“You mean you could become a Jew?” I repeated seriously.
“I probably am a Jew,” he insisted. “And a Mongol, and a Hindu, and a Tajik. But I’m also a hundred percent Aryan, because I have a certificate from Göttingen University to prove it.”
We lapsed again into the deep silence of the desert and the faint stirrings of a brotherhood that was developing between us. Then I asked what I know Nazrullah intended me to ask when he suggested that I ride in his jeep: “Where’s Ellen?”
“She ran away.”
“You know where?”
“Not exactly.”
“You think she’s alive?”
“I know she is,” he said, clenching his hands on the steering wheel. “I’m morally sure she is.” From his actions and manner of speech I had to conclude that he was still in love with his wife, hungrily, deeply; yet I found it almost comical that I should worry about a man, no matter how much I respected him, who was worried about his second wife when he had a perfectly good wife waiting for him in Kandahar. It all seemed so Muslim. I was then too young to know at first hand any of those average American men who deeply loved their wives but who could at the same time become agonized if something untoward happened to their mistresses. It was the same problem in two different guises, but at the time I didn’t know it.
“She hasn’t written to her parents in thirteen months,” I said.
With a certain grim humor he asked, “Have you met her parents?”
“No, but I’ve read their reports.”
“Then you know.” He smiled as he recalled them, then added, “They’re like this, Miller. If they’d seen that pillar at the caravanserai they’d have cried, ‘Goodness, something ought to be done about that,’ but they’d never have understood if you replied, ‘About Genghis Khan you can’t do anything.’” He grew painfully intense and said, “There wasn’t a thing they could have done about Ellen. They were fated to lose her. I was fated to lose her. And there wasn’t a goddamned thing that any of us could have done to prevent it.”
I waited till the signs of his bitterness vanished, then asked, “Is she still in Afghanistan?”
I remember distinctly, and at the time I remarked upon it to myself, that before Nazrullah answered he leaned out to look at the stars, both west and east, then said quiedy, “I’m sure she is. Yes, she’s in Afghanistan.”
I wanted to pursue the matter further, but at this moment I saw to the west, where Nazrullah had peered in search of his wife, a star that seemed brighter than the others and pointed it out to my guide. “Good,” he said, halting the jeep till the others could overtake us. When they did he pointed to the star and said, “The City.”
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.”