Stewart - The places in between

A HARVEST ORIGINAL HARCOURT, INC.
Orlando Austin New York San Diego Toronto London

Copyright Rory Stewart 2004
Illustrations copyright 2006 by Rory Stewart

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work
should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact
or mailed to the following address:
Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,
6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

www.HarcourtBooks.com

Maps by Susie Knowland, created from original maps by www.ml-design.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Picador in 2004

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stewart, Rory.
The places in between/Rory Stewart.1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: London: Picador, 2004.
"A Harvest Original."
1. AfghanistanDescription and travel. 2. AfghanistanSocial life and customs.
3. Stewart, RoryTravelAfghanistan. I. Title.
DS352.S74 2006
915.8104'47dc22 2005032213
ISBN-13: 978-0-15-603156-1 ISBN-10: 0-15-603156-6

Text set in Baskerville MT
Designed by April Ward

Printed in the United States of America

First U.S. edition

A C E G I K J H F D B

This book is dedicated to the people of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, who showed me the way, fed me, protected me, housed me, and made this walk possible. They were not all saints, though some of them were. A number were greedy, idle, stupid, hypocritical, insensitive, mendacious, ignorant, and cruel. Some of them had robbed or killed others; many of them threatened me and begged from me. But never in my twenty-one months of travel did they attempt to kidnap or kill me. I was alone and a stranger, walking in very remote areas; I represented a culture that many of them hated, and I was carrying enough money to save or at least transform their lives. In more than five hundred village houses, I was indulged, fed, nursed, and protected by people poorer, hungrier, sicker, and more vulnerable than me. Almost every group I metSunni Kurds, Shia Hazara, Punjabi Christians, Sikhs, Brahmins of Kedarnath, Garhwal Dalits, and Newari Buddhistsgave me hospitality without any thought of reward.

I owe this journey and my life to them.

Preface

The New Civil Service

Tanks into Sticks

Whether on the Shores of Asia

Part One

Chicago and Paris

Huma

Fare Forward

These Boots

Part Two

Qasim

Impersonal Pronoun

A Tajik Village

The Emir of the West

Caravanserai, Whose Portals ...

To a Blind Man's Eye

Genealogies

Lest He Returning Chide...

Crown Jewels

Bread and Water

The Fighting Man Shall

A Nothing Man

Part Three

Highland Buildings

The Missionary Dance

Mirrored Cat's-Eye Shades

Marrying a Muslim

War Dog

Cousins

Part Four

The Minaret of Jam

Traces in the Ground

Between Jam and Chaghcharan

Dawn Prayers

Little Lord

Frogs

The Windy Place

Part Five

Name Navigation

The Greeting of Strangers

Leaves on the Ceiling

Flames

Zia of Katlish

The Sacred Guest

The Cave of Zarin

Devotions

The Defiles of the Valley

Part Six

The Intermediate Stages of Death

Winged Footprints

Blair and the Koran

Salt Ground and Spikenard

Pale Circles in Walls

While the Note Lasts

Footprints on the Ceiling

I Am the Zoom

Karaman

Khalili's Troops

And I Have Mine

The Scheme of Generation

The Source of the Kabul River

Taliban

Toes

Marble

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

I'm not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan. Perhaps I did it because it was an adventure. But it was the most interesting part of my journey across Asia. The Taliban had banned posters and films, but I arrived six weeks after the Taliban's departure and saw the Herat arcade hung with posters of the Hindi film star Hrithik Roshan standing on a cliff at sunset, his bouffant hair ruffled by the evening breeze. In the courtyard where al-Qaeda men had gathered to chat in Urdu, students were waiting to practice their English on war reporters. I found The Man in the Iron Mask among a pile of DVDs on a handcart. It had been touched up for the Afghan market so that Leonardo DiCaprio, as Louis XIV in seventeenth-century dress, brandished a Browning 9mm. Heratwhich had been a great medieval market for China, Turkey, and Persiawas now selling Chinese alarm clocks, Turkish sunglasses, and Iranian apple juice.

It was the beginning of 2002. I had just spent sixteen months walking twenty to twenty-five miles a day across Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. I had wanted to walk every step of the way and I had intended to cross Afghanistan a year earlier. But in December 2000 the Iranian government took my visa away. They may have discovered that I had been a British diplomat and become suspicious of my motives. The Taliban then refused to allow me into Afghanistan, and the government of Pakistan barred me from Baluchistan. As a result, I had to leave a gap between Iran and the next stage of my journey, which started in Multan in Pakistan and continued in an unbroken line to eastern Nepal.

Just before Christmas 2001, I reached a town in eastern Nepal and heard that the Taliban had fallen. I decided to return by vehicle to Afghanistan and walk from Herat to Kabul and thus connect my walk in Iran with my walk in Pakistan. I chose to walk from Herat to Kabul in a straight line through the central mountains. The normal dogleg through Kandahar was flatter, easier, and free of snow. But it was also longer and controlled in parts by the Taliban.

The country had been at war for twenty-five years; the new government had been in place for only two weeks; there was no electricity between Herat and Kabul, no television and no T-shirts. Villages combined medieval etiquette with new political ideologies. In many houses the only piece of foreign technology was a Kalashnikov, and the only global brand was Islam. All that had made Afghanistan seem backward, peripheral, and irrelevant now made it the center of the world's attention.

The country is quite covered by darkness, so that people outside it cannot see anything in it; and no one dares go in for fear of the darkness. Nevertheless men who live in the country round about say that they can sometimes hear the voices of men, and horses neighing, and cocks crowing, and thereby that some kind of folks live there, but they do not know what kind of folk they are.

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville,
c.1360, Chapter 28

I watched two men enter the lobby of the Hotel Mowafaq.

Most Afghans seemed to glide up the center of the lobby staircase with their shawls trailing behind them like Venetian cloaks. But these men wore Western jackets, walked quietly, and stayed close to the banister. I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was the hotel manager.

"Follow them." He had never spoken to me before.

"I'm sorry, no," I said. "I am busy."

"Now. They are from the government."

I followed him to a room on a floor I didn't know existed and he told me to take off my shoes and enter alone in my socks. The two men were seated on a heavy blackwood sofa, beside an aluminum spittoon. They were still wearing their shoes. I smiled. They did not. The lace curtains were drawn and there was no electricity in the city; the room was dark.