As an ingredient of smalt—a pigment that had been made of ground-up blue glass since the 1500s—cobalt had been used in paint for years, but in its purer form it didn’t reach European paintboxes until the nineteenth century, when a scientist called Louis-Jacques Thénard managed to make it into a pigment. If he had been living today, Michelangelo would have liked this blue best. It is expensive, and leans toward violet. It was the Persians who really first found how good cobalt was as a glaze—they used it for the blue tiles of their mosques, representing the heavens, while copper makes the turquoise, remembering the green of the Prophet’s cloak. The results are spectacular. When traveller Robert Byron visited the town of Herat in the 1930s (which we would have reached, eventually, had we continued west from Bamiyan) he described the blue on the tomb of Gowhar Shad as “the most beautiful example of color in architecture ever devised by man to the glory of God and himself.” 14
The Chinese coveted this color, and for four hundred years they would swap green for blue—sending green celadon-ware to Persia and getting “Mohammedan blue” back. In the national arts library at the Victoria and Albert Museum I read how the cobalt quality varied throughout the Ming dynasty. The finest blue was in the mid-fifteenth century Xuande reign, while under the emperors Zhengde and Jiajing a hundred years later, porcelain-makers were using an excellent violet glaze. Meanwhile—and bear with me on the dates here—the “blue and white” from the Chenghua (late fifteenth) and Wanli (late sixteenth) reigns was virtually “gray and white,” after those emperors imposed trade sanctions against Central Asia.15 With the details scribbled down in my notebook I went down, with some excitement, to the Chinese gallery and tested it out. To my delight I could now tell immediately, by color alone and from a distance, when a Ming vase was probably fired. The possibilities for pretentious expertise were endless.
SECOND ATTEMPT
The following year I was determined to get to Sar-e-sang. It was now exactly five hundred years since Michelangelo had been waiting for his blue. It was a nice conceit to go and collect it for him in the spring, when he would have needed it, even though I was half a millennium too late. It was also necessary timing. The season for blue was very short in 2001. There would be a month or so between when the passes melted in April and when the harvest was gathered in June. After that the fighting would start again, and who knew where the front line would go?
By Christmas the political situation in Afghanistan was even more precarious than before. So in February I changed tactics. I jumped on a plane to Hawaii to see the “Gem Hunter,” an American dealer who had been in and out of Afghanistan for thirty years. If anyone could help me then Gary Bowersox could. We met in Maui, where he was hosting a jewelry show, and talked for hours. He was a big friendly man who laughed a lot and told excellent stories of meeting mujahideen leaders and of smuggling himself into the country under chicken wire. He gave good advice about how to stroll into Afghanistan over the mountains, disguised in a burka (get a guide you trust and keep walking), and what to do if threatened by a yelling man with an AK-47 (smile). On the second day I asked him directly. Could I go with him on the next trip? He paused. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This year is going to be tough; I’d like to, but I can’t help.” As I flew back to Hong Kong a few days later I felt disconsolate: I was going to have to make it on my own.
My first hurdle was a visa. I had friends in Islamabad who could help get me on the twice-weekly United Nations plane to Faisabad, the nearest town to the mines. But internal protocol insisted that I could board it only if I had a Taliban visa, just in case we crash-landed. I couldn’t help but feel that if this happened then having the right documents would be the least of my problems, but rules were rules, and I applied. Of course I could have a visa, came the obliging reply from that usually least obliging of governments; all I needed was a supporting letter from my own government. Of course I couldn’t have a letter, came the reply from the British embassy. “We don’t recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government of Afghanistan.” I was in a bind, so I decided to go to Islamabad to sort it out.
And to my surprise I popped into Afghanistan like a cork from a non-alcoholic champagne bottle. On the first morning I got a call from the friend I was staying with, who worked for the U.N. “They’ve decided to take you without a visa,” she said. “I’ve sent a car—can you be ready in ten minutes?” I bundled three of her long-sleeved shawar kameez outfits of baggy pants, long shirts and scarves in my backpack, along with notebooks, hiking boots and Gary’s book (Gemstones of Afghanistan ), and raced out of the house, scattering my belongings behind me. Two hours later I was on a nineteen-seater Beechcraft, heading west.
In his best-selling book about Afghanistan,16 Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid recounts a story he heard from an old man. “When Allah had made the rest of the world, He saw that there was a lot of rubbish left over, bits and pieces and things that did not fit anywhere else. He collected them all together and threw them down onto the earth. That was Afghanistan.” And as we crossed the high Pamirs, the description seemed fair. We were flying over snow-covered mountains; somewhere beneath us were the fabled mines of Badakhshan and a village where only men were allowed to live. Looking down at the inhospitable terrain, it was almost impossible to believe that anybody could live there at all.
Badakhshan was a region under siege: most of the country was under occupation by darker forces. Only that small area—every year smaller—had held out. It reminded me of the village in the Astérix comic books—a place of indomitable fighters, led by a few powerful figures, most powerful of whom was Ahmed Shah Massood, whose career over twenty years had the status of myth. People believed he could not be killed, although in September 2001 he would die dramatically when a suicide bomb in a TV camera exploded in his face. His druid’s potion was mostly hard tactics, spiced by charisma and the people’s desperation not to be Taliban fodder. But his success had to be paid for, and there were few sources of battle income. The two that were publicly acknowledged were emeralds from the Panjshir valley, and lapis from Badakhshan. The mines, I knew, would be being worked busily beneath me: the government needed the money.
After two hours the land flattened out onto a plateau, and the plane landed with a scrape and a judder on a military metal run-way. Welcome to Faisabad International Airport, with the rubble of old wars—tanks and bits of plane engines—rusting at its edges. There were no immigration formalities, not even any security guards. Just a surreal few moments as the arriving passengers were greeted, and the departing passengers sent off, mostly by bearded men in jeeps adorned with logos blazing MSF, Oxfam, Afghan Aid and, ubiquitously, the U.N. with its smoky blue-and-white flag. The colors had been chosen in 1945 because they were believed to be non-aggressive and neutral: all nations share the same sky.
I had been in e-mail contact for several months with Mervyn Patterson, the representative of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. He had given me encouragement from the beginning. “Glad to have confirmation there’s someone as mad as I am,” he had replied, apologizing that I might be disappointed at how easy it would be to get to the mines. He was there waiting for the plane, introduced himself enthusiastically, and then announced that he was just leaving on the same plane for Islamabad. But he put me in the hands of his colleague Khalid, who would look after me. I was going to have to hire a jeep and a translator, but I was lucky to have found Khalid Mustafawi. His uncle was the commander for the part of eastern Afghanistan where Sar-e-sang was located, and he had already given his permission to visit the mines.
That first day I walked to the old bazaar. A white burka strolled toward me and I salaamed her through her lace. Suddenly the veil was flung back—veils seem to have been a theme of my search for blue—and a pretty twenty-year-old appeared. “Come home for tea,” she commanded. As we walked she would cover herself whenever a man appeared, and then—as later I noticed other women doing—she would fling back the veil once she could
see through her lacy radar screen that they had gone. It was flirtatious behavior: waiting until that last second and then whoosh, disappearing. “You know the neighborhood girls from your childhood,” an Afghan man explained later. “You know who is pretty and you can recognize them from their shoes. The veil doesn’t stop flirting,” he added. “Maybe it increases it.”
When I got back to the U.N. guesthouse a few hours later, there were two men lying on cushions drinking tea with Khalid. Tony Davis and Bob Nickelsberg were on an assignment for Time, and by coincidence they were heading to the lapis mines the next day, to learn more about how Massood paid for his fighters. Had they realized that their war-correspondent mission would from then on include exchanging bean recipes with cooks and stopping for flower-pressing they might have thought twice, but that was all in the future. We agreed to share the cost of hiring what turned out to be—at seven the next morning—a very battered Soviet jeep. “They look like shit,” Tony said, “but these Russian jeeps are tough.” We were to remember his words.
We headed south toward the crossroads town of Baharak, and toward the mountains. A nomadic tribe of Araps was heading for summer pastures with their flock. The “fat-tailed” sheep of Badakhshan store their excess energy in their bottoms—and in front of us for half a kilometer we could see nothing but jauntily lardy bums taking over every part of the road. The nomads halfheartedly knocked their flocks to the left to let us pass but we kept losing ground and it took nearly an hour to pass. From Baharak— having met the commander and been introduced to Abdullah, a smiling soldier turned farmer, now turned translator—we would follow the Kokcha river south. After the wealthy town of Jurm, where opium poppies competed with wheat for field space, the road narrowed into a gray gorge. In my head I was mentally following Titian’s controversial scrape of sky back in time. I imagined that little daub travelling back on to the wooden palette, then to a granite pestle and mortar wielded and bashed by a sulky apprentice, into sacks and then back in rapid cartoon reverse from the port of Venice, across the Mediterranean to Syria, and along the Silk Road, possibly along this very path . . .
“What’s that noise?” asked Bob suddenly from his front-seat position. I awoke from my reverie. It is an irony that the old “silk” roads are the least smooth pathways in the world. In rocky road hierarchies this one was king, and our Soviet jeep had been protesting in a language of clonks and crunches for hours. Some of the gradients against which the engine would curse in its diesel-fumed Russian were so seemingly impossible that it was a miracle we achieved them each time. I couldn’t hear anything different, so settled back sleepily to rejoin Titian’s paint. The driver, however, became excited and talked rapidly in Dari—a language that shares the word “axle” with English. “I don’t like the sound of it,” said Bob ominously. It had been dark for an hour already, and we were passing through the last major village before Sar-e-sang. We would stop there and cover the final 40 kilometers the next day, we decided. The road was so bad it would take three hours and would not be safe in the dark.
So Mr. Haider, a gentle math teacher at the girls’ school in Hazrat Said, found himself with five guests for dinner. We arrived in the darkness and ate one of his last chickens, which had probably not been expecting guests either. We sat up until midnight, those bearded faces sidelit by hurricane lamps, boy children squatting in the corner, eyes bright with curiosity. Yes, they were worried about the possibility of fighting this summer, and yes, they would fight. The mine was vital to the economy. “It is a narrow valley,” Mr. Haider explained, and when there is not a blue rush, then everyone is poorer. They did not use lapis themselves: the stone was not part of local dowries. It is the same story around the world: when we name the most valuable we tend to seek out the exotic; we rarely choose the thing—however unusual—that can be picked up by donkey-boys a day’s journey away.
We joked about the axle that night. What if we had to ditch the car? Privately I thought it would be fun: I had been disappointed to learn that for the past five years Sar-e-sang had been accessible to jeeps. I hadn’t wanted my pilgrimage to be as easy as Mervyn had promised. The next morning, after we had toured the girls’ school—no benches, few books, bright faces peering out of unglazed windows—and waved goodbye grandly, my idle dream became reality. The jeep gave up the battle of the brave in an explosion of burning dust. Village men tried to push it up the hill, but didn’t succeed. “These hungry people have no strength,” said Abdullah compassionately.
An hour later, accompanied by two donkey-men—a man and a boy wearing torn shirts and ripped plastic boots—we strolled out of town. I had, in my bag, a photocopy of a chapter written by a traveller called John Wood, who had made the same journey in 1851. Wood too had spent the night at Hazrat Said, and had visited the tomb of Badakhshan’s saint and poet, Shah Nassur Kisrow. The bit of his poetry that Wood—and, exactly 150 years later, I—was most interested in were the two lines that advised: “If you wish not to go to destruction, Avoid the narrow valley of Koran”—which referred to this very valley.
At first the way was wide—we walked along jeep tracks in the sunshine, drinking water straight from the mountain. In Wood’s day the local farmers complained that wheat would not grow on their land, believing the saint had “kept wheaten bread from them, that their passions might be easier kept under.” The saint had evidently been working overtime in the year 2001—nothing was growing at all in those farmlands that relied on rain. Some villages were reporting up to eighty children dying of hunger that season: for them the valley of the Koran had really meant destruction. The peaks in that area were like children’s drawings of mountains. Or perhaps they were even more basic than that—scribbles made on paper to check that a pen works; impossible jagged crags glowering over the horizon. Usually, with mountains like that, I would be aching to know what was on the other side, imagining lost kingdoms full of apricots and longevity. But this time, I realized, I was on the side I wanted to be, and in a few hours, Allah willing, I would see the mine I had dreamed about.
Looking at this geology, we wondered—as perhaps anybody wonders about an ancient mine—how anyone discovered its treasures. There the Bronze Age farmers were, eking out a simple living on these gray limestone slopes—hunting game, herding animals, worrying about snow in winter and drought in summer— and then suddenly they were exchanging sky-colored stones with people thousands of kilometers away in Egypt. But how did they first find the lapis under all that rock? By midday the heat was intense: at Abdullah’s urging I climbed onto a donkey and was trotted over a pass or two. Donkeys were much more comfortable than I had imagined, and at one point I swear I fell asleep as I rode toward azure under an azure sky.
THE COLOR OF THE SKY
The nineteenth-century British scientist and motivator John Tyndall always said that he did his best thinking about the nature of light and colors while he was walking in the mountains. He took his holidays in the Alps. It was a place where his mind could be clear, he said, and it was also a place where, on sunny days, the sky was clear enough to think about. He was an educator, and one of the best. He would stand in front of audiences at the School of Mines, and he would teach people how to use their imagination to understand science. To explain the color of the sky, he would use an image of the sea.
Think of an ocean, he would say, and think of the waves crashing against the land. If they came across a huge cliff then all the waves would stop; if they met a rock then only the smaller waves would be affected; while a pebble would change the course of only the tiniest waves washing against the beach. This is what happens with light from the sun. Going through the atmosphere the biggest wavelengths—the red ones—are usually unaffected, and it is only the smallest ones—the blue and violet ones—which are scattered by the tiny pebble-like molecules in the sky, giving the human eye the sensation of blue.
Tyndall thought it was particles of dust which did it; Einstein later proved that even molecules of oxygen and hydrogen are big enough to sc
atter the blue rays and leave the rest alone. But the effect of both theories is the same. And at sunset, when the air is polluted with molecules of dust—or, over the sea, little salt particles—both of which act as “rocks” rather than “pebbles” in disturbing the wavelengths of light, the sky will seem orange or even red. When Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in 1991, shooting jets of volcanic dust into the sky and killing three hundred people, the sunsets throughout South Asia were crimson. I remember smiling, ignorant of the reason, thinking how beautiful they were.
LOSING A SHOE
On a small ridge we saw a red jeep: it had broken down. It was the King of Munjon’s car, we were told by the man left to guard the vehicle. I took a photograph of him standing resignedly by a slogan on the door, which boasted “no cars satisfy me but this,” and then we went down toward the serai, a one-story hotel in the middle of nowhere. The young king was there in his chocolate shawar kameez, looking mysterious. He had inherited the title from his late father five years ago and was trying hard to be a good charismatic leader to his Ismaili flock—Shiite Moslems in a land of the ever-rising Taliban Sunni. The car would be repaired in a day or two and meanwhile he would stay with his aunt’s family in this remote restaurant. A tiny window in a wall opened with a grunt and our boiled goat with rice arrived, passed through by a woman’s hand—dark and covered with three rings. The donkey-man patted his stomach optimistically and was pleased to see we had ordered full meals for him and the boy. We could eat only a fraction of what we had been served—they ate all of theirs and the rest of ours as well.
Leaving the serai, I made two discoveries: amoebic dysentery and a boot heel that flapped as I walked. About the former I could hope to last out between rocks; the latter seemed more disastrous in this stony country. I wrapped the wretched thing with a rubber band, hoping it would hold—or at least that the others wouldn’t notice and I could walk at the back with my reputation as travelling companion intact. “Your boot is flapping,” noticed Bob nicely, within three minutes. So I tied my laces around it—travelling on a shoestring taken literally—and adjusted the knots every hour or so as the cord became worn through. John Wood also had boot problems. He had had to barter his Uzbek boots for leather buskins as soon as he had realized—at about this spot in the valley, when the path was broken after an earthquake—that the rest of the journey would have to be undertaken by foot. For him the march was “long and toilsome,” with one Afghan member of his party falling on the road “too severely bruised to come on.” For us it was, especially in the cool of the late afternoon, rather spectacular: over cliffs and through dynamited arches.
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