The Road to Oxiana (35 page)

Further on, we found a Turcoman encampment. The men were out, but the dogs attacked us, and as the women would not call them off, it needed twenty minutes' studied resolution to make the snarling beasts retire. Two old witches, presumably widows, came out to greet us dressed in loose ugly robes of grey-blue sackcloth, though they kept the tall head-dress. The younger women, who stayed at a distance, were a beautiful sight moving hither and thither among their black bee-hives, sweeping the ground with pink-and-white draperies, and making a show of modesty behind long veils of rich saffron yellow that fell from their tall pink hats. These veils often take the form of coats. We passed some women later in the day, still dressed in red, whose faces were framed in coats of deep cornflower blue embroidered with flowers.

I approached a mother and two children. They fled into a kibitka, and I turned to a younger woman of magnificent carriage who was clasping a baby. Placing it behind a wattle screen, she grabbed a pole, traced a circle in the dust in front of it, and came at me like a mediaeval knight. Her face was screwed up with anger,
and there was something in the tone of her denunciations that made me uncomfortable, as if I were meanly taking advantage of her man's absence. The two old witches chuckled at the scene. But our guard, a new one who had joined us at Andkhoi, was ashamed, and said that Afghanistan was like that. He had on a sophisticated Western mackintosh, and was always taking snuff from a silver-mounted gourd with a ruby in the lid.

One kibitka was empty, a guest-house perhaps, and we could examine it unthreatened. A dado of trellis-work on the inside, and another of rush-matting on the outside, enclosed the bottom of the black felt dome. This was stretched over a frame of bent wood, which was attached, at the apex, to a sort of circular basket open to the sky and serving as a chimney. Beneath the basket hung a festoon of black tassels. Double doors opened from a stout wooden frame; both were slightly carved. There was felt on the floor, and the furniture consisted of carved and painted chests. The general effect was not at all squalid or savage. As we left, we saw one of the kibitkas being dismantled. The struts of the frame, when folded up, resembled a bunch of thin skis. But the basket apex, as big as a cartwheel, swayed uneasily on the camel's hump.

It was an evil day, sticky and leaden: Oxiana looked as colourless and suburban as India. A green patch of pasture at Khoja Duka tempted us to stop again, to watch a drove of brood mares and their foals, among which cavorted a raw-boned old stallion of sixteen hands, which is big for these parts. Christopher said a group of ragged children sitting on a wall reminded him of the clients at Sledmere. Then we came to Shibargan, a ruined place overlooked by a castle, whence a road goes south to Saripul. It was near Saripul that Fender noticed a Sasanian rock-carving. So he says. But we
could hear no corroboration of it between Maimena and Andkhoi, and he is too unreliable for us to have gone in search of it without.

Akcha was more flourishing. We met an ice-cream barrow under the castle walls whose owner put a table in the lorry for us to eat lunch off, and brought a pail of snow to cool our drinks.

After Akcha, the colour of the landscape changed from lead to aluminium, pallid and deathly, as if the sun had been sucking away its gaiety for thousands and thousands of years; for this was now the plain of Balkh, and Balkh they say is the oldest city in the world. The clumps of green trees, the fountain-shaped tufts of coarse cutting grass, stood out almost black against this mortal tint. Sometimes we saw a field of barley; it was ripe, and Turcomans, naked to the waist, were reaping it with sickles. But it was not brown or gold, telling of Ceres, of plenty. It seemed to have turned prematurely white, like the hair of a madman—to have lost its nourishment. And from these acred cerements, first on the north and then on the south of the road, rose the worn grey-white shapes of a bygone architecture, mounds, furrowed and bleached by the rain and sun, wearier than any human works I ever saw: a twisted pyramid, a tapering platform, a clump of battlements, a crouching beast, all familiars of the Bactrian Greeks, and of Marco Polo after them. They ought to have vanished. But the very impact of the sun, calling out the obstinacy of their ashen clay, has conserved some inextinguishable spark of form, a spark such as a Roman earthwork or a grass-grown barrow has not, which still flickers on against a world brighter than itself, tired as only a suicide frustrated can be tired.

Yet by degrees the country became greener, pasture
covered the adamant earth, trees multiplied, and suddenly a line of bony dilapidated walls jumped out of the ground and occupied the horizon. Passing inside them, we found ourselves amid a vast metropolis of ruins stretching away to the north; while on the south of the road, the shining greens of mulberries, poplars, and stately isolated planes were balm to eyes bruised by the monstrous antiquity of the preceding landscape. We stood in Balkh herself, the Mother of Cities.

Our guard, surveying the ruins, which were mostly left in this state by Jenghis Khan, remarked: “It was a beautiful place till the Bolsheviks destroyed it eight years ago”.

Half a mile more brought us to the inhabited core of the place, a bazaar, shops, serais, and a cross-roads. Out of the trees to the south rose a tall fluted dome, moonlit-blue against the deep-toned verdure and the slaty frown of a storm on the Hindu Kush. We walked to this building, while the chauffeur went in search of rooms; and on emerging from behind it were surprised to see our acquaintance the Governor of Maimena in the middle of an open space. Near him stood a Frank, whose polished pea-shaped pate announced him for a German. A squad of four soldiers was drawn up on one side, a knot of officers and secretaries had gathered on the other. Between them, in front of a tent approached by carpets, the German was explaining the He of the ground to a dignified man wearing a fur hat, neatly trimmed black beard, open cricket shirt, and three fountain pens in his breast pocket.

This man, to whom the Governor of Maimena presented us, was Mohammad Gul Khan, Minister of the Interior for Turkestan. He had driven over from Mazar to see about the rebuilding of the city. There were pegs in the ground, and a clearance has already been made between the front of the domed shrine and the ruined
arch of a College opposite. The German told us he had been three years in Afghanistan and six months in Mazar, where he acts as maid-of-all-work for bridges, canals, roads, and building in general.

The storm was approaching. Mohammad Gul, after hoping we had not been overwhelmed by the inconveniences of the road, mounted his car and drove away. His mention of a hotel in Mazar, where he expected us to be comfortable, decided us to follow him instead of stopping in Balkh. It was another fifteen miles. The deluge and the dark descended as we reached the capital.

“Where is the guest-house?” we asked, using the ordinary Persian word.

“It is not a guest-house. It is a ‘hotel'. This way.”

It is indeed. Every bedroom has an iron bedstead with a spring mattress, and a tiled bathroom attached, in which we sluice ourselves with water from a pail and dry our feet on a mat labelled
BATH MAT.
The dining-room is furnished with a long pension-table laid with Sheffield cutlery and finger-bowls. The food is Perso-Afgho-Anglo-Indian in the worst sense of each. The lavatory doors lock on the outside only. I was about to point this out to the manager, but Christopher said he liked it and wouldn't have them touched.

We pay 7s. 6d. a day, which is not cheap by local standards. Judging from the excitement of the staff, we must be the first guests they have had.

Mazar-i-Sherif
,
May 27th
.—This town owes its existence to a dream.

In the time of Sultan Sanjar, who reigned in the first half of the XIIth century, a report reached Balkh from India that the grave of Hazrat Ali, the fourth caliph, lay near by. This was denied by one of the mullahs of
the place, who believed, as most Shiahs still do, that his grave was at Nejef in Arabia. At this, Ali himself appeared to the mullah in a dream and confirmed the report. The grave was found, and Sultan Sanjar ordered a shrine to be erected over it, which was finished in 1136 and provided the nucleus of the present town.

This shrine was destroyed by Jenghis Khan. In 1481 it was replaced by another at the instance of Hussein Baikara, who had been campaigning in Oxiana the year before. Thenceforth Mazar became a place of pilgrimage, and gradually ousted the fever-stricken ruins of Balkh as the chief town of the district, just as Meshed, by the same process, ousted Tus in Khorasan.

There is not much to be seen of Hussein Baikara's building from the outside; though its two shallow domes, indicating an inner and an outer sanctuary, suggest that the plan was copied from Gohar Shad's Musalla. The exterior walls were entirely retiled in the last century with a coarse geometric mosaic of white, light blue, yellow, and black. Even since Niedermayer was here, there have been additions; the Italian balustrades of turquoise pottery along the main parapets do not appear in his photograph. All the same, the group as a whole is not unpleasing; it might be described as a cross between St. Mark's at Venice and an Elizabethan country-house translated into blue faience.

Outside the big shrine stand the ruins of two smaller ones. Their domes have fallen, but each retains panels of mosaic round the drum, ugly in colour owing to an excessive pinkish ochre. Like the Mausoleum at Herat, the easterly one contains an inner dome, a shallow intermediate structure resting on the wall of a gallery inside the drum. Above this can still be seen the curved brick buttresses which supported the upper dome as it rose from the outside of the drum.

As at Meshed, there has been a clearance of houses round the shrine, so that it can be seen from a distance completing the vistas of various streets. Indeed the whole town has been smartened up lately. The bazaars are new and whitewashed, and their roofs are supported on piles which let in light and air underneath. In the new town, where the hotel and Government offices stand, the roads are edged with neat brick gutters. The traffic is shared between the Indian gharry, with an awning, and the Russian droshky, with its high wooden yoke over the horse's neck. After Murghab and Maimena we feel in contact with the outer world again, and wish we had stayed longer in those places. Still, it would be churlish not to admit that the town is the pleasanter for these improvements. We are certainly enjoying the hotel.

There seem to be objections to our visiting the Oxus. The Governor and the Mudir-i-Kharija are both away at Haibak, and we have had to deal with the latter's deputy, a callow pompous young man, who received our proposals disdainfully. But he evidently has no power of decision in the matter. We must ask assistance of the Vazir, as Mohammad Gul is called.

Mazar-i-Sherif
,
May 28th
.—There is a public garden outside the hotel, growing sweet-williams, snapdragons, hollyhocks, and evening primroses. Between the beds little benches have been placed, and more popular rush-mats, where people sit and drink tea while the music plays. There are two bands. One stands in the sun, a row of old men with brass instruments; they know three European tunes, and are accompanied by two young men behind, who strike every beat on the triangle and drum. The other sits lackadaisically on a dais under a tree and plays Indian music on a guitar, various drums, and a small harmonium. We listen from our rooms,
whose French windows open on to a verandah behind the garden.

Each afternoon, as the clouds gather on the mountains, an irresistible lassitude descends. Flies and a sticky warmth fill the room. The sound of partridges clucking turns my dreams into a September afternoon at home, till I remember they are waiting to be fought. Why these clouds? It is hot enough, but the summer ought to have set six weeks ago. Such a year has never been known. The rain that fell the night we arrived has closed the road to Kabul for a month; a whole village has fallen into the gorge at Haibak. If we ride on from here, as may be necessary, we shall have to camp out, and apart from designing a couple of mosquitonets, we have been too lazy to see about an outfit. Water is the main difficulty of such a journey, as sufferers from syphilis of the throat, who are numerous, are apt to choose the wells to spit in.

Our hopes of the Oxus have been further discouraged.

The Muntazim of the hotel, a fat elderly disagreeable man, acts as our gaoler. This morning he followed us protesting to Mohammad Gul's office, where we learnt that the Vazir would be asleep till eleven. At eleven he followed us back there. The Vazir was still asleep. He then followed me to the telegraph office, puffing and sweating in the heat; the more he puffed, the quicker I walked. The Muntazim-i-Telegraph, whom I had been told of by his fellow in Herat, said he had forgotten all his English in the stress of speaking Russian; there was a Russian in the office with him. He suggested I should go to the doctor instead. On the way to the hospital I jumped into a pony cart, leaving the Muntazim-i-Hotel in the road. But the driver, it appears, will have to complete the report of my movements.

The doctor, Abulmajid Khan, proved to be a Cambridge graduate, a charming and cultivated man, whose natural reserve, so rare in Indians, soon expanded into geniality. He has been here eight years, and, seeing my surprise, explained that he had had to leave the Indian Medical Service owing to an incident connected with the Non-Cooperation Movement. He spoke rather wistfully of this youthful indiscretion, which had wrecked his career, and added that the Non-Cooperation Movement seemed to be dead now, as if to imply that the effort which had cost him so much had been given to a lost cause. But there was no bitterness in his voice, and none of that embarrassing defiance which Indian nationalists often assume towards an Englishman. I tried to convey, without seeming fulsome, that the nationalists had my sympathy and that of many more Englishmen today than ten years ago. There was no bitterness either in his remarks about Afghanistan. He is fond of the people and of his work, in which he differs from the other Indians I have met in this country.