Below the aylaq the valley widened out until there was an expanse of grass a quarter of a mile wide on either side of the river, which here no longer raced over shallows, as it had higher up, but flowed deep and silent, winding through the meadow between high earthy banks. On the far bank a big herd of black cattle, calves and bullocks were slowly grazing their way up the valley.
Presently two men came up riding upon bullocks, urging them forward with prods from the forked sticks they both carried. Neither of these men took the slightest notice of us.
‘It is time, let us make the camp,’ said Abdul Ghiyas. No one had the strength to disagree with him.
‘So long as there are sufficient rocks for each of us to have one when we need it, I don’t care where we camp,’ said Hugh.
He looked like I felt, wan and exhausted. The last few days had been extremely trying: our reverses on the mountain; the crossing that morning of a pass more than 16,000 feet high, followed immediately by the awful party in the aylaq; all these, in conjunction with our wounds and the ills we had contracted en route, had been almost too much for us. Like dreadnoughts that had received the full force of an enemy salvo, until we could drop anchor in some haven and have time to clear up some of the damage, we were temporarily out of action.
Having decided to camp, Abdul Ghiyas laid down all sorts of stringent conditions for the choice of a suitable site, mostly of a strategical nature and dictated by his distrust of the Nuristanis, an apprehension I was beginning to share with him.
Eventually he found a grassy isthmus formed by a double bend in the river that was hemmed in by water on three sides. On it there stood a large rock that offered some protection ‘against being struck down from behind’ as he vividly put it; while on the landward side a fall of boulders from the mountains above provided plenty of the sort of dead ground that interested Hugh and myself far more than questions of defence against an enemy.
While we were lying on the grass trying to summon up energy to unpack, two men appeared on a grey horse, one riding pillion behind the other. They both carried long wands that looked like lances. The man riding pillion wore a red skull-cap; the other, one of the large floppy sort. Seen against the background of the green meadow with the river between us the feeling of having been transported into the Middle Ages was overwhelming. With some monks in the foreground fishing for carp it could have been an illustration in a pictorial history of England. For a moment I felt homesick.
They moved along the far bank, staring rudely over their shoulders at us, until they reached a place where some boulders out in the stream made it possible to cross. There they dismounted and, after tethering their horse, crossed the river, leaping from rock to rock, using their sticks to steady themselves, and came down the bank towards us.
Close-to these two men made a most disagreeable impression on all of us. The one with the skull-cap looked nothing more than an assassin. As well as his willow wand he carried a rifle slung across his shoulder. There was nothing medieval about the rifle, a .45 Martini-Henry that, although almost eighty years old, could still blow the daylights out of anything, nor about the bandolier of ammunition he wore under his shirt.
‘That’s a nasty-looking man,’ said Hugh. ‘He’d be better dead.’
‘He’s thinking the same about us. But look at the other one. What a great conk he’s got!’
The other was really sinister. In London in a dark suit and wearing a carnation he would have been unremarkable as a promoter of shady companies with an office in Park Lane. Here, dressed in the local costume, he was terrific.
He had very long teeth, almond-shaped eyes that swivelled and a nose like a huge beak. He wore a white and red striped shirt and the same baggy trousers as the men at the aylaq but made of cotton the colour of faded denim. The trousers were secured below the calf with brown puttees wrapped round and fastened with red and white woven strings which terminated in red pom-poms. He wore short ankle boots with cowhide soles and goatskin uppers dyed red, tied with coloured laces. Round his neck were slung a pair of Zeiss binoculars.
This man never looked at us except when he thought he was unobserved. Instead he sat close to Abdul Ghiyas, himself a strange figure in his windproof suit from which he refused to be parted, and from time to time hissed something in his ear.
‘I’m sure he’s a spy,’ said Hugh. ‘The question is who’s he spying for?’
‘I should have thought in your business you would have some way of recognizing a spy. Don’t you have some kind of sign, like Masons have? Or a badge?’
‘They don’t issue badges.’
Whether he was a spy or not there was nothing I could do about it. Besides I thought him ill-mannered. I fell asleep, and slept for four hours.
When next I woke, the sun was behind clouds, the air was soft and the grass without the glare was a darker green. The two men had moved away and were now sitting a hundred yards up the valley talking to one another. They had both put on their dark coats and at this distance they looked like seminarists out for the afternoon. With the soft air and the greenery we might have been in Ireland.
Hugh had also been asleep.
‘I don’t like that man with the nose at all,’ he said when he woke. ‘Abdul Ghiyas told me that he wanted to know where we were going to sleep tonight.’
We set off to bathe in the river but abandoned the idea when we found out how cold it was. When we came back the men had mounted their horse and were riding away down the valley.
‘Abdul Ghiyas says that we should post sentries for the night,’ said Hugh when it grew dark.
‘Do you want to be a sentry?’
‘No. I’d rather be murdered in bed.’
‘So would I.’
‘Abdul Ghiyas! No sentries!’
Here at around 13,000 feet it was cold. In the night I woke to find that we were in the clouds. Everything was soaking. On the other side of the river I could hear horses drumming up and down in the mist. Our own horses were restless and the stallion was pawing the ground, like a small, thin Rosinante.
Very early, when it was just growing light, a man appeared at a swift trot from the direction of the aylaq. He was barefooted and on his back he carried a skin full of butter.
‘Mandeh nabashi. May you never be tired,’ said everyone, as he came up to us and unslung his load. ‘May you live for ever.’ To which he replied, ‘Ayershah.’
He was a youngish man, about twenty-five, with a brown beard and a moustache. He spoke some Persian. His name, he said, was Aruk. He had been three weeks at a still higher aylaq than the one we had visited, somewhere on the way to the Anjuman Pass. He was a handsome man but, like most of the people we had so far seen, with the same mad look of barely-controlled savagery. Across his nose there was a shiny white scar. ‘A man did it with a sword,’ was all he would say about it.
When he was offered tea, he produced his own cup. It was beautifully made of thin porcelain decorated with a pattern of flowers. It was a Russian cup, made before the Revolution at the factory of the Englishman, Gardener, at St Petersburg.
‘There are many such in the Ramgul, he said.
I lifted his pack. It must have weighed well over sixty pounds. The frame was made of two forked pieces of willow with the fork ends lashed together and the four uprights stretched open to admit the goatskin, a horrid-looking thing, inside-out with the legs sewn up, so that the stumps, like the body, were distended with butter. The carrying straps for this contrivance were two thin cords of plaited goats’ hair. Worn with nothing but a shirt between them and the shoulders they would have been excruciatingly painful, but across his shoulders he wore his fringed coat rolled up as padding. On top of the pack he carried a pair of chamus – the same red boots the other man had worn but faded pink with age – and a smaller skin which contained dried wild onions.
He now offered to accompany us to Pushal, the capital of the Ramguli Katirs.
Whilst the drivers were making the last adjustment to the loads I tried Colonel Davidson’s Bashguli Grammar on him, reading from the book and pointing to the objects I wanted to identify.
‘Wetzâ?’ I said, pointing to his chamus.
‘Utzar!’ he said.
This was encouraging. I picked up his fringed coat.
‘Budzun?’
‘Bezih!’
I pointed at myself. ‘Manchī?’
‘Manchī!’
Girl. I made conventional curves in the air. ‘Jūk?’
‘Jug!’ he smiled.
Valley was gōl. The Chamar Valley, Chamar b’gōl. But in Bashguli bread was yashī and here it was anjih. There was no doubt the languages had something in common.
All this took a long time. Finally Hugh tried a sentence, taken straight from the book. ‘The Kafir language is very sweet’, ‘Katõ wari bilugh aruzwā essā.’
Aruk shook his head. ‘Katõ dīz bilugh aruzwā essā,’ he said.
With Aruk leading we set off downhill at a terrific pace. At the foot of this valley the grass came to an end and we passed through a narrow funnel-shaped defile and came out at the top of a desolate, cloud-filled glen with big mountain peaks rising through the clouds and shining in the sun. Here Aruk put on his boots and plunged on again faster than ever. But after a while he stopped.
‘Apparently his heart is hurting him,’ said Hugh.
‘It isn’t really surprising.’ Nevertheless we were disappointed to find him an unsuper superman. From now on he stopped regularly every ten minutes. For us with our various defects this was agony. On the move they were forgotten, but we were not carrying four Kabuli Seer.
After two hours the valley narrowed and became a gorge filled with rocks, the most difficult place we had yet been in on the whole journey and terrible for the poor horses. Sometimes the track descended to the level of the river, at others it twisted steeply over bluffs. Here we saw the first trees, a few birch and juniper growing close down to the river, and some shattered stumps of what looked like pines.
From now on the track was often blocked with tree-trunks and twisted bushes brought down by the river in flood. Here large junipers grew close to the river with willows and flowering tamarisk, blackcurrants and bushes of orange-coloured Persian roses. There was no air and the red cliffs reflected the heat down on to us. We stopped frequently to drink at the cool springs which issued from the walls of the gorge.
On the way we passed a rock with a hole in it standing in a clearing. We asked our mad-looking guide about it.
‘When the Amir Abdur Rahman came with the Mussulmans, the Siah-Posh were brought here. Their heads were put in the hole and they were asked if they would be of the Faithful.’
‘And if they wouldn’t?’
‘Their heads were struck off with a great sword.’
‘What happened if their heads were too big for the hole?’
‘My father had a big head but he became a Mussulman.’
In 1895 the happy existence of the Kafirs as robbers, murderers of Muslims, drinkers of prodigious quantities of wine, keepers of slaves, worshippers of Imra the Creator, Moni the Prophet, Gish the War God and the whole Kafir pantheon with its sixteen principal deities, came to an end when Abdur Rahman sent his armies under the command of his gigantic Commander-in-Chief, Ghulam Haider Khan, on a jehad against the infidel and converted them to Islam by the sword; probably the last time in history that such a conversion has taken place.
According to his own admission, Abdur Rahman was thoroughly fed up with the Kafirs. He had invited their chiefs to visit him in Kabul and sent them back to their country loaded with rupees. With the money they immediately bought rifles from the Russians which they used to slaughter more Afghans. (It is difficult to believe that Abdur Rahman imagined that they would do otherwise.) A further source of friction arose over the sale of Kafir girls to the Afghans in exchange for cows and the subsequent disputes over their relative values. He himself says that the chief reasons that caused him to invade Kafiristan were the aggravation caused by having a semi-hostile country at his back and also the fear that the Russians might annex it.
Besides these statesmanlike considerations there were others. He longed to convert the Kafirs and win an apostle’s reward and also to keep open the Kunar Valley trade route between Jalalabad and Badakshan, which their really intolerable behaviour made extremely difficult.
The campaign opened in the winter of 1895, the idea being to avoid the Kafirs escaping to Russian territory and also to keep casualties as low as possible. Whilst irritated by the Kafirs, the Amir seems to have recognized that they would be more use to him alive. Each man in the three armies that invaded Kafiristan was paid twenty rupees a day to stop him looting which, in such terrain as Kafiristan in mid-winter, would have condemned the inhabitants to death at any rate. The taking of women for private delectation was also forbidden. It was all highly respectable.
The three armies attacked simultaneously, that which Ghulam Haider Khan commanded in person consisting of eight infantry regiments, one cavalry regiment and one battery of artillery, marched by way of the Kunar Valley and attacked the Safed-Posh Kafirs at Kamdesh, defeating them in one decisive battle; the Afghan losses being given officially as seventy, those of the Kafirs as between four and five hundred. The army of Kohistan attacked from the south, probably by way of the Alingar river, and the army of Badakshan, ‘several battalions of well trained troops from Panjshir, Andarab and Laghman’, attacked from the north and west. The Kafirs gave up without much fight, all except the Siah- Posh Kafirs of the Ramgul Valley who fought a house to house and village to village struggle, particularly distinguishing themselves at a place called Sheshpoos. The invaders were ordered to take the Kafirs alive (a somewhat novel order in this part of the world) but it was difficult to implement it as the defence was so vigorous and the Kafirs suffered heavy losses from artillery fire, many hundreds dying in the flames when they put their own villages to the torch. From these operations, which they had conducted with the most primitive weapons, swords, bows and arrows and a few old rifles, the survivors were taken captives to the plains around Laghman in the Kabul Valley; some were settled on the land, some allowed to return home later, and many thousands of the most virile were taken into slavery. Some of these slaves remained in Kabul until the abdication of Amanullah in 1929.
There were a number of outraged squeaks from England; a few dispatches appeared in The Times to be answered rather surprisingly by a Miss Lillias Hamilton, M.D., Doctor to the Amir’s Court, a resourceful woman who had introduced vaccination to the country and founded a hospital at Kabul.1 The main point of her letter was that anyone judging what had happened to the Kafirs by English standards of ethics was talking through his hat.
There were many protests from missionaries to whom the Amir replied, blandly: ‘I did not find any Christians among them.’
It was a little difficult for the Government to censure Abdur Rahman. Officially his subsidy had just been increased from 12,000 to 16,000 lakhs of rupees. To the British he had fully justified their selection of him as Amir of Afghanistan and, apart from the few foibles remarked by Lord Curzon, like flaying people alive who displeased him, blowing them from the mouths of cannon, or standing them up to the neck in pools of water on the summits of high mountains and letting them freeze solid, he had done nothing to which exception could be taken. Nothing happened – a curtain descended on Kafiristan. The next time it would rise on Nuristan, The Country of Light.
We passed a steep valley on the right leading to Mir Samir and for a moment we saw the top of it remote-looking and inaccessible far away to the west. Above us an eagle glided along the crests.
Here at this small valley junction we came to the first of five suicidal bridges, at each of which the track crossed from one bank to the other. They were all exactly the same, a single juniper trunk more than twenty feet long, split in half and extended over the torrent by cantilevers of wood and stone. Because the trunks rested on their round sides, they wobbled from side to side when trodden on in an alarming manner.
But it was the unfortunate horses who really suffered. They had been really happy in the meadow higher up. Now they had to swim for their lives with their loads half under water, sometimes downstream of a bridge, sometimes far above it, whilst Badar Khan and Abdul Ghiyas shouted encouragement from the bank. But not Shir Muhammad; his little grey mare was the only one the other horses would follow, so that it was she who had to swim while her master sat with his feet tucked up on the saddle. Why his was the most spirited horse no one ever discovered. Not only did he allow it to wander on without giving it any help or encouragement but by sheer neglect it became horribly galled under the saddle. It was only the last bridge made from two parallel tree-trunks with rocks in the space between them (the trunks were crooked) that they were able to cross at all, at the rest they were made to flounder miserably in the river.
At this last bridge we came on an old bearded man sitting under a willow tree with two small boys, who were both wearing waistcoats with orange backs and oatmeal hats several sizes too large for them. With his two grandchildren he had made the journey up from Pushal, the capital, to meet us. This was the Isteqbal – the traditional journey of half a stage – that is made by people in the Moslem world to greet a friend who is travelling. The old man was Sultan Muhammad Khan, an ex-captain of the Royal Afghan Bodyguard, who although born a Kafir, had learned this pleasant custom in the years when he was at Court and had come up to escort us to his house, the news of our arrival having been brought to him by the disagreeable man on the horse.
After we had sat with him for some time in the shade of the willow tree, he proposed that we should continue.
‘It is only a short walk,’ he remarked.
Thinking that it might be perhaps a matter of half an hour we set off. The journey took seven hours.
We emerged from the Chamar gorge at a place where it joined another river, the Bugulchi, that rises under the main Hindu Kush range and leads into a part of Badakshan so remote that even the quarter-inch map showed a large unsurveyed blank, and entered the valley of the Ramgul, long and narrow between jagged mountains and thickly wooded with holly oak; crossed the last bridge before the Chamar joined the Ramgul and then, horror, started to climb again up a steep, dusty valley full of bushes on which grew a stalkless fruit, red like a cherry but more bitter, until we came out on a hillside among terraced fields of wheat and barley still young and green, deserted in the midday heat.
Soon even these evidences of human occupation ceased and the track wound interminably along a desolate hillside dotted with the stumps of dead and dying juniper trees, like the remains of a forest destroyed by shell-fire. The heat was appalling. We both had a raging thirst but there was no water, except where five hundred feet below the Ramgul raced down, as green as the fields on either side of it, mocking us. Only the Captain and his two small grandsons seemed impervious to heat and distance, racing ahead and then waiting courteously at the difficult bits to allow Hugh and myself to go first, so that at each steep place we all stood bowing and smiling politely at one another until I could have screamed.
After four hours of this the track descended steeply to the river and we met the first women we had seen in Nuristan. All were unveiled, but it was difficult to form any opinion about their charms because, as they passed us, staggering under the weight of enormous conical wicker baskets piled eight feet high with firewood, they latched a cloth across their faces. Dressed in dark brown coats with wide sleeves, like the fringed bezih worn by the men in the aylaq, and with a sort of hood of the same material, they looked like overworked members of some austere religious order.
At a narrow place between the river and the steep side of the mountain we crossed a stone wall built of round stones the size of cannon balls. Originally it must have been extremely solid, now it was broken down, indistinguishable from the ones that divided the path from the fields on either side.
‘Here were the outer forts of Pushal,’ said the Captain, ‘but after we were conquered by the Afghans, they were broken and thrown down.
‘And there is your camp site,’ he added.
‘And about time, too,’ said Hugh in English. Like me he was at the end of his tether. Apart from short halts we had been on the move since six. It was now four-thirty and we had not eaten all day.
It was a splendid camp site in a field by the river and was shaded by a vast walnut tree. It was the camp site of our dreams – but Abdul Ghiyas rejected it. Now that the Captain had taken us under his protection and the risk of assassination had receded, he was anxious for the bright lights of the city. We were too tired to argue with him.
The next possible place was in a grove of mulberry trees. It was full of girls and young women. There had been an air of sadness about the others in their drab working clothes: these were far more gay. They wore white and red trousers with red dresses over them. Under their skirts they wore petticoats with contrasting hems which showed. Their hair was covered with a sort of cream-coloured coif and under it they seemed to wear some kind of cotton cap. Their arms were bare and they wore heavy bracelets of brass or gold. On their foreheads they mostly had a fillet of round silver ornaments or cowrie shells. They were barefooted. Even at a distance it was obvious that they were extremely handsome.
Some carried babies on their backs in the sack made by the turned-down hoods they wore. The really small ones were asleep in the conical carrying baskets or in small wooden beds, like the baskets suspended on ropes from the trees. One girl was seated on a swing. As she swung high up under the trees she shrieked and showed her petticoats. It was an innocent happy scene.
‘Here,’ we said instantly.
‘No,’ said Abdul Ghiyas, looking at the Captain out of the corner of his eyes. ‘It is not suitable.’ It must have been a hard tussle for him to set a good example to the Infidel at this moment.
‘Not suitable,’ said the Captain. Here he left us and hurried on home.
Eventually Abdul Ghiyas chose an awful place for us. It was in an amphitheatre under some cliffs and had previously been used in the time of the old religion as a place of sacrifice, but there the resemblance to something out of the Golden Bough ended. It was a dusty place covered with excrement and squashed mulberries. There were flies by the million, fierce black ants and, when the sun went down, large blood-thirsty mosquitoes. The raffish youths who watched us as we slowly set up our camp, the dust and the general air of stickiness, made me think of Clapham Common and Bank Holidays.
But, as the news of our arrival spread, the smart young men of the town began to arrive. Half a dozen of the most elegant seated themselves on a large rock and watched us languidly. Like members of the Eton Society, they were dressed rather foppishly – big flat caps, embroidered waistcoats, silver medals and lucky charms. One of them was armed with a double stringed stone bow. From time to time he discharged a pebble at the lizards that crawled over the face of the cliff.
Before these aloof dandies and an audience of at least fifty lesser men we hobbled backwards and forwards, performing our mundane household chores, like actors in some interminable drama in an experimental theatre, until, unable to stand it any longer, we set off to wash in the river.
‘God. You’re thin!’ Hugh said.
It was the first time we had taken our clothes off for a fortnight. During this time our bodies had become unrecognizable. High altitude, insufficient liquid and the wrong food had wrought an extraordinary change. All the muscles in our arms and legs had melted away to nothing – they were like matchsticks. Our ribs were starting through the flesh. We were as repulsive as the survivors of a journey in open boats.
‘If von Dückelmann only began to lose weight when he got to Nuristan, I can’t bear to think what we shall look like in another ten days.’
‘If the rest of Nuristan is like the place we’re camping in, we shan’t be alive to find out,’ Hugh said. His teeth were chattering. So were mine.
We were standing up to our waists in a bay of the river, the only possible wash place. The water was bloody cold. The current moved in a circle so that the dirt remained where it was. We had already lost the soap.
Back at the amphitheatre a game had started – a game of quoits called auzil. Like everything else these people did, it took an excessive Herculean form and consisted of hurling heavy flat stones the size of soup plates at a mark the length of a cricket pitch away. When a particularly good shot resulted loud cheers rose.
Meanwhile the boys, who infested the place, were amusing themselves in their own fashion; creeping up behind someone smaller than themselves and violently hurling him to the ground, where the victim would lie blubbering for a few moments until he himself would get up and do the same to someone even more diminutive.
Whilst Abdul Ghiyas held off the spectators who fought among themselves for the empty tins, I started to cook. Unable to stand the thought of Irish stew, and as a revenge on our drivers for forcing us to camp in this spot, I concocted a loathsome mixture of soup and pork which I knew would be unacceptable to them on religious grounds.
The food no sooner started to warm up than a whirlwind descended on the amphitheatre, which extinguished the stoves and covered everything in dust. To escape from it I moved everything to the shelter of some smelly rocks at the foot of the cliff. In this unbelievably horrid situation I finished cooking our dinner.
‘Apparently this place belongs to a Nuristani General who lives at Kabul,’ Hugh said as we digested the ghastly dinner I had prepared.
‘Well, if I were a General I’d get a fatigue party to clean it up.’
When we had finished we gave out chocolate to the watchers, but it was like attempting to feed the five thousand without the aid of a miracle.
It had been among the most awful days I could remember. To escape from the crowds, who showed no signs of dispersing, and from the giant mosquitoes that were sucking my blood, I took my bedding to the top of a high rock.
‘If anything falls from the cliff you’ll be killed,’ Hugh shouted up to me.
‘Good!’
‘Abdul Ghiyas says if you sleep up there you may be murdered.’
‘It’s a risk I’m prepared to take.’
He picked up his own bedding and started to move towards the cliff.
‘I’m coming up there, too.’
‘Why don’t you find a rock of your own? I need this one myself.’
‘All right, I will,’ he said huffily.
Before falling asleep, having long since lost all sense of time, I looked at the calendar in my diary. The date was the twenty-third of July. Only fourteen days had passed since we had set off from Kabul. It seemed like a lifetime.
1. The Times, 4 April 1896.