, Asad, and another boy to guide me over the next pass.

  Crossing the Zarin pass would have been impossible without them. The snow was falling very fast. We caught glimpses of a few black rocks and at times a ridge would disengage itself from the fog and we would see, racing across the surface, a fine, sandlike flurry of snow, caught in the southeast wind. But most of the time the whiteout was total. Sensing the gradients, we picked our way over ridges and through deep snow bowls. We could not see the texture of the snow at our feet. Where the snow had fallen on a hard crust, it was knee-deep. Here, Asad was able to pick a route. But then he'd lose it and we would plow through much deeper powder, lifting our legs
like sumo wrestlers with every step.

  After an hour and a half the snow thickened and was driven horizontally into our faces. We were all very cold. At every ridge Asad turned and shouted through the storm, "Manda na Bashi" (May you not be tired). We sank into a deep drift and for ten minutes Asad plunged cheerfully around in a wide circle, till he had worked out where we were. I wondered how these ridges and valleys looked in the summer. Finally we were on the last slope into the Zarin valley, which was only twenty kilometers from Yakawlang. The pass had taken us three hours, and Asad and his companion were now going to walk back through the blizzard.

  I offered Asad money but he was horriied. It seemed a six-hour round-trip through a freezing storm and chest-deep snow was the least he could do for a guest. I did not want to insult him but I was keen to repay him in some way. I insisted, feeling foolish. He refused five times but finally accepted out of politeness and gave the money to his companion. Then he wished me luck and turned up the hill into the face of the snowstorm. I turned along the Zarin valley, toward Yakawlang.

  Babur the Emperor probably spent his final night before reaching Yakawlang on the slope we had just descended:

  Before we reached the bottom of the Zarin pass, the day closed in around us. We halted in the defiles of the valley. The cold was dreadful and we passed that night in great distress and misery. Many lost their hands and feet from frost. Kupek lost his feet, Siyunduk Turkoman his hands, and Akhi his feet, from the cold of that night. Early next morning we moved down the glen. Although we knew this was not the usual road, yet placing our trust in God we advanced down the valley, and descended by difficult and precipitous places. It was evening prayer before we reached the other end of the valley. It was not in the memory of the oldest man that this pass had ever been descended when there was so much snow on the ground; nay it was never known that anyone even conceived the idea of passing it at such a season. Although for some days we endured much from the depth of the snow yet, in the issue, it was this very circumstance which brought us to our journey's end. For if the snow had not been so deep, how was it possible to have gone, as we did when there was no road, marching over precipices and ravines? Had it not been for the extreme depth of the snow, the whole of our horses and camels must have sunk into the first gulf that we met with:55

  Every good and evil that exists

  If you mark it well is for a blessing.

  It was bedtime prayers when we reached Yakawlang and halted.

  Five hundred years later I reached Yakawlang some hours after bedtime prayers. Asad had left me at about three in the afternoon. I knew I had to walk fast to reach Yakawlang that evening. The valley floor was low and broad and Zarin was a cluster of caves dug into the sandstone wall. The entrances to many of the caves had been finished with walls and it appeared from the caves' soot black ceilings that most of them were once inhabited. This was the first cave-dwelling culture I had seen. From here to Bamiyan more and more of the villages had caves, now used mostly for storage and to shelter flocks. Opposite the caves was a large, ruined mud castle.

  From Zarin I emerged onto a clear, broad vehicle road, the road from Lal. This was the first clear road I had seen for two weeks, but I saw no vehicles on it, probably because the passes on either side were closed. For the first time, in the late afternoon sun, I could see the true color of the hills free of snow. There was a coal black peak with slopes of sulfurous yellow, an emerald green mountain, dark purple cliffs with a white crest, and in the foreground pale brown sandstone cliffs with dark eyelets of caves at the base, each stained with soot.

  Yakawlang

  I climbed into this blaze of color, but underfoot the mountains faded into somber shades of gray, khaki, and rust. We reached the stream and valley of Yakawlang at sunset, and at the same moment the snow began to fall. On the valley floor the pale yellow of the corn stubble was dusted with white, the hills had turned the smoky pink of a Ching vase, and the mist gathered on the peaks in the thick waves of a classical Chinese painting. The air was alive with snowflakes.

  Babur writes of his arrival:

  The people of Yakawlang, who had heard of us as we descended, carried us to their warm houses, brought out fat sheep for us, a superfluity of hay and grain for our horse, with abundance of wood and dried dung to kindle our fires. To pass from cold and snow into such a village and its warm houses, on escaping from want and suffering, to find such plenty of good bread and fat sheep as we did, is an enjoyment that can be conceived only by such as have suffered similar hardships or endured such heavy distress.

  I entered Yakawlang pacing fast, swathed in my blanket, with Babur behind me. It was now dark. I hammered on a number of gates but, although I could see lights within, no one opened their doors to me. At the fifth compound a man opened a shutter and when he heard I needed a bed, told me to go to the Médecins Sans Frontières office at the top of the hill. We did so. As soon as I knocked the gate of the MSF compound was opened by an Australian male nurse. He looked at me in surprise and then led me to a new clean room built into the side of the valley. There, I was welcomed. Lola, a Spanish doctor, gave me some pig fat for Babur. I was offered a hot shower and then Petr, a Czech from the People in Need Foundation, sat with me as I ate cornflakes, peanut butter, honey, and Marmite, and drank hot chocolate and coffee.

  The next morning I walked through the bazaar to look at the "warm houses" that had welcomed Babur. I found only charred, empty shells. Yakawlang had been one of the largest towns in Hazarajat, with a literate and politically engaged population. The Taliban attacked the town in 1998 and executed four hundred men against the clinic wall. Since then 75 percent of the population had either died or fled.

  In the shells of what had once been shops in the lower bazaar, men had set up trestle tables with small awnings. In one there were cracker boxes, in another the hanging carcass of a cow. But it was mostly rubble, filled with the fresh feces of men and dogs. I walked past shop after shop without ceiling or upper walls, black with soot. The smoke from the fire must have filled the narrow valley, and the rattle of the firing squad's automatic weapons would have echoed off the steep walls.

  The MSF house into which I had been welcomed was probably the most remote and isolated Médecins Sans Frontières operation in Afghanistan. The staff had flown to Kabul in a giant Antonov plane a month earlier and had driven into Yakawlang when the passes were open. Before their arrival the district had no medical facilities. They had opened nine clinics, including one by the caves in Zarin. Replacement staff had arrived just before the passes were closed. Some of the staff due leave had been marooned for two weeks in Yakawlang, unable to get to Bamiyan.

  Since it was only three or four days by foot to Bamiyan, I suggested they walk with me rather than waiting for the passes to clear, but they wanted me instead to travel by vehicle with them. The Australian nurse had seen a horse and its rider cut in half on the path ahead, and warned me that the path was heavily mined. The Spanish doctor, Lola, warned me that I would have to cross a very large snow plateau, in which I would not see a house for thirty kilometers. She had just amputated the frostbitten leg of an Afghan soldier who had tried to cross the pass, and she thought she would have to take off one of his comrades' legs that afternoon. She reminded me to take aspirin if I began to develop frostbite.

  They were very generous hosts and I was sorry to leave them. So was Babur. MSF had adopted a puppy and it ran around him in circles, yapping at his heels, trying to make him play. He wandered ponderously around on the roof of the compound, pretending the puppy didn't exist and occasionally giving a gruff bark if it bit him too hard. Play for him, when it happened, was a solitary activity, in which he ran far ahead and rolled in the snow. But he had been very well fed. I hoped he had recovered his strength sufficiently to reach Bamiyan, because there the roads were open and he would be able to travel ahead by vehicle and wait for me in Kabul.

  Part Six

  I am the grave of Biton, traveler:

  If from
Torone to Amphipolis you go

  Give Nicagoras this message: his one son

  Died in a storm, in early winter, before sunrise.

  —Nikainetos, third century B.C.

  Day 26—Yakawlang to Band-e-Amir

  Day 27—Band-e-Amir to Ghorak

  Day 28—Ghorak to Shaidan

  Day 29—Shaidan to Bamiyan

  THE INTERMEDIATE STAGES OF DEATH

  From the ridge a mile beyond Yakawlang, I looked back. The charred houses were concealed by distance, absorbed into the hills and the lines of poplars and willow. After the rest and meat at Yakawlang, Babur started strongly, moving more quickly than me and pulling me up the first few slopes. But soon he was tired again. After two hours, on the final climb from the Firuzbabar plain to the long snow plateau, I saw my first men of the day. They were leading a donkey loaded with a man on a stretcher. I assumed they were taking a relative to the Yakawlang clinic. But as I drew level, I saw he was beyond hospitals.

  A glistening piece of pink flesh still clung to one cheek, but his eyes were gone and only a thin tuft of gray hair was left on the back of his skull. Enough tendons remained to hold his gray jawbone in place. His knees were together, his arms stretched out stiff to either side, his head slightly raised. His hands were well preserved and the wrinkles on his fingers suggested he had been old. He was wearing a tattered brown homespun jacket and two transparent plastic bags, tied at his wrists, as gloves, to keep the cold away. They had not worked. The men had found him on the snow plateau, frozen to death.

  They did not know who he was, only that he had been walking from Bamiyan to Yakawlang. Because he was traveling alone on foot they assumed he was a poor man from a remote area. He might have been on his way to visit his family for the Eid festival. It was Eid that day, and they had missed their own festival to take the man to the district headquarters.