Caravans

  After the meal, when our greasy fingers had been washed by servants, we returned to Nazrullah’s tent, where he said reflectively, “It’s been my salvation, living here on the edge of the desert. After Germany and America, it’s reminded me of what Afghanistan is. Do you know what it is?” he asked me directly.

  “Until I saw the Desert of Death I thought I knew. A mountainous land marked by inhabitable valleys and plateaus.”

  “Precisely. That’s what I thought it was. But four-fifths of our nation looks like what you see outside these walls. Desert, cut by rivers. And wherever we can lead those rivers onto the desert, we’re rewarded a thousandfold. Before you came here, Miller, did you realize that the Afghan is probably the world’s best irrigation expert?”

  I said I hadn’t and he continued, “We waste hardly a drop of water. The skill of our peasants is unbelievable. They take a little stream coming out of the mountains and lead it hundreds of yards to irrigate a field, then take it back to its main bed so that others can borrow it farther down the mountainside. One insignificant stream will be used many times.”

  “I’ve never seen that,” I replied.

  “My job is to do on a grand scale with the Helmand what the farmers do so well with little streams. We’re going to build a gigantic dam up in the hills and capture all the water you see going to waste out there.”

  The concept had inflamed his imagination, and with boundless vitality he rushed us out of the tent and over to the city, where we passed through silent streets that must once have been glorious with ribbons from India and furs from Russia. We climbed stairs that were almost as good now as when erected and came to a vast reception hall, its walls still marked with murals, then entered the battlements which troops could have used that night. Nazrullah moved quickly, for he was familiar with the ancient city, but I was tardy because I wanted to absorb the implied splendor of the place. It was incredible that men had ruled here whose dynasties were forgotten, that a city of this magnitude could have perished without leaving in the records even the name by which its enemies described it. As I caught up with Nazrullah on the battlement I said, “Must give you an eerie feeling, living in a place like this.”

  “It does. No matter how indifferent you are to history, when you live here you speculate.”

  “Any conclusions?”

  “None. I don’t have to solve the past.” He pointed down to the river that ran along the foot of the wall on which we stood. “My job is to get water out of that river.”

  “What’ll you do with it when you get it?”

  He pointed beyond the river to the bleak desert, where wind was churning up the sand, and I supposed that he was going to say that farther out lay an arable district. Instead he replied, “What looks like desert down there is potential farmland. Wherever we can lead the water, we can grow crops. When we’re through, this land will be as valuable as it was when this city supported perhaps half a million people. They lived by irrigation.”

  “You think so?”

  “Look!” he cried with infectious enthusiasm, and he intended that I look upstream where old embankments proved that the Helmand has once before been tapped for irrigation purposes, but I saw instead a curious procession of tall mounds that led away from our city toward a group of small mountains some twenty miles to the east. The mounds had obviously been made by man, because they appeared at regular quarter-mile intervals, and since each was of considerable size, and there were eighty or more visible, I was looking at a project of magnitude, whatever it was.

  “What are you staring at?” Nazrullah asked.

  “That chain of mounds,” I replied.

  Nazrullah thought for a moment, then banged his right fist enthusiastically into his left palm and cried, “Miller, are you game for something exciting?”

  “The ambassador told me to look around.”

  “You’ll be the only American who’s ever done this.” He ran to a point from which he could call to Nur Muhammad: “Nur, you want to go with us through the karez?” He pronounced the strange word in one syllable to rhyme with breeze, and it had an instant effect upon Nur.

  “Not me! And if Miller Sahib has any sense, he won’t go either.”

  “He’s already volunteered,” Nazrullah shouted enthusiastically, “and if he goes, you’ll be shamed.”

  “I stand before my ancestors shamed,” Nur laughed. “You uphold the honor of Afghanistan. I’m a coward.”

  We hurried through the deserted city and climbed into one of Nazrullah’s jeeps, which he raced expertly through the breached wall and onto the desert. Soon we were pulled up beside one of the mounds, which was built of mud brick rising to a height of fifteen feet or more. A crude ladder led to the top.

  When we had climbed it, I saw inside another ladder, much longer than the first, leading down to darkness. Nazrullah dropped a pebble, which splashed in water, far below us, and I realized that we were perched atop a shaft which led to an underground stream.

  “Down we go!” Nazrullah cried like a college boy, and I watched his excited face, its beard covered with dust, disappear. I followed, and when I reached bottom found myself standing on a narrow edge of earth bordering a clear stream of water only faintly illuminated by sunlight seeping down the shaft.

  “Is each of the mounds like this?” I asked.

  “Yep,” Nazrullah replied, proud of his American colloquialism. “It’s an underground irrigation system bringing water down from the hills. You game to crawl through to the next mound?” He must have seen my apprehension, for he flashed on a light and added, “We’ve cleaned it out for just such expeditions.”

  I looked at the low ceiling of the tunnel and discovered that once we left the mound, which permitted us to stand, we would be walking in very stooped positions—duck-walking, we had called it as children—and I wasn’t sure my legs would take it. “You won’t feel it … in a quarter of a mile,” Nazrullah assured me.

  “Here we go,” I cried, more bravely than I felt, and bent over to creep duck-wise into the tunnel.

  My back quickly began to ache and, as I feared, my leg muscles became numb, but lithe Nazrullah was pushing ahead with such enthusiasm that I had to follow. At midpoint we could begin to see slight indications of light from the next mound and this encouraged me to bear my pain; it also permitted me to see the construction of the tunnel. Its ceiling was protected in no way and was held in place merely by the cohesion of clay, and whenever I bumped it with my head, bits of earth splashed into the water. I thought: This thing could collapse at any moment, and I began to feel my throat constricting.

  Fortunately, we reached the next mound and I was able to stand erect. My feet were soaking wet and my back creaked as I stretched it, but I was too stiff to want to climb the ladder immediately, so we stood in the small shaft of light and breathed the cool air.

  “Now you understand why Nur refused the invitation,” Nazrullah laughed.

  “I’m glad I came. Who invented the idea?”

  “Maybe the Persians. More likely the Afghans. It’s the best way known to transport water across a desert. If we tried to do it on the surface, the sun would evaporate it all.”

  “How old is the tunnel?”

  “Assuming that it was used by the city, which it probably was, the hole we’re standing in could have been dug twelve or thirteen hundred years ago.”

  “Let’s get out of here!” I cried.

  “Of course, it’s been redug many times. The tunnels do collapse,” he said brightly.

  “I wondered about that as we were crawling through,” I replied.

  Nazrullah held the ladder by one hand and said, “The karez system was very costly of human life. Water experts would go to the mountains and dig at likely points … sometimes seventy feet down, but because they were experts they usually found water. They would then calculate where that particular level would work itself to the surface, and they would dig these underground tunnels for ten to twenty miles, following the natural line o
f the water’s flow.”

  “Why didn’t the ceilings fall in?” I asked.

  “They did, frequently. The one we crawled under could collapse at any moment,” he said without emotion. “In desert regions men who worked the karez formed a special caste. They lived under special laws, ate special food, had extra women. Mullahs and police were powerless to molest them, for generally they lived short lives and when they died, usually of suffocation, for they never shored up the ceilings and trusted to luck, their few possessions and their women were passed along to the next karez man.”

  I was beginning to feel the approach of claustrophobia and started up the ladder, increasing my speed when I saw how fragile the clay bricks were under which we had been standing. When I regained freedom I gasped deeply, then saw Nazrullah smiling, his beard gray with dust. “Lucky I didn’t tell you that when we were halfway through,” he apologized.

  “That tunnel is going to fall on me every time I go to sleep for the next month.” I laughed thinly.

  “I’ve thought of that myself,” Nazrullah confided. “After a series of collapses they often had to beat the men with whips to drive them back into the karez. At the beginning of the system the kings ordained that any boy born to a karez man had to inherit the job. In some districts they were branded at birth.”

  “You live in a rugged land,” I remarked, shivering in the hot sun.

  Nazrullah climbed down the outside ladder and sat with me in the shadow of the mound. “It is a cruel land,” he admitted. “The existence of this karez reminds us how cruel. But even today in Afghanistan I could show you things that would shock you.”

  “I’ve seen some of them,” I assured him.

  “What?” he asked suspiciously.

  “In Ghazni … a woman stoned to death. In Kandahar a young man committed murder over a dancing boy. They cut off his head … with a rusty bayonet.”

  “You’ve been initiated,” Nazrullah said without inflection. He seemed wholly composed, but his inner tension was betrayed by quick gestures and the nervous movement of his beard. “I force myself down to the karez occasionally so that I may remember the heritage of human suffering we’re trying to eradicate. If I’d known you’d seen the executions I wouldn’t have dragged you into the tunnel, but I find I can’t talk with ferangi who haven’t had some similar experience.”

  “I’ve had three now,” I said. “We can talk.”

  “I think we can,” he agreed, “and I’d like to say two things. It will require some words, but like your journey through the karez, it may be worth it.

  “I went to Germany at the age of twenty. Before that I’d been educated by private tutors whose main job, it seems to me now, was to impress me with the moral depravity of Afghanistan and the timeless glory of Europe. I knew no better than to accept their indoctrination at face value and reported to Germany fully prepared to exhibit my tutors’ prejudices. But when I reached Göttingen I found that the true barbarians were not the primitives who stone women in Ghazni—and we have some real primitives in this country—but the Germans. From 1938 through 1941 I remained as their guest, to witness the dreadful degeneration of a culture which might once have been what my tutors claimed but was now a garish travesty. Believe me, Miller, I learned more in Germany than you’ll ever learn in Afghanistan.

  “As you know, I went from Germany to Philadelphia, where half the people thought I was a Negro. What I didn’t learn in Germany, you taught me. Why do you suppose I wear this beard? Before I grew it I made a six-week experiment. I decided to be a Negro … lived in Negro hotels, ate in their restaurants, read their papers and dated Negro girls. It was an ugly, ugly life, being a Negro in your country … maybe not so bad as being a Jew in Germany, but a lot worse than being an Afghan in Ghazni. To prove to Philadelphians I wasn’t a Negro, I grew this beard and wore a turban, which I had never worn at home.

  “My education was worth every penny my government paid for it, because after six years in Göttingen and Philadelphia I positively hungered to get home and go to work. Miller, we can build here just as good a society as the Germans or the Americans have built in their surroundings.”

  I looked at his surroundings: a bleak desert, a muddy river, blazing empty hills, an abandoned city. Because I had seen Afghanistan, I appreciated the Herculean task he had set himself.

  “The second thing I want to say is this,” he continued with fervor. “Having made my transition from a boy who wanted to escape Afghanistan to a man who fought to get back, I find daily joy in being here. Imagine, at twenty-eight I can be appointed head of a project that will revolutionize this part of Asia. In Philadelphia a man at a cocktail party offered me the stirring job of helping to sell shoes. ‘You’re enthusiastic,’ the man said. ‘Women will go for that beard.’ Miller, I’m here in the desert because I want to be here. I want to stir the earth like the karez men stirred theirs … fundamentally … in the bowels … at the bottom of the ladder in a deep hole. And if the ceiling collapses on me, I don’t give a damn.”

  There was another moment of tension, then he laughed and said, “We’d better drive back,” but when we tried to enter the jeep, the metal was so hot we could not touch it, for we were really in the desert, and if the ancient karez men had not dug their perilous tunnels, water could never have crossed this land and the city could not have existed.

  In the days that followed, Nazrullah talked eagerly about all aspects of life in Afghanistan, but whenever I broached the subject of his wife, he was adept in putting me off. Ellen was not at Qala Bist, however; of that I was satisfied. If Nazrullah did not respond to my overtures on the subject, he did take every opportunity to let me see the kind of man he was, and as I watched him with the engineers and the workers I knew that I was observing a man who had matured far beyond his years.

  He had an enviable capacity to elicit from others their best efforts. I understood why the shoe company in Philadelphia had wanted to hire him and why a German engineering firm, looking to the future, had recently written to ask if he would represent them in Asia. He had a quick smile, an infectious wit and a generosity of spirit that was engaging, and I could now understand his effect upon a junior at Bryn Mawr, bored by her native surroundings. It was reasonable that Ellen Jaspar had fallen in love with him, but it was not reasonable that she should now, because of him, be in serious trouble, if indeed she were alive.

  In a way, I was sorry that I had interviewed Nazrullah’s Afghan wife in Kandahar, for if that silken, shrouded voice had not convinced me that she and Ellen had been friends, it would now be easy to conclude that only the shock of discovering a previous marriage had unnerved Ellen. But if relationships were as placid as reported, and if Nazrullah were as congenial as he seemed, what dark force operating on this trio could have occasioned tragedy?

  It was also interesting for me to compare Nazrullah with Nur. The former had been set free psychologically by his travels abroad, while Nur was still uncertain of himself, because of an insular limitation which he was working desperately to correct. Nazrullah utilized a broad, frontal approach to problems and for an Afghan was markedly outspoken, partly because he was honest and partly because he lacked the ability to maneuver, whereas Nur was a master of manipulation. The big difference, however, lay in their concept of what process would lead to their country’s salvation. Nur, the traditionalist, whose brother was an enlightened mullah, felt that Afghanistan would be saved through the rededication of the individual and the moral regeneration of Islam. Nazrullah, in our long talks in the tent, argued that what happened to the Muslim religion was no great concern of his. From having studied various religions at first hand, he suspected that any of the three great desert religions, Islam, Christianity or Judaism, was as good as any other but that Islam was rather better fitted for the social structure of Afghanistan. “But what’s going to save this nation is the creation of a contemporary world—a new economic system, a real representative form of government, dams, roads, farms … the things that we ca
n create.”

  As he said this he snapped his fingers and cried, “Miller, to show you what I mean, I’m going to take you to the site of the new dam. How soon can you start?”

  Nur protested that the location was too far away, but Nazrullah would not listen. “You’ve got to go there anyway. Saddle up the jeeps!” He dashed about camp and within fifteen minutes had a major expedition assembled. “You’re going to see the future of Afghanistan!” he promised.

  We roared out of the old walls in a caravan of three jeeps because Nazrullah felt that any penetration of the desert in machines was so inherently perilous that group protection was advisable, but on this day nothing happened. We reached the junction town of Girishk, from which we struck off across forbidding land on a trail that jeeps could barely negotiate. Finally we ground to a halt at a goat trail, where we left the jeeps under guard while we climbed on foot to a high elevation, from which we could see, far below us, the roaring Helmand River as it carried the spring thaw through a narrow cleft in the mountains.

  “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.”