I looked again at the star and none of us except Nazrullah knew that it was a light and not a star. “It’s a light at The City,” Nazrullah said. “We’ll camp here.”
“If it’s so close, why don’t we finish the drive?”
“It’s sixty miles away,” Nazrullah replied. “Impossible,” I protested but Nur supported his friend.
“When you first see something like this, you can’t believe it. The light may well be sixty miles away.”
“It is,” Nazrullah assured us. “Let’s get out the sleeping bags.”
I looked for low ground that would give me some protection from the wind that was rising, but Nazrullah led us to the highest part of a small hill and when we were prepared for bed he explained, “Tonight we saw two men who died in the desert from sun and heat For everyone who dies that way, a hundred die from floods.”
Stiglitz and I looked at each other in the white moonlight and Nazrullah continued, “Once every three or four years it rains over some part of this desert. In a way you never saw before. Terrible, shattering. A wall of water builds up thirty feet high and destroys everything before it. Moves whole dimes from one place to another, and anything caught in a low spot is crushed.”
We looked at the gullies with new respect as he finished, “Probably hasn’t been any water down there in five hundred years. But just south of here —due south, as a matter of fact—Alexander the Great was marching his troops home from their conquest of India. They camped in the desert and in four minutes a wall of water swept over them, killing two men in three. This is a tough country, Miller. Don’t sleep in gullies.”
At dawn we rose and headed west, and when I saw the last sixty miles of terrain I appreciated why Nazrullah had left Qala Bist in a hurry, for we could not have traversed at night what now faced us, and if we had tried to drive through the heart of the desert at midday, the heat would have been unbearable. In these last sixty miles the sand had largely disappeared and we were forced to pick our way through heaps of shale which thundered the day’s heat right back at us. The humidity was down to nearly zero and a strong wind dried us out as we moved across the blazing dasht. Nur Muhammad warned me, “Be careful not to bump your nose. The mucus dries up into little needles which puncture the skin. Bad infection.” Warily I touched my nose, and he was right. The thirsty air had sucked away all moisture, and my nose was lined with needles.
At one period I thought I would collapse if we didn’t stop for a drink, but Nazrullah fell back to warn us, “We’ve plenty of water and cans of fruit juice, but we’re not going to touch it until we’re sure we’ll reach The City today.” He must have seen my disappointment, for he added, “You can discipline yourself, Miller.”
So we pressed on, parched with heat. In the States I had never known anything like this, a heat so forceful that it seemed to fight with you for all body moisture. I could feel water evaporating from my skin, and my thoughts constantly returned to the soldiers who had perished in the jeep: This damned wind sucked them dry as they sat there.
Slowly I began to exercise the discipline of which Nazrullah spoke, and I began to find ways to adjust. I wasn’t as thirsty as I thought, nor as near dead as I feared. I was on an ugly mission across inhospitable terrain that would kill me if I gave it a chance, but there were many ways to survive, and Nazrullah now taught us one. “We’d better put on the turbans,” he suggested, and when we had done so he produced a canister of river water, not for drinking, and from it poured water directly onto the turbans until they were dripping down our necks. We then drove on.
The turban, about eight yards of cloth, held a lot of water and released it slowly, lowering the temperature of our heads as it evaporated. I thought: This is the way to lick the heat. But within twelve minutes the voracious wind had sucked all moisture from the cloth. So we stopped again and sloshed on more river water, and for a while we were cool, but after ten or twelve minutes the turbans were again dry.
At last we reached a narrow pass that dropped down between rocks, and having descended this canyon for about a mile, we reached a low plain and saw ahead of us trees and signs of life and a village, beyond which lay an ancient city and a large body of water. We cheered and blew our horns, for the transit of the desert was completed.
A few Afghans in dirty desert dress straggled out to greet us, but we did not stop. “Tell the sharif well be back!” Nazrullah called, and we sped for the lake, where we quickly undressed and lay in the water, so that our bodies could absorb the liquid they had lost.
“Look at him!” Stiglitz said after a while, and I saw Nazrullah far out from shore, where the water came only to his knees. When I caught up with him he said, “You can walk completely across, if you care to.”
It was here, in this vast shallow lake, that the great Helmand River ended, for the desert sun and wind evaporated the water as fast as the mountains near Kabul delivered it. The powerful Helmand simply flowed into the desert and died. I hadn’t believed it when Nur told me, but here it was, the death of a river. In late summer even this lake might be gone.
When we dressed, the sharif joined us. His title was pronounced sha-reef, with the accent on the second syllable, and he brought us melons and fruit, which in their richness, dripped juice from our chins. He listened impassively as Nazrullah explained the location of the missing jeep, and said that he’d dispatch a scouting party. No one was much perturbed about the deaths; if men crossed the desert often enough, some were bound to die, and many from that area had done so.
Talk then turned to the American engineer Pritchard, and we were all brought into the conversation. The sharif reported that twenty-two days ago the American, who worked at Chahar, seventy miles to the south, had broken his leg while taking water levels. It was originally intended to haul him to this village on a stretcher for a trip across the desert, but the sharif at Chahar had felt that local practitioners could heal the leg, and no stretcher was dispatched. A week ago news came to the village that an infection had set in.
“Did the broken bones puncture the skin?” Dr. Stiglitz asked.
“We were told so,” the sharif replied.
“And they tried to treat a case like that?”
“They’ve been doing it for three thousand years,” the sharif grunted. He sent a servant to fetch a man who hobbled in on a leg that had been broken three weeks ago. “We fixed his.”
Dr. Stiglitz examined the leg and said in Pashto, “It’s as good as I’d have done.”
Nazrullah asked, “You’ll send a guide with us?”
“Of course,” the sharif said, and he ordered servants to refill our water bottles. “But I wouldn’t travel in this heat.”
“We have to,” Nazrullah replied. And we were off.
I have said that when we dropped down off the desert we saw a city by the lake. What we actually saw was one of the marvels of Asia, The City, and we were about to explore a fair portion of its incredible length. For more than seventy miles this nameless metropolis stretched along the lake, the marshes and the river that formed the western boundary between Afghanistan and Persia. At the dawn of history it had been a stupendous settlement. In the age of Alexander it had been one of the world’s major concentrations, and he had camped near its bazaars. For a millennium after his departure it flourished to become one of the prime targets of the Mongols, and Genghis Khan had once slaughtered most of the people in the area. Tamerlane … all the others had ravaged the treasure, and now it stood in majestic silence, mile after mile after mile.
I thought: We’re probably in error, calling this a city. It must have been like Route One between New York and Richmond. At intersections there were towns, and some were sizable, but much of the distance must have been interurban, so that city merged into town and town into rural area, with always the roadway itself hemmed in by buildings of some sort. Here the roadway had been the Helmand River, and now as we traversed it we saw the relics of The City.
At times there would be walls of substantial
height running for miles, broken by majestic gates and marked with niches in which, before the Muslims outlawed human statuary, depictions of local heroes had stood. At other times we saw municipal buildings which might have sent emissaries to Jerusalem a thousand years before the time of Herod. And everything we saw was withering in the dry air, an inch or two eroding every hundred years.
There were rugged forts, obviously built by the Muslims: against unorganized shepherds from Persia they must have been impressive; against the skilled troops of Genghis Khan they probably lasted a day or two, at most, after which all the defenders were slaughtered.
We drove along the entire length of The City, and I cannot recall many moments when we were out of sight of really noble monuments. The architecture was solid and secure, wholly fitted to the bleak terrain, and the impression was one of dignity and organization. Qala Bist, at the eastern edge of the Desert of Death, had stunned me with its magnificence. The City, on the western edge, left no such impression. It was so huge, so beyond normal comprehension, and yet so intimate—I felt that men had actually walked these streets and collected taxes in these buildings—that no reaction was required. There it was. Damn it all, there the stupendous thing was, abandoned in the desert the way Route One, two thousand years from now, might reach in shadowy grandeur from what used to be New York to what used to be Richmond.
If the early morning heat on the desert had been oppressive, the heat we experienced at noonday along The City was almost unbearable. Of it I will say only this: Whenever we came upon an irrigation ditch or an arm of the river, we jumped from our jeeps, held our watches and wallets over our heads, and plunged fully dressed into the water, soaking in the moisture through aching pores. We then took with us large cans of dirty water, which we poured over our turbans as we rode, but as before, any relief was temporary, for within a few minutes we were once more completely dry. At least ten times we jumped into the ditches, and if we had not been able to do so, we could not have continued our journey. We would have been forced to seek protection in one of the vast, vacant buildings and wait for nightfall.
After one such dunking Nazrullah again asked me to ride with him, but he would not speak of his marriage. He wished to discuss the old days, when The City flourished. “It probably had trade with areas as far removed as Moscow, Peking, Delhi and Arabia. It was never the superb city that Balkh was, but it must have been impressive. What do you suppose killed it?”
“Genghis Khan,” I replied with confidence. “In school I read about him, as a name, but never appreciated what a devastating force he was. He stood before your city and shouted, ‘Here I am!’ and pretty soon there was no city.”
“No,” Nazrullah laughed, “you give good old Genghis too much credit. Now Balkh, the best city we ever had … He did destroy that. But not this place. Nor Herat. He wiped out the population, but people are easy to replace and Herat still exists. He didn’t wipe out The City. Something else did that.”
“Plague?” I hazarded, for my mind was not yet geared to Central Asia.
“Three hypotheses are predominant, not mutually exclusive,” he said slowly. This was the kind of talk he liked, arguing in Germanic patterns, like most learned Afghans.
I interrupted him, laughing. “It just occurred to me, Nazrullah. I’ve been with you and Moheb Khan and Nur Muhammad for some time now, and none of you ever says, ‘By the beard of the Prophet,’ or ‘By the blood of the infidel,’ or ‘Allah shall be revenged.’ I don’t believe you’re real Muslims.”
“I have the same complaint against you,” he replied seriously. “Not once do you or the ambassador say ‘By cracky’ or ‘Gee whillikens.’ We’re living in a denatured age.”
“Proceed, Son of the Prophet.”
“That reminds me of something amusing,” he said. “For a while I dated a Penn coed whose sole knowledge of Asia was that fine ballad ‘Abdul Abulbul Amir.’ Funny thing was, she made about as much sense as any of the others.”
“What did wreck The City?”
“First, this used to be the world’s foremost example of irrigation. I think Alexander commented on that. You can see relics of the old system everywhere. Over there, for example. Probably a reservoir. But people got lazy. They didn’t keep working on it. They felt that what had worked for a hundred years was good enough for the next hundred years. They stopped cleaning the ditches … built no new dams. They guessed right. For a hundred years, no trouble. But the death warrant had been signed. Genghis Khan can’t be blamed for that. The people had grown fat and lazy.
“Second, and I place much emphasis on this, there was salt. If you irrigate a piece of land long enough, the constant flow of water must deposit salt, so that each year you raise a crop, you deteriorate the land that made the crop possible. Therefore I don’t blame the lazy people entirely. Maybe the salt was just too big a problem to handle. In some future century, perhaps, all of Colorado and Utah will be useless because the men of this century were such good farmers. Your salt levels are rising ominously. Behold, Denver, Colorado!” And he pointed to the ruins.
“The third reason is the most tantalizing of all. Goats. Those damned goats are the curse of Asia. God gave us a fertile land, covered with magnificent trees and soil rich enough to feed all men. But the Devil got even by giving us just one thing. Goats. And they took care of the forests. Ate all the young trees. And the rich fields. Ate the cover off and turned them to deserts. Probably the most destructive animal ever created. Much more dangerous than the cobra.”
“But how would goats affect The City?” I asked.
“When this was a metropolis,” Nazrullah explained, “the hills you see must have been covered with trees. Brisk business in timber and charcoal. Excessive cutting killed some forests, but goats took care of the rest. So today in Afghanistan we have almost no forests. Do you suppose we live in mud houses on purpose? They’re miserable, but we have no wood. All the time I was in America I wondered, ‘What is the goat in America?’ I found out. It’s the man who destroys your forests.” He paused, then observed, “You defeated Germany in this war, but in the future Germany’s bound to win. Because Germans plant trees.”
I tried to lead the conversation back to Ellen Jaspar but was forestalled when our guide, perched on the spare tires behind my ear, sang out that we were approaching Chahar, where Pritchard lay. We looked for a ditch and plunged in to refresh ourselves, then stood on the bank as the monstrous wind sucked us dry, and when our turbans were no longer wet we replaced them with karakul caps. We straightened our clothes to make ourselves as presentable as possible, and while we were doing this I asked, “Why all the falderal?”
Nazrullah replied, “Down here you impress the sharif, or you get nothing.” As we drove into the village he added, “We’re so far from Kabul that government doesn’t actually exist, except in the person of this brigand who rules as he wishes. Who’s going to drive across that desert to correct him?”
It was an attractive village with an oversized caravanserai and cool pomegranate trees whose blossoms sent me an unfamiliar fragrance. The sharif came out to greet us, a huge fellow well over six feet in height, and I thought: How often we choose tall men to govern us.
And this sharif governed, that was obvious. As absolute monarch of a tiny kingdom, he had his own army, his own judges, his own treasury. Since he lived so close to Persia and so far from Kabul, his little kingdom used mainly Persian coins and Persian stamps. “Dozens of these principalities remain in Afghanistan,” Nazrullah explained, and I understood why, in Chahar, the evacuation of an American with a broken leg was impossible. When you got sick here, the local medicine man cured you, or you died.
The sharif led us to a low, stifling hut tucked away in a corner of the caravanserai, and there on a straw mattress laid over a rope bed we found the gaunt, gray-faced American engineer John Pritchard, a wiry man in his late forties. Nazrullah held out his hand and said, “Hello, Professor. The American embassy’s sent a man to get you out of here.”
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“I’m willing to go … right now,” the sick man replied. The sharif’s servants had kept him clean, fed and shaved, but he was in pitiful shape and I sensed at once that he was close to dying, for his left leg, exposed to dry air to speed the healing, had been punctured by two fractures and was now clearly gangrenous. The skin was taut and greenish.
Dr. Stiglitz hurried to the bed and studied the leg for some minutes, smelling his fingers as he did so. He then probed the man’s groin and armpits. When he was done he placed his right hand on Pritchard’s shoulder and said quietly, “Herr Professor Pritchard, the leg must come off.” The engineer groaned and his face went even whiter than it had been.
Stiglitz continued, as if to convince the rest of us, “In my opinion there’s no chance on earth to save this leg. I’m positive other doctors would agree. I’m sorry, Herr Professor, but you must know.” Pritchard made no further sound; he must have expected such a decision.
Stiglitz added in a dispassionate professional voice, “We face a difficult choice, for which we are all responsible—Pritchard, Nazrullah, Miller. I can take the leg off here, but where would you recuperate? Tell me that. Or I can medicate the leg now, then rush you back to Kandahar, where the operation could be performed much better and where you could recuperate at ease. In that case the question is, Could you stand the trip across the desert?”
Each waited for the other to speak, then Pritchard said firmly, “If I stay here, I will surely die.”
Stiglitz asked, “Then you want to go back to Kandahar?”
“Yes! Yes!” Pritchard cried.
“What do you think, Nazrullah Sahib?” Stiglitz continued.
“I’d like to ask one question,” Nazrullah countered. “Professor Pritchard, you remember what the desert was like. Do you feel strong enough to cross it now?”