The Road to Oxiana (34 page)

By supper-time, horsemen were arriving from the neighbouring villages to have their ailments treated. One had fever, one sores on his nose, which had been slit as a punishment; one headaches and vomiting in the morning; one a pestilent skin-disease all over his back, which had lasted a year and looked like syphilis: but what could we do for him? We doled-out aspirin, quinine, and ointment, all we had, and now deliberately assumed the witch-doctor's air of mystification, saying the medicines would not work, at least in the case of the sores, unless accompanied by repeated washings in boiled water—yes,
boiled
, we hissed, as though it had been a toad's liver. This morning there were more of them.

I went for a walk after breakfast in the poplar grove. Sparrows were twittering in the upper branches. Below, it was shady and damp and smelt of an English wood, which caused me a stab of homesickness. Then our host took us to see his walled garden, a vineyard with a watch-tower in the middle where he sits to enjoy the view and see who is arriving. A dank dell in one corner contained a tangle of big crimson roses, of which he picked us an armful each.

We asked if we could pay for our shelter, or at least for the food we had eaten. “No,” he said, “you cannot. My house is not a shop. Besides, you gave the people your medicines.”

“He is a holy man”, explained Abbas as we drove away, “who receives all travellers on this road. That is why he puts up these things”—pointing to the grass pillars—“so that they shall know his house is there. The name of the place is Kariz.”

The car smelt of roses as we crossed the frontier into Turkestan.

The road was now a dug road again, but offered frightful obstacles on its way through the hills. We crossed two river beds three hundred yards wide, playing musical chairs with the boulders; the gradient out of the first was so steep that we ran backwards into the water at thirty miles an hour. In every cutting the rain had cleft great fissures in the soft earth surface. Eventually we changed to the old horse-road, where engineering had not interfered with the drainage. It ambushed us instead with a regular pit, which the Ford jumped in and out of like a tennis-ball.

Twelve miles before Maimena, we stopped at a pool and a group of trees in the plain of Bokhara Kala to watch a partridge fight. The spectators formed a ring, the birds were unloosed from their wicker domes; but one turned tail after a few minutes, and scuttling through our feet, fled into the landscape pursued by us all. The road was more populous now. Most of the travellers were mounted on horses of a miniature hunter type, as though the Chinese and Arab breeds had met here; with their gay turbans, flowing beards, flowered robes, and carpets rolled up behind them, they might have stepped from any Timurid painting, but for the rifles slung across their backs. There were animals too, many snakes and tortoises, Indian jays as bright as kingfishers popping out of holes as we passed, and a species of earth-bound squirrel, light buff in colour, whose rudimentary bush of a tail, only two inches long, was the natural concomitant of a country without forests.
Near Maimena the hills were more cultivated, and we noticed that as far as the plough had reached, often to the very top of each green escarpment, poppies had sprung up; so that even the peaks were dappled with scarlet among the golden green.

The Governor of Maimena was away at Andkhoi, but his deputy, after refreshing us with tea, Russian sweets, pistachios and almonds, led us to a caravanserai off the main bazaar, a Tuscan-looking old place surrounded by wooden arches, where we have a room each, as many carpets as we want, copper basins to wash in, and a bearded factotum in high-heeled top-boots who has laid down his rifle to help with the cooking.

It will be a special dinner. A sense of well-being has come over us in this land of plenty. Basins of milk, pilau with raisins, skewered kabob well salted and peppered, plum jam, and new bread have already arrived from the bazaar; to which we have added some treats of our own, patent soup, tomato ketchup, prunes in gin, chocolate, and ovaltine. The whisky is lasting out well. But the library unfortunately is down to the classics and I am now reading Crawley's translation of Thucydides while Christopher is back at our much-battered Boswell.

We also have with us a work by Sir Thomas Holdich called
The Gates of India
, which gives a summary of Afghan exploration up to 1910 and describes the journey of Moorcroft, who died at Andkhoi in 1825. In this I find, on page 440: “Moorcroft's books (thirty volumes) were recovered, and the list of them would surprise any modern traveller who believes in a light and handy equipment”. What surprises me is that considering he was away five years, there should have been so few. A light and handy equipment! One knows these modern travellers, these over-grown prefects and pseudo-scientific bores despatched by congregations of extinguished
officials to see if sand-dunes sing and snow is cold. Unlimited money, every kind of official influence support them; they penetrate the furthest recesses of the globe; and beyond ascertaining that sand-dunes do sing and snow is cold, what do they observe to enlarge the human mind?

Nothing.

Is it surprising? Their physical health is cared for; they go into training; they obey rules to keep them hard, and are laden with medicines to restore them when, as a result of the hardening process, they break down. But no one thinks of their mental health, and of its possible importance to a journey of supposed observation. Their light and handy equipment contains food for a skyscraper, instruments for a battleship, and weapons for an army. But it mustn't contain a book. I wish I were rich enough to endow a prize for the sensible traveller: £10,000 for the first man to cover Marco Polo's outward route reading three fresh books a week, and another £10,000 if he drinks a bottle of wine a day as well. That man might tell one something about the journey. He might or might not be naturally observant. But at least he would use what eyes he had, and would not think it necessary to dress up the result in thrills that never happened and science no deeper than its own jargon.

What I mean is, that if I had some more detective stories instead of Thucydides and some bottles of claret instead of tepid whisky, I should probably settle here for good.

Maimena
,
May 24th
.—The court of our robat becomes a market in the mornings. We are woken by the sound of hoofs, the dump of bales and a chaffering in Persian and Turki. Beneath our verandah bobs a sea of turbans, white, deep blue, pink, and black, some flat and broad,
some tight and pumpkin-shaped, some wound anyhow as if they had come out of a mangle. These merchants are mainly Uzbegs, aquiline-featured and iron-bearded, all dressed in long robes of chintz or silk which bear designs of flowers, or stripes, or the big jazz-lightning effects in red, purple, white, and yellow which used to be made in Bokhara and are now thought old-fashioned. The tall leather boots have toes like canoes, high heels, and embroidery round the top. Other races throng the bazaar: Afghans from the south, Persian-speaking Tajiks, Turcomans, and Hazaras. The Turcomans are those of the Oxus, and are distinguished from the western tribes by a different hat: instead of the black busby, they sport a lambskin cone surrounded by a ring of coarse buff fur which comes, we are told, from the
sag-abi
, water-dog; is this an Oxus otter? The Hazaras, who are of Mongol stock, descend from Timur's armies and live mainly in the mountains, supposedly in great poverty. Those we see here are the picture of prosperity, well-built people with handsome oval faces of a Chinese cast and complexion, who dress in short embroidered jackets not unlike those of the Levant a hundred years ago. Single exotics pick their way through the crowd: a Hindu merchant; a dervish with a live black snake, four feet long and poisonous, coiled round his neck; a little man in white ducks and a black cloth cap, who is the Russian consul. The women as usual are invisible, but the small girls wear saris and nose-jewels in the Indian way. Even the soldiers fail to strike a discord. A regiment marched through the bazaar this morning, skull-faced morbid-looking fellows when deprived of their turbans; but every other rifle had a rose in the muzzle. Perhaps Nur Mohammad was among them. There is a large garrison here to which he was returning when I said goodbye to him that morning in Kala Nao.

The town has no architectural character. Its only
feature is a ruined castle. Inside this rises a mound, which used to have buildings on it, as heaps of bricks show, but is now occupied by a solitary sacred grave.

Outside the town, where the bazaar ends, lies a spacious meadow, which might be an English cricket-field, against a horizon of poplars. Every evening a brass band plays there in front of the Commander-in-Chief's villa, a mud house of one storey defended by a hedge of roses. In the tea-houses near the road, someone plucks a guitar; the men put down their cups and murmur a melancholy song. A stream beside them turns a little mill, and a flock of white doves have gathered on its bank under a plane tree. The band strikes up again in the distance.

Men with roses in their mouths are sauntering across the grass to watch the wrestling matches. Each wrestler wears a pointed skull-cap and keeps on his long gown, but is swathed round the waist with a red sash, which gives the other man a grip. Before the contest is decided, a partridge match is announced, and the ring breaks up to re-form itself round the birds. Eventually a bird escapes, and the whole audience, boys and greybeards alike, tucking up their gowns above the knee, scatter in frantic pursuit.

Against the darkness of a coming storm, the pale orange sunset lights up the green earth-mountains, the waving poplars silvered by the breeze, and the multicoloured dresses of the sporting populace.

Andkhoi
(1100
ft
., 82
miles from Maimena
),
May 25th
.—We have hired a lorry to take us to Mazar-i-Sherif. It is a new Chevrolet, and its accessories, self-starter, milometer, etc., work. This is the way to travel here. We sprawl over the benches with all our necessaries, food, water-bottles, cameras, books, and diaries about
us, while the heavy luggage rides on top. The chauffeur is an Indian, a Peshawari, and consequently most respectful, but he stutters, and when he and Christopher get stuttering together conversation moves slowly. Besides him, we have old Puss-in-boots with his rifle, from Maimena, and a couple of Turcomans, one resembling a Guards' officer, the other an Etruscan Apollo.

For travelling, Puss-in-boots wears a brownlamb skin hat, a frock-coat of black felt, and breeches of the same which are left undone in front; there is another pair underneath, but the effect is arresting. His name is Ghapur.

From Herat to Maimena we were travelling mainly north-east. On leaving Maimena we turned due north up a valley such as one finds among the Wiltshire uplands, where the villages are lined in close succession along a small nameless river meandering through orchards and fields: orchards in this case of mulberries and apricots; fields of pale-blue flax flowers. After Faizabad, the chief of the villages, the hills grew lower, the ground barren, and the air warmer; we began to skid in sand. A flat horizon opened out, a sinister hot breeze struck us, and the sky grew the colour of lead. We had reached the Oxus plain, and felt the presence of the river fifty miles away as one feels the presence of the sea before seeing it. At length we sighted a flat-topped mound, on top of which, at the head of a steep stairway guarded by yellow plaster lions, stood a hideous brick bungalow. Here we found the Governor of Maimena, a giant of a man with spectacles, a small black beard and a feminine voice, to whom we presented a letter from Shir Ahmad.

“Yes,” he said, “the ground is all
cooked
between here and Mazar, but it is green again near the Jihun”, employing this word for the Oxus, and not understanding
our reference to it as the Amu Darya. He gave orders for our lodging in Andkhoi, which was still two miles off.

Andkhoi is the centre of the lambskin trade. At the depot in the bazaar, which was also stacked with Russian petrol and galvanised iron pails, we watched the skins being cured in a solution of barley and salt, laid out on the roofs to dry, and heaped into bales for packing. The manager said that the Jews had been deported from here to Herat in order that the trade should be no longer in the hands of “foreigners”. Most of the flocks, he added, were owned by Turcomans. The Andkhoi skins were the best of all, those of Akcha nearly as good, and those of Mazar, where the ewes lamb three or four weeks later, not so good. Every year he sent a lakh (7500) of skins to London.

Christopher asked if he could buy some skins. Fine ones, of course. “This quality”, said the man, producing a pelt large enough for a pair of doll's cuffs, “costs 70 Afghanis (
£
1 : 15s.). The best quality, suitable for a good hat, is worth 100. But we don't get many of them.”

It is Friday evening, and people are celebrating the holiday at tables under the mulberry grove outside the bazaar. I am writing among them, drinking whisky with snow in it and waiting for a pilau.

Mazar-i-Sherif
(1200
ft
., 122
miles from Andkhoi
),
May 26th
.—I must confess that for me our arrival here this evening was a solemn occasion. I left England in August with two hopes: one, to see the monuments of Persia; the other to reach this town. Neither was very formidable, but they have taken some time to fulfil.

We were out of Andkhoi by five o'clock in the morning.
Espying a flock of sheep when the sun was up, we stopped the lorry and walked towards it over the sparse crackling pasture that makes the wool curl. The shepherd was an Uzbeg, and would have no truck with us at first, supposing we were Russians. He excused his ill manners later by explaining that three years ago the Russians had stolen sixty thousand of the best sheep, which made us wonder if the disgraced Jews might not have been concerned in some transaction of this kind. His flock consisted of two breeds: Karakulis, which give the finer fur, and Arabis; catching a ram of one and an ewe of the other, he showed us how to distinguish them by the tails. Both grow fat tails, but while the Arabis' are round or kidney-shaped, the Karakulis' dangle a pendant from the middle.