Sometime during the next several days, the truck was scheduled to leave the town of Ishkoshem, lumber over a 300-foot bridge into Tajikistan, and make its way north on the Pamir Highway past the ancient ruby mines of Kuh-i-Lal to the Tajik city of Khorog. There, Sarfraz had arranged for the vehicle to be loaded with forty bags of cement and other building materials before proceeding another long day across the aching monotony of the Pamir plateau to Murghab, a town whose name means “river of birds” in Persian.
Meanwhile, Sarfraz had also ordered a consignment of 190 poplar trees to be cut from the Pamir forests. These logs would be sawed into lumber, and loaded onto the Kamaz when it reached Murgab, at which point the truck—now groaning with its massive load—would continue south for another eighty miles along the valley of the Aksu River, skirting the no-man’s-land along the border of western China and the looming hulk of 24,757-foot Muztaghata, the highest peak in the Pamirs.
Eventually the Kamaz would reach a point just above the easternmost end of the Wakhan. There it would cross back into Afghanistan and grind, in its lowest gear, along the remnants of a dirt track that was originally bladed by tanks from the Soviet military and had barely been used since the end of the Soviet occupation. At the point where the track ended, the supplies would be taken off, loaded onto the backs of a herd of waiting yaks and carried the final distance into Bozai Gumbaz, a journey of two days.
Total round-trip distance: just under nine hundred miles.
Time to destination: unknown.
Needless to say, we had never done anything like this before, and setting up the necessary arrangements to enable this unorthodox shipment to move across the heavily restricted Afghanistan-Tajikistan border would have been categorically impossible without the assistance of the man who had emerged as our most formidable ally in the Wakhan.
Several weeks before standing up in front of Admiral Mullen in Pushgur and delivering his “stones into schools” speech, Wohid Khan had approached his counterparts in the Tajik Border Security Force about the possibility of being granted a one-time permit for this special delivery expedition. Despite the fact that Wohid commands deep respect on both sides of the border, the Tajiks were initially reluctant to accede to such an unusual request. (Because southern Tajikistan is plagued by smugglers who traffic heavily in heroin, guns, and even child slaves, its borders are exceptionally sensitive and are placed under extremely tight controls.) The Tajiks’ attitude changed, however, when they were presented with a warranty that could not be turned down without giving personal offense: As a guarantee that the conditions of the permit would not be violated, Wohid Khan himself would personally accompany the truck on its entire journey. Doing so would require the Afghan commander to set aside his professional duties for longer than he could really afford. But in the eyes of Khan, there could be no worthier mission for a mujahadeen.
At the moment, there were still a few lingering details yet to be worked out. (The school’s windows and doors, which were now being assembled in Ishkoshem, would not be finished before the Kamaz departed for Tajikistan.) Nevertheless, Sarfraz’s strategy was clear: Having concluded that access to Bozai Gumbaz from any single direction was impossible, he had decided that the first school to grace the world’s rooftop would be assembled by using all four points of the compass simultaneously. The Charpurson masons and carpenters would tromp over the Irshad Pass from the south. The bulk of the cement and lumber would make its way in a daring northern loop through Tajikistan and then be thrust into the far eastern end of the Corridor. And the cash to pay for the final phase of construction, $20,000, would enter the Wakhan from the west in the pockets of my vest and Sarfraz’s.
As Sarfraz and I completed our drive back to Kabul from the Panjshir Valley following Admiral Mullen’s inauguration of the Pushghur School, we calculated that if we left for Badakshan immediately, we might be able to reach Bozai Gumbaz just before Wohid Khan’s yak train arrived, giving us time to conduct a ceremonial jirga with Abdul Rashid Khan and the rest of the Kirghiz community. Construction could begin the following day, and with a bit of luck, the walls would be up and the roof would be nailed down before the first big snowstorm locked the Pamirs down for another winter. There was, however, one problem.
“There are no flights scheduled from Kabul to Faizabad between now and the end of the week,” explained Sarfraz as we arrived back in Kabul.
“So what are our options?” I asked.
“The roads north are very dangerous,” he said. “We must pass through Khundud, and Taliban are attacking. But if you want to reach Bozai Gumbaz on time, we will need to drive all the way.”
“Then let’s do it,” I replied. “It will be just like old times.”
We launched our blitz the following morning in a rented Toyota with a driver we knew and trusted named Ahmed. This was the first time I had traveled by road to Badakshan in three years, and I was astonished by the changes. Back in 2003, when I had made my first drive north, the entire landscape had been devastated and scorched by war. The buildings along the highway had been almost totally destroyed, and there were so many land mines buried at the side of the road that it was dangerous even to pull over. Now, however, the countryside was coming back to life. The fields were dotted with villagers tending to their grape vines, orchards, wheat, and barley. It was almost possible to imagine, momentarily, what peace might look like in Afghanistan.
The surface of the highway had been paved, and we made good time. We shot through the Salang Tunnel at 10:00 P.M. and three hours later stopped for tea at Pul-e Khumri, the original home of Abdul, the orphan boy who had repaired our radiator on my first trip north. We asked if there had been any news of him, but nobody knew anything, so we pushed on.
The August night was clear, and the heavens were littered with a spray of stars whose clarity and brilliance I have seen matched only by the skies of Montana. As the hours rolled past and the night deepened, I stared out the window and gave myself over to a floating sense of déjà vu that carried me back to countless similar drives up the Karakoram Highway along the Indus River gorges and into Baltistan during the early years of our work. The names of the mountains and the languages spoken in the villages that were flitting past us in the dark now were different. But everything else—the dull taste of the dust filtering through the open window, the metallic pink glow of the lights above the all-night truck stops beside the highway, the rhythm of the road, and the vastness of the landscape—all of these things drove home the notion that my years in Pakistan and my time in Afghanistan were part of a continuous whole, a journey that was still unfolding and whose final aim remained something of a mystery.
As we dropped off the back side of midnight and entered the early hours of the morning, however, I found myself colliding against the limitation of my own stamina. The endless litany of plane flights and fund-raising appearances across the United States, followed by the whirlwind tour of Wakil’s literacy centers and the frenzied preparations for the inauguration of the Pushgur school, now seemed to be catching up with me. Sarfraz, I knew, had been working just as hard, if not harder. And yet, despite the fact that he was a few years older than me, he seemed to draw from a well of energy that was deeper than my own.
Somewhere north of the town of Baghlan, the toll of the past several weeks finally washed over me in a wave of weariness so oppressive that it felt as if someone were smothering me with a wet blanket. Like a long-distance runner who has slipped off the top of his game, I realized that I no longer had the ability to keep up with Sarfraz. In terms of determination, stubbornness, and the pigheaded refusal to give up, the two of us were still remarkably well matched. But when it came to sheer resiliency, my friend and colleague had passed me by and disappeared into the distance.
“Maybe we should rest for a little bit,” I suggested as we approached the lights of another fuel station. “Why don’t we pull over?”
“No stopping,” ordered Sarfraz. “There have been many Taliban in this area recentl
y. We cannot rest until we are past Khundud.”
We kept driving, passing through Khundud around 1:30 A.M., and it was not until we reached the safety of Talikan, which lay beyond the furthest advances of the insurgency, that Sarfraz finally allowed our driver to pull into a roadside tea stand and each of us collapsed on a charpoy, a short-legged bed whose platform is woven together with coarse rope.
Sarfraz’s instincts, it turned out, were as accurate as ever. One month after we passed through Khundud, Taliban insurgents hijacked a pair of tanker trucks, provoking an air strike from NATO fighter jets. The resulting explosion killed more than eighty people, including dozens of civilians. Twenty-four hours after that Stephen Farrell, a journalist working for the New York Times who was reporting on the aftermath of the air strikes, was kidnapped, together with his Afghan interpreter. Four days later, a rescue mission by British commandos resulted in the deaths of a British soldier and the Afghan interpreter, whose name was Mohammad Sultan Munadi.
A week prior to his death, Munadi, a thirty-four-year-old father of two, had written the following blog posting for the New York Times: Being a journalist is not enough; it will not solve the problems of Afghanistan. I want to work for the education of the country, because the majority of people are illiterate. That is the main problem facing many Afghans.
Sarfraz and I awoke at just after 5:00 A.M., nudged the driver to his feet and gently prodded him into the rear seat, then pulled back onto the road. With Sarfraz behind the wheel and the sun just beginning to come up, we crossed into Badakshan. The fertile valleys, rugged hills, and broken gorges carried a welcoming sense of familiarity, and the feeling of moving through a landscape to which we belonged was reinforced as we began passing some of our Central Asia Institute schools. First came Fakhar School, followed by Faizabad Girls’ School, and beyond that, Sadhar Khan’s school in Baharak—where the road south led to the Shodha Girls’ School and the Jherum Girls’ Primary School. We kept pressing east, skirting above the Eskan Girls’ Primary School, the Koh Munjon School, the Wardugh Girls’ Middle School, and the Ziabakh Girls’ Elementary and Middle School.
On a normal trip we would have stopped at each of these places for tea and a quick visit, but not this time. As we entered the Wakhan proper, Sarfraz kept his foot to the accelerator, and eleven more schools flew past. Together these twenty projects provided visual affirmation of the fact that despite the endless setbacks and delays, we had managed to accomplish something worthwhile during our time in northern Afghanistan. And perhaps I would have given myself over to a wave of pride and self-congratulation, had I not been overtaken by something far more powerful. During my yearlong absence, I had forgotten that the Wakhan, despite its harshness and austerity, is a place of unspeakable loveliness.
Compelling evidence of this fact was on display everywhere. The previous winter had been the worst the Wakhan had seen in twelve years, bringing with it an endless succession of storms that had buried the High Pamir beneath a second mountain range of snow and kept temperatures below freezing well into June. The conditions had been devastating for livestock, and many of the surrounding villages had lost a significant portion of their animals. When the melt-out finally arrived, the hardships had continued with a larger-than-normal wave of avalanches, landslides, and flash floods. Now, however, the Corridor was finally reaping the flip side of the equation.
Thanks to all the moisture from the shrinking snowpack and the glacial melt, the vibrant emerald green colors of late spring were still refusing to surrender to the brown and ocher tones of midsummer. In village after village, every field was bursting with a bumper crop of wheat, potatoes, or millet. Above this shimmering green patchwork soared the double-walled architecture of the Wakhan’s unique geologic signature: to the south, the bulwark of the Hindu Kush, blocking off Pakistan; and to the north, across the Amu Darya, the ramparts of the Pamirs defining the edge of Tajikistan. When taken in by the eye in a single, sweeping glance, this dramatic ensemble—the jagged peaks, the foaming river, the orange- and purple-hued rocks, the splashes of color from the wild roses and buttercups, all spread beneath the measureless immensity of the sky—offered a vision of unmatched beauty and grandeur.
On the second day from Kabul, we reached our twenty-first and final school, the Sarhad School, where the road ended and the central reaches of the Corridor began giving way to the colder and more severe lines of the High Pamir. Here, even in midsummer, winter was never more than half a step away. The stretches of flatland that were wedged between the mountains and the river around Sarhad were carpeted in a thick, tightly knotted tundra grass that resembled what one might see in the subpolar latitudes of northern Canada.
Aside from its visual splendor, what makes Sarhad so striking is that more than any other place in the Wakhan, or even Afghanistan, it suggests the possibility that you have arrived in a land where time itself has frozen. Beyond the cluster of low-slung, mud-and-stone houses that make up the village, wildhaired children preside over herds of shaggy-coated yaks and shovel-footed Bactrian camels that look as if they are still part of the Pleistocene. In the nearby fields, which have been fenced off with the bleached bones and the curled horns of ibex and Marco Polo sheep, men turn the earth with plows whose design has not changed in two thousand years.
By the time we arrived, we had been driving almost nonstop for about forty hours. We pulled up in front of the residence of Tashi Boi, the local chief who was in charge of civil affairs in this part of the Corridor and who had been a fierce advocate for literacy and girls’ education since he completed a drug-treatment program a decade ago and successfully overcame his addiction to opium, the scourge of so many families in the Corridor. Tashi Boi’s home, which he shared with his wife, children, and fifteen members of his extended family, was a traditional Wakhi “hearth house.” A hexagonal structure, its interior featured an earthen floor in which a sunken area in the center, which contained the hearth, was surrounded by a raised platform covered with thick blankets and rugs upon which members of the household spent most of their time. The roof was supported by rough-hewn wooden beams, and a touch of modernity was provided by the addition of a support post fashioned from a long steel girder that had once served as the tread cover of a Soviet T-62 tank.
Sarhad was the deepest I had ever penetrated into the interior of the Wakhan, and before stepping inside the house to share a meal of noodle soup, I paused to cast a glance at what lay beyond the end of the road. About fifteen miles to the south rose the escarpments of the Hindu Kush. A day and a half’s walk in that direction would take one to the northern entrance of the Irshad Pass. Meanwhile, forty-two miles to the east lay the old Kirghiz burial grounds of Bozai Gumbaz. If Sarfraz and I started first thing in the morning, within three days we could make our rendezvous with Wohid Khan and Abdul Rashid Khan.
I headed indoors with the hope that in less than seventy-two hours, we would finally finish off a piece of business that had been languishing for a decade. It was at this point, however, that fate apparently felt the need to demonstrate the irritating truth that in this place, nothing ever happens the way it’s supposed to.
One of the benefits of having been raised in rural Africa was that it imbued me with an unusually strong constitution. During my sixteen years of work in Pakistan and Afghanistan, I had only been severely sick twice. When I awoke the following morning, however, my entire body was wracked by chills and my limbs and chest had been overtaken by a fatigue so dense and so heavy that it seemed to have penetrated all the way to the bone. An hour later, my head was spinning wildly and I was locked in the grip of a remorseless fever.
The dizziness and the pounding headache made me think it might be malaria, to which I had succumbed twice as a boy in Tanzania. There were no mosquitoes this high in the Wakhan, however. Whatever it was that had a hold of me, there was no resisting its onslaught, and as Tashi Boi and Sarfraz pumped me full of green tea and piled four or five blankets on me, I slipped into a deep delirium.
; Inside the cauldron of my fever, I lost all sense of time, fumbling to the surface only periodically to register what was happening around me. On several occasions, I experienced the blurred sense that someone seemed to be piling yet another blanket on top of me or performing a kind of pressure massage that involved pressing down on my legs and head with two or three fingers, then letting go. In other instances, I could hear the mumbled whispers of Sarfraz and the members of Tashi Boi’s household as they discussed my condition and speculated on what to do. Once or twice, I awoke in the middle of the night to realize that a circle of elders was sitting quietly beside me and keeping vigil. The residents of Sarhad were doting and they were worried, and they never once left me alone. Drifting through my illness, I had the sense that people were taking turns sitting beside me and holding my hand for hours.
As the days and the nights melded, my sense of the present slipped away and was overtaken by scenes from my past. I flashed back to my childhood battles with malaria, when I had lost six months of school. I also traveled back to Korphe, where the care that I had received during my first stay in Haji Ali’s village seemed to merge with what the people of Sarhad were now doing. At night, over the roar of Tashi Boi’s generator, I could hear the yaks clustered outside the house, grunting and mooing in the moonlight—sounds that convinced me that I had been transported back to Montana and was standing on the Great Plains surrounded by a herd of buffalo. At one point, an elderly woman awakened me from my stupor to ask if I wanted to smoke some opium, which she said would take away the pain.
“No thanks,” I said, “I’ve already got some medicine.”
As I descended back into sleep, I could hear Sarfraz rhythmically shaking our jumbo-sized jar of ibuprofen like a maraca.