Southside of the Salang Tunnel
Walls of the Bala Hissar at Balkh, late afternoon.
(I started this final blog about Afghanistan on the 4th of June and became distracted. Please forgive. )
For my last weekend in Mazar I had asked for a trip to walk the walls of Balkh with someone who knew the area. Most of my doctor friends are not particularly interested in the history that fuels these desires and do not feel comfortable in this town that is known to have strong taliban ties. Someone big and knowledgeable about the area--in short a Pashtun protector--was what I was after. On Thursday it seemed that the trip wasn't going to come off but at 08:00 Friday morning Rahimullah called to say he would pick me up at 14:15 to take me to a cross-roads where Dr. Meraj, one of our colleagues, would be waiting to take me to Balkh.
On most outings with Afghans I am generally left in the dark. Though I might request to see certain things, the going, the timing, and much of the execution are up to others. This is unnatural for me. On this trip, I was particularly left in the dark. Afghans aren't the sort to start the trip with a little organizational pow-wow, outlining the details of the agenda. Even among the planners, the details seem to get sorted out, piecemeal, as they arise, and rarely with a "plan B" in place in case plan A fails. I wasn't sure Meraj knew exactly what I wanted, or maybe he correctly thought better to ignore my requests, after all, what person really wants to walk around Balkh's walls when the temperature hovers at 100°F. His English is rough and I often find bits are missing in the translation of words to action. He asked a friend of his, Shah Gawsi, who lives in Balkh and who knows many of the ruins to accompany us. I had badly misjudged Meraj.
On our way into the town, Meraj asked if I knew Jalalludin Rumi. I caught enough to recognize the name of the Sufi poet. The celebrated Rumi had left Balkh at the age of 12, two years before Genghis Khan razed the city and massacred the population in the early 13th century. Shah Gawsi took us on a tour of the shrines to Rumi, plus some other shrines, of which Balkh holds an inordinate number. None of them were particularly beautiful, but all were festive with Friday picnickers. At the first shrine I commented on the majesty of a tall chenar tree. The next shrine was graced with a much larger chenar, a lofty patriarch with many trunks spawned from its ancient roots. It was truly a tree to be worshipped. A rope and wooden-seated swing hung from a stout branch and young bearded men vied with each other to pump for acrobatic height. I was entertained, watching the boy-men swing in the cool shade, being, as well, entertainment as a farangi woman.
We drove to the ruins of Rumi's house and the mosque/madressa of his father Bauhuidin. Only a few preserved ogive arches of baked brick and mud survive. Shah Gawsi said the Turkish government wants to develop this area for tourism, but the villagers have rightly nixed the plan. I could gain little sense of Rumi, but these ruins in the middle of the village's fields and orchards gave a sense of the timelessness of the people and landscape. We continued to drive a further few kilometers on a dusty road through another village of horse carts and people working in their fields to another shrine. The village roofs were stacked with thick, brown rounds of animal fuel, like great loaves of rustic hearth-baked bread.
On this particular shrine, to one of Rumi's teachers I remain completely ignorant. The grave lies in a garden, a true refuge from the heat, among fruit trees. We walked under grape arbors and a haphazard orchard mixed with roses to an unwalled compound, maybe 12 by 12 meters, of flatted packed dirt deep in the shade of surrounding chenars. The old man guardian was smoking hashish in his cool garden on this hot afternoon. We paid our respects and left in peace.
We back tracked to the inner ancient wall of Balkh, and another shrine, this to Shah Nabi, under a huge rip-stop tent. His long grave could have held a dozen or two uncrowded bodies. From there we entered the ancient inner city walls. When I was in Balkh 3 years ago, I wasn't oriented, this time, Meraj pointed out ruins and sights to me and I finally got a sense of the ancient city--the outer walls extending into the orchards and fields, the inner city walls of the Bala Hissar, and finally the walls of the high citadel. Were these the walls Alexander saw? Were these outlines of the Bala Hissar the walls under which he married Roxanne, the 13 year old daughter of a Sogdian warlord? I don't know. The city inside these ruined mounds of mud had been a living, changing entity through its thousands of years of habitation.
From the citadel we drove across the empty space of the old inner city, the Bala Hissar, and through another portal to another shrine and walked along the walls a short way. Meraj wanted to show me the mosque-shrine to Nasra Parsa and the grave of the poetess, Rabia Balkhi, a princess who fell in love with a slave, was imprisoned for her passion, and died writing her final poem in her own blood. We walked through the cool central park of Balkh in the late afternoon. It smelled of deep shaded greenery. The gypsy women were gone. I was walking with two men, one large and the other known in the city and two children. I was looked at, but the stares were not obtrusive because I was protected. For all I know the stares were harsher, longer, but the presence of men beside me, their sauntering attitude, their unhesitancy at approaching the shrines, deflected all the negatives. How remarkable this was. I liked Balkh; the park that before had been filled with luring men, turning, twice, three times to stare at me, no longer existed.
About 18:00 we returned to Shah Gawsi's orchard, picked sour cherries then rested on some carpets, toshaks (thin mattresses),and pillows he had laid out on some well-tamped dirt under a 9-trunked chenar whose leaves grew as large as a man's head. Another magnificent specimen. From this slightly elevated position I sat in the background, out of the conversation, unobtrusive. I watched people slowly, sauntering by or casually pedaling a single-geared bike under the trees and along the walls, returning home in the early evening dusk.
A young man climbed a nearby mulberry, tut, tree, shook it while young boys held a sheet to catch the falling fruit. Like kings, we were handed platters of sweet, soft, white tut that melted in the mouth. This was an Afghan scene I'd read about many times, thinking it bordered on perfection, yet sure I'd never experience it. Meraj handed it to me along with his tour of the walls--like the tut--on a platter, perfectly ripe and without even knowing it is what I most desired.
A few days after this trip to Balkh I left Mazar on the bus to Kabul over the Salang Pass and tunnel. I Bought bus tickets for myself and Amy Son, who was in Mazar visiting from Kabul, the day before. I wanted two window seats so we could both have unobstructed views of the countryside, but the man wouldn't sell them; the two foreign women had to sit together. When I protested, the ticket seller looked at me with furrowed forehead and explained to Rahimullah, "But who will sit next to them?" No lone male would sit beside us and no lone female travels--they always have someone with them.
The bus hit the road at 04:20. People were already working in the fields. It was still a bit dark and the window at our seat was clouded with something between the two panes, so I didn't get the sort of view I expected. South of Tashqurgan we passed through a narrow, windy gorge of red rock. Despite the clouded window and the early light, the red gorge was quite spectacular--the sort of pass a caravan master would not attempt without being accompanied by armed guards. Traveling through the pass, I had a better feel for the difference between the flatness of the extensive plain around Mazar and points north and the significant barrier made by the wall of mountains to its south. After about 10 kms the pass opened into a 1-2 km wide valley ringed with low hills. It was heavily cultivated and the grass of the hills was just beginning to turn brown from summer heat.
We climbed through wheat fields and pasture lands; the higher we went the greener the landscape became, as if going back in time. We passed through the town of Puli-Kumrei after two hours travel and from there started to climb into the mountains, through wide, green, cultivated valleys and mud houses piled one on top of the other. Flowering tamarisk blossomed along the river, surrounded by rocky, treeless mountains. The sweep of wide, vertical "footprints" left by the cascading waters that had come down the mountains in the snow melt played out in a lighter shade of brown against the rock and were zig-zagged with sheep and goat trails. We passed nomadic koochi encampments tucked into the valley offshoots, each made up of a half dozen tents (a couple of which were inevitably stamped, "UN"), hundreds of sheep, and a few camels. Groups of nomads were on the move, the small children perched on camels, slowly, sedately taking-up their portion of the road, the trucks and buses moving around them. As we climbed a thin overcast dulled the sky. The mountains became sheer rock faces and the river divided into innumerable streams of frothy white water rushing through treeless, alpine bog dotted with spikes of yellow red-hot pokers. The air was cool and smelled of fresh of water and mint.
Before we entered the Salang tunnel, (at 3400 meters altitude and 2.6. km long) we passed through a series of roofed, partly open "half-tunnels" that protect the road from avalanche. We came out of the dark Salang tunnel to snow and bright light, speeding down the hair pin turns. Fresh spring was in full brightness on the south side of the tunnel. Poplar leaves shimmered in the sun, and a much earlier green graced the terraced hillsides on the cooler south slopes of the Hindu Kush. The Shomali plains north of Kabul were still lush, unbeaten by the heat that had swiftly turned the plains of north Afghanistan into baked fields ready for harvest.
Many farangis try to pass unobtrusively in Afghanistan. Women especially go to great lengths in dress and manner to be like Afghan women. Though it is true that with my skin and hair color I could on first glance be mistaken for an Afghan, there is something in the way I stand and walk that shouts out: "foreigner." Plus I have no desire to be treated like an Afghan woman--I can think of nothing more degrading. Instead I use and have become dependent on the courtesy extended to me by this foreignness. This stems from the responsibility Afghans automatically assume for the protection of the guest in their midst. For the conductor and even for the ticket seller, who would not give me two window seats, my being a guest was never questioned. I was never asked to show a ticket, but the conductor knew where my seat wase--he had been warned about the two farangi women traveling on the morning bus. He kept track of us, showing us the toilet facilities when we stopped for a tea break. He remembered which side of the bus my luggage had been placed and retrieved it as soon as we arrived in Kabul.
