by Rory Stewart
As Humayun recovered, Babur began to sicken. He died on Boxing Day 1530. He had asked to be buried on this hill in Kabul, with his grave open to the sky. His great-grandson built a marble mosque beside the tomb, with an inscription that reads in Peter Levi's translation:
Only this mosque of beauty, this temple of nobility, constructed for the prayers of saints and the epiphany of the cherubs, was fit to stand in so venerable a sanctuary as this highway of archangels, this theater of heaven, the light garden of the godforgiven Angel King whose rest is in the garden of heaven, Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur the Conqueror.
The side palace built by later Afghan kings was wrecked. The sunken floors of the water tanks were smashed; the plaster was crumbling; and bullet holes dotted the embossed leather ceiling. The holes made by mortar shells mirrored those in the abandoned Soviet apartment blocks across the road.
The afternoon sun threw the long shadows of saplings up the gentle slopes, over the traces of fourfold paths and fountains. Babur had founded an Indian empire and his descendants incorporated scalloped Indian Mughal arches into the mosque's design. But the hill of his tomb climbed north toward the Central Asian snow peaks he had crossed on his way from Herat, and beyond them to his homeland and Samarkand.
Turning into a side lane, I opened the gate of what had once been Usama Bin Laden's third wife's house. On the doorstep was my Babur asleep. I put my pack down and at the familiar sound he woke, trotted over, stumpy tail wagging, and rolled on his back for me to scratch his stomach. I'd never seen him look so healthy, rested, and alive.
Epilogue
Usama's wife's house was now rented by my friend Peter and filled with British men and women working in Afghanistan, who had been feeding Babur shepherd's pie for a week. One of them, Mel, had become particularly devoted to Babur and spent much of each day stroking, grooming, or feeding him. After a lifetime of bread, Babur was now eating meat three times a day. He spent most of his time asleep in the garden, shaded by the vines or the mulberry trees. For an almost wild dog, he seemed to adjust quickly to domestic life.
Babur and I left by car two days later, following the Kabul River through the Khyber Pass to Pakistan. The car was small, and Babur and I shared the front passenger seat, his hindquarters between my legs, his paws on my shoulder, and his dribble on my sweater. He was terrified of cars, having never seen them in his village, and he dribbled a great deal.
In Pakistan, I arranged Babur's vaccinations, his vet's certificates, his enormous kennel, and his seat on the plane to Britain. The Pakistani summer was starting and Babur, who was most happy rolling in snow, was hot. But I wasn't too worried. He seemed entranced by the lush grass and the bird-filled trees. He was going to my home in Perthshire, where it would be cool beneath the oaks.
Finally, everything seemed finished. I was booked to fly to London that day and he would follow the next. I went out into the garden and he woke, looked up, and rolled lazily onto his back. I didn't scratch him for as long as I would have liked because I didn't want to worry him. But I suppose he guessed something was up because when I had got in the car, he came trotting around the back of the house with his white-muzzled wrinkled face in the air. He stopped at the gate, watching me as the car backed down the drive.
After twenty months of walking, I flew out of Islamabad with a layover at Dubai International Airport, where I was served at McDonald's by a Filipino from Luzon. I landed in London and noticed its glass shop fronts and posters of half-naked women. Where I had been in Asia the tarmac roads petered out into bare patches of littered earth. Here the concrete ran clean from the roads over the curbs and up the walls of the houses, so that the whole city seemed rendered as a single room. Middle-aged men in suits stood in the streets at midday, looking lost and soft.
I took the sleeper up to Dunblane and walked the last twenty kilometers home. It was dawn and the halogen lights were still lit along the road. Rabbits stood beneath single trees. The sheep were scattered across a grass plain that could have supported a flock fifty times larger. Under a close, small sky, the river was still and broad and labeled PRIVATE, NO FISHING. A line of daffodils had been planted along the verge, in front of an avenue of bare beech trees.
Clean metallic signs announced a school and a forty-mile-an-hour speed limit. A cat leaped over a gas station wall. The cars were parked in front of the houses with their noses thrust over the close-mown lawns. There were conservatories, dark green ironware tables behind thigh-high walls, and birdbaths with hanging seed. I imagined knocking and saying, "Where is the headman? I would like to stay."
I reached an eighteenth-century bridge built just wide enough for a horse. A smart silver sign beside it announced that it had been restored with European Union funding in 1990, twelve years earlier, and reopened by a general. It was overgrown with nettles, and a fallen log blocked one end.
I climbed into the hills. Two overfed ponies with long manes and hair over their eyes trotted toward me through the rough gorse and the mist. It was a Scottish mist, damp on my hands and cheeks. At Muthill I stopped in the pub for breakfast. The landlady asked, "Why are you walking?" I remembered the reasons I had given Afghans. She added, "Are you doing it for charity or are you on holiday?"
I crossed the old stone bridge at the south end of Crieff, and the gravel sank into the damp earth beneath my boots as I turned up the drive. A sycamore had fallen, revealing the campsite. The heavy oaks strained forward, two years thicker. The dark, stiff bark of the sweet chestnuts had been forced farther apart, revealing more smooth underflesh. Someone—my father, I assumed—had moved six large box trees from the woods. I could see the yew ahead and then the gray columns of the house, dark with damp. I strode toward the steps. If I had been in a car someone would have heard me arrive, but as it was, no one was in the hall to greet me.
Much later, when I had kissed my mother and gone up to my room, I thought again of the telephone call I had received in London. It was Edward from Pakistan to say that Babur had died the day before he was meant to get on the plane. Someone had given him rack of lamb. After eating bread all his life, he had neither the teeth nor the experience to handle a bone. The shards cut up his stomach and killed him. I had thought that line of smells by unmarked boulders, stretching to a snow-ridge horizon, with ice holes for drinking, would finish with good meat, oak trees, rabbits, and a warm house. But it ended with his death.
I don't imagine Babur would have been very impressed to see me crying now, trying to bring back five weeks' walking alone together, with my hand on a grizzled golden head, which is Babur, beside me and alive.
Acknowledgments
This book was written at home in Perthshire. I was lucky in the many friends who read it in draft form. I owe particular thanks to Patrick Mackie, Stephen Brown, Edward Skidelsky, Minna Jarvenpaa, and Rachel Aspden for giving the book more life and all its commas.
To Clare Alexander for her imagination and energy; Mary-Kay Wilmers for first publishing me; Jason Cooper for understanding the journey and editing it skillfully; and Peter Straus and Andrew Kidd for editorial support. For the many improvements in the American edition, I am very grateful to Flip Brophy, Stacia Decker, and Rebecca Saletan.
I am indebted to J D-B for much that I will never be able to communicate, Peter Jouvenal for his encouragement, and Diana Livesey, Felix Martin, Nassim Assefi, Andrew Greenstock, Will Adamsdale, Luke Ponte, Palash Dave, Tommaso Nelli, Peregrine Hodson, Honor Fraser, Nico Schwarz, Mani Boni, Nick Crane, Fiona, Annie, Heather, Gordon, Gillie, and Richard for their friendship and advice during the journey and the writing.
Throughout the walk I was inspired by the courage and determination of Mohammed Oraz, who walked for three months beside me across Iran. I had hoped to finish the journey beside him. He was killed in an avalanche on the summit of Gasherbrum 1, his sixth eight-thousand-meter peak, in September 2003.
Finally, it is to my parents that I owe the most, in this as in so much else.
Footnotes
1 Babur describes scores of men in Herat and their painting, theology, dancing, and poetry and most of all drinking. Some of them were unusual people; see, for example, "the mullah who left a Persian prosody which omits many useful and difficult subjects and writes about obvious subjects in the minutest detail and was remarkable for the force with which he could deliver a blow with his fist."
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2 The mythical Huma bird never alights on the ground but is perpetually in flight. Its diet is bones. The female drops her eggs from the sky and her chick hatches as the egg plummets, escaping before it hits the ground. Anyone over whom the Huma flies will become king. It is part of the myths of both Persia and India and is celebrated by the Hindu poets as well as by Muslim Sufis such as Attar and Rumi. There were once two giant golden Huma on the walls of the lost Ghorid capital of the Turquoise Mountain. Even Babur quotes a poem about the Huma, written by one of his courtiers.
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3 The Malla were a medieval Nepali dynasty who conquered much of the Indian Himalayas. I walked from Gangotri, through Kedarnath and Joshimath, to Jumla in Nepal, along their routes.
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4 In fact, Ismail Khan was very keen to refuse formal deference. He would not allow people to bow to him. Ritual was even more complex in the sixteenth century, when status was also measured by how far a man advanced up a room. This is Babur describing being presented at court in Herat:
As soon as I entered the Hall of State I bowed, and then without stopping, advanced to meet the ruler, who rose up rather tardily to come to meet me. Qasim Beg, who was keenly alive to my honor and regarded my consequence as his own, laid hold of my girdle and gave me a tug; I instantly understood him and advancing more deliberately we embraced at the spot that had been arranged.
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5 Babur may have faced greater linguistic problems. Although everyone then, as now, spoke dialects of Persian, the differences between dialects were probably more dramatic. Babur says that there were seven languages spoken in Kabul at his time, some of which have vanished or are now confined to very small communities.
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6 The first refers to an attribute of God; the second is a name for the Prophet.
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7 In Herat under Ismail Khan, people who committed "vice crimes" such as drinking alcohol had their heads shaved or were denounced on television. Women could not walk or ride in a car alone with a man who was not a close relative, even a taxi driver. A police task force patrolled Herat city, arresting men and women who were seen together and suspected of being unrelated or unmarried. Men were taken to jail; women and girls were taken to a hospital to undergo forced medical examinations.
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8 Only Ismail Khan's men wore these scarves, which resembled the Palestinian keffiyeh.
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9 His description, which was to prove more than a little misleading, bears a strong resemblance to that of Mountstuart Elphinstone in 1815. The bold generalizations probably reflected the fact that, like Elphinstone, he had never visited the interior in person.
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10 The main pass through to Chaghcharan is called Shotor Khun—camel's blood—for this reason. All the ancient cultures seem to have agreed that the edge of the great Asian mountain massif beyond Herat was an important frontier. The Greeks called its mountains the Paropamisus from the Persian word uparisena—peaks over which the eagles cannot fly. Aristotle believed that from these mountains you could see the eastern edge of the earth. Perhaps this was why Alexander the Great refused to follow the Satrap Satibarzanes into the mountains.
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11 It may have been built as a status symbol by a local ruler who wanted to attract trade or simply to imply that his kingdom was a more integral part of classical Persian civilization and trade than it had ever been in reality.
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12 Hazrat Ali Hajweri.
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13 But the Taliban, who were never as close theologically to al-Qaeda as has been suggested, left the shrine of Ansari well alone.
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14 They may have been motivated as much by a desire to drive up prices as by religious considerations.
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15 Alexander sent his assassins twelve hundred kilometers from Herat to kill his friend Parmenion in Hamadan and they covered the distance in eleven days. In seven days Alexander's enemies, the Persians, could cover twenty-two hundred kilometers on the Royal Road from Sardis to Susa.
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16 Like the seventy small kingdoms of mountainous Nepal.
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17 "Three foreign kings have subdued India...," wrote Babur, "one of these was Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni ... the second was Sultan Muizuddin the Ghorid ... and for many years his slaves and descendants swayed the specter of these realms. I am the third."
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18 This Kufic script was unique to the Ghorids. I had seen it also in the alcove of the Herat mosque, where the al-Qaeda men used to chat in Urdu.
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19 See the Kabud dome in Maragheh.
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20 The ancient peoples of highland Asia were very sensitive to the landscape. During the earlier stages of my walk, in Turkey and Iran, I was often struck by the symmetry and isolation of a rock in the desert, only to find on approaching it that the Phrygians had carved a lion into its surface; or that forty feet up a sheer cliff, the Medians had placed the facade of a shrine; or that beside a volcano cone and beyond livid copper walls, the Persians had built water temples.
The Ghorids seem to have shared this delight in the shape and color of rock. Unlike the Seljuks or the Mongols, they were not nomads from the steppes but instead, like the Phrygians, Medians, and Persians, people who had lived for centuries among their mountains.
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21 A pride reflected in the Ghorids' use of the epithet Malik-I-Jabal, or King of the Mountains, as their royal title.
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22 Qutb-al-Din Baktiar Kaki.
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23 Nezam Al-Din Aulia.
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24 Gisuderaz.
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25 Not much, however, is known about their relationship. I found a myth in India of how a great Chistiyah saint walked through Multan and Lahore in the late twelfth century and, reaching Ajmer, appeared to the Ghorid prince in a dream saying, "Arise, the land of India is yearning to kiss your feet and the crown and throne await you there," encouraging the Ghorid to conquer all of India. Muinuddin Chisti Sanjari went from Multan (which they conquered in 1175) to Lahore (1186) and then to Ajmer (where they held their decisive battle in 1193). The saint's march into India seemed to pass through the cities the Ghorids conquered and in the order in which they conquered them. It suggested at least that the military conquerors supported the work of missionaries and then were in turn encouraged by the missionaries. The conquest was a jihad, a holy war, and both warriors and saints were required.
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26 See Nancy Dupree's account of the central route, 1976.
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27 They sometimes refer to themselves also by tribal names such as Taimani, Firuzkuhi, Jamshidi, and Hazara-e-Qala-e Nau.
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28 Some of the Aimaq have Mongol features. They are also supposed to use many more Turkic words in their dialect than other Persian speakers. Perhaps because my Persian was not good enough or because they were avoiding dialect in
talking to me, I never noticed this. Even the Aimaq disagree about which are the four main tribes. Among the groups, however, are the Firokuhi, Taimani, Taiwara, Hazara, Jamshidi, and Timuri. Elphinstone in 1815 added the Zooree and has the Firuzkuhi and Jamshidi as subtribes of the Hazara.
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29 Their carpets would often be sold as Bokharan or "Khoja Rushnai"—areas hundreds of miles away. The main cost of the carpet lay in the wool. The women and girls who wove were often paid less than ten dollars for work that took them a month.
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30 The British retreat from Kabul took place in January 1842, almost exactly 160 years before my conversation with Dr. Habibullah. The Afghans killed at least twelve thousand of the British troops and their followers in six days in the snow-filled gorges below Kabul. Only Dr. Brydon, a medic, managed to ride into the fort of Jalalabad. Apart from a few prisoners released later, he was the sole survivor of the army of the Indus. Lady Butler's painting of him shows him half dead on his pony at the gates, looking, in his long-tailed tunic, like a pre-Raphaelite knight ending a Grail quest. He took the pony, which he had taken from an Afghan village and which had carried him to safety, back with him to Scotland.
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31 Arab historians also refer to it as a Hindu area, but they had a tendency to call all pagan kingdoms Hindu. Bosworth, who is the great authority on the Ghorids, suggests they may have had their own individual local religion, which simply vanished with the Islamic invasion.
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32 Among those who had been forgiven was the Russian-era governor of Ghor, Fazal Ahmed Khan, who was now the Christian Aid representative in the province, living in Shahrak. He came from a feudal family even grander than Haji Mohsin's. Haji Mohsin's family were khan zada, important district figures, but Fazal Ahmed's family had been Taimans, effectively controlling the province under the royal court. His KHAD security chief, Moheddin, and he had been forced into hiding.
