A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. Eric Newby
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that is the only route they will permit anyway. That is if anyone at the customs post can read,’ he added mischievously.
Reluctantly we took leave of this agreeable man and set off down the road through a flat wilderness, until we came to a road block formed by a solitary tree-trunk. In the midst of this nothingness, pitched some distance from the road, was a sad little tent shuddering in the wind. After we had sounded the horn for some minutes a sergeant appeared and with infinite slowness drew back the tree-trunk to let us pass and without speaking returned to the flapping tent. Whatever indiscretion the Colonel may have been guilty of to land himself in such a place as Taiabad paled into utter insignificance when one considered the nameless crimes that this sergeant must have been expiating in his solitary tent.
After eight miles in a no-man’s-land of ruined mud forts and nothing else we came to a collection of buildings so deserted-looking that we thought they must be some advanced post evacuated for lack of amenity. This time the tree-trunk was white-washed. As Hugh got down to remove it, angry cries came from the largest and most dilapidated building and a file of soldiers in hairy uniforms that seemed to have been made from old blankets poured out of it and hemmed us in. As we marched across the open space towards the building, the wind was hot like an electric hair dryer and strong enough to lean on.
Inside the customs house in a dim corridor several Pathans squatted together sharing a leaky hubble-bubble. They had semitic, feminine faces but were an uncouth lot, full of swagger, dressed in saffron shirts and chaplis with rubber soles made from the treads of American motor tyres. In charge of them was a superior official in a round hat and blue striped pyjamas whom they completely ignored. It was he who stamped our passports without formality.
The customs house was rocking in the wind which roared about it so loud that conversation was difficult.
‘Is it always like this?’ I screamed in Hugh’s ear.
‘It’s the Bād-i-Sad-o-Bist, “the Wind of Hundred and Twenty Days”.’
‘Yes,’ said one of the Pathans, ‘for a hundred and twenty days it blows. It started ten days ago. It comes from the north-west, but God only knows where it goes to.’
After the half-light of the building, the light in the courtyard was blinding, incandescent; the dust in it thick and old and bitter-tasting, as if it had been swirling there for ever.
We were in Afghanistan.
Now the country was wilder still, the road more twisting, with a range of desolate mountains to the west dimly seen in the flying sand of the Bād-i-Sad-o-Bist. The only people we met were occasional roadmenders, desiccated heroes in rags, imploring us for water. To the left was the Hari-Rud, a great river burrowing through the sand, and we pointed to it as we swept past, smothering them in dust, but they put out their tongues and waved their empty water skins and cried, ‘namak, namak’ until we knew that the river was salt and we were shamed into stopping. It was a place of mirage. At times the river was so insubstantial that it tapered into nothingness, sometimes it became a lake, shivering like a jelly between earth and sky.
At Tirpul the road crosses the river by a battered handsome bridge, six arches wide, built of brick. We swam in a deep pool under an arch on the right bank that was full of branches as sharp as bayonets, brought down by the floods. Nevertheless, it was a romantic spot. The air was full of dust and the wind roared about the bridge, whipping the water into waves topped with yellow froth that falling became rainbows. Upstream a herd of bullocks were swimming the river, thirty of them, with the herdsmen astride the leaders and flankers, urging them on. Beyond the river was Tirpul itself, a small hamlet with strange wind machines revolving on mud towers, with an encampment of black nomad tents on the outskirts and a great square caravanserai deserted on a nearby hill.
Out of the water, we dried out instantly and were covered with a layer of glistening salt. Hugh was a wild sight crouching on the bank in Pathan trousers, shalvār, far removed from the Foreign Office figure conjured up by the man at the Asian Desk. Here Hugh was in his element, on the shores of the Hari-Rud, midway between its source in the Kōh-i-Bāba mountains and the sands of the Kara-Kum, its unhealthy terminus in Russian Turkestan which holds the secret and perhaps the bones of the enigmatic Captain X whose name endures on the map in the Consulate at Meshed.
Sixty miles farther on we arrived at Herat. On the outskirts of the city, raised by Alexander and sieged and sacked by almost everyone of any consequence in Central Asia, the great towers erected in the fifteenth century by Gauhar Shah Begum, the remarkable wife of the son of Timur Leng,2 King Shah Rukh, soar into the sky. Only a few of the ceramic tiles the colour of lapislazuli, that once covered these structures from top to bottom, still remain in position.
In the city itself the police stood on platforms of timber thick enough to withstand the impact of a bus or a runaway elephant, directing a thin trickle of automobiles with whistles and ill-tempered gestures, like referees.
In the eastern suburbs, where the long pine avenues leading to the Parq Otel were as calm and deadly as those round Bournemouth, the system became completely ludicrous. At every intersection a policeman in sola topi drooped in a coma of boredom until, galvanized into activity by our approach, he sternly blew his whistle and held up the non-existent traffic to let us pass.
The Parq Otel was terribly sad. In the spacious modernistic entrance hall, built in the thirties and designed to house a worldly, chattering throng, there was no one. Against the walls sofas of chromium tubing, upholstered in sultry red uncut moquette, alternated with rigid-looking chairs, enough for an influx of guests, who after thirty years had still not arrived. On the untenanted reception desk a telephone that never rang stood next to a letter rack with no letters in it. A large glass showcase contained half a dozen sticky little pools that had once been sweets, some dead flies and a coat hanger.
Besides ourselves the only other occupants of the Parq were two Russian engineers. We met them dragging themselves along the corridors from distant bathrooms in down-at-heel carpet slippers. They had gone to pieces. Who could blame them?
While Hugh washed in one of the fly-blown bathrooms, I went to photograph the great towers. Maddened by gaping crowds, fearful of committing sacrilege, I drove the vehicle off the road on to what I took to be a rubbish dump. It turned out to be a Moslem cemetery from which there was an excellent view but the camera refused to wind the film, and as I struggled with it, the sun went down. From all sides the faithful, outraged by my awful behaviour, began to close in. Gloomily I got back into the car and drove away.
By the time we left Herat it was dark. All night we drove over shattering roads, taking turns at the wheel, pursued by a fearful tail wind that swirled the dust ahead of us like a London fog. If it had been possible we should have lost the way, but there was only one road.
Until midnight we had driven in spells of an hour; now we changed every thirty minutes. It was difficult to average twenty miles in an hour and trying to do so we broke two shock absorbers. It was also difficult to talk with our mouths full of dust but we mumbled at one another in desultory fashion to keep awake.
‘The aneroid shows seven thousand.’
‘I don’t care how high we are, I’m still being bitten.’
‘It’s something we picked up at that tea place.’
‘Perhaps if we go high enough they’ll die.’
‘If they’re as lively as this at this altitude, they’re probably fitted with oxygen apparatus.’
Finally even these ramblings ceased and we were left each with the thoughts of disaster and bankruptcy that attend travellers in the hour before the dawn.
The sun rose at five and the wind dropped. We were in a wide plain and before us was a big river, the Farah-Rud. As the owner of a tea-house had prophesied, the bridge was down. It was a massive affair but two arches had entirely vanished. It was difficult to imagine the cataclysm that had destroyed it.
We crossed the river with the engine wrapped in oilskin,