The Places in Between

by Rory Stewart

  "And," the old man interrupted, "there were two giant golden birds on the battlements, except one was melted down to make that cauldron in the mosque in Herat."

  "In my village," said the man from Beidon, "we have found weapons where my father said Genghis's first attack was defeated. He made his second attack at this very time of year, while the snow still lay on the ground, sending one army up the old wooden causeway from Kamenj."

  "It was destroyed twice," Bushire added, "once by hailstones and once by Genghis."

  "Three times," I said. "You're destroying what remained."

  They all laughed.

  Gaming piece and terra-cotta ewer excavated at Ghor

  TRACES IN THE GROUND

  If this was the Turquoise Mountain, then the bricks of the minaret were made with the blood of the citizens of Ghazni and the village was digging through the traces of more than a single Afghan culture. As the capital of a Silk Road empire, the Turquoise Mountain contained art imported from all over twelfth-century Asia. The new colors and motifs of Iranian porcelain and the new forms in Seljuk metal would have lain alongside Ghorid innovations in architecture. We know very little about this period because, just as Genghis buried the Turquoise Mountain, he also obliterated the other great cities of the eastern Islamic world—massacring their scholars and artisans, turning the irrigated lands of central Asia into a waterless wilderness, and dealing a blow to the Muslim world from which it barely recovered. The Turquoise Mountain could have told us much, not only about Afghanistan but also about the lost glory of the whole of pre-Mongol Asia.

  The chronicler Juzjani, who was alive when the city was at its height, wrote that the Friday Mosque was filled with Indian treasure looted from Delhi and that on "the palace-fortress are placed five pinnacles inlaid with gold and also two gold humae36 each about the size of a camel." Juzjani has often been accused of making up his description of the city, but the villagers' discoveries suggested he may have been accurate. The huge Friday Mosque beneath the two giant minarets must have filled the entire base of the gorge, straddling the Hari Rud River. Above it, a wall of tightly packed houses must have risen almost vertically to the castles on the ridgeline. The city would have reflected the Ghorid sense of landscape in their architecture and their pioneering use of terra-cotta decoration, calligraphy, and tile work. The magnificence of the city could now, however, only be sensed from the grandeur of the lone surviving minaret.

  The villagers' excavations had already done so much damage that the site might never reveal much about the mysterious culture of the Ghorid period. Most of its artistic treasures were on their way through Pakistan and Iran to European markets. But even the debris scattered around the trenches hinted at how unusual this culture had been.

  I had thought at Chist that the Ghorids defied the economic and administrative logic of their time by building in the mountains, but I had not understood the extreme to which they had gone. The valley floor was hardly a hundred meters wide and so barren that even Bushire's goat was too weak to walk. Food, fodder, and all goods for the city must have been carried in, either over the snow passes we had just crossed or, if the villagers were right, on a causeway of planks laid for five kilometers up the Hari Rud River.

  The valley walls were steep, prone to landslides, and difficult to build on. The lower houses must have received at most an hour's sunlight a day. No easy roads connected the city to the Ghorids' kingdoms in Herat, Bamiyan, or Ghazni, still less Delhi. Nevertheless, the villagers' excavations suggested that more people had lived in this remote, unpleasant, impractical gorge eight hundred years ago than lived in any town in Ghor today. This suggested a great deal about the power of the Ghorids and their desire to emphasize their mountain roots in opposition to the rival nomads of the plains.

  The Turquoise Mountain was only the most dramatic and most recent victim of a general destruction of Afghanistan's cultural heritage. The demand for these historic objects and the money for the excavations came from dealers and collectors predominantly in Japan, Britain, and the United States. A month after I left the village, items from Jam—described as Seljuk or Persian to conceal their Afghan origin—were being offered on the London art market.

  Antiquity looting is an ancient and highly controversial problem and because of the money involved, it is almost impossible to stop.37 But the situation in Jam was comparatively simple. A single, small site of immense historical importance lay in a remote location that could be manageably enclosed, policed, and monitored. Any items reaching the international market from Jam were not chance finds, but deliberately stolen. The local villagers were earning only a dollar or two a day digging and could have been employed by an archaeological team to work with an official excavation, rather than against it. Ismail Khan, the most powerful man in the province, did not earn much from the illegal antiquities trade in comparison with the cross-border trade in other items from Herat. He would have seen providing security at the site as an inexpensive and uncontroversial opportunity to cooperate with the international community. One reasonably energetic and committed foreign archaeologist with decent funds could have stepped in to protect the site at any time. I guessed, however, that the international community would not act before it was too late, and I was right.38

  Just before I left the site of the Turquoise Mountain, Abdullah, Bushire's son, showed me three pieces he'd found that morning. They suggested the Ghorid dynasty was in some ways more open to the world in the twelfth century than the government in Herat is today. One was a fragment of porcelain that appeared from the delicate design in under-glaze red to have been imported eight hundred years ago from China on a trading route four thousand kilometers long. The other was a coin depicting Zoroastrian fire worshippers, one element in the complex religious patchwork from which the minaret emerged: The Hebrew tombstones showed there had been Jews; the indigenous people had perhaps been Hindus; while the Ghorids' second capital of Bamiyan was dominated by two giant Buddhas.39 The third piece was a fragment from the rim of a plate. On the surface, cross-legged in a brightly colored robe, a man with a halo preached in a flower garden. Mani, the founder of the now dead Manichean religion, was associated with bright robes and flower gardens. It has always been assumed that the Manicheans left this area centuries before the Turquoise Mountain, but the shard made me wonder whether they had not survived under the protection of the Ghorids until Genghis's invasion.

  "These pieces suggest very interesting things about the culture of the Turquoise Mountain and about Afghanistan," I said, handing them back to Abdullah.

  "I don't know about that," he replied, "and I won't be able to sell them. But," he said, smiling, "I like the man on this plate and I think I'll keep him."

  BETWEEN JAM AND CHAGHCHARAN

  Babur and I had eaten well at Seyyed Umar's, but we were living mostly on dry bread, which did not provide much protein. I had been walking for fourteen days, and despite the antibiotics, my stomach was still very weak. I was looking forward to reaching Chaghcharan, which was the district capital as it had been in Babur the Emperor's day. Although the roads were closed by snow, an airstrip was there and, I had been told, British soldiers and a small mission from the Red Cross. I imagined resting for a day in a private room, talking English, and getting Babur some meat before continuing into the mountains of Hazarajat.

  For the next four days we walked on a narrow path that led through the village of Beidon. Judging by the Mongol arrowheads that I was shown there, this was also the route the Mongol armies took for one of their attacks on the Turquoise Mountain. According to Juzjani, they surprised the Ghorids by doing the journey, like me, "when the snow still lay on the ground." I stayed the first night in Ghar, the second in Chesme Sakina, the third in Barra Khana, and reached Chaghcharan on the fourth. It had snowed more heavily in this region, which was at a higher altitude, and we were walking through snow most of the time.

  In the Indian Himalayas, villagers had described their landscape in terms of religious myt
h. "This hill is where Shiva danced," they said, or, "This lake was made by Arjuna's arrow." But like Abdul Haq, the Aimaq villagers defined their landscape by acts of violence or death. I was shown the hundred yards the young Commander Mullah Rahim Dad galloped when mortally wounded after an ambush by men from Majerkanda, then the grave of a young man who had died of starvation on his way to the refugee camp.

  Places in the Scottish Highlands are also remembered for acts of violence: the spot where Stewart of Ardvorlich shot a MacDonald raider, or where the MacGregors decapitated Ardvorlich's brother-in-law. Around my house in Scotland the Gaelic place-names record death: "Place of Mourning" or "Field of Weeping." But here the events recorded were only months old.

  They were inflicted not by Russians but by one community on another. The settlement of Tangia was now only a line of red mud pillars like giant rotting teeth. The school in Ghar had been destroyed. Everyone knew the men who did these things. They had watched them at it.

  On the second afternoon after leaving Jam, Babur and I turned from the broad snowfields of Chesme Sakina into a small side valley invisible from the main path. When we reached a line of leafless silver poplars along a stream and a small group of mud houses, a man ran toward me crying, "Welcome, welcome." Seizing me by the hand, he told a man to feed Babur and led me straight into his guest room without asking who I was.

  This was Dr. Paende, a veterinary doctor like Habibullah Sherwal. His room was decorated with Hekmatyar posters attacking Russia and America: "Let us combine to fling out the Red and Black imperialism." He lived with two servants and his wounded brother. Dr. Paende asked his servants to get some food. They smiled and did not move, and then he smiled and got it himself. While he was out of the room, his servants picked up my jacket and inspected all the pockets minutely. Hearing his return, they sat back in their positions beside the door.

  Dr. Paende's brother was walking with a crutch and limping. He worked for Afghan Aid and had been riding to the road head in one of their jeeps three months earlier, before the road was closed by snow. He ran into an ambush and took three bullets in the leg. His driver was shot in the head beside him and died "quite quickly." Paende was wealthy enough to send his brother to Pakistan for an operation. He had just emerged from the hospital with six pins in his thigh. The attack had been a mistake, he told me. The ambush party thought the jeep belonged to Commander Abdul Salam, who had killed four men from Barra Khana. Because they were illiterate, they had not been able to read the Afghan Aid sign. They were apologetic. There was no sense taking the incident to court.40

  Dr. Paende persuaded his younger servant to guide me. Shortly after dawn we set off across a plateau of fresh snow. It seemed endless and we did not see a track for hours. The snow was deep and came over the tops of my boots, eventually soaking my feet. To our left, a mountain range ran in a silhouette of waves, endlessly repeated, trough and crest, trough and crest. It stretched for sixty kilometers. I took out my sunglasses, but the guide had none so I lent him mine. In the glare from the flat, shadowless snow plain, I could see no more than a few yards ahead. I had no idea whether we were climbing or descending. After half an hour without sunglasses, I could hardly see at all. When I closed my eyes lights danced behind my lids and my head ached. The young man got lost and crossing the plateau took us two hours more than it should have.

  DAWN PRAYERS

  After the snow plain, Dr. Paende's guide left me. I pressed on and reached Barra Khana when the sun was just above the horizon. The snow had melted off the south-facing slopes, revealing a mustard yellow soil. The snow peaks were a gentle mauve and the distant mud houses glistened like oil. In the village, the headman, Bismillah, interrogated me for half an hour in the street. When he invited me in, his dogs attacked Babur. I slammed my staff on the ground to scare them away, and the staff snapped in the middle. Everyone except me laughed. For dinner I was given dry bread and a bowl of water with sugar dissolved in it. Nine people shared the floor with me that night.

  My host woke at half past four and, having gone outside and returned, washed his hands and feet, and began praying. The stars were starting to fade and the sky was paler over the snow peaks, but it was not yet morning. I was still exhausted from walking eleven hours the previous day and could have slept more. When Bismillah had finished his prayers he put brushwood in the stove and the others who were sharing the floor with me hurried to roll their blankets away and then knelt in a line facing west toward Mecca. It was cold and they shivered as they prayed, each speaking and bowing out of sequence.

  The mullah chanted a long sura of the Koran, reveling in the guttural sounds of the Arabic. The villagers did not speak Arabic, and I suspected they understood little more than the set phrases: "In the name of God"; "the only God"; and "God be praised." Finally everyone bowed, announced in clear voices "God is Great," then stood and knelt again and, turning to their right and left, said, "Peace be with you," twice.

  Then they sat leaning against the walls with their blankets draped over their knees against the cold, looking at me with solemn, half-awake eyes. Like Habibullah, they asked me questions that sounded anthropological but were based on Islamic practice: "In Scotland, can a widow remarry? How much of her husband's wealth can she keep? Can she marry her husband's brother?"

  The mullah told me he had recited the mariam sura about Mary, the mother of Jesus, to show how much Muslims loved Jesus. It was the sura inscribed on the minaret of Jam.

  I went outside. A thin band of yellow light had appeared on the eastern ridge and the snow glowed under a dark sky. I gave Babur a scratch and he stretched elaborately, groaned, rolled, and stood. Facing south, he greeted the morning with four gruff barks. This was the village where Dr. Paende's brother had been shot. There were signs that the graveyard on the hill had been recently excavated. Almost every village I passed was digging for antiques, often in old graves. Villagers showed me corroded spearheads, incised terra-cotta pots, and bronze bangles they had removed from the wrists of skeletons.

  Dr. Amruddin, my host in Ghar three days earlier, had been the first man to take me into the private quarters of an Afghan house. As we entered the dark room lit by a single oil lamp, women scattered into the shadows. But I saw that they wore pillbox caps and bright scarves, and had thickened their eyebrows with black dye. Later Amruddin brought out highly stylized female heads that formed the tops of clay beakers he had excavated on the hill. They were decorated with white slip on a dark brown background or with bright yellow on a red background. Their eyebrows were exaggerated bands of black glaze. I was shown the same beaker heads, with the same eyebrows and the same sharp chins, in many villages along the route.

  West of Dr. Paende's house, we passed the "snake stone" at Dahan-e-Choqur, a four-meter-high pillar of coarse mud and gravel with a flat head arched forward like a python's. Villagers had found a pre-Islamic burial site beside it. Snake cults are the earliest surviving religions in the Indian Himalayas,41 and I wondered if one had been here too.

  But again the villagers were not interested in recording or preserving historical evidence. They were digging up things from very different periods. They had found people buried eight or nine to a grave with wooden bowls and they had found tiny mud houses with pottery. But were these sites related? Who made the bowls that depicted men on horseback carrying lances? Were they the same men whose lances and helmets and shields villagers had found?

  I spent half an hour handling a fragment from a vase that must once have been two feet in diameter. It was decorated in black, cream, red, and brown. In the center of a circle neatly drawn in black on white were two isosceles triangles, one equilateral triangle with a ribbed edge, a spiral, an oblong, and a human eye. The geometric forms were elegantly balanced by the surreal eye. The design was presumably pre-Islamic, but again there was no clue as to which Afghan culture had been responsible for its strange and confident symbolic composition.

  Bismillah's son

  LITTLE LORD

  The only fe
udal lord to whom I spoke at length between Jam and Chaghcharan was a twelve-year-old.42 He had been riding for a month with a small group of retainers, having been summoned from Pakistan to meet his father, Rais Salam Khan. I met him in the village of Beidon, where I was shown the Mongol arrowheads. His father, a brother-in-law of Commandant Haji Mohsin Khan of Kamenj, was not a popular man. A number of villagers told me he had stolen land and collaborated with the Taliban, and was now in hiding because he had killed some of Ismail Khan's men. But his twelve-year-old boy was riding toward Chaghcharan like a young prince.

  Six bodyguards followed the boy into the room in which I was sitting. I stood to greet him, and he acknowledged this by putting his small hand in mine before taking the senior position in the room. His long fawn coat—identical to the one worn by his uncle Haji Mohsin—emphasized how small he was. I felt very large and unwashed. He introduced himself in an unbroken singsong voice, then added in English, "It is rather dirty here. Are you not displeased?"

  "I like it very much. Do you not?"

  "I am not really familiar with this. I study at a boarding school in Pakistan. A madrassah for Koran and English." He stroked the black down on his cheeks. I had not heard English for a fortnight. "A most excellent school. I like Pakistan very much. We have a big house in Peshawar. But I fear these people are only village people. They are not educated or civilized people. Yes," he concluded, "I prefer Pakistan."