The Network - Jason Elliot [131]
In Afghanistan all this is reversed. The road demands your attention from the start. Every aspect of it requires effort and stamina and determination. It does, literally, crumble to dust under your wheels, and offers you no time for distracted thoughts. In the meantime your destination becomes an ever more abstract idea, a thing you doubt and question and wonder if you’ll ever reach, and as your journey lengthens you feel like a fool for blindly assuming that your eventual arrival is guaranteed. The road, in short, becomes the goal, and arrival a luxury.
Our caravan is made up of two vehicles. The trust’s white Toyota pickup leads the way, carrying Sher Del, Aref and Momen. H and I ride second in the G. Our doors and bonnets bear the vinyl stickers that Mr Raouf has supplied us with, so that our true purpose, like that of many a charitable institution operating in this part of the world, is amply disguised.
We drive through the devastated western suburbs under a brilliantly blue, clear sky. On the outskirts of the city the surfaced road ends. There was one, years before, but it’s simply been worn away. Now it’s a pale scar on which every vehicle lurches and weaves in a perpetual cloud of white dust. Which side to drive on is only an approximate convention.
Beyond the dust we can see the long chains of peaks to the north and south of the city. It’s late spring now and the mountains are draped in ice on their upper ridges, and lower down their snow-filled gulleys resemble the camouflage of a killer whale. It’s hard to believe that a country so beautiful is in the midst of a brutal conflict, and has been for years. But there’s always the ruined armoured vehicles, tilted at the verges of the road like ships that have run aground in the shallows and been abandoned, to remind us otherwise.
An hour west of the city centre the road divides. The route to the north-west leads up to Paghman and the southern towards Ghazni. We take the lower branch and move beyond Maidan Shahr, the natural pass that protects the city’s western flank. Then an hour later, at the next main junction, we turn into the mountainous folds of Wardak province, where the road deteriorates a stage further.
It’s the Afghan version of a B road, virtually impassable by Western standards but not at all bad by Afghan ones, and it’s more like being in a boat than a car because of the constant pitching and rolling. Sometimes the rocky surface of the road changes to packed earth and suddenly the crunch of stone under us is silenced as if by a ceasefire. But it’s only ever for a few miles before we are fighting the dust and stone again.
In the early afternoon we stop to buy some apples from a farmer who’s put up a stall by the side of the road. As I’m talking to the farmer, our men take their pattus, lay them over the ground near the road, and perform their afternoon prayers.
We move west through a landscape of great beauty, winding through a succession of long broad valleys where the surrounding slopes glide gently down towards the emerald-coloured patchwork of the valley floors. Beyond Jalrez, the slopes begin to steepen and grow less gentle, and the grassy bloom turns to darker stone, which rises steadily on both sides of the road.
Several hours later I hear Aref’s voice on the two-way.
‘We’re coming to Gardandiwal,’ he says. ‘I think we should stay here tonight. We won’t reach Bamiyan today.’
Gardandiwal sits at the crossroads of four mountain ranges and has the feeling of a primitive gold miners’ outpost from the nineteenth century. We install ourselves at a tiny mehman-khana beneath the clusters of mud-walled homes that sprawl up the hillside. At sunset we sit on the wooden veranda and the owner brings us kebabs and rice. The river that runs through