This story originally published in the September 1968 issue of National Geographic magazine. See more digitized stories from our archives here.
A dozen bold Afghan stallions, lashed to frenzy, collided in combat around the headless goat sprawled in the dust. These were fighting horses, giants 17 hands high, trained to kick and bite. Sweating and shouting, their turbaned riders hacked away with short whips at men and beasts alike. I plunged my horse into the battle.
“Wardar! Wardar!” screamed the crowd. “Pick it up!”
Through the billowing dust I saw my friend Mohammed Ali Hussein swoop down. Hanging from one stirrup amid the flying hoofs, he snatched the prize from the ground. His horse reared, kicking to clear an opening, but Mohammed was surrounded. He thrust the carcass into my hands.
Instinctively my horse whirled. I locked the goat under my leg and galloped for the flag, a quarter of a mile down the field.
“Namani! Begeer!” came shouts at my heels. “Grab it! Get him!”
National sport befits a rugged land
This was buz kashi, Afghanistan’s national sport, a roughshod ancestor of polo with as many as a hundred horses on a team, a beheaded goat or calf for a ball—and almost no holds barred. Recently knives and chains have been outlawed, but sudden death on the playing field is still not uncommon.
My friend Mohammed had spent many hours teaching me the fine points of the game. He had loaned me a horse and invited me to play. “There is no greater thrill,” he had said, “than a head-down gallop toward the circle with the rest of the world at your heels.”
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I knew now what he meant.
But hardly had I gained momentum when a giant Tajik rider, holding his whip between his teeth, rammed me broadside and jerked the goat out of my grasp. Before I had my mount under control, the Tajik had already thrown the carcass into the scoring circle.
After the game, Mohammed and I walked our horses along a stream that sparkled through the town of Baghlan, 115 miles north of Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital. In the distance the foothills of the Hindu Kush range were already white with winter.
“I’ve broken both arms at this game, and once a leg. I’ve lost count of the ribs,” said Mohammed. “Still, I can’t wait for the cool season and the games every Friday.”
For an Afghan, tureh—bravery—is a prime quality. Says an ancient Afghan song:
Better come home stained with blood
Than safe and sound as a coward….
In the veins of Mohammed, the farmer, flowed the blood of a hundred generations of warriors. Buz kashi means “goat-drag.” It’s no game for the timid—but a fitting sport for Afghanistan. It reflects the boldness, the tenacity, the fighting spirit of the Afghans themselves, dwellers in a rugged land where only men of iron and leather could survive at all.
Half desert, half mountains, Afghanistan covers a high, landlocked patch of central Asia almost the size of Texas. Scattered along fertile valleys between the sands and the snows, most of the 15,000,000 Afghans farm and graze livestock, seared by 120°F summers, sometimes snowbound by the long cold winters.
A natural barricade wedged between Persia, Russia, and the Indian subcontinent, Afghanistan has long been a pivot point of Asia. As keepers of the crossroad, Afghans have battled an endless stream of invaders who have funneled into their land through the high mountain passes.
Recently I spent three months in Afghanistan, traveling some 20,000 miles by Land Rover, camel, horse, and yak—from the parched Desert of Death in the south to the snow-clogged passes of the northern Pamirs. I followed the timeworn trails of Alexander the Great, who founded proud cities here, and Genghis Khan, who destroyed them. In between, Parthians, Kushan Buddhists, Persians, Arabs, and Seljuk Turks had reigned then waned.
The turbulent Pushtun tribes—some isolated, some active in war and politics—were united by Ahmad Shah Durrani in 1747.
Marching out of Kandahar, he subdued most of the land; though the conquest was temporary, it foreshadowed the Afghan nation.
By the 19th century, two new great powers began to crowd Afghanistan. Alarmed when expanding Tsarist Russia supported Persian claims to Herat, the British invaded Afghanistan from India in 1839 and installed a puppet king.
But the first British “conquest” ended in tragedy. In January, 1842, the Afghans forced the British garrison to abandon Kabul. In freezing cold, 4,500 British and Indian soldiers and 12,000 civilians accompanying them were ambushed just east of the city. Only a handful escaped to India.
Again in 1878 the British invaded Afghanistan to set up a buffer state. Finally in 1919, after still another Anglo-Afghan war, Britain recognized Afghanistan’s independence. In Kabul, the crowds celebrated for days.
Every August the Afghans set aside business, string the streets with lights, and celebrate the Jashin Isteqlal, or Independence Festival, with music, parades, games, and fireworks. This year the fiftieth festival includes an international trade fair.
Kabul teems with many tribes
It was late August, on the eve of the festival, when I first arrived in Kabul, dusty and tired after a thousand-mile desert drive from Teheran in Iran. The cool air of the 6,000-foot-high Kabul Valley was a welcome relief. Invigorating, too, was the excitement of the crowds already filling the streets.
Over the centuries, armies that ebbed and flowed left many cultural pools. Today people of some dozen ethnic strains, speaking more than 20 different languages, proudly call themselves Afghans.
Modern Kabulis in Western suits and lambskin hats mingled with turbaned Tajiks and Pushtuns, wearing Afghan knee-length shirts, tails out over baggy pantaloons. Here too were Uzbeks and Turkomans from the north, in high black boots and long striped robes. I saw stocky Hazaras, swarthy Baluchis, Nuristanis. Many had come from distant provinces for the eight-day festival.
Horse carts, jeeps, and Russian-built taxicabs honked their way through the throng. Crowds pressed into the teashops, drawn by the sizzle of shish kebab and the blare of Islamic music from scratchy loudspeakers. Nearby, enterprising young boys rented water pipes, a penny a puff. Bolts of silk and calico hung from cloth merchants’ stalls. Jashin is a time for new clothes.
Broken lance puts score in doubt
Next morning I joined the crowds along Mohammed Akbar Khan Street for the military parade that opened the festivities. Infantry, in German-style helmets and carrying Russian machine guns, marched past, followed by Russian-built tanks and rockets on mobile launchers. MIG-21 jets of the budding Afghan Air Force flashed over head. His Majesty Mohammed Zahir Shah, in his olive uniform of commander in chief, saluted them from the royal pavilion.
Communist assistance to Afghanistan is double the American aid program there. The Afghan army is trained, equipped, and supplied almost entirely by the Soviet Union.
Meeting an army commander, Brig. Abdul Wali, after the parade, I expressed surprise that Afghanistan, traditionally suspicious of outsiders, would entrust so much of the preparation of its military force to this one powerful neighbor. His answer was beautifully Afghan: “When you ride a good horse, do you care in which country it was born?”
Good horses were gathering down the street at the Jashin grounds as visiting tribes men cleared the field for a contest of niza bazi, or tent-pegging. One of the players, a red-bearded warrior from Ghazni, explained the history of the game to me as he tightened his saddle girth.
“The old raiders would storm an enemy camp before dawn and spear the tent pegs at full gallop,” he said. “The tents would collapse on the defenders. Instantly the attackers had the upper hand.”
Drums started beating. My friend galloped to the far end of the field carrying a 10-foot lance. Near me an old man drove a poplar peg firmly into the ground in the center of a five-foot circle.
The drums followed the beat of the horse’s hoofs as the rider neared the target. He leaned low with his lance and impaled the peg at full gallop, waving the prize high over his head as he passed the cheering galleries.
When the last rider from the Ghazni team thundered downfield, his team was half a point behind. Spectators held their breath. He speared the peg so hard he snapped his lance, sending splinters flying.
A full point—or a half? A knot of tribesmen, shaking their fists, surrounded the referees as I left. It would take some time to settle that score.
On the Jashin grounds, modern pavilions featured exhibits by government ministries and Afghan industries. I accompanied the royal party when the King officially opened the exhibition to the public.
The Afghan Textile Company, the country’s biggest manufacturing industry, exhibited bright bolts of cotton and rows of mannequins draped in Western styles. The Afghan Wool Industries set out cashmere blankets and camel’s-hair coats. The Steinbock shoe factory exhibited everything from high-heeled shoes to mountain-climbing boots. Cottage industries displayed knives and scissors, Turkoman carpets, carved alabaster and lapis lazuli, and karakul-fur coats and hats.
Afghan people ”a pleasure to lead”
The King lingered at the Ministry of Agriculture display, inspecting the prize bulls, studying giant working models of irrigation projects, and watching fat silkworms convert mulberry leaves into shimmering strands.
“Agriculture is the base of our economy,” His Majesty told me later at Karez-i-Mir, his private farm north of Kabul. Gone now were the brass and khaki of the military commander in chief, replaced by the comfortable tweeds of a country gentleman.
As we walked through his apple orchard, he explained his new graftings and snipped off an occasional errant shoot. Experimental specimens—bananas, cactus, aloe plants—filled benches in the greenhouse nearby.
“Of course, I’m only an amateur farmer,” the King said in French. “But I take it seriously. One who doesn’t know the Afghan soil could never understand the Afghan people.
“Only recently have the traditional patterns begun to change, as our industries begin to grow. It is not enough just to keep up with the changing times. We must keep ahead of them—to encourage our people to learn and to accept new responsibilities.”
In 1964 Mohammed Zahir Shah promulgated the new constitution that gave real power to Afghanistan’s parliament.
“The Afghans are used to running their own affairs. The power of the country’s tribal leaders has always depended on the support of their people,” the King said.
“The Afghan, with his natural spirit of independence, is a difficult man to command—but a pleasure to lead.”
Cannon blast proclaims midday
The city of Kabul, more than a mile high, lies at the intersection of two valleys. A brisk climb along the old city walls that wind steeply up a mountainside gave me a spectacular view of the spreading city below.
The crumbling walls of stone and mud-brick, more than 30 feet high and 12 feet thick, date back to the fifth century. Small wonder they were built, I thought. From these heights the city lay bare to any enemy.
Halfway down I stopped in surprise. On a rampart below, an old man was loading a cannon.
“I haven’t missed a day in 35 years,” he explained, tamping black powder and rags down the muzzle with an eight-foot ramrod. Old Mohammed Amman climbs the hill every day to fire the top-i-chasht, the noon gun. Once prisoners were strapped across the cannon’s mouth and blown to eternity. Nowadays the roar merely announces midday.
“Times have changed since my beard was black,” the noon gunner said, sweeping his arm across the panorama of busy streets to the south. “When I first climbed this hill, that whole valley was green with fields and orchards and vineyards.”
Glancing at his silver Swiss pocket watch, the old man stuffed wads of cotton into his ears and laid the punk to the touchhole.
Barooooooom! The roar nearly blew me off the parapet, and I was engulfed in choking smoke. But far below the noon gun was hardly noticed—lost in the din of traffic.
Though Kabul is the country’s nerve center, the mountains are its soul. I decided to visit the Wakhan corridor first. There, in the high valleys of the Hindu Kush range, winters begin in early September.
Joining me was Lal Mohammed, a small wiry Baluchi. Lal, in his forties, was one of Afghanistan’s first licensed drivers and had grown up with its struggling network of motor roads.
On the map, the Wakhan corridor arcs eastward from Afghanistan’s northernmost wing like the neck of an eagle—Russia on one side, Pakistan and Kashmir on the other, with a nip of China in its beak.
Marco Polo traveled through here on his famous journey to China in the 1270s. In 1948 another Westerner traversed the remote Wakhan—a National Geographic writer, now Associate Editor, Franc Shor.
The Khirghiz and mountain Tajiks he found there had never heard of America, though he was heartily welcomed just the same. Twenty years had changed these people very little, I found. They still scratch out a meager living, farming the narrow banks of the Wakhan River (historically known as the Oxus) and herding yaks.
By the motor road, part of it newly paved, it’s still a hard, four-day drive from Kabul to Qala Panja, 530 miles northeast at the end of the auto road. From Faizabad the track begins to climb steadily, and often seems little more than a mountain trail. We crossed rushing torrents that sometimes washed over the hood of the Land Rover.
The last stretch, from Ishkashim to Qala Panja, follows the border between Afghanistan and Russia. At many places one could easily pitch a pebble across the narrow Panja River into Soviet territory. At intervals we passed watchtowers grimly guarding the Russian side. Were they built to keep the Afghans out, or the Russians in?
“It works both ways,” said a young man who had hitched a ride with us. “Often we see the people across the river working in the fields. They are Moslems like us and speak the same language—some of us are from the same families. But we never meet.”
Along the 800 miles of rivers that separate northern Afghanistan from Russia, there is not a single bridge.
Pass imperils horse and rider
The commander of the small fort in Qala Panja arranged horses for us and sent along an escort. Our first day on horseback brought us to the village of Sargaz, on the banks of the Wakhan River, flowing here at an altitude of 10,000 feet.
A young Sargaz farmer, Ibrahim, invited us in. Like many Afghans, he had only one name. His simple house was built of stones and set deep into the ground; inside, it resembled a windowless dungeon. Women of the family were baking bread around a crackling fire of straw. A shaft of daylight stabbed through the smoke hole in the roof.
“It is better if you go on from here with yaks,” Ibrahim said. “The horses are strong, but the trail is high and dangerous.”
Next morning I added a pair of yaks to the caravan. The ridiculous shaggy beasts would do for the heavy baggage, but I kept the horses for riding.
By lunchtime, alternately riding and walking, we had gained 3,500 feet in altitude; the horses were breathing hard. Finally we led the animals over a snowy pass at 15,000 feet—higher than the summit of the Matterhorn.
Then I made a serious mistake. I remounted. It would be all downhill now.
Suddenly along a treacherous ledge my weary horse slipped, jamming his foreleg between two rocks. Down he went, pitching me headfirst. My lug-soled climbing boot hooked in the stirrup. I dangled by one leg over the precipice. The horse whinnied in pain and panic.
In an instant Lal and one of the yak drivers jumped to the rescue, hauling me up and freeing the horse. No bones broken, we continued down, the lame leading the lame.
We pitched our tents at 14,000 feet, near a summer camp of villagers from Sargaz. The spongy grass hummocks reminded me of the Alaskan tundra. Much of the year they are buried in snow.
“The yaks can’t stand the summer heat in the valley,” Lal explained. “Half the village spends the warm months with the herds.”
Tajik women in long red dresses were milking rows of yaks. They hurried to finish before sunset. Now it was warm, in the mid 80s; half an hour after sunset, water would be freezing in our canteens.
Mountains harbor wary wildlife
An easy day’s ride brought us to the Touliboy Valley, one of the last preserves of the Marco Polo sheep (Ovis poli). The government periodically opens the valley to hunters—who pay $6,000 to bag a single sheep. The difficulty of the hunt makes the massive spiral horns of the Marco Polo the most coveted of big-game trophies.
At a small camp I found Ali Gohar Sheikh, a leathery old hunter, who now spends his summers as game warden at Touliboy.
“I’ve taken over 200 sheep and ibex in these hills,” Ali Gohar said. “Many hunters worked together, one team driving a herd to gunners waiting in stands near the passes. Those days are over. The government controls the hunting now. But if you’re just shooting with cameras, I can find you some sheep.”
Before dawn next morning, Ali Gohar was ready with three yaks. I rode behind him up the steep slope, guiding my shaggy beast with a rope rein tied to a ring in his nose. I soon found that the yak, though clumsy looking, walks nearly as fast as a horse and is far more sure-footed. I could feel his giant heart beating under the lambskin saddle as we passed 15,000 feet. Suddenly Ali Gohar stopped.
“There they are!” he whispered. I saw nothing but the gray hills. On foot we edged toward an outcropping of rocks, and Ali Gohar passed me his binoculars. Across a wide draw, perhaps a mile away, I could make out a flock grazing. We counted 24.
“We are lucky to see this many,” Ali Gohar said. But the tiny gray specks were well beyond the range of my telephoto lenses. I was not destined to bag a Marco Polo sheep, even on film. They caught our scent and scampered out of sight.
I continued upward alone, slowly, trading a breath for each step. By noon I was on the summit.
The needle of my pocket altimeter nudged 17,000 feet, although this was only a minor, unnamed peak. To the northwest I could see the snows of Karl Marx Peak in Soviet Russia; to the south rose the higher crests of Pakistan. Beneath the distant clouds, 75 miles to the east, lay Communist China.
On the way down I flushed a covey of giant snow partridges (Lerwa lerwa) the size of chickens. “Sooooo, sooooo,” they whistled, fleeing downward in a swift diving glide.
Just below snow level, a sound of falling stones stopped me. Upwind, not 100 yards away, a herd of ibex (Capra ibex) pranced down the steep cliff face.
Farther down, from behind a boulder, I watched a colony of jolly rust-brown marmots (Marmota caudata). Suddenly they scampered, chirping, back to their holes as a great black shadow briefly blotted out the sun. I looked up, startled. It was an eagle, the biggest I had ever seen. Such giants carry off lambs and (so I am told) even attack calves. He decided I was not his dish, and rose slowly out of sight on the last warm currents of the afternoon.
It was already bitter cold when I reached camp. Lal was worried about the clouds to the west. I wished for more time in these unexplored hills, but winter was pressing us. And we did have a whole country to see.
U. S. and Russian roads cross Afghanistan
By Land Rover from Kabul, Lal and I set out for a journey through Afghanistan’s mountain heartland, the Hazarajat. We drove south on the asphalt highway that connects the capital with Kandahar, 300 miles southwest. It was built by the U. S. Agency for International Development. Another road, built by the Soviet Union, leads on around the mountains to Herat, 350 miles farther.
But an hour out of Kabul we turned west up the valley of Maidan. The trucks and buses back on the highway could be in Herat easily in two days. Over the rough mountain roads ahead, our trip would take two weeks.
In Maidan, we stopped at a teashop across from the ziarat, or tomb, of Hadji Mohammed Naqaswar, a local saint. Like most such shrines, this one was festooned with hundreds of flags.
“Each means a prayer,” Lal said. “Most are tied on by women asking Allah for cures for their children.”
The ancient keeper offered to show me around, pointing out the marble slab, engraved with verses of the Koran, that covered the grave of the venerable holy man. Ibex horns adorned the walls. On Fridays sheep’s-fat lamps burned in niches beside the sepulcher. The old caretaker wore a tattered vest made of patches from the flags to symbolize his vow of poverty. On his shoulder was pinned a taweez, a small silver box with sacred scriptures folded inside—to ward off disease.
I thanked him and explained that I, too, was a Moslem and a hadji—I had made the trek to Mecca in 1965. He stared into my blue eyes in disbelief. I asked to borrow his Koran and read several verses in Arabic. Overcome, he seized my hands and blessed us for the long journey ahead.
Great stone Buddhas watch over Bamian
Though the Afghans have been Moslems for a thousand years, I often found the religion overlaid with the symbolism of former faiths. Earlier animistic religions held the wild animals of the highest mountains as symbols of distant purity—hence the ibex and mountain sheep horns decorating the ziarats. The prayer flags reminded me of Buddhist shrines in the Nepalese Himalaya.
Our next stop, Bamian, was once a thriving Buddhist center. The isolated valley is still guarded by colossal sentinels, two standing Buddhas carved into red sandstone cliffs between the second and fifth centuries. The larger towers 175 feet high. The cliffs around it are honeycombed with cells where more than a thousand monks once lived and contemplated the Perfect One.
I stood at the crumbling feet of the enormous statue. The face was gone—destroyed by Moslem image breakers—and the rich scarlet of its robe had long ago faded away. I explored the grottoes around the statue, picking my way upward through tunnels and galleries, stepping out finally atop the giant’s head.
Here and there traces of ancient frescoes remain: Buddhist deities seated in serene contemplation; sensuous dancers frolicking on the walls of the enormous niche.
Far below I could hear the hammers along the street of the tinkers in the Bamian village bazaar. Farther out in the fields, farmers shouted, driving teams of oxen around threshing circles. The valley life went on, oblivious of the past.
At nearby Shahr-i-Ghulghula, the “city of noise,” an ocher-colored citadel sits on a hill in the center of the valley. Its name recalls the cries of the populace, massacred 750 years ago by Genghis Khan in his fury over losing his favorite grandson in battle near here.
“It was that evil woman,” claimed a brawny Tajik farmer winnowing wheat below the ruined citadel. He paused to tell me the legend.
“It was Lala Khatun, the daughter of the king. She sent a note to Genghis Khan, camped just over there,” he pointed with his wooden pitchfork, “telling him about the secret underground canal that brought water to the city. The Mongols destroyed the canal; the city had to surrender or die of thirst.”
And the Mongols killed them all, the whole city, the whole valley—not a chicken was spared. The khan, no admirer of treachery, ordered Lala Khatun stoned to death.
Serais still mark the passing miles
At Panjao, in the shadow of the big red fort, we filled tanks and jerrycans with green Russian gasoline from a pile of rusty barrels. Ahead lay 400 miles of low-gear driving. We had spent the night in the fort, guests of the local police chief, Mr. Abdul Bakir, and he came out to see us off. Nearby, a string of camels bawled in protest as caravaneers strapped on heavy loads of firewood and salt.
“It won’t be long before the trucks put the camels out to pasture,” said Abdul Bakir. “Oh, the nomads will always come through with their caravans every season—but the new motor roads are changing our lives. Already there are plans for a paved highway through the Hazarajat.”
West of Panjao we saw fewer and fewer trucks. Regularly we passed ancient caravanserais along the roadside. These square, high walled fortresses, motels for the caravans, lie a day’s march apart—about 12 miles. Here caravans could spend the night, safe from raiders. But improved roads are bringing government and soldiers; the raiders are turning to more peaceful pursuits. Most of the caravanserais are crumbling. Still, wherever we stopped to ask directions, distances were always given in serais.
A few serais beyond Chakcharan, the new capital of Ghor province, we turned off in search of the Minaret of Jam, one of the most impressive monuments in Afghanistan, and the tallest, rediscovered only 26 years ago.
Traffic record: 14 cars in 9 months
Growling dogs greeted us at Jam, a cluster of mud huts. Steep brick-red hills dropping from an indigo sky walled in the narrow valley shaded by flaming yellow poplars and clumps of crimson apricot trees. Women at their outdoor looms added still more color to the autumn scene.
Here motor cars and foreigners are still a novelty. It had been a record year for traffic in the valley; our car was the fourteenth in nine months. Villagers swarmed around us as we sought out Mohammed Azzam, a town elder and the keeper of the minaret.
“Of course you will honor me by being my guest,” Mohammed insisted, ushering us into his home. The small stove was soon burning and tea was brought. I hadn’t noticed many chickens in this poor village, but outside someone was noisily killing several hens.
I have been spoiled by hosts all over the Middle East, but in the art of hospitality no one excels the Afghan. It was just turning dark when Mohammed’s brothers carried in a giant tray of rice and chicken, slabs of bread, and brimming bowls of yogurt. Over more tea we traded news from the outside for some of the valley’s legends.
Finally our host brought in armloads of mattresses and thick quilts. He unrolled them around the stove and bade us goodnight.
It was still dark next morning when I stumbled down the gully behind Mohammed. I wanted to meet sunrise at the Jam Minaret. At dawn we came around a hill and there it was, rising 20 stories above the canyon floor.
I stopped, awed, first by its size, then by its beauty. The entire column was lavishly decorated with flower patterns and graceful Arabic script. To some mosaic bricks still clung a pure turquoise color that rivaled the morning sky.
Most amazing of all, the remarkable monument stood in this remote valley unnoticed by outsiders for centuries. Of course Mohammed Azzam had known about it. He had guided Afghan officials here in 1942.
Mohammed opened a small wooden door. We squeezed through an opening only 14 inches square and slowly climbed 250 spiraling steps to the topmost gallery.
During the middle of the 12th century a powerful civilization, the Ghorid dynasty, rose from these valleys. From its capital at Firoz Koh, Turquoise Mountain, here in the mountains of Ghor, it swept across Afghanistan and India as far as Bengal.
Bold in battle, the Ghorids were also patrons of art and learning, but they spread their empire thin. The homeland was neglected, then forgotten. Looking down from the Jam Minaret, I saw only some ruins scattered on the hill across the river. The rest was wilderness.
Artist paints with a single hair
Where the mountains of Ghor meet the Iranian desert stands the walled city of Herat, often called “city of artists.” Fortified and enlarged by Alexander the Great in 330 B.C., it has been sacked and burned by many conquerors. But Herat always recovered, nurturing painters, poets, mystics, and scholars.
Much of Herat’s glory lies in ruins scattered around the city. But the brilliant carpets that line her bazaar, the fine filigrees of her silversmiths, the silk looms, the richly tiled Friday Mosque—these still recall Herat’s artistic legacy.
Herat’s greatest artist was Kamal ud-Din Bihzad. During the 15th century, Herat’s “golden period,” he painted miniatures never excelled. I visited one of Bihzad’s modern disciples, Senator Said Mohammed Mashal Gohri, at his studio on the outskirts of the city.
As a member of parliament, Senator Mashal spends much of his time in Kabul, but his first love is his painting. I found his hearty bulk hunched over a small square of silk.
Meticulously he traced the hairs of an old gentleman’s beard on a face a quarter of an inch high.
“Yes, Bihzad was a master craftsman,” he said. “No tiny detail was unimportant to him. Much of his work was done with a brush like this—a brush with just one hair.” He opened a folio of Bihzad reproductions.
“But it was his love of nature that made him immortal,” Senator Mashal continued. “Look at the grace of the animals, the details of the smallest flower. Even the rocks and the trees seem almost ready to speak.”
Before I left I had bought one of Mashal’s paintings. The tiny scene showed Herat in Bihzad’s time. The central figure was the famous mystic poet, Jami, a contemporary of Bihzad, seated in his garden. Behind rose an indigo dome against a sky of gold leaf.
Not far from Mashal’s studio I paused at Jami’s simple grave. A gnarled pistachio tree shaded a marble stele engraved with one of the poet’s most famous verses:
Behold, the palaces in ruins,
The wrath of rulers disappeared in air
No trace of pomp and glory remains,
But poets live in letters through the ages.
I walked back into the busy city through the dust of late afternoon. How little had changed since the time of Bihzad and Jami, I thought amid the crowds of turbaned men and veiled women, the files of camels, the horse-drawn taxis. As they bustled past the blue Friday Mosque set against a hazy sky of gold, it was almost as though the precious miniature under my arm had come to life.
Zaranj rises on an arid plain
For four hours we enjoyed the luxury of the smooth pavement south of Herat, and then turned at Dilaram across the rutted sands toward one of the country’s newly formed provinces, Nim Roz. For a while we followed the Khash River, dried to a trickle at this time of year. When we left the riverbed, the track split and rambled. I kept an eye on the com pass and the odometer.
“It’s good we didn’t come in summer,” Lal laughed. “It’s usually 120° this time of day.” Now, in September, it was probably 100°.
Small consolation.
We pulled into the new town of Zaranj a few stark buildings set in neat rows in the middle of nowhere. Here and there, masons laying mud bricks worked slowly under ragged awnings. Camels hugged patches of shade; shopkeepers dozed. Only the flies seemed busy, swarming around the shop where we relaxed over tea and bread.
After lunch I met one man who was very much alive, the young provincial governor, Abdul Kadr Kazi. “It’s a difficult job, building a province from scratch—and we’ve only started,” he said in excellent English, learned at the University of Pennsylvania. “The old city floods nearly every spring, so we had to build a new capital, too.
“The river is at once our best friend and our worst enemy,” he went on. “We have the driest climate in Afghanistan—less than two inches of rain a year. The river is our only hope.”
It wasn’t always this way. When Alexander the Great passed through here, Drangiana, a Persian satrapy, flourished along the river bank. But around 1380, Mongols led by Tamerlane swept through, slaughtering the populace and wrecking intricate canal systems that had taken centuries to build.
In a bouncing Russian-built jeep I rode out with Amanullah Sherzad to reach the ruins. Amanullah is a tall, handsome Baluchi, with long hair and flashing eyes. He was working as a contractor in the new city. Lal followed with the Land Rover as we headed out into the Dasht-i-Margo, the infamous Desert of Death.
“It’s safer with two cars,” Amanullah said. “It’s easy to get stuck in this sand. A serious breakdown could be fatal.”
When we stopped near midday, the scorching siah bad—“black wind,” as the Baluchis call it—seemed to suck the very life out of me.
“Over there you can see parts of the old irrigation system.” Amanullah pointed across the sand. I could make out the outlines of windswept ditches and a silt-choked canal.
Only one remains of Amiran’s million
For five miles we drove through the jagged ruins of a city, then finally stopped beside the rubble of what was once a mosque. Here stood a ziarat, the tomb of some long-ago local saint, guarded by a ragged old man living off the charity of passing caravans.
“This is all that is left of the city of Amiran,” said Amanullah. “Once maybe a million people lived here. Now there is one.”
Back in Amanullah’s village, near Zaranj, we lunched on sawad, a platter of bread soaked in chicken broth. We washed it down with tall glasses of murky water from the shallow village well.
Thick mud walls and a high, arched ceiling minimized the heat inside Amanullah’s house. Outside a small window, servants had piled thorn bushes and doused them with water.
Presto: Baluchi air conditioning.
As I left, Amanullah dropped half a dozen silver coins into my hand. I could just make out ”… Allah, Mohammed is the prophet of Allah” in Arabic beneath the tarnish. There was no date, but from the script I guessed tenth century. I handed them back.
“No. They are for you,” Amanullah said. “A souvenir of once-great Amiran, and your friends here who hope to build it again.”
HAVA brings life to the desert
Some 150 desert miles to the east, a massive irrigation project harnesses the water of the Helmand River and its chief tributary, the Arghandab. Combined, the two rivers drain nearly half the country. Backed by American loans and grants, the Helmand-Arghandab Valley Authority is slowly changing the face of the land.
Two large dams were built to hold back devastating spring floods. As water became dependable, old lands were revitalized; new fields sprang up on what was once desert. In Lashkar Gah, a new town growing up where the two great rivers meet, I visited the head quarters of HAVA and talked with Abdul Tawab Assifi, chief engineer for the project.
“This is the biggest job Afghanistan has ever attempted; for several years it was allotted 5 percent of the national budget.” With maps and charts Assifi outlined the complex enterprise. “Our primary mission is to improve the lot of farmers by improving the land and its use. The key is water. At the same time we’re building schools, roads, power plants, health centers, agricultural research stations. In short, we’re raising the standard of living for half a million people.”
Across the Helmand from Lashkar Gah I drove along gravel roads lined with silvery tamarisks, through rich farmland laced with canals and ditches. With Sultan Mohammed Omar of HAVA’s land settlement office, I headed for Nad-i-Ali, one of its boldest projects.
Along the road we passed camps of kuchis, Afghan nomads. Their black goat’s-hair tents were banked with piles of thorn and brush, fuel for the coming winter. Nad-i-Ali, too, was a kuchi settlement—but a permanent one.
“Each family got a house, up to 15 acres of land, a pair of oxen, simple tools, and cash for seeds,” Sultan Mohammed explained. “But it’s a hard life, even for an experienced farmer—worse for the inexperienced nomad. Hundreds of families gave up after a year or two.”
In one of the new villages I met Hadji Wakil of the Durrani tribe, one of the first settlers. We took the customary tea in the shade of an arbor of grapevines, then walked the fields with Hadji Wakil. Nearby his son plowed the small plot with a team of oxen.
“For 17 years I’ve fought this soil,” the old man said, crumbling an ash-brown clod between his fingers. “It takes work as well as water. But we’ve won.
In three more years I’ll have the deed to this land. Something to pass on to my sons.”
Most of Afghanistan’s two and a half million kuchis are still on the move. Every autumn they strike their summer camps and thread down through the passes into the warmer plains. Often we had passed their caravans on the narrow mountain roads.
Late one afternoon north of Kandahar we approached a kuchi encampment—six black tents huddled against the chill evening wind. A pair of snarling mastiffs, ears and tails clipped, stopped me a hundred paces from the camp. A tall, lean nomad strode out to meet us.
“Staray ma-shi!” We shook hands over the traditional Pushtu greeting. “May you not be tired!”
He slung his rifle and led me past the watchdogs to his campfire. Figures filled the circle to appraise the intruder. Behind us, women flattened dough into disks of unleavened bread.
I hoped to march with them for a few days, pitching my tent beside theirs. The invitation came with the first cup of tea.
Suddenly the chatter stopped and everyone was on his feet. Into the firelight stepped the patriarch of the clan, Mahmud Karim Khan Girnayl, wrapped in sheepskins and crowned with a turban of white cotton.
“Har kala rashi,” he said.
“Welcome.” His face was a web of wrinkles above a hawklike nose and a beard frosted with age. But his voice was strong, his hand steady. An old soldier who refuses to fade, Mahmud Khan claims 111 years.
These were Ghilzai tribesmen, the most famous of Afghan warriors. Four times the old man has mustered his riders against the British, the last time in 1919.
“Those were exciting times,” he recalled, and memories brought a glint to his eye. “Good horses, brave comrades, the smell of powder, and the spoils of battle. Once we ambushed the British at Toba and captured 1,200 rifles….” He opened a silver snuffbox and thumbed a pinch into each nostril. “But life has changed since the border was closed.”
I knew the history. In 1893 the British set up the Durand Line between Afghanistan and British India, an arbitrary boundary cut through tribal territory. When the British left in 1947, some 5,000,000 Pushtun tribesmen found themselves under the rule of a new state—Pakistan.
“When we moved freely, we prospered,” said the old man. “We brought almonds, carpets, raisins, and Afghan horses as far south as the Indus, bringing back spices and bolts of cloth to trade. When they closed the border, we had to decide between Afghanistan and Pakistan. We are Afghans, but our world has been cut in half.”
Kuchi band treks 1,000 miles a year
So the yarns were spun through a dinner of dried mutton strips, bread, yogurt, and rounds of tea. Finally the fire died and the cold drove us all to our bed rugs.
A cold wind was blowing sand against a gray sky when the first clatter woke me. Outside, shivering men herded in the hobbled camels while the women knocked out tent pegs and wrapped meager furnishings in the tent cloth.
I helped the men load their kneeling camels. The beasts groaned their displeasure under sacks of straw, skins of oil and water, carpets, mattocks, and blackened pots. Babies, wrapped like mummies, were lashed atop the loads.
In less than half an hour all was ready. Ninety nomads, 50 camels, 12 donkeys, 5 horses, and 600 sheep began the march south with the wind. Everyone walked, except for the old khan and the children. I walked with Mohammed Naim, eldest son of the khan, a mere 70 years. He carried a pistol, an English rifle, and battered binoculars.
“Since we left our summer camp in Nawar over a month ago, winter has been close behind us,” shouted Mohammed Naim. His words were nearly lost in the keening sandstorm. “But in Garmsel it will be warm.”
Garmsel, in fact, means “warm valley.” A winter settlement 250 miles to the southwest, it lay another month’s march across the Registan Desert. Every year the nomads make this thousand-mile round trip.
I wondered how these people, especially the old ones, could survive such a hard life. They never moved fast, true, but they never stopped for a minute to rest during the day’s eight-hour march. My legs felt the pace. The old khan chuckled from his chestnut mare.
“The open air is the place for a man, not the smoke of the towns,” he said.
On the third day we neared Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second largest city.
“I’d prefer to go around it,” the old khan confided, “but the young men look forward to a day in town.” There would be silver filigree to buy for a prospective bride, some tea and sugar, a visit to the gunsmith’s.
We picked our way slowly through outlying fields and villages; from rooftops children jeered as we passed. The old khan staked his horse in a stubble field near the city. But the first tents were barely up when an angry farmer burst into our midst. “Your unholy camels are stripping my pastures!” he shouted.
Mohammed Naim smiled apologies and sent two young men to investigate. But the farmer would not hold his tongue. “Why can’t you sons of devils stay in the desert where you belong?” I think at first the kuchis admired his pluck—he was outnumbered fifty to one—but he spat another curse. An angry tribesman grabbed him. I stiffened as guns were drawn. With arms raised the old khan quieted his men.
Then quickly the farmer spread his long coat on the ground in the direction of Mecca. No one could deny it was proper time for afternoon prayer—and the farmer’s sudden attack of piety spared him violence.
The relationship between the nomad and the settled people in Afghanistan has always been strained. Historically they have needed each other, but now as the trucks and transistor radios bring the goods and the news, villagers have less and less need of the kuchis.
I went to say goodbye to the old khan.
He was reading a worn book through spectacles with only one thick lens.
“… and prayers of peace upon the Prophet and His family, as many prayers as raindrops in the sky, as grains of sand in the desert ….”
Small wonder, I thought, that great religions have sprung from the desert. Here one has little room in his pack for idols. Nor is there need for them. On the mountaintop, or among the endless dunes, one feels close enough to his God to speak to Him.
In mysterious Kafiristan, literally “land of the infidels,” lived the last of Afghanistan’s idolators. For nearly a thousand years the Kafirs isolated themselves in a mountainous pocket 150 miles northeast of Kabul. Not until 1895 did the Afghan armies of Amir Abdur Rahman march in to burn their idols and convert the Kafirs to Islam. Now the area is called Nuristan, “land of light.”
Nuristan is still off the beaten path, and I needed special government permission for my visit. Officials were worried by recent rumors of tribal fighting.
Along a raging river in the heart of Nuristan our Land Rover was hailed by a band of armed men. They were returning to their village from a skirmish with the Gujars, they told us, and did we have room for them? We managed to squeeze all six in amid our baggage.
The leader of the footsore squad was Ghulam Dastigir Khan. He was as tall and thin as his rifle, with fine features and a pointed beard.
His broad brown beret, instead of a turban, stamped him as a Nuristani.
“We surprised the Gujars from two sides,” Dastigir said, “but they fled into the forests. We’ll get them this winter at their valley camps.” The Gujars are semi-nomadic herdsmen who roam the high pasturelands. Some of them had contracted to shepherd Nuristani goats for a percentage of the flocks. But there were arguments over payments, and many of the villagers’ goats had disappeared.
In Nuristan goats are money. The size of a man’s flocks determines his social position. The price of a house, a gun—or a bride—is still quoted in livestock. The quarrel with the Gujars was serious business.
Origins of the Nuristani obscure
At Urmir we parked the Land Rover and climbed for two hours up a trail through forests of holly oak to Kamdesh, the region’s largest village. Leading the way were Richard and Emmorette Strand, a young couple from Cornell University spending a season here studying the Kom language, one of five distinct tongues spoken in Nuristan.
The 500-odd houses of Kamdesh cascade down from the crest of a steep hill. They are built of wood-squared logs chinked with stones and mud. On the flat roofs corn, walnuts, mulberries, beans, and apricots were spread out to dry.
Below the village, women toiled in patches of millet and barley, lugging the harvest up hill in tall baskets on their backs. The men gathered in small groups, drinking tea.
“Except for hunting and fighting, the men do very little,” Strand explained. “All the artisans—the potters, the smiths, the weavers, the carvers—are baris, members of a class who were slaves in pre-Islamic times. For a few, their situation is still close to serfdom.
“These villages of Nuristan are remote and independent,” Strand said. “Outside laws still have little effect—but let’s take a look at the bari quarter.”
Strand led me across rooftops and down the steep narrow streets through the heart of the village. We passed a bari lumberjack with a pair of axes on his shoulder.
“Lesta sha!” he said. “How are you!” Strand returned the Kom greeting, adding, “Kor yenji! Kaa unji!” meaning “Where are you going? What are you doing?” He was not prying; these inquiries are part of the normal greeting ceremony.
Shy women in black dresses—some with eyes outlined in red mascara—hurried past, lugging baskets of firewood. I was surprised by the light complexions among the villagers. A few even had blond hair and blue eyes.
“Some say the Nuristani descend from an early Greek colony,” Strand said, “but judging from the language, it’s unlikely. The truth is, nobody knows their origins.”
We stopped to watch a young shoemaker sewing a pair of red goatskin boots. We were joined by a villager who introduced himself as Abdul Hanan.
“Once such a shoemaker would have been a slave,” he said. “Slavery is illegal now, but years ago a good artisan like this one could be bought for 12 cows or 120 goats.”
Despite the baris’ inferior position, they often fight beside their social superiors in tribal wars. Some have been elected to village councils. One bari, Wakil Abdullah, served as wakil, or representative, from Nuristan to the Afghan parliament in Kabul.
Afghan parliament in Kabul. I met Wakil Abdullah at his house in Kushtus, a two-hour walk around the mountainside from Kamdesh. Abdullah offered us fresh grapes and green peaches and told us stories of his life, his visit to Singapore as a young merchant sailor, his years in Kabul.
Now he was content to spend his last years back home. He had been saddened, he said, by the recent death of his wife, but added philosophically: “Allah be praised, I still have two left.”
It was pleasant for a change to sit up off the floor again. In most Afghan homes the only furniture is a carpet, but the Nuristanis use simple chairs and tables. Abdullah’s collection, dating from pre-Islamic times, was elaborately carved.
Unlike many Nuristanis, Wakil Abdullah was not ashamed of his infidel ancestors. “Islam was our salvation, but it’s a pity so little of our old culture survived it.”
Then, tapping out the rhythm on the floor with the handle of a small ceremonial ax, he crooned an old Kafir song his father had taught him:
0 Sunmri, open your door,
For tomorrow I string my bow
And march to war.
Warfare is still the Nuristani’s way of settling an injury to the tribe. As I packed my rucksack to leave Kamdesh, talk continued of the coming winter skirmish with the Gujars. The gunsmith was the busiest man in town.
Even after December snows had closed the high trails of Nuristan, the weather remained mild in Mazar-i-Sharif, 250 miles north west in Balkh province. Mazar stands only 1,200 feet above sea level, on the plains south of the Amu River.
Mazar-i-Sharif means “tomb of the saint.” The city grew up around a shrine which Afghans believe is the burial place of Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet. Its shining blue domes rise above the everyday smoke and dust of the streets. Flocks of sacred white doves flutter about the streets and gardens.
Earlier followers of Ali, the Shiahs, split from the orthodox Moslem traditions. Though scarcely 10 percent of the Afghans embrace the Shiah sect—the rest are Sunnis—all revere Ali as a saint.
I spent a Friday in Mazar during Ramadan, the holy month of fasting. Throughout the month Moslems neither eat nor drink from an hour before dawn until after sunset. Restaurants and teashops are closed, and streets are strangely quiet.
In a small office at the tomb I found Imam Hafiz Abdul Ghafur, keeper of the shrine. He wore the small white turban of a mullah, or religious leader. A hennaed beard brightened his otherwise long and serious face. He told me the tomb had been built because of a vision.
“Ali was killed at Al Kufah in Iraq, and many believe he is buried there,” explained Imam Hafiz. “But centuries ago a local holy man dreamed that Ali’s remains had been moved here. Scholars dug, and found his skeleton.”
How they identified the bones was never made clear, but as further proof, Imam Hafiz showed me a Koran, believed to have been hand-lettered by Ali himself, and a marble stele that legend says accompanied the body.
“Afghan Moslems have long revered the site,” the Imam continued. “Centuries ago the people of Mazar buried the original smaller shrine under a huge mound of earth to hide it from the Mongol invaders. Most of the inhabitants were killed or fled.”
The tomb had been so thoroughly hidden that it wasn’t discovered again for two hundred years.
Villagers who had come to spend a Friday in Mazar filled the shrine. One in particular caught my eye. Seven times he circled the rotunda, past the old men chanting in the sunshine near the window, past a niche set with flickering candles, past the women at prayer, heads buried under the crimson drape covering the bier.
On small tables around the wall lay giant hand-lettered Korans. Reverently the man touched his eyes, then his lips, to each. On his way out—leaving nothing to chance—he kissed the heavy bronze knockers on the high green doors.
Feast and song end daily fast
A little after midday I followed the call of the muezzin to the new mosque adjoining the tomb. Outside, amid piles of pointed slippers, shopkeepers’ sandals, and Turkoman riding boots, I left my tennis shoes.
The formal prayers in Arabic were followed by a lengthy animated sermon in Persian while we all sat back in rows, facing Mecca. Lal whispered a running translation; it was clearly hell-fire and brimstone. Faces around me wore looks of uneasy piety.
By late afternoon everyone was home preparing for iftar, literally “breakfast”—the first meal of a long day. At the hotel we broke the fast with qaymaq, a special Ramadan treat of clotted cream, then dined on kabili pilao—chunks of mutton heaped with rice, carrots, and raisins.
Outside I heard voices that sounded like carolers. When I opened the window, I found a chorus of five boys, coats pulled over their heads to keep warm, singing a special “trick-or-treat” ballad in a garble of Persian and Turkoman. Lal unraveled some of the verses:
Ramadan, Ramadan, for thirty days
we call,
Hungry but full in heart,
We wait for coins beneath your wall.
Scattered on the flat plains north and west of Mazar lie Turkoman villages famous for their fine carpets. Typical is Birmazeed, a small hamlet divided into family compounds by high mud-brick walls. At one picket gate I was invited inside by a hospitable villager, Subhan Berdi. We were soon joined by other men, many carrying infants. With winter plowing finished, they were baby-sitting while the women kept busy at their looms.
“Most of us came as refugees from Russia 37 years ago,” Subhan said. “My father and I helped build these fields and canals—the whole village—from a patch of desert.”
These Turkoman families from Bukhara brought their weaving skills with them. Encouraged by a Kabul carpet company which supplies wool, sets standards, and provides steady markets, the village developed a profitable cottage industry. Today a girl who can weave commands a high bride price. Carpets are more important than crops.