Shadow of the Silk Road (31 page)

We went through city ramparts without any city in sight, drenched in the sudden lushness of plane trees and apricot orchards. Balkh was no more than an overgrown village now, shrunk in its seven miles of walls. We reached its centre among a crush of carts and horse-drawn taxis, and glimpsed the broken sheaf of the Khoja Parsa shrine above its parklands.

Balkh’s extreme age–the Arabs called it ‘the Mother of Cities’–is a poetic guess. But as early as 1500
BC
, perhaps, Aryan warriors rode their chariots into the surrounding plains, bringing
Vedic Hinduism and bronze; and Zoroaster, the founder of Persia’s ancient faith–whose doctrine refined the concepts of purgatory and absolution–is said to have been born here and to have been slain at the city’s fire-altar.

Alexander the Great, advancing east after crushing Persia, turned Balkh into his eastern capital for two years. He found the Oxus river worshipped on its banks–a star-crowned goddess robed in thirty otter skins–and he married the daughter of a Bactrian chief, Roxana, whom his dazzled followers thought the most beautiful woman in Asia after the widow of the Persian king. And here–in that first, fatal softening to the Orient–he enraged his followers by instigating the practice of prostration.

After 126
BC
, for almost four centuries, Balkh was the merchant jewel of the Kushan kings, whose Tocharian ancestors I had seen mummified far away in the Taklamakan desert. Their huge, syncretic kingdom straddled the Silk Road between China to the east, Parthia and Rome to the west. A single trove unearthed near their lost summer palace yielded Chinese lacquers, Egyptian bronzes and erotic Indian ivories, with a Parthian sphinx and a shoal of glass dolphins, a statue of Hercules and a bust of Mars. It was the rich and pliant Buddhism of the Kushans which travelled east along the Silk Road to China, and at last to Japan. Still bearing the Hellenistic print of Alexander, their artefacts were to astonish future archaeologists with Grecian Buddhas pulled from the Afghan earth, and acanthus leaves carved in a Chinese desert where none were known.

But of all these centuries, almost nothing in Balkh remained, and the Islamic splendour that succeeded them–a city ringing with the poetry of Persia–was snuffed out by the Mongols. From a later age the clotted fantasy of the Khoja Parsa shrine survived like a traumatised descendant in the garden where we were walking. It was built only in 1461, over a theologian’s grave, but in its lonely endurance it seemed to carry the burden of all the city’s past. Flanking its high portal, two barley-sugar columns twisted up fifty feet and snapped off against nothing, and the drum of its bruised cupola still gleamed with white blossom opening on an indigo field.

In the park where Tahir and I walked for a while in quiet, the plane trees were turning yellow and a few old men lingered to stare at me. The ghostly arch of a seventeenth-century
madrasah
swung enormously against the sky, and we came upon the spurious tomb of the tenth-century poetess Rabia Balkhi, who in legend was killed by her family for loving a slave, and wrote her last poem in her blood. Sometimes young women murmur here the tangle of their own hearts.

We drove through choked streets until the plateau of the inner city stopped us. Then, climbing through the gap where a gate had been, we looked down on a desolation that choked the breath. Against the circling oasis, immense ramparts of platinum-coloured earth undulated. From the shapeless ridges of the earliest wall, threaded by goat-tracks, the bastions erupted in shattered fangs and stubs, stretching like a worn mountain range toward the Oxus. This inner city must have measured a mile across. It enclosed only bleached earth. Here and there a ruined gate left a gap of sky. A lone horse-cart was travelling across its wastes.

We did not know if there were leftover mines, and there was no one to ask. Most villagers never left well-known paths or even ventured on to verges. Above us the inmost citadel was a gaunt hill, leached by the sun. We followed each other’s footsteps delicately along the tracks winding up it, over a brittle crust of clay. Fifty years before, French archaeologists had dug for Alexander’s city here, and given up. They found nothing beneath the dense Islamic detritus except the vestige of a Kushan platform. Only in 2002 did a local gold-digger stumble on Corinthian columns, which mostly disappeared again. Under our feet the earth was strewn with turquoise and mauve-painted shards. They glistened imperishably in the compacted soil, with fragments of a dark green ceramic, and indecipherable bones. The noises of the little town ascended below us, and the squeaking of birds in the clefts.

When Genghis Khan invaded with a hundred thousand horsemen, the city he devastated was an Islamic cosmopolis still rich in Buddhist and Zoroastrian temples, even a Nestorian cathedral. Jelaleddin Rumi, founder of the great Mevlevi sect of whirling dervishes, was born here, and had departed the city as a boy the
year before. All its people were driven into the plain and butchered.

On the citadel the slim clay bricks of a later age were knitting indissolubly with those of the Kushans, perhaps of Alexander. Tamerlane, remembering Balkh’s prestige, crowned himself among its ruins in 1370, and his dynasty restored it. Far to the east and south the parapets of these later walls still ringed the oasis, bulging with towers. I followed them half-heartedly, and came upon two coagulated mounds which were all that remained of the Buddhist wonders visited by Xuanzang in 630. In his day the monasteries were in decline, and vaguely repellent: their jewelled statues and encrusted relics–the Buddha’s washbasin, the Buddha’s sweeping-brush and tooth–guarded by a lax brotherhood.

But a mile or two beyond, on a track between fields, I reached a chance survivor of the Mongol fury. It stood isolated in a grove of plane trees, where an armed sentry slept. Outside its walls the grave of Hajji Piyada, who tramped seven times to Mecca, has lent it his name. Inside I found myself walking among giant, drum-like pillars sunk almost to their capitals in the heaped earth. The nine domes of the ceiling had fallen, and the spring of pointed arches rose to nothing.

But over their sombre strength, over the brute square capitals and all the soffits of the arches, there swarmed a tracery of leaves and rosettes incised in stucco. Here and there the interlocking zones of foliage were tinged with white plaster and a hint of blue. This ninth-century Islamic prayer-hall–the oldest in the country–belonged to the world of an earlier Persia, the Persia of the Sassanian kings, and must have been echoed a hundred times in vanished Balkh.

The city, it seems, never recovered. A Taoist monk who passed by in the night two years after the Mongol sack heard only dogs barking in the streets. Even a century later the Berber traveller Ibn Battuta entered a maze of azure-painted ruins.

I had found a driver prepared to take me west. Mobin looked like
a ruffianly Talib, but he drove a Land-Cruiser, spoke halting English and was quickly resourceful. We went to the Mazar headquarters of the national police to find out the dangers of our route. The compound teemed with recently arrived government militia. In their sooty uniforms they looked drab and expendable. Some of them had probably belonged to disbanded warlord squads, and might as easily return. We were interviewed by a massive, slovenly officer with hooded eyes. He told us we should take two militia as bodyguards.

But they looked a liability. They might cause trouble with Dostum’s soldiers, who controlled Shebergan along the way, and I decided to leave without them. In the fortified offices of the UN Assistance Mission, a sleek Pashtun told me that the road beyond Shebergan to Maimana, two hundred miles away, was impassable. Better to take a track across the desert, he said, and a satellite phone.

But when I asked about the road beyond that, he thought for a second, then drew his hand across his throat.

We started before dawn, the stars still shining. The streets of Mazar were empty, the bazaars cluttered with covered carts, and dogs scavenging between. Our road went easily over the dark plain. A year before it had been impassable as Dostum’s men fought with the rival militia of Mohammed Ata. Now we passed without challenge through the walled emptiness of Takht-i-Pul, where the Taliban had slaughtered hundreds in 1998. No lights showed. A burnt-out tank was abandoned in a field. Towards dawn Mobin stopped the Land-Cruiser and spread his prayer-mat over the tarmac, alert to mines. Then he prayed, facing west in the headlights, the motor ticking over. His prostrations were almost feverish. Perhaps, I thought uncomfortably, he was thinking of the way ahead.

It was morning as Dostum’s militia lifted a barrier and we entered the fir-lined streets of Shebergan, passing the white confection of his palace. Shebergan was Dostum’s stronghold, and his portraits–the face of a genial uncle–were pasted everywhere. On the main street we picked up an old man who knew the track
to the west, and soon afterwards our tarmac petered out. We veered on to a trail which ran between sandy ridges, sometimes opening on to flats of ashen earth and scrub. Mobin said sombrely: ‘This is the Dasht-e-Laili.’

I could make out nothing. But somewhere here, close together, the prisoners of Mazar-e-Sharif’s double sack–Taliban in 1997, Hazara in 1998–were laid brutally to rest. Then it became Dostum’s killing field. In December 2001, after the Taliban surrender at Kunduz, most of the crammed container lorries did not go to Qala-i-Jangi but laboured on to Shebergan, and to here. Their doors opened on a mass grave. Half their human cargo, it is said, had already suffocated; those who survived were executed. Some 2,500 may have died. The United Nations called for supervision of the site, for fear of evidence vanishing, but would not investigate without military protection. None was granted.

I saw nobody in the crumpled wilderness. The sand was drifting over it. The guerrilla chief Namangani, who had fought alongside the Taliban, dreaming of a fundamentalist Uzbekistan, might well lie here. Mobin said: ‘I came once before. There were hands and feet sticking out of the earth.’ He was driving nervously, faster. Seated in the back, the old man said nothing.

For miles the Land-Cruiser–a tough Toyota–slid and bucked along an undulating corridor of sand. Then the track lifted, and our path diffused over compacted desert, while the old man tried to guide us. The air was windless in a sky flaked with silvery cloud. Once or twice we passed a patch of tilled earth, where a lone opium farmer camped. And once, astonished, I glimpsed a tent pitched on a high slope, and saw the grey uniforms of the national army. A bandit had plagued this region for months, the old man said, and they had recently shot him.

The way grew starker. Nothing softened or scarred it. Whenever we crested a slope, we looked down on a lunar stillness of rounded hills, touched by weak sunlight, and on valleys eroded to aluminium or matted grey-green with dying grass. And out of this wasteland, where surely nothing could live, the nomadic Kuchi came like a mirage, perched on their delicate-looking camels among herds of goats and golden, bob-tailed dogs: haggard, black-
faced men hung with great cataracts of beard. They went by without a look, as if either they or we were dreaming. Some were riding white donkeys, their small boys high on the camels, laden with silver canisters for water–the earth so dry now, the old man said, that they were forced to buy it in oasis villages. Others, black-turbaned and cloaked, loped with heavy sticks among their herds. Minefields all over the country had decimated the Kuchi livestock, which now jostled round them in clouds of dust, led by black rams with backswept horns.

Yet the sand-scarps and hillocks were riddled with obscure life. Sometimes along the shallow banks an audience of marmots stood erect above their burrows, their forelegs dangled before their white chests. Once a sand-coloured fox turned its broad, assessing face to watch us. Buzzards waited on ridges–their only vantage-point in this treeless land–and we met the hot stare of a burrowing owl, before it turned its back on us.

Mobin drove exhilarated now. His head was full of didactic Islam and he plied me with country lore. ‘They say desert rats live in thieves’ houses. If there are rats in a house, the people are stealing. And the owl–wherever he lands will be destroyed.’ He guffawed, his mouth loose-lipped between unshaven jowls. ‘But what is here to destroy?’

An ethnic Tajik, he hated the Taliban. ‘A Muslim should be clean, gracious and believing. The Taliban only believed.’ With the Taliban advance, he had escaped over the Iranian border, leaving behind his wife and small son with her father. ‘She wasn’t allowed to leave the house without a male relative. She couldn’t even take the boy to hospital!’ Near the Iranian border he had evaded the road checkpoints by circling them on foot at night fifteen or twenty times, and found work at last as a mechanic in Tehran. ‘Those Taliban times won’t come back, and I think our future will be good.’ He was squinting into fiercer sunlight. ‘Everybody is sick of fighting. We are very tired.’

We plunged again into a defile of dust, its flanks knit by long-dead grass, thrashing the Land-Cruiser’s sides. Suddenly we emerged at a village by a dry stream. Its roofs bubbled under low domes, and bleached doors closed in the walls. A gang of men was
carving the earth with spades, where a canal guided a lonely trickle. Two oxen were pulling a plough. But in the courtyards vines were yellowing, and there were apples and water-melons, and the world seemed rich. Bright-clad women in high, tapering hats made a sparkle on the hillsides, and swept gauzy veils aside to watch us pass.

These people were Turcomans, Mobin said–the Turkmenistan frontier lay barely twenty miles away. Drought had blistered their fields, and they were probably growing opium poppies. There was no other way to survive. The previous year Afghanistan had produced three quarters of the world’s opium, eighty-seven per cent of its heroin. The poppy grew in near-aridity. But now the harvest was in, and the fields looked innocently barren.

A minute later our track merged with the half-vanished road from Andkvoi, and the valley to Maimana channelled us south. In the village of Dowlatabad, among a semicircle of stalls under brushwood awnings, Mobin hunted for petrol. The place looked in suspension. The electoral polling booths were still up, hung with posters of Dostum riding a black horse. Young men crouched there, silent, and boys in high-coloured pillbox caps. Others were riding motor-scooters over the scrubland of the Friday market, their handlebars twined with plastic roses, their veiled women perched behind them.