The Road to Oxiana

by Robert Byron

  The town has no architectural character. Its only feature is a ruined castle. Inside this rises a mound, which used to have buildings on it, as heaps of bricks show, but is now occupied by a solitary sacred grave.

  Outside the town, where the bazaar ends, lies a spacious meadow, which might be an English cricket-field, against a horizon of poplars. Every evening a brass band plays there in front of the Commander-in-Chief’s villa, a mud house of one storey defended by a hedge of roses. In the tea-houses near the road, someone plucks a guitar; the men put down their cups and murmur a melancholy song. A stream beside them turns a little mill, and a flock of white doves have gathered on its bank under a plane tree. The band strikes up again in the distance.

  Men with roses in their mouths are sauntering across the grass to watch the wrestling matches. Each wrestler wears a pointed skull-cap and keeps on his long gown, but is swathed round the waist with a red sash, which gives the other man a grip. Before the contest is decided, a partridge match is announced, and the ring breaks up to re-form itself round the birds. Eventually a bird escapes, and the whole audience, boys and greybeards alike, tucking up their gowns above the knee, scatter in frantic pursuit.

  Against the darkness of a coming storm, the pale orange sunset lights up the green earth-mountains, the waving poplars silvered by the breeze, and the multicoloured dresses of the sporting populace.

  Andkhoi (1100 ft., 82 miles from Maimena), May 25th.—We have hired a lorry to take us to Mazar-i-Sherif. It is a new Chevrolet, and its accessories, self-starter, milometer, etc., work. This is the way to travel here. We sprawl over the benches with all our necessaries, food, water-bottles, cameras, books, and diaries about us, while the heavy luggage rides on top. The chauffeur is an Indian, a Peshawari, and consequently most respectful, but he stutters, and when he and Christopher get stuttering together conversation moves slowly. Besides him, we have old Puss-in-boots with his rifle, from Maimena, and a couple of Turcomans, one resembling a Guards’ officer, the other an Etruscan Apollo.

  For travelling, Puss-in-boots wears a brownlamb skin hat, a frock-coat of black felt, and breeches of the same which are left undone in front; there is another pair underneath, but the effect is arresting. His name is Ghapur.

  From Herat to Maimena we were travelling mainly north-east. On leaving Maimena we turned due north up a valley such as one finds among the Wiltshire uplands, where the villages are lined in close succession along a small nameless river meandering through orchards and fields: orchards in this case of mulberries and apricots; fields of pale-blue flax flowers. After Faizabad, the chief of the villages, the hills grew lower, the ground barren, and the air warmer; we began to skid in sand. A flat horizon opened out, a sinister hot breeze struck us, and the sky grew the colour of lead. We had reached the Oxus plain, and felt the presence of the river fifty miles away as one feels the presence of the sea before seeing it. At length we sighted a flat-topped mound, on top of which, at the head of a steep stairway guarded by yellow plaster lions, stood a hideous brick bungalow. Here we found the Governor of Maimena, a giant of a man with spectacles, a small black beard and a feminine voice, to whom we presented a letter from Shir Ahmad.

  “Yes,” he said, “the ground is all cooked between here and Mazar, but it is green again near the Jihun”, employing this word for the Oxus, and not understanding our reference to it as the Amu Darya. He gave orders for our lodging in Andkhoi, which was still two miles off.

  Andkhoi is the centre of the lambskin trade. At the depot in the bazaar, which was also stacked with Russian petrol and galvanised iron pails, we watched the skins being cured in a solution of barley and salt, laid out on the roofs to dry, and heaped into bales for packing. The manager said that the Jews had been deported from here to Herat in order that the trade should be no longer in the hands of “foreigners”. Most of the flocks, he added, were owned by Turcomans. The Andkhoi skins were the best of all, those of Akcha nearly as good, and those of Mazar, where the ewes lamb three or four weeks later, not so good. Every year he sent a lakh (7500) of skins to London.

  Christopher asked if he could buy some skins. Fine ones, of course. “This quality”, said the man, producing a pelt large enough for a pair of doll’s cuffs, “costs 70 Afghanis (£1 : 15s.). The best quality, suitable for a good hat, is worth 100. But we don’t get many of them.”

  It is Friday evening, and people are celebrating the holiday at tables under the mulberry grove outside the bazaar. I am writing among them, drinking whisky with snow in it and waiting for a pilau.

  Mazar-i-Sherif (1200 ft., 122 miles from Andkhoi), May 26th.—I must confess that for me our arrival here this evening was a solemn occasion. I left England in August with two hopes: one, to see the monuments of Persia; the other to reach this town. Neither was very formidable, but they have taken some time to fulfil.

  We were out of Andkhoi by five o’clock in the morning. Espying a flock of sheep when the sun was up, we stopped the lorry and walked towards it over the sparse crackling pasture that makes the wool curl. The shepherd was an Uzbeg, and would have no truck with us at first, supposing we were Russians. He excused his ill manners later by explaining that three years ago the Russians had stolen sixty thousand of the best sheep, which made us wonder if the disgraced Jews might not have been concerned in some transaction of this kind. His flock consisted of two breeds: Karakulis, which give the finer fur, and Arabis; catching a ram of one and an ewe of the other, he showed us how to distinguish them by the tails. Both grow fat tails, but while the Arabis’ are round or kidney-shaped, the Karakulis’ dangle a pendant from the middle.

  Further on, we found a Turcoman encampment. The men were out, but the dogs attacked us, and as the women would not call them off, it needed twenty minutes’ studied resolution to make the snarling beasts retire. Two old witches, presumably widows, came out to greet us dressed in loose ugly robes of grey-blue sackcloth, though they kept the tall head-dress. The younger women, who stayed at a distance, were a beautiful sight moving hither and thither among their black bee-hives, sweeping the ground with pink-and-white draperies, and making a show of modesty behind long veils of rich saffron yellow that fell from their tall pink hats. These veils often take the form of coats. We passed some women later in the day, still dressed in red, whose faces were framed in coats of deep cornflower blue embroidered with flowers.

  I approached a mother and two children. They fled into a kibitka, and I turned to a younger woman of magnificent carriage who was clasping a baby. Placing it behind a wattle screen, she grabbed a pole, traced a circle in the dust in front of it, and came at me like a mediaeval knight. Her face was screwed up with anger, and there was something in the tone of her denunciations that made me uncomfortable, as if I were meanly taking advantage of her man’s absence. The two old witches chuckled at the scene. But our guard, a new one who had joined us at Andkhoi, was ashamed, and said that Afghanistan was like that. He had on a sophisticated Western mackintosh, and was always taking snuff from a silver-mounted gourd with a ruby in the lid.

  One kibitka was empty, a guest-house perhaps, and we could examine it unthreatened. A dado of trellis-work on the inside, and another of rush-matting on the outside, enclosed the bottom of the black felt dome. This was stretched over a frame of bent wood, which was attached, at the apex, to a sort of circular basket open to the sky and serving as a chimney. Beneath the basket hung a festoon of black tassels. Double doors opened from a stout wooden frame; both were slightly carved. There was felt on the floor, and the furniture consisted of carved and painted chests. The general effect was not at all squalid or savage. As we left, we saw one of the kibitkas being dismantled. The struts of the frame, when folded up, resembled a bunch of thin skis. But the basket apex, as big as a cartwheel, swayed uneasily on the camel’s hump.

  It was an evil day, sticky and leaden: Oxiana looked as colourless and suburban as India. A green patch of pasture at Khoja Duka tempted us to stop again, to watch a drove of brood mares and their foals, a
mong which cavorted a raw-boned old stallion of sixteen hands, which is big for these parts. Christopher said a group of ragged children sitting on a wall reminded him of the clients at Sledmere. Then we came to Shibargan, a ruined place overlooked by a castle, whence a road goes south to Saripul. It was near Saripul that Fender noticed a Sasanian rock-carving. So he says. But we could hear no corroboration of it between Maimena and Andkhoi, and he is too unreliable for us to have gone in search of it without.

  Akcha was more flourishing. We met an ice-cream barrow under the castle walls whose owner put a table in the lorry for us to eat lunch off, and brought a pail of snow to cool our drinks.

  After Akcha, the colour of the landscape changed from lead to aluminium, pallid and deathly, as if the sun had been sucking away its gaiety for thousands and thousands of years; for this was now the plain of Balkh, and Balkh they say is the oldest city in the world. The clumps of green trees, the fountain-shaped tufts of coarse cutting grass, stood out almost black against this mortal tint. Sometimes we saw a field of barley; it was ripe, and Turcomans, naked to the waist, were reaping it with sickles. But it was not brown or gold, telling of Ceres, of plenty. It seemed to have turned prematurely white, like the hair of a madman—to have lost its nourishment. And from these acred cerements, first on the north and then on the south of the road, rose the worn grey-white shapes of a bygone architecture, mounds, furrowed and bleached by the rain and sun, wearier than any human works I ever saw: a twisted pyramid, a tapering platform, a clump of battlements, a crouching beast, all familiars of the Bactrian Greeks, and of Marco Polo after them. They ought to have vanished. But the very impact of the sun, calling out the obstinacy of their ashen clay, has conserved some inextinguishable spark of form, a spark such as a Roman earthwork or a grass-grown barrow has not, which still flickers on against a world brighter than itself, tired as only a suicide frustrated can be tired.

  Yet by degrees the country became greener, pasture covered the adamant earth, trees multiplied, and suddenly a line of bony dilapidated walls jumped out of the ground and occupied the horizon. Passing inside them, we found ourselves amid a vast metropolis of ruins stretching away to the north; while on the south of the road, the shining greens of mulberries, poplars, and stately isolated planes were balm to eyes bruised by the monstrous antiquity of the preceding landscape. We stood in Balkh herself, the Mother of Cities.

  Our guard, surveying the ruins, which were mostly left in this state by Jenghis Khan, remarked: “It was a beautiful place till the Bolsheviks destroyed it eight years ago”.

  Half a mile more brought us to the inhabited core of the place, a bazaar, shops, serais, and a cross-roads. Out of the trees to the south rose a tall fluted dome, moonlit-blue against the deep-toned verdure and the slaty frown of a storm on the Hindu Kush. We walked to this building, while the chauffeur went in search of rooms; and on emerging from behind it were surprised to see our acquaintance the Governor of Maimena in the middle of an open space. Near him stood a Frank, whose polished pea-shaped pate announced him for a German. A squad of four soldiers was drawn up on one side, a knot of officers and secretaries had gathered on the other. Between them, in front of a tent approached by carpets, the German was explaining the He of the ground to a dignified man wearing a fur hat, neatly trimmed black beard, open cricket shirt, and three fountain pens in his breast pocket.

  This man, to whom the Governor of Maimena presented us, was Mohammad Gul Khan, Minister of the Interior for Turkestan. He had driven over from Mazar to see about the rebuilding of the city. There were pegs in the ground, and a clearance has already been made between the front of the domed shrine and the ruined arch of a College opposite. The German told us he had been three years in Afghanistan and six months in Mazar, where he acts as maid-of-all-work for bridges, canals, roads, and building in general.

  The storm was approaching. Mohammad Gul, after hoping we had not been overwhelmed by the inconveniences of the road, mounted his car and drove away. His mention of a hotel in Mazar, where he expected us to be comfortable, decided us to follow him instead of stopping in Balkh. It was another fifteen miles. The deluge and the dark descended as we reached the capital.

  “Where is the guest-house?” we asked, using the ordinary Persian word.

  “It is not a guest-house. It is a ‘hotel’. This way.”

  It is indeed. Every bedroom has an iron bedstead with a spring mattress, and a tiled bathroom attached, in which we sluice ourselves with water from a pail and dry our feet on a mat labelled BATH MAT. The dining-room is furnished with a long pension-table laid with Sheffield cutlery and finger-bowls. The food is Perso-Afgho-Anglo-Indian in the worst sense of each. The lavatory doors lock on the outside only. I was about to point this out to the manager, but Christopher said he liked it and wouldn’t have them touched.

  We pay 7s. 6d. a day, which is not cheap by local standards. Judging from the excitement of the staff, we must be the first guests they have had.

  Mazar-i-Sherif, May 27th.—This town owes its existence to a dream.

  In the time of Sultan Sanjar, who reigned in the first half of the XIIth century, a report reached Balkh from India that the grave of Hazrat Ali, the fourth caliph, lay near by. This was denied by one of the mullahs of the place, who believed, as most Shiahs still do, that his grave was at Nejef in Arabia. At this, Ali himself appeared to the mullah in a dream and confirmed the report. The grave was found, and Sultan Sanjar ordered a shrine to be erected over it, which was finished in 1136 and provided the nucleus of the present town.

  This shrine was destroyed by Jenghis Khan. In 1481 it was replaced by another at the instance of Hussein Baikara, who had been campaigning in Oxiana the year before. Thenceforth Mazar became a place of pilgrimage, and gradually ousted the fever-stricken ruins of Balkh as the chief town of the district, just as Meshed, by the same process, ousted Tus in Khorasan.

  There is not much to be seen of Hussein Baikara’s building from the outside; though its two shallow domes, indicating an inner and an outer sanctuary, suggest that the plan was copied from Gohar Shad’s Musalla. The exterior walls were entirely retiled in the last century with a coarse geometric mosaic of white, light blue, yellow, and black. Even since Niedermayer was here, there have been additions; the Italian balustrades of turquoise pottery along the main parapets do not appear in his photograph. All the same, the group as a whole is not unpleasing; it might be described as a cross between St. Mark’s at Venice and an Elizabethan country-house translated into blue faience.

  Outside the big shrine stand the ruins of two smaller ones. Their domes have fallen, but each retains panels of mosaic round the drum, ugly in colour owing to an excessive pinkish ochre. Like the Mausoleum at Herat, the easterly one contains an inner dome, a shallow intermediate structure resting on the wall of a gallery inside the drum. Above this can still be seen the curved brick buttresses which supported the upper dome as it rose from the outside of the drum.

  As at Meshed, there has been a clearance of houses round the shrine, so that it can be seen from a distance completing the vistas of various streets. Indeed the whole town has been smartened up lately. The bazaars are new and whitewashed, and their roofs are supported on piles which let in light and air underneath. In the new town, where the hotel and Government offices stand, the roads are edged with neat brick gutters. The traffic is shared between the Indian gharry, with an awning, and the Russian droshky, with its high wooden yoke over the horse’s neck. After Murghab and Maimena we feel in contact with the outer world again, and wish we had stayed longer in those places. Still, it would be churlish not to admit that the town is the pleasanter for these improvements. We are certainly enjoying the hotel.

  There seem to be objections to our visiting the Oxus. The Governor and the Mudir-i-Kharija are both away at Haibak, and we have had to deal with the latter’s deputy, a callow pompous young man, who received our proposals disdainfully. But he evidently has no power of decision in the matter. We must ask assistance of the Vazir
, as Mohammad Gul is called.

  Mazar-i-Sherif, May 28th.—There is a public garden outside the hotel, growing sweet-williams, snapdragons, hollyhocks, and evening primroses. Between the beds little benches have been placed, and more popular rush-mats, where people sit and drink tea while the music plays. There are two bands. One stands in the sun, a row of old men with brass instruments; they know three European tunes, and are accompanied by two young men behind, who strike every beat on the triangle and drum. The other sits lackadaisically on a dais under a tree and plays Indian music on a guitar, various drums, and a small harmonium. We listen from our rooms, whose French windows open on to a verandah behind the garden.