The Road to Oxiana

by Robert Byron

  Each afternoon, as the clouds gather on the mountains, an irresistible lassitude descends. Flies and a sticky warmth fill the room. The sound of partridges clucking turns my dreams into a September afternoon at home, till I remember they are waiting to be fought. Why these clouds? It is hot enough, but the summer ought to have set six weeks ago. Such a year has never been known. The rain that fell the night we arrived has closed the road to Kabul for a month; a whole village has fallen into the gorge at Haibak. If we ride on from here, as may be necessary, we shall have to camp out, and apart from designing a couple of mosquitonets, we have been too lazy to see about an outfit. Water is the main difficulty of such a journey, as sufferers from syphilis of the throat, who are numerous, are apt to choose the wells to spit in.

  Our hopes of the Oxus have been further discouraged.

  The Muntazim of the hotel, a fat elderly disagreeable man, acts as our gaoler. This morning he followed us protesting to Mohammad Gul’s office, where we learnt that the Vazir would be asleep till eleven. At eleven he followed us back there. The Vazir was still asleep. He then followed me to the telegraph office, puffing and sweating in the heat; the more he puffed, the quicker I walked. The Muntazim-i-Telegraph, whom I had been told of by his fellow in Herat, said he had forgotten all his English in the stress of speaking Russian; there was a Russian in the office with him. He suggested I should go to the doctor instead. On the way to the hospital I jumped into a pony cart, leaving the Muntazim-i-Hotel in the road. But the driver, it appears, will have to complete the report of my movements.

  The doctor, Abulmajid Khan, proved to be a Cambridge graduate, a charming and cultivated man, whose natural reserve, so rare in Indians, soon expanded into geniality. He has been here eight years, and, seeing my surprise, explained that he had had to leave the Indian Medical Service owing to an incident connected with the Non-Cooperation Movement. He spoke rather wistfully of this youthful indiscretion, which had wrecked his career, and added that the Non-Cooperation Movement seemed to be dead now, as if to imply that the effort which had cost him so much had been given to a lost cause. But there was no bitterness in his voice, and none of that embarrassing defiance which Indian nationalists often assume towards an Englishman. I tried to convey, without seeming fulsome, that the nationalists had my sympathy and that of many more Englishmen today than ten years ago. There was no bitterness either in his remarks about Afghanistan. He is fond of the people and of his work, in which he differs from the other Indians I have met in this country.

  It is not easy work. He has to run the hospital on 10,000 Afghan rupees a year, the equivalent of £250. The beds are contained in two or three one-storey pavilions, which stand in a shady garden full of twittering birds. They looked rough, but clean and well ordered. The patients suffer mainly from cataract, stone, and syphilis.

  I told the doctor of our wish to visit the Oxus and of our attempts to see Mohammad Gul. He said the latter’s attack of sleeping sickness was merely a polite intimation that he did not wish to discuss the matter with us. I asked him what further steps we could take. He suggested we write the Vazir a letter in English, but so elaborate in style as to be beyond the powers of the Muntazim-i-Telegraph to translate. In that case, one of the resident Indian merchants will be summoned, who may put in a good word for us.

  The result of this suggestion has been as follows:

  His Excellency Mohammad Gul Khan,

  Minister of the Interior for Turkestan.

  YOUR EXCELLENCY,

  Knowing from personal experience that Your Excellency’s day is already too short for the public welfare, it is with signal reluctance that, in the absence of Their Excellencies the Wali and the Mudir-i-Kharija at Haibak, we venture to lay before Your Excellency a trifling personal request.

  In undertaking the journey from England to Afghan Turkestan, whose tedium and exertions have already been thrice repaid by the spectacle of Your Excellency’s beneficent administration, our capital object was to behold, with our own eyes, the waters of the Amu Darya, famed in history and romance as the river Oxus, and the theme of a celebrated English poem from the sacred pen of Matthew Arnold. We now find ourselves, after seven months’ anticipation, within forty miles of its banks.

  Understanding from the secretary of His Excellency the Mudir-i-Kharija that an extraordinary permission is necessary to visit the River, we request this permission for ourselves, confident that Your Excellency will not be deluded into imputing a political motive to what is but the natural curiosity of an educated man.

  The fact that others, in their lesser wisdom, may be victims of this delusion, reminds us that Afghanistan and Russia are not the only countries in the world to be separated by a river. We dare observe that an Afghan traveller, sojourning in France or Germany, would encounter no regulations to prevent his enjoying the beauties of the Rhine.

  There are indeed some countries where the Light of Progress has yet to pierce the night of mediaeval barbarism, and where the foreign visitor must expect to be obstructed by ill-conceived suspicions. But we consoled ourselves, during our stay in Persia, by the consideration that we should soon be in Afghanistan, and should thus escape from a parcel of vain and hysterical women to an erect and manly people, immune from ridiculous alarms, and happy to accord that liberty to strangers which they justly demand for themselves.

  Were we right? And on returning to our country, shall we say that we were right? The answer lies with Your Excellency. Certainly, we shall tell of the hotel in Mazar-i-Sherif equipped with every comfort known to the great capitals of the West; of a city in course of reconstruction on lines that London itself might envy; of bazaars stocked with all the amenities of civilisation. But are we then to add that though Your Excellency’s capital holds everything to delight the visitor, nevertheless the chief, the unique attraction of the district is denied him? that, in short, he who comes to Mazar-i-Sherif will be treated as a spy, a Bolshevik, a disturber of the peace, if he asks to tread the shores where Rustam fought? We believe that Your Excellency, jealous of your country’s good name, would deprecate such statements. We believe also that when you have read this letter, they will not be necessary.

  We had hoped originally to make a journey by horse along the River from Pata Kissar to Hazrat Imam. If this is inadvisable, we should be content simply to ride or drive from here to Pata Kissar and back. All we desire is a sight of the River, and any point will serve this purpose if Your Excellency cares to suggest another. We have mentioned Pata Kissar because it is the nearest point, and because from there can be seen the ruins of ancient Termez on the opposite bank.

  With apologies for troubling Your Excellency with so long a letter in a foreign tongue.

  We are, etc., etc.

  The invention of this grotesque document has afforded us almost too much amusement. Mohammad Gul must be a greater fool than he looks if his vanity is deceived by it.

  Mazar-i-Sherif, May 29th.—The letter has at least provoked an answer. Refusal.

  It appears that Mohammad Gul is not simply being disagreeable. High policy is involved, which lays down that permission for foreigners to visit the River must be got from Kabul; so that even if he wished, Mohammad Gul could not let us go without a correspondence that might take a month now that the telegraph is cut at Haibak. Apart from this, there is also a local obstacle. In the last six months, huge bands of Turcomans have crossed the River from Russia and settled themselves in the jungle on the south bank. Their lawlessness alone would prevent our proposed ride to Hazrat Imam. It would also give cover to any Bolshevik agents who might think it their duty to prevent two Englishmen from reconnoitring the frontier. This last reason might sound unnecessarily imaginative if it did not correspond with information given us in Meshed.

  According to the doctor, who visited Tashkent some years ago and was not well received there, we shall miss nothing by not seeing Pata Kissar, which consists of two tents, one for the customs officer and one for the guard; there used to be some buildings, but
they were swept away by a flood. He agrees, however, that the ride to Chayab or Hazrat Imam would have been interesting, taking us through a beautiful country renowned for its pheasants; though there are no tigers there as I thought.

  All the same, I should like to have seen the ruins of Termez; Yate describes them as looking very impressive from the south bank, and there is an early minaret among them which Sarre illustrates. But it is precisely Termez, I suppose, that those putative agents would object to our seeing. The railway from Bokhara ends there, and the place is held by a regiment from European Russia. It is the Peshawar of Russian Turkestan.

  The Russian forces on the Oxus are not there for ornament. They actually invaded Afghanistan at the time of Amanullah’s dethronement. It was not a very serious invasion, though sufficient to explain our guard’s remark at Balkh; the whole force consisted of about 300 men, three guns, and a small medical service. At one moment they were shut up in the fort of Dehdadi, a large walled enclosure which we passed on the road between here and Balkh and noticed because the walls, instead of falling to bits, were in good repair. Here they were besieged by hordes of Turcomans, whom they held off by dragging their guns from one side of the walls to the other. But the Turcomans, who are said to have numbered more than 20,000, put up a wretched fight.

  One imagines the hysteria that must have shaken the Government of India when it heard of this incursion, regardless of the fact that, as far as I can see, the Russians were only doing what we do every year on the North-West Frontier: smothering tribal unrest before it could spread over the border. No doubt, if opportunity had arisen, the Russian troops would have acted in Amanullah’s interest, just as ours, in similar circumstances, might have acted in King Nadir’s. But the broad issue is clear. If the Afghans can’t keep their own house in order, the Russians will be liable to do it for them on the north, just as we do on the south. They showed this then; they were ready to show it again last November, when I was in Herat. No wonder the Afghans are nervous, particularly up here. It is only eighty years since this part of Turkestan was incorporated in the Afghan state. Access from Kabul is difficult owing to the Hindu Kush. The local Turcomans, swollen by disaffected refugees, are regarded by the Russians as a potential source of anti-Bolshevik infection. Naturally, the province’s real safeguard lies in the fact that the Russians are not anxious to embroil themselves with the British, and that Afghanistan intact, if quiet, is useful to both Powers as a buffer. But the Afghans think it humiliating to admit this. None the less, they know well enough that the way to keep the Russians at arm’s-length is to keep their own country peaceable, and that the best means of doing this are telegraphs and roads: the former to summon troops, the latter to convey them, to the scene of any rising. We have seen something of their efforts in this respect. But the national communications will need a lot of improvement before they cease to be at the mercy of the weather.

  As we suspected after our conversation with the Uzbeg shepherd, it was fear of Russian penetration, economically if not by force, that led to the expulsion of the Jews last winter. There were always a few Jews in Afghanistan, squalid ill-bred people, unprosperous and unimportant. These Jews have stayed behind; we saw some of them in Murghab. The ones I met at Kala Nao in such distress were Bokhara Jews—I thought perhaps they were—who only came to Afghanistan after the Revolution, when they were assisted to escape by an Afghan consul in Tashkent who could be bribed for visas. But as Jews always will, having settled in a new country, they still kept up a connection with the parent community, and the Afghans began to fear that most of the profits of the lambskin trade were being surreptitiously diverted to Russia; not to mention the sheep themselves. The Jews have not been the only sufferers from this kind of jealousy. Ten years ago there were about 400 Indian traders in and around Mazar. Since then, particularly since the advent of Mohammad Gul, they have been systematically blackmailed out of business, till only five or six are left, and the Government of India, having done nothing to help them, is supposed to be in its dotage.

  Poor Asia! Everything boils down to the inevitable nationalism, the desire for self-sufficiency, the wish to cut a figure in the world and no longer be called interesting for lack of plumbing. Afghan nationalism is not so undignified as Persian because the officials have learnt, thanks to Amanullah’s bowler, that the people they seek to inspire with it are still prepared to fight before throwing away tradition for a mess of technical pottage. But it goes its way in silence, sometimes sensibly in the direction of public benefits such as roads and posts, sometimes in that of such extravagant eccentricities as the hotel here and the rebuilding of Balkh. These are Mohammad Gul’s personal schemes; they reveal the extreme nationalist, who cares more for symbols than utility, the Afghan de Valera who would even go so far as to change the official language from Persian to Pushtu. All the same, Mohammad Gul is more than a froth-blower; our conversation at Balkh brought us into contact with a singular man. He was educated in Turkey, became an associate of Enver Pasha, and was with him near Bokhara when he was killed by the Russians. In his own country he enjoys a unique reputation for incorruptibility and disinterestedness; this is the secret of his power, which extends beyond the boundaries of Turkestan. In fact, we hear that this is why he is kept in Turkestan.

  Mazar-i-Sherif, May 30th.—We spent today at Balkh.

  The shrine in the inhabited part of the town was put up to the memory of Khoja Abu Nasr Parsa, the son of a more famous saint, Khoja Mohammad Parsa, who brought religion to the poet Jami when he was five years old and died at Medina in 1419. Abu Nasr Parsa became a theological lecturer in Herat, at the college founded by Firuza Begum, the mother of Hussein Baikara. Later he seems to have settled at Balkh, for in 1452 he came forward there to advise Babur, son of Baisanghor, against crossing the Oxus and attacking Abu Said. He died in 1460.

  The body of the building is a plain brick octagon, which is concealed, and overtopped, by a tiled façade flanked with glistening corkscrew pillars. From behind the façade, standing on the octagon, the fluted dome rises to a height of eighty feet. Two minarets also stand on the octagon, clumped in between dome and façade.

  The colours of the façade are confined to white and dark and light blue, reinforced by discreet touches of black. It is the absence of purple and other warm tints which produces the silvery effect that struck us on first arrival. This effect is continued by the dome, whose fat round ribs are covered with tiny bricks glazed with greenish turquoise; where the glaze has worn off, at the top, the ribs are white and look as if they had received a fall of snow. Like the other two domes of this type at Herat and Samarcand, that of Abu Nasr Parsa has a monumental pride. But the building as a whole is unsubstantial and romantic. An unknown force seems to be squeezing it upwards. The result is fantasy, and in some lights, an unearthly beauty.

  We could not enter; but on creeping into one of the sixteen window embrasures that surround the drum, were assailed by the sound of a village choir-practice. This arose, as usual, from a mullah and his pupils.

  There is another shrine outside the east gate known as that of Khoja Agacha. Who St. Agacha was I don’t know. Hussein Baikara had three grasping mistresses of that name, and Babur a wife. They came of an Uzbeg family.

  It is not an interesting building. The dome has disappeared. Round the drum runs a glazed Kufic inscription. Near by lies another of those crouching artificial platforms to which Balkh owes its archaeological fame.

  We lunched under a plane tree among a crowd of turbaned navvies. The plan of the new city is as ambitious as Canberra, but no one who can help it will come from Mazar to this fever-stricken air; one might as well rebuild Ephesus in the hope of displacing Smyrna. Later, I was drawing the shrine when a black-bearded person in Kabuli dress came up, muttered after my health, and stated that while photographing was permitted, drawing was not, and that my sketch was therefore his. At this I was seized by such a paralysing anger that I could not speak for several minutes. When I could, the words were take
n out of my mouth by one of the servants from the hotel who, as he put it, “made fight” with the officious brute and learned that he was employed in the rebuilding scheme. By the time they had finished, my drawing and I were out of sight.

  Doctor Abulmajid came this evening to give me an injection. He had to ask leave to do so, and thought it more discreet not to dine with us. But we managed to give him a cold whisky and soda, having secured four bottles of soda water from the photographer’s and put them in a pail of snow. It was a triumph for all of us. But I could see that the taste of a “burra peg” again reminded him sadly of his youth and promise. I went to his house the day before yesterday, one of the ordinary mud houses of the place, and found he had had his chairs and sofa covered with loose frilly chintz in the English country way.

  He told us that until Foucher came here a few years ago and bought them all up, the old Greek coins of Bactria were still in circulation. Since then, people have begun to think them priceless and ask twenty or thirty times the museum value for them.

  Fruit has begun: delicious apricots, and now some cherries, but these are of the Morello kind, so bitter that we have had them made into jam.

  Mazar-i-Sherif, June 1st.—Yesterday morning Christopher called at the Mudir-i-Kharija’s office to ask permission to visit the Russian Consulate. His excuse was that we needed some visas, of which there is in fact no hope, though it is tantalising to think that Bokhara is only fifteen hours from Termez by train. However, he had no chance of using this excuse, since even the Mudir-i-Kharija’s deputy is asleep to us now. He therefore went by himself, breasted his way through a posse of Afghan soldiers who presented their bayonets at him, and at length reached M. Bouriachenko, a small intellectual man who was sitting under a tree reading.

  “You want visas for Samarcand?” said M. Bouriachenko. “Of course you do. I will telegraph to Moscow at once to say that two Oxford professors of Islamic culture”—(God forgive us, we both left Oxford without degrees)—“have arrived here and are waiting for permission to cross the Amu Darya. No, there is nothing to see at Termez. The place you ought to go to is Anau. Professor Simionov has just written a book on the Timurid monuments there. I wish I could give you the visas at once, but I’m afraid it will take a week or so to get a reply. Anyhow you are here for a bit, that’s the main thing. We must have a party. Will you come?”