Under the absolute Amir

by Frank A. Martin

The country round Kabul is well cultivated, and as there is little rainfall irrigation is resorted to for watering the crops. Trees have of late years been planted along most of the roads leading from the city, and some are to be seen in the walled-in gardens which dot the plain here and there, but on the hills round about the absence of trees and vegetation makes them look very bare and desolate by contrast.

The city contains some hundred and fifty to a hundred and sixty thousand inhabitants, and, like all other cities in the country, is walled-in. On the north-west side the city has overgrown itself, and here the palaces of the Amir and princes and houses of the officials and well-to-do people are built. Deh Afghanan, which gives its name to the new portion of the city, also lies on this side, and is yearly growing larger, for all who can leave the old portion of the city do so, and build houses and live in the fashionable quarter.

The streets of the city are narrow and winding, and are mostly paved with round cobble stones of varying sizes and badly laid, and in the interstices between the stones a horse sometimes gets its hoof and lames itself. The roadways are sloped from the houses on either side towards the centre for the purpose of drainage, and refuse is thrown out into the street from the houses, and lies where it falls and rots, so that the stench on occasions when there is little wind is particularly trying.

The houses and shops are built of sun-dried brick and clay, with flat roofs formed of timbers stretching from wall to wall which are covered with grass mats, over which a thick layer of clay is laid. The floors of the rooms are of the same materials, and the houses are small and packed close together. The upper stories of the houses in the wider bazars jut out over the streets, the ends of the overhanging beams being supported by wooden struts. In the narrower streets the upper stories cover the road entirely, forming dark crooked passages of unpleasant odour through which it is best to pick one’s way with a light. The widest bazars are about fifteen feet in width, and the narrowest about four feet, and as pack horses and camels carrying loads are to be met with all over the city, it is often a matter of difficulty to avoid being swept out of the saddle when riding past them. The strings of loaded camels are worse than the pack-horses in this respect, for the camel has no thought for others, and sticks to the middle of the street, its load projecting far on either side, and necessitating a horseman stretching himself flat along the back of his horse to get past, and it is in the narrowest part of a bazar that one meets these obstructions more often than not.

Streams of water led from a higher level up the river run alongside the street through most of the bazars for the use of the inhabitants. The water is good enough where it enters the city, but as it goes on it gathers impurities of all sorts. Refuse and filth from the houses find their way into it, people sit and wash themselves in it, and dead bodies, too, are washed in the same stream without thought of the disease which caused death. By the time the water reaches the Bala Hisar side of the city its quality may be imagined, and yet this is the water the inhabitants have to use for drinking and cooking purposes. In cholera and other epidemics it is in that portion of the city which the water reaches last where the disease rages most, and no doubt it is the washing of the bodies of people dead of the disease in the same water used by others for drinking which accounts for a good deal of the spread and long stay of those epidemics which visit Kabul periodically and carry off so many thousands of its inhabitants.

Shortly before Amir Abdur Rahman’s death he instituted a system of latrines in the city with donkeys to carry away the soil, selling the latter to those cultivators who required it. This did much to sweeten the city, but as all private houses could not be included in the scheme because only the larger houses have refuse-shoots built up against the outside wall whence the soil could be carried away, and no strange man may enter a house where women are, there was still a good deal left to be desired. The present Amir, during the cholera epidemic of 1903, had all the streets of the city swept and cleaned daily by an army of sweepers, and this was a step in the right direction, but with the necessity for cleanliness removed orientals soon fall back into their happy-go-lucky habits.

With the quantity of refuse thrown out of some thirty thousand houses daily the city of Kabul would soon become impossible to live in, but for the scavenging work done by the dogs and crows, who are the unconscious remedy of the evil, and prevent the city becoming uninhabitable. I was told that one of the former Amirs had all bazar dogs killed, and the occasion was remembered, because soon afterwards a bad epidemic of cholera visited the city. The present Amir also gave orders for all bazar dogs to be killed, and the bulk of them were despatched, and then a few months later the cholera epidemic of 1903 broke out and was noted for its virulence.

CHAPTER IV
KABUL—continued

How streets are governed—City magistrate—Robberies and murders—Bazar shops—Style of palaces and better-class houses—Climate of Kabul.