The Road to Oxiana (38 page)

Among the passengers of the wreck was a tall man in
a heavy black beard and lounge suit who spoke German. He said he was one of the king's secretaries, and was making this journey in order to write an Afghan travel book. There he sat on the river-bank, industriously penning it from right to left. He looked suspiciously at our whisky, though we have now learnt the habit of calling it sherbet in public.

Khanabad
(
1300 ft
.,
27 miles from robat before Kunduz
),
June 4th
.—The bridge was mended by midday and our lorry crossed it safely. Seyid Jemal, our driver, turned out to be the other driver's brother. He linked our lorry to the wreck with a steel cable, and while the naked men levered with poles from below, gradually pulled it out the right way up. It had suffered no damage except to the paint, started at the first touch, and sailed off down the road in front of us.

A sandy track through high marsh reeds brought us to an open beach beside the river Kunduz, at a point where its flow of pinkish muddy snow-water, sixty yards wide, came sweeping round a bend on its way to the Oxus with the speed of an express train. The beach was crowded with people; a blazing heat rose from the shimmering sand; against the lucid pink-blue sky, a line of camels and a line of willows disarranged each other's silhouettes. As we arrived, the ferry was putting off from the opposite bank, crowded with men, horses, and merchandise. It consisted of two rough-hewn high-sterned barges, fastened together by a railed stage across the middle. The current caught it. Simultaneously a line of swimmers grasping a rush tow-rope struck out at right angles across the river, while a man in one of the sterns used a broad paddle as a rudder. At last, thanks to the bend, it hit our shore a quarter of a mile downstream. Further up, other swimmers were guiding horses
and cattle across by themselves. When they landed, we saw that many of these professional mermen had large gourds tied to their backs. Their skins were dark brown with exposure, and some of their faces of a type which suggested the servile aboriginal; though no one could tell us if they belonged to a special race or not. Only our regard for the savage Afghan modesty prevented us from joining them on the return journey.

The ferry had now to be dragged upstream, to the top of the bend again, where our lorry mounted the railed stage. We approached the further bank at ten knots an hour, and I was preparing to swim for my life when, by an adroit twist, the impact was lessened and we grated into the low earth cliff. The excitement of the crowd equalled Putney on boat-race day: the dark-skinned naked swimmers, stately Uzbegs in flowered gowns, squat peering Turcomans in pointed fur caps, Hazaras in black turbans as broad as Ascot hats, and one or two men in fair beards whom we supposed to be Kaffirs, handed us up into the field above. Through them all stalked the red-bearded Governor of Kunduz, whip in hand, looking like a Scottish ghillie and conscientiously supervising the whole procedure.

A line of ramparts, white, weary, and old as the mounds of Balkh, announced Kunduz town. On the other side of it we struck across a rising green plain, which brought us nearer to the great snow-peaks on the south-east, so that we could distinguish faces and clefts of bare rock among the snow. Out in the pasture, which consisted of that curious prickly clover whose flowers are like clover flowers, cream with pink tips, while the leaves are more like holly, stood occasional kibitkas, rush-built and untidy, around which grazed herds of horses and cattle. A yellow asphodel
¹
appeared, three or four feet high, singly at first, then in patches, at length transforming
the whole prairie into a sea of deep daffodil yellow warmed by the golden blush of sunset.

The people of Khanabad call these yellow pokers “sikh”, and make a kind of thread from their green berries.

Under the mountains we joined the road from Kabul, whose double line of closely posted telephone wires had a new political meaning, if they stretch, as we supposed, to the mouth of the Wakhan Valley, that narrow salient of Afghanistan which separates the three great Asiatic states of Russia, China, and India. A sudden drop brought us into the town, where the Mudir-i-Kharija proved a youth of eighteen prematurely aged by appendicitis. The English words “boots”, “programme”, “sugar”, and “motah-van” cropped up in his Persian vocabulary. He took us to drink tea in the Governor's audience chamber, a room ninety feet long adorned with the national arms in black and white on an orange curtain at one end of it.

Tired and dirty, we asked for rooms. But instead of the expected guest-house, which had recently fallen down, he led us to a grove of rustling plane trees as tall as elms, which dated, he said, “from the days of the Mirs”, in other words, from before the conquest of Badakshan by the Emir Dost Mohammad. Here tents had been pitched, carpets, tables, and chairs set out, and lamps lit for our reception. It would have been better done, he said, if he had known we were coming; but there was no telephone between here and Mazar to warn him.

We call our guards the Vicar and the Curate. Not knowing that a third tent in the background contained a newly dug latrine, I asked the Vicar where the lavatory was. At first he did not understand, though I used the ordinary Persian words. Then he guessed. “Oh”,
he said, “you mean the
jawab-i-chai
—the answer-to-tea.”

A nice euphemism for that essential office.

Khanabad
,
June 5th
.—This morning we saw the Governor, Shir Mohammad Khan, a sensible man, who answered our questions straightly without any pretence of being asleep all day.

“No,” he said in a low depressed voice, “you can't go to Hazrat Imam, because it's near the River; and you can't go to see the hot springs at Chayab for the same reason; the River is the frontier, and it would be impolitic to allow you there. As for the Chitral road, the Durah pass will be closed by snow for another two months. And anyhow, in all three cases, you would have to get permission from Kabul.”

I regret Hazrat Imam, since the Mudir-i-Kharija has told us the shrine there has tiles on it.

Tomorrow, therefore, after ten months' travelling, we turn towards home.

There is little to interest us here, apart from our pleasant shady camp. The brick bridge over the river has been carried away by a flood. The Indian bean trees that scent the Governor's garden are said to come from Russia. They sell ice instead of snow in the bazaar.

Bamian
(8400
ft
., 195
miles from Khanabad
),
June 8th
.—We had just embarked in the lorry at Khanabad the day before yesterday, when the Mudir-i-Kharija ran up and asked us to wait an hour, while he found two new attendants to go with us. At the prospect of losing the Vicar and the Curate, Christopher blew and roared, I stamped, the Vicar muttered in the Mudir-i-Kharija's ear that we were dangerous if thwarted, Seyid Jemal
swore he would not wait another moment, and off we drove, kidnapping our own guards. They are pleased at the jaunt, having never seen the capital, but nervous of what may happen to them in Mazar when they return. I don't know why we set such store by their company; they are more comic than useful. The Vicar, whenever he is asked to do anything, repeats the request several times in a sing-song tone, utters a long eulogy on his inexhaustible desire to be of help, begs us to believe that his happiness and ours are one, and then doesn't do it. The Curate is avowedly lazy. He has to be galvanised into action by a forcible shake. But at least they no longer obstruct us from photographing or going where we want, which new guards might have done.

Eighteen miles from Khanabad, we rejoined the Kunduz as it entered the mountains, and are still beside a bit of it here at Bamian; in fact, but for this river it is difficult to see how a motor-road could ever have been made over the Hindu Kush. For the moment it proved a nuisance, or the parent of one. A small tributary, swollen with snow-water, brought us to a stop in the middle of the Baglan plain.

There was nothing to do but wait, marking the water by stones to see if it was rising or falling. Our only shade, as we nestled in the cool pasture, was from clumps of pampas grass. A little slug-shaped hill stood near, uplifting a few graves and a shrine to a view of the great snow-range on the east. After a time another lorry joined us, and its men organised a shooting match at a bit of tin, in which the Vicar and the Curate and Seyid Jemal joined. Christopher and I bathed; but the water was such that we had to clean our bodies afterwards with a clothes-brush. When evening came we put out the beds beside the lorry. Mosquitoes the size of eagles collected as though to a dinner-bell.

Early next morning I was lying in bed, when an old gentleman riding a bay horse arrived at the river. He was dressed in a faded chocolate gown flecked with roses and the end of his turban was wrapped round his face over an iron-grey beard. Across the saddle he carried a brown lamb. Behind him, on foot, came his son aged twelve, flapping along in a gown of geranium red and a white turban as big as himself, and holding a stick with which he directed the progress of a black ewe and her black lamb.

When the party had assembled at the ford, the process of crossing began. First the old man rode into the stream, with difficulty kept his horse's head against it, and deposited the brown lamb on the other side. While he was returning, the child caught the black lamb. This he gave to his father, who then re-entered the water dangling it by one leg so that it screamed. Bleating in sympathy, the ewe followed. But the current swept her away and landed her on the bank she had started from. Meanwhile her offspring, now safe on the further bank with the brown lamb, kept on crying. Again the old man returned, and helped his son drive the wet and shivering ewe a hundred yards up the bank above the ford. There the current caught her once more, and landed her neatly at the ford itself, this time on the further side, where she was warmly greeted by both lambs. Putting his foot on his father's boot, the little boy hopped up behind him and probed the stream with his pole as they crossed, to see if the bottom was firm. On the other bank he dismounted, restored the brown lamb to his father's saddle, set the ewe and the black lamb in motion, and launched into a swinging trot, with his geranium gown flying out behind him. The bay horse followed, and the procession was lost on the horizon.

It was now a question of whether we should go on by horse too. But the water had gone down 3½ inches
in the night, and Seyid Jemal resolved to make a bid to save his contract. Thirty men were collected from an invisible village, some to pull in front with ropes, others to push behind. The lorry reached the incline to the ford, flew headlong into the water, upset and all but killed the men in front, and in ten seconds had been carried too far down by the current to make the exit on the other side. It backed, turned its nose from the stream, and sailed along the river at thirty miles an hour, followed by a yelling mob of bearded torsos in skull-caps, who were just in time to give it a further shove on to dry land at a second ford further down. Not a drop of water had reached the vital parts of the engine.

Baglan itself was a congeries of villages at the south end of the plain, standing among fields where the corn was already reaped and lay drying in stooks. We crossed the Kunduz again by the Pul-i-Khomri, an old brick bridge of one arch, beside which I found a group of small white carnations on tall stalks. Henceforth the road was properly engineered with gentle gradients carried on embankments or passing through cuttings; but being still in the earth country, there was nothing to sustain these works and the rain had cut them like cheese. Almost everyone, instead of being a convenience, necessitated a detour over ground where there was no road at all.

Now began the most beautiful part of the whole journey, which made us long to be on horses. The road left the river and started a frontal attack on the main Hindu Kush, climbing up their green bastions, not in twists, but by a succession of steeply sloping saddles leading from ridge to ridge. On all sides, below and above, as far as the eye could see, the escarpments of waving grass were spangled with an endless variety
of flowers, yellow and white and purple and pink, growing with such art, neither too close nor too scattered nor too profuse in any one kind, that it seemed as if some princely gardener, some Oriental Bacon, had been at work over the whole mountain range. Blue chicory, tall pink hollyhock-mallows, clumps of lemon-coloured cornflowers on stout brown knobs, patches of low white spikes like jasmine, a big spotty-leaved saxifrage, a small flower of butter yellow with a brown inside like garden musk, bunches of blue and pink nettles with stingless leaves, and branching sprays of rose-pink lobster-blossoms, were only a few of those that winked at us from this vast enamelled lawn edged by the clouds above and the ever-receding waves of Turkestan below—winked at us, sometimes from under pistachio bushes, as we chugged and fumed, cursing our vandal truck, to the top of the Kampirak pass.

Scooting over the green uplands, we arrived at a narrow defile, two miles long, where the road became a torrent-bed of loose stones and the lorry could scarcely insinuate itself between the unloose boulders. When this opened out, the Kunduz was below us again; mighty snow-peaks rose from the other side of it. The river took us west now, cantering its white river-horses toward us down the valley, till darkness obliged us to stop at a village called Tala or Barfak or sometimes Tala-Barfak.

We woke up this morning to realise we had left Central Asia. Tribes from the south were moving northward, real Afghans, swarthy and half Indian in their dress, managing strings of two and three hundred camels. Ruined castles and fortified walls crowned the opposing heights. The river, as if enraged by its own shrinkage, ran foaming out of a gorge whose sheer rock walls rose hundreds of feet into the blue sky. This
formation, interrupted by occasional cultivated valleys, lasted forty miles, and began by describing two-thirds of a circle. We crossed the river eight or nine times by wooden bridges. Pomegranate trees in scarlet flower and bushes of pink spiraea lined the water's edge. Eventually another bridge led us off the main road westward, into the valley of Bamian.