Caravans (18 page)

“What for?”

“Manner of construction,” he replied.

“What’s unusual, the plaster?”

“The insides.”

Dr. Stightz interrupted. “What’s inside?” he asked, and years later when I reconstructed that night I became convinced that somehow he knew what the answer was going to be.

“It’s not pleasant,” Nazrullah cautioned. “Want to hear it before dinner?” When I said yes, he continued, “Some time around 1220, Genghis Khan …”

“I just thought of him!” I cried.

“How so?” Nur asked.

“I was looking at those shadows and thought, If Genghis Khan came in now, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“He was here,” Nazrullah laughed.

“What about the pillar?” Stiglitz asked.

“Genghis Khan destroyed Afghanistan. In one assault on The City he killed nearly a million people. That’s not a poetic figure. It’s fact. In Kandahar the slaughter was enormous. Some refugees fled to this caravanserai … this room. They were sure the Mongols wouldn’t find them here, but they did.” His voice resumed its flatness.

“And the pillar?” Stiglitz pressed.

“First Genghis erected a pole right through the roof. Then the Mongols took their prisoners and tied their hands. Laid the first batch on the floor over there and lashed their feet to the pole. All around. That’s why the pillar is twelve feet across.”

“Then what?” Stiglitz asked, perspiration standing on his forehead.

“They just kept on laying the prisoners down, one layer on top of the other until they reached the roof. They didn’t kill a single person that day, the Mongols, but they kept soldiers stationed with sticks to push back the tongues when they protruded. And while the pillar of people was still living—those that hadn’t been pressed to death—they called in masons to plaster over the whole affair. If you’d scrape away the plaster you’d find skulls. But the government takes a dim view of scraping. It’s a kind of national monument. The Caravanserai of the Tongues.”

No one spoke. The meal was ready but no one seemed hungry, so finally Nazrullah said, “I tell you these things only to explain the terrible burdens under which Afghanistan has labored. Our major cities have been destroyed so many times. Do you know what I expect… seriously? When a thousand men like me have rebuilt Kabul and made it as great as The City once was, either the Russians or the Americans will come with their airplanes and bomb it to rubble.”

“Wait a minute!” I protested.

“I’m not speaking against Americans … or Russians. You won’t destroy us in anger. Genghis Khan wasn’t angry at us when he destroyed The City.
Neither was Tamerlane or Nadir Shah or Baber. And I’m not downcast because we’re doomed to be destroyed again.” He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s inevitable. We go on building while we can.”

He laughed and inspected the cans that lay opened on the blankets. “I for one love American K-rations. But please, gentlemen, you must see to it that Nur Muhammad and I get ones that contain no pork.”

“Tonight,” I said with some embarrassment, “everyone has pork and beans.”

“Then Nur and I shall make a great show of picking out one shred of pork each and placing it upon your plate … thus. ‘Please take this pork from us, Miller Sahib, because we are Muslims.’ But the rest of the pork I shall jolly well keep on my plate, because I love it.” We ate as a family group, two Muslims, a renegade Christian and a Jew, and my sense of loneliness was erased, but when it came time to clean the dishes I noticed that Dr. Stiglitz, who sat facing the pillar, had eaten little.

It was after our meal that I learned with pleasure that we would not stay in the serai but were pushing across the desert in the cooler night air. As I left the refuge I said, “One nice thing about it. It’s the only building I’ve seen that I can date. It was here in 1220.”

“Probably been rebuilt since then,” Nazrullah said without further comment.

We went into the night and for the first time in my life I saw the stars hanging low over the desert, for the atmosphere above us contained no moisture, no dust, no impediment of any kind. It was
probably the cleanest air man knows and it displayed the stars as no other could. Not even at Qala Bist, which stood by the river, had air been so pure. The stars seemed enormous, but what surprised me most was the fact that they dropped right to the horizon, so that to the east some rose out of dunes while to the west others crept beneath piles of shale.

While I was staring at the unfamiliar stars, Nazrullah borrowed a light and wrote the following note on a scrap of paper in Persian, Pashto and English:

Using a sharp piece of shale, he wedged the message into the door and we started up the gully to the desert.

Then I understood why Nazrullah had halted our caravan at the serai; while we were listening to the explanation of the pillar the burning wind had abated and the moon had brightened and was nearly full. It now stood well above the horizon, a huge center of light which made our trip across the desert possible. It was an unworldly experience, with moonlight reflecting from the dunes as if it were day. I noticed that we now traveled at less than twenty-five miles an hour, and since the path looked just as good as it had in the afternoon when we did over forty, I asked why and Nur explained, “At night we can’t spot the gotch.”

“The what?” I asked.

“Gotch. A flaky white substance that comes in big patches. I think you call it gypsum.”

“That’s worth something, gypsum. It occurs in piles?”

“Desert’s full of it, always in patches. That’s where Genghis Khan got his plaster for the pillar.”

“So that’s what gypsum’s used for,” I mused.

“Mixed with water it’s useful,” Nur cautioned, “but don’t hit it when its dry.”

At this point we heard a horn blowing insistently, and I looked about for Nazrullah’s flag. It was stationary in a valley ahead and he was signaling us not to follow. “He’s trapped in gotch,” Nur said. “In this light you can’t see the stuff.”

“Did we pass some this afternoon ?”

“Acres of it,” Nur assured me. “But then it was no trouble.”

We parked our jeep and hiked ahead to where Nazrullah was stuck. “Nothing serious,” he said. “The wheels slow down … pooosh.”

I knelt to feel the gotch and found it a flaky powder, very soft to the fingers and providing no traction for a spinning wheel. “Here’s the rope,” Nazrullah cried. “Give me a little tug.”

We edged our jeep carefully forward, attached the rope, and with no trouble pulled Nazrullah free. When he drew up beside us he warned, “If you hit this stuff at more than twenty-five you may break a nose.”

“If we do hit,” Nur added, “protect your face. We stop very suddenly.”

It was now our turn to lead, and we set forth upon one of the few flawless journeys a man can take: to be moving over the desert at night when
the great stars are overhead and a white moon illuminates the ghostly world; to be rising suddenly from a depression and on the crest to see a great sweep of desert appearing like a cross between a blizzard of snow and a garden of white flowers in spring; to watch the rise and fall of dunes as they make their poetic march across the shadowy horizon. Most impressive was the silence, the absolute silence of the desert at night. No insects marred it, no night birds whispered, there was no echo of wind nor sound of distant thunder. If we stopped to reconnoiter, we could hear Nazrullah’s jeep chattering unseen behind some hill, and I remember once when we had worked ourselves into a cul-de-sac of sweeping dunes how the sound of our engine echoed from each as we tried to fight our way to passages that did not exist. We were hemmed in by floating sand, but as we studied our position I caught sight of Nazrullah’s flag whisking past us on the correct road.

We had proceeded thus some forty miles deeper into the desert when I thought I spied something unusual off to the north. I watched it for some minutes and at first took it to be a pile of shale. Then I drew Nur Muhammad’s attention, but he had been concentrating so intently on gotch that at first he saw nothing. Finally his eyes adjusted and when they did so he said, “It’s a jeep!” And I saw that he was right.

We then faced the problem of how to flag down Nazrullah, who was well ahead of us. We could drive faster, but that might pitch us into gotch. We could blow our horn, but would they hear? I suggested,
“Let me get down and stand here, so that you can find the jeep when you come back.”

Nur looked at me in horror. “In the desert?” he asked.

He flashed his headlights, whereupon Nazrullah’s jeep promptly turned about, and when he had joined us, he asked, “What’s up?”

“Miller found the jeep,” Nur replied. Then he added, “He suggested that he get down and wait here till I caught you.”

Nazrullah looked at me and groaned. “My God!” Then he looked toward the ghostly jeep and said, “I hate to go up there.”

Slowly we drove north and it soon became apparent that we were entering a huge concentration of gotch. Nazrullah called out, “Drive back and plant your flag on the hard surface.” We did so and then reassembled our little caravan and moved cautiously forward.

Even from a distance we saw what we had hoped not to see: two men sitting in a jeep. They had bogged down in gotch, had tried to pile stones under the wheels, had probably burned out their clutch.

We hiked across the soft gypsum and reached the uncanny sight: two men fully dressed for desert travel, resting in their jeep, their eyes wide open but completely dried out. They had been dead for eight or nine days, but rarely had the hand of death been placed so gently upon two human beings, for the desiccating wind, blowing constantly through the day with a hundred and twenty or thirty degrees of heat, had completely mummified the bodies.

“We’ll leave them here,” Nazrullah said finally. “Nothing’ll harm them now.”

I studied the bodies for clues, but there were none. The jeep contained ample food, some gasoline, but no water. Nazrullah said, “Shift him over, Miller. I’ll see if the clutch works.” With some apprehension I lifted the driver away from the wheel, while Nazrullah slipped in and started the car. The dead man weighed little. The engine choked, coughed, started. There was no clutch. “Poor bastards,” Nazrullah said. “Put him back.”

When we were back at our jeeps he said, “They may have lived two days … no more. Miller, if you leave a jeep even for twenty yards in this climate, you’re dead.”

Nur asked in Pashto, “I wonder who blamed the other?”

The idea was so unexpected that we all stared at Nur, but we were also forced to look back at the dead men, and whatever hideous recriminations may have passed between them were now silenced. The younger of the two had been driving.

When we stopped to recover our flag Nazrullah said with real sadness, “Foolish, foolish men, to take one jeep across this desert Miller, why don’t you ride with me on this leg?”

After we had taken the lead I asked, “Did you know them?”

“Fortunately no. I’d hate to think my friends were so idiotic.” We drove for some time, then he chuckled. “It’s rather fun riding with Stiglitz. He’s so German.”

“Is it true that he’s a Muslim? Or is he just kidding?”

“Why not? He has to live here the rest of his life.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“The minute he steps across our boundary, the English will arrest him, or the Russians.”

“Nazi crimes?”

“Naturally.”

“Guilty … or just charges?”

“We’ve seen the legal papers. That is, the government has.” He said carefully, “I’d say the charges weren’t hypothetical.”

I pondered this for some minutes and wondered to myself: If the Afghan government has the dossier, why hasn’t it been shared with our ambassador, who’s obviously looking Stiglitz over as a possible doctor? I didn’t want to ask Nazrullah about this directly, but I did hit upon what I considered a neat alternative: “Surely the British must know about him, if they’ve threatened to arrest him.”

“They do,” Nazrullah laughed, for he had guessed the purpose of my question. On his own he added, “As a government, they know his record, and if they could catch him in India, they’d arrest him. But if he gets clearance for Kabul, which I’m sure he will, the embassy people as individuals would consult him medically.” Dryly he added, “I’m sure your ambassador would behave the same way—arrest him in New York but use him in Kabul.”

“You’re probably right,” I said noncommittally.

We dropped the matter there, but later Nazrullah observed, “You expressed surprise that Dr. Stiglitz had become a Muslim. Surely, if I’d stayed
permanently in Dorset, Pennsylvania, with Ellen’s people I’d have become a Presbyterian.”

The fact that he had mentioned Ellen of his own volition startled me, but his casual attitude toward abandoning Islam seemed even more striking, for I was then in the days when I believed that Muslims, Christians and Jews were destined not to shift back and forth, so I argued, “Could you really have become a Christian?”

“For six years in Germany and America I was a Christian in everything but formal conversion. Suppose you lived in Afghanistan permanently, wouldn’t you pray as a Muslim?”

I thought: Wouldn’t he be amused if he knew whom he was asking this question of. That conceit produced my next question: “But if you were to work in Palestine with the British, could you become a Jew?”

“Why not? If the facts were known, probably half our Afghan heritage is Jewish. For hundreds of years we boasted of being one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Then Hitler decreed us to be Aryans, which gave us certain advantages.”

“What’s your own opinion?” I asked bluntly.

“I think we’re a delightful hodgepodge. Have you heard our marvelous myth? In the valleys west of Kabul we have a concentration of the Hazara people. Know what we believe about them? We claim that every Mongol who ever settled in Afghanistan—and there must have been millions—set-tied in those particular valleys and never once intermarried with any of us. A thousand years of racial purity. If the truth were known, I’m probably
descended from the bastards who plastered up that pillar.”