The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  He spent years on the trail of the Yezidis of Iraq, the so-called ‘People of the Peacock Angel’; and made long expeditions through Tibet, Turkey, the Arabian peninsula and the Sudan. But none of those pursuits matched his secret obsession, the details of which he kept in the Afghan Notebook.

  After more than forty years of marriage, in August 1960, my grandfather lost his beloved Bobo to cancer. He was a broken man, and vowed that he would never return to any place they had travelled together.

  That was how he came to live in Tangier.

  After the funeral, he packed his belongings in an old sea trunk and journeyed to Morocco, where he rented a small but well proportioned house on Rue de la Plage.

  At the time of his own death, in November 1969, I was less than three years old. My great sadness is that I never really knew him. We had been taken to see him at his villa a few days before the accident, presented so as to make him proud. My sisters were dressed in silk kaftans embroidered with gold, and I was trussed up in a camel wool jelaba, my miniature head crowned in a giant turquoise turban. I can just see it, a blur of memory.

  As a child, my grandfather was an irresistible figure.

  I would beg to hear the stories of his expeditions, his encounters with warlords, mystics and kings. My father would recount the tales, often tingeing them with a vein of disapproval, as if he regarded his own father as irresponsible.

  ‘You cannot understand what it was like,’ he told me one day as we sat on the lawn of our home at Tunbridge Wells. ‘He would suddenly stand up at breakfast and order us out of the house, saying we were to leave our toys and all our things. Possessions, he would insist, were for the weak, and we were becoming far too attached. So we left everything, just walked out, and started afresh somewhere else.’

  ‘He was a nomad,’ I said.

  My father regarded me hard, groomed his moustache with his hand.

  ‘He was a maniac,’ he replied.

  My father’s eagerness for stability explains our childhood in Tunbridge Wells. Odd trips to Morocco injected us with cultural colour, and proved there was a real world out there, somewhere. Throughout my youth, the Afghan Notebook lay in a box file, waiting to be appreciated. My father knew about it, of course. He had opened the brown manila envelope, perhaps had even scanned the frail pages, before burying it in a tomb of forgotten paperwork in his secret cubbyhole.

  I have a feeling he knew I would one day find it, and it would begin a journey, leading me to seek out people and places I would not have encountered without it. The fact he didn’t destroy the notebook or give it away, suggested he wanted me to take up the search – the search for the greatest lost treasure in history.

  The Treasure

  By the mid eighteenth century Mughal India was like a ripe fruit ready for the plucking. The Mughal Emperor Mohammed Shah had turned his back on his armed forces, and preferred to occupy his time with his harem and the arts. His coffers were overflowing with riches – diamonds the size of apples, emeralds, rubies, silver and millions of gold coins.

  Word of the Mughals’ fabulous prosperity spread on the wind, and reached the ears of Nadir Shah, Emperor of Persia. The son of a shepherd, Nadir had built an empire on a bedrock of ruthlessness. The idea of seizing the wealth of Mughal India – which had been amassed over centuries since the time of Babur – was too much for him. Without delay, we planned an attack, and sent spies to infiltrate the Mughal Court. Then, with a massive army at his side, he rode eastward across Afghanistan and up the Khyber Pass into northern India.

  At the Red Fort, Emperor Mohammed Shah relaxed in his harem, oblivious to the fact that the might of the Persian army was about rewrite history. North-west of Delhi, at Panipat, Nadir made camp. While his sixty thousand soldiers recovered from the long journey from Persia, he sent word to the Mughal Emperor, demanding reparations. In one of the greatest miscalculations in Asian military history, Mohammed Shah sent a pathetically small force to rebuff Nadir Shah at Panipat. The outcome was slaughter, with the Indian force being decimated.

  The battle proved Nadir’s genius at warfare. Aware that camels are the only creatures without a blatant fear of fire, he ordered for his camel cavalry to be trussed in pairs, with a dais in the middle. On each dais a fire was constructed, onto which was thrown camphor. The clouds of pungent smoke sent fear into the Emperor’s ranks. His cavalry and elephants beat a frenzied retreat.

  After his victory at Panipat, Nadir Shah took his time. He could have marched onto Delhi immediately. But instead he decided to send word to Mohammed Shah, ordering him to prepare for the victor’s arrival. When the messenger arrived at the Red Fort bearing the encoded communiqué, the Mughal Emperor was stupefied. He had expected Nadir to sweep into his capital, and begin a whirlwind of looting. Lulled into a false sense of security, Mohammed Shah ordered for Delhi to be festooned with decorations. He had the great Lahore Gate of the Red Fort flung open and, when the Persian ruler arrived on a caparisoned elephant, he welcomed him as a brother ruler and a guest.

  While expressing amity to his fellow Emperor, Nadir wasted no time in pressing for reparations to pay for the cost of transporting his army and staff from Persia to India and back. He demanded a million rupees’ worth of precious gems and gold. Mohammed Shah protested, declaring that he could muster only a fraction of the amount. The Mughal Emperor withdrew into his state apartments to consult his advisers. And for three days, Nadir toured the Red Fort. Such was the opulence that Nadir was struck dumb by what he saw.

  Historians suggest he was about to demand extra reparations from Mohammed Shah, when fate gave him a godsend. Although the Mughal Emperor had commanded his people not to attack the Persian army, a high-ranking officer was knocked down and killed in Chandni Chowk, the nearby silver market. Using the event to his advantage, Nadir gave his soldiers permission to attack for six hours.

  By sunset the streets of Delhi were running with Indian blood. Tens of thousands of innocent civilians had been slain, their homes burned and looted, their wives and daughters raped. As the Mughal Emperor was being briefed on the carnage, Nadir Shah hammered on his door. He said that the price of his compensation had just risen nine-fold. Mohammed Shah was to pay nine million rupees at once, and annual reparations thereafter. If he did not, his entire Court would be beheaded, and the Emperor himself would be subjected to a far slower, more painful death.

  The seals to the Imperial treasure magazines were broken, and the royal stables were opened. The wealth amassed through generations of Mughal dynasty was laden onto twelve thousand horses, ten thousand camels and a thousand elephants. Mohammed Shah, it is said, was wailing in his private apartment, distraught at the loss.

  At that moment Nadir Shah arrived to bid his host farewell. Before quitting the Mughal Court, Nadir it is said removed his simple turban and offered it to Mohammed Shah. It was common for monarchs of the time to exchange headdresses as a gesture of fraternity and goodwill. The Mughal Emperor’s face turned crimson.

  He had no goodwill to give.

  Fearing death if he did not comply with the Imperial etiquette, he carefully removed his own silk turban and presented it to his victor. But there was another more important reason for his anger.

  Concealed within the folds of cloth was his most prized jewel of all – the Koh-i-Noor diamond.

  The Caravan

  At dawn on the hundredth day following his march into Delhi, Nadir Shah led the treasure caravan out from the Lahore Gate of the Red Fort, westward, towards Persia.

  Never in history could there have been a sight like it – thousands upon thousands of camels, elephants and horses, heaving under their burdens. Nadir not only stripped the Mughal capital of its wealth, but its finest craftsmen, too. His great army of veteran warriors, and his harem, were joined by thousands of stone masons, carpenters, jewellers and swordsmiths.

  It’s said that the caravan’s entire length took three full days to pass a fixed point. The danger of starvation was very real for such a moving f
orce, as few towns would possess enough food to feed animals and men. For this reason, Nadir ordered for flocks of sheep to be herded along with the train, as well as sending messengers to have encampments ready with animals along the way home. The pride with which the Persian emperor departed Delhi is easily imaginable. He was king of the world, the richest monarch in history, a man of unparalleled wealth and power. But, unfortunately for him, others nearby were already conspiring to relieve him of his new responsibility.

  The caravan snaked its way north-west out from Delhi towards the fertile farmlands of what is modern Pakistan. They reached Lahore, a city famed for its scholarship, and pressed on westward, down the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan. With such an immense caravan to control, Nadir Shah must have been aware of the danger. The threat of having the hoard of Mughal India poached from his grasp was all too real. Nadir was obsessed with security, for himself, and for the treasure. Each night, along with his most trusted generals, he planned out the route the caravan would take through the badlands of Afghanistan, to his homeland, Persia. And, each night, his most trusted generals would then plan how best they could execute their master, and relieve him of his loot.

  The history of Afghanistan fades in and out of focus.

  At times it is little more than hearsay or myth. The difficulty for the historian is that Nadir covered his tracks, going to extreme lengths to hide his motives, and conceal his real strategy. He was a survivor, a tactician who had started off as a shepherd boy, and was now the richest ruler on earth. It seems that he split the caravan in two, sending part on a northern route to Persia, and part in a southern crescent through Kandahar. It is uncertain exactly when or where the generals unsheathed their swords and ended Nadir’s life. But legend tells that it happened in a tented camp somewhere in the south, and that the fatal blow was made by the Persian Emperor’s most trusted general, Ahmed Shah Durrani.

  With the death of Nadir, Durrani seized control of the treasure caravans, and shortly after, he called a loyd jurga, a meeting of elders from the Afghan clans. Such assemblies, which are still used today, named Durrani King of Afghanistan. He was twenty-three years old. In the following years, Ahmed Shah went on to sack Delhi again, and shored up the boundaries of Afghanistan. Establishing his capital at Kandahar, he planned out the future of the kingdom. But suddenly, he fell sick, struck down with cancer of the face. An Afghan legend tells how a soothsayer visited Ahmed Shah one night in his campaign tent. The woman foretold the future of the kingdom – that Timur Shah, Durrani’s eldest son, would inherit, and would destroy all his father had established.

  Terrified that his legacy would be undone, the dying king had his treasure storehouses emptied, and the immense hoard moved to a cave system somewhere in Afghanistan. There, it was concealed, in a series of vast chambers. So as to protect the location, Durrani ordered all those who hid the treasure to be executed.

  For the last two centuries and a half, the whereabouts of the treasure of Ahmed Shah Durrani has been debated by generations of Afghans. Many have searched for it. More still have questioned whether it ever existed, or if it has already been found, by the British, or the Russians, or the Taliban.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  The Fattening Rooms

  FOR THE LAST SIXTEEN DAYS, Adele Mopoti, has sat on a low wooden bench in a thatched hut on the edge of her village, eating.

  As soon as she’s scraped up the last spoon of lumpy grey porridge, her grandmother barges in and hands her another bowlful. Once she’s finished it, she will munch her way through a platter of cooked yams, and another heaped high with plantains. Then she will be permitted to sleep off the meal in the suffocating summer heat, before starting all over again at dusk.

  Adele, seventeen, who lives in a small village on the Nigerian border with Cameroon, is being fattened up in an ancient ritual which has traditionally preceded marriage in south-east Nigeria. She is expected to eat between four and five enormous meals a day. The hope is that, once she emerges after a month, her body will be layered in a healthy cushion of fat. The thinking behind the so-called ‘Fattening Rooms’ has corresponded with customary values of the Efik and neighbouring tribes for centuries.

  A stay in the rooms – generally no more than a thatched hut – have long been the last stop on a pubescent girl’s journey to the altar. The residence is one part of a complex tribal initiation from childhood into womanhood. It’s a place where one learns the responsibilities expected in the years to come, a time for solitary reflection, as well as an opportunity to get the body ready for years, possibly decades, of childbearing.

  In a land where excess food has never been easy to come by, a plump bride has always signified health, wealth, and hinted at the ability to produce numerous children. But the young generation of residents in the Fattening Rooms of Adele’s village don’t see the point.

  These days, most of them have other things on their minds.

  ‘I’m only here, to please my father,’ says Adele as she pushes back her braided hair, ‘he told me that if I didn’t spend two months here, then he wouldn’t pay for me to go and study in Calabar. I have dreams, big plans. I want to study to be a nurse. But at the same time I understand the importance of tradition. If I did not, I would have run away by now. As soon as I get out of the village, I’m going to lose all the weight I’ve gained. In the city people laugh at fat women, they make fun of you, saying that you’re backwards, and from a village.’

  Adele’s best friend, Gloria, shares the scant room with her. They entered the hut at the same time, and spend much of their time talking, that is when they’re not eating. Both girls are dressed in a rappas, a loose-fitting sarong, their feet bare. Unlike Adele, Gloria’s legs are bound with shiny copper bracelets.

  For the first two or three days you feel very pampered,’ explains Gloria, ‘our grandmothers come in with food all the time. They won’t let us do any housework, or even do the washing. They tell us how nice we look, and that all the boys in the village are asking about us. Of course it makes you feel good! But then you start feeling disgusted with yourself, and bored… so bored.’

  Gloria is cut short by a scratching at the boarded-up window. She giggles nervously. ‘It’s my boyfriend, he’s not allowed to come in here,’ she says. ‘He misses me very much. And I miss him. But I can’t see his face until I leave here. If I do, then my father will whip me, and our family’s reputation will be ruined.’

  Bending down, Gloria rubs her legs. It’s a clumsy process, made difficult by the spiralling copper bracelets. When she is asked what they are for, she grimaces. ‘They’re like manacles that a slave wears,’ she says. ‘If I sneak out and meet my boyfriend, then my grandmother will hear the metal jangling, and she’ll call out to my brothers. Then they will beat me, and when they have beaten me, my father will whip me.’

  Gloria’s grandmother is blind in one eye, but she watches out attentively for the two girls. She can’t remember how old she is or when she herself was married. But she does know that of the ten children she gave birth to long, long ago, at least six are still alive. ‘Maybe seven are still living,’ she mumbles, correcting herself, ‘the youngest son went away to Yaounde and never came back.’

  The old woman, whose name is Walima, crouches outside the thatched hut, stirring an immense pot of millet porridge. ‘These girls are eating well,’ she says as she stirs. ‘But it’s not their appetite’s I’m worried about… I’m worried about their minds. They don’t understand about duty now, and when you say anything to them, they think they know better than the customs.

  ‘How can a girl know how to please her husband, how to care for him, how to cook for him, unless she has listened to the elders?’

  Suddenly, footsteps can be heard from behind the hut.

  With her one good eye, Walima moves her head about fitfully. ‘There’s been a boy coming here,’ she rasps, ‘if I catch him I’ll have him beaten. Oh, the young generation have no respect for tradition. It will lead to the downfall of all we have
.’

  Tradition is something of incalculable importance to the Efik tribe. It is the traditions which have formed a basis to life, and have allowed vital knowledge to be passed down from one generation to the next. For millennia the Efik have been a farming people, tilling the land for maize and millet, fishing in the rich waterways of the Calabar delta. But now the traditions are under threat.

  ‘We have talked and talked about what is right and wrong,’ says Thomas, Adele’s father. ‘When my wife went through the iria initiation, she was so happy to eat the food her grandmother cooked for her and then, soon after, we were wed, and then the children were born. Adele wants to go and get educated and become a nurse. That’s fine, but there’s so much else for her to know. The mbobi, the fattening hut, is a place where she can learn much deeper information… information about people, about life.’

  Across Africa initiation rites abound for both young men and women, all of them drawing a firm line between youth and maturity.

  The iria ritual is different from many other initiations, in that it shows the community who is ready to be married, and just how beautiful they are. The fattening rooms are essentially pampering parlours, in which the nubile girls are indulged with food, attention and advice. One cannot overstate the significance of this last ingredient – the advice.

  The elders dote on the beauty of their daughters, pointing out the growing layers of fat, but you get the feeling their attention is really on the wealth of information that the fattening rooms pass down. In a changing society, the information may be out of date, but it is ancient and tested knowledge.

  Throughout the iria ritual, the elder women of the community guide the iriabos, the initiates. No one takes a keener interest in the proceedings than the girls’ grandmothers. They take every opportunity to remind the young generation how things have not changed since the time they themselves passed through the ritual.