The Way of Wanderlust (18 page)

Then we heard the good news: Asad had somehow secured permission for us to visit the Khyber Pass!

Martial music played and images from
Gunga
Din
marched through my head as we wound due west toward the border. We passed two sprawling Afghan refugee settlements—temporary structures of mud, bamboo, and straw, stretching across the dusty flatlands—and Asad said that 35,000 people lived in one and 28,000 in another. He added that Pakistan supplies three-quarters of the cost of supporting all the camps.

Until this time, my sense of the Afghan war had been confined to television and newspaper reports viewed or read in the comfort of my living room. Now the picture had changed. “Try to imagine all the inhabitants of Burlingame, say, or Los Gatos,” I wrote in my journal, “living in these patched-together structures, laced by dirt lanes on a parched plain; then try to imagine providing for all their needs in a country that is already strapped meeting the needs of its own inhabitants, and then try to imagine the sufferings of the refugees themselves—from maimed limbs to splintered families to profound psychological displacement. Imagine all these, and you begin to get some sense of the scale and depth of the problems the Afghan war has created.”

As long-prowed, brightly painted trucks bearing lumber, bricks, tires, and cows honked their horns and ground their gears around us, Asad summarized the history of the region: “The road we are traveling now is a continuation of the Grand Trunk Road, which was originally built in the 14th century connecting Kabul to Delhi. It was improved on and expanded through the centuries, but most importantly by the British in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The route passes through Europe into Turkey, then Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.”

For a moment the “magic buses” I had seen crammed with long-haired hippies in tie-dyed T-shirts in Istanbul in the '70s came to mind, and I remembered the exotic tales of Kabul and Kathmandu. How far away that whole world seemed—and yet how near.

“So many armies have passed this way,” Asad continued, “beginning with the Indo-Aryans in 1500-1200
b.c.
, then Alexander the Great and his troops in the 4th century
b.c.
, and through the centuries the Tatars, Mughals, Afghans, and English
. . .
.

“The mountains we are traveling into are part of the Hindu Kush. The Khyber Pass itself is thirty-three kilometers (about twenty miles) long; 98,000 people live in the area, and three different tribes control different areas of the pass.

“The main industry here, to tell you the truth, is smuggling. The tribal chiefs have huge complexes that are well guarded, and the tribespeople pass back and forth over the border at will; there are many unsupervised points where they can cross at night.”

The road twisted and wound past rocky, barren bluffs with forts the same bleached color perched on their tops, etched against the cloudless blue sky. Naked children jumped and splashed in streams, and women led straggling strings of children, or balanced bulging bags, or talked in groups away from the road—their brilliant robes catching our eyes even as they hastily drew their veils around their faces to avoid our stares.

What kind of life do these people have out here? I wondered. And yet this is where they grew up, this is all they know of the world, an inner voice replied.

At one point we stopped and got out, and Asad pointed to the ribboning road we had just traveled. “If you look closely out there, you can see three roads: On the top is the road the Mughals used in the early 16th century; below that—see the dirt trail—is the path the Greeks used under Alexander; and then there is the Grand Trunk Road the British made.”

At another point he motioned out the window to a grassy, depressed plain. “This was the site of a bloody ambush during the third Afghan war in 1919. The British and the Pathans fought fiercely throughout this area for more than a century.”

At this Tom Cole said, “Of all the peoples the British encountered in their 300-odd years on the subcontinent, they admired the Pathans the most.” And then he quoted the words the Pakistanis had chiseled in stone at the gateway to the pass, in commemoration of the end of British-Pathan conflict: “According to the British, it was here that they met their equals, who looked them straight in the face and fought against them up to the last day of their rule. But when the British quit, after a rule of 100 years, the two great peoples parted as friends.”

Later we passed a honeycomb of small shops, and Asad said, “This is Ali Mastid bazaar—from the earliest days of the Silk Route, this is where the camel caravans would stop for the night. In fact, nomad caravans still do stop here.”

We saw the remains of a Buddhist stupa, and tank barriers built by the British during WWII, and always the sere, steep, craggy rocks; the twisting road; the brown, baked tribal settlements set into the hills; the trucks laden with wood, metal drums of fuel, tires; pedestrians and goats and cows; buses bulging with passengers; pickup trucks bearing grizzled men with rifles slung over their shoulders; and the dust, in my mouth and on my clothes, coating everything.

As we bumped along, I realized that I had been given a great gift: In the accumulation of images and encounters, as my feet scuffed that parched ground, as I nodded at Pakistani soldiers, shook Afghan hands in the bazaar, and waved to children in the settlements, the war was becoming personalized—it was no longer their war, but my war, too. And as the sun glowered down and the earth baked as it had when Alexander's soldiers walked this way, I thought of how all wars are just people fighting people—and of how just as sun and wind inevitably shape landscape, so too do climate and countryside shape human character and culture.

We reached the last checkpoint before the border, and there we had to stop. Ahead, clearly visible less than four miles in the distance, was Afghanistan. Through binoculars we could see the row of white markers strung out along the hills that represented the border, people moving at the border crossing, and trucks, and then the sere hills stretching into the distance.

Afghanistan! It reminded me of stories I had heard of people in the days before China was open to visitors, driving to the New Territories and peering off toward the misty fields of Canton. Those far mountains were in fact no different from the very mountain on which I stood—except that at some point in the minuscule moment of human history someone had decided to lay an imaginary line between them and call it a border. What chaos that caused, I mused, and the pickup trucks with their riflemen bouncing in the back sped by, bound for—I didn't know where.

And the scrape and trudge of all the feet that had raised dust on this inhospitable path—Aryan feet, Greek feet, Mughal feet, British feet—echoed in my mind.

On the drive back to Peshawar, Asad pointed to plastic packets that were hanging along with cigarettes, oranges, and other everyday goods from just about every streetside stall. “See those packets?” he said. “They contain opium. Drug-selling is another very big business here. The tribal chiefs are very clever, and very wealthy and well protected. They sell just about everything,” he added.

“Even people?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, people too,” he said.

In a distant field children were flying white paper kites, and women in white robes trailed by children in red and purple
shalwar kameez
walked through waving grasses from one mud settlement to another. Eucalyptus trees and poplars—strange that I hadn't noticed them before—lined the road, sighing in the breeze.

Part Two: High Road to Hunza

April 5 dawned dark and drizzly, and we splashed through the muddy, puddling streets of Peshawar bound for the Swat Valley and the city of Saidu Sharif, ancient capital of the Kingdom of Swat. As we wound north, roadside images revealed the presence of the past in this slowly developing land: cultivated fields crisscrossed by rough-dug irrigation trenches, occasionally punctuated by walled compounds of mud and straw; children gathering branches and twigs in the rain; yoked oxen snorting through the mud; carcasses hanging in a market; men huddled around a makeshift fire in a shop.

It was not propitious weather for touring the Buddhist ruins and Alexander the Great-related sites of Swat, so instead we spent our day and a half there shopping. I dutifully but dispiritedly hefted melons, admired earrings and necklaces, and trailed fine rainbow-colored scarves through my hands—until we stopped at the village of Khwazakhela.

There, in a dark, dingy closet of a shop, maybe eight feet deep by five feet wide, we discovered a wooden and leather arrow quiver, with the arrows still inside, that both the shop owner and Asad said was at least 100 years old. Then in a grimy corner, among lanterns and coins and cooking utensils, I found a 100-year-old drum and a 350-year-old leather shield.

I twirled an arrow and felt the prick of its cool metal tip. Then I turned the drum in my hands, studying how the leather had been stretched over the beautifully worked brass, running my fingers over the creases where the leather had been stretched, smelling the dust and sweat and age of it. I beat it—dust dancing into the air—and imagined tribal palms beating that same worn spot a century ago; the dull
thonk, thonk
and
tum, tum
echoed in my ears just as—I imagined—they had echoed in tribal ears through the years.

Then I took the rough shield and imagined a Pathan warrior 300 years ago gripping those same thongs, that musty, pocked, leathery disc—about as big as a woman's floppy Sunday hat—the only thing between him and death.

The shop owner picked an old, rusted, curving sword off the wall and playfully swung it at me. I parried his thrust with my shield. His eyes were suddenly electric with mirth and interaction—understanding that spanned cultures, connections that spanned time.

The next day mists shrouded the Himalayan peaks that Asad said loomed majestic and snowcapped in the distance, but patches of clearing revealed an entirely different Pakistan from the dusty plains of Peshawar: hillsides terraced with row upon row of lush green plots (wheat at that time of year) bright with yellow mustard plants and white-blossoming pear trees.

When we reached 6,300 feet, snow and pine trees unexpectedly appeared, along with patches of pink mountain tulips. And as the countryside and climate changed, so did the inhabitants' lifestyle: Now hillside clusters of brick and rock houses with tin roofs replaced the sprawling mud and straw settlements of the lowlands; and as the slopes grew increasingly steep, tiny terraces folded down them like the ribs of an emerald fan.

At a fraying, frontier-feeling truck stop called Besham, Tom Cole announced that we were at one of the most significant points of passage on our trip. From there on, we would be traveling along the legendary Karakoram Highway, or KKH, “one of man's most magnificent and stupefying feats of engineering and endurance.”

Undertaken jointly by Pakistan and China, the two-lane, 730-mile highway took twenty years to complete, with 15,000 Pakistanis and from 9,000 to 20,000 Chinese working on the project at any one time.

The KKH was dynamited and dug out of the mountains, connecting Islamabad all the way to the Chinese border and beyond to Kashgar in the wastes of Chinese Turkestan. In some places the builders followed ancient trade routes that predated even the Silk Route; in other places, because of unresolvable property disputes, they simply blasted a way through virgin territory.

The landscape through which we now wound was as wild and uncompromising as any I had ever seen. The peaks rose steep and sheer—ragged in some places, sandpapered by colossal landslides in others—from the side of the road into the clouds. In all this immensity, the highway was a filament, a puny patch of pavement that nature could reclaim at any moment through any of the elements at its command: snow or mud, rock or flood.

When we saw nomads with sheep and cows walking by the side of the Indus River far below, they looked about as big as the period at the end of this sentence. In my journal I wrote: “This is a landscape for gods, not men.”

Nature's raw power was manifest in much more mundane—and mortal—ways as well: The rains of the previous days had washed many parts of the road away. Whenever we reached one of these, our driver, Ali Muhammad, would gingerly prod and caress the van over the muddy, slippery, rock-strewn stretches—air whistling beneath our windows all the way to the gray-green squiggle of the Indus.

Asad and Ali kept a constant watch on the mountainside: Tumbling streams of small rocks, Asad said, often precede huge, highway-demolishing rockslides. Whole regiments of soldiers are maintained in camps along the highway just to keep it clear, Asad said.

Eventually we passed so many mudslides and rockslides—and soldiers in bulldozers and backhoes—that I lost count and stopped scanning the mountainsides. Instead I gave myself up to the
sumi-e
serenity of peak and cloud, the occasional apparitions of umbrella-toting villagers, and the throat-tightening sight of a narrow dirt track, perhaps as old as human settlement here, ribboning along a far mountainside.

Asad and Tom Cole used this time to present some background information: From the beginning of human habitation in the region, northern Pakistan had been composed of fiercely independent valley kingdoms. The leaders of these kingdoms, who went by various titles—rajah, mir, wali—subsisted for centuries in their mountain fastnesses, raising their own food and preying on passing caravans for ceramics, silks, spices, and slaves; at the same time, they used promises of allegiance to gain bounty and maintain independence from the emperors of China and the maharajahs of Kashmir.

This political balancing act reached its climax in the Great Game of the late 19th century, when Russia and England vied through emissaries and outposts—and, finally, armies—for the favor of the local rulers and the control of these remote but strategically alluring territories.