Full Tilt (10 page)

Despite the heat, today’s was a glorious ride, across vast unpeopled widths of sand and barren sun-split clay. Lines of naked peaks, like broken swords, were just visible along the horizon and the only alleviation of the surrounding flatness was the deep, dead canyons which are waiting for the floods to revive them. When I came to the oasis at midday its green orchards and meadows seemed passionately fertile amidst the unproductive wastes and on entering its shade the temperature dropped by 15°. It is just as well I’m moving north because I couldn’t stand much more of this – at 3.30 p.m. furnace blasts of hot air were ricocheting off the face of the desert and even my hair was soaked with sweat. I’m deadbeat now so early to bed.

We only covered sixty-eight miles today; the road was appalling once the American contribution to my comfort ended and we wouldn’t have got even this far but for a deliciously cool northerly breeze which blew all day.

Prepare for shocks. At 10 a.m. Roz had a puncture and by 11.15 a.m.
I
had repaired it. Even more sensational – at 1.30 p.m. the chain broke and again I, myself (alone and unaided!), got out the spare links and after one and three-quarter hours of intense concentration figured how the thing operated and mended it! It is astonishing what latent talents are suddenly revealed by breakdowns in mid-desert.

The first half of today’s ride was through comparatively fertile country with many streams and consequently many little villages surrounded by acres of wheat and lucerne and by groves of poplars. Then we were back to the desert and the nomad camps. One of these
donated water for mending the puncture, which was jolly decent considering that they have to bring water-skins about ten miles on camels to the nearest well. At this camp I saw a pure white, new-born camel, whose mother was ill, being fed out of a leather bottle by an adorable nomad infant aged about four years. After the broken chain interlude came some dramatically beautiful gorges and extraordinary landscapes of fissured earth. Afghanistan is certainly living up to my expectations; it’s a pity brainwashing tactics were used to dissuade me because I must admit that I’m now aware all the time of a slight underlying tension which mars what would otherwise be a completely enjoyable experience. I suppose
all
the people can’t be wrong
all
the time and every Afghan I’ve met has said that he personally would
not
cycle alone through his own country.

We arrived here at 6.45 p.m. and I asked for the chief’s house as there is no hotel or police barracks and I funked the tea-house after one quick look. A young man led me to the outskirts of the town and through a most beautiful orchard, where the trees were gay with
bell-shaped
, flame-coloured blossoms and a cool, deep carpet of lucerne lay beneath them. Then we came to an enormous mud compound, where the chief, his
five
wives, fourteen sons and uncounted daughters,
thirty-eight
grandchildren and sundry cousins all live in various apartments around a courtyard through which flows a swift stream with weeping willows and birches lining its banks.

Several of the chief’s sons speak English and/or German, and I had a long conversation with one of them, aged nineteen, whose
seventeen-year-old
wife has borne him three children and who is about to acquire a second, fourteen-year-old wife. When I asked him what his wife thought about a second wife arriving on the scene, he said that Afghan women don’t talk to their husbands and anyway it’s none of her business
how
many wives he has! His father’s fifth wife, aged eighteen, was acquired three years ago when the senior wife, now aged
forty-eight
, retired from stud. A total of 135 members of the family plus twenty-two servants live in the compound.

I’m writing this sitting by the stream waiting for supper (I suggested bread and boiled eggs but very much fear rice will come) and one of the
servants has just glided up with a new lantern to give me more light: it’s all deliciously like the Arabian Nights. Tonight I’ll sleep in the maidens’ (eleven- to fourteen-year-old girls) quarters and of course this has been my first chance to
see
any Afghan women. Physically they’re very beautiful (the men being so tanned, one doesn’t realise that Afghans are as white-skinned as we are) but the effect on their mental
development
of the purdah-system, as practised here, is horrifying. We should feel grateful for having been born ‘free’ and ‘equal’ – something we take completely for granted though the majority of the world’s women do not yet enjoy this right.

Most Afghan village houses have no windows and the walls are lined with little alcoves which serve as cupboards. One misses the Persian carpets; coarse matting is more usual here. I can now see a servant coming with my supper on a tray; obviously I am considered not really fit company for the women of the family, so I must eat in solitude!

I went to bed last night
dead drunk
. I was enjoying my ‘Irish stew’ of mutton, potatoes and onions when one of my host’s sons arrived with a bottle and said he’d heard Christian women liked alcohol and would I have some wine? It is hardly necessary to record my reply. He then filled a tumbler (‘Made in Czechoslovakia’) with what looked like white wine and I, being thirsty and having eschewed the muddy water served with the meal, took a gulp of it in all innocence – and nearly collapsed! I don’t pretend to know what it was, but it certainly was not wine as we know it. My gullet must be fairly leathery by now but I felt as if my mouth, throat and tummy were being cauterised. When I’d stopped choking the boy said, ‘With water, yes, it is better?’ and I nodded, feeling that however many lethal bacteria the water contained they would all die instantly on meeting this brew. So I finished it diluted and then, to my horror, found myself almost incapable of standing up and going to bed, and quite incapable of talking coherently. It comes to something when
one
drink can knock me out! I was in a besotted coma by 9.30 p.m. but up at 4 a.m. as usual – without a ‘head’, to my astonishment.

It was much cooler today and the road was slightly less agonising, so we covered the seventy miles from Mukur by 2.30 p.m. I was pushing myself to allow time to explore this city which I guessed would be congenial because of historical associations and no Americanisation; in fact it’s a good second to Herat.

I tried to buy a film here, but none was available, which was very frustrating as the fine old fortifications, ruined mosques (which you may photograph), the river and camel-market make Ghazni even more photogenic than Herat. However, as things developed I was perhaps lucky to be without a film today.

Leaving Roz in the hotel, I went off to explore, still carrying my camera in hope of finding a film. For some time I strolled around the base of the old city – which looks like a more primitively constructed Avila – doing no harm to anyone and scarcely noticing the battalion of inconceivably scruffy soldiers who were marching past me, until suddenly two privates broke rank, seized my arms and hustled me about a hundred yards up the street to a military police barracks. There they asked for my passport, which I explained was in the hotel, so my camera was promptly confiscated and I was locked for fifty minutes in a cell which had been used as a lavatory by all its former occupants and never cleaned out. Then an officer appeared in a frenzied flurry of profuse apologies and said that it was all a mistake – the army was on manoeuvres in the locality and his men had been instructed to look out for ‘hostile observers’. He saw by my passport that I was harmless and hoped I would forgive the incident and would now have vodka with him. I told him there was no offence taken but explained that unhappily I hadn’t time for vodka as I wanted to see the old city of Ghazni and the Moghul tomb – so by way of atonement he laid on an army car to drive me there.

The tomb of Afghanistan’s most famous poet, whose name no one could reasonably be expected to remember, is a very impressive marble affair in a little mosque all to itself on a hilltop outside the city. I walked up there at sunset and stood overlooking a rich spread of grain-fields, orchards dense with blossom, and groves of slim, graceful sinjit trees. The bird-song in these oases is continuous and
very sweet; now, apart from swallows, the birds are all unfamiliar to me.

I’ve just been informed that the Americans are moving in here soon; I’m glad I saw it first. It’s quite cold tonight, with snow on the hills to the east and the sky overcast – what a change!

Today was a repeat of the Robat performance. I slept late, having had no siesta yesterday, and woke at 6.45 a.m. to find a tremendous thunderstorm in progress and
rain
(of all unlikely things!) coming down in buckets. I enjoyed a leisurely breakfast of omelette and bread as I had only intended covering forty-eight miles today (to Top, the village midway between Ghazni and Kabul) and when the rain stopped at 8 a.m. we left the hotel. But then, outside the town, came another road block, with what was by local standards a vast convoy of two buses, five trucks and a motorcyclist, all lined up outside a
tea-house
. I joined the queue and asked what it was this time. No one knew definitely; some said that a Danish engineer working for an American company had been shot at and wounded while others maintained that two Indians going to Europe had copped it yesterday evening twenty miles north of Ghazni. I wasn’t surprised at this vagueness; the authorities here are extremely sensitive about such ‘incidents’ and cover them up as best they can. Anyway, whatever the cause, the effect was that Roz and I boarded one of the ‘buses’ at 9.30 a.m. and arrived here, having covered a distance of only ninety-three miles, at 10 p.m. A young army officer who sat beside me on the bus said that Pakistani tribesmen were behind all the trouble; he accused them of coming over the frontier and shooting up travellers (especially foreigners) to discredit Afghanistan in the eyes of the world. Maybe that’s partly true, but it certainly wasn’t Pakistanis who attacked the Land-Rover on the road between Robat and Farah.

I have just been told that Afghan time is one hour and ten minutes ahead of Persian time – a comical refinement in this land where ten hours or ten days more or less mean nothing whatever to the average citizen.

I have just registered the fact that Easter happened four days ago – that’s what comes of travelling in ’Eathen Lands! It gives me all I can do to cope with the date and I’ve long since given up the unequal struggle to distinguish one day of the week from another; when Friday is Sunday and Thursday is Saturday and Saturday is Monday it seems hardly worth the effort. But presumably I’ll register the significance of 25 December when the time comes.

Kabul, though so much of it has been recently rebuilt, is an attractive little city. Many of the new buildings and public monuments are hideously
avant-garde
but their incongruity is so extreme in this country that the total effect is comic rather than offensive. The city streets were paved (by the Russians) only a few years ago and today I saw a traffic policeman abandoning his post to kneel on the footpath and say his prayers at the appointed hour.

This frank devotion is for me one of the most impressive features of Islamic culture. If we accept that it is more than a superstition then there is something very wonderful indeed about mixing one’s daily deeds and one’s daily prayers in such an unselfconscious fashion, instead of keeping each in an airtight compartment.

Kabul reminds me of Sofia in that the traffic is virtually nil by capital city standards; you can cycle happily around with only camel caravans, herds of pack-donkeys and droves of fellow-cyclists to impede the way. Among the injuries which Roz sustained in Meshed was a damaged back brake so I took her into a cycle shop today and she was efficiently cured in five minutes.

One sees a few women and quite a number of girls unveiled in the streets here and many men wear European suits, though happily these are still in the minority. I bought a first (and last) souvenir for myself this morning – one of the famous Afghan sheepskin coats. It’s a second-hand (or more likely fifth-hand) model and looks and smells exactly like a dead sheep, which is logical enough, as the Afghans haven’t a clue about curing skins. Anyway the main thing is that it cost only 28
s
., whereas a new one would have cost about £6. It still has years of wear in it, if the Irish public can bear the stink.

The weather here today is just like April at home – showery, warm sun, cool breeze – but with growth about two weeks ahead of us. This is the month when northern Afghanistan gets all its rainfall – heavy showers and thunderstorms nearly every day.

German seems to be more widely spoken than English among Afghans educated before the war. At that period the country was teeming with Germans – it is now beginning to teem with them again – and I am told that German is still the first foreign language of the ten per cent who go to school. Russian is widely understood too, even by the illiterate majority. In each city I noticed that the radio news from Russia was switched on regularly and listened to attentively. Russians seem to handle the propaganda tool of aid to backward countries much more intelligently than the Americans do. They achieve lots of
little
things – electricity for small towns, paving city streets, building silos and presenting superior seeds for crops – as well as launching big projects such as roads, whereas the Americans concentrate on enormous schemes – roads and dams that cost five times what the Russians spend but will take years to complete and make no impression whatever on the minds of simple people. The more I see of life in these ‘undeveloped countries’ and of the methods adopted to ‘improve’ them, the more depressed I become. It seems criminal that the backwardness of a country like Afghanistan should be used as an excuse for America and Russia to have a tug-of-war for possession. Having spoken to nine or ten young Afghans who have been exposed to Western influences, I notice an impatient feeling of contempt for their own country, an undiscriminating worship of
everything American and a general restlessness, rootlessness and
discontent
. They repudiate their native culture yet cannot succeed in adopting an alien civilisation which they imagine is superior, though they don’t understand the first thing about it. Give me the nomads’ outlook every time – they haven’t heard of America yet. I don’t claim to know the right answer to the ‘underdeveloped’ problem but I feel most strongly that the Communist answer is less wrong than the Western; the Communists have much more imaginative
understanding
of different national temperaments, as two Russians I spoke to here today revealed very clearly. They want to impose Communism as a way of life, but with the minimum of damage to the traditional foundations of the country concerned, whereas Westerners have told me repeatedly that they want to bulldoze those foundations right away and start a nice, new, hygienic society from scratch – an ambition that seems to me almost too stupid to be true.

I have just discovered that the sale or consumption of alcohol in Afghanistan is strictly forbidden by law – a piece of information handed to me with a glass of Scotch by my hostess in the Diplomatic Enclave! Even tourists can’t get permission to have it here as they can in the prohibition states of India.

My plans for the immediate future are in ‘a state of chassis’; my host wants to drive me to Bamian tomorrow (a Friday, so the Embassy will be closed) and I, of course, want to cycle there and, if possible, on up to Mazar-i-Sharif. But no one seems to know whether the road beyond Bamian is free of snow or not.

I had to register with the police as a tourist this morning, which involved going to three separate offices and waiting hours in each. The head of the Tourist Department, Mr Tarzi, is a great buddy of our Mr Driscoll, this year’s President of the International Tourist Board. I couldn’t believe it when I met an Afghan who knew Dublin! He’s an exceptionally nice man and is now trying to find out about the Mazar road before issuing me with my permits to move from Kabul. But everything is so slow here that, tomorrow being Friday, Saturday is the first day I can get my papers straightened out and make definite plans. Everyone agrees that the business of being a
tourist in Kabul involves so much paperwork and waiting in offices that one has no time to see the sights. Not that there are many; apart from the magnificent museum, the city itself, with its lovely semicircle of mountains curving round it, is the chief ‘sight’.

If my arrival in Teheran was a sensation, it has been a riot here! The Tourist Office and Press photographers, complete with flashlights, were on my heels the whole day, and my ‘Impressions of
Afghanistan
’ will be in the
Kabul Times
tomorrow. ‘Everyone’ wants to meet me – not that I’m surprised or imagine that it’s because I’m me. Kabul is wonderful from a visitor’s point of view, but if one had to live here for two years, and if one were accustomed to cars (which only senior officials can have) and to TV, daily papers, mod. cons, pubs, cafés, cinemas and theatres, life without them must seem rather monotonous. This is rated a ‘hardship post’ by foreign services and everyone is paid a twenty-five per cent bonus to come to Kabul. It’s funny to see the sedate Embassy staffs scooting round on bicycles or walking, but it does mean that for at least two years of their existence they lead healthy lives with daily exercise.

Cheers! By signing a statement to say that I was cycling alone to Mazar entirely on my own responsibility I obtained the necessary police pass, so off we go first thing tomorrow. I spent eight and a quarter hours in four different offices getting the pass because
forty-five
Hajis were looking for permits to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca and I was at the end of their queue in every office.

I’m only taking the saddlebag with essential kit as there is no point in dragging my panniers and knapsack from here to Mazar and back again.

I’ve decided that when I suspected the Afghans of a narrow hostility to emancipated women, I was being unfair. Many of them give the
impression of being almost frightened by the spectacle of a lone woman roaming around their land – a phenomenon so startling to their simple minds that they are at a loss as to how they should react. Obviously this situation throws the onus on the more
flexible-minded
Westerner and, now that I’ve realised how much depends on my approach to them, relations are far easier to manage. I already love the country and the people and somehow language barriers don’t matter when one feels such a degree of sympathy with a race which responds so graciously and kindly to a smile or a gesture of friendship.

We left Kabul at 7 a.m. in perfect cycling weather with a brilliant, warm sun, a cool breeze behind us and the air crisp and clear. Beyond a doubt today’s run up the Ghorband valley was the most wonderful cycle-ride of my life. Surely this must have been the Garden of Eden – it’s so beautiful that I was too excited to eat the lunch my hostess had packed for me and spent the day in a sort of enchanted trance. High hills look down on paddy-fields and vivid patches of young wheat and neat vineyards; on orchards of apricot, peach, almond, apple and cherry trees smothered in blossom, and on woods of willows, ash, birch and sinjit, their new leaves shivering and glistening in wind and sun. Lean, alert youths, their clothes all rags and their bearing all pride, guard herds of cattle and nervous, handsome horses and donkeys with woolly, delicately tripping foals, and fat-tailed sheep with hundreds of bounding lambs, and long-haired goats whose kids are among the most delightful of young animals. At intervals there are breaks in the walls of sheer rock on either side and then one sees the more distant peaks of the Hindu Kush rising to 18,000 feet, their snows so brilliant that they are like Light itself, miraculously solidified and immobilised. The little mud villages remain invisible until you reach them, so perfectly do they blend with their background, and the occasional huge, square, mud fortresses, straddling hilltops, recall the cruel valour of this region’s past and have the same rigid, proud beauty as the men who built them. The ‘road’ – narrow and rough – alternately runs level with the flashing river and leaps up
mountainsides
to give unimpeded views for miles and miles along the valley.
This is the part of Afghanistan I was most eager to see, but in my wildest imaginings I never thought any landscape could be so magnificent. If I
am
murdered en route it will have been well worth while! Not that I think there’s much chance of that; the seventy-eight miles of my route today were patrolled by armed soldiers in pairs, apparently for my special protection as the last pair went off duty when they had led me, at dusk, to the home of the Provincial Governor in this village. I should think that if solitary travellers do get killed here it is because they’ve not told the police, as requested, where they are going and when. It seems to be beyond dispute that Afghanistan has slightly more than its share of bandits, yet almost everyone who travels through is favourably impressed by the treatment they receive and it’s high time the silly nonsense about the extreme dangers of this land were ‘exposed’ as exaggeration.

The average Afghan is at once hard-working and easy-going and retains lots of things that industrial psychiatrists are now laboriously struggling to rediscover. He is good-humoured but not very talkative. He loves music and often sings quietly to himself for hours on end. He also loves bird-song and flowers, is very sensitive to natural beauty and on the whole treats animals well – not only his superb horses, but also his pack-donkeys, who are pushed in the required direction more often than beaten, his strings of cynical camels, who show few signs of returning affection, and his flocks of goats and sheep, one of whom is usually a special pet. Most of all, he loves his children, who may well number up to thirty if he can afford four wives. He is, of course, hot-tempered and uncontrollably ferocious when roused, but once a dispute is settled without loss of honour on either side he embraces his opponent and they sing a duet. (One must applaud Mohammed’s common-sense in prohibiting alcohol among his followers; if they stopped at pubs as often as they do at tea-houses the populations of the Islamic countries would long since have exterminated each other.) He is indifferent to hardship, on which he has been nurtured, he endures acute pain without a moan and he is among the most fearless of soldiers. In short, he’s a man after my own heart.

The latest hair-raiser I heard in Kabul concerned a four-man team
of Western surveyors who were recently shot up by the tribesmen because the tribal chiefs don’t want the Government to know how much land they own, since a new system of land taxes is soon to be levied. Obviously the tribesmen had been given orders not to kill, as the surveyors were only wounded, and no Afghan would miss a
man-sized
target. I’ve often seen them potting tiny birds from fantastic distances just for the hell of it, which sounds a horrid hobby but is no worse than shooting such a glorious thing as a cock-pheasant for its food value. By now I’ve got quite used to all the men around me carrying rifles as Irishmen carry umbrellas and I’ve learned to beware of falling over the stacked weapons when entering a dark, windowless tea-house from bright sunshine.

This house reveals what some might describe as the poverty of Afghanistan but what I prefer to call its simplicity, since poverty denotes a lack of necessities and simplicity a lack of needs. The Governor is the most important man in the district yet the poorest Irish peasant would have a more elaborate home, though when one examines it every essential comfort is here.

The family consists of Mohammad Musa – my thirty-one-year-old host – his elderly mother, his seventeen-year-old wife, their
five-months-old
first baby and four servants. They are natives of Kabul and Mohammad, who speaks fluent English, is extremely well educated. At first he was most uncomfortable about entertaining a Westerner in such a home but my very evident happiness here has reassured him. His is, of course, a ‘made marriage’ but it seems very successful, although the young wife, who attended a Kabul Secondary School, tends to rebel against wearing the veil and would like to meet her husband’s friends – concessions which he will never allow.