The Places in Between (20 page)

Leaving Babur to sniff around the base, I clambered into a hole four feet from the ground and dropped into a circular staircase. Narrow skylights had been worked into the design above, but here it was dark and the steps were steep, worn, and narrow. I had not climbed far when I slipped and came accelerating down in the darkness, cracking my head against the staircase and grabbing at bricks to try to stop myself. I tore the skin from my palm, bricks came away in my hands, and the tower seemed to shake as I hit the outer wall. For a moment I wondered if I would be remembered as the man who died while knocking down the last Ghorid masterpiece. Then I came to a halt and the tower was still. It was quiet at the bottom of the stairwell and cold. When I started to climb again, I did so slowly, pressing my hands against both brick walls. My right leg was shaking.

After perhaps 120 feet, I came out into a circular chamber from which a second spiral staircase ascended. Here, the smaller brick steps had fallen away from the wall and I had to pull myself up by my arms to get onto a ceiling. I continued, climbing between portions of an old staircase, up over another three chambers, till I emerged just below the lantern. Above me were smoke-blackened wooden beams that must once have supported an external balcony. I looked out from the skylight and saw on the facing ridge two small ruined towers and, to my surprise, a line of trenches cut into the gravel slope.

When I descended and emerged, I found Babur lifting his leg against the base and a man squatting on the ground, looking warily at him, cradling his Kalashnikov and stroking his long white beard. Standing to greet me, he put his hand to his chest and said, "
Salaam aleikum. Chetor hastid? Be khair hastid?
" very quickly, while I rapidly spoke over his words, saying, "
Jur hastid? Sahat-e-shoma khub ast? Khane kheirat ast? Zjnde bashi...,
" and other politenesses. I gathered that this man was Bushire, the commandant of the area. I had heard of him before. He had led eighty men against the Russians and during the last five years had fought the Taliban while his old commander supplied them. He had been fighting Seyyed Umar, my host from the previous night. Bushire was not at war at the moment, but he was still called commandant and was a power in the valley of Jam.

Abdullah, son of Commandant Bushire

Bushire invited me to stay and led us across the ice on the Hari Rud River and up the western gorge. We passed one of Bushire's cows carrying a live goat in a saddlebag. "We don't have enough grazing land in this valley," said Bushire, "so the goat is too hungry and weak to walk."

Near Bushire's mud house, Babur sniffed around a curious rock in the snow. I picked it up and found it was a piece of gray marble carved with a floral frieze. Inside the guest room, we sat on carpets while Bushire's son threw twigs into the stove.

"What are you doing at the moment?" I asked.

"I am a director of a society that has been set up to protect the tower," Bushire replied. "We get money from foreigners abroad to preserve its history."

"And have you found out anything about the history of the tower?"

"Well, we've dug up quite a lot of stuff from the ground."

"What kind of things?"

"Oh, we've sold most of them to traders from Herat, but I'm sure there are a few pieces left. Son, go and see what there is next door."

His son, Abdullah, returned with a tray holding green tea and some objects wrapped in a cloth. There was a marble slab with a floral pattern (the same as the piece that Babur had found outside); a terra-cotta ewer covered with a bold black design of waves and fish eyes; a bronze six-sided dice with five spots on each side; a hemispherical bead carved from bone; and a large clay disk with a peacock in the center.

"And where are these from?"

"From all over the mountainside."

After tea, I climbed up the hill beside the tower. The gravel was loose and the slopes steep and I needed to use my hands. I soon found myself clambering over rough trenches, some almost ten feet deep. Along the rims of the pits were piles of sand and pottery fragments. I passed shards of brilliant yellow porcelain, half a terra-cotta bowl, a section of ancient guttering, and some new spades and pickaxes. Clearly the antique robbers did not steal one another's tools. Those digging had made no attempt to preserve the shape of the buildings they had found; only in a tiny section on the ridge could you even trace the walls of the rooms. The villagers were tunneling as deep and as quickly as possible to reach whatever lay beneath and destroying a great deal in the process. The trenches, invisible from the base of the tower, now stretched across every slope in sight. The villagers had clearly succeeded where the archaeologists had failed and had uncovered an ancient city.

I was on the ridge looking down at the pits beneath the tower when I heard a shout from Abdullah, Bushire's son, as he pushed up the steep slope to join me. "This was the palace of the princess," he said as he reached me.

"How do you know?"

"We found an inscription on an old stone here, which a trader deciphered for us. It said that this palace had been built by the daughter of Ghiyassudin the Ghorid."

"Where is this inscription now?"

"Sold. We have found houses on slopes three kilometers up this valley."

I followed him along the narrow walls of the trenches, sliding down the steep face toward Bushire's house. "Do you want this?" asked Abdullah, pausing to pick up a complete terra-cotta pot.

"No, thank you. Actually I think these things should be in a museum."

"Indeed," said Abdullah. "Do you think you could bring us a metal detector next time you visit?"

That evening, a large group gathered in Bushire's house. Someone had told them I was interested in history and they were hoping for advice on where to dig.

"When did you move here?" I asked.

"A year ago. Before that there were no houses in this place. The slopes are so steep that building is difficult, and so narrow that there is very little sun. We cannot grow crops here and the animals are weak from lack of food. We only moved here to dig."

"How many of you are digging here?"

"A few hundred. Now people are coming down from all the surrounding villages, two hours in each direction."

"Do you control this?"

"No, no, anyone is free to dig," said Bushire, who as the commandant had some authority in the area. "You can have a go yourself."

"When did you find this city?" I asked.

"Really only in the last two months. We tried to do some digging during the five years when the Taliban were here, but it was difficult. Some of the Taliban mullahs had good links to the antique smugglers, but they also killed people for illegal excavations. Now it's fine. There is no government anymore, and in any case the snow has closed the passes so no outsiders can interfere."

I was clearly wrong in assuming American operations had had little effect on this valley—they had freed up the antique smuggling market. As an Islamic site, Jam had been relatively well protected during the Taliban period.

"And what have you found out about the life of this ruined city?"

"I don't understand. What do you mean?"

I tried again. "Have you found out roughly what the plan of the city was ... where the bazaar was, the religious schools?"

"No."

"The smaller mosques, the gardens, the military barracks?"

"No. You are asking difficult questions. We just dig downward and we find a jumble of things. It can be very frustrating—yesterday we dug a pit ten meters wide and didn't find anything worth anything."

"What did the ordinary houses look like?"

"Like this house—built from mud, but the rooms were very small and crowded, and many of them were multistoried, perhaps because they were built on such a steep cliff. We can sometimes guess which the better houses were from the state of their foundations. But it doesn't help us find the treasure—many of the houses have nothing in them. Nothing at all."

Abdullah interrupted, "I think I've found a bathhouse. There were a lot of pumice stones in it and guttering that brought the water up to the ridge from a spring three kilometers away."

"That is very interesting. Anything else?"

"No."

"What do you think about the people who lived here?"

"Gamesters," said Bushire, and everyone laughed in agreement. "We find so, so many playing pieces like this bronze dice. This old man," Bushire said, pointing to a toothless villager, "found a whole set of beautifully carved ivory chessmen a month ago, in one of the smallest houses on the hill. Our ancestors weren't Taliban." The Taliban banned chess. "And he's just sold a wonderful carved wooden door, one and a half meters high, with tigers and hunting scenes, to a merchant from Herat for a lot of money."

"How much do you sell these objects for?"

"This," replied Bushire, holding up the twelfth-century ewer with its bold wave pattern, "is worth one or two American dollars—good money. That's why we are here. The door or chess pieces can go for more. But it isn't as much as we would like. The people must have taken a lot with them before the city was burned."

"Burned?"

"Yes. There are charred roof beams in most of the houses."

"There was once a famous city in Ghor called the Turquoise Mountain, which Genghis burned and which has been lost ever since," I said, not sure whether these people, all of whom were illiterate, would have heard of it.

"This is the Turquoise Mountain," said a man from Beidon, a village eight kilometers away. "We found it here two months ago."

"But the foreign experts in the seventies?"

"We remember them," replied the old man who had found the chess pieces. "There was even a hotel by the minaret where they used to stay, which we blew up during the war. I always used to tell the professors that my grandfathers believed the Turquoise Mountain was here. And they never listened. Why do you think our tribe has always been called Firokuhi Aimaq [the Aimaq of the Turquoise Mountain]? The foreigners didn't know how to dig; they worked so slowly, a few centimeters at a time. All they found were the Jewish headstones, which were lying above the ground. They should have worked like us."

***

"We all heard stories about the Turquoise Mountain, the Ghorid capital, when we were children," said another man, the next morning. "There were legends of a causeway built of wooden beams, covering the river for kilometers because the gorges were too narrow and the passes too steep to get the camel caravans in any other way. There was a tunnel that ran under the minaret, beneath the river and up the hill to the princess's palace—"

"And," the old man interrupted, "there were two giant golden birds on the battlements, except one was melted down to make that cauldron in the mosque in Herat."

"In my village," said the man from Beidon, "we have found weapons where my father said Genghis's first attack was defeated. He made his second attack at this very time of year, while the snow still lay on the ground, sending one army up the old wooden causeway from Kamenj."

"It was destroyed twice," Bushire added, "once by hailstones and once by Genghis."

"Three times," I said. "You're destroying what remained."

They all laughed.