#73: The Places in Between

This book is a chronicle of Rory Stewart’s 36-day walk through central Afghanistan in January 2002, from Herat in the west to Kabul in the east, starting six weeks after the Taliban were removed from power after 9/11. Stewart likes a challenge. He decides to take the shorter, but harder and colder, route through the central mountains (rather than the longer southern route around them) since the Taliban still controls parts of the south. He goes in winter because he does not want to wait for the snow to melt.

In the footsteps of the first Mughal emperor

He discovers he is following in the footsteps of Babur, the first emperor of Mughal India, who crossed the mountains at the beginning of the sixteenth century when he was still prince of a poor part of Uzbekistan (before going on to conquer Kabul and then Delhi). Babur’s diary is a constant accompaniment on the journey, and Stewart comments on it: ‘What he did was very dangerous, but he never draws attention to this. Instead, he focuses on the people he meets and uses portraits of individuals to suggest a whole society.… He does not embroider anecdotes to make them neater, funnier, more personal or more symbolic.’

Stewart tries to follow Babur’s lead by painstakingly describing people and places as he asks for hospitality each night. He generally rejects journalistic or political generalisations, and is unwilling to search for premature meanings, often leaving conversations and episodes open-ended without trying to analyse them. Like Babur, Stewart tries not to embroider, commenting early on that ‘abrupt episodes and half understood conversations already suggested a society that was an unpredictable composite of etiquette, humour and extreme brutality’, and describes an episode in which one of his companions points a gun at children for fun.

It’s clear that Stewart knows a great deal about which local people hold power in the different areas of the country, and about Western intervention, but this is mainly cleared to the sides of the main story – his trek in freezing temperatures, often living only on bread, spurning lifts when offered, experiencing great kindness from hosts who are much poorer than him. For most of the journey his closest companion is a semi-domesticated mastiff with yellow wolf’s eyes whose trust he slowly gains, who he names Babur. His relationship with the dog is for me the most touching thing in the book.

Detailed descriptions as a form of respect

Another joy of the book is its descriptive detail. One night just over halfway through the journey, Stewart is attacked by some boys throwing stones at him, and asks an old man if he can walk with him to escape the intimidating attentions of three other men. He is then invited by a man called Aktar to stay in his house and then to a castle guest room, where he is allowed to light a small fire but not the stove for lack of fuel. Stewart is ill and stares at the castle ceiling for hours:

[it] was made from a frame of poplar branches, their brown, curled leaves still attached. The mud floor was partly covered by a shabby striped blanket, two pieces of dark felt and a small cheap rug in the Bokhara style. Mattresses were stacked in the corner under a grimy white sheet. The walls were undecorated except for a photograph of my absent host, the feudal lord Bushire Khan, with a pencil-thin moustache and a trilby hat. He looked like a 1930s Shanghai gangster.

I woke later feeling a little better to find a girl by the fire. She looked about 17. Her beautiful pale face was scrunched in concentration as she crumbled dry animal dung into the hearth. Both her hair and eyebrows were very black, as though she had dyed them. She wore a gold cap in a blue embroidered turban and, over her dress of blue chintz, a purple waistcoat and a green embroidered wool cardigan. A pair of blue corduroy trousers showed beneath the skirt. She raised her head and met my eyes. I smiled. She looked at me expressionlessly and then turned and left the room.

Such descriptions are a form of respect for the country, and allow us to take our time imagining the journey, the landscape, the people.

The minaret of Jam

During the journey he comes across the minaret of Jam, a solitary column in the midst of mountains, decorated with turquoise tiles and densely patterned bricks. Stewart thinks this could be the remains of Turquoise Mountain, the capital city of the Ghorid empire, before it was destroyed by Genghis Khan. This had been excavated under Western-led programmes before but when Stewart visited, after a decade of destruction of cultural heritage under the Taliban, no one outside the region knew whether it was still standing.

Bushire, a powerful military man in the area, tells Stewart he gets money from foreigners to direct a society which protects the tower. He tells Stewart they have sold most of the things they have dug up. Stewart asks him:

‘What have you found out about the life of this ruined city?’

‘I don’t understand. What do you mean?’

I tried again. ‘Have you found out roughly what the plan of the city was… where the bazaar was, the religious schools?’

‘No.’

‘The smaller mosques, the gardens, the military barracks?’

‘No. You are asking difficult questions. We just dig downwards and we find a jumble of things.’

Bushire says the city has been destroyed twice, once by hailstones and once by Genghis. The group laugh when Stewart tells them they are destroying what remains.

Stewart would like to see the villagers employed by an official archaeological team and the site enclosed and monitored, and laments that the ‘international community’ did not act before it was too late.

The minaret of Jam

Local, personal meaning

Stewart says at the end: ‘Nothing in my life has brought me as much fulfilment as my walk in Afghanistan and my work in Afghanistan.… I hope, therefore, the book will survive not as a metaphor of something international and political, but as a chronicle of an experience which found its deepest meaning when it was at its most local and most personal.’

He subsequently returned to the country and set up the charity Turquoise Mountain which restores buildings, has built a clinic and a school, trains craftspeople and helps them launch businesses. It has since expanded to Saudi Arabia, Myanmar and the Levant.