The Road to Oxiana (33 page)

The people of the place agreed that the open road was no place for Jamshyd and the luggage at this time of day, and sent out to fetch them as soon as possible.

Moghor
,
May 18th
.—Christopher has accepted Haji Lal's offer for the car, which is about fifty pounds. He
only gave sixty for it originally. One of the guards has gone off to Kala Nao to fetch part of the money, and the rest is arriving in sacks from the neighbouring villages; our friend must be a man of credit. Ten pounds are being deducted for the black horse, which Christopher has taken a fancy to. I am hiring one for myself, in case we find motor transport later.

A lorry has just passed on its way to Herat containing the secretary to the Russian Consulate in Maimena. Having seen our car being dragged in by oxen, he stopped to ask if he could help, which was friendly of him. He said that lorries run from Maimena to Mazar-i-Sherif almost daily.

After he had gone, an Afghan walked into the room and addressed me as “Tovarish”. “Good God,” I said, “don't comrade me. I'm English.” It took a long time to persuade him that not all fair people were Russians. But when we succeeded in doing so, it transpired that he was an escaped Russian subject and in fact had nothing to say for the Bolsheviks.

There is a river near the robat where we went this evening to wash our plates. Seeing a village on the other side of it, we asked a passing youth if he could get us any milk there. He could, he said, if he had anything to put it in; so we handed him a thermos. But instead of going to the village, he stood still and open-eyed, fingering the glittering object, till we had finished washing up. Then, as we started to go back to the robat, he ran after us, and taking off his turban presented it to us as a security for the thermos.

Later
.—Everyone thinks Christopher has been swindled over the car, whose value in this country seems to be greater than we thought. I forgot to mention the most
curious part of the bargain. This was that we should give Haji Lal a letter to enable him to see over the buildings at New Dehli. I have done my best, though I know no one in the Public Works Department there.

One should study first aid before starting on this kind of journey. We have just had one man asking help for a sprained thumb, another for worms. The least one can do is to make a show of treating them. But instead of masquerading as a witch-doctor, it would be pleasanter to know they would be cured.

Bala Murghab
(1500
ft
., c
45 miles from Moghor
),
May 20th
.—We left Herat six days ago. If we had started in the morning instead of the afternoon, we should probably have arrived here the same night.

Our caravan from Moghor consisted of six horses, three for the luggage, one for me, one for the “gunman” who escorted us, and Christopher's black. The last turned out to be a remarkable pacer, putting its near and off legs forward alternately with the speed of a machine-gun. We forsook the motor-road, and cutting across the downs, came to higher hills, still grass-covered, but dotted with outcrops of rock and occasional pistachio bushes which I mistook for wild fig trees till I saw the clusters of reddening nuts. From the top of this range we had a last view of the Paropamisus behind us, still half hidden by rain clouds. In front, and nearer, rose the main range of the Band-i-Turkestan.

A broad valley, hot and stony, intervened, where the desert flora reappeared and a solitary traveller, seeing us from afar, hid himself in a gulley till we had passed. On the other side of the valley, as we were preparing for a new ascent, a river came in sight and was flowing,
to our astonishment, straight towards the mountain wall. Its behaviour was explained by a pair of rocky gates, each crowned by a watch-tower, which passed it through the mountains. We followed it, crossing from the west bank to the east by means of a dilapidated bridge, of whose two stone arches one had been washed away and replaced by a wooden suspension. The motor road, which must have joined the river further south, uses this bridge. According to the Russian who called on us at Moghor, both it and the towers were built by Alexander.

The river in question was the Murghab, which rises in the Hindu Kush and frays out to lose itself in the desert round Merv. Here it was about the size of the Thames at Windsor, though the current was stronger, flowing between low grass banks lined with reeds and bushes of pink spiraea. On the other side, groups of black tents were dotted over the green foothills.

Having ridden more than thirty miles, and Murghab being still another twelve, we stopped for the night at a robat. The people were stupid and disobliging; our room was an airless cell, and crowded with flies, which showed we must have dropped during the day; and we were glad to be gone early this morning, leaving the valley at last and emerging into a cultivated plain encompassed with grassy rounded foothills. Here it was much hotter. The cropped grass by the road already had a brown tinge, and the corn was standing high, full of pink veitches. Yet on some of the hills men were ploughing; perhaps for a second crop. As usual, the town looked like a wood from a distance, but reminded me of an Irish market-town once we were in it. The front doors lead straight out of the street into one-storey houses, so that instead of the ordinary blank walls and intervening courtyards one catches sight of the life within.

Central Asia is beginning. Conversations in Turki assailed us, uttered by hirsute, slit-eyed men wearing striped and flowered gowns. Turcomans in busbies and red robes were pacing up and down, having mostly escaped over the Russian frontier, which is only twenty miles away. We saw a party of their women, all dressed in different reds and squatting over their food in an open court; with their tall hats nodding as they ate, they looked like a bed of geraniums and sweet-williams. To our surprise we also saw various Jews seated unconcernedly before their shops.

Our gunman took us to the Governor's house, which stands in a walled garden by the river. Outside it, on a bluff above the water, perches the old castle, now containing a small garrison. From this to the garden, the bank is lined with mulberry trees, beneath which the townsmen spend their leisure conversing, reading, praying, washing and grazing their horses. Christopher joined them with his.

The Governor was eating, but ordered us to be his guests; we have a room at the back of his secretary's office. They tell us he is seventy years old, has a long white beard, and is much loved for his suppression of robbers. Some of the robbers were clanking about in fetters on the other side of the garden; they seemed cheerful enough. He appears to enjoy the position of a hereditary khan, and may perhaps be the last representative of those numerous independent rulers who flourished between the Oxus and the Hindu Kush till eighty years ago, when the Emir Dost Mohammad incorporated their dominions in the Afghan state. His son, who has the face of a Spanish nobleman and is dressed in top-boots, a shooting suit, trench coat, stiff white collar, and turban cocked over one eye, certainly does the honours with the air of a Crown Prince. The whole atmosphere is patriarchal. Turcomans, Tajiks,
and Uzbegs, of both sexes, keep coming up the garden path to seek justice at the secretary's window.

A black Labrador retriever and a doubtful spaniel are also wandering about the garden, both bred in Russia.

Maimena
(2900
ft
.,
c
. 110
miles from Murghab
),
May 22nd
.—Turkestan!

I have been reading Proust for the last three days (and begin to observe the infection of uncontrolled detail creeping into this diary). His description of how the name
Guermantes
hypnotised him reminds me of how the name
Turkestan
has hypnotised me. It started in the autumn of 1931. The Depression was in full swing, Europe insupportably gloomy, one asked if Communism was the solution, and the only way of escape seemed to be a villa at Kashgar out of reach of the post. I consulted the London Library, the library of the Central Asian Society, and the School of Oriental Studies; but architecturally and historically it appeared that Russian Turkestan, if not so remote, would offer more than Chinese. I gave up Kashgar, made friends with a secretary at the Russian Embassy, collected the members of a possible expedition, and went to Moscow to ask leave for it to start. To no purpose: in every department I was met by the argument that when Russian scientists, or even a single tea-taster, were allowed in India, I might go to Bokhara. In 1932 I reverted to the original plan. Another party was formed, and applied to the India Office for permission to travel up the Gilgit road to Kashgar. This application, after eliciting a curious sidelight on the sort of information confided to the India Office archives concerning peers who visit India, was forwarded to Delhi and Pekin. But before it could be answered, the government in Kashgar collapsed, civil war invaded the whole of Sinkiang, and the Gilgit road
was closed to travellers. There remained a third, an Afghan, Turkestan. For it, another expedition was formed, but preferred, at the last moment, to undertake a research into the combustive properties of charcoal. I tried by myself, failed, have tried again, and now have hopes of succeeding. But though we have crossed the provincial frontier, we are still only half-way to Mazar.

When he actually met his duchess, Proust's image was shattered; he had to build another, to correspond with the woman instead of the name. Mine has been confirmed, enhanced. In the last two days, all the novelty and pastoral romance implied in the name Turkestan have come true; already a whole chapter of history has been transferred from the printed page to the mind's eye. I owe this fulfilment to the luck of the season. It was Mme. de Guermantes's complexion that failed Proust. We have found Turkestan in the full bloom of early summer.

Three cars stood in the Governor's garden at Murghab. One was the lifeless body of a grey Ford coupé. The others were Vauxhalls, new, dark red, and closed; when it rained, they were covered with tarpaulins. Early in the morning after our arrival, the Governor and his son drove away in the Vauxhalls, to Maruchak on the Russian frontier. We looked forlornly at the Ford's engine scattered over the surrounding vegetable-beds and ordered horses.

“I can take you to Maimena in the car if you like”, said a Persian boy named Abbas, plucking the radiator out of a bush. “We will start in an hour.”

The likelihood of covering more than two or three of the intervening hundred miles in this preposterous vehicle seemed so remote that we took none of the usual precautions before starting, prepared no food, disdained, if only out of courtesy to the driver, to count the car's
spare parts, and even went so far as to wear our so-called best suits. The luggage was put into the back, where it reached to the ceiling. When Christopher and I stepped into the front, the chassis subsided a foot, as if we had been the mother-in-law in a slapstick film. Abbas was winding the crank handle. Suddenly his arm flew over his head, the noise of a blacksmith's shop proceeded from the now collected engine, and we bounded across the Governor's flower-beds, while Abbas, in flying pursuit, just reached the wheel in time to turn us through the gate. Down the main street the population fled; in a minute we were through the town and tearing up a deserted valley. The luggage fell out of the un-glazed windows. The radiator, playing fountains to the sky, first declined to the earth in front, then fell backwards on top of the engine, entangling itself in the fan, till we roped it up with our bedding cord. The sound of the machinery became apocalyptic, clanking and fizzing without any sort of rhythm till at last, with a final deafening cannonade, it ceased altogether and Abbas beamed at us with the expression of a conductor laying down his baton after an applauded symphony. A sympathetic report from the near hind tyre, though a beat late, announced that it also needed rest for the moment. We had come ten miles.

There was no spare tyre. Gathering up the shreds of the outer cover, Abbas produced a patching outfit, while Christopher and I, still determined that fate should look after us, lowered our best suits on to the grass some way off. The afternoon shadows were lengthening. It remained to bring the engine to life. But this was quickly accomplished by a few random blows with a hammer, as one beats a child, and we jumped in just in time. We now began to realise that the kangaroo paces of our vehicle, though not so comfortable as the glide of the old Chevrolet, were taking us over a road which the Chevrolet could never have tackled at all.

The valley we were following was about two miles broad. A river ran along it on the west, confined in an earth cutting. On either side rose earth hills, whose boneless green contours, rounded and polished by the weather, had the glossiness of a horse's flanks; though those on the west grew so steep towards the bottom that they met the valley with bare cliffs, revealing the body underneath, where the green vesture had no hold. Valley and hills alike were covered with a pasture of waving golden green, so rich that we could scarcely believe it had not been specially sown; until, when we came to crops, they seemed bare and thin by comparison. This wonderful country, with not a pebble in it to impede the plough or seedling, was hardly inhabited.

Not a pebble assisted the surface of the road either. When we left the valley, turning from north to northeast, the track was marked simply by two ditches, dug for that purpose, which wound in and out of the troughs of the downs. The grass which had looked so smooth from a distance was full of holes and hummocks; every bump threatened to annihilate us. But imperceptibly the distance to Maimena grew less, and we had come about forty miles when Abbas, seeing two turf pillars by the road, suggested that though his headlights left nothing to be desired we should stop here for the night. Feeling we had tempted fate enough for one day, we agreed.

A side-track from between the pillars led us over several hump-backed bridges to a solitary house and yard overlooked by a grove of poplars. Its owner came out to greet us, a man of middle height dressed in white with a white turban, whose smile, framed by a curly dark brown beard, had the innocence of a child's. He showed us to a carpeted room furnished with a sliding wooden window, a fireplace, and a lot of old books in
a niche over the door; it had the smell of an English drawing-room, exhaled by a pot-pourri of rose-leaves that were drying in another niche. Children staggered in with the luggage. Others brought us tea as we sat in the grass outside, gazing at the cool serpentine shadows among the green hills smeared with gold, above which rose the abrupt lilac peaks of the western Hindu Kush.