The Road to Oxiana (37 page)

Doctor Abulmajid came this evening to give me an injection. He had to ask leave to do so, and thought it more discreet not to dine with us. But we managed to give him a cold whisky and soda, having secured four bottles of soda water from the photographer's and put them in a pail of snow. It was a triumph for all of us. But I could see that the taste of a “burra peg” again reminded him sadly of his youth and promise. I went to his house the day before yesterday, one of the ordinary mud houses of the place, and found he had had his
chairs and sofa covered with loose frilly chintz in the English country way.

He told us that until Foucher came here a few years ago and bought them all up, the old Greek coins of Bactria were still in circulation. Since then, people have begun to think them priceless and ask twenty or thirty times the museum value for them.

Fruit has begun: delicious apricots, and now some cherries, but these are of the Morello kind, so bitter that we have had them made into jam.

Mazar-i-Sherif
,
June 1st
.—Yesterday morning Christopher called at the Mudir-i-Kharija's office to ask permission to visit the Russian Consulate. His excuse was that we needed some visas, of which there is in fact no hope, though it is tantalising to think that Bokhara is only fifteen hours from Termez by train. However, he had no chance of using this excuse, since even the Mudir-i-Kharija's deputy is asleep to us now. He therefore went by himself, breasted his way through a posse of Afghan soldiers who presented their bayonets at him, and at length reached M. Bouriachenko, a small intellectual man who was sitting under a tree reading.

“You want visas for Samarcand?” said M. Bouriachenko. “Of course you do. I will telegraph to Moscow at once to say that two Oxford professors of Islamic culture”—(God forgive us, we both left Oxford without degrees)—“have arrived here and are waiting for permission to cross the Amu Darya. No, there is nothing to see at Termez. The place you ought to go to is Anau. Professor Simionov has just written a book on the Timurid monuments there. I wish I could give you the visas at once, but I'm afraid it will take a week or so to get a reply. Anyhow you are
here
for a bit,
that's the main thing. We must have a party. Will you come?”

“When?” asked Christopher, forgetting to say thank you in his surprise.

“When? I don't know when. What does it matter? This evening? Would that suit you?”

“Perfectly. What time?”

“What time? Seven, is that all right? Or six? Or five or four? We can start now if you like.”

It was half-past eleven, and a blazing hot morning. Christopher said perhaps the evening would be nicer.

At half-past six we tiptoed out of the hotel so that the Muntazim should not hear us, reached the gate of the Consulate, where the guard brandished their weapons as before, and found ourselves in a series of courtyards shaded by trees; in the front yard stood a number of lorries and cars, including a red Vauxhall. M. Bouriachenko received us in a cool room free from icons of Lenin and Marx, and lit by a private electric light plant. I said, I supposed by his name that he must come from Ukraine. “Yes, from Kiev, and my wife from Riazin.” She walked in, a young woman plainly dressed in dark purple, whose good-natured face was framed in hair drawn flat from a parting in the middle. Others followed her: an enormous wallowing man, slightly scented, from whose pitted face came the voice of a dove; his wife, a blonde with red lips whose golden hair was brushed straight back from her forehead; Master Bouriachenko, aged five and the spit of Chaliapin; a boy and girl belonging to the second couple; the doctor, a tubby little fellow with a black moustache and butcher's lick; another lady discreetly painted, whose fair hair was ruffled into a crest; the fat fair man I saw in the telegraph office, who said he had been a radio officer at Canterbury during the War; two natty young fellows just arrived from Kabul, who had taken a fortnight over
the journey owing to the rains; and last of all a girl of fourteen, daughter of the painted lady, whose movements were beautiful to watch and who is destined to become a ballet dancer.

Judged by Russian standards, which differ from ours, the food was not really profuse; indeed how could it be? though they had bought, at considerable expense we discovered afterwards, the last sardines in the town. But it had that
air
of profusion which Russians always create about them, and as new guests kept wandering in, and new tables were brought, and new chairs, and the children hopped up on people's laps, the dishes kept pace and were still as full as ever of the sardines from India, paprika from Russia, fresh meat with onion salad, and bread. A decanter of yellow vodka, in which fruit was swimming, was endlessly replenished. The Russians, who gulped it off in cups, complained furiously of our slow sipping. But that was only at first.

The two young men from Kabul had been bringing a number of new English records that had been ordered from Peshawar; but they had all been spoilt in the wreck of their lorry by the storm at Haibak, and the loss was a tragic disappointment to this isolated community; though to hear them apologise for it, one might have thought the records had been ordered for us instead of them. As it was, tangos and jazz alternated with
Shehérezade, Boris Godunov
, and
Eugène Onyegin
. We danced, we sang, we sat down to eat, we danced again. Conversation was in Persian, and what made it odder, when talking to one's own kind, was the inevitable accompaniment of Persian gesture, the bowing of the head and fluttering of the eyelids, the hand on the heart, and the general assumption of self-deprecation. M. Bouriachenko and the man with the dove's voice addressed us as “Sahib”. Perhaps they thought this sounded more equalitarian than the Persian Excellencies and Highnesses we used to them.

The hours fled, the decanter flowed, the telegraphist was carried out, I fell into a torpor, the Russians began to unload their emotions, and when I woke up I found Christopher gasping for breath under the souls of the whole community. It was two o'clock and time to go home. The hotel was only a few hundred yards away. But M. Bouriachenko, calling for the “Consulski Vauxhall”, insisted on driving us to it. This was an act of real friendship. For whether our walk was unsteady or not, it would have been unwise to run a risk of the Afghans observing it, a fact we appreciated when a sentry thrust his rifle into the window of the car.

This morning was painful beyond the usual run of next-mornings. We called at the Consulate after tea, bearing not flowers, but some boxes of cigars, and found them all sitting out in a sort of games-court equipped with swings and parallel bars and a high net over which any number of people, divided into two sides, can fist a soft football. A game was started for us, the party being increased now by three or four other men, proletarian savages, who are employed as chauffeurs and mechanics. The telegraphist looked older.

M. Bouriachenko told us that the only other Russians in this part of the country were four locust-fighters living in and about Khanabad. The locusts are a new plague here. They arrived from Morocco a few years ago, breed on the north slopes of the Hindu Kush, and thence descend on Russian Turkestan, where they menace the cotton crops.

Since there is a road from here to Khanabad, and another from there to Kabul which avoids the Haibak gorge, we have decided not to ride after all. This detour will take us 150 miles further east, to the edge of Badakshan, and the excuse for making it afforded by the
blockage at Haibak is too good to miss. Christopher regrets the horse-journey, but I think the detour will be more interesting.

Robat before Kunduz (1100 ft., 95 miles from Mazar-i-Sherif), June 3rd
. —Even before leaving Teheran, we had resolved not to sleep at Kunduz if we could help it. Moorcroft died of fever caught in these marshes. There is a proverb which says a visit to Kunduz is tantamount to suicide. Here we are, therefore, lying in a mulberry grove beside a stagnant pool, both irresistible attractions to the fatal mosquito. Other pests abound. I pitched my bed near a wall. A wasps' nest was at once discovered in it, and anyhow, people warned me, it was full of scorpions. When I suggested removing to a neighbouring garden, they said that was full of snakes. We are lucky to have ordered those mosquitonets in the bazaar at Mazar. I have draped mine over the camera tripod; Christopher had half a mulberry tree demolished to make him a framework. Frogs are blowing musical bubbles in the pool. On the south-east, a vast new range of snowy peaks has caught the first light of the moon. Our two guards are loading their rifles before going to sleep, and a cat assaults the morning's milk. For dinner we ate scrambled eggs and onions. Christopher thought of the onions, and had them ready cooked and chopped in the hotel so that they had only to be heated. A brilliant invention.

The day that brought us to this pass was complicated to start with by the after-effects of another Russian party. It was only a zakuska party this time; but again we danced, again the souls came out and fastened on us. M. Bouriachenko said that even if two great nations, like two mountains, were unable to approach each other, there was no reason why the individuals of those
nations should not do so; for himself, he admired England and hoped for our sakes there would soon be a revolution there. He added that if only we would stay on at Mazar, instead of flying off in this absurd hurry, the Consul himself would be back in a few days with a supply of decent brandy; besides which he had every hope that our visas would be granted.

I had no such hope. But it struck me forcibly that the policy pursued by Russia and England of mutual exclusion from Turkestan and India is beginning to lose its sense. Looking at our hosts, quiet cultivated men and women who spent their money on classical music, it seemed to us preposterous that even transit visas through India should be denied them. And it dawned on us, moreover, that the interests of Russia and England in Asia, instead of conflicting as they used to do, have now become virtually the same, particularly with regard to the buffer states between them, whose purpose in foreign relations is to assert themselves by teasing their larger neighbours. If only the Russians would consent to dam up the trickle of money and doctrine which still percolates into India as a lip-service to the Marxian creed of World Revolution, this identity of interest might emerge into the daylight. A conference between the Governor of Tashkent and the Viceroy, on Persia, Afghanistan, Sinkiang, and Tibet, would benefit both sides far more than do the maintenance of revolutionary propaganda on the one hand, and the fear of it on the other.

When we left, again in the Consulski Vauxhall, the whole party saw us to the gate, waving us goodbye and good journey.

Outside Mazar this morning we met a dragon. It was 3½ feet long, yellow underneath, and rather high on its four little Chippendale legs. Lashing its tail furiously,
it ran into a hole. Near by we found a sand-grouse's nest with three eggs in it.

At Tashkurgan, where the main road turns off to Haibak, we stopped for breakfast. I was taking a photograph of the castle, a Chinese-looking building above a mountain torrent, when the elder of our two guards, a motherly old fellow in a white frock-coat crossed with big checks, said that photographing was “unnecessary”. I answered that if he really thought that, he had better go back to Mazar; it was our lorry, and there was none too much room in it. Further on, as I was taking another picture of the Oxus plain from a convenient height, he again interfered, jogging my arm. This time I roared till his jaw and rifle dropped. When I next took out the camera, he was silent.

We wondered why the authorities at Mazar had given us two guards instead of one. Now the guards themselves have admitted it was to prevent us taking photographs. The poor creatures are rather distressed at not being allowed to do their duty. But we really can't help them.

The country was still bare, but a fiery opalescence now displaced the metallic drabness of the plain before Mazar. Such pasture as there was consisted of a dry prickly clover. There were no trees and little life. Every sixteen miles we passed a lonely robat. Once we saw a flock of vultures huddled in congress round a pool. Sometimes locusts went whirring by in small coveys. The foothills of the Shadian mountains, which bound the plain of Turkestan on the south, began to curve northward and we gradually ascended them. Suddenly, 88 miles from Mazar, the ascent stopped and the road fell down a thousand feet. Beneath us, crawling up the hillside, bobbed a string of camels, each laden with a couple of wooden cots containing ladies. Beneath them
unrolled the glinting marshes of Kunduz and the province of Kataghan. Far away, through the misty sunshine, rose the mountains of Badakshan, carrying my mind's eye on up the Wakhan to the Pamirs and China itself.

At the foot of the descent, another lorry was waiting on the threshold of a bridge made of poles and turf, which spanned a river in a cutting twelve feet deep. Our driver was about to pass, when the other lorry suddenly moved forward. The bridge quivered and sagged. In a cloud of dust and sticks, to the sound of screams and gasps and rending timbers, the lorry turned a slow side-somersault into the river, where it landed with its roof submerged and its chassis indecently exposed, while its wheels fluttered helplessly in the air. The passengers had dismounted, and the driver, whose cabin was tilted up by the opposite bank, climbed out unhurt. But someone shouted there were women inside, and with superfluous gallantry Christopher and I flung ourselves on the wreck, hacking away at the ropes that bound the outside and clearing out the bales from within, to discover there was no one there at all. As the bales were rescued from the current, the whole country grew gay with borders of herbaceous chintz, orchards of pink satin caps and swards of carpet, all laid out to dry.

Already a swarm of half-naked men had sprung out of the fields to investigate the disaster. Now the Governor of Kunduz rode up on a fast grey pacer, an angry red-bearded man, who set about the population with his whip, bidding them haul the lorry out and mend the bridge before morning. Our luggage was put on to horses and taken across the river to a robat, which was so crowded that we have preferred to sleep in the open.