Under the absolute Amir

by Frank A. Martin

The late Amir, who was ill with gout at the time, was sitting in durbar, and as soon as the earthquake commenced, all those with him ran out at once and left him sitting there, unable to move. With his constitutional dread of earthquakes, his feelings, when he found himself deserted, may be imagined; but he was not left for long, for three or four of the slave-boys rushed back as soon as the violence began to subside, and carried him out into the garden. The shock, however, affected the Amir so much that, as a thanksgiving for his escape from harm, on the following day he ordered three to four hundred prisoners to be released. My Hindustani servants were asleep in their room when the disturbance started, and, roused from sleep by the violence of the shaking, and not knowing the cause, for this was their first experience of an earthquake, they rushed out into the open, lightly clad as they were, and, sinking on their knees in the snow, prayed aloud to be protected from the calamity that was upon them, and they were down with fever the next day, the result of exposure and nervous shock.

In Kohistan, close to Kabul, earthquakes of such violence occur at times that the mangers for feeding horses are thrown down. These mangers, which are built of stone and mud, stand some three feet high only, and are fairly thick, so that the shaking of the earth may be imagined when such are overthrown. In 1899 the fortune-tellers prophesied that in the month which corresponded to November of that year many earthquakes would be experienced, and the last earthquake of all would happen on a certain day, which they specified, and would be of such violence that all Kabul would be demolished. Strangely enough, towards the end of that month earthquakes were of continued occurrence for about two weeks, and not a day passed without at least one shock being felt, and on some days there were many, both during the day and night. Although earthquakes are usual towards the end of the year, a prolonged continuation was very exceptional, and the fortune-tellers’ prediction affected the people to such extent that those who had tents pitched them on the ground outside the city walls, and lived in them, for they fully believed that as the prophecy was in part fulfilled, the rest of it would come about also, and that it was foolish to live in a house that was appointed to fall on a certain day, and in its fall would crush them. The Amir, however, who had consulted his own fortune-tellers, gave orders that any person found living in a tent outside the city on the day following his proclamation would be imprisoned, so all of them had perforce to return to their houses. But, in spite of the Amir’s assurance, the appointed day for the overthrowing of Kabul was passed in fear and trembling by the majority of the people, which was not allayed by the day commencing with one huge shock, which made the whole city tremble. However, no further shocks happened, and that was the last one felt for several months.

Some of the earthquakes which occurred from time to time were of the nature of a single bump, while others were of a rumbling and shaking character. I have noticed that the latter sort, which on one or two occasions occurred at night when all was quiet, and I was lying in bed before falling asleep, could be heard coming before they could be felt under the house to make it shake, and could also be heard pass on, travelling from the south-west towards the north-east. These earthquakes resembled a very heavy drag driven along a bumpy underground road, which, as it passed immediately underneath, made the house vibrate, and then could be heard passing on until lost in the distance.

The subsoil indications show that the valley of Kabul was at one time a large lake, and that the valley was not once, but many times submerged, and it is said by the people a story has been handed down to them that where Kabul is now was once a great lake of many miles in circumference. It is probable that at the point where the river flows through a cleft in the mountains which surround Kabul on its way down to India, landslips occurred at times, which blocked up the outlet of the river, and caused the water to rise until all the surrounding country was submerged, and the water went on rising until it was so high that the dam caused by the landslip was unable to hold it back, and then the obstacle would be swept away, and the valley drained of its water, and remain dry until another landslip blocked the river’s progress once again. From the appearance of the sub-strata when making excavations, I concluded that there had been many inundations, and the thicknesses of the different deposits superimposed one on the other, showed the floods to have lasted for varying periods of time. On the mountain sides around Kabul there are also rocks and boulders which have the appearance of being water-washed, and in some places the under-part of rocky cliffs are holed through and worn smooth by the action of water, similar to cliffs on the seashore, and as some of these appear at very high levels, it would lead one to suppose that the Kabul valley was at one time of much greater extent, and subterranean disturbances subsequently threw up high some of those portions of the land which were formerly under water. The rocks on the Asman Heights, past which the river flows, are water-marked and worn up to some fifty yards above the level of the river, which is probably the height to which some of the floods rose.

In the mountains near Khurd Kabul, about thirty miles from Kabul, thin seams of new coal have been found outcropping. There are several seams deposited one on the other, and they vary in thickness from a sixteenth of an inch to eight or nine inches, and are separated by thin layers of clay, the thicker seams of coal being lower than the thinner ones. In some cases three inches in thickness of the strata show about twelve different deposits of carbonaceous matter, and point to various short periods of inundation following in rapid succession.

Throughout Afghanistan the strata are in a most disturbed condition, and in innumerable places veins of ore, which are rich in metal, are found outcropping on the mountain sides. Ores of copper, lead, silver, zinc, tin, nickel, etc., are numerous. Gold is found in the sand of several of the northern rivers, and it is said the river Oxus is rich in it too. Gold-bearing quartz was found within a couple of miles of Kandahar, but it has been exhausted. Samples which have been kept of the gold embedded in a matrix of quartz show the mine to have been a rich one, and it is said that large quantities of gold were obtained from it by former Amirs. Many of the copper ores sent me to assay were very rich in metal, and samples containing thirty to forty per cent. of copper were common, and there were others with about sixty per cent. of metal, while in some of the veins of ore native copper was present. Lead ores of over seventy per cent. of metal are worked to obtain the required quantity of lead for bullet-moulding, and one lead ore which was sent me for assay contained a little over ten per cent. of silver. In the Sher Darwaza Heights is a vein of copper ore which runs throughout its length, outcropping here and there, but it is a thin seam and rather poor in metal, as compared with other ores round about, but the percentage is enough to pay handsomely for its working. In other parts of the mountains round Kabul, however, are veins of copper ore of sufficient extent and richness to supply the requirements of Europe for several years, and if the country was thoroughly prospected, it is probable that the existence of still further deposits would be revealed.

The people of the country are very chary of giving information of the existence of ores in their locality, fearing that if such are known to exist, the Amir will have the mines worked, and then the people of the neighbourhood will be pressed to labour on them, and as that means taking them away from their fields and crops to work hard and long on a small pay, the prospect does not appeal to them. Should the Amir decide to take advantage of the mineral wealth of his country, this is what would happen, no doubt; but, for some unknown reason, the Amir prefers that these mines, of the richness of which he is cognisant, should remain unworked; and yet he appointed several sappers and miners to prospect the whole of the country and bring in samples of all rocks, etc., which had the appearance of being of value and were different in colour and weight to the common rocks and earth; and these men were placed under me, and I had orders to go over the samples they brought in and assay and report on those which contained metals. From this I gathered the impression that the Amir eventually intended working the mines, but up to the time I left the country nothing had been said or done to this end. The lead ores are worked for the use of the Government, and the Amir has proved that his people are sufficiently intelligent to learn and carry out any work taught them, and he had sufficient confidence in my report on ores to send the lead-smelting men to work on another ore which I recommended when that of the old working ran out, so that it is difficult to understand why the exploitation of the mines is not put in hand; but I have sometimes thought that the Amir perhaps fears the cupidity of his powerful neighbours, should he by working the mines of his country give practical evidence of its richness, and thereby lose it.

The people of Turkestan, when speaking of the richness of their country in mineral wealth, claim that it is much more wealthy than the rest of Afghanistan, but no ores from that country were sent to me for assay. One Turkistani chief brought with him, when on a visit to the Amir, an ore which he said contained gold, but it turned out to be iron pyrites. This chief is not the only man who has made that mistake, for ores of iron pyrites exemplify the old saying that all is not gold that glitters. At Durrah-i-Yusef, in Turkestan, a seam of coal outcrops in the valley, but it is new coal or lignite. The seam has been described to me as some six feet in thickness, and of considerable extent. There are many uses to which this coal could be put, and several tons of it were brought to Kabul to try as fuel in the boiler-house instead of wood, and the experiment was successful; but the cost of carrying the coal by camels over the intervening ranges of mountains, a three weeks’ journey, was prohibitive.

The question of obtaining fuel for the boilers in the Kabul workshops has lately become of urgent importance, for the trees of the country up to several days’ journey from Kabul have been used up, and further fuel is barely obtainable, while the young trees which have been planted in places for a future supply of fuel will not be ready for cutting for eight years or more to come. In an effort to remedy matters, the present Amir, a year or so ago, issued a proclamation offering a large reward to any one finding coal near to Kabul. The reward was to be thirty thousand rupees for coal found within five miles of the city, twenty thousand rupees within ten miles, ten thousand within twenty miles, and so on. But there was one stipulation, and that was, that the coal found should be so located that a road could be constructed up to within a mile of the mine for wheeled traffic, otherwise the amount of reward would be reduced in proportion to the distance from the mine to which carts could be brought. The proclamation resulted in the country for many miles around being very thoroughly prospected by the people, and although very few of them had ever seen coal, they eventually found thin seams outcropping in several places, which evidently belonged to one original bed or field of coal before subterranean disturbances dislocated the sub-strata around. I was sent to inspect and report on these outcrops, and found that it was new coal in such thin seams that the yield would not repay the cost of working, and borings failed to reveal the existence of thicker seams within easy reach below. A gang of my men, who were appointed to search further afield, found thick seams of new coal at Sheikh Ali, some six days’ journey from Kabul towards Hazara, and further outcrops were discovered at other places on the same range of mountains; but in this case also the intervening mountains made the cost of camel transport far too expensive for the Government to take advantage of the find, and the Amir is strongly prejudiced against anything in the way of tram or light railways, which would be the only way of carrying coal thence cheaply.

It is more than probable that the Kabul workshops will have to close soon for want of fuel to keep the machines running, and the Amir told me, shortly before I left Kabul, that the local supply of wood is exhausted, and that there is little likelihood of coal being found near enough to be of value. The last winter I spent in Kabul, wood was so scarce that it realized three times the price of five years before, and there was very little to be had even at that price.