Eastern Approaches (21 page)

The inhabitants of the
sarai
, who I hoped were soldiers or frontier guards, but who from their lack of uniform and ferocious appearance, might equally well have been brigands, seemed distressed to find that I spoke no known language and took little interest in my passport. We seemed to have reached a deadlock. After a suitable interval had elapsed I accordingly said ‘Mazar-i-Sharif’ and made as if to remount my horse. But this I was gently but firmly prevented from doing.

A further interval elapsed at the end of which, feeling hungry and thirsty and finding an orange in one of my bundles, I began to suck it, spitting out the pips on the floor. For some reason this made more impression on my captors than anything else I had hitherto said or done. At once the horses were brought round, our temporary captors waved goodbye and we started off again, I, at any rate, none the wiser. As an afterthought an escort was sent galloping after us. For miles he rode abreast of me with a loaded rifle held loosely across his saddle bow and pointing exactly at my stomach. I was glad when he tired of our company and eventually faded away.

An hour or two later we sighted a small earth-coloured hump on the horizon. The drab, khaki-coloured desert was absolutely flat and it was a very long time before we came near enough to see that it was the immense dome of a ruined mosque, apparently of very great age. From now onwards the plain was scattered with ruins, sometimes a few crumbling stones, at others, whole cities with mosques and watch-towers
and city walls stretching for miles. Away to the west lay what is left of Balkh, the ancient Bactria, the Mother of Cities. These were the remains of a civilization which had been founded by Alexander of Macedon, had been destroyed by Genghis, had recovered, and had then gradually crumbled into decay. There are no signs of vegetation near any of these ruins and any water supply there may have been must have dried up or been diverted.

Towards sunset we came to the cultivated fields and plantations of the oasis of Seyagird, the first we had seen since the Oxus. Here a large military fort, with crenellated mud wall, towers over a cluster of houses and gardens surrounded by high walls and a small mosque, all built of the mud bricks used throughout Turkestan. In a large open space before the fort the camels of a number of caravans were resting, before setting out once more. We dismounted at the house of the Headman of the village, with whom I made, by means of signs, place names and a lavish use of the three or four Persian words which I had by now acquired, polite conversation over a cup of tea until it was time to go on. One of the horses was by now beginning to show signs of distress, so the luggage was transferred to a cart and we continued on our way in the dark over the flat clay plain. After what seemed a long time we saw the lights of Mazar reflected in the sky and just before ten clattered down the main street past the great mosque from which the town derives its name and dismounted in front of the inn. My horse, in spite of its unprepossessing appearance, had done sixty miles over bad country under a scorching sun without turning a hair.

The inn turned out to be clean and well-appointed. Unfortunately, no one spoke a word of any European language, and all that I was able to discover from the inn-keeper with regard to my onward journey was that the only motor vehicle in the place was ‘out of order’, a Persian phrase which was to impress itself forcibly on my memory in the course of my travels.

The conversation had taken place outside the inn. Turning away, somewhat depressed by what I had learned, I walked into the first door I came to where a light was showing. A couple were lying in bed under a mosquito net. As far as I could judge they were Europeans. I addressed them in English. They replied in Russian that
they did not speak German. A few minutes later they were making me some tea on a spirit lamp and I was giving them the latest news from the Soviet Union.

My host, a large, jovial man, came from Tashkent and was employed as a technical adviser at the local cotton mill. Since the removal of the Soviet Consulate earlier in the year he and his wife had been the only European residents in Mazar. My arrival, it seemed, had not been entirely unexpected to him, for he produced from his pocket a torn and crumpled letter which I found was from the British Minister in Kabul and intended for me. The somewhat excessive interest which he showed in my affairs was however amply made up for by his helpful and amiable attitude. With his help I succeeded in arranging that the car which was to take me to Kabul should be repaired without delay and that we should start for the mountains next morning.

Like so many Soviet citizens, once they get outside their own country, the cotton expert and his wife showed no signs of the agonized reserve to which foreigners grow so accustomed in Moscow, but talked away gaily about all manner of things: night-life in Tashkent, the unculturedness of the Afghans and the fate of Czechoslovakia. They seemed particularly astonished to hear that I had been allowed to cross the Oxus. I explained, not without pride, how I had argued my way across. They said that they could not understand why the frontier authorities had let me across in view of the cholera. On my inquiring innocently what cholera, they proceeded to explain, with evident gusto and great wealth of detail, clearly delighted at such an opportunity of making anyone’s flesh creep, how northern Afghanistan, and in particular the town of Mazar, was being swept by a devastating epidemic of cholera, and added that, now that I had entered the stricken area, I should not be allowed to continue my journey until I had spent a week in an Afghan quarantine station. There I was certain to catch cholera if I had not got it already.

This prospect did not please me at all and, having politely got out of a pressing invitation to make up a party for the local circus, I retired to bed, determined to leave for Kabul next day as I had originally arranged.

By an early hour next morning I had succeeded in collecting in my
bedroom the head doctor of the hospital, a Turk who could speak one or two words of each of a number of languages, and the local Director of Sanitation, an elegant young Afghan in a European suit and karakul hat. Having, with considerable difficulty, first convinced them that I was not myself suffering from cholera, which was what they had been led to suppose by whoever had fetched them, I explained the situation and asked them for their advice. After a good deal of desultory talk during which I lost no opportunity of assuring my audience of my admiration for Afghanistan and for all Afghan institutions, including the local sanitary authorities, and also hinted darkly at the vital and urgent character of my mission, we came to the conclusions that the best way of smuggling me through the sanitary cordon would be to furnish me with a document certifying that I had already had cholera and recovered. An impressive-looking medical certificate to this effect was accordingly drawn up and signed and a similar document made out in favour of the driver of the truck. I was left with some hours in which to look round before setting out.

Mazar-i-Sharif, now the chief town of Afghan Turkestan with a population of 50,000, has supplanted Balkh and the other cities of which the ruins are strewn over the desolate and malarious plain in which it is situated. In the midst of it stands the fifteenth-century mosque from which it derives its name, the Noble Shrine. The walled gardens, the windowless fronts of the houses and the
chai-khanas
open on the dusty street, recalled Bokhara and the cities of Soviet Turkestan, but there was a striking difference in atmosphere and in the demeanour of the population. In the bazaar, a noisy, brightly clad crowd pushed its way through narrow streets of stalls containing, in addition to local products, a rich selection of goods from Birmingham, Yokohama and Berlin. Here and there one or two European-built buildings testified to the modernizing tendencies of the Government. It was the King’s birthday and a stream of somewhat superficially Europeanized troops in khaki and steel helmets were marching to the music of brass bands along recently laid out avenues under flag-bedecked triumphal arches to a review.

Towards midday the truck, which, I gathered, had been repaired, made its appearance and I settled into the front seat with the feeling
that there was nothing more for me to do but sit still until we got to Doaba, the village approximately half way to Kabul, where it had been arranged that I should meet the British Minister, Colonel Fraser-Tytler.

Once we had left the outskirts of the town I found myself once again in a typical Central Asian desert, complete with sand, tamarisks, marmots and skeletons, but travelling this time at forty miles an hour along a very fair road. This took us eastwards for some fifty miles to the foot of the mountains and the village of Tashkurgan, the namesake of the fort which dominates the road from Kashgar to the Indian border. Here we stopped to show our medical certificates and noticed that the petrol tank had sprung a leak. We collected from some amused villagers a handful of raw cotton and a handful of raisins, ground them together between two stones, spat on them, and effected the necessary repair, only to find that the steering gear was also out of order. A summary inspection revealed that at least one important part was missing. This was replaced by a metal collar-stud and, well pleased with our resourcefulness, we then proceeded contentedly on our way up into the mountains.

The pass through the mountains which I was to follow as far as Doaba and thence on to Kabul corresponds roughly to the branch of the Silk Road leading from Turkestan over the Oxus into India. This was the way followed by the pilgrims from China searching for the Buddha, by the caravans and by Genghis on his way to the plains of India.

The present road, which twists beside rushing mountain streams between towering crags and cliffs of light red volcanic rock, has only been in existence since 1937 and represents one of the most important achievements of the reign of Nadir Khan. Besides being no mean feat of engineering this road, some three hundred miles long, possesses considerable economic and political significance. It is only natural that Afghan Turkestan, cut off as it is by geographical and, to a certain extent, by ethnological barriers from Kabul and southern Afghanistan, should be drawn towards the rest of Turkestan and, in particular, to Soviet Turkestan, from which it is separated by no natural barriers save the Oxus for a part of the length of the frontier. Until the
construction of the present road northern Afghanistan was only connected with Kabul by a few mountain passes only negotiable by pack animals, while to the north a number of roads, or at any rate potential roads, across flat country, connected Mazar-i-Sharif and Herat with the Soviet frontier and, what is more, with the Central Asian Railway which now runs for a considerable distance along the Soviet frontier and of which a branch line joins up with Kushk. The chances were that northern Afghanistan, besides being exposed to a military attack, would, even without this, fall completely under Soviet economic domination, which is apt to be followed by Soviet political and even military domination. This would almost certainly have meant the end of Afghanistan which would scarcely have been able to exist without its richest province. By this road, however, along which a steady stream of lorries runs from Kabul to Mazar-i-Sharif, Nadir Khan enabled the northern province to turn southwards for its supplies and markets.

After leaving Tashkurgan, we climbed through rocky gorges until, towards nightfall, we reached Hai-Bak, with its long street of bazaar-stalls and
chai-khanas
, in front of which the male population were sitting smoking and drinking tea in the soft evening light. The bazaar was overflowing with saddle-bags, skull-caps, Afghan national flags and melons. We laid in a large store of the latter and drove on in the dark over a dusty plain, cultivated in places, until again we reached another craggy range of mountains and started to climb once more. As we negotiated hairpin bends in the dark at a steady fifty miles per hour with a wall of rock rising above us on one side and a rushing torrent at the bottom of a precipice on the other, I wondered sleepily how the collar-stud, which occupied so important a position in the steering gear, was standing up to the strain.

We reached Doaba at three in the morning and here found, very much to my surprise, a rest house built by the Afghan Government on Anglo-Indian lines and reserved apparently for travelling Europeans and high Government officials. The caretaker was roused and I was soon asleep in a bed with blankets and clean sheets. I afterwards learned that it was generally considered a poor sort of place by the Diplomatic Corps in Kabul, but to me it seemed at the time the height of luxury.

I devoted most of next day to preparations for my meeting with His Majesty’s Minister. The rest house boasted a bathroom with fittings by Messrs. Doulton, but these were very definitely ‘out of order’ and had long since been turned to other, by local standards no doubt more practical, uses. In the end a number of buckets of tepid water were brought and poured over me and by the time the Legation car arrived I was, if not very elegant, at any rate moderately clean.

The next two days, spent in camp on the banks of a rushing stream beneath a great natural wall of rock in the valley of the Andarrab, a tributary of the Oxus, were amongst the pleasantest of the whole journey. In Mrs. Fraser-Tytler I found a fellow clanswoman with whom my friendship dated back to the days of my childhood in Inverness, while from her husband I learned more about Afghanistan in forty-eight hours than I should otherwise have learnt in as many days. Finally, large quantities of excellent food, partaken of in magnificent natural surroundings and in circumstances of extreme luxury, contributed still further to my contentment.

From the Andarrab valley I did not travel direct to Kabul, but turned aside westwards along the river valley to Bamyan. Here two immense Buddhas are cut in the side of a red sandstone cliff, honeycombed with the cells and passages of a monastery which the Chinese pilgrim Hsijan-Tsang visited at the height of its splendour in 630
A.D.
, six centuries before the Mongol invasion. On the summits of the crags on either side of the valley stand the forts and watch towers which guarded the approaches of the great city of Bamyan, of which the ruins are scattered over the plain into which the valley broadens out. High above these rises the castle of the King, which, so the story goes, was betrayed to Genghis Khan by the King’s lovesick daughter. After which Genghis sacked the city and defaced the great Buddhas and, incidentally, put the King’s daughter to death.