Caravans (17 page)

“To build a dam, a great dam such as the American and German experts advise,” Nazrullah cried, pointing with a stick, “requires two things, a gorge and a mountain close by. Down there you see the gorge, with steep, solid walls, and over there you see one hell of a mountain.”

“What’s the relationship?” Nur asked.

“You build a road from the mountain to the gorge. Then you lead that road over a temporary bridge that crosses the gorge, high up in the air. Then you dynamite the mountain rock by rock and haul it in trucks to the bridge, where you drop the rocks into the river. And after you do this day and night for three or four years, you have a dam.”

He showed us where the road would be built
and where the bridge would be slung, high above the rapids. “For seven months trucks will dump rocks off that bridge and nothing will happen, because the river will wash our boulders downstream as if they were straw. But one day the rocks will begin to hold, and the river will start to back up-just a little. But on that day we have it strangled. Then we can do with it what we will.”

He called for his field glasses, which enabled me to see bench marks already cut into the cliff north of where the dam would be and other marks south, many feet above the present water level. “Any idea what that’s to be?” he asked, and when I admitted my ignorance he replied, “That’s the tunnel. While we’re throwing in the rock, we’re also digging that tunnel, and when the river starts to back up, it gradually rises to that level, and runs away through the tunnel. Then we move in hundreds of trucks and throw thousands of tons of rock into the ravine, pack them with earth and after some years concrete the exposed face and find ourselves with a dam.”

It was difficult to visualize the completed dam, it was of such magnitude, but Nazrullah had surveyed the ground so often that to him the gigantic structure already existed. Pointing to a mark hundreds of feet above the river he said, “The water will rise to there. We’ll collect the floods in the spring, when they aren’t needed in the fields, and release them in the summer, when they are. And the beauty of this system is that every pound of water that drops through our tunnel will generate electricity which we’ll send over the mountains to Kandahar.”

Remembering that primitive city I predicted, “In Kandahar they won’t be using much electricity.”

“Ah! That’s where you’re wrong!” Nazrullah cried. “In Germany we made a study of fifteen primitive societies”—I liked his using the word
primitive;
our ambassador had forbidden us to do so, claiming it insulted the Afghans—“and we found that when irrigation dams were built in primitive areas, the financial experts always fought against wasting the money to add generators at the same time. They argued, ‘The people are so primitive they’ll have no use for electricity.’ In every instance, within five years the original output of electricity, which the experts had called wasteful, was being utilized and further capacity was required. If we can get electricity to Kandahar, they’ll find ways of using it. Progress creates its own dynamics.”

The concept was so new to me that I asked for an illustration of a primitive society where this had happened. “I’ll give you a classic,” he said instantly. “The Tennessee Valley Authority.”

“I’d hardly call Tennessee primitive,” I argued with some asperity.

“I would,” he replied flatly. “The hill region anyway. I made a study of it, on the spot, and in its way, compared to New York, it’s as primitive as Girishk compared to Kabul. And the T.V.A. found it couldn’t make electricity fast enough.”

I was not satisfied with his description of part of my country as primitive, having always reserved that word for other nations, but I was impressed by his excitement about his job and the poetic insights he brought to it. For example, he stared
down at the river which now ran wild through the gorge and said softly, “Isn’t it a gripping idea, Miller, that on the day we drop our first load of rock into that turbulent river it’ll have no idea of what’s happening? Rocks like that have been falling off the cliffs for a million years, and it’s washed them aside. But these rocks will be different. They’ll be the beginning of something not even that river is strong enough to halt. And we will continue …” He hammered the air with his fist, visualizing the enormous aggregation of rock that would ultimately jam that gorge and tame the river.

He turned to Nur and me with dancing eyes. “Each day we must throw similar rocks into the human river of Afghanistan. Here a school, there a road, down in the gorge a dam. So far our human river isn’t aware that it’s been touched. But we shall never halt until we’ve modified it completely.”

As I looked down at the turbulent Helmand, rushing freely between the cliffs, it seemed to symbolize the wild freedom of Afghanistan, and I said half to myself, “It’s rather a pity that such a river must be brought under control.”

Nazrullah grabbed me by the arm and whipped me about. “What did you say?” he demanded.

“I said, It’s a shame such a river has to be dammed.”

“That’s incredible,” he muttered, not in surprise or anger or any other emotion that I could recognize. “That’s really incredible, Miller.” He snapped his fingers, tugged at his beard and stared at me as if trying to reassemble fragments. “Those are the exact words Ellen said while standing
here.” He bit his forefinger, then added with impatience, “You damned Americans are so sentimental. You’ve organized your own land to the limit, but you criticize others who want to organize theirs.”

“I was speaking symbolically,” I protested.

“So was Ellen,” he snapped. “What you both meant was, The more modern Tennessee becomes, the nicer it would be to keep Afghanistan a primitive place where we could come to observe the peasants. Well, Miller, we’re going to change it … profoundly.”

“I want you to. Perhaps Ellen meant that old-fashioned ways are always better. A lot of Americans believe that nonsense. But I don’t.”

“What do you believe?”

“That it’s always sad to see freedom lost. As for change, that’s why we have an American embassy in Kabul. To help you make the changes, yet stay free.”

“You’d better help,” he warned. “Because if you try to hold us back, Russia will be eager to jump in and help us.”

“To what?” I asked, but he had turned away and now stamped angrily down the mountain trail. When he reached the jeeps he jumped into one and roared down the dangerous trail to Girishk, leaving Nur and me to ride with an assistant engineer, who drove us back to Qala Bist. But often as our jeeps passed and repassed on the desert I caught sight of Nazrullah, brooding in silence, the knuckles of his left fist pressed against his bearded chin.

Our caravan had barely come in sight of Qala Bist when we spotted a strange jeep speeding at us from the walled city, throwing a cloud of dust across the desert. It was Dr. Stiglitz, driven by an Afghan military officer, coming out to intercept us as quickly as possible.

“Where’s Nazrullah?” the German shouted as he drew close.

“He’s back there,” I cried.

The four jeeps drew together in the desert and Stiglitz said in German, “I bring you bad news.”

He and Nazrullah continued talking in German, but I caught the fact that something had happened to the American engineer Pritchard, who had crossed the Desert of Death some months before to measure the spring flow of the Helmand River. I waited impatiently while the two discussed the problem, and finally they took cognizance of me. “Sorry, Herr Miller. My visit really concerns you.”

“How?”

“There’s an official message for you,” Nazrullah replied, and he spoke to the Afghan officer, who handed me a paper containing directions which the
American embassy had phoned down to Kandahar military headquarters that morning. It said:

It was signed by Verbruggen and I could imagine his rough, worried voice on the telephone. I asked Stiglitz, “You know what’s in the message?”

“Of course.”

“You’ll go?”

“I’m here.”

“How much?” Before he could reply I led him away from the others, where he stood silent for some moments. I was certain he had guessed why I had called on him in Kandahar and I knew he wanted me to carry back a good report which might enable him to jump from Kandahar to Kabul, so he would be disposed to request a low fee in hopes of winning my favor; on the other hand he was a trained doctor and proud of his German degree, in addition to which the cost of German beer in Kandahar was not trivial, so that he had reasons for asking a substantial fee. It was a delicate problem, and the poor pudgy man was not equal to solving it. I grew ashamed of myself, especially since I was a Jew and he a German.

“I’m sorry, Doctor,” I said. “I should’ve spoken
first. Two hundred dollars plus twenty dollars for each day beyond five that we’re out.”

Stiglitz breathed deeply, and I judged that my offer was more generous than he had dared to demand. “I accept!” he said, continuing with profuse thanks which became almost embarrassing. “You’ve no idea, Herr Miller, how those damned Afghans rob me for my beer.”

“Agreed.” Then I asked the Afghan soldier, “Are you driving us?”

“He is not!” Nazrullah protested. “I am.” He drew his staff about him and shot a series of questions: “What’s the state of the moon?” “Which of our jeeps is in best condition?” “Miller, will you turn over your K-rations to us?” “Water, crowbars, tow ropes?” When he had satisfactory answers he looked at his watch and said, “We’ll leave Qala Bist in forty minutes. We’re taking Miller’s jeep and mine. Nur Muhammad to drive one. I’ll drive the other. Stiglitz and Miller the only passengers. I want everything assembled in front of my tent at once. O.K.?”

He jumped in his jeep and sped for Qala Bist, leading us through the ponderous wall and across the fields to the camp. As he ran for his tent he shouted, “Nur, stay with me,” and in the next minutes I watched two Afghan gentlemen assume command of an expedition that could turn out disastrously if anything went wrong. Nur, who understood jeeps, took care of matters in that area, while Nazrullah checked the logistics, then supervised the packing. “Turbans for the ferangi!” Nazrullah shouted, and one of the engineers solved this
by lifting two from the heads of the servants. “You’ll need it,” Nur assured me as I packed mine.

It was still several hours before dark when we approached our loaded jeeps, where Nazrullah consulted for the last time with his staff and with the Afghan officer. Taking a map he drew a tentative line from Qala Bist across the desert to an extended area marked simply The City. There he turned his line south until it reached the remote village of Chahar. “We’ll be going this way,” he announced in Pashto, “and if anything should happen, I promise I won’t be far off this route.” He watched while Nur and the officer traced the route on their maps.

“Now,” Nazrullah asked sharply, “where do you think the missing men could be?”

He stared at his staff, at Nur, at the officer. The latter spoke: “Ten days ago we sent two men in a jeep …”

“One jeep?” Nazrullah asked, tugging his beard.

“Yes.”

“Great Jesus Christ!” Nazrullah snapped, uttering an oath quite inappropriate for a Muslim, something he had picked up at the Wharton School. “One jeep?” He stabbed at the map. “Driving across that?”

“Yes,” the officer replied, unruffled. “They left Kandahar ten days ago, drove to Girishk, and started across the desert on this course.” On Nazrullah’s map he drew a firm line which converged on our projected course about halfway across the desert.

Nazrullah reflected and said, “With the lines
running that way we might spot them anywhere during the second half.”

I added, “If they’re broken down, they’ll probably have a flag waving that we can see.”

Nazrullah looked at me with compassion, then asked, “Did they know the desert?”

“Yes.”

“They the type who follow instructions?”

“Best men we had.”

Nazrullah studied the map for some minutes. “I want you to change my route just a little. We’ll drop up here and take a look.” He drew a jog to the north, almost off the desert, and said, “We’ll never be far from this route. Salaam aleikum.” With that he spun his wheels in a tight circle and sped for the wall. In a few moments we were entering the desert, headed west for the setting sun, a simple caravan of two jeeps, each marked by high poles from which fluttered large squares of white cloth.

The Afghan Dasht-i-Margo was not a desert in the accustomed sense, for although it did contain vast unbroken stretches of sand, it was also an accumulation of shaly detritus laid down by deteriorating mountains which had eroded through millions of years, so that across the desert we found bands of this shale sometimes half a mile wide along which our jeeps could race at forty miles an hour, while we saw on either side the glorious sweep of traditional dunes that characterize the usual desert.

An additional feature marked this desert: When we were well into its heart we could not see a single thing growing nor any shred of human existence.
There were no lichens on the rock, no seedlings in crevices, no shrubs, no birds, no gullies touched with a little water, no lizards, no eagles, no oases of any kind. There were no fence poles nor relics of forgotten homes nor even stones laid in a row. There was only the most blazing, heat-racked emptiness I had ever seen. I remember thinking once, when we were surrounded by dunes: In the polar regions they at least have frozen water and insects. Here there’s nothing … except heat.

“How hot is it?” I asked Nur.

“Hundred and thirty, but it isn’t the thermometer that worries us,” he said as he studied the desolate landscape. “It’s the wind.” He checked some drifting sand and said, “Wind’s thirty miles an hour. Later it’ll grow to fifty. That’s what kills you on the desert.”

I now began to appreciate the flags that Nazrullah had provided for our jeeps, for as our caravan moved across the desert we were frequently separated, since neither driver could be sure that what looked like a potential road would turn out to be so; and often it was the driver in second position who found the successful trail, whereas what had looked good to the first man had turned into a wall of impenetrable sand. When this happened, the unsuccessful driver would whirl about, look for his companion’s flag, and set off in hot pursuit. Neither waited for the other, but each felt responsible for seeing that the separation did not become too great.

“Is it possible to work your way into a real dead end?” I asked.

“Sure. Probably what happened to the missing men. In this business you need that other flag.”

We had been on the road for well over an hour when Nazrullah, whose jeep was now in the lead, stopped abruptly and waited for us to join him. He signaled for silence, then pointed to a small herd of gazelles—not more than fifteen—that had penetrated these dreadful wastes where I had been unable to see a shred of forage but where they were acquainted with hidden areas that no man had yet identified.

At first I didn’t understand why the gazelles fascinated me, but I sat spellbound watching the small, delicate animals standing gracefully on the face of the burning desert. What could they be doing? What did they signify? Afghanistan had untold valleys where an animal could find forage. Why were they here? And why was I so moved by seeing them?

One of their lookouts spotted us, and with a disembodied grace the small animals leaped, exploded in the dying sunlight, twisted, turned and fled like wraiths across the desert. I had never before seen such flawless motion, and as they sped away like the sound of retreating music, one female, small and without horns, ran toward us with a breathless poetry, then saw the jeeps and turned in mid-air, throwing her sharp hoofs to one side as she changed direction. As she did this marvelous thing, I was forced to cry out, for I saw that she was colored like the chaderi Moheb Khan’s niece had worn, and she was not an animal at all, she was not a gazelle, but the embodiment of the hunger I felt. In this cruel land of recurring ugliness,
where only men were seen, the gazelle reminded me of womanliness, of girls at a dance, of the mystery of half the world. I watched her go in matchless grace, darting this way and that until she vanished behind a distant dune, and there were tears in my eyes and I felt I could not tolerate the awful loneliness of the desert. I was lost in Asia. I was forsaken on the high roof of the world and the gazelles had been a sighing, drifting premonition.

Then I heard Nazrullah saying, “They must have come down from the caravanserai,” and we took out our maps to discover that we were near the jog that Nazrullah had drawn to the north. “There’s a chance the other two might have made for the caravanserai.” And we turned north.

The sun was just setting when we reached the top of a dune from which we could look down upon one of the sights that has always inspired the traveler in Asia: a walled caravanserai looming out of the dusk at the end of a long journey. It remains unforgettable: a gaunt, square, mud-walled sanctuary built around a central open space where animals of the caravan were sheltered. One leg of the wall comprised a fort devoid of windows but well supplied in recent centuries with slit holes for rifle fire. Entrance was by a solitary gate, a handsome structure built in fine Arabic proportions. The serai had been erected hundreds of years ago, possibly even in the days of Muhammad, and through the centuries had served continuously, for it stood at the edge of the desert near the end of a little gully in which grass grew and stagnant water accumulated, and to it had come, as we now came, thousands
of caravans needing protection for the night. It was a rule of the desert that whoever succeeded in entering a serai was safe for the night, no matter what antagonist he encountered inside, and there must have been many stirring tales of blood enemies who shared sanctuary here under unexpected circumstances.

As we approached the gate, Nazrullah halted the jeeps and he and Nur debarked to study, on hands and knees, all the surrounding sand, entering the walls to continue their search. After a while they reappeared and said, “They didn’t get this far.”

I hoped that this was a sign that we were to move on, for whereas I had found the ruins at Qala Bist so immense as to be commanding, I found this old deserted caravanserai a place of brooding quiet that was in a sense terrifying. Possibly I was still influenced by the gazelles, possibly by the haunting loneliness of a desert twilight, but the idea that a wayside inn had once flourished here but had now lost its reason for being was at the moment too gloomy for my acceptance.

“Are we leaving?” I asked hopefully.

“We’ll eat here,” Nazrullah replied, and he took us to the fort, where he and the doctor began laying out blankets on the earthen floor. Nur lit two Coleman lamps, whose incandescent glow showed the high roof of the caravanserai to good effect, and if anything were calculated to make me feel gloomier than I already did, it was the way the flickering light threw enormous shadows on the mud walls. I thought: Genghis Khan could come through that door, and he’d be right at home.

Two-thirds of the way down the hall, a stout circular
column about twelve feet in diameter rose from the floor and continued through the roof. It was built neither of wood nor of mud but of plaster, and our lights played upon its uneven surfaces in exciting patterns. ‘That’s a beautiful column,’ I remarked. “What’s it used for?”

“Famous, too,” Nazrullah replied without looking.