Elizabeth’s allowance had cushioned him when he left Sotheby’s. “It was a help, but you certainly couldn’t live on it entirely,” she says. Bruce had supported himself at Edinburgh by dealing, the junk shops providing a steady source of income. In one shop he had bought for £20 a chalcedony salt cellar. “He found the pair to it in the Schatzkammer in Vienna and the date is Burgundy, 1490!” Many of the objects had been collected by Scots seafarers, including a Maori sculpture, once belonging to Sarah Bernhardt, “for which he has already been offered more than twice what he paid”. This rapid turnover upset Elizabeth. “I hate having him buy things & then sell them because it seems such a pity to let them go after we get attached to them . . . but it’s a constant struggle, because people are always offering him huge sums for something he bought for £100 & it’s a temptation.”
After Edinburgh, where he had been on a student grant, Bruce’s financial position forced him to reconsider Christie’s offer. He agreed to work for them on a freelance basis – so long as his name did not appear on their books. On 25 January, Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude: “For goodness sake, don’t tell ANYONE.”
Bruce’s retainer from Christie’s amounted to £1,250 a year. This is what he lived on for the next two years, supplemented by the sale of various objects belonging to him or Elizabeth. The first part of his retainer was paid after a visit to Egypt and financed his journey to Afghanistan.
On 7 June, Bruce flew to Cairo with Christie’s managing director, Guy Hannon. Their mission was to secure the sale of the contents of the Cairo Museum. The Egyptian government, anxious to raise hard currency to pay for the war with Israel, had decided to sell off some of its national treasures in order to buy a squadron of MiG fighter planes. They had approached Christie’s with a list of tantalising objects. “The whole thing was too fraught for words,” says Hannon, who took along Bruce because “he was reckoned to know more than anyone else”.
They found Cairo tense and deserted. “Nobody was there because people thought the Israelis were going to drop bombs.” Bruce and Hannon sat before a committee and together they ran through the list, providing their estimates. But the Egyptians had changed their mind. They no longer wished to sell their most important sculptures. “They wanted to sell us a huge number of stuffed ibis,” says Hannon.
Surrounded in the Cairo Museum by the implacable face of the Pharaoh, a thought struck Bruce. “Where is the face of Moses, I said, amongst all this lot?” Every vestige of Rameses II was on view, down to his mummified fingernails, but nothing remained of the nomad who had gone out from the city and died in the desert. “And you have to ask that question in history: Who is a more important figure, Moses or Pharoah? And you come to the conclusion: it’s Moses.” This sweeping question, as he prepared to join Levi in Afghanistan, became central to his thesis.
Bruce and Levi landed in Kabul on 25 June, and dined with an English public school master who was hoping to be allowed to lead a team of undergraduates to the northern province of Badakhshan.
Among the missions to Kabul in 1841 was a Society for the Suppression of Vice among the Uzbeks. Rather in this vein, Peter Willey, a senior housemaster at Wellington College, had arrived from London to make a study for the Anti-Slavery Society. “They are, if the whole story bears credence, investigating the bond relationship between the growers of opium and Indian hemp and those who control the market,” Bruce wrote in his journal. “This constitutes a master-slave relationship . . . Col Gregory has therefore provided funds and button microphones and miniature cameras. The expedition lives on corned beef.”
The Willey Expedition seemed so ludicrous to Bruce that two years later he proposed it to the director James Ivory as a fit subject for cinematic treatment. “No spectacle, not even the Angel Gabriel on a trip, was more bizarre than one puffy public school master followed by three of the most exquisitely dressed and pretty and flirtatious boys, one with boots and marginally more masculine than the other two with handbags, as they picked their way delicately from the Ministry of the Interior to the Ministry of the Exterior to the Ministry of Education to the Ministry of Culture and finally when the Afghan government had made it abundantly clear that they didn’t want to be investigated, least of all by an ex-British army major, the party dropped in on the PM to be shown the door, first of all quite politely and then really rather rudely . . . My Dear, it was funny, very funny.”
Willey and his entourage haunted Bruce’s third Afghan journey, hovering around Kabul, “because Kabul was where the Afghans said the expedition must remain and remain it did”. Despite the criticism he heaped on the Anti-Slavery Society, his own expedition was not without its absurdities.
His expedition started with a whipping. On 12 July, Bruce sent a postcard to Elizabeth from the British Embassy in Kabul. “British School in Teheran was populated by the most awful Cambridge archaeologists you can imagine. Breathing tomb fungus. We barged in on the Bala Hisar, a military fort, and both got lashed at by a very irate infantryman with his belt. Very uncomfortable but in fact quite funny.”
Bruce and Levi were looking for pottery shards below the Bala Hisar, an imposing castle on the south of the Kabul river, when an enraged private soldier attacked them, unarmed except for his military belt. Levi dismissed the episode as an “odd little incident of fantasy” explained by midday heat. Bruce, in his journal, showed less composure. “A refreshing spot after a fiendish day. Poor P. He was wrong, obstinate and wrong. I warned and was right, triumphantly right.”
Kabul, smelling of balsam poplars and petrol, held no more charm than before. Whenever they returned from an expedition, they heard the same donkey in the Embassy garden screeching with unsatisfied desire. At least Shah Jahan’s marble pavilion, once offered to Bruce and Robert Erskine, had been restored among its mulberry trees.
From Kabul, they visited Bamiyan in the passes of the Hindu Kush. Bruce was looking for nomad tombs in the upper pastures. The highest point of his summer occurred early on in a valley behind Shar-i-Golgola. After walking 35 miles they came to a line of four nomadic burial mounds. “We looked and neither of us spoke, being unwilling to believe our eyes,” Levi wrote in The Light Garden of the Angel King. “It was too good to be true, after so many enthusiastic conversations, that you only had to move an hour into the hills to come across unexcavated and uncharted burial mounds.”
For Bruce, “the moment of sitting on the hot mounds was one of the rare occasions when poetry and life are mingled. Plongé dans nature. One has a desperate wish to communicate the almost mystical sensation, but finds oneself parched and impotent.”
He turned to poetry to express his feelings. This was his legendary back of beyond, where the Animal Art of the Eurasian steppes had evolved. He was excited by his discussions with Levi and possibly by Basho and Marvell whose poems he carried in his rucksack. Higher up the same valley he watched a hawk chasing a lark over the rocks. He put the image into verse form.
A Crested lark
Caught in the wind
Lost a feather
The lark sang
On a smooth stone
The feather floated up
and was chased by a hawk.
His notebooks from now on contain frequent attempts at Levi’s speciality.
“Afghanistan was the ideal place for these kinds of reflection,” says Maurizio Tosi. In few other countries were the remains of the past so ubiquitous, mixing together civilisations arriving from distant corners with the Greeks, the Arabs, the Mongols. Tosi, having excavated there, well understood Bruce’s fascination. “You stand in a barren countryside watching a group of camel and horse-mounted nomads moving with all their stuff and flocks and behind them are still standing the most magnificent ruins of splendid buildings made by kings who ruled over farmers and craftsmen in large cities.”
In the three months Bruce spent in Afghanistan he travelled almost everywhere on all kinds of vehicles and often on foot. Only in Patagonia and West Africa would he ever be such an intense tra
veller. “Peter told him about the joys of writing,” says Tosi. “He came back and made up his mind to be a writer.”
Levi was generous about Bruce in The Light Garden of the Angel King. “It will be obvious from every page of this book that I was extremely fortunate in the travelling companion I did have, Bruce Chatwin. Most of our best observations and all the best jokes were his; it was he who was interested in nomads, he who told me to read Basho, he who had done all the right homework in my subjects as well as his own, who knew the names of flowers and who understood Islamic art history.”
Bruce was less charitable. By the time of publication, in 1972, Peter Levi had fallen the way of Bruce’s previous mentors. In a letter to Elizabeth, he claimed Levi’s book “drove me wild with rage and I think I’d better not read it or I shall become apoplectic”. A paragraph later, he added: “the thing that really infuriates me about the Afghan book is that all my remarks and observations are repeated verbatim as an integral part of his text.”
Bruce began as a disciple, taking photographs for Levi’s book. Yet he was an old Afghan hand. Levi’s Hellenistic project soon irritated him, as did Levi. “Peter is being used by his neighbours as a spittoon. He declares that never will he again go on a bus. I can’t imagine what alternative he has to suggest. It’s perfectly all right to me. Behaving very stupidly. Says he goes to pictures to see the country.” Bruce wondered how he could write poetry of any meaning with that attitude. He cautioned him about his behaviour towards officials. “Tell P he must not call the men at the ministry buggers, bastards, or anything else. If he believes they are, he will greet them accordingly . . . ‘You’ve no sense of the practical,’ I say.” In August 1988, Bruce looked back on their trip without enthusiasm. “It was one of the more unpleasant experiences of my life. Peter always believes there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. He kept picking up bits of pottery and saying they were from a great Greek temple.”
Levi for his part was irritated by Bruce’s habit of “playing at Napoleon”. He was amused by Bruce’s inability to set correctly a special altimeter he had bought in Holland. “It turned out he had us up Everest.” And Bruce’s one-upmanship sometimes tested his patience. At Kunduz, they found a watch in working order dated 1748 and afterwards wandered into the meat and vegetable markets. “I declared loftily but truthfully that all this was nothing to the fishmarket in Venice. Bruce turned out to be another enthusiast for that labyrinth of experiences, but infuriated me by saying, ‘Aha, it was nothing to the fungus season in the market at Brno’.”
Bruce’s competitive spirit was strongest in his feelings towards Levi’s book. “Peter says he was asked to write a book about Balkh. I countered by asking how on earth he could write a book about it when he’d been there for half a morning. He said it would take him a month to look up the necessary references.”
The moment would come on their journey when Bruce became impatient to surpass his mentor.
Bruce succumbed to his usual sickness in Kabul. “Bruce had mild heat exhaustion and a sunstroke temperature,” wrote Levi. “He sat dazed on his bed dressed in a long Arab gown, reading aloud fearsome sentences from the Royal Geographical Society’s Traveller’s Guide to Health, such as ‘after collapse, death soon ensues’.”
Levi meanwhile suffered from dysentery, refusing to eat “white food” like rice, milk or yoghurt.
In Kabul, an English hippie called Nigel joined them. Nigel, whom Bruce described as “small, elfin, mischievous, very queer and highly likeable”, incarnated every fear the Willey Expedition entertained for Afghanistan. “Nigel has been approached by a young man who offers a complete armour of hashish,” wrote Bruce. “Pectorals, body belts, cross over braces, necklaces, thigh packs, back packs, holding some 10 kilos in all. Costing not much more than $20 a kilo for high quality stuff. I am bored by the whole business.”
Bruce felt Nigel was someone to be saved, not least from the clutches of the Anti-Slavery Society, still agitating to leave Kabul. He asked Levi whether they might hire him as an interpreter on their journey to Chagcheran in the north-west district of Ghor. “‘Can he come with us? We might save his soul.’ I said, ‘Oh?’ ‘Well, you see,’ said Bruce, ‘he was at Marlborough’.”
They flew to the barren grazing grounds of Chagcheran, where Bruce had heard of a huge annual nomad fair. A week earlier there had been 1,000 tents. Now about 40 flapped in a dust storm, exciting Bruce, who had once slept beneath a jousting tent in Grosvenor Crescent Mews. “I am always moved by the sight of tents and I thought of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the last gasp of a medieval chivalry that owed so much to the mounted cavalry of the Steppe.”
The tents belonged to the Firuzkuhi, who came into Afghanistan with the first Turkish conquerors. Bruce’s destination was their lost capital city, locked in the mountains of the Ghorat and identified as the modern village of Jam.
On 10 July, the three of them reached Shahrak in a bus, from there intending to ride to Jam. “Officer in charge is 23 and has offered us a room and use of his servant Jon-o, which means ‘Soul-Ho!’ One syrupy glance from our new soulmate makes me very nervous. He is so thin and angular one expects him to collapse in a disjointed heap. Deep, deep glance, rolling of eyes, and wide toothy smiles. In bazaar he has helped me stock up with provisions, carrying eggs in his turban . . .”
Not for the first time was Bruce unnerved by syrupy glances, but Levi is quite certain: “He didn’t go to bed with any monkeys or goat-boys. He led the life of a Cistercian monk.”
That night Bruce danced for his supper, “an ecstatic dance with 5 emphatic and suggestive thumps at the climax. An old man highly complimentary on my ‘lady movements’ and kept dragging me to my feet.”
They set off on horseback for Jam, 14 hours away, Bruce perched in agony above some lilac tweed saddle bags which contained the horses’ food. To his apoplectic mirth, Nigel and Levi had bought turbans. They looked to him “sensationally like crested pouter pigeons”, Nigel bearing a resemblance to Lady Hester Stanhope. But the turbans saved their lives in the heat and Levi in his journal records that not long after mocking their appearance, Bruce talked about buying a black one.
Jam was famous for its apricot groves and its minaret of strawberry-coloured brick. This was situated in a shiny black gorge and rose into view at the apex of a chasm of nearly vertical cliffs. “One cannot adequately describe one’s feelings of surprise and bewilderment at this marvel,” Bruce wrote. Planted in a desolate, forlorn valley, the Minaret of Ghyath-ud-Din Muhammad, Sultan of Ghor for the last 40 years of the twelfth century, was, believed Bruce, one of the world’s most audacious monuments. “It rears to the sky like some triple-tiered Moon Rocket and was built with exactly the same aspirations.” Inside, a birch staircase swirled to the muezzin platform. Bruce climbed to the top where a few timbers stuck out like the frame of a worn-out umbrella. “High above me white vultures are spiralling in a thermal, and the crenellated turrets of the castle cling precariously to the peaks opposite. They were once adorned, we are told, by a pair of gold griffins, each the size of a camel. The permanence of the castle is due, perhaps, to the strength [of the mortar] for which Ghyath-ud-Din’s father had a special recipe. Captives from Ghazni were forced to carry dried earth in sacks on their shoulders. They were beheaded and their bodies mixed in to form a paste. Charming . . . ‘Nasty people,’ says Peter as we take one last look at the minaret. ‘Always cutting each other up. And horrible to their women’.”
It was probably in Jam that Bruce decided – without a word to his companion – to write a book on Afghanistan.
Levi had assumed Bruce to be researching his work on nomads. “Bruce has been reading Genesis & has been confirmed in his view of the essential role of vegetarianism in Paradise.” Bruce’s notebooks are clotted with conundrums for The Nomadic Alternative: “The main question is this. Is wandering – the urge to travel – an endoeomatic genetically inherited manifestation of a biological urge to explore or is it culturally dependent
?” Occasionally a note of doubt creeps in. “I am afraid that I have conducted in truly nomadic fashion cavalier raids on specialised disciplines I have not even begun to master.” Yet he never doubts the magnitude of his task. “Book must carry a new theory of motion as a mainspring of life.”
At the time, Levi hardly suspected the scale of Bruce’s ambition. Later, he would compare him to Casaubon in Middlemarch, always writing an important book that remained unpublished. “He was desperately competitive in a way I’d never have grasped. It was a pointless ambition, like a fire eating him out.”
Bruce extolled the nomads for having left no traces. In the same breath he marvelled at the buildings he found in Jam and Balkh and Herat. Setting aside his obligations to Maschler, he would set down on his return to England an outline based on his three visits to be called On the Silk Road. Bruce’s agent does not remember receiving his proposal and nothing came of it, but it reads not unlike Levi’s proposal to Collins and matches many of Byron’s aspirations in The Road to Oxiana. “The book would take the form of a travel diary with diversions to take in the aspect of the country, the mountains, trees, the crops and animals and birds; the travellers from the Buddhist pilgrims, who have passed through, the great conquerors; architecture, mostly Islamic, and art; the complicated ethnography; trade from ancient times to the present.” Bruce would also provide illustrations. “Mostly the diaries will be used as a vehicle for my photographs.”
Bruce Chatwin Page 31