Kara Kush
*
Brigadier Sakhi was dead now, gunned down by a patriot outside the Soviet Embassy in Kabul, on April 18th. But that hadn’t helped Noor: and Sirdar Akbar was still a captive at the hydropower dam.
Akbar looked at his slide rule once more and did the calculations all over again. They came out the same as at all the other times. It wasn’t the specifications; but there was something wrong somewhere. The massive, steel-reinforced concrete at Kajakai was sound, and the dam, standing there since the nineteen fifties, was as firm as a rock. The immense bulk of the dam sat partly within a hollow, blasted from the rocks, like some enormous giant’s tooth filling, gleaming white out of the grey. Good enough. When the mass of the matrix, the rock, had been calculated, it was obvious, given the character of the rock itself, that the dam would hold. Now, however, on a tour of inspection of the encircling mountain-girdle, Akbar had found that some rocks were fissured. Earthquakes? No, that had been taken into account. Erosion? Next to no rainfall here, and there had not been time for any significant erosion to take place. Blasting? It could never have produced such effects …
Only one possibility occurred to him, a remote one. If the rock were partly of a different consistency from the samples on which the original calculations of their stress-resistance had been based … Could the dam burst? Was the $120 million really wasted?
Akbar got up and called his servant. He’d brought the brothers Salik and Samir with him from Kabul. They were the only two people in the world now who cared about him and could help in any way.
‘Samir, call the guard. Say I have to inspect the rock-face again. He can bring the jeep and we’ll leave as soon as it comes round to the front.’
‘By my eyes, Excellency.’
He was back in three minutes. ‘I’ve told the zhondarm.’
The internal telephone rang. ‘Engineer Akbar? Chief Engineer Yilderim here. Go and look at the rock-face if you must, but you can’t have the jeep, the driver is busy.’ Yilderim had sent him off to fetch drink or hashish, or something, that would be it. ‘But there’s no problem, Engineer, just take Samir.’
‘How about an escort? I’m not allowed out on my own.’
‘That’s quite in order, just put Samir on the line. I’ll tell him something.’ Samir too? Samir as his escort. Gone over to Yilderim, to the Russian side?
Samir took the handset. ‘Bali, bali, yes, yes. I understand. Yes, by my eyes.’ He didn’t look at his master as he replaced the instrument on its cradle.
‘Why am I allowed out alone, with only you, Samir Khan?’ Better have it out with him now.
‘Excellency! We are allowed out: or, rather, you are, because I am to be responsible for your safe return after the inspection.’
‘And if I tried to escape – would you stop me?’
‘Yilderim is holding Salik, Excellency, against our return. Would you have him kill my brother?’
‘May the right prevail, may the evildoers receive their recompense, whoever they are, Samir. Let’s go, on foot.’
Yilderim was almost certainly corrupt, greedy too. But he was still afraid enough of Kabul, of the KGB, to keep a tight grip on affairs at Kajakai.
But if Yilderim had such strict orders, this suggested a possibility: that Sakhi had no real hold on Akbar, that Noor was perhaps free? He could never act on any such flimsy hypothesis, but the thought was a kind of hope, one to keep at the back of his mind where there was none. Like a false coin in an otherwise empty purse.
They tramped around all morning. Akbar looked at the rock. No, there were no inherent weaknesses: it was all of the same type. Now for the fissures. He found one, and clambered down, leaving Samir at the top of a rise. He was in a dry river bed. There was the base of the crack. Measure the length and width of the gap, do some calculations, after estimating the weight of rock, the stress factors.
Here was a boulder, wedged in the fissure. It must have been there some time, for there was moss on it. He looked again. Just like a doorway, in a sense. He felt words going round in his head; the heat must be affecting him. No, it wasn’t the heat. He was reciting the words of the old tale, ‘And, lo, Alla-addin called out “Open Sesame!” And, slowly the boulder swung aside, and the young man entered the Cavern of Treasures.’
He tugged at the boulder. It came away easily, just as if on a pivot.
The fissure led to a passage, then a cave. Akbar walked inside. This was a honeycomb, a catacomb, in fact, part of the very ancient underground dwelling places, cities almost, which were found all over Afghanistan: and all the way to the Gobi in Mongolia. Generations of troglodytes had lived here millenia ago. That was it! The dam’s weight had cracked the rock because it wasn’t a solid matrix at all – not at this point at least. It was a mass of passages, linked caves, leading to caverns. Sometimes there were even underground saline lakes in places like this. He would have to make more calculations.
As the days passed, Akbar supervised the unloading of the generator turbines from their immense transporters, and had them positioned near the gullies which would eventually receive them. There was a great deal to do; even moving such weights was a major feat of engineering in itself. The American-built town of Lashkargah, near Kajakai, had been virtually deserted for years, but was now suddenly full of workers, Party officials, nomads and traders. A large space was turned into a market; a mayor and police chief were appointed, a court sat once a week; and even the present generator capacity of the installation was becoming stretched, as demands for power continually increased, for light, for machines, and to supply current for the cookers, videos, food-mixers and deepfreezes. Wherever did all these people, all this equipment, come from? The place was like a boom-town. What an extraordinary transformation!
And Arghandab. Sixty miles to the south-east lay the second of the monster dams, again American-built, with its own town and hydropower centre. This dam, with its huge lake, hardly twenty miles from that other white elephant, Kandahar International Airport, was also about to burst into life. One day, visiting the engineering shops there to get some spare parts, Akbar saw crowds of Russian technicians, Soviet Air Force officers, and the piles of aeronautical maintenance equipment being offloaded from huge trucks. Walls were plastered with posters showing an Afghan soldier, side by side with a peasant, busily defending the Revolution with a gun. People had even unearthed some ancient posters from the American period and stuck them up, perhaps in an excess of zeal. They showed an Afghan in a peaked cap and an American engineer in a turban, both admiring a huge melon. They stood beside a Ford tractor, shaking hands. Underneath was the triumphant caption, ‘Water for the Thirsty Land!’
Another rousing slogan, though, had been partly covered in whitewash. Running the length of a long, low, building, it proclaimed, in English: ‘Afghanistan, with its proud and ancient peoples, welcomes the new ways of US technology!’
But at Arghandab the usual miserable presence of Afghan Army conscripts was not to be seen. Here, instead, were fresh-faced, well-fed, stalwart troops, well turned out, looking properly defiant. A lot of money and training had been deployed, Akbar could see, to effect this transformation. They goose-stepped around the new Monument to the Fallen Heroes, too, in a very Russian fashion. The guard, like the one at Lenin’s tomb in Red Square, was changed every hour, on the hour. Their vehicles bore the blazon of the Afghan Fifteenth Infantry Division.
Back to Kajakai. Akbar, in a series of forays, had mapped many of the galleries inside the mountain walls around his dam. The cracks, he was now positive, had reached their maximum extension and were not going to expand further. Nothing was going to disturb the ancient monastery for some time yet.
But, as he worked on the survey of the place, something nagged his memory, something from the distant past. He knew it was related somehow to the area north of Kandahar. He could not quite capture it. Old age, he supposed, was having its traditional effect. He used to know it, that was sure. Perhaps he’d forget his own name next.
Then
, one day, exploring the caves he stumbled on the great tunnel. This, his engineer’s eye told him, was of relatively recent date and the discovery of a bolster chisel and a nearly modern-looking hammer confirmed this assessment. About a hundred years old.
Akbar remembered now about the story … It said that the Afghan ruler, Amir Abdur-Rahman, at the time of Queen Victoria, had had prisoners working somewhere up here, feverishly and for years, to seek some hidden treasure. Yes, that was it, the Loot of Ahmad Shah, talked about with bated breath as the greatest treasure the world had ever known.
But they hadn’t found it. Still, this was a promising place, near enough to where Ahmad Shah – Afghanistan’s first king – was said to have diverted the river, and discovered an underground tunnel complex.
The Master Tunnel, as he named it on his sketch maps, was large, dry as a bone and free of moss and fungus. Why had the tunnel been cut at all? Looking at the plan, Akbar projected the line of the passage at its present angle, to the surface. It should emerge there …
The next day he was climbing, with Samir, to the vantage-point, the outcrop of rock above and to the north of the dam, officially to continue his ‘inspection’.
The view from this point was breathtaking. They could see over thousands of acres – both new farmland and desert – to the forests beyond. On the surface of the dam, a vast expanse of still water, tens of thousands of water-birds of every Afghan variety went about their business, unconcerned about being in a country at war. And here, just a few yards away, what he had thought was an ancient fort was revealed as the ruins of a medieval mosque.
He and Samir spent hours clearing rubble with their bare hands, moving carved marble pillars, stacking exquisite blue tiles, looking for the entrance to the tunnel. It was there all right. Just behind the prayer-niche facing Mecca, as Samir pushed away a pile of rubble from the collapsed roof, a dark hole with steps came into view.
The two men, without exchanging a word, began to climb downwards. Samir, who had few possessions, was proud of his flashlight, which he kept clipped, as a schoolboy might, to his belt. Now it stood them in good stead. The steps were easy to use. The treads were intact, and whoever had made them had taken care that the rises were no higher than even an old man could comfortably manage. Akbar, however, panting with the excitement of the unknown, was relieved that they were going down and not up.
At the bottom of the steps, a tunnel ran into another passage at right angles to it. Then it opened out into a vast passageway, with man-made caves to left and right.
Akbar went into the first cave, knocking over a slab of clay, which toppled from a perished wooden plinth as he brushed past.
It was here, almost as an anti-climax after such suspense, that Sirdar Akbar and Samir found the gold.
At first they thought that they were looking at a wall, with leaves of long-dead creepers hanging down, one over another, covering the three sides of the cavern, from floor to roof. But, as soon as Akbar touched this surface, he realized that the scraps were tattered pieces of ancient, perished leather: remnants of the once-sturdy sacks in which the gold coins, millions of mohurs, had been stored.
Samir stood stock still, playing his light back and forth like an automaton as the coins came cascading to the ground, bright as the day they were minted. There was no damp to corrode metal, Akbar realized, and fine gold does not oxydize anyway.
The Hoard of Ahmad Shah. As Sirdar Akbar stood there, senses reeling, Samir stepped forward and pulled at another piece of leather. More coins spilled out, tinkling, then lay like a frozen stream, silent, shining, challenging.
Akbar took the flashlight from Samir’s hand and went back into the passage. Immediately opposite the cave which they had just left was another, full of sacks. Walking down the tunnel, the two men counted twenty such caves, until they turned and retraced their steps. When they reached the first cave, Akbar picked up the clay tablet and slipped it into his satchel. It had writing of some sort on it.
‘Samir, we must get back to the administration offices, in case they miss us.’ He did not caution Samir not to tell anyone of their find; and Samir knew that, after this, neither would speak of it to anybody, at least until they had absorbed the staggering facts.
‘Ah, yes, Excellency.’ As they climbed the steps to the ruined mosque, Samir said, ‘There must be … a million … coins there, Excellency.’
‘Yes, Samir. Millions.’
They were late back at the offices, but Yilderim (which means Thunderbolt in Turki) didn’t care. Busily justifying his name, he was jumping about in a drunken frenzy, playfully striking with a stick at some Russian troopers who had drunk orange juice mixed with a can of anti-freeze liquid intended for their tanks. Holding Salik as hostage, Engineer Yilderim had dismissed the old man and Samir from his mind.
When they got to Akbar’s room without challenge, passing the sounds of revelry coming from the party in the canteen, the two men slumped into armchairs. Samir had never so much as sat down in his master’s presence, let alone sprawled in his best seat, but neither noticed. Then, like schoolboys suddenly given a whole day off, they jumped to their feet and danced, twisting and whirling, in the ecstatic if undignified configurations of the Atan, the national sword dance. Then they stopped, giggling, slapping one another on the back, shaking their heads in near-disbelief. Finally, with Akbar shouting ‘Mast-i-be-mai – drunken without wine!’, they sat down again. Sirdar Akbar remembered the tablet, and brought it out from his bag. It was small, no larger than an average modern book, and the words on it were impressed, scratched as if with a piece of wood, in excellent Persian calligraphy. He wiped it with his bandanna handkerchief and placed it on the desk under his reading lamp. The words stood out clearly:
‘786’. This was the numerical equivalent of the phrase ‘In the Name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful’, often used in manuscripts and inscriptions. Then: ‘Khazana-i-tila-i-Zat-i-Shahana, Sultan Ahmad Shah, Durr-i-Durran – Gold Treasury of the Essence of Royalty, Sultan Ahmad Shah, Pearl of Pearls …’ Then the date: ‘1171 Hijri – Year of the Flight’. Equivalent, in the Christian Era, to 1757: the year after Ahmad Shah had sacked Delhi and carried away the treasures of the great Moguls …
Samir, looking over Akbar’s shoulder, could not make out the words: literacy was not his strong point.
‘Read, Excellency, read!’
Akbar read the words aloud:
‘There are forty-eight caves, and in each cave a hundred piles …’ Akbar wiped the sweat from his forehead and paused.
Samir, forgetting himself, shook the old man’s shoulder. ‘Read, read!’
‘Yes, I’m reading. The next words say that each pile contains a lakh – a hundred thousand – gold mohurs or the equivalent of ingots.’
‘Excellency, what is that worth?’
‘Wait a minute.’ Suddenly fearful, Sirdar Akbar covered the tablet with some papers and tiptoed to the door. There was nobody outside; Yilderim and his friends could be heard singing at the top of their voices. Akbar went back to his desk.
‘The inscription continues, “Each pile has one thousand bags of one hundred coins or equivalent gold. Total amount, forty-eight krur”.’
‘“Forty-eight krur!” – Excellency, a krur is half a million!’ Samir’s eyes rolled.
‘A krur, Samir,’ Akbar said quietly, ‘is indeed half a million according to the Dari, Persian, reckoning. But this writing was done by a Mogul, Indian, scribe or treasurer. In India, a krur is exactly ten million. There are four hundred and eighty million coins – or their equivalent – in those caves!’
At first, Akbar had thought that he could do something with the gold: put himself and his daughter out of the hands of the communists, perhaps. Or – crazy idea – give it to the Kabul regime of Babrak Karmal so that they could buy the country’s freedom from the Russians. He and Samir sat in the room, at first elated, then dazed, finally discussing eagerly about what gold, on such a scale, could do.
It was Sam
ir who brought them both back to reality. ‘There is a saying, Excellency,’ he said, ‘that “if a cat is rich, the money belongs to its master.” We can’t use the gold. The moment we tell Engineer Yilderim, or Kabul, or the Russians, we are dead men; and then someone else owns it. The only hope is to get it out of the country so that it can be sold abroad. Then the money could be used to buy arms for the people. If the people don’t get guns and rockets soon they will all be wiped out, now that the Russians are destroying the farms and the villages, and slaughtering the population.’
Someone abroad: that was it. The Americans? The British? Akbar’s mind began to work. If he had someone to send, he might try anywhere, Japan, Western Europe. He could get the gold to the sea, all right. He had blood-links with the huge Durani clan, whose territory extended from Kandahar to the ocean, to the shores of the Arabian sea. But Akbar had nobody to send. After all, Samir was more of a houseboy than a diplomat. Emissaries in modern times had to negotiate through institutions, ministries and established delegations. Samir the servant would never get an appointment with a high government official anywhere. In ancient times, of course, one simply sent one’s messenger – with a token or password – to a single person, a ruler or a prince, who would have the power to say yes or no …
Akbar flicked on the radio, a cheap, medium-wave transistor which he had got, though forbidden to own a set, from one of the guards. He had paid for it with his wrist watch, the gold Vacheron Constantin. Radio Pakistan came through loud and clear on the medium wave, the nearest station which gave anything resembling impartial news.