by Robert Byron
A broad valley, hot and stony, intervened, where the desert flora reappeared and a solitary traveller, seeing us from afar, hid himself in a gulley till we had passed. On the other side of the valley, as we were preparing for a new ascent, a river came in sight and was flowing, to our astonishment, straight towards the mountain wall. Its behaviour was explained by a pair of rocky gates, each crowned by a watch-tower, which passed it through the mountains. We followed it, crossing from the west bank to the east by means of a dilapidated bridge, of whose two stone arches one had been washed away and replaced by a wooden suspension. The motor road, which must have joined the river further south, uses this bridge. According to the Russian who called on us at Moghor, both it and the towers were built by Alexander.
The river in question was the Murghab, which rises in the Hindu Kush and frays out to lose itself in the desert round Merv. Here it was about the size of the Thames at Windsor, though the current was stronger, flowing between low grass banks lined with reeds and bushes of pink spiraea. On the other side, groups of black tents were dotted over the green foothills.
Having ridden more than thirty miles, and Murghab being still another twelve, we stopped for the night at a robat. The people were stupid and disobliging; our room was an airless cell, and crowded with flies, which showed we must have dropped during the day; and we were glad to be gone early this morning, leaving the valley at last and emerging into a cultivated plain encompassed with grassy rounded foothills. Here it was much hotter. The cropped grass by the road already had a brown tinge, and the corn was standing high, full of pink veitches. Yet on some of the hills men were ploughing; perhaps for a second crop. As usual, the town looked like a wood from a distance, but reminded me of an Irish market-town once we were in it. The front doors lead straight out of the street into one-storey houses, so that instead of the ordinary blank walls and intervening courtyards one catches sight of the life within.
Central Asia is beginning. Conversations in Turki assailed us, uttered by hirsute, slit-eyed men wearing striped and flowered gowns. Turcomans in busbies and red robes were pacing up and down, having mostly escaped over the Russian frontier, which is only twenty miles away. We saw a party of their women, all dressed in different reds and squatting over their food in an open court; with their tall hats nodding as they ate, they looked like a bed of geraniums and sweet-williams. To our surprise we also saw various Jews seated unconcernedly before their shops.
Our gunman took us to the Governor’s house, which stands in a walled garden by the river. Outside it, on a bluff above the water, perches the old castle, now containing a small garrison. From this to the garden, the bank is lined with mulberry trees, beneath which the townsmen spend their leisure conversing, reading, praying, washing and grazing their horses. Christopher joined them with his.
The Governor was eating, but ordered us to be his guests; we have a room at the back of his secretary’s office. They tell us he is seventy years old, has a long white beard, and is much loved for his suppression of robbers. Some of the robbers were clanking about in fetters on the other side of the garden; they seemed cheerful enough. He appears to enjoy the position of a hereditary khan, and may perhaps be the last representative of those numerous independent rulers who flourished between the Oxus and the Hindu Kush till eighty years ago, when the Emir Dost Mohammad incorporated their dominions in the Afghan state. His son, who has the face of a Spanish nobleman and is dressed in top-boots, a shooting suit, trench coat, stiff white collar, and turban cocked over one eye, certainly does the honours with the air of a Crown Prince. The whole atmosphere is patriarchal. Turcomans, Tajiks, and Uzbegs, of both sexes, keep coming up the garden path to seek justice at the secretary’s window.
A black Labrador retriever and a doubtful spaniel are also wandering about the garden, both bred in Russia.
Maimena (2900 ft., c. 110 miles from Murghab), May 22nd.—Turkestan!
I have been reading Proust for the last three days (and begin to observe the infection of uncontrolled detail creeping into this diary). His description of how the name Guermantes hypnotised him reminds me of how the name Turkestan has hypnotised me. It started in the autumn of 1931. The Depression was in full swing, Europe insupportably gloomy, one asked if Communism was the solution, and the only way of escape seemed to be a villa at Kashgar out of reach of the post. I consulted the London Library, the library of the Central Asian Society, and the School of Oriental Studies; but architecturally and historically it appeared that Russian Turkestan, if not so remote, would offer more than Chinese. I gave up Kashgar, made friends with a secretary at the Russian Embassy, collected the members of a possible expedition, and went to Moscow to ask leave for it to start. To no purpose: in every department I was met by the argument that when Russian scientists, or even a single tea-taster, were allowed in India, I might go to Bokhara. In 1932 I reverted to the original plan. Another party was formed, and applied to the India Office for permission to travel up the Gilgit road to Kashgar. This application, after eliciting a curious sidelight on the sort of information confided to the India Office archives concerning peers who visit India, was forwarded to Delhi and Pekin. But before it could be answered, the government in Kashgar collapsed, civil war invaded the whole of Sinkiang, and the Gilgit road was closed to travellers. There remained a third, an Afghan, Turkestan. For it, another expedition was formed, but preferred, at the last moment, to undertake a research into the combustive properties of charcoal. I tried by myself, failed, have tried again, and now have hopes of succeeding. But though we have crossed the provincial frontier, we are still only half-way to Mazar.
When he actually met his duchess, Proust’s image was shattered; he had to build another, to correspond with the woman instead of the name. Mine has been confirmed, enhanced. In the last two days, all the novelty and pastoral romance implied in the name Turkestan have come true; already a whole chapter of history has been transferred from the printed page to the mind’s eye. I owe this fulfilment to the luck of the season. It was Mme. de Guermantes’s complexion that failed Proust. We have found Turkestan in the full bloom of early summer.
Three cars stood in the Governor’s garden at Murghab. One was the lifeless body of a grey Ford coupé. The others were Vauxhalls, new, dark red, and closed; when it rained, they were covered with tarpaulins. Early in the morning after our arrival, the Governor and his son drove away in the Vauxhalls, to Maruchak on the Russian frontier. We looked forlornly at the Ford’s engine scattered over the surrounding vegetable-beds and ordered horses.
“I can take you to Maimena in the car if you like”, said a Persian boy named Abbas, plucking the radiator out of a bush. “We will start in an hour.”
The likelihood of covering more than two or three of the intervening hundred miles in this preposterous vehicle seemed so remote that we took none of the usual precautions before starting, prepared no food, disdained, if only out of courtesy to the driver, to count the car’s spare parts, and even went so far as to wear our so-called best suits. The luggage was put into the back, where it reached to the ceiling. When Christopher and I stepped into the front, the chassis subsided a foot, as if we had been the mother-in-law in a slapstick film. Abbas was winding the crank handle. Suddenly his arm flew over his head, the noise of a blacksmith’s shop proceeded from the now collected engine, and we bounded across the Governor’s flower-beds, while Abbas, in flying pursuit, just reached the wheel in time to turn us through the gate. Down the main street the population fled; in a minute we were through the town and tearing up a deserted valley. The luggage fell out of the un-glazed windows. The radiator, playing fountains to the sky, first declined to the earth in front, then fell backwards on top of the engine, entangling itself in the fan, till we roped it up with our bedding cord. The sound of the machinery became apocalyptic, clanking and fizzing without any sort of rhythm till at last, with a final deafening cannonade, it ceased altogether and Abbas beamed at us with the expression of a conductor laying down his baton after
an applauded symphony. A sympathetic report from the near hind tyre, though a beat late, announced that it also needed rest for the moment. We had come ten miles.
There was no spare tyre. Gathering up the shreds of the outer cover, Abbas produced a patching outfit, while Christopher and I, still determined that fate should look after us, lowered our best suits on to the grass some way off. The afternoon shadows were lengthening. It remained to bring the engine to life. But this was quickly accomplished by a few random blows with a hammer, as one beats a child, and we jumped in just in time. We now began to realise that the kangaroo paces of our vehicle, though not so comfortable as the glide of the old Chevrolet, were taking us over a road which the Chevrolet could never have tackled at all.
The valley we were following was about two miles broad. A river ran along it on the west, confined in an earth cutting. On either side rose earth hills, whose boneless green contours, rounded and polished by the weather, had the glossiness of a horse’s flanks; though those on the west grew so steep towards the bottom that they met the valley with bare cliffs, revealing the body underneath, where the green vesture had no hold. Valley and hills alike were covered with a pasture of waving golden green, so rich that we could scarcely believe it had not been specially sown; until, when we came to crops, they seemed bare and thin by comparison. This wonderful country, with not a pebble in it to impede the plough or seedling, was hardly inhabited.
Not a pebble assisted the surface of the road either. When we left the valley, turning from north to northeast, the track was marked simply by two ditches, dug for that purpose, which wound in and out of the troughs of the downs. The grass which had looked so smooth from a distance was full of holes and hummocks; every bump threatened to annihilate us. But imperceptibly the distance to Maimena grew less, and we had come about forty miles when Abbas, seeing two turf pillars by the road, suggested that though his headlights left nothing to be desired we should stop here for the night. Feeling we had tempted fate enough for one day, we agreed.
A side-track from between the pillars led us over several hump-backed bridges to a solitary house and yard overlooked by a grove of poplars. Its owner came out to greet us, a man of middle height dressed in white with a white turban, whose smile, framed by a curly dark brown beard, had the innocence of a child’s. He showed us to a carpeted room furnished with a sliding wooden window, a fireplace, and a lot of old books in a niche over the door; it had the smell of an English drawing-room, exhaled by a pot-pourri of rose-leaves that were drying in another niche. Children staggered in with the luggage. Others brought us tea as we sat in the grass outside, gazing at the cool serpentine shadows among the green hills smeared with gold, above which rose the abrupt lilac peaks of the western Hindu Kush.
By supper-time, horsemen were arriving from the neighbouring villages to have their ailments treated. One had fever, one sores on his nose, which had been slit as a punishment; one headaches and vomiting in the morning; one a pestilent skin-disease all over his back, which had lasted a year and looked like syphilis: but what could we do for him? We doled-out aspirin, quinine, and ointment, all we had, and now deliberately assumed the witch-doctor’s air of mystification, saying the medicines would not work, at least in the case of the sores, unless accompanied by repeated washings in boiled water—yes, boiled, we hissed, as though it had been a toad’s liver. This morning there were more of them.
I went for a walk after breakfast in the poplar grove. Sparrows were twittering in the upper branches. Below, it was shady and damp and smelt of an English wood, which caused me a stab of homesickness. Then our host took us to see his walled garden, a vineyard with a watch-tower in the middle where he sits to enjoy the view and see who is arriving. A dank dell in one corner contained a tangle of big crimson roses, of which he picked us an armful each.
We asked if we could pay for our shelter, or at least for the food we had eaten. “No,” he said, “you cannot. My house is not a shop. Besides, you gave the people your medicines.”
“He is a holy man”, explained Abbas as we drove away, “who receives all travellers on this road. That is why he puts up these things”—pointing to the grass pillars—“so that they shall know his house is there. The name of the place is Kariz.”
The car smelt of roses as we crossed the frontier into Turkestan.
The road was now a dug road again, but offered frightful obstacles on its way through the hills. We crossed two river beds three hundred yards wide, playing musical chairs with the boulders; the gradient out of the first was so steep that we ran backwards into the water at thirty miles an hour. In every cutting the rain had cleft great fissures in the soft earth surface. Eventually we changed to the old horse-road, where engineering had not interfered with the drainage. It ambushed us instead with a regular pit, which the Ford jumped in and out of like a tennis-ball.
Twelve miles before Maimena, we stopped at a pool and a group of trees in the plain of Bokhara Kala to watch a partridge fight. The spectators formed a ring, the birds were unloosed from their wicker domes; but one turned tail after a few minutes, and scuttling through our feet, fled into the landscape pursued by us all. The road was more populous now. Most of the travellers were mounted on horses of a miniature hunter type, as though the Chinese and Arab breeds had met here; with their gay turbans, flowing beards, flowered robes, and carpets rolled up behind them, they might have stepped from any Timurid painting, but for the rifles slung across their backs. There were animals too, many snakes and tortoises, Indian jays as bright as kingfishers popping out of holes as we passed, and a species of earth-bound squirrel, light buff in colour, whose rudimentary bush of a tail, only two inches long, was the natural concomitant of a country without forests. Near Maimena the hills were more cultivated, and we noticed that as far as the plough had reached, often to the very top of each green escarpment, poppies had sprung up; so that even the peaks were dappled with scarlet among the golden green.
The Governor of Maimena was away at Andkhoi, but his deputy, after refreshing us with tea, Russian sweets, pistachios and almonds, led us to a caravanserai off the main bazaar, a Tuscan-looking old place surrounded by wooden arches, where we have a room each, as many carpets as we want, copper basins to wash in, and a bearded factotum in high-heeled top-boots who has laid down his rifle to help with the cooking.
It will be a special dinner. A sense of well-being has come over us in this land of plenty. Basins of milk, pilau with raisins, skewered kabob well salted and peppered, plum jam, and new bread have already arrived from the bazaar; to which we have added some treats of our own, patent soup, tomato ketchup, prunes in gin, chocolate, and ovaltine. The whisky is lasting out well. But the library unfortunately is down to the classics and I am now reading Crawley’s translation of Thucydides while Christopher is back at our much-battered Boswell.
We also have with us a work by Sir Thomas Holdich called The Gates of India, which gives a summary of Afghan exploration up to 1910 and describes the journey of Moorcroft, who died at Andkhoi in 1825. In this I find, on page 440: “Moorcroft’s books (thirty volumes) were recovered, and the list of them would surprise any modern traveller who believes in a light and handy equipment”. What surprises me is that considering he was away five years, there should have been so few. A light and handy equipment! One knows these modern travellers, these over-grown prefects and pseudo-scientific bores despatched by congregations of extinguished officials to see if sand-dunes sing and snow is cold. Unlimited money, every kind of official influence support them; they penetrate the furthest recesses of the globe; and beyond ascertaining that sand-dunes do sing and snow is cold, what do they observe to enlarge the human mind?
Nothing.
Is it surprising? Their physical health is cared for; they go into training; they obey rules to keep them hard, and are laden with medicines to restore them when, as a result of the hardening process, they break down. But no one thinks of their mental health, and of its possible importance to a journey of supposed obse
rvation. Their light and handy equipment contains food for a skyscraper, instruments for a battleship, and weapons for an army. But it mustn’t contain a book. I wish I were rich enough to endow a prize for the sensible traveller: £10,000 for the first man to cover Marco Polo’s outward route reading three fresh books a week, and another £10,000 if he drinks a bottle of wine a day as well. That man might tell one something about the journey. He might or might not be naturally observant. But at least he would use what eyes he had, and would not think it necessary to dress up the result in thrills that never happened and science no deeper than its own jargon.
What I mean is, that if I had some more detective stories instead of Thucydides and some bottles of claret instead of tepid whisky, I should probably settle here for good.
Maimena, May 24th.—The court of our robat becomes a market in the mornings. We are woken by the sound of hoofs, the dump of bales and a chaffering in Persian and Turki. Beneath our verandah bobs a sea of turbans, white, deep blue, pink, and black, some flat and broad, some tight and pumpkin-shaped, some wound anyhow as if they had come out of a mangle. These merchants are mainly Uzbegs, aquiline-featured and iron-bearded, all dressed in long robes of chintz or silk which bear designs of flowers, or stripes, or the big jazz-lightning effects in red, purple, white, and yellow which used to be made in Bokhara and are now thought old-fashioned. The tall leather boots have toes like canoes, high heels, and embroidery round the top. Other races throng the bazaar: Afghans from the south, Persian-speaking Tajiks, Turcomans, and Hazaras. The Turcomans are those of the Oxus, and are distinguished from the western tribes by a different hat: instead of the black busby, they sport a lambskin cone surrounded by a ring of coarse buff fur which comes, we are told, from the sag-abi, water-dog; is this an Oxus otter? The Hazaras, who are of Mongol stock, descend from Timur’s armies and live mainly in the mountains, supposedly in great poverty. Those we see here are the picture of prosperity, well-built people with handsome oval faces of a Chinese cast and complexion, who dress in short embroidered jackets not unlike those of the Levant a hundred years ago. Single exotics pick their way through the crowd: a Hindu merchant; a dervish with a live black snake, four feet long and poisonous, coiled round his neck; a little man in white ducks and a black cloth cap, who is the Russian consul. The women as usual are invisible, but the small girls wear saris and nose-jewels in the Indian way. Even the soldiers fail to strike a discord. A regiment marched through the bazaar this morning, skull-faced morbid-looking fellows when deprived of their turbans; but every other rifle had a rose in the muzzle. Perhaps Nur Mohammad was among them. There is a large garrison here to which he was returning when I said goodbye to him that morning in Kala Nao.