The Age of Kali

by William Dalrymple

  Certainly, Landi Khotal station looked as if it had been built to expect the worst. It seemed more like a castle than a railhead, with solid stone walls pierced by tiny arrow-slits. Projecting turrets on its four corners covered every angle. All around the houses had been cleared to leave a free field of fire. Afghanistan is less than half a mile away: this was once the British Empire’s first line of defence.

  The windows were covered with thick metal grilles, and the doors were of reinforced steel. One, however, had been smashed off its hinges, and I climbed inside to explore. The interior – a quadrangle of rooms giving off an overgrown cloister-garth – had something of the air of Custer’s last stand. You felt instinctively as if something terrible had happened here: that the tribesmen had crucified the Stationmaster perhaps, or garrotted the ticket collector. This was the sort of place where Kipling’s short stories came to an end, the true-blue Victorian hero lying disembowelled on a frontier pass, and the vultures hovering nearby:

  When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,

  An’ the women come out to cut up what remains,

  Jest roll on your rifle an’ blow out your brains,

  An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

  Inside the stationmaster’s office, everything was as it had been when the last train pulled up the Pass. The Pakistan Railways Almanac 1962 lay open on a desk and old ledgers gathered dust on a shelf. It was an eerie place and I had no wish to linger.

  It was now mid-morning and the market in the centre of Landi Khotal was in full swing. Old men were gathered around a fire drinking Pathan khawa (sweet green tea). Kebab-wallahs fanned little charcoal grills while butchers disembowelled chickens and tanners skinned dead goats, leaving little rivulets of blood running in to the open sewer. Nearby a scrap merchant was weighing a crate full of spent shell-cases. I explained to the guard what I was looking for, and he nodded and led me further in to the labyrinth.

  Along an alley, down a dark, slimy staircase we arrived at a gateway. The guard knocked three times, and the door swung open. Inside eight bearded tribesmen were sitting in the half-lit gloom under some trellising. For a moment I looked at my companion, wondering why he had brought me here. Then one of the tribesmen took from his pocket a paper envelope. He tipped the contents – some browny-white powder – out on to a piece of silver foil, then held it up to his face. He lit a match and warmed the foil until the powder liquefied. Then he took a small white tube and inhaled the vapours. The sweet, sickly stench of heroin filled the air.

  Landi Khotal was awash with narcotics. Heroin itself was generally kept out of sight under the counter, but hashish and opium were freely available, and as casually displayed as cigarettes and betel nut. Some of the hash was set in great toffee-like blocks; other pieces were folded in to hash chapattis or tortured in to spaghetti strands. One roadside stall moulded its hash in to curvilinear arrangements that looked like liquorice allsorts.

  The US tried to bribe us to stop growing the poppy,’ one vendor told me. He tore a little lump of opium off a block, nonchalantly rolled it in to a ball and popped it in his mouth. ‘They promised us irrigation and improved roads if we destroyed our crops. We let them spend their money, then used the wells to grow better poppy.’

  Drugs were not the only illegal trade flourishing in Landi Khotal. The town also has one of the largest smuggling bazaars in Asia. Electrical equipment from Hong Kong and Japan and cheap Russian household goods (huge washing machines; vast, outdated air conditioners) are brought by rail or air from the former Soviet Union to Kabul. They are transferred to lorries and driven towards the Pakistani border, then loaded on to pack-mule or camel and wind their way by night across the border and in to the tribal territories. There they are either sold direct or passed on to middlemen who smuggle them in to Pakistan proper. No duty is paid at any stage. The profits are colossal.

  The question that currently exercises the intelligence agencies is how long it will be before nuclear warheads from the former Soviet Union join the hardware passing on donkey-back in to the Frontier – and thence on to the international market.

  It is not the first time that these barren and remote hills on the edge of the Hindu Kush have been both prosperous and strategic. For centuries the area has been a natural border zone between the rival cultures of India, China, Persia and Central Asia, the place where the goods of the different civilisations have been exchanged and where all the porous cultures, religions and languages of the area have mixed and intermingled – not for nothing does ‘pesh awar’ mean ‘frontier town’. But however large the profits of the opium trade in Peshawar today, they are nothing compared to the riches brought to the area by the Silk Route, especially during the first five centuries AD. It was at this time that the area around Peshawar gave birth to the civilisation of Gandhara, one of the most remarkable composite cultures in South Asian history.

  I first stumbled across Gandhara when, a couple of days after hitching a lift out of Peshawar, I found myself climbing up a goat path in Swat, one of the most beautiful valleys on earth. Here the snow peaks of the Karakorums widen and thaw in to a landslide of cultivation terraces. Below, the Swat river – in autumn the colour of lapis-lazuli – meanders lazily around a green plain of orchards and wheatfields. As you wander past, scenes from a Moghul miniature take shape in the fields around you: men are bent double beneath stooks of corn, reaping with sickles; others carry bundles of juniper branches for feeding to their goats.

  The tarmac road had given up far below, and a shepherd boy had offered to lead me to my destination. Although he must have been barely twelve years old, he strode on ahead, scrambling up the track at a pace that only one born among mountains could set. I followed in fits and bursts, stopping every few minutes to wheeze and catch my breath. In this fashion we climbed up past mud-brick farms and through unharvested fields, the track getting ever smaller and steeper. Behind us the dying sun was sketching deep-cut shadows in the hills. We passed a group of hayricks, and above them a herd of cows chewing their evening cud. In the distance I could hear the ringing of bells as the shepherds led their fat-tailed sheep home for the night. We climbed on; and eventually, doubling back up the side of the hill and turning a corner, we arrived.

  It was an extraordinary sight. Perfectly preserved in the middle of nowhere, miles from the nearest main road, lay the ruins of a sophisticated and beautifully constructed monastic complex. It was built in a style that would not be out of place in Athens, Rome or Constantinople: the porticoed and pedimented façades were supported by carved Corinthian pillars. Halls, chapels, stupas (burial mounds) – all were built in a style immediately recognisable as classical Greek. Yet these were Buddhist buildings, a few miles from the Afghan border, and they dated from the early centuries of the Christian era, long after the demise of classical civilisation in Europe.

  I stood on top of the highest stupa. A crescent moon had just risen, though it was not yet dark, and the cicadas were singing. Pillars of dung-smoke rose from the valley villages. I looked out over the landscape, astonished by what I was seeing; it was only later, in the libraries back home, that I was able to make sense of it.

  It seems that the origins of these extraordinary buildings date back to the summer of 327 BC, when Alexander the Great swept in to the highlands of Swat at the head of his victorious Macedonian army. Intending to conquer even the most distant provinces of the ancient Persian empire, Alexander had crossed in to the Hindu Kush; and there, high on the Afghan plateau, he had first heard stories of the legendary riches of the Indian subcontinent – of its gold, said to be dug by gigantic ants and guarded by griffins; of its men who lived for two hundred years and its women who made love in public; of the Sciapods, who liked to recline in the shade cast by their one enormous foot; of the perfumes and silks which, the Afghans told the Greeks, grew on the trees and even in the cabbage patches of India; of the unicorns and the pygmies; of the elephants and falcons; of the precious jewels which lay scattered on the g
round like dust; and the unique variety of steel which could avert a storm.

  It was the end of the hot season, the beginning of the rains, and Alexander had arrived at the edge of the known world. Now he made up his mind to conquer the unknown world beyond. Easily defeating the Hindu Rajahs of Swat on the banks of the river Jhelum, he prepared to cross the last rivers of the Punjab and to conquer the Indian plains. But on the swollen banks of the Beas he was brought to a halt. His homesick soldiers refused to go on; the torrential monsoon rain had destroyed their spirits where everything else – heat, starvation and disease – had failed. Alexander was forced to turn back, leaving a series of Greek garrisons behind to guard his conquests. On the return journey Alexander died – perhaps poisoned – in Nebuchadnezzar’s empty palace in Babylon; and his empire split in to a million pieces.

  In the ensuing anarchy the Greek garrisons of India and Afghanistan were cut off from their homeland. They had no choice but to stay on in Asia, intermingling with the local peoples and leavening Indian learning with Greek philosophy and classical ideas. Over the following thousand years, further cross-fertilised by Central Asian influences brought by the conquering Kushans, an astounding civilisation grew up in the fastness of the Karakorums, deep within the isolated and mountainous kingdom known as Gandhara. Hellenic in spirit, Buddhist in religion, worshipping an encyclopedic pantheon of Greek, Roman, Iranian, Hindu and Buddhist deities, Gandhara’s principal icon was a meditating Buddha dressed in a Greek toga.

  Gandhara survived for a thousand years, long after Greek civilisation had disappeared in Europe; and when it was extinguished by a further wave of Central Asian invaders in the seventh century it left behind a legacy of finely constructed monasteries – in the plains around Peshawar, Faxian, a fifth-century Chinese traveller, counted no fewer than 2,400 such shrines – and a scattering of well-planned classical cities, acropoli, stupas and superb sculptures. Most of these illustrate the Buddhist scriptures, but to do so use the motifs and techniques of classical Greek and Roman art, with its vine scrolls and cherubs, tritons and centaurs. The slowly decaying remains of the civilisation which emerged from this extraordinary clash of cultures still litter much of northern Pakistan.

  I had left Peshawar early in the morning the day before, and hitched out of town on a succession of brightly painted trucks.

  It was both harvest and election time in Pakistan, and the little roadside villages were suffering from the head-on collision of agriculture and politics. As I approached a village bazaar I would come across a traffic jam made up of bumbling herds of fat-tailed sheep, strings of bad-tempered camels and heavily-laden tractors bringing in farm-folk with their crops. I would not have to wait long to find the cause of the obstruction: from the opposite direction a float bearing a parliamentary candidate and his supporters would be making slow progress through the village lanes, waving banners, pasting posters and shouting slogans.

  For all their dour machismo, the Pathans have a great love of festivities and bright colours, and to their minds elections seem to come under the same sort of heading as New Year celebrations, pilgrimages and religious festivals. They much enjoy festooning their mud-brick houses with the colourful flags of the different political parties, even if it sometimes means that one house carries the flapping colours of three rival parties. Processions and meetings are well attended, and even the most hopeless candidate can gather a cheerful crowd of tribesmen.

  This is all very well for the candidate, but is less of a boon to a traveller trying to get anywhere at election time. In one village where the streets were clogged solid, my truck driver was forced to give up and retire to a tea shop until the procession had passed. Pin-ups dotted the walls: Benazir Bhutto, a selection of election candidates, Sylvester Stallone, Madonna and the Ayatollah Khomenei.

  ‘Which of these is the best candidate?’ I asked the chai-wallah, gesturing at the posters.

  The man shrugged his shoulders: ‘Who knows?’ he replied, glancing up at them undecidedly. ‘All are good Muslims.’

  Because of such delays, it was well past noon by the time we arrived at the ruins of Pushkalavati, the City of the Lotus. Once upon a time, Pushkalavati was a rival of the great Babylon, but its conquest by Alexander began a decline from which it never recovered. Today it is a strange and romantic ruin, more like a ziggurat in desert Mesopotamia than the remains of the one-time capital of the fertile Punjab. The barren grey clay walls rise eighty feet out of the cane-breaks, huge and sheer and craggy. Their original shape has been washed away by two and half thousand years of rain, and all that remains now is a Herculean block of mud and a series of local legends of a city made of gold.

  I climbed to the top of the vallum, unrolled a rug and sat munching away at my packed lunch; while I ate I listened to a shepherd boy playing a reed flute in the cane-breaks below. Afterwards I picked around the ramparts, trawling through the mass of pottery, bones and arrowheads which lay scattered across the hillocks of the ruin. Handles of ancient amphorae, painted shards and fragments of geometric decoration lay strewn around like autumn leaves – tens of thousands of broken shards poking out of the mud as if some ancient sledgehammer-maniac had run amok in a pottery kiln. At its height, traders came to Pushkalavati from all over the world: archaeologists have found alabaster from Rome, painted glass from Antioch and Alexandria, porphyry from Upper Egypt, ivories from south India and lacquers from the China coast. But now it was just the shepherd boy, the shards and the mud and the ruins and me. I pocketed a couple of glazed pot-handles and returned to the road.

  Beyond the ruins of Pushkalavati the first lavender-coloured peaks of the Himalayas rose in to the sky. I flagged down a passing Morris Traveller driven by an unusually small and round Pathan named Murtazar, and together we set off towards the Malakand Pass, the gateway to Swat.

  In the nineteenth century the valley’s ruler was the Akond of Swat, who inspired the Edward Lear comic poem:

  Who or why, or which, or what,

  Is the Akond of Swat?

  Is he tall or short, or dark or fair?

  Does he sit on a stool or a sofa or chair,

  Or squat,

  The Akond of Swat?

  But there was nothing in the least comical or whimsical about the Malakand Pass. Here the road rises some five thousand feet in a near-vertical ascent of only a few miles. It is a most dramatic drive up a virtual cliff-face, unspoilt by such tiresome impediments as crash-barriers or fences to break your fall. It is emphatically not a road to be travelled by anyone suffering from vertigo; nor is it recommended for anyone driving an ancient Morris Traveller – as we soon discovered.

  We had only turned the first of the great U-bends when the car began to shake and rattle like a boiling kettle. ‘Car going ruk-ruk,’ observed Murtazar. ‘This ruk-ruk not good noise.’ It certainly wasn’t. But the car jolted grudgingly on. Below, the fields of the plain of Peshawar receded in to a quilt of patchwork squares, broken by seams of poplar avenue. We crawled on, up and up, and suddenly we were there. The Traveller gave a last metallic groan and turned its nose triumphantly down in to the valley on the far side. ‘Olden car is golden car,’ said Murtazar in a tone as much of surprise as of pleasure, and as if to reward the car for its good behaviour, he turned the ignition off and let the Traveller freewheel down the slope to the banks of the Swat river.

  So relieved was I to have achieved the top of the pass that it was several minutes before I began to take in the astonishing beauty of the valley in to which we were rapidly plunging. It was like entering a lost world, a forgotten Eden isolated on its high Himalayan plateau.

  We were passing rapidly through the vortex of an ashok avenue, flanked on one side by the blue Swat river and on the other by green orchards watered by bubbling irrigation runnels. There were mangoes and cherries, quinces and apples, apricots and almonds, and beyond the orchards there were thickets of tamarisk and casuarina as well as groves of mulberry trees belonging to silk farmers. There were children paddling in t
he streams, and girls carrying brushwood bundles on their heads, and old men sitting in the shade, sucking at their silver hookahs. Everywhere you looked were the undecayed remains of the Gandharan golden age: colossal Buddhas and reliefs of the Kushan King Kanishka cut in to the rockface; huge stupas rising from hexagonal drums; and a series of fortresses sitting on vast bluffs of rock overlooking the old Silk Road.

  Though many of the most remarkable surviving Gandharan remains lie around the top of the Malakand Pass, Gandhara’s ancient capital is sixty miles to the south, at Taxila. When Alexander appeared at the mouth of the Khyber, the King of Taxila wisely decided against challenging the Greeks. Instead he met Alexander in Swat and guided him through the forests of rhododendron and alpine clematis to the walls of the city. Here, for the first time, Alexander’s troops were able to rest and take in the Indian scene.

  To the Greeks, familiar with the glories of Athens, Babylon, Susa and Egyptian Memphis, the buildings of Taxila were unremarkable: the houses were made of mud and uncut stone, and were laid out without any central order or plan. But what did amaze them were the Pathans who lived there. ‘Physically, the Indians are slim,’ wrote Alexander’s Admiral Nearchus. ‘They are tall and much lighter in weight than other men … they wear earrings of ivory (at least the rich do), and they dye their beards, some the very whitest of white, others dark blue, red or purple or even green … they wear a tunic and throw an outer mantle around their shoulders: another is wound round their head. All except the very humblest carry parasols in summer.’