The Road to Oxiana

by Robert Byron

  “When?” asked Christopher, forgetting to say thank you in his surprise.

  “When? I don’t know when. What does it matter? This evening? Would that suit you?”

  “Perfectly. What time?”

  “What time? Seven, is that all right? Or six? Or five or four? We can start now if you like.”

  It was half-past eleven, and a blazing hot morning. Christopher said perhaps the evening would be nicer.

  At half-past six we tiptoed out of the hotel so that the Muntazim should not hear us, reached the gate of the Consulate, where the guard brandished their weapons as before, and found ourselves in a series of courtyards shaded by trees; in the front yard stood a number of lorries and cars, including a red Vauxhall. M. Bouriachenko received us in a cool room free from icons of Lenin and Marx, and lit by a private electric light plant. I said, I supposed by his name that he must come from Ukraine. “Yes, from Kiev, and my wife from Riazin.” She walked in, a young woman plainly dressed in dark purple, whose good-natured face was framed in hair drawn flat from a parting in the middle. Others followed her: an enormous wallowing man, slightly scented, from whose pitted face came the voice of a dove; his wife, a blonde with red lips whose golden hair was brushed straight back from her forehead; Master Bouriachenko, aged five and the spit of Chaliapin; a boy and girl belonging to the second couple; the doctor, a tubby little fellow with a black moustache and butcher’s lick; another lady discreetly painted, whose fair hair was ruffled into a crest; the fat fair man I saw in the telegraph office, who said he had been a radio officer at Canterbury during the War; two natty young fellows just arrived from Kabul, who had taken a fortnight over the journey owing to the rains; and last of all a girl of fourteen, daughter of the painted lady, whose movements were beautiful to watch and who is destined to become a ballet dancer.

  Judged by Russian standards, which differ from ours, the food was not really profuse; indeed how could it be? though they had bought, at considerable expense we discovered afterwards, the last sardines in the town. But it had that air of profusion which Russians always create about them, and as new guests kept wandering in, and new tables were brought, and new chairs, and the children hopped up on people’s laps, the dishes kept pace and were still as full as ever of the sardines from India, paprika from Russia, fresh meat with onion salad, and bread. A decanter of yellow vodka, in which fruit was swimming, was endlessly replenished. The Russians, who gulped it off in cups, complained furiously of our slow sipping. But that was only at first.

  The two young men from Kabul had been bringing a number of new English records that had been ordered from Peshawar; but they had all been spoilt in the wreck of their lorry by the storm at Haibak, and the loss was a tragic disappointment to this isolated community; though to hear them apologise for it, one might have thought the records had been ordered for us instead of them. As it was, tangos and jazz alternated with Shehérezade, Boris Godunov, and Eugène Onyegin. We danced, we sang, we sat down to eat, we danced again. Conversation was in Persian, and what made it odder, when talking to one’s own kind, was the inevitable accompaniment of Persian gesture, the bowing of the head and fluttering of the eyelids, the hand on the heart, and the general assumption of self-deprecation. M. Bouriachenko and the man with the dove’s voice addressed us as “Sahib”. Perhaps they thought this sounded more equalitarian than the Persian Excellencies and Highnesses we used to them.

  The hours fled, the decanter flowed, the telegraphist was carried out, I fell into a torpor, the Russians began to unload their emotions, and when I woke up I found Christopher gasping for breath under the souls of the whole community. It was two o’clock and time to go home. The hotel was only a few hundred yards away. But M. Bouriachenko, calling for the “Consulski Vauxhall”, insisted on driving us to it. This was an act of real friendship. For whether our walk was unsteady or not, it would have been unwise to run a risk of the Afghans observing it, a fact we appreciated when a sentry thrust his rifle into the window of the car.

  This morning was painful beyond the usual run of next-mornings. We called at the Consulate after tea, bearing not flowers, but some boxes of cigars, and found them all sitting out in a sort of games-court equipped with swings and parallel bars and a high net over which any number of people, divided into two sides, can fist a soft football. A game was started for us, the party being increased now by three or four other men, proletarian savages, who are employed as chauffeurs and mechanics. The telegraphist looked older.

  M. Bouriachenko told us that the only other Russians in this part of the country were four locust-fighters living in and about Khanabad. The locusts are a new plague here. They arrived from Morocco a few years ago, breed on the north slopes of the Hindu Kush, and thence descend on Russian Turkestan, where they menace the cotton crops.

  Since there is a road from here to Khanabad, and another from there to Kabul which avoids the Haibak gorge, we have decided not to ride after all. This detour will take us 150 miles further east, to the edge of Badakshan, and the excuse for making it afforded by the blockage at Haibak is too good to miss. Christopher regrets the horse-journey, but I think the detour will be more interesting.

  Robat before Kunduz (1100 ft., 95 miles from Mazar-i-Sherif), June 3rd. —Even before leaving Teheran, we had resolved not to sleep at Kunduz if we could help it. Moorcroft died of fever caught in these marshes. There is a proverb which says a visit to Kunduz is tantamount to suicide. Here we are, therefore, lying in a mulberry grove beside a stagnant pool, both irresistible attractions to the fatal mosquito. Other pests abound. I pitched my bed near a wall. A wasps’ nest was at once discovered in it, and anyhow, people warned me, it was full of scorpions. When I suggested removing to a neighbouring garden, they said that was full of snakes. We are lucky to have ordered those mosquitonets in the bazaar at Mazar. I have draped mine over the camera tripod; Christopher had half a mulberry tree demolished to make him a framework. Frogs are blowing musical bubbles in the pool. On the south-east, a vast new range of snowy peaks has caught the first light of the moon. Our two guards are loading their rifles before going to sleep, and a cat assaults the morning’s milk. For dinner we ate scrambled eggs and onions. Christopher thought of the onions, and had them ready cooked and chopped in the hotel so that they had only to be heated. A brilliant invention.

  The day that brought us to this pass was complicated to start with by the after-effects of another Russian party. It was only a zakuska party this time; but again we danced, again the souls came out and fastened on us. M. Bouriachenko said that even if two great nations, like two mountains, were unable to approach each other, there was no reason why the individuals of those nations should not do so; for himself, he admired England and hoped for our sakes there would soon be a revolution there. He added that if only we would stay on at Mazar, instead of flying off in this absurd hurry, the Consul himself would be back in a few days with a supply of decent brandy; besides which he had every hope that our visas would be granted.

  I had no such hope. But it struck me forcibly that the policy pursued by Russia and England of mutual exclusion from Turkestan and India is beginning to lose its sense. Looking at our hosts, quiet cultivated men and women who spent their money on classical music, it seemed to us preposterous that even transit visas through India should be denied them. And it dawned on us, moreover, that the interests of Russia and England in Asia, instead of conflicting as they used to do, have now become virtually the same, particularly with regard to the buffer states between them, whose purpose in foreign relations is to assert themselves by teasing their larger neighbours. If only the Russians would consent to dam up the trickle of money and doctrine which still percolates into India as a lip-service to the Marxian creed of World Revolution, this identity of interest might emerge into the daylight. A conference between the Governor of Tashkent and the Viceroy, on Persia, Afghanistan, Sinkiang, and Tibet, would benefit both sides far more than do the maintenance of revolutionary propaganda on the one hand, and the fear
of it on the other.

  When we left, again in the Consulski Vauxhall, the whole party saw us to the gate, waving us goodbye and good journey.

  Outside Mazar this morning we met a dragon. It was 3½ feet long, yellow underneath, and rather high on its four little Chippendale legs. Lashing its tail furiously, it ran into a hole. Near by we found a sand-grouse’s nest with three eggs in it.

  At Tashkurgan, where the main road turns off to Haibak, we stopped for breakfast. I was taking a photograph of the castle, a Chinese-looking building above a mountain torrent, when the elder of our two guards, a motherly old fellow in a white frock-coat crossed with big checks, said that photographing was “unnecessary”. I answered that if he really thought that, he had better go back to Mazar; it was our lorry, and there was none too much room in it. Further on, as I was taking another picture of the Oxus plain from a convenient height, he again interfered, jogging my arm. This time I roared till his jaw and rifle dropped. When I next took out the camera, he was silent.

  We wondered why the authorities at Mazar had given us two guards instead of one. Now the guards themselves have admitted it was to prevent us taking photographs. The poor creatures are rather distressed at not being allowed to do their duty. But we really can’t help them.

  The country was still bare, but a fiery opalescence now displaced the metallic drabness of the plain before Mazar. Such pasture as there was consisted of a dry prickly clover. There were no trees and little life. Every sixteen miles we passed a lonely robat. Once we saw a flock of vultures huddled in congress round a pool. Sometimes locusts went whirring by in small coveys. The foothills of the Shadian mountains, which bound the plain of Turkestan on the south, began to curve northward and we gradually ascended them. Suddenly, 88 miles from Mazar, the ascent stopped and the road fell down a thousand feet. Beneath us, crawling up the hillside, bobbed a string of camels, each laden with a couple of wooden cots containing ladies. Beneath them unrolled the glinting marshes of Kunduz and the province of Kataghan. Far away, through the misty sunshine, rose the mountains of Badakshan, carrying my mind’s eye on up the Wakhan to the Pamirs and China itself.

  At the foot of the descent, another lorry was waiting on the threshold of a bridge made of poles and turf, which spanned a river in a cutting twelve feet deep. Our driver was about to pass, when the other lorry suddenly moved forward. The bridge quivered and sagged. In a cloud of dust and sticks, to the sound of screams and gasps and rending timbers, the lorry turned a slow side-somersault into the river, where it landed with its roof submerged and its chassis indecently exposed, while its wheels fluttered helplessly in the air. The passengers had dismounted, and the driver, whose cabin was tilted up by the opposite bank, climbed out unhurt. But someone shouted there were women inside, and with superfluous gallantry Christopher and I flung ourselves on the wreck, hacking away at the ropes that bound the outside and clearing out the bales from within, to discover there was no one there at all. As the bales were rescued from the current, the whole country grew gay with borders of herbaceous chintz, orchards of pink satin caps and swards of carpet, all laid out to dry.

  Already a swarm of half-naked men had sprung out of the fields to investigate the disaster. Now the Governor of Kunduz rode up on a fast grey pacer, an angry red-bearded man, who set about the population with his whip, bidding them haul the lorry out and mend the bridge before morning. Our luggage was put on to horses and taken across the river to a robat, which was so crowded that we have preferred to sleep in the open.

  Among the passengers of the wreck was a tall man in a heavy black beard and lounge suit who spoke German. He said he was one of the king’s secretaries, and was making this journey in order to write an Afghan travel book. There he sat on the river-bank, industriously penning it from right to left. He looked suspiciously at our whisky, though we have now learnt the habit of calling it sherbet in public.

  Khanabad (1300 ft., 27 miles from robat before Kunduz), June 4th.—The bridge was mended by midday and our lorry crossed it safely. Seyid Jemal, our driver, turned out to be the other driver’s brother. He linked our lorry to the wreck with a steel cable, and while the naked men levered with poles from below, gradually pulled it out the right way up. It had suffered no damage except to the paint, started at the first touch, and sailed off down the road in front of us.

  A sandy track through high marsh reeds brought us to an open beach beside the river Kunduz, at a point where its flow of pinkish muddy snow-water, sixty yards wide, came sweeping round a bend on its way to the Oxus with the speed of an express train. The beach was crowded with people; a blazing heat rose from the shimmering sand; against the lucid pink-blue sky, a line of camels and a line of willows disarranged each other’s silhouettes. As we arrived, the ferry was putting off from the opposite bank, crowded with men, horses, and merchandise. It consisted of two rough-hewn high-sterned barges, fastened together by a railed stage across the middle. The current caught it. Simultaneously a line of swimmers grasping a rush tow-rope struck out at right angles across the river, while a man in one of the sterns used a broad paddle as a rudder. At last, thanks to the bend, it hit our shore a quarter of a mile downstream. Further up, other swimmers were guiding horses and cattle across by themselves. When they landed, we saw that many of these professional mermen had large gourds tied to their backs. Their skins were dark brown with exposure, and some of their faces of a type which suggested the servile aboriginal; though no one could tell us if they belonged to a special race or not. Only our regard for the savage Afghan modesty prevented us from joining them on the return journey.

  The ferry had now to be dragged upstream, to the top of the bend again, where our lorry mounted the railed stage. We approached the further bank at ten knots an hour, and I was preparing to swim for my life when, by an adroit twist, the impact was lessened and we grated into the low earth cliff. The excitement of the crowd equalled Putney on boat-race day: the dark-skinned naked swimmers, stately Uzbegs in flowered gowns, squat peering Turcomans in pointed fur caps, Hazaras in black turbans as broad as Ascot hats, and one or two men in fair beards whom we supposed to be Kaffirs, handed us up into the field above. Through them all stalked the red-bearded Governor of Kunduz, whip in hand, looking like a Scottish ghillie and conscientiously supervising the whole procedure.

  A line of ramparts, white, weary, and old as the mounds of Balkh, announced Kunduz town. On the other side of it we struck across a rising green plain, which brought us nearer to the great snow-peaks on the south-east, so that we could distinguish faces and clefts of bare rock among the snow. Out in the pasture, which consisted of that curious prickly clover whose flowers are like clover flowers, cream with pink tips, while the leaves are more like holly, stood occasional kibitkas, rush-built and untidy, around which grazed herds of horses and cattle. A yellow asphodel1 appeared, three or four feet high, singly at first, then in patches, at length transforming the whole prairie into a sea of deep daffodil yellow warmed by the golden blush of sunset.

  The people of Khanabad call these yellow pokers “sikh”, and make a kind of thread from their green berries.

  Under the mountains we joined the road from Kabul, whose double line of closely posted telephone wires had a new political meaning, if they stretch, as we supposed, to the mouth of the Wakhan Valley, that narrow salient of Afghanistan which separates the three great Asiatic states of Russia, China, and India. A sudden drop brought us into the town, where the Mudir-i-Kharija proved a youth of eighteen prematurely aged by appendicitis. The English words “boots”, “programme”, “sugar”, and “motah-van” cropped up in his Persian vocabulary. He took us to drink tea in the Governor’s audience chamber, a room ninety feet long adorned with the national arms in black and white on an orange curtain at one end of it.

  Tired and dirty, we asked for rooms. But instead of the expected guest-house, which had recently fallen down, he led us to a grove of rustling plane trees as tall as elms, which dated, he said, “from the days of the Mirs”, i
n other words, from before the conquest of Badakshan by the Emir Dost Mohammad. Here tents had been pitched, carpets, tables, and chairs set out, and lamps lit for our reception. It would have been better done, he said, if he had known we were coming; but there was no telephone between here and Mazar to warn him.

  We call our guards the Vicar and the Curate. Not knowing that a third tent in the background contained a newly dug latrine, I asked the Vicar where the lavatory was. At first he did not understand, though I used the ordinary Persian words. Then he guessed. “Oh”, he said, “you mean the jawab-i-chai—the answer-to-tea.”

  A nice euphemism for that essential office.

  Khanabad, June 5th.—This morning we saw the Governor, Shir Mohammad Khan, a sensible man, who answered our questions straightly without any pretence of being asleep all day.

  “No,” he said in a low depressed voice, “you can’t go to Hazrat Imam, because it’s near the River; and you can’t go to see the hot springs at Chayab for the same reason; the River is the frontier, and it would be impolitic to allow you there. As for the Chitral road, the Durah pass will be closed by snow for another two months. And anyhow, in all three cases, you would have to get permission from Kabul.”

  I regret Hazrat Imam, since the Mudir-i-Kharija has told us the shrine there has tiles on it.

  Tomorrow, therefore, after ten months’ travelling, we turn towards home.