“Wait!” I called as he passed, and the old man stopped. “Doctor!” I shouted. “Get a picture of this, too,” and I struck a pose between the unlikely pair.
When I rejoined my table Nur Muhammad was so angry that he cast aside his role of polite government aide. “Why did you do that?” he demanded bitterly.
“It was so goddamned ridiculous,” I said, suddenly ashamed of myself.
“You’re using Mr. Jaspar’s word,” Nur said acidly.
“What’s that? Who?” Stiglitz asked, carefully putting away his camera.
“A friend of Miller Sahib’s. Every time he confronts something he doesn’t understand he calls it ridiculous.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Some years ago a Frenchman took a series of excellent photographs … in Alabama … of a lynching. Was that ridiculous?”
“I was laughing because my nerves were shot,” I explained lamely.
“Good. I think that now you may be ready to discuss your problem seriously.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked angrily.
“You’ve seen the terror of my nation. Now let’s talk about Ellen Jaspar.”
“I’m willing,” I said in some bewilderment.
“Let’s have no more diversions. No more amusing yourself with old men in public.”
“I apologized,” I snapped.
“Good,” Nur said grudgingly. “When you ridiculed the old fool and the evil young man I thought …”
“I think it was the coat … It rounded out the story.”
“I’ve forgotten the incident,” Nur said. “Don’t you remember it as the way we live in Afghanistan.”
“We can talk frankly, then?” I asked.
“You always could, with me,” Nur replied.
“The other day when I spoke with Shah Khan he confided that he had heard rumors that something extremely bizarre had happened to Ellen Jaspar … so bizarre, in fact, that he wouldn’t even repeat the rumor.”
“What rumor?” Dr. Stiglitz interrupted.
“The one I asked you about the first night.”
“I told you. I have no speculation,” he growled, returning to his beer.
“Have you?” I asked Nur.
“As I told you before, she’s run away and perished.”
“You’re honestly convinced that she didn’t die at the hands of fanatical mullahs?”
Nur was plainly irritated. “Miller Sahib,” he protested, “you asked me that last week in Ghazni, and I swore it could not have happened. Don’t you take my word for anything?”
“What we just saw,” I said quietly, pointing toward the headless corpse which would lie on the ground till sundown, “permits a man to check answers, doesn’t it?”
“Not when the answers have already been verified,” Nur replied.
“But the mullahs?” I repeated.
Nur laughed pleasantly. “Those two mullahs happen to be among the finest men in our priesthood. They were acting in strict accordance with Afghan custom, but they know public executions like this can’t continue indefinitely. And when it comes time for men like you and me to end them, they’ll be on our side.”
“They will?” I asked incredulously.
“Of course. I’ve a brother who’s a mullah and a lot better citizen than I am.”
“I’d like to meet him,” I said brusquely.
“When we get back to Kabul, you will. Miller, you miss the secret of Afghanistan if you think that Islam is a religion which condones what you’ve just seen.”
“It’s a damned fine religion,” Dr. Stiglitz interrupted in Pashto, where the oath was more colorful. “Matter of fact, I became a Muslim last year.”
“You did?” I asked in undisguised surprise.
“Why not? This is my home from now on. It’s an exciting country with a profound religion.”
“You’ve surrendered Christianity?” I asked with an abhorrence which I didn’t try to mask.
“I repeat,” he began in Pashto. Then for some inexplicable reason he started speaking French. “I repeat,” he said in French, “why not? A religion is not something eternal. It’s got to function in a given time in a given place. If it doesn’t function, it’s no good and you’d better get another. Have you ever considered how your Christianity functioned in Germany? The total perversion of society it permitted? The mass executions? The horrible betrayal of humanity? I swore when I reached Herat, ‘If Christianity can’t do any better than it did in Munich, I’ll take whatever religion they use here. It can’t be worse.’ Actually, it works out rather well.”
Nur added something that astounded me. “I suppose you know that Ellen Jaspar also became a Muslim?”
Before I could speak, Dr. Stiglitz said, “Sensible girl. We talked about it the last time I saw her. She said she found great solace in her new faith. Called it ‘a desert faith.’ When I asked her what she meant by that, she said that Christianity had become a convenient ritual for those who overeat on Saturday, commit adultery on Saturday night, and play golf on Sunday.” Ellen’s description, when delivered in French, sounded witty, ugly and profound. “She said she needed a religion much closer to original sources. One thing she said impressed me. She pointed out that Islam, Christianity and Judaism all started in the desert, where God seems closer, and life and death are more mysterious. She said that we are all essentially desert animals and that life is meant to be harsh. When we live in an oasis like Philadelphia or Munich we become degenerate and lose touch with our origins.”
“Would you return to Munich … if you were free to do so?” I asked.
Dr. Stiglitz looked at me with contempt. Nothing he had so far said implied that he was barred from returning to Germany, but his self-committal to a new world permitted only one conclusion, and I had publicly stated it. He was angry with me for having done so and replied in German, “No, I would never return to Germany.” Then he translated into Pashto.
At this point the pilau was served, a rich, steaming dish with extra pine nuts and raisins, and although immediately after the beheading I had been repelled by the thought of food, with the passage of time I had grown hungry, and we three dug into it with our fingers, achieving a kind of hard brotherhood as we did. Dr. Stiglitz was then forty, Nur Muhammad was thirty-two and I twenty-six, but because each of us had a certain integrity which he was willing to protect, we were growing to respect one another, and I was happy to be with them. Indeed, I was proud to be with them, eating in communion after a ritual execution.
“You must not think of Islam as a religion of the desert,” Nur warned. “It has much vitality and the world has not yet heard the last of it.”
I was driven to ask an impertinent question. “If a new state of Israel is fashioned out of the desert, will you Muslims be able to accept it?”
“You can trust the Jews to look after themselves,” Stiglitz said bluntly, and the brotherhood that had been burgeoning collapsed. I was shocked that a German refugee would make such a statement publicly, but what followed shocked me even more: “And if they should need help, men like you and me would help them. They deserve a country of their own.” He returned to his beer.
“The Muslims won’t like it,” Nur reflected, “particularly the Arabs. I won’t like it. I don’t want Jews taking part of my homeland. But the alternatives I like even less. We Muslims will give the Jews a little … not much, but a little.”
After a while I remarked, “We have no proof at the embassy that Ellen Jaspar became a Muslim.”
“Many ferangi wives do,” Nur replied. “We see no reason for official comment one way or the other.”
“They do?” I asked.
“Of course. You Christians always think that conversion goes one way. Right here you see proof to the contrary. Dr. Stiglitz from Germany and Ellen Jaspar from Philadelphia.”
I began to laugh again, this time nonhysterically. “What about that beer?” I asked, pointing at the half-empty bottle.
“A Germa
n can be many things,” Stiglitz explained robustly. “A Catholic, a Jew, a Lutheran, a Muslim. But always he’s a beer drinker. I have a dispensation from the mullah … the one you saw today. He’s an understanding liberal.”
Two substantial rivers ran through the part of Afghanistan in which I was traveling, the Helmand, which started in the Koh-i-Baba west of Kabul, and the Arghandab, which flowed down past Kandahar. It was at Qala Bist that they met to combine forces for a dash across the desert, and it was at this confluence, in the most ancient times, that a powerful civilization developed. From the way Shah Khan had described it, I would have wanted to see Qala Bist even had I not known that Nazrullah was working there and that Ellen Jaspar had vanished from that point.
The ruins lay only seventy miles west of Kandahar, but since many of those miles were across open desert, Nur Muhammad had our jeep packed before dawn and we drove out of Kandahar with the first rays of sun. We must have made an impressive one-jeep caravan, for we had now discarded western clothes and were dressed like desert Afghans, except that we kept our karakul caps. I was impressed by the road west, for it led through fruit groves and well-established farms, each protected by high mud walls with box-like structures at the corners.
“What are the boxes for?” I asked.
Nur laughed and said, “Those are melon fields.”
“I still don’t get the boxes.”
“They’re for the lookouts,” he explained. “Growing melons in Afghanistan is extremely difficult. During the entire month they’re ripening the farmer has to station armed men at each field to shoot thieves.”
I must have looked as if I thought he was teasing, for he added gravely, “My father raised melons, and at the age of nine I stood night watch with a shotgun. Otherwise every melon would have been stolen.”
“Why do you permit such thievery?” I asked.
“We’re a brigand society,” Nur said. “Our king doesn’t rule in Kabul the way your president rules in Washington. In this country we murder kings.”
We had now reached the village of Girishk, where we were to leave the pleasant melon patches and turn south across the desert. For me this was a rare moment, for we were about to enter upon the great world-desert that sweeps from Central India across Arabia, through Egypt, over the Sahara and on to Morocco, where it is finally halted by the Atlantic Ocean. I had not previously seen this enormous desert, and now as the early sun showed me the windswept land and the burning rocks I knew I was entering a new world. This was the universe of shifting sand, the mournful camel chewing sideways, the men in dirty white. I remember with great clarity my first impression of this vast desert and my astonishment at its enormous vistas.
The segment which we had struck was in some ways an ideal introduction, for it was both smaller than the better-known deserts of Arabia, Egypt and Libya—less than two hundred miles on a side —and more savage. It had no oasis, no vegetation and no protective rocks. It was a bleak, barren waste across which the wind howled perpetually, and to be lost on it meant death, a fact which was amply proved each year, and it was from this remorseless character that the Afghan desert had obtained its lurid name, which I hesitate to repeat, since it sounds so exhibitionistic: The Dasht-i-Margo, the Desert of Death.
We had traversed the dangerous wastes for about two hours when we saw ahead a sight that I knew was coming but which nevertheless startled me. Rising from the desert, along the shores of the Helmand River, stood the arch of Qala Bist, an enormous clay-brick structure rising high in the air. A thousand years ago it had formed part of some Muslim edifice, but even the memory of the mosque was lost. Yet there the arch stood, so tall it seemed impossible that a desert people had built it. It was the more surprising because it was an unsupported arch, a lofty, soaring flight of brick composed in beautiful proportions, and when we stopped the car to admire it I told Nur, “You had some architects in the old days.”
“Wait till you see over there,” Nur laughed, and as we approached the suspended arch I began to see the outline of a great deserted city: walls that crept up from the river and enclosed enormous areas, turrets of majestic size, and battlements that once accommodated thousands of soldiers.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Nobody knows.”
“You mean it’s just there?”
“It’s one of our smaller deserted cities,” Nur assured me. Pointing westward across the desert he said, “On the other side, where the Helmand disappears, there’s an empty city seventy miles long. No one knows who built it, either, but there it is.”
“What do you mean, where the Helmand disappears?”
“This river,” he said, indicating the powerful flow at our feet. “Out in the desert it just disappears.”
“Into what?” I asked.
“Into air. The Desert of Death is so dry that the river runs into a lake that just dries up.” I looked at him suspiciously and realized he was not teasing, so I dropped the matter, but the city before me could not be casually dismissed.
“Who built this?” I probed.
“It’s always been here,” Nur laughed.
“No name?”
“No. Qala Bist is our modern name for the arch.”
“It’s a masterpiece. If we had something like this in America, we’d make it a national park.”
“You started about a thousand years too late to have something like this,” Nur laughed. “We do have some ideas, of course. Possibly it was the winter capital of Mahmud of Ghazni. He was rich enough to have built it. But I agree with the experts who argue that it must have been here for a long time before Mahmud’s day.”
“And that’s all that’s known?”
“You see what I see,” Nur replied defensively. “There was a great city in the desert, and now even its history is gone.”
The idea tantalized me and I was about to say, I’m going to find out what happened here, when I saw on the ramparts above me a young man in his late twenties, dressed in desert costume and turban. He was waving to us and Nur cried, “It’s Nazrullah,” and I saw that he wore a mustache and beard. On the city wall he made a fine figure and could have been a young captain of the guard a thousand years ago.
“Eh, Nazrullah!” Nur shouted. “I’ve brought an American with me … from the embassy.” This news somewhat deflated the young man on the wall, for he ceased waving; but then his pleasure at seeing visitors overcame any hesitancy, and he scrambled down from the high wall and ran forward to greet us.
“Nur Muhammad!” he cried with real pleasure, and they embraced in a manner that satisfied me that my driver was no ordinary Afghan. Nazrullah then turned to me and said in English, smiling warmly, “You are welcome to my humble abode, such as it is, four hundred rooms.”
We laughed and Nur said in Pashto, “This one speaks our language. And he’s come to spy you out for the evil fellow you are.” It was apparent that Nur desperately wanted us to get along.
Nazrullah extended his hand and said generously, “You’re most welcome! Drive this way. We’ve cut a breach in the wall and you can bring your jeep into the city.” And he led us to the opening.
There he climbed in with us, for his camp site was far inside the walls—three-quarters of a mile, I judged—and as we traveled I tried to study both Nazrullah and his extraordinary city. He was an attractive fellow, not so tall as I but more wiry and better coordinated. He had a mercurial brilliance, in both gesture and speech. His hair was rather long, possibly because barbers were rare in Qala Bist, but he was extremely clean, even though he was living under unusual conditions. He seemed a well-organized man and I could understand the high regard in which Moheb Khan, Nur Muhammad and Dr. Stiglitz held him.
The deserted city was equally impressive. Stout walls many feet thick and sometimes twenty feet high swept over rolling ground for some eight or nine miles, enclosing an area which once contained substantial farm lands, water systems and separate villages for menials. The brick city itself was a confusion of palaces, min
arets, fortresses and what must have been administrative centers. I can best describe it this way: By the time I had seen one complete set of related buildings I thought: This is the city. But it wasn’t, for it was connected by ramparts and forts to a larger segment, and this was repeated six or seven times.
After a considerable drive we reached a large field contained within the walls, and here Nazrullah had pitched his tents, from which he was conducting surveys of the area that was to be irrigated by water taken from the Helmand River. He had at his disposal two jeeps, three engineers and four servants. No women were evident, but one tent, finer than the others, must have been the one in which Ellen Jaspar had lived when she came to Qala Bist nine months ago, and where possibly she still remained. I tried cautiously to study this tent without attacting attention, but I failed, for Nazrullah volunteered, “That’s where I live. Let’s unload your gear.”
“Don’t let us inconvenience you,” I apologized.
“You’re my first guests from Kabul,” he replied expansively. “Of course you’ll stay with me.” He threw back the flaps of his tent and bade us enter. I remember two things: the floor was covered by an expensive Persian rug, and on the desk stood a portrait of Ellen Jaspar dressed in the surplice she wore when singing Beethoven’s Ninth with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Nazrullah made no comment about the photograph.
He indicated where we were to sleep and sent his servants to fetch our gear, which they unpacked for stowing in cardboard trunks which Nazrullah had acquired in the bazaar, but as they worked I saw in another corner a trunk made of leather, stamped with the initials E.J. It was locked, so I could not tell whether it was empty or full, but it seemed to be waiting for its owner to return.
Nazrullah now took us to a tent some distance from the others, and here, seated on rugs, we had our inevitable lunch of nan and pilau, but this was different, because near the tent the cook was operating an oven that must have been more than a thousand years old, and for the first time I saw how nan was baked. A conical mound of clay, looking exactly like a beehive with the top cut off, rose above a shallow pit in which charcoal was kept burning. The opening of the beehive gave access to the inner sides, which sloped over the coals, and it was against these sloping sides that the raw dough was fixed, though why it did not fall onto the coals I never understood. I asked Nazrullah and he said, “By trial and error the desert people developed this stove three or four thousand years ago. The dough is just sticky enough to cling to the sides and the fire is cool enough not to bake the bread too quickly. It’s obviously impossible, but it works.” The hot bread was delicious.