Full Tilt (12 page)

Having discovered the worst about Roz I went with the Indians to see the Buddhas and caves. This is one of Afghanistan’s main tourist attractions (hence a ‘luxury’ hotel), but what a contrast to our idea of a tourist centre! Apart from the hotel the whole valley is completely unspoiled; nothing comes between the ancient past and the moment when you walk beneath the shadow of those immense monuments of an era when Bamian was the centre of the Buddhist religion. The statues, however, look far less impressive close-to than from the other side, or centre, of the valley. There the effect of so many centuries of weathering is not apparent, although, considering their great antiquity, the damage is very slight and much skilful restoring has recently been done; even the paintings executed on the arches of the alcoves and in the caves are still traceable. The monastery of caves is fabulous; one could spend days wandering (chiefly on one’s tummy) through the maze of connecting passages between one cell and another. Similar caves, all blackened with the smoke of fires that burned so long ago, are located in other mountains around the valley and I hope to explore these tomorrow on my own; delightful as the Indians are, I prefer being alone in places like this.

After a lunch of tea and dry bread and two boiled eggs (the variety of the menu here is
fascinating
) I wandered off to a little village at the foot of the massive, snowy mountains that overhang this valley to the south. The fields were being ploughed by the most primitive methods, which involve tremendously hard work on the part of the men as well as the yokes of bullocks, and irrigation channels were rippling smoothly along between the cultivated patches. In the village, of well-fortified houses, the little children were so terrified at the sight of me that they fled like chickens before a fox. Yet to my extreme astonishment when a group of ten- to fourteen-year-olds gathered to investigate me and asked where I came from and when I replied ‘Ireland’ they immediately said ‘Dublin!’ in unison. They were dressed in the usual filthy rags, but
instead of begging from the tourist they offered me revolting fly-blown sweets, nuts and raisins out of the (probably lousy) recesses of their garments. I didn’t like refusing but one has to draw the line somewhere. They also organised a bird-fight for my entertainment; this is one of the most popular sports among the villagers. Two birds, about the size of hen-pheasants, but in build and plumage like doves, are released from their cages on the ground and go for each other; the fight lasts until one bird has the other pinned to the ground so that it can’t get up. There’s no bloodshed and no killing, only plenty of feathers flying, and since the tactics are quite beautiful to watch it was a lot more enjoyable than I had expected. Of course my last film had been used on the Buddhas; I’ve discovered that one of the chief griefs of a photographer’s life is that the last film has always been used immediately before a ‘special’ picture presents itself.

After this I went off to explore the ruins of ‘The City of Sighs’, where the King of Bamian was successfully besieged by Genghis Khan in 1222. It stands on a hill isolated in the centre of the valley and the climb is so sheer that I was completely breathless by the time I got to the top, with its remains of two watch towers. The view of the valley would be well worth climbing Everest to see; I had deliberately chosen this time, to watch the sunset from here. Bamian valley runs from east to west and the hilltop is 900 feet above the valley floor. Looking down I could see right into the compounds of all those inscrutable blank-walled villages and watch tiny figures of unveiled, red-trousered women scuttling around at their household jobs. Across the fields men were moving home with their pairs of oxen and down from the hillsides came little shepherd boys driving their flocks of sheep and goats and frisking lambs and kids. I must digress here to expatiate on the loveableness of Afghan kids, so nimble and playful and alert of expression and beautiful to look at, with their short, glossy coats and upturned tails and almost snub-nosed faces and delicate bones. They come in jet-black, nigger-brown and an extraordinarily lovely shade of blue-grey. Their elders look very dignified before shearing, with coats sweeping the ground and horns curving handsomely back – quite a contrast to the comical fat-tailed sheep with that vast bundle
(weighing from 100 to 140 pounds) swaying along behind them. Arab sheep are also fairly common, bred exclusively for their skins as the wool is of little value; these sheep are very lightly built and can be confused with short-haired goats at a distance. I haven’t yet seen any of the breed from which comes genuine Persian Lamb – most unjustly misnamed. The cattle here are small and dainty; some remind me of Kerries but they’re mostly like Jerseys.

North of this valley are the sandstone mountains of the statues and caves and to the east lie low hills like vast mounds of velvet dropped from the sky and delicately shaded in violet, brown, pink and beige. (Such formations are very common in Persia, too, where the colouring is usually brown or grey.) To the south, in complete contrast to these soft contours and tints, rears a craggy range of 14–18,000-foot peaks, covered in fiercely white snow which turned to radiant gold a few moments before the sun dropped behind the lower, bluish-tinged peaks at the far western end of the valley, leaving one splendid billowy cloud of bronze behind it.

The ruins among which I stood were equally moving in their way. Archaeologists reckon that ‘The City of Sighs’ must have had between seven and eight thousand inhabitants and as I climbed the silent laneways between those houses – some still in an excellent state of preservation, with many traces of paintings on the walls – a curious feeling of melancholy crept over me. Local techniques of building seem to have remained unchanged over all those centuries; the Afghans one sees building new houses today construct them in exactly the same manner with identical materials.

Climbing down in the rapidly fading light was almost eerie; the locals, who firmly believe in an endless variety of ghosts and spirits, wouldn’t come near the place day or night. On reaching level ground I found two soldiers, complete with the usual armoury of revolver, rifle and sword, posted one on either side of the hill, and when they had escorted me back to the hotel the manager explained that some years ago a German boy was murdered among those ruins, so now tourists are always supervised there. Then I had supper of dry bread and two boiled eggs and tea (sorry for the monotony!) followed by a
most interesting discussion with one of the Indian boys on Hinduism and Christianity.

How stupid can one be? I woke this morning to find my rib markedly worse; then, as I was having breakfast (bet you can’t guess the menu!) the Police Commander called and said that since there was no sign of a bus going from Bamian in the foreseeable future perhaps I’d like to spend the day riding up the valley? Commonsense prompted me to say, ‘No, thanks; it’s very kind of you but not with a cracked rib.’ However, the temptation was too strong – a day on horseback in the Hindu Kush is the nearest thing I can think of to Heaven. But half an hour later, looking out of the window, my heart sank at the sight of a gleaming, rearing chestnut stallion on the gravel. I then proceeded to disprove the theory that if you go up in a plane – or whatever – immediately after an accident you won’t lose your nerve. Last October I remounted an Aran Island demon of a mare three times after being thrown, yet the moment my steed appeared this morning I began to positively tremble with terror. But I needn’t have worried; he was a darling and seemed to understand the situation perfectly as soon as he felt me shivering fearfully on his back. The Afghan saddle further demoralised me – no fancy leather, but solid wood and make the best of it. I did register a protest about the girth being too loose and the stirrups too long and had both adjusted; the Persians ride very short stirrups but the Afghans in this region go to the other extreme. After about twenty minutes I regained my nerve and from then on enjoyed myself thoroughly –
what
a day! I had my usual two guards who combined business with pleasure by shooting three deer and two foxes between them. It was tremendously exciting to sit watching them galloping along mountainsides in pursuit of deer and bringing them down with magnificent shots fired while going at full speed. (Not that I really approve of shooting deer, but one has to admire the skill and it
does
mean venison instead of boiled eggs for supper!) We went deep into that magnificent range of snowy peaks, through lush green ravines and across streams and up hillsides and
through woods. Quite apart from my normal inability to convey the beauty of it all, I’m too exhausted tonight even to try. After nine and a half hours in the saddle I’d have been a stiff mass of agony tomorrow, however fit at the start, but with that rib it was just idiotic to ride. The day’s beauty so excited me that I didn’t heed the pain increasing every hour; time will tell what damage has been done.

My body was suffering such universal torture when I dragged it out of bed this morning that I can’t yet determine the precise extent of damage to my rib. At 7 a.m. the Police Commissioner appeared again to say that a bus was leaving for Bolola at 8 a.m., but I’ve been long enough in Afghanistan now to know what that means, so I crawled down to the village at 9.30 and sat in the sun, drinking tea and watching the Bazaar Day crowd, till the bus was ready to go at 12.15 p.m. In these parts no bus will start until double the number of passengers that it was designed to hold have been crammed into and on to it. If there’s room for just
one
more, it’ll wait hours for that one to turn up, with the
bacha
standing out in the middle of the road hoarsely yelling the bus’s destination to attract the necessary extra passenger. As Afghans are so indifferent to time (the vast majority have no idea how old they are) it follows that every passenger comes when it suits him so that it can take up to six hours to fill a bus. Afghans are equally vague about distance: a truck-driver who goes from Kabul to Mazar once a week won’t have the remotest idea how far it is; he just knows that if he keeps driving long enough, and if Allah is willing, he’ll get there some day. Personally I find all this most endearing after a lifetime of being tyrannised by the clock.

Next to food, fuel is the scarcest thing in this region at this season and on Thursdays dozens of donkeys come in from the surrounding few hamlets laden with bushes of some herb which smells like incense and weighs so light that one donkey can carry a load twice the size of itself. Everyone lines up to bid for these loads and the owners of
tea-houses,
who need it most and can bid highest, go off with the bulk of what’s available.

The winter is so cold round here that no potatoes or other vegetables will grow and the pasturage is so poor now that neither cows’, sheep’s nor goats’ milk will make butter or cheese. Within a few weeks all that will be changed; even during the days I’ve been here the trees have turned from bareness to greenness and the grass and wheat have come up well. Meanwhile, the people live on tea and dry bread and eggs.

I got a very pleasant surprise when the bus stopped to take us on, having loaded up elsewhere; it was the bus which had brought us here and the driver promptly handed me the two water-bottles and the plastic mug I thought I’d lost for ever. Not bad in an alleged ‘nation of robbers’ – it hadn’t even occurred to me to enquire about them.

One significant thing I notice in Afghanistan is that many men with severe physical disabilities are seen doing the same jobs (although more slowly and perhaps less efficiently) as their healthy brothers. In Persia, these men would be lying on the sidewalks begging.

Officially Mongolians are supposed to form less than fifteen per cent of the Afghan population, but anyone can see that this is nonsense – forty per cent would be more like it, and around this region sixty to seventy per cent. In the centuries following Ghenghis Khan’s invasion the Mongolians were important and prosperous citizens; now they are all in the poorer class.

The first twenty miles today was back along the stretch we came over by the light of heaven the other night and seeing the road by the light of day I realised that our survival was a miracle. This road is marked third-class on maps and when one remembers that a
first-class
Afghan road would be marked as a track on any European map – well, you see what I mean! (A recent United Nations survey declared Afghan roads to be the worst in the whole wide world – a description which I now have no difficulty in accepting.) This goat-track crawls around mountains, overhanging a river the whole way, and in these twenty miles I saw the remains of two recently crashed buses:
mercifully
the lightning didn’t reveal them the other night. In several places the river has eaten away so much of the track that one can only drive at
5 m.p.h. with inches to spare and it took us one and three-quarters hours to cover those twenty miles. Actually I was very glad, for this stretch is just about the most beautiful part of the Hindu Kush I have seen. The glory of those mountains makes one feel that it must all be a dream. Every peak and slope and outcrop is different in shape, texture and colour, the rock and shale and clay shaded purple, rose, green, ochre, black, pale grey, dark grey, brown, navy and off-white. Then, below those arid, soaring cliffs – so vertical that not even an Afghan goat attempts them – is this narrow vale of Bamian, all graceful with willows and poplars, and soft with new grass and filled with bird-song and the rush of the river. Towards the end of the vale, the mountains closed in ahead and we entered a permanently shadowed gorge no more than fifty feet wide, where the river was forced into a deep channel, half-filled with gigantic boulders through which it roared and foamed in a series of waterfalls. When the gorge ended we crossed a bridge built entirely of wood and mud.

A few miles further on, at the junction village, I transferred to a truck going to Mazar; this must be one of the easiest routes in the world for hitch-hiking because so many empty trucks go to Russia from Kabul to import essential supplies. Afghanistan’s closing of her border with Pakistan was a classical example of biting off one’s nose, etc.; the gesture hurt no one but Afghanistan and benefited no one but Russia, who now has almost a monopoly of trade with Afghanistan. (What makes me so sick in Afghan vehicles is the nauseating reek of Russian petrol, which is very inferior stuff; I’m told it ruins cars.) A lot of people thought that when the old pro-Russian Prime Minister ‘resigned’ (i.e. was dismissed by the Emir) the border would re-open, and perhaps it will soon. Its closure means that the prices of all imported goods in Kabul are almost as high as in Teheran.

Afghan trucks are unique. To make up for the absence of windows, wipers, mirrors, handbrakes and all the other refinements we take for granted, their exteriors are so brilliantly painted with a series of elaborate pictures that they look like circus caravans; also they have a railed-in compartment built on top of the cab which can carry extra goods or four humans – or both. I chose to ride up there, (
a
) so that I
wouldn’t miss anything of the scenery and (
b
) so that I wouldn’t get sick. Of course it all depends upon what makes you sick – if you’d a bad head for heights those fantastic valleys and gullies and ravines and gorges, seen from the top of a truck crawling along with no margin of error, might make you feel sicker than any Russian petrol fumes could. The situation on this route is one that could only occur in a deliciously crazy land; during the two years since the border closed eighty per cent of Afghanistan’s traffic has travelled on it, yet it’s the country’s worst road.

The
bacha
acts as rear-mirror, horn-blower (the horns are fabulous things like trumpets, eighteen inches long and audible miles away) and windscreen wiper if the truck is posh enough to have a windscreen. He also leaps down whenever the truck stops and inserts a huge wooden block to act as a brake beneath a back wheel. Every mile or so the road widens enough to let two trucks pass if one remains stationary and you can imagine the chaos involved. The really exciting part of the performance comes when you have to
back
down this track, overhanging a gorge for about a quarter of a mile, because your truck is the one nearest the passing point; that’s when it’s wiser to look up rather than down. For this manoeuvre the
bacha
is of course out on the road, walking backwards shouting instructions to the driver.

The average speed of forward progression is 15 m.p.h. and allowing for frequent reversings, and for one puncture or other breakdown every two hours, it takes four hours to cover forty miles – at this rate I’ll be in Mazar for Christmas! But these Afghan drivers are really magnificent – good-humoured about their hardships, brilliantly resourceful when mechanical improvisations are required, and very sensible and cautious. The only thing that terrifies me is the appalling state of repair of the trucks; if a brake went or the steering column broke on this road the best drivers in the world couldn’t avoid disaster. Fortunately, the beauty of the landscape leaves little time for these morbid broodings.

For about the first twenty of this afternoon’s forty miles we were going through a narrow gorge overhung by mountains eroded to many grotesquely beautiful shapes – some were like the ruins of colossal
Gothic cathedrals, others had crags worn by wind and water into parodies of sculptured human faces and always there was that incredible display of colours. Then the valley widened slightly and we came to a region of devastation, a shattered wilderness where giant rocks, the size of cottages, lay strewn everywhere, and wide fissures in the mountains warned that at the next earth tremor – and they are frequent here – the whole appearance of the area would change. Before the border trouble this track was often blocked by rock-falls; now the Russians have teams of men camped at intervals to clear away the débris as soon as it crashes down.

I reckon that today’s forty miles were only about ten miles as the crow flies, so tortuously did the road and river wind back and forth through the mountains. After such a jolting on top of the truck, added to yesterday’s gallivanting, the rib is neat hell tonight and the rest of my ill-treated carcase feels not much better. ‘Bed’ in a tea-shop corner now.

It took us eleven hours to cover ninety miles today; we were afflicted by two punctures and three engine breakdowns. This obviously suited my purpose as, while the repairs were being done, I could wander off and absorb the beauty of a landscape no less spectacular than yesterday’s. But I couldn’t wander far or do anything energetic – merely climbing into the truck this morning was agony. Definitely I’m in for real trouble with this rib and I must take it to a Russian doctor in Mazar, if we ever get as far.

The valley was wider and more fertile and more populous today. Women in this region lead a very active life and lovely splashes of crimson against grey rocks or green pastures indicate that a
shepherdess
is on duty. Almost all the villagers here seem to be Mongolians, who are much less conservative than the Aryan Muslims. The women have elaborate patterns tattooed on their foreheads and chins, and girl-babies wear silver ornaments permanently embedded in their noses. Both men and women use massive silver bangles and ear-rings and their curly-toed shoes are inlaid with silver and gold. They all look
sturdy, rosy-cheeked and healthy beneath the dirt of bodies that certainly do not know what water feels like.

This is the centre of the Afghan horse-breeding area, where herds of magnificent animals graze beneath the mountains on velvet pastures, with scores of frolicking foals, and to see them galloping away from the sound of the truck is a heart-stopping sight. Here too the famous sport of Buzkashi is most popular. This involves two teams, of up to a hundred horsemen each, who try to drop a sheep’s carcase in a hole in the centre of a mile-long pitch; I hope to see it before leaving the region. This explains the wooden ‘handle’ on my saddle the other day – riders hang on to it with one hand while they bend down to spear a sheep off the ground with the other.

Tonight I’m again staying with a Provincial Governor, one who spent seven years in an American university and speaks perfect English. His house is so primitive that his wife prefers to remain in Kabul with their children; only one room is fit to sleep in and despite his foreign education he takes it for granted that I won’t mind sharing it with him. As it happens he’s quite right in this case, since by now I equate ‘Afghan’ with ‘gentleman’. He’s a very nice fellow who paid me one of the most valued compliments I’ve ever received when he said that he had never before met a foreigner who had become so completely adjusted to Afghan life in so brief a time. I replied that it isn’t difficult to get adjusted when you love a country as much as I love this one. He had been warned by the other Governor to expect me, so there was quite a banquet for supper – fried chicken, spinach beautifully prepared,
hard-boiled
eggs, the usual flat wholemeal bread, sheep’s butter, goat’s and sheep’s cheese and masses of sultanas; sultanas eaten with unsalted goat’s cheese are quite a gastronomic experience and on that course I made a pig of myself. Then we had hot cow’s milk with lots of sugar in it and finally green tea, and the more I filled my tummy the sorer my rib got – from expansion!

I slept very little last night and couldn’t stand up without help this morning; I was in too much pain to eat an elaborate breakfast. While
drinking my tea I coughed involuntarily and at once fainted clean away because of the agony. When I had come to, my host and I held an emergency conference and he advised me to go to the
German-built
hospital in this town, fifty-five miles from Doshi. I’ll skip details of the journey – I did
not
observe the landscape and fainted twice more: I’m getting quite expert at it. A young Afghan doctor said that three ribs are broken; he plastered them and ordered me to bed and banned cycling for a month.

This hospital is exactly what you would expect an Afghan hospital to be – even one built by Germans. A male nurse undressed me and two police officers and three other officials stood by as interested spectators while I stood naked from the waist up being plastered. There are a few women nurses here – elderly widows without sons or husbands or fathers to restrain them from leading such immoral lives! A
bathroom-cum-lavatory
leads off my room but the water supply has been broken down since the Germans left in 1945. However, this doesn’t deter everyone from using the lavatory: it would be so much healthier to have an Eastern one outside instead of a Western one, minus water, inside. I can’t see myself escaping from this dive without dysentery – the room is
dense
with flies. Fortunately it opens on to a verandah and the bed is beside a big window with a wide view of the heavenly garden which is like a miniature forest, full of chestnuts heavy with blossom and Scotch firs and many other big trees, unfamiliar to me, in early summer foliage. There are also blazing flower-beds, smooth lawns and a little bubbling stream. Possibly I’ll survive; a Czech doctor is going to re-examine me tomorrow.