Survivor: The Autobiography (53 page)

Wednesday, 26 June
Mr Burke and King remain at home cleaning and pounding seed; they are both getting weaker every day; the cold plays the deuce with us, from the small amount of clothing we have: my wardrobe consists of a wide-awake, a merino shirt, a regatta shirt without sleeves, the remains of a pair of flannel trousers, two pairs of socks in rags, and a waistcoat, of which I have managed to keep the pockets together. The others are no better off. Besides these, we have between us, for bedding, two small camel pads, some horsehair, two or three little bits of rag, and pieces of oilcloth saved from the fire.

The day turned out nice and warm.

Thursday, 28 June 1861
Mr Burke and King are preparing to go up the creek in search of the blacks; they will leave me some nardoo, wood, and water, with which I must do the best I can until they return.
I think this is almost our only chance.
I feel myself, if anything, rather better, but I cannot say stronger: the nardoo is beginning to agree better with me; but without some change I see little chance for any of us. They have both shown great hesitation and reluctance with regard to leaving me, and have repeatedly desired my candid opinion in the matter. I could only repeat, however, that I considered it our only chance, for I could not last long on the nardoo, even if a supply could be kept up.

Friday, 29 June 1861
Clear, cold night, slight breeze from the east, day beautifully warm and pleasant. Mr Burke suffers greatly from the cold and is getting extremely weak; he and King start tomorrow up the creek to look for the blacks; it is the only chance we have of being saved from starvation. I am weaker than ever, although I have a good appetite and relish the nardoo much; but it seems to give us no nutriment, and the birds here are so shy as not to be got at. Even if we got a good supply of fish, I doubt whether we could do much work on them and the nardoo alone. Nothing now but the greatest good luck can save any of us; and as for myself I may live four or five days if the weather continues warm. My pulse is at forty-eight, and very weak, and my legs and arms are nearly skin and bone. I can only look out, like Mr Micawber, ‘
for something to turn up
’; starvation on nardoo is by no means very unpleasant, but for the weakness one feels, and the utter inability to move one’s self; for as far as appetite is concerned, it gives the greatest satisfaction.

(
Signed
) W. J. W
ILLS

Wills’s journal was found lying beside his corpse. Burke also died of starvation. King managed to find an aboriginal band and was eventually rescued.

The journey, as we bucked and bumped our way across the desert, was quite back-breaking, but I felt that I could take it pretty uncomplainingly, for after all it would only be another couple of nights, and then . . . Then, goodbye helicopters, MiGs, RPGs and barren desert. Why, in 72 hours’ time I would be relaxing in the swimming pool of a sumptuous hotel.

My daydreams were abruptly overwhelmed by the sight of another burnt-out Symorgh. It was the fifth wreck we had passed. How many dead, I wondered, just in this little struggle for control of the road. Clearly it was not firmly back in mujahedeen hands.

We were going to have to travel for a short stretch along the main road that links Kabul and Kandahar, and we had sent scouts ahead to check if it was clear. Now, we pulled over to await their return. It was a tense time, and I found myself having to breathe deeply and regularly to contain my excitement. I did not think I could bear it if they were to return and say ‘Ra band’ – the way is closed.

‘When can we expect them?’ I asked one of my companions – a rather better-off young man, who had feigned sickness off and on in the hope of getting me to give him some pills, which I think he took to be like sweets.

‘Two hours,’ he said promptly. I decided to expect them in four. In fact, they returned in precisely two hours, and you could tell by their faces what they were going to say.

‘
Ra band
.’

We spent the rest of that night and the whole of the next day holed up tensely at an oasis, marking time under the shadow of the trees, while the scouts were dispatched yet again to keep an eye on the situation. Restlessly, we once again discussed alternative possibilities. As we did so, Abdul Mohmy, his usual tireless self, went to bake bread for us at a nearby hamlet.

‘Could we walk?’ I asked.

‘It would take five days – if we could get through.’

‘No water,’ said Abdul Rahman. He was more restless than anyone else, and clearly couldn’t relax.

‘What’s the matter with him? Is he ill?’ I asked Zahir, my minder.

‘I think he must be afraid,’ replied Zahir.

With two hours of daylight left the scouts returned, this time with the heartening but almost unbelievable news that the road was once again ‘
ra azad
’. I hoped it would still be so by the time we reached it. We headed off at once.

We had only just cleared the first hill and begun to travel along a dry river bed when someone near me began to scream,

‘
Tiare!
’

The panicky word caught on, and soon they were all yelling it, craning for a sight of the sky from the packed jeep. They had spotted a plane.

The jeep slowed violently, and we struggled to bail out, but there were many unable to jump when the jeep decided to take off at full speed. We were the middle jeep. The leader had carried on apparently unaware; the last one had seen the panic ahead and reversed up a hill. Ours had come to a halt some way off and the driver and the mechanic were throwing a tarpaulin over it. We had all rushed up a steep incline and now crouched huddled together, taking refuge in whatever crevice we could find – all, that is, except for one man who had taken off in the other direction – into the open – where, to my total disbelief, he now knelt and proceeded to pray. We strained our ears for the noise of the returning jet, but we must have been just in time to get out of its way, for the sound of its engine faded and finally died.

Once the danger was over, the whole group settled down to pray – I have to say that I found this vexing, given how urgent our situation was. Our driver seemed to pray for an inordinately long time.

We caught up with the first jeep. They, too, had heard the plane, and had rounded a bend and pulled up close to the cliff-wall of the valley we had been passing through.

‘Thank God for that valley,’ the mechanic said.

‘Thank God we weren’t five minutes further along the track,’ said the driver. ‘Then we would have been in open desert.’

During the long days of marching before Nouzad, I had learned to tell the time by measuring the length of my shadow cast by the sun. Now I tried to teach myself how to get my bearings by the stars. I always kept an eye on where the nearest mountains were, and remembered the location of the last oasis we had visited. This wasn’t easy. We never took a direct route, but were forever weaving around the desert. I was most impressed by our drivers’ uncanny sense of direction, but perhaps the close brush with the aeroplane had disconcerted them more than somewhat, for all at once the three jeeps pulled up together and the drivers announced that they were lost. It was by now dark, and to go on without a guide would have been foolhardy. Luckily, and as always happens in the Afghan desert, other life appeared within a matter of moments, in the form of a tractor and its driver.

Immediately our drivers started to argue with our commanders about who was going to pay this guide for his services. Each side was trying to outdo the other, of course, and there was lot of lip-curling and ‘Call yourselves Muslims?’ going on. Meantime valuable minutes ticked by, and my nerves were becoming frayed.

‘How much are you arguing about?’ I asked.

‘He wants one thousand
Afghanis
.’

About £7! I was about to pull out the money in
Afghanis
, thinking, to hell with this, I’ll pay, but then I stopped. I knew that such a gesture would be hopeless. It would also betray me and endanger my companions. So I sat and seethed until the argument was resolved, trying to calm myself with the thought that for an Afghan, £7 is a considerable sum.

The tractor-driver guided us down a dirt track to a village where dozens and dozens of children milled about, despite the fact that by now it was the middle of the night. We stopped for the mechanics to overhaul the jeeps as far as they could, and for our drivers to find out how far we were still from the Kabul– Kandahar road.

‘Three hours,’ came the inevitable reply. Gloomily, we refuelled the jeeps from the oil drums they carried and set off again – but at snail’s pace, for the track ahead was full of pitfalls, and we had to send two mujahedeen ahead of each vehicle to guide us. However, at length we reached the road. Our tractor-driving guide left us, and I was about to breathe a sigh of relief. Then one of the jeeps broke down. It took half an hour to repair it, by which time I estimated that we had a bare hour of darkness left to travel in. But now, instead of taking to the road, our drivers took off along a track to the left of it.

The track led us to a bowl-shaped area surrounded on three sides by precipitous mountains.

‘What are we doing here?’ I asked Abdul Rahman as calmly as I could.

Abdul Rahman had recovered quite a lot of his composure. ‘We will camp here tonight, and then in the morning we will climb to the guerrilla stronghold at the top of that hill,’ he said.

During all my time in Afghanistan, I tried to place my faith in the people in whose hands my safety lay. I had had no difficulty in doing this with Ismail Khan, but I felt doubtful about Abdul Rahman. I decided that I would try to panic him. Fortuitously, high overhead, a large plane flew by. It was still dark enough to see its red landing light flashing clearly.

‘Do you see that?’ I asked him.

‘Yes.’

‘That light is a camera. The Russians are taking photographs of us every time it flashes.’

I had hoped that he would order an immediate evacuation. Instead he looked rather pleased and wandered off. I was nonplussed but a few minutes later I was surrounded by delighted mujahedeen.

‘Did you see that plane?’ they chorused.

‘Yes.’

‘It was taking pictures of us. Isn’t that something?’ they announced proudly. ‘Abdul Rahman told us. Truly, he is a great commander, to know such things.’

I did discover that the mujahedeen stronghold we had invited ourselves to belonged to a group called Jabhe. In the freezing dawn of 13 September we threw tarpaulins over the jeeps, parked, as I now saw, among several other similarly shrouded vehicles. Then, wrapped in our patous, we climbed the path uphill. We hadn’t gone far when,

‘Halt! Who goes there?’ demanded a young mujahed, popping up from behind a rock, complete with Kalashnikov, which he proceeded to fire, once, into the air. We were frisked and disarmed, and only then allowed to proceed. We were told not to stray from the path, which was clearly marked with black flags, and on either side of which drivers and passengers lay sleeping in niches and crevices in the rocks. We came to a halt at the top of an improvised waiting area-cum-mosque. The holy
mirhab
of the mosque was simply marked out in a semicircle of stones. Here, Abdul Mohmy spent several hours in prayer – an action which gave me serious and grave concern. Mohmy was highly intelligent and genuinely tough. He would not pray so long and so earnestly without good reason. I noticed too that high morale and good humour had somehow evaporated overnight. To my horror, it looked as though the trip to Pakistan had finally been abandoned, though I could not fathom why.

Later the reason became clear. There had been a report on the BBC the night before that the Russians intended to seal the border once and for all. Most of the day was spent brooding, or in
sotto voce
discussion, but by late afternoon a decision appeared to have been reached, and we all trooped down to the jeeps. Hope rose in me before I could suppress it.

‘What’s happening?’ I asked Aminullah, a brazen commander who had joined us on the road.

‘Tonight we will try for the border,’ he said. ‘Tonight it will be make or break.’

Our party was joined by eight heavily armed Jabhe mujahedeen in their own Symorgh. They were mean-looking characters, and one of them still sported his sunglasses, though the light had long since faded; but any demonstration of extra support was reassuring, as we would have to join the main road at a junction by a village where a Russian garrison was situated. We left after a lengthy prayer meeting, but finally the engines roared, beards were wiped, Allah was invoked, and off we went.

The extra Symorgh carrying the eight guerrillas took up the rear. We never saw them again.

On reaching the Kabul–Kandahar road we were confronted by a tumult. Our headlights caught a crowd of mujahedeen running hither and thither, brandishing their guns and shouting frantically. Not far beyond them loomed the sinister shapes of buildings. The first jeep roared off down the road, and the second jeep and ours followed closely, while we passengers either kept a lookout for mines or bent our heads in prayer. We could in fact have been travelling faster, but we dared not, for fear of not being able to brake in time to avoid a pothole or a mine. I wondered if we could have avoided a mine anyway, but then I realised that the local mujahedeen had sent scouts up ahead and these had lit signal flares to tell us that a particular stretch of road was clear. Proceeding like this, from signal to signal, we travelled some way. After a time, we braked hard and swerved off the road down a steep bank to the right. Lights ablaze, we headed for the foothills, but we paused briefly with a group of mujahedeen who proudly showed us the mines they had collected. Mines are simply placed on the tarmac by the army, and the same technique is employed by the mujahedeen when they manage to collect them, rather than being blown up by them. But I hadn’t got time to try to make sense out of this, for I was worrying now about why we still had our lights on as we headed across country. What if the Russians had landed heli-borne troops ahead to ambush us? Sometimes I wished I hadn’t such a vivid imagination.