The Places in Between

by Rory Stewart

  I had not seen this intermediate stage of decay before, only the newly dead and the skeleton. I wished the two men luck, then continued on to the plateau the old man had been crossing. A cold wind rose. The footprints on the snow path were old. After two or three hours, very conscious of the plain stretching unbroken to the horizon on every side, I stopped for some crackers and water and began to shiver, aware of my wet feet and being alone. I was suddenly defeated and I felt instinctively that I did not have the energy to make it to Kabul. Yet I rose to my feet and began walking, slowly at first and then increasingly quickly, dragging Babur behind me, wondering when my muscles would stop moving.

  At sunset, having seen no humans since the corpse, we reached three large terraces of snow so flat I realized they were a chain of frozen lakes. A waterfall had frozen into bloated stalactites streaked with intense copper oxide green and turquoise blue and sulfur yellow and creamy with snow where they struck the water. The sun sank into the straight cleft of the cliff behind me and the colored alchemy of the ice drained into twilight.

  I saw a village across the lakes, but I didn't turn toward it. Instead I pressed on toward a wall dividing the upper lake from the lower. After wanting to stop three hours earlier, I now wanted to walk across the plain. I thought of the stars over the fresh snow and the size of the plain and the peace of it. I was entranced by my forward movement. But Babur lay down in the snow. I struggled with him and pleaded, but he would not move. Finally I gave up and followed him toward a house, which we reached just after dark.

  This place was Band-e-Amir. The decayed mudroom in which we stayed had once been a guesthouse. Until the Soviet invasion, the lakes had been a tourist destination, and thereafter Russian soldiers had come here on leave. I was my host's first foreign paying guest in twelve years. My money bought five flat fishes he had caught through an ice hole in the lake. He fried them and served them with bread. He said I was lucky. The Taliban had fished by dynamiting the lake and few fish were left.

  WINGED FOOTPRINTS

  The next morning I walked across the frozen lake and, standing in the very center, looked back at a mosque carved into a cliff the color of elm wood. A smooth layer of powder covered the ice, broken only by a single set of footprints and a single set of paw prints.

  Babur and I climbed up the facing cliff onto the snow plateau we had been crossing the previous day. After a few minutes, it seemed I had never been so alone or anywhere so silent. The only sounds were the creak of my staff and my steps. I could see nothing across the whole circle of the plateau except our tracks in the snow and, behind them, the mountain peaks. The snow was light and ruffled under my boots, and when I looked back a slender feather flared out from each heel mark. As we continued, the winged footprints and the oblong grooves of the staff changed shape, freezing and melting in the sun.

  I stopped, sat down, got up, walked ten more minutes, and then, because I felt exhausted, sat down again, half buried in deep powder. My feet were wet, my hands were cold, and the wind moved in a fine white mist over the surface of the snow. I lifted my sunglasses and looked through sudden light at a landscape shrinking, contorting, corroding, dissolving. There was no winged footprint or horizon in the even glare. I could not remember why I was walking.

  I was sick, my muscles were stiff. The snow formed a bright clean cushion, perfectly shaped to my back. Lying back, I felt warm and at ease. I closed my eyes and smiled. I had done enough. It occurred to me that no one could criticize me for staying here. I half opened my eyes and the sun seemed particularly brilliant; the unbroken powder stretched without end. It was a very private place and here, buried in the snow with only my head in the sun, my body would not be disturbed for days. I knew villages lay ahead, but there seemed no point in trying to reach them.

  Beside me, Babur scuttled snow with his large paws. He buried his nose in the powder, emerged blinking with a white beard on his black muzzle, then lay down heavily, craning his head to the side to lick the ice. After a few minutes, he sat up on his haunches and then walked stiffly to where I was sitting. I could feel his warm breath on my neck as he sniffed carefully around my collar, and gently pushed his nose against my ear. When I did not respond, he backed away, watched me, approached again, and finally began to walk away across the snow plain, occasionally looking over his shoulder. When he was two hundred yards ahead he stopped, turned, and barked once. His matter-of-factness made me feel that I was being melodramatic. If he was going to continue, so would I. I stood and followed in his tracks.

  After eight kilometers, we reached a small hamlet between Subzil and Kuh-I-Kinuti where we were given bread and tea in a house the villagers said was "poor." It was. Most houses had at least one colored rug on the floor, some acrylic blankets, and a brightly decorated box in which a bride brought her possessions. But this floor was covered in undyed goat's wool, the trunk was plain tin, and the blankets were home-walked felt.56

  From the hamlet we had to climb again. Babur's foreleg was very stiff. Leading me off the plain seemed to have used up his strength. I walked on ahead, hoping that when he saw himself left behind in an empty waste of snow he would catch up. He didn't, however. He slowed almost to a halt—limping step by step toward me and hanging his head—and finally just lay down. I walked back and talked to him a little. At 140 pounds he was too heavy to carry, and at this pace we would take a month to reach Bamiyan. I tied him to the leash and set off pulling him behind me, faster than he wanted to go. I had to pull him at least as far as Bamiyan if I was to have a chance of getting him by vehicle to Kabul and a vet.

  We were following a watercourse and I was keen to get Babur some water, but the ice must have been eighteen inches thick and however often I drove my steel-shod staff into it, I was not able to break through. Higher up, however, the ice was thinner. I called Babur. "Come on, sweet, come on, my darling ... come on—there's a good dog—water...," but Babur simply lay on the bank with his head between his paws, looking at the mountains. I tried to pull him down and he pulled back. He had refused to drink from the lake at Band-e-Amir, perhaps because of the chemicals in the water. We had a whole day without water ahead.

  I squatted by the hole I had made in the ice and again splashed the water and dribbled some on his nose. He turned away, grimacing, but something penetrated and eventually he moved heavily down to the river and drank. After a couple of minutes, he straightened up, still dribbling, and looked around. I remained squatting. He lowered his head and drank again.

  We had too far to go that day to stop for long, but we did stop when we came down from the ridge into Pasuruan. Here we rejoined what had been the main road from Yakawlang. No one was using it because of the mines. The Taliban had burned Pasuruan and the next village, Ghorak, which we reached at nightfall.

  BLAIR AND THE KORAN

  Below Ghorak I met Ali, the headman's son. I explained that I wanted a bed for the night. He said it would be difficult.

  "Travelers sleep in the mosque, but you can see the mosque..." He pointed to a long, fire-ravaged shell among the abandoned houses. "No one can entertain a guest here."

  I waited in silence. After a minute he said, "We could see my father. Follow me and be careful of the mines."

  "The Taliban laid the mines?" I asked, to make conversation.

  "No, we laid them, but we can't remember where they all are."

  We climbed past ruined buildings to the crest of the hill, where we entered his courtyard house. It had been burned like the others, but the family had repaired part of one room. I could not see through the smoke from the dung-fed stove how many people sat inside, but I could hear a baby screaming in the far corner. Ali's father lay swaddled in blankets on a high iron bed. It was the first bed I had seen in an Afghan village house. Ali's father looked about eighty. He asked me to sit. Then he broke into a lung-bruising staccato cough that pulled him upright with a quivering body and wet eyes, mouthing, "In the name of Allah," and retching into a tin spittoon. When the cackle and roar subsided
, he lay down and closed his eyes and said, "I am sick. Excuse, please, my rudeness to my guest."

  "I should go..."

  "You are our guest. You will stay for meat," the headman replied. "Some rice, some meat ... My baby son is crying. He is two and I am old and too decrepit to discipline him. Accept, please, my apologies. My elder son will tell you about the Taliban and us Hazara. They burned our Koran. Look."

  Ali lifted the lid of a carved wooden box, kissed the bundle inside, unwrapped it carefully, said a prayer, and opened the Koran. The fire had consumed one corner, exposing thin layers of oil-blackened paper, and as Ali opened the book, some ash fell from the binding.

  "The Taliban did this to our holy Koran," said Ali's brother.

  "If you want to understand the Taliban, look at what they did to our holy Koran," Ali added.

  There was no electricity or television in the village. These men had never visited an Afghan city or met a journalist. I wondered why they immediately explained to me what the Taliban had done and why they focused on this Koran rather than on their families and their village.

  "Can you read the Koran?" I asked.

  "No. We cannot read or write."

  "Did the Taliban take it out and burn it?"

  "No. It was lying in one of the houses that the Taliban burned when they attacked the village."

  "So it was accidental."

  "Yes. You see what kind of people the Taliban are." He meant I imagined they were infidels.

  "How many people did the Taliban kill in this village?" I asked.

  "Five."

  "Six," corrected another. "Hussein, Muhammad Ali, Ghulam Nabi..."

  "Six," agreed Ali.

  "From your family?"

  "Yes. My brother. His father. But look at the Koran."

  There was no Pepsi in this village; the only global brand was Islam. Ali thought the only thing he and I had in common was the Koran and I would understand that anyone who burned the book, even accidentally, would be damned for sacrilege. He didn't think foreigners would be interested in deaths in his family. In a way he was right. Westerners paid little attention to the killing of the Hazara. What moved them was the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas or the fate of the lion in the Kabul zoo. In Britain and the United States nine hundred thousand dollars had been raised for the lion. Tony Blair paid particularly close attention to the Koran, but Ali would have had difficulty understanding Blair's view of it.

  On September 20, 2001, Blair packed his Korans for a tour of the Middle East. Nine months earlier, he had told an interviewer he possessed two editions. Now, according to the Guardian, he had three. "Blair," it stated, "now carries a copy of the Koran at all times for 'inspiration and courage'—a habit he picked up from President Clinton's daughter." Blair had encouraged Muslims to study their holy book before September 11, telling readers of the Muslim News, "the concept of love and fellowship as the guiding spirits of humanity is so clear ... if you read the Koran." On October 7, speaking of the 9/11 hijackers, he said: "The acts of these people are contrary to the teachings of the Koran ... It angers me, as it angers the vast majority of Muslims."

  And a week later, he said, "I can't understand how anybody who truly studies the teaching of Islam and the words of the message of the Koran can possibly justify the slaughter [of September 11]." Bush joined in: "Islam's teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith..."

  Blair's handling and discussion of the Koran would have struck Ali as highly eccentric. In Ali's view, Blair could not have read the Koran because Blair could not read Arabic. Since the Koran, unlike the Bible, is the verbatim word of God, spoken through Muhammad in Arabic, a translation is not considered to be the Koran. At times, it has been considered blasphemous to translate it at all.

  Ali carefully wrapped his Koran, kept it in a wooden box on a high shelf, and approached it only after ablutions and with a prayer. He would have been horrified to see Blair thumb through his translation on a plane or to hear Blair make confident statements about its meaning. The Koran's dense network of metaphor, poetry, and allusion is traditionally interpreted with reference to the Hadiths (sayings) of the Prophet and long traditions of legal and theological exegesis. As a result, public pronouncements on the meaning of the Koran are usually reserved for the most learned and senior of mullahs.

  Blair's confidently casual handling of the text was not supposed to be patronizing or presumptuous, but to display his sensitivity to Islamic culture. He seemed to assume the Koran resembled the Protestant Bible, which can be translated without problem; easily understood; freed of apocrypha; opened to interpretation by laypeople; and physically handled much like any other book. This assumption may be shared by other Christian commentators such as Bush. In November 2001, a photograph showed Bush casually dragging a Koran across a table with his unclean left hand, while the mullah who presented the book struggled to smile.

  Much of the British media followed Blair in defining Islam almost exclusively in terms of the Koran without reference to the text's cultural context. They might not have been as quick to reduce the Catholic Church to the gospels. But perhaps they were more interested in changing Islam than in describing it. On September 16, 2001, the Guardian remarked that the houris the Koran promises the faithful are purely innocent symbols, rather than virgins provided for sexual services, and implied the suicide bombers had been misled. A month later, the Observer wrote of one version of the faith, "This is not Islam any more than the Ku Klux Klan is Christianity." Commentators rarely described the variety of Islamic beliefs and practices. This may have been because their comments were primarily intended to calm anti-Muslim sentiment in Britain (and perhaps, in the case of Tony Blair, appeal to Muslim coalition partners). Anti-Muslims also approached the Koran without context, though in support of a different agenda. In November, the Chairman of the British National Party wrote:

  [We] began by looking for the piece [in the Koran] which has been quoted again and again since September 11th, including by George Bush, Tony Blair, Iain Duncan-Smith and an endless string of journalists: "Whoever kills a soul is like one who has killed the whole of Mankind." This sentence is at the heart of the Politically Correct campaign to ensure that the war fever against Islamic terrorists doesn't lead to an explosion of hostility against Muslims per se. After all, isn't it clear evidence that Islam is at root a peaceful, loving religion; Christianity with a towel on its head?

  Indeed it would be, if it were genuine. But the problem is that this quotation is a Politically Correct fabrication. Just look at what Surah 5, Ayat 32 actually says:

  "...whoever kills a soul, not in retaliation for a soul or corruption in the land, is like one who has killed the whole of mankind."

  He went on to cite twenty-three verses as "evidence" that Muslims are "a threat to British life."57

  SALT GROUND AND SPIKENARD

  The next day, I fell in with two Ghorak boys who were driving a donkey to Bamiyan to buy salt. We walked the first five hours, perhaps twenty-five kilometers, without stopping. I noticed very little of the landscape, but when we climbed ridges I saw how very difficult it was to move a donkey through deep snow.

  Like many villagers, the boys were tough on their donkey—I saw them break a bamboo stick on her back and then strike her with a sharp stone. But in the snow the boys beat a path for her and patiently returned to lift her whenever she lay down. She would take a couple floundering steps and lie down again while they beat more of the path and doubled back to stroke, encourage, and lift her once more. In the Qarghanatu valley, the boys pointed out a number of mines, some only two feet from the path. I tightened Babur's lead.

  In the early afternoon, we came over the Shibartu pass to what had been a Hazara resistance center. Here Khalili, the Hazara commander, had run an airstrip where supplies were dropped from Iran. All that remained of the village was a single crowded room. The other buildings had been
burned by the Taliban and abandoned. But this valley had not suffered only under the Taliban. Babur reached it in mid-February 1507:

  We descended by the hill-pass of Shibartu. The Turkoman Hazara had taken up their quarters in the line of my march, with their families and property and had not the smallest intimation of my approach. Next morning on our march we came among their huts, close by their sheep folds, two or three of which we plundered; whereupon the whole of the Hazara, taking alarm, abandoned their huts and fled away to the hills with their children.

  Soon afterward, there was information that a body of them had stopped our people in a narrow defile and were assailing them with arrows ... Our men were all rather perplexed and halted. I came up alone. I attempted to encourage them. Not one of them listened to me or advanced on the enemy, but they stood scattered about in separate places. Although I had not put on my helmet, my horse's mail, or my armor, and had only my bow and quiver, I called out that servants were kept that they might be serviceable and, in time of need, prove their loyalty to their master; not for the purpose of looking on while their master marched up against the foe; after which I spurred on and advanced...[He inserts a Turki poem about the events...]

  My men, on seeing me advance, advanced also,

  Leaving their terror behind.

  We gained the top of the hill, and drove the Hazara before us,

  We skipped over the heights and hollows like deer;

  We plundered them and divided their property and sheep;

  We slew the Turkoman Hazara,