30
WHEN I RETURNED to Kathmandu from my trek to Tipling, I called on Boris at the Yak and Yeti. He listened with interest to the tale of helicopters touching down to spirit away gemstones that rightly belonged to His Majesty King Birendra. His own relations with the royal family had cooled since the halcyon days of the Shah restoration. In 1970, he had lost the catering contract for state functions to the new Soaltee Hotel, owned by Prince Gyanendra. He naturally made his displeasure known, and the next thing he knew he had been detained during an investigation into the theft and illegal export of ancient art objects.
Jailed!
He himself!
Boris!
He was cleared, of course, but the message was plain: one crossed the Shahs at one’s peril. He hoped that was understood fully up in Tipling.
The first thing he said when I told him that my visa was up and I would be returning to the States was that if I wanted to stay in Nepal, he would be happy to give me a part-time job teaching English to his employees. That would take care of the visa extension. The second thing he said, after I demurred because I had another year of college to complete, was that since I was traveling across Afghanistan again, I ought to look up a fellow he knew in Herat.
An Englishman, one of those archaeologists who couldn’t sit still. Digging, digging, always digging. Not one to bother with papers and permits. He’d show me a proper ruin or two, my eyes only. That I could depend upon. He would write him straightaway.
Relying on the post between Nepal and Afghanistan, though—that would be foolish. One didn’t place wagers on a horse gone lame in two legs. I had better take a copy of his letter with me.
The Englishman, whom I’ll call Hendricks, turned out to be a donnish loner in his forties. He insisted that Boris had over-egged the pudding in calling him an archaeologist. He was nothing of the sort. Bog-standard amateur was more like it. (Later, after the Islamic revolution in nearby Iran and the invasion of Afghanistan by the equally nearby USSR, he would strike me as a likely professional in a more clandestine line—one that would have accounted for his fluency in Farsi, Dari, Pashto, and Russian as well as the vagueness of his explanation for his presence in Herat.) As promised, he chauffeured me by Land Rover to wild, unknown ruins on the outskirts of the ancient city, termed “the breadbasket of Central Asia” by Herodotus and captured by Alexander in 330 B.C. But he also showed me the spires and domes clad in luminous mosaics that brought Herat its greatest fame as the capital of the Timurid Empire, whose rulers bestowed lavish commissions on artists, architects, and men of letters.
Here were the towering minarets of the Musalla, tiled with blue lozenges filled with flowers. There was the azure mausoleum of Empress Gohar Shad, described by Robert Byron after his visit in 1934 as “the most beautiful example in color in architecture ever devised by man to the glory of God and himself.”
At the zenith of Herat’s magnificence, in the fifteenth century, it was one of the most cultured cities in the world, larger than Paris or London. It was a place where it was said that if you stretched out your feet, you were sure to hit a poet.
The greatest was the beloved Persian Jami. On a bright, clear morning, we drove out a dusty road lined with pines to his simple tomb, sheltered by a spreading pistachio tree in the garden of a mosque. The poet had written his own epitaph, and I copied Hendricks’ translation into my notebook:
When your face is hidden from me,
Like the moon hidden on a dark night,
I shed stars of tears and yet my night remains dark
In spite of all those shining stars.
Later we wandered through the ruins of an old royal hunting lodge at Rosi Bagh, a few miles south of the city. The sand-blown grounds of the adjacent necropolis were littered with shards of the exquisite glazed tiles that had given the monuments of Herat their celestial luminescence. The two largest tombs contained the remains of father and son. Hendricks called them Sadozais. The father’s name was Mahmud Shah. He was once the king of Afghanistan, once held the Koh-i-noor diamond. He was thought to have been poisoned by his son Kamran, whose name was on the other tomb.
After the bloodline ran out, Hendricks said, most of the lesser royal tombs had been stripped of their mosaics by grave robbers. Only a few forlorn tiles with inscriptions remained. He drew my attention to one, shaped as a twelve-pointed star and decorated with fine faience mosaic—small pieces of turquoise, saffron, and green ceramics fitted together to form designs of flowers, leaves, and calligraphy.
The curious thing about it was the calligraphy. It quoted from Jami’s epitaph, which was well-known in the Islamic world. But the inscription concluded abruptly with “I shed stars,” as if the artisan’s thoughts had turned elsewhere and, upon resuming his work, he’d forgotten there was more to the poem.
It was the sort of lapse, grumbled Hendricks, that never would have happened in the glorious reign of Gohar Shad.
He pointed out the pattern of arabesques on another tile. It consisted entirely of repetitions of the word for “mercy.”
That, he said drily, was the rarest of qualities among the rulers interred there. Then he told me a story about “Kamran the Cruel,” who maintained a pride of lions to which he fed his enemies alive.
YEARS WOULD PASS before the story signified. I had not yet connected Sa’adat to the Afghan ruling family and the vivid pink-hued rubies of his birthright. There was no way of knowing then that the truncated stanza from Jami on the star-shaped tile in that bleak dusty boneyard outside of Herat was the crucial missing piece of the puzzle that was Nigel.