Читать книгу A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush - Eric Newby - Страница 13

In Tehran Wanda left us to return to Europe.

On 30 June, eleven days from Istanbul, Hugh and I reached Meshed, the capital of the province of Khurasan, in north-east Persia, and drove through streets just dark to the British Consulate-General, abandoned since Mussadiq’s coup and the breaking off of diplomatic relations in 1953.

After a long wait at the garden gate we were admitted by an old, grey-bearded sepoy of the Hazarah Pioneers. He had a Mongolian face and was dressed in clean khaki drill with buttons polished. Here we were entertained kindly by the Hindu caretaker.

The place was a dream world behind high walls, like a property in the Deep South of the United States. Everywhere lush vegetation reached out long green arms to destroy what half a century of care had built up. The great bungalows with walls feet thick were collapsing room by room, the wire gauze fly nettings over the windows were torn and the five-year-old bath water stagnant in the bathrooms. In the living rooms were great Russian stoves, standing ceiling high, black and banded like cannon set in the walls, warming two rooms at once, needing whole forests of wood to keep them going.

The Consulate building itself was lost and forgotten; arcades of Corinthian columns supported an upper balcony, itself collapsing. The house was shaded by great trees, planted perhaps a century ago, now at their most magnificent. Behind barred windows were the big green safes with combination locks in the confidential registry. I asked Hugh how they got them there.

‘In the days of the Raj you could do anything.’

‘But they must weigh tons. There’s no railway.’

‘If Curzon had anything to do with it, they were probably dragged overland from India.’

On the wall in one of the offices we found a map of Central Asia. It was heavily marked in coloured pencil. One such annotation well inside Russian Territory, beyond a straggling river, on some sand dunes in the Kara-Kum desert read, ‘Captain X, July, ‘84’ and was followed by a cryptic question mark.

‘The Great Game,’ said Hugh. It was a sad moment for him, born nearly a century too late to participate in the struggle that had taken place between the two great powers in the no-man’s-land between the frontiers of Asiatic Russia and British India.

Apart from Hugh and myself, everyone inside the Consulate firmly believed that the British would return. In the morning when we met the old man from Khurasan who had been in the Guides Cavalry, the younger one who had been in a regiment of Punjabis and the old, old man who was the caretaker’s cook, I felt sad under their interrogation about my health and regiment. To them it was as though the Indian Army as they had known it still existed.

‘Apka misaj kaisa hai, Sahib?’

‘Bilkul tik hai.’

‘Apka paltan kya hai?’

I had acquired Urdu rapidly sixteen years before. It had vanished as quickly as it came. Soon I dried up completely and was left mouthing affirmatives. ‘Han, han.’

‘For God’s sake don’t keep on saying, “Han, han”. They’ll think you’re crazy.’

‘I’ve said everything I can remember. What do you want me to say. That we’re not coming back, ever?’¹

With all the various delights of Meshed to sample it was late when we set off. Driving in clouds of dust and darkness beyond the outer suburbs the self-starter began to smoke. Grovelling under the vehicle among the ants and young scorpions, fearful of losing our feet when the great American lorries roared past, we attained the feeling of comradeship that only comes in moments of adversity.

The starter motor was held in place by two inaccessible screws that must have been tightened by a giant. It was a masterpiece of British engineering. With the ants marching and counter-marching over me, I held a guttering candle while Hugh groped with the tinny spanner that was part of the manufacturers’ ‘tool-kit’.

‘What does the book say?’

It was difficult to read it with my nose jammed into the earth.

‘The starter is pre-packed with grease and requires no maintenance during the life of the vehicle.’

‘That’s the part about lubrication but how do you GET IT OFF?’

It was like trying to read a first folio in a crowded train. I knocked over the candle and for a time we were in complete darkness.

‘It says: “Loosen the retaining screws and slide it.”’

‘There must be a place in hell for the man who wrote that.’

‘Perhaps you have to take the engine out first.’

Late at night we returned unsuccessful to the city and in the Shāri Tehran, the Warren Street of Meshed, devoted to the motor business, hammered on the wooden doors of what until recently had been a caravanserai, until the night watchman came with stave and lantern and admitted us.

In the great court, surrounded by broken-down droshkies and the skeletons of German motor-buses, we spread our sleeping-bags on the oily ground beside our vehicle. For the first time since leaving Istanbul we had achieved Hugh’s ambition to sleep ‘under the stars’.

Early the next morning the work was put in hand at a workshop which backed on to the courtyard. It was the sort of place where engines are dismembered and never put together again. The walls of the shop were covered with the trophies of failure, which, together with the vast, inanimate skeletons outside, gave me the same curious feelings of fascination and horror that I still experience in that part of the Natural History Museum devoted to prehistoric monsters.

The proprietor Abdul, a broken-toothed demon of a man, conceived a violent passion for Hugh. We sat with him drinking coffee inside one of the skeletons while his assistant, a midget ten-year-old, set to work on the starter with a spanner as big as himself, shaming us by the ease with which he removed it.

‘Arrrh, CAHARLESS, soul of your father. You have ill-used your motor-car.’ He hit Hugh a violent blow of affection in the small of the back, just as he was drinking his coffee.

‘Urggh!’

‘What do you say, O CAHARLESS?’

Hugh was mopping thick black coffee from his last pair of clean trousers.

‘I say nothing.’

‘What shall I say?’

‘How should I know.’

‘You are angry with me. Let us go to my workshop and I shall make you happy.’

He led us into the shop. There he left us. In a few minutes he returned with a small blind boy, good-looking but with an air of corruption. Abdul threw down his spanner with a clang and began to fondle him.

‘CAHARLESS!’ he roared, beckoning Hugh.

‘NO!’

Presently Abdul pressed the boy into a cupboard and shut the door. There followed a succession of nasty stifled noises that drove us out of the shop.

Later, when we returned, Hugh was given a tremendous welcome.

‘CAHARLESS, I thought you were departed for ever. You have come back!’

‘You still have my motor-car.’

To me he was less demonstrative but also less polite, snatching my pipe from my mouth and clenching it between his awful broken teeth in parody of an Englishman.

‘CAHARLESS, when you take me to Englestan I shall smoke the pipe.’

All through the hot afternoon he worked like a demon with his midget assistant, every few minutes beseeching Hugh to take him to England. After two hours the repairs were finished. Now he wanted to show us how he had driven to Tehran in fourteen hours, a journey that had taken us two days and most of one night.

In breathless heat he whirled us through the streets, tyres screeching at the corners. We were anxious to pay the bill and be off. Never had we met anyone more horrible than Abdul, more energetic and more likely to succeed.

‘How much?’

‘CAHARLESS, my heart, CAHARLESS, my soul, you will transport me to Englestan?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘We shall drive together?’

What a pair they would make on the Kingston By-Pass.

‘Yes, of course, Bastard’ (in English). ‘How much?’

The machine almost knocked down a heavily swathed old lady descending from a droshky and screamed to a halt outside a café filled with evil-looking men, all of whom seemed to be smitten with double smallpox.

‘CAHARLESS, I am your slave. I will drive you to Tehran.’

‘Praise be to God for your kindness (and I hope you drop dead). THE BILL.’

‘CAHARLESS, soul of your father, I shall bring you water. Ho, there, Mohammed Gholi. Oh, bring water for CAHARLESS, my soul, my love. He is thirsty.’

He screamed at the robbers in the shop, who came stumbling out with a great chatti which they slopped over Carless.

‘Thank you, that is sufficient.’

‘CAHARLESS, I love you as my son.’

‘This bill is enormous.’

It was enormous but probably correct.

A little beyond Meshed we stopped at a police post in a miserable hamlet to ask the way to the Afghan Frontier and Herat. I was already afflicted with the gastric disorders that were to hang like a cloud over our venture, a pale ghost of the man who had climbed the Spiral Stairs on Dinas Cromlech less than a month before. Hugh seemed impervious to bacilli and, as I sat in the vehicle waiting for him to emerge from the police station, I munched sulphaguanadine tablets gloomily and thought of the infected ice-cream he had insisted on buying at Kazvin on the road from Tabriz to Tehran.

‘We must accustom our stomachs to this sort of thing,’ he had said and had shared it with Wanda, who had no need to accustom herself to anything as she was returning to Italy.

The germs had been so virulent that she had been struck down almost at once; only after three days in bed at the Embassy with a high temperature had she been able to totter to the plane on the unwilling arm of a Queen’s Messenger. I had rejected the ice-cream. Hugh had eaten it and survived. It was unjust; I hated him; now I wondered whether my wife was dead, and who would look after my children.

I had succumbed much later. In the fertile plain between Neishapur and Meshed we had stopped at a qanat for water. The qanat, a subterranean canal, was in a grove of trees and this was the place where it finally came to the surface after its journey underground. It was a magical spot, cool and green in the middle of sunburnt fields. There was a mound grown with grass like a tumulus with a mill room hollowed out of it and a leat into which the water gushed from a brick conduit, the qanat itself flowing under the mill. In several different spouts the water issued from the far side of the mound. It was as complex as a telephone exchange.

‘Bound to be good,’ Hugh said, confronted by the crystal jets. ‘Qanat water. Comes from the hills.’

It was delicious. After we had drunk a couple of pints each we discovered that the water didn’t come from the qanat but from the conduit which came overland from a dirty-looking village less than a mile away.

‘I can’t understand why you’re so fussy,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t affect me.’

Now, as I sat outside the police station brooding over these misfortunes, there was a sudden outburst of screams and moans from the other side of the road, becoming more and more insistent and finally mounting to such a crescendo that I went to investigate.

Gathered round a well or shaft full of the most loathsome sewage was a crowd of gendarmes in their ugly sky-blue uniforms and several women in a state of happy hysteria, one screaming more loudly than the rest.

‘What is it?’

‘Bābā,’ said one of the policemen, pointing to the seething mess at our feet and measuring the length of quite a small baby. He began to keen; presumably he was the father. I waited a little, no one did anything.

This was the moment I had managed to avoid all my life; the rescue of the comrade under fire, the death-leaper from Hammersmith Bridge saved by Newby, the tussle with the lunatic with the cut-throat razor.

Feeling absurd and sick with anticipation I plunged head first into the muck. It was only four feet deep and quite warm but unbelievable, a real eastern sewer. The first time I got hold of something cold and clammy that was part of an American packing case. The second time I found nothing and came up spluttering and sick to find the mother beating a serene little boy of five who had watched the whole performance from the house next door into which he had strayed. The crowd was already dispersing; the policeman gave me tea and let me change in the station house but the taste and smell remained.

Five miles beyond the police post the road forked left for the Afghan Frontier. It crossed a dry river bed with banks of gravel and went up past a large fortified building set on a low hill. After my pointless immersion I had become cold and my teeth were chattering. It seemed a good enough reason to stop the vehicle and have a look. Only some excuse such as this could halt our mad career, for whoever was driving seemed possessed of a demon who made it impossible ever to stop. Locked in the cab we were prisoners. We could see the country we passed through but not feel it and the only smells, unless we put our heads out of the window (a hazardous business if we both did it at the same time), were the fumes of the exhaust and our foul pipes; vistas we would gladly have lingered over had we been alone were gone in an instant and for ever. If there is any way of seeing less of a country than from a motor-car I have yet to experience it.

The building was a caravanserai, ruined and deserted, built of thin flat bricks. The walls were more than twenty feet high, decorated on the side where the gate was with blind, pointed arches. Each corner was defended by a smooth round tower with a crumbling lip.

Standing alone in a wilderness of scrub, it was an eerie place. The wind was strong and under the high gateway, flanked by embrasures, it whistled in the machicolations. Inside it was a warren of dark, echoing tunnels and galleries round a central court, open to the sky, with the same pointed arches as on the outer wall but here leading into small cells for the accommodation of more important travellers. In time of need this was a place that might shelter a thousand men and their animals.

The roof was grown thick with grass and wild peas, masking open chimney holes as dangerous as oubliettes. The view from the ramparts was desolate.

The air was full of dust and, as the sun set, everything was bathed in a blinding saffron light. There was not a house or a village anywhere, only a whitewashed tomb set on a hill and far up the river bed, picking their way across the grey shingle, a file of men and donkeys. Here for me, rightly or wrongly, was the beginning of Central Asia.

We drove on and on and all the time I felt worse. Finally we reached a town called Fariman. A whole gale of wind was blowing, tearing up the surface of the main street. Except for two policemen holding hands and a dog whose hind legs were paralysed it was deserted. Through waves of nausea I saw that Hugh had stopped outside some sort of café.

‘I think we’d better eat here.’ To my diseased imagination he seemed full of bounce.

‘I don’t think I can manage any more.’

‘You are a funny fellow; always talking about food, now you don’t want any.’

‘You forget I’ve already eaten.’

He disappeared for a moment, then I saw him in the doorway semaphoring at me. With my last remaining strength I tottered into the building. It was a long room, brilliantly lit, empty except for the proprietor. He was bald, but for a grubby-looking frizz of grey curls, and dressed in a long, prophetic sort of garment. Hanging like a miasma over him and everything else in the building was a terrible smell of grease.

‘Ovis aries, fat-tailed sheep, they store it up in their tails for the winter.’

‘I’ve never smelt a sheep like this, dead or alive.’

‘It’s excellent for cooking,’ Hugh said. Nevertheless, he ordered boiled eggs.

I had ‘mast’. Normally an innocuous dish of curdled milk fit for the most squeamish stomach, it arrived stiff as old putty, the same colour and pungent.

While I was being noisily ill in the street, a solitary man came to gaze. ‘Shekam dard,’ I said, pointing to my stomach, thinking to enlist his sympathy, and returned to the work in hand. When next I looked at him he had taken off his trousers and was mouthing at me. With my new display of interest, he started to strip himself completely until a relative led him away struggling.

That night we huddled in our sleeping-bags at the bottom of a dried-out watercourse. It seemed to offer some protection from the wind, which howled about us, but in the morning we woke to find ourselves buried under twin mounds of sand like dead prospectors. But for the time being I was cured: sixteen sulphaguanadine tablets in sixteen hours had done it.

Full of sand we drove to the frontier town, Taiabad. It was only eight o’clock but the main street was already an oven. The military commander, a charming colonel, offered us sherbet in his office. It was delicious and tasted of honey. Hugh discussed the scandals of the opium smuggling with him. ‘It is a disgraceful habit,’ the Colonel said. ‘Here, of course, it is most rigorously repressed but it is difficult to control the traffic at more remote places.’ (In the Customs House the clerks were already at this hour enveloped in clouds of smoke.) ‘You are going to Kabul. Which route are you proposing to take?’

We asked him which he thought the best.

‘The northern is very long; the centre, through the Hazara country, is very difficult; the way by Kandahar is very hot. We are still awaiting the young American, Winant. He set off to come here by the northern route in May.’

‘But today’s the second of July.’

‘There was a Swedish nurse with him. Also he was very religious. It was a great mistake – a dangerous combination. Now we shall never see them again. In some respects it is a disagreeable country. Unless you are bound to go there, I counsel you to remain in Iran. I shall be delighted to put you up here for as long as you wish. It is very lonely for me here.’

We told him our plans.

‘You are not armed? You are quite right. It is inadvisable; so many travellers are, especially Europeans. It only excites the cupidity of the inhabitants. I should go by Kandahar. Your visas are for Kandahar and 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, the fan belt removed, and with a piece of rubber hose on the exhaust pipe, to lift it clear of the water, led by a wild man wearing a turban and little else, one of the crew of three stationed on the opposite bank. In the middle the water rose over the floorboards and gurgled in our shoes.

It was a beautiful morning; the sky, the sand and the river were all one colour, the colour of pearls. Over everything hung a vast silence, shattered when the ruffians on the other side started up a tractor.

Because we were tired, having driven all night, we had forgotten to discuss terms for this pilotage. Now, safe on the other bank, too late we began to haggle.

‘This is a monstrous charge for wading a river.’ It was necessary to scream to make oneself heard above the sound of the tractor.

‘It is fortunate that we did not make use of the tractor,’ said the man in the ragged turban. ‘It is rare for a motor to cross by its own power. With the tractor you would have had greater cause for lamentation.’

‘That being so by now you must be men of wealth.’

Back came the unanswerable answer.

‘But if we were not poor, Āghā, why should we be sitting on the shores of the Farah-Rud waiting for travellers such as you?’

The walls of the hotel at Farah were whitewashed and already at six o’clock dazzling in the sun. Breakfast was set in the garden: it was a silly idea of our own: runny eggs and flies and dust and hot sun all mixed inextricably together in an inedible mass.

We passed the day lying on charpoys in a darkened room. Hugh was out completely, like a submarine charging its batteries, naked but for his Pathan trousers. Except for a brief interval for lunch, mildly curried chicken and good bread, he slept ten hours.

I could not sleep. I tried to read but it was too hot. Outside beyond the shutters the world was dead, sterilized by sun. At a little distance, shimmering in the heat, were the turreted walls of old Farah. I longed to visit it but the prospect of crossing the sizzling intervening no-man’s-land alone was too much. This was the city that Genghis Khan had captured and vainly attempted to knock down in the thirteenth century, that was re-occupied in the eighteenth and finally abandoned voluntarily in the nineteenth, so miserable had life within its walls become.

The sun expired in a haze of dust and the long, terrible day was over. In the early evening we set off. To the left were the jagged peaks of the Siah Band range; there were no trees and no sign of water, but by the roadside wild melons were growing, and we halted to try them but they were without taste. As we grew sticky eating bought melons from Farah, using the bonnet of the vehicle as a table, two nomad men passed with a camel, followed at a distance of a quarter of a mile by a youngish woman who lurched along in an extremity of fatigue. Neither of the men paid the slightest attention to her but they saluted us cheerfully as they went past.