Full Tilt (9 page)

From the map it looks like more lovely mountains tomorrow – if only the road keeps Russian! Early bed now.

For reasons that will soon become apparent I’d no opportunity to report on the day’s activities last night, so I’m doing both dates now.

I was up at 4.30 a.m. yesterday morning, after a good sleep on carpets in a corner of a tea-house. I have decided that Afghans are much more ‘comfortable’ people to travel among than Persians, despite their unbending gravity – or perhaps because of it. A dense, curious throng surrounded us every time we stopped in Persia but though here our arrival must be equally a rarity, no one crowds us out – you’d think they were used to a continual flow of cycling women through their villages! They are very interested to know where one has come from and what route was taken to Afghanistan, but
they ask no questions – just listen and look politely if you choose to explain by mime and a map. I find the contrast very intriguing; Afghanistan never attained the heights of civilisation that Persia did, nor has she ever descended to Persia’s present depths. Is it that if a nation expends sufficient energy to get to a peak she hasn’t enough left to maintain herself there and falls far, whereas if she remains at a certain restricted level a limited degree of national well-being can be maintained indefinitely? I suppose history proves that this is the pattern.

But to get back to 4.30 a.m., when I set off down the road and after fifty yards was held up by two police, this time wearing the jackets of their uniforms to emphasise the solemnity of the occasion. They said I’d have to go by autobus to Khandahar, and I said, ‘What rot!’ and showed my pass from the Commander in Herat. Then they pointed to a petrol-tanker and signed that it couldn’t go on either, and to their own jeep containing two soldiers with machine-guns! (You never saw anything quite so unhappy as an Afghan soldier wearing Western uniform – the poor lads looked as though they were in a
torture-chamber
.) I began to wonder now whether (
a
) World War III had started or (
b
) a little local war with Russia was brewing. Anyway something was happening somewhere so I retired to the tea-house and went asleep again until 7 a.m., having been told that the bus was coming at 7.30. Eventually it came at 10 a.m. and all the passengers tumbled out for
chi
and hands and face washing in the
jube
, and lavatory work in an adjacent field; unlike Turkish and Persian
tea-houses
, Afghan tea-houses have no lavatories attached. Two women were travelling on the roof amidst everyone’s goods and chattels – very symbolic! I simply can’t imagine what torture it must have been for them. Of course they don’t often travel at all and my horror was multiplied by ten when I discovered that these two were going to Kabul hospital because they were very
ill
; yet for 1,000 km they had to adhere to the top of a bouncing bus on an awful road through blazing sun and cold night air and choking dust.

The bus looked like something left on a municipal dump for a year and then retrieved during a National Emergency. It was almost entirely
home-made with no cover on the engine and no doors or windows. You could read on the ceiling inside that it was constructed partly from wooden boxes in which something had been imported from the USSR. The wheels had belonged to a truck and were far too big for the body and the seats were planks across which you scrambled to get to your place as no space was wasted on an aisle down the middle. The bus had been so overcrowded on leaving Herat that my entry made no difference to the general misery (not that the Afghans seemed to regard it as misery) of being tightly wedged with nothing to lean on back or front and no chance to move an inch in any direction once you sat down. Eventually at 11 a.m. we set off and about ten miles from Robat the road petered out – not merely the good road, but any road at all. For the next two hours we bumped on over the hard rock and baked sand of the desert till the faintest trace of a track reappeared – which was worse than the desert. In the agony of the journey I’d forgotten to wonder why we were being compelled to travel in convoy but towards evening we passed a Land-Rover with its windshield shattered and its doors riddled by bullet-holes and two soldiers on guard.

I won’t go into all the harrowing details, beyond saying that it took us twenty-two and a half hours to cover 420 miles. Apart from some eighty miles of sheer desert it would have been good cycling country with lots of mountains – not in the least as monotonous as I’d expected. But the road – or lack of road – would have made it very gruelling. With the seven days I estimate I’ve saved I’m planning to go up from Kabul to Mazar-i-Sharif via Bamian and return via Kunduz – I think it is permitted to go up from the east side.

The one compensation last night was the beauty of that wonderfully desolate landscape by moonlight, never to be forgotten. We stopped often as, apart from praying and eating sessions, the bus had two punctures and the truck three. Also the bus frequently threatened to come apart at the seams and then the driver leaped out with a mallet and went round giving it unmerciful bangs on the vital spots. Of course no one minded all these delays: people here have no concept of time as we understand it. The majority wear watches as ornaments and I was diverted to discover that they can’t read the time and don’t
see why they should learn! Yesterday is over, today is something to be enjoyed without fuss, and tomorrow – well, it’s sinful to plan anything for the future because that’s Allah’s department and humans have no business to meddle with it. This basic tenet of Islam is obviously one reason why Muslim countries are so materially undeveloped; after a thousand years of living by such a doctrine it is difficult to think ahead constructively.

The majority of Afghans practise their religion very seriously.
Yesterday
evening at about 6.30 the convoy suddenly put on terrific speed – I thought my whole unfortunate carcase would be disjointed – and after some ten miles pulled up before a tea-house beside a stream. Then the truck drivers, the soldiers and the bus passengers all rushed together to the water for ritual washing, before taking off their cloaks, which they use as prayer mats, and spreading them on the dusty ground. By sundown the whole surrounding desert was dotted with standing, bowing and kneeling men: no wonder they remain so supple in old age for this performance five times daily would keep anyone fit. They had been through it all before at 3.30 p.m. and were to repeat it at 4.10 a.m. today. Meanwhile those two unhappy women were cowering in their burkahs up on the roof among the crates and bales and Roz. They didn’t even come down for meals though their husbands passed them up bread and tea occasionally.

When I first boarded the bus the men simply ignored me, but after a couple of hours they thawed out and became very pleasant companions. Of course they wouldn’t allow me to pay for anything en route (it was poetic justice that I lost my £12 in this country) though they were not forthcoming with the conventions we’re used to – opening doors, ladies first, and all that; in fact it was taken for granted that I should be served
last
at meals. We had a very good stew last night with mincemeat balls and deliciously prepared spinach and the ubiquitous rice. After one mouthful of the rice I admitted defeat – it tasted as though cooked in
jube
-water and most Afghan
jubes
are stagnant. So I concentrated on bread (probably mixed with
jube
-water) which is darker here than in Persia and much more palatable. Breakfast was a bowl of hot sheep’s milk with bread in it and a tea-potful of very sweet cocoa made of milk
and finally green tea. Having toured Khandahar today and studied the butchers and the flies and the ‘sanitary’ conveniences, I’ve reluctantly decided to avoid meat, good though it tastes, and concentrate on boiled eggs for protein – I haven’t forgotten my last Spanish trip and what dysentery feels like. In Turkey and Persia it wasn’t the fly season, but here everything is permanently black with the pests.

We arrived in Khandahar at 9.30 a.m. and I said goodbye to my buddies and wished them joy on the next 515 km to Kabul. The armed guard went off to get a few hours sleep before going back to Herat with another convoy made up of a bus, two trucks and two Australians motoring to England and wishing they weren’t. I’m afraid I’ve very little patience with people who complain indignantly about places like Afghanistan being primitive. Why didn’t they (
a
) find that out before coming here and then (
b
) fly from Lahore to London?

I came straight to the hotel, got my sore bones into bed and slept till 2 p.m. This hotel is a filthy building, but again my bed is clean and the only furniture in the room, apart from bed and chair, is a fine solid writing desk which compensates for a lot.

When I went off to explore at 2.30 p.m. it was overcast so not too hot. This is quite an attractive city but after Herat anything would be an anticlimax and it’s disquieting to find the place teeming with Americans and their works. Obviously a terrific battle is going on to win over Afghanistan, but I hope neither side succeeds.

The Afghans smoke fewer cigarettes than the Persians. Not one passenger smoked in the bus but many chewed a green powdery stuff out of little tins kept in their pockets and the results were spat out incessantly on to the floor. No cigarettes are made here; Russian blends cost 9
d
. for twenty (pure poison) and English blends, specially ordered by the Afghan Government from England and labelled to that effect, cost 2
s
. for twenty. All the popular American blends are also 2
s
. a packet.

I’ve a bad sore throat this evening, which is not surprising, as last night it turned very cold from about 3 to 5 a.m., when we were crossing the mountains, and I was chilled through – I am still thinking of those two unfortunate women.

An hour ago a fierce southerly gale blew a sandstorm over the city; I felt very glad that Roz and I were not exposed to its horrors.

Undoubtedly (despite clean beds) the Afghans are, on balance,
much
dirtier in clothes, personal habits and dwellings than either the Turks or Persians. And I thought Persia bad enough when I got there! The light here goes out every ten or fifteen minutes for about five minutes, which is very right and proper; it would be too boring to travel all the way to Central Asia and then have an infallible electricity supply.

In many ways English influence is apparent here: most of the Afghans I met today spoke a little English and addressed me as ‘Memsahib’, which I find infuriating. Also a number of shop and public signs are in English as well as in Pushto or Pharsi; one sees some lovely spellings – ‘
CLOADS DRI CLEENED
’! But nearly all the few Afghan-owned cars, jeeps and trucks seem to be Russian. I must write to Mr Khrushchev and tell him that a few buses would not be superfluous in the next consignment.

I hope to make Kabul in five or six days, depending on heat, roads and other contingencies such as mountain passes. Of course one never knows – we could be there under escort in forty-eight hours if the bandits move the scene of their activities.

I woke this morning at 4 a.m. and leapt energetically out of bed, stark naked, to see a fine bearded warrior in each of the other two beds, which had been empty when I retired; happily they missed the fun, being sound asleep. This intrusion didn’t really surprise me because I had already observed the craziness of the hotel key system. There was only
one
key to twenty rooms, and as all the rooms were occupied – which here means families of up to ten members in a room containing four single beds – with people coming and going and wanting their doors locked and unlocked and relocked, or their womenfolk incarcerated while they went out to town, the distraught lad in charge of the key had been kept in a state of perpetual motion on the previous evening.

Roz and I left Khandahar at 4.30 a.m. and the road was good for all
of today’s ninety miles – and will continue good for the first ten miles tomorrow. This time it’s ‘God bless the Americans’ who within four years expect to have completed the 320 miles from Kabul to Khandahar. On the outskirts of Khandahar I passed various other evidences of American A.I.D. – little factories, a new school and an electricity power plant.

It was very hot today, with only two little villages en route. I would have been tormented by thirst but for milk obtained from various nomad camps (there were plenty of them) and now I’m quite muzzy in the head after so much sun. At 11 a.m. the heat compelled me to stop for four hours at a village; I slept for two hours and then wrote a sheaf of ‘duty’ letters to be posted in Kabul.

We arrived here at 7.15 p.m. This local hotel is inexplicably vast and I’m the only inhabitant; as food is not served I went to an eating-house in the village and gorged on bread and mutton-stew. (I felt too hungry to keep my good resolution about not eating meat!) The roof of the eating-house was so low that big six-footers in flowing robes had to bend their heads while walking to the carpet they had chosen to sit on. More wood than usual is in evidence in the buildings around here – though one sees few trees growing – and the ceiling and ‘pillars’ were of big, crudely-hewn trunks blackened by years of lamp and hookah smoke; but everything else, including the cooking stove, was of mud. I love the washing-ritual. Here, as in Persia, a special boy is employed for the purpose. Serious as an acolyte, he comes to each person with a brass or copper jug, round-bellied and long-spouted, containing very hot water, and with a basin shaped like a witch’s hat turned upside-down. Having poured water over the hands into the basin he then presents a filthy towel and as cutlery is unknown here, this rite is repeated after the meal. It is fascinating to sit on the floor in a corner watching it all by the soft light of oil-lamps suspended on chains from the ceiling to about eighteen inches above floor level. This light reflects on the copper jugs, and glows in the quick dark eyes of the men, their faces strong-featured beneath high turbans. Huge shadows stir on the walls when someone arrives or departs, moving lithely in bare feet, and then the small room seems even smaller. The rapid trickling of the washing-water mingles
with the meditative gurgle of the hookahs as they are passed from man to man, puffed at ceremoniously and then repacked and relit no less ceremoniously, with embers carried from the stove in lieu of matches. And always there’s the other ritual of
chi
-drinking, so that when I left I had to pick my way carefully among a litter of little Japanese tea-pots and bowls. By now I’m in love with Afghanistan – with its simplicity, its courtesy and its leisureliness and with the underlying
sanity
of an area fortunate enough to have remained very backward indeed …