Full Tilt (11 page)

Mohammad’s mother is a tremendous character – one of those old people who make the young realise that old age is not something to be dreaded, when it can give such mellowness and balance and
contentment
to a human being. I would have readily forgiven her for being distant to someone who represented, according to her traditions, the complete negation of womanhood but, although she speaks no English, the warmth of her welcome has made me feel truly ‘one of the
family’ this evening. Not for the first time, I am astonished and humbled by the tolerance of Muslims, who so easily accept the fact that my standards differ from theirs, yet give me no feeling of being regarded as inferior on that account. Even more remarkable, the liberty which they recognise as my inheritance does not deter them from treating me with a courtesy too rarely found in modern Europe; by this civilised fusion of our two cultures I have all the advantages and none of the disadvantages of their own womenfolk. I think it is fair to say that the modern Muslim, even if he is an uneducated peasant, shows less prejudice towards other religions than we Christians do, with our persistent tendency to brand any religion not our own as ‘ignorant superstition’. This Muslim tolerance makes it all the sadder that politicians so often artificially stimulate religious differences for their own ends.

As I write, sitting in a corner on a rug on the floor, with a roll of bedding at my back and a dim oil-lamp beside me, prayer-time has come and the old lady has gone off to her room for private devotions. Mohammad is kneeling on his prayer-mat in another corner, just now touching the ground with his forehead, his wife is sitting near me, breast-feeding the baby, and a manservant is spreading a cloth on the floor in front of us for supper. When my host heard that I was coming he took one of his guns (five of them are stacked beside the door) and went out and shot a deer – the answer to unexpected guests in this region! So it’s venison and rice for supper, cooked on a mud stove in the compound.

Another day of incredible, unforgettable and indescribable beauty, plus our highest climb yet – 10,380 feet over the Shibar Pass; I felt like a fly going up a wall.

At breakfast this morning Mohammad tried to persuade me to go by truck as he simply didn’t believe a cycle could be got over the Shibar but when I reached the foot of the pass I was very glad I hadn’t agreed to his kind suggestion. At the moment there is heavy traffic on this route because Afghanistan and Pakistan are not on speaking terms
and their frontier is closed, so that many of the goods which would normally be imported via Karachi and the Khyber Pass are coming from Russia via Mazar-i-Sharif. But this track was never meant to be a grand trunk road and the sight of grossly overloaded and mainly ‘home-made’ trucks negotiating these fantastic hairpin bends, with inches between the outer wheels and a 1,000-foot drop, made me sweat with vicarious terror – and thank God that it was only vicarious as I pushed Roz up, keeping close to the cliffside. In fact, the climb wasn’t as stiff as I had anticipated, because the foot of the pass is itself about 7,000 feet above sea level; yet over the last thousand feet I did notice the effects of the altitude – shortness of breath and aching
calf-muscles
. But it was worth it all to rise gradually from that fertile, warm valley to the still, cold splendour of the snow-line, where the highest peaks of the Hindu Kush crowd the horizon in every direction and one begins to understand why some people believe that gods live on mountain tops.

There’s an astounding change on this northern side of the range. Within a few miles the whole landscape has altered from early summer to late winter; trees are almost bare, grass and wheat are just beginning to show and the temperature is many degrees lower.

The downward gradient is much less severe and at one point the road goes through a glorious narrow gorge of red-brown cliffs; these are so close, so high and so sheer that standing between them, looking up, one has the sensation of being a midget dropped into some ruggedly built edifice with a slight crack in the roof.

It was at the end of this gorge that disaster hit Roz; she suffered two vicious rips in the back tyre and I doubt if they can be patched. The road is excruciating but personally I’ve got used to the feeling of being dislocated in every joint at one bump and relocated at the next.
However
, it’s different for poor Roz and today’s calamity was my fault; I let her go too fast down the pass. This was because of the back brake again giving trouble so that the alternative to cycling too fast was walking, and when you’ve walked up to 10,380 feet you don’t feel much like walking down. At this stage it was 5.15 p.m. and we were some twenty miles from Bamian, near the junction of the Mazar–Bamian road
where there is a tiny village called Bulola. I asked about a bus and one was pointed out as going to Bamian ‘in a few minutes’, so Roz was loaded up and I sat in. My other buses were luxurious compared with this one. The floor was covered in sheep and goat droppings and the steering-wheel was held together with sticking-plaster – a device not calculated to soothe one’s nerves on a journey in this terrain. We finally set off at 6.20 p.m., by which time I was frozen stiff – it had been raining hard and there was no glass in the windows, as usual – after sitting patiently watching huge piles of hides being roped together and tied to the roof till the whole rickety contraption looked gruesomely top-heavy. And just before our departure nine men had climbed up and settled down on top of the hides, wrapping themselves in their huge rugs.

About two miles beyond Bulola the engine broke down; it was now dark and raining, and the repairs, during which the headlights were put out of order, took very nearly an hour. At 7.30 p.m. we resumed the journey up and over a 10,000-foot pass on a corkscrew ‘road’, barely wide enough for one vehicle, with sheer drops which I could imagine, but happily not see, as there was no light. Then quite soon there
was
light – lots of it – when the daily spring thunderstorm began. For several minutes lightning was continuous – not flashes as we know them, but glaring sheets of blue illumination, revealing gaunt peaks on one side and sickening ravines on the other; yet it was all so beautiful and awe-inspiring that one simply forgot to be afraid. The thunder reverberating in the mountains was deafening – peal after peal, the echoes of each being drowned in the crash of the next. With all this came gusts of gale-force wind carrying enormous hailstones which took the skin off my nose where they struck it as I sat next to the window-that-wasn’t. There are limits even to Afghan toughness and when this demonstration started the bus stopped for the nine men on the roof to come below. As the ‘inside’ was already overcrowded beyond belief this meant that I had three children on my lap for the rest of the journey; I had only one two-year-old at the beginning. We waited for about fifteen minutes until the worst was over because to attempt to negotiate that winding track with the driver intermittently
dazzled by lightning would have been suicidal. (To my mind the whole trip wasn’t far short of suicidal anyway.) Yet what an experience to see a landscape, dramatic in itself, under such melodramatic conditions – like some inspired choreographer’s setting for
Faust
.

Soon after we had restarted a melodrama of a different kind began. The system on these privately owned buses is that the owner-driver’s assistant, usually an adolescent known as a
bacha
, collects the fares during the journey. The
bacha
now asked twelve
afghanis
from everyone and a number of passengers protested that ten had been agreed on before the start. Hell then broke loose and while I was bundling the children under the seat an infuriated tribesman, brandishing his rifle, climbed over me, trying to get at the driver; the
bacha
pushed him, and he fell backwards, striking me a frightful blow on the ribs with the rifle-butt. I looked round to see a terrifying forest of rifle-barrels behind me – terrifying because in a jolting bus I imagined them going off accidentally; but of course these men know exactly what they are doing with their triggers, if not with their butts, and nothing of the sort happened. The unarmed
bacha
continued his heroic defence of the driver, the bus stopped yet again, the driver got out and stood grasping
his
gun and refusing to go another yard until everyone had paid their twelve
afghanis
and I hastily produced mine, vaguely hoping to set a good example. But I was completely ignored while the verbal battle raged and everyone fingered his trigger menacingly as though it wouldn’t be verbal much longer; the angry shouts of all concerned almost drowned both the thunder and the hiss of the hail slashing down. Finally one of the passengers threatened to smash the inside light with his rifle-butt. Then a compromise of eleven
afghanis
was accepted, whereupon the driver resumed his seat and off we went again. This time – rather to my astonishment – we kept on going, at some 15 m.p.h., until reaching Bamian, where Roz and I were decanted in total darkness and I was told that the hotel lay on my left. As I was switching on Roz’s light a policeman appeared and almost wept with joy when he saw me – he’d been expecting me hours earlier. He had a storm-lantern and led me on a mile-long walk up a very steep hill to the hotel; we were halfway up when we encountered a car, stuck in
deep, loose gravel and being pushed by two softly swearing men. Afghanistan’s tourist trade is so flourishing that after a few weeks in the country most tourists are on christian name terms with each other, so I yelled ‘Hi, what’s wrong?’ having recognised three very nice Indians I’d met in Kabul. They said that after the 140 miles from Kabul everything that could go wrong with a car was wrong and now they just wanted to get her as far as the hotel, to avoid leaving her unguarded all night. So Roz was dropped by the wayside and the policeman and I added our pushes, during which operation I began to suspect that my lowest right rib has been fractured by the rifle butt. When we eventually got the unfortunate machine over the crest of the hill the policeman said that he’d go back to the village as I had found friends and then, having retrieved Roz, I walked on with two of the Indians, who had stayed out of the car to save it extra weight. We were trotting along, numb with cold and exchanging our harrowing experiences of the road, when a blood-curdling yell halted us and we found ourselves looking down the barrel of a rifle held by a very young soldier. We gave a chorus of little yelps of terror and said ‘Hotel! Hotel! Tourist’s Hotel!’ But the sentry wasn’t at all sure that three strangers – one with a bicycle and two without luggage – coming suddenly out of the black, cold night, could be genuine tourists, so he kept us covered until another soldier had examined our passports. This second lad then led us to the hotel, some 200 yards away from what is apparently a military barracks.

It was depressing, if not altogether surprising, to discover that here there was (
a
) no food or drink of any description, (
b
) no light, (
c
) no water, (
d
) no heating and (
e
) only one thin blanket on each bed. As we were now 8,550 feet above sea level (
e
) was not funny. I had coffee and sugar and bread with me and the boys had some tinned sausages and pineapples so we scraped together a meal of sorts by the light of
oil-lamps
borrowed from the military, making coffee with the boys’ emergency water supply. (The side-splitting part of this story is that Bamian Hotel is listed as Luxury, Grade A!) Then we raided a vast number of empty bedrooms and accumulated six blankets each; I am now sitting up in bed swathed in my six, with numb hands and feet
and a howling gale blowing through the loose window-frame. But I suppose I should be grateful for glass in the windows …

I woke this morning, looked through my window and almost fell out of bed with excitement. This hotel is built on a 1,000-foot cliff rising sheer from the valley floor and across the valley, distinct in the brilliant, early sunshine, I saw a 120-foot-high statue of the Lord Buddha standing, as it has stood for over 2,000 years, in a gigantic alcove in the golden sandstone mountain – both alcove and statue having been carved with extraordinary skill out of the rock. The whole face of this mountain is pitted with the caves of Buddhist monks and another, eighty-foot, statue stands about a quarter of a mile east of the giant one. Quite apart from this unique spectacle the valley itself is superbly beautiful; a depression in the centre of the mountains, fertile and neatly tilled, dotted with tiny villages and criss-crossed with lines of silver-barked sinjit trees, whose diminutive rosy buds were glowing softly in the early light. Even though I was mentally prepared for those Buddhas the impact was tremendous when I actually saw them presiding impassively over the valley.

After breakfast of two boiled eggs, dry bread and tea, I investigated Roz fully; there are five severe cuts in the back tyre and eleven punctures in that tube and three in the front tube. Definitely this is where I gracefully accept defeat, admit that Afghanistan is not a suitable country for cycle-touring and get on the next bus for Mazar. No one knows when another bus will come to Bamian but that aspect doesn’t worry me – I could happily spend a month here. The spare tyre is in Kabul, yet even if it were here I’d hesitate to put it on as it would probably be in shreds before we got back to Kabul and the next spare is with the British High Commission in Peshawar. So a bus to Mazar and back is the obvious though acutely disappointing solution. From Kabul, where I’ll put the new tyre on, much of the road to Peshawar via the Khyber Pass is metalled.

My experience to date of Afghan buses leads me to expect that the trip to Mazar will be (
a
) infinitely more dangerous than by cycle, (
b
) a
thousand times more wearying and uncomfortable and (
c
) at least as long in travelling hours. It will also be fraught with frustration – so many places where I’ll want to stop and be alone – but better to go by bus than not at all.