The Road to Oxiana

by Robert Byron

  Opinion at the Legation agrees on the silliness of refusing the Russian diplomats in Kabul transit visas through India. Even if they go as far towards the frontier as Jelallabad, the Government of India sends in official complaints. The result is a sort of gentlemen’s agreement between the two Legations and the Afghan Government that the English shall not travel in the north of the country and the Russians in the south. That is why the authorities at Mazar could not allow us to the Oxus, though they would not admit such a reason lest it appear a limitation of their sovereignty. We were lucky to have got as close as we did, particularly as it appears that Haji Lai Mohammad, who bought the car, and our chauffeur Jamshyd Taroporevala, spread a tale that we were Secret Service agents engaged in map-making. Next time I do this kind of journey, I shall take lessons in spying beforehand. Since one has to put up with the disadvantages of the profession anyhow, one might as well reap some of its advantages, if there are any.

  British diplomacy in Kabul just now hangs on the Minister’s roses. At the King’s birthday party, on June 3rd, they were in full flower, and the Afghans, who are all rose-lovers, had never seen such big formal blooms. Next morning, visiting cards from the Minister of Court were fluttering from the finest trees; they had been left by his gardener in the night. Now all the other ministers want cuttings too, and are also in a turmoil over the peonies, which have been promised them for next year.

  Magnificent as the formal roses are, I yet prefer an Afghan tree which stands by the gate in front. It is fifteen feet high and covered with such a profusion of white blossoms that hardly a leaf is visible.

  Kabul, June 14th.—Uneventful days.

  The garden here is too pleasant to leave, full of sweet-williams, canterbury bells, and columbines, planted among the lawns and terraces and shady arbours; it might be England till one notices the purple mountain behind the big white house. The total establishment is ninety persons; at tennis this evening there were six uniformed ball-boys for one game. People complain, though I have never wanted to, that our embassies and legations, relying on Lord Salisbury’s despatch, think it their duty not to help visitors. This legation might exist for no other purpose, for all the visitor can see. And not only the English visitor. Americans who come here generally get into trouble of some sort, and having no legation of their own, ask assistance of ours, which they receive.

  Ghazni (7300 ft., 98 miles from Kabul), June 15th.—The journey here occupied 4½ hours, along a good hard road through the Desert of Top, which was carpeted with irises.

  The famous “Towers of Victory” stand 700 yards apart on the way to the village of Rozah: a pair of octagonal star-shaped stumps, each seventy feet high and now roofed with a tin hat to prevent further decay. Vigne, who sketched them in 1836, shows that their circular superstructures were more than twice as high again. They were built as minarets, commemorative rather than religious, for the ground gives no evidence that there was ever a mosque in the neighbourhood. It was a Sasanian habit to build such towers, and after the coming of Islam the Persians kept it up, till about the XIVth century. The minarets at Damghan and Sabzevar, and many of those at Isfahan, are similarly isolated.

  There has been a muddle over the founders of these towers. J. A. Rawlinson published the inscriptions on them in 1843, ascribing the larger and more splendid of the two to Mahmud, son of Sabaktagin, the maker of the Ghaznavide Empire and patron of Firdaussi and Avicenna. But Rawlinson must have mixed his notes; for in 1925, when Flury the epigraphist obtained some photographs, he found that the inscription relating to Mahmud was actually on the smaller tower, while the larger bore the name of his descendant Masud III, son of Ibrahim. The smaller tower, therefore, must date from before 1030, the larger from between 1099 and 1114.

  The difference between them is in breadth, the diameter of the larger, excluding the stone base, being about twenty-four feet, and that of the smaller about twenty-two. Both are built of a rich toffee brick tinged with red, and are adorned with carved terra-cotta of the same colour. In each case, each of the eight recesses between the star-points is divided into eight ornamental zones of varying depths. Between the third and fourth, fifth and sixth, and sixth and seventh zones, the brickwork is interrupted by wooden joists.

  Apart from the zig-zag patterns in which the bricks are set, the ornament of the smaller tower is confined to two narrow bands of terra-cotta in the middle, and to the sixteen panels of bold Kufic lettering at the top, which describe Mahmud as “the august Sultan, King of Islam, trusted of society, Abul-Muzaffar, support of Mussulmans, help of the poor, Abulkasim Mahmud—may God illuminate his constancy—son of Sabaktagin Gazi… Commander of the Faithful.” The larger tower is richer, its bricks are closer set, and all eight zones are filled with elaborate ornament, sometimes bordered with lesser inscriptions. Another sixteen panels round the top proclaim the titles of Masud; their Kufic is taller and more graceful, standing out from a maze of pattern like soldiers from a crowd. Generally, when it is a question of comparing two buildings of similar design but different dates, the simplicity of the older is preferable. Here that is not so. The fineness of the larger’s brickwork and the elaboration of its ornament have a functional propriety. They weight the tower to the earth, giving it that air of strength and cohesion which it needed to support the shaft above. An old photograph in the Legation at Kabul, taken about 1870, shows the detail of this shaft. The first twenty-five feet were plain and were probably hidden, when the tower was first built, by a wooden balcony. Thereafter it was divided into ornamental ribs, alternately curved and flat. These were surmounted by eight pairs of elongated niches and by a belt of carving which looks as if it contained a Kufic inscription.

  It is interesting to remember that this minaret was built in the same century as the Gumbad-i-Kabus. Each is monumental, deserves the very palm of ostentation. But the difference between the ornateness of the one and the simplicity of the other shows that two separate ideas were at work in Persian architecture at that time. Seljuk architecture, which followed, was the fruit of these ideas, and inheriting the genius of both, attained a perfect balance between ornament and construction.

  The Tomb of Sultan Mahmud, which lies in the village of Rozah half a mile off, has attracted the notice of more travellers than the towers. Ibn Battuta, in the middle of the XIVth century, says it was surmounted by a hospice. Babur looked in of course, and saw the tombs of Sultans Ibrahim and Masud near by. Next came Vigne in 1836, and six years later an English army, which took away the doors of the Tomb because some idiot of a historian—I believe it was Ferishta—had said they were the doors of the Hindu Temple of Somnath in Gujerat, which Mahmud had stolen when he sacked it. Prodigies of transport (they measure 16$ feet by 13½) were employed to bring them to Agra, while Lord Ellenborough requested the Princes of India to observe how worthy the British Government “proves itself of your love, when, regarding your honour as its own, it asserts the power of its arms to restore to you the gates of the temple of Somnauth, so long the memorial of your subjection to the Afghans”. The ridicule that greeted this announcement consigned the doors to permanent obscurity in the Fort at Agra, where they still remain. Their wood is that of the Afghan deodar, and an inscription on the lintel invokes the forgiveness of God on Abulkasim Mahmud, son of Sabaktagin. Yet the legend of their Hindu origin still persists in school textbooks. The Government of India might well demolish it by returning them. Their rape has never even been justified by a published description of the carvings, which are unique in Mohammadan art.

  After the War, when Niedermayer was here, the Tomb lay open to the sky. We found it now beneath a spacious dome, approached through cloisters and a rose-garden.

  Three old men were chanting from large Korans, while our guides leant over a wooden railing to take off the black pall, shaking the rose-petals that covered it into a heap at one end. There emerged an inverted stone cradle with triangular ends, five feet long and twenty inches high, and mounted on a broad plinth. The stone is marble, white an
d translucent. On the side facing Mecca runs a Kufic inscription in two lines begging “a gracious reception from God for the noble Prince and Lord Nizam-ad-Din Abulkasim Mahmud ibn Sabaktagin”. On the other side, a small trefoil panel says: “He died… in the evening of Thursday when seven nights remained of the month of Rabiat II in the year 421”. That was February 18th, 1030.

  The virtue of the Tomb as a work of art lies in the depth and fulness of the carving, in the glow of the marble where age has caressed it, and above all in the main inscription. Kufic lettering has a functional beauty; regarded as pure design, its extraordinary emphasis seems in itself a form of oratory, a transposition of speech from the audible to the visible. I have enjoyed many examples of it in the last ten months. But none can compare with these tall rhythmic ciphers, involved with dancing foliage, which mourn the loss of Mahmud, the conqueror of India, Persia, and Oxiana, nine centuries after his death, in the capital where he ruled.

  The crowd that had followed us into the garden was excluded from the shrine while we were looking at the Tomb, to the indignation of one man who wanted to say his prayers. “Why do you allow those heretic clerks inside?” he shouted. “It isn’t clean.” The crowd took his side, and began to shout also, till our guards were threatened with a brawl. It was they who had suggested our visiting the Tomb. The Foreign Minister had telegraphed from Kabul that we were to see everything.

  Kabul, June 17th.—We solved a mystery on the way back from Ghazni.

  Some small trees of the sallow type were growing along a stream near the road, and Seyid Jemal stopped to let his assistant pick a few branches from them, which he threw into the back of the lorry. As they fell at our feet, they gave out that same elusive smell which has pervaded the whole journey since we first met it at the Afghan frontier, and which now, in its overwhelming sweetness, brought the minarets of Herat before my eyes again. It emanated from clusters of small yellow-green flowers,1 which are unnoticeable from a distance, but which, if ever I smell them again, will remind me of Afghanistan as a cedar wardrobe reminds me of childhood.

  Seyid Jemal has heard that soon after we crossed it, two lorries were completely wrecked by the stream that delayed us on the Baglan plain, and that the Kunduz ferry has overturned and sunk, drowning five women.

  We are now staying in the hotel here, which is run by Indians and is not uncivilised; they have just built an annexe and telegraphed for a German chef. Kabul for the most part has an easy unpretentious character, as of a Balkan town in the good sense of the term. It clusters round a few bare rocky hills which rise abruptly from the verdant plain and act as defences. Snow-mountains decorate the distance, the parliament sits in a cornfield, and long avenues shade the town’s approaches. In winter, at a height of 6000 feet, the cold may be inconvenient. But at present the climate is perfect, hot yet always fresh. Cinemas and alcohol are forbidden. The Legation doctor has had to give up treating women at the instance of the Church; though they sometimes visit him disguised as boys. And the whole policy of forcible Westernisation is in abeyance All the same, Westernisation is progressing by example, and one feels that perhaps the Afghans have struck the mean for which Asia is looking. Even the most nationalist of them makes a pleasant contrast with the mincing assertiveness of the modern Persian.

  This morning at the Legation I met a Colonel Porter who asked what my share in the world’s work was. I said I had been looking at Mohammadan architecture.

  “Mind you,” he replied, “I’ve seen a good deal of Mohammadan architecture one way and another, in Palestine, Egypt, and Persia, and I’ve given a good deal of thought to the matter. I can tell you the key to the problem if you like.”

  “Really. What is it?”

  “The whole thing’s phallic”, he uttered in a ghoulish whisper.

  I was surprised at first to note the influence of Freud on the North-West Frontier, but soon discovered that for Colonel Porter the universe itself was phallic.

  In the afternoon Fletcher of the Legation drove us out to Dar-al-Aman and Paghman, the unfinished dreams of Amanullah. The former was to be a New Delhi, the latter a new Simla, created out of the British subsidies which Amanullah’s father, Habibullah, accumulated year by year but never spent. Dar-al-Aman is joined to Kabul by one of the most beautiful avenues in the world, four miles long, dead straight, as broad as the Great West Road, and lined with tall white-stemmed poplars. In front of the poplars run streams confined by grass margins. Behind them are shady footwalks and a tangle of yellow and white roses, now in full flower and richly scented. And then at the end, O God, appears the turreted angle—not even the front—of a French municipal office, surrounded by a French municipal garden and entirely deserted. While below it, occupying the very centre of the whole four-mile vista, stands a German match factory in the ferroconcrete-farmhouse style.

  Paghman, the Simla, spreads over a wooded slope two or three thousand feet above the plain, where grassy glades interrupt the poplars and walnuts, an orchestra plays of mountain streams, and the snows appear through the trees unexpectedly close. In each glade stands a house or office or theatre of such appalling aspect, so vilely reminiscent of a German Kurhaus and the back parts of Pimlico, that it is impossible to imagine where Amanullah could have found the architects to design them, even as a joke. But no; they are not a joke. Untenanted, shoddy, and obscene, they defile the woods and streams and the view of the plain beneath, where narrow shady lanes go winding among the irregular fields. The climax of this pseudo-civilisation is a racecourse, no larger than a cricket-field, round whose hairpin corners elephants were forced to compete.

  I bought some lapis this evening, not because it was cheap or a good colour, but because it comes from the famous mines near Ishkashim in Badakshan, and is therefore the authentic stone from which the old painters ground their blue. The sale of it is a Government monopoly and the whole export of the mines goes to Berlin.

  Christopher has gone out to drink beer with a German schoolmaster, while I, Martha-like, have been packing and paying the bill. It is midnight.

  INDIA: Peshawar (1200 ft., 189 miles from Kabul), June 19th.—The result of my virtue was that when Seyid Jemal drove up at five next morning expecting as usual to wait two hours, the luggage was ready on the doorstep and we reached Peshawar the same evening. Even in a touring car the journey generally takes two days. It was a grim drive, down through the bare black-boned mountains into the steel haze of India. We were at Jelallabad by one, bought a melon, and hastened on towards the Khyber over a grey waste of pebbles dancing in the heat. At Dacca, a scattered hamlet containing a few shops, a petrol-pump, and one stunted tree on a cliff above the now extensive river Kabul, the frontier formalities were quickly done with. The mountains closed on us. Seyid Jemal remarked with pride that he was an Afridi. Our passports were looked at again by a knot of Afghans sitting under two trees. And round the corner appeared an uplifted steel barrier, a sentry in a steel helmet, and a milestone announcing British India as if it were the local car-park. The new passport office was a bungalow in a garden of flowering shrubs. We sat on a bench and ate our last chicken salad out of the blue bowl from Isfahan, while the passport officer requested that as it was a quarter-past four, and therefore too late to allow Europeans through, we should say we had entered the pass at half-past three.

  As passes go, the Khyber is invitingly mild. It is this which makes it the theatre of such stupendous works. The tracks of middle Asia, the single telephone wire on its stunted wooden posts, give place to communications of Roman exuberance. Not one, but two graded roads wind up and down the length of the defile: the one of asphalt, as smooth as Piccadilly and flanked by low battlements; the other, its predecessor, abandoned to camels, but still such a highway as we had not seen since Damascus. Intertwined with these comes a third and larger thoroughfare, a railway, leading to the head of the pass and soon to extend beyond it, glinting from tunnel to tunnel, whose black mouths, framed in pylons of red masonry, recede into the savage grey distance. Roa
ds and railway are embanked on shelves of hewn stone linking mountain to mountain; iron viaducts carry them across the valleys and each other. Sheaves of telephone wires fastened to metal posts by gleaming white insulators, red and green signals jewelled in the torrid haze, drinking-troughs fashioned like antique sarcophaguses, and milestones proclaiming, at intervals of thirty yards, that the distance to L, J, and P—Landi Kotal, Jamrud, and Peshawar—has decreased, all complete the evidence of the neat grey blockhouses perched on every ledge and peak: that if the English must be bothered to defend India, it shall be with a minimum of personal inconvenience. This was our feeling. It was the spectacle of common sense that thrilled us amid the evil heat, the eyries of the tribesmen, and the immemorial associations of pilgrims and conquerors, a spectacle too remarkable for complacent, boasting patriotism.

  Seyid Jemal was in mad spirits. “Sarakh bisyar harab! What an absolutely rotten road!” he shouted, grinning at its shiny complexion. “Tonight you must be my guests in Khyber.” We passed Landi Kotal, where Hamber’s regiment of Gurkhas was playing hockey, but saw no officers except those who whizzed by in tennis clothes and Morris cars, so that we could not deliver Hamber’s messages. At Khyber village, a typical village of the pass, where every house was a fortified enclosure with its own watch-tower, Seyid Jemal stopped, and a crowd of scrofulous children leapt into the lorry, oblivious of our selves or luggage, to greet their father. The owner of the lorry, a walloping capitalist, rushed out of his house to see how his property had fared on the Afghan roads. Seyid Jemal’s assistant, lifting the front seat, disclosed a secret hoard of Russian sugar purchased in Mazar. His relations arrived too, and the whole village was soon assembled in a ring to welcome the lost, after three months’ absence.