Full Tilt (8 page)

I slept very well last night in my roadside tea-house, curled up in a corner of the one-roomed building, with moonlight streaming through the doorway that had no door and the ‘proprietor’ curled up under his camel-hair rug in another corner, rifle and turban to hand. He was a dear old boy, who seemed quite shocked when I attempted to pay him before leaving at 5.30 a.m.

It took me four and a half hours to cover the thirty miles to Herat but I enjoyed the wide silence of the desert in the cool of the morning.

This is a city of absolute enchantment in the literal sense of the word. It loosens all the bonds binding the traveller to his own age and sets him free to live in a past that is vital and crude but never ugly. Herat is as old as history and as moving as a great epic poem – if Afghanistan had nothing else it would have been worth coming to experience this. Even the loss of my wallet containing over £12 hasn’t been able to depress me today. (It was not stolen but just slipped out of my pocket somehow, as I was exploring.) Of course I’d feel worse about such a loss in Europe; the fact that every Afghan I’ve seen so far obviously needs £12 even more than I do is quite a consolation. During a long trek some disaster of the sort is inevitable.

The Afghans impress me as a people with very clear-cut
personalities
, in contrast to the rather characterless Persians. Everyone I’ve met so far stands out as an individual; for example, the three servants at this hotel. One is an elderly man, very slim and sad-looking and withdrawn from the world. When not working (and that means most of the time) he sits in odd corners sipping tea or stands at
strategic points of the stairs and corridors looking through everyone who passes and giving the impression of being in a mystical trance. When I arrived he came to my room with the book to sign and the whole scene was like some solemn religious ritual. The door curtain was pushed aside to admit this individual, wearing a long, pale pink muslin turban and bearing the book open at the relevant page. He bowed very low and glided across the floor in bare feet, laid it on the table before me, bowed again and glided backwards towards the door where he stood erect with arms folded looking into the far distance while I filled in details. Then he glided back to collect the book, bowed, backed to the door, gave a final and most profound bow and disappeared soundlessly – the whole performance without attempting to utter a word and, despite all the bowing, there was not a trace of servility.

The waiter is equally fascinating in a different way. Aged about twenty and very handsome, with pale, clear white skin, luminous brown eyes and wonderfully clear-cut features, he has a princely bearing and paces slowly round the dining-room; he is extremely efficient, in a quiet way, and looks as though he has some special private joy which makes him supremely happy. The little ‘boots’ is a character too; aged about twelve, he has a round Mongolian face, a big permanent grin and a bouncing friendly manner. Watching me washing my teeth is for him an entertainment beyond compare – he positively holds his breath at the sheer excitement of the spectacle!

This is a ‘Grade A’ hotel: i.e. it has an Eastern lavatory but with flush attached (when I pulled the string the whole apparatus collapsed and I was drenched in rusty water – but perhaps I used immodest vigour!) and there is also a holder for lavatory paper on the wall which makes one feel that if one stayed here long enough it might have paper too some day. The establishment sports electrical fittings as well – but the supply failed an hour ago and I am now writing by oil-lamp – and my room has a door with a padlock and a window that opens, and clean though very threadbare sheets and blankets on the bed. Other amenities include a bathroom on this first-floor landing; the cold water is contained in a zinc barrel with tap attached and, as you wash,
it drains away through a hole in the wall down into the yard. For all these luxuries one pays 6
s
. 2
d
. per night.

Afghan ‘fashions’ for men look marvellously dignified, even when in tatters. The most common garment is one piece of cloth (usually cotton) which is worn so that it provides both a shirt and loose trousers to halfway down the calves. (Is this the ‘seamless’ garment of the Gospels?) Waist-length turbans, to protect the spinal cord against the sun, often have beautiful fringes and come in pastel shades of blue or pink or yellow. But there is no uniformity about dress – some wear sleeveless leather jackets inlaid with gold and silver, some fabulous brocade knee-length shirts, some heavy brocade coats, thrown over the shoulders in this weather, some brown homespun cloaks and others the flowing white robes which I have always associated with Arab countries. About fifty per cent go barefooted, even on horses and cycles – the latter being almost the only evidence of the twentieth century in Herat. The men, if Aryan, are considerably taller than Turks or Persians and are very handsome indeed. The women I simply haven’t seen; very few appear on the streets and those few are
completely
veiled – not in the
chador
of east Turkey and Persia, which leaves eyes and nose just visible, but in the
burkah
, a garment like a tent with a piece of lace at eye-level. This lace is of such fine mesh that you have to be right beside them to distinguish it from the rest of the material and seeing the wearer standing still you don’t know which is back or front: they look like people dressed up as ghosts. This
afternoon
I saw two women riding splendid ponies and asked their husband if I might photograph them, but he very vigorously refused permission. The only female face I’ve seen in the city was that of a Mongolian tribeswoman down from the mountains, bringing cloth to sell in the bazaar; she was galloping along the main street, astride and bareheaded with a baby tied to her back and its father galloping along behind on his silver-grey pony stallion.

I notice that most of the phaeton ponies are stallions who dash spiritedly around, their vehicles taking the corners on one wheel. This is all right if the mares are kept in purdah too – and evidently they are! It’s a joy to see these ponies after the miserable specimens in Persian
cities; they are well groomed and well fed here and their coats ripple with reflected sunlight. Oddly enough, they’re the only clean looking objects, animate or inanimate, to be seen in the streets. Another point of contrast with Persia is that I haven’t seen any beggars here, except for a few cripples in the immediate vicinity of the mosque.

The Afghan has not yet learned that tourists were invented to be fleeced and twice today my money was refused when I attempted to pay for tea. I am a guest of the country, so it pleases Allah when someone provides me with free refreshment …

During one of these pauses in a tea-house a man, whom I had never seen before and will never see again, silently approached, laid a packet of cigarettes beside me and vanished before I even had time to thank him; I couldn’t help thinking then of my kind European friends who had warned me so often of the dangers of being a woman and a Christian in Muslim countries.

Strolling through the bazaar I was delightedly conscious of the fact that when Alexander’s soldiers passed this way they must have witnessed scenes almost identical to those now surrounding me – bakers cooking flat bread in underground ovens, having spread the dough on leather cushions stuffed with straw and damped with filthy water; blindfolded camels walking round and round churning
mast
in stinking little dens behind their owners’ stalls; butchers skinning and disembowelling a sheep and throwing scraps to the yellow, crop-eared dogs who have been waiting all morning for this happy event; tanners curing hides, weavers at their looms, potters skilfully firing pitchers of considerable beauty, cobblers making the curly-toed, exquisitely inlaid regional shoes and tailors cutting out the long, fleece-padded coats which when thrown over the shoulders of an Afghan makes him look like a fairy-story king.

On my way back to the hotel I observed hens importantly leading their excited broods to unrevealed destinations, tiny boys sitting
cross-legged
on the pavement meticulously cleaning oil-lamps, diminutive, anxious, furry donkey-foals who had temporarily lost their mothers, and youths squatting in doorways preparing hookahs for the men to smoke. It’s unlikely that the other Afghan cities will be equally attractive; Herat is now so cut off from everywhere on every side that
it’s just gone jogging along happily while the rest of the country is being modernised by the US and the USSR.

The ‘traffic’ police here take my fancy particularly; obviously they’re trained in the French system and they stand on little platforms with batons, wearing caps to prove they’re police but otherwise keeping to the national costume. The joke is that you see them making a quick sweeping movement with one hand and a ‘stop’ movement with the other and in answer to the ‘come on’ signal, with its flourish of the baton that should herald the rush past of a stream of high-powered cars, twelve camels appear, heavily laden and chained together, and pace solemnly by the police-box taking about ten minutes to clear the junction. Meanwhile the ‘stop’ signal has briefly halted a horseman who pulls up his steed on its hind legs, looks from the camels to the policeman with a curl of the lip and then proceeds to canter round the caravan and gallop away up the main street. Occasionally a truck appears from Persia (because of the Pakistan blockade, everything now has to come from the outside world via Russia or Persia), and then there is real commotion which the police are helpless to control; donkeys, horsemen, camels, phaetons and flocks of sheep and goats all flee in the wrong direction at the wrong moment, the camels looking outraged at having to amble faster than usual.

This morning I went to the outskirts of the town just to wander among the green woods and sit on green grass beside a little stream in a beautifully kept public park. Many of the streets are lined with enormous pine trees and a glorious garden of lawns and lavishly blooming rose bushes stretches in front of the mosque. There were no restrictions about me visiting this mosque (without a camera) and it is so very beautiful that I felt it compensated for the Meshed frustration. I sat on the shady side of the enormous courtyard for almost an hour, enjoying the mosaics and the gold of the brickwork glowing against the blue sky. It was very peaceful there with no sound or movement except for a myriad twittering martins swooping in and out of the cool, dim passages between the hundreds of pillared archways. Meshed is probably as beautiful but it would be difficult to surpass this. The predominant colour here is blue of all shades, with yellow, black, pink, brown, green
and orange tiles blended so skilfully that from a certain distance a façade or minaret looks as though made of some magic precious metal for the colour of which there is no name. Also, quite apart from its colouring, the proportions of the whole vast series of buildings are superb.

There was so much to say yesterday that I failed to mention the big route problem. My original intention was to go to Kabul via the northern road as this is by far the most beautiful and interesting, but that plan has been ruled out because of the current tricky situation with Russia. Therefore, when I reported to the police in Herat
yesterday
I told them I wished to go by the central route, which is the next most interesting – but the Commander said, ‘No!’ Apparently this road is closed to all traffic because it is too infested with bandits to be adequately policed. Even if I had wanted to have fun and games with the authorities, as in Persia, I realised that I couldn’t as they’re quite a different type here – clearly their ‘No’ means ‘No’; so now I’m on the third, southern route, via Khandahar, and am lucky to have my permit to cycle confirmed by the police who took a very dim view of my ambitions and tried to get me aboard a bus. In fact I may have to give in at some stage on this road as it would be silly to risk more than fifty miles unbroken desert with Roz and there may be one eighty-mile stretch. I’ll investigate the situation fully when we get to that point.

We left Herat at 4.45 a.m. because it will get hotter every day now, going due south. A glorious eight- or nine-mile oasis of green fields and woods surrounds the city and the wheat and barley are within a few weeks of harvesting. Then – about five miles out – the road became perfect! I nearly fell off with astonishment and joy and Roz really let herself go and whizzed along at an average of 15 m.p.h. Our unexpected bliss lasted all day – God bless Russia! There’s an average of one truck and two buses a day on this route so the Russians certainly didn’t build a flawless road here for the convenience of the Afghans; but at the moment I couldn’t care less who built it or why – I only hope it lasts.

A double row of pines, alternating with a richly pink flowering
shrub, lasted well beyond the green belt out into the desert. Then, just as it was getting hot enough to make me fret slightly about having no hat, the road began to climb through mountains that were great barren piles of grey, slaty rock, but, because of the good surface, we covered just over eighty miles today despite much walking. I used my chlorinated pills for the first time in some doubtful-looking water obtained during the afternoon from a nomad camp, where the people were very courteous and kind. They invited me to have a meal with them and served some sort of porridge mixed with cheese and camel’s milk; I suppose I’ll get used to it but at the moment I wouldn’t actually say that camel’s milk is my favourite beverage. Huge herds of camels were being grazed around the encampment; goats or sheep wouldn’t survive this terrain. I asked if I might take photographs but though they didn’t refuse they were obviously against the idea so it would have been an abuse of hospitality to insist.

We arrived here at 7.20 p.m., just after dark. This is a small town with some rather grim-looking characters around and I’m almost sorry I didn’t stay for the night with my nomads, where I would have felt safer. But one can’t judge yet; the Afghans seem very reserved and distant people and what I feel as ‘grimness’ may be merely aloofness.