From the Indus to the Tigris

by H. W. Bellew

The city was taken and destroyed by Nadír Sháh in 1738, after a long siege, during which the Afghan defenders displayed such conspicuous bravery that Nadír largely recruited his army from amongst them, and advanced on his victorious career towards India.

On our way to the ruins we visited the shrine of Sultán Wais, and examined the great porphyry bowl supposed to be the begging-pot of Fo or Budh. It is a circular bowl four feet wide, and two feet deep in the centre (inside measurement), and the sides are four inches thick. When struck with the knuckle, the stone, which is a hard compact black porphyry, gives out a clear metallic ring. The interior still bears very distinct marks of the chisel, and on one side under the rim bears a Persian inscription in two lines of very indistinct letters, amongst which the words Shahryár (or Prince) Jaláluddín are recognisable, as also the word táríbh or “date.” The exterior is covered with Arabic letters in four lines, below which is an ornamental border, from which grooves converge to a central point at the bottom of the bowl. Many of the words in the inscription were recognised as Persian, but we had not time to decipher it General Pollock had an accurate transcript of the whole prepared by a scribe in the city, and forwarded it, I believe, to Sir John Kaye.

The keeper of the shrine could tell us nothing about the history of this curious relic, except that it, and a smaller one with handles on each side, which was carried away by the British in 1840, had been brought here by Hazrat Ali, but from where nobody knows. Possibly it may have come from Peshín, which in documents is still written Foshanj and Foshín.

The bowl now rests against the trunk of an old mulberry-tree in a corner of the enclosure of the tomb of Sultán Wais. The trunk of the tree is studded all over with hundreds of iron nails and wooden pegs, like the trees described on the march to Hykalzai. About the enclosure were lying a number of great balls, chiselled out of solid blocks of limestone. The largest were about fourteen inches in diameter, and the smaller ones five or six inches only. They were, our attendants informed us, some of the balls used in ancient sieges of the adjoining city in the time of the Arabs. They were propelled by a machine called manjaníc in Arabic—a sort of ballista or catapult.

From the ruins of the old city we went on to those of Nadírabad, now surrounded by marshes caused by the overflow of irrigation canals, and returned to our quarters by the southern side of the present city, or Ahmad Shahí. The fortifications have been recently repaired and fresh plastered, and have been strengthened by the construction of a series of redoubts, called Kása burj.

12th February.—We visited the city this afternoon with the Saggid and General Safdar Ali. We entered at the Herat gate, and at the Chársú turned to the left up the Shahí bazaar, and crossing the parade-ground, where we received a salute of fifteen guns, passed into the Arg or “citadel,” which was our prison-house for thirteen months when I was here in 1857-58 with Lumsden’s mission. I say prison-house, because we could never move outside it but once a day for exercise, and then accompanied by a strong guard, as is described in my “Journal of a Mission to Afghanistan in 1857-58.” From the citadel we went to see the tomb of Ahmad Sháh, Durrani, the founder of the city, and thence passing out at the Topkhana gate, returned to our quarters in the garden of the late Sardár Rahmdil Khán.

The main bazaars had evidently been put in order for our visit. The streets had been swept, and the shops stocked with a very varied assortment of merchandise and domestic wares, which were now displayed to the best advantage. The sides of the main thoroughfare were lined with a picturesque crowd of citizens and foreigners, brought here by their trade callings. The demeanour of the crowd was quiet and orderly, and their looks were expressive of good-will; which is more than could be said of any similar crowd in the bazaars of Peshawar, as was very justly remarked at the time by General Pollock. As we passed along, I now and again caught a finger pointing at me with “Haghah dai” (“That’s him”); and in the Chársú, where we had to pick our way through a closely packed crowd, I was greeted with more than one nod of recognition, and the familiar “Jorhasted?” (“Are you well?”) “Khúsh ámadíd” (“You are welcome”), &c.

The citadel, which is now occupied by Sardár Mír Afzal Khán, Governor of Farráh, and his family, is in a very decayed and neglected state, and the court of the public audience hall is disgracefully filthy. The court and quarters formerly occupied by the mission of 1857 are now tenanted by General Safdar Ali, the Amir’s military governor of the city.

From the citadel we passed through the artillery lines, a wretched collection of half-ruined and tumbledown hovels, choked with dung-heaps, horse litter, and filth of every description, and turned off to the Ahmad Shahí mausoleum. The approach to it is over an uneven bit of ground, which is one mass of ordure, the stench from which was perfectly dreadful. It quite sickened us, and kept us spitting till we got out into the open country again. The tomb, like everything else here, appears neglected and fast going to decay. The stone platform on which it stands is broken at the edges, and the steps leading up to it, though only three or four, are suffered to crumble under the feet of visitors without an attempt at repair. The dome has a very dilapidated look from the falling off here and there of the coloured tiles that cover it, whilst those that are still left make the disfigurement the more prominent by their bright glaze. Where uncovered, the mortar is honeycombed by the nests of a colony of blue pigeons, which have here found a safe asylum even from their natural enemies of the hawk species. The interior is occupied by a central tomb, under which repose, in the odour of sanctity—though those surrounding it are anything but sanctified—the ashes of the first and greatest of the Durrani kings. Near it are some smaller tombs, the graves of various members of the king’s family. The cupola is very tastefully decorated by a fine Arabesque gilding, in which run all round the sides—the dome being supported on an octagonal building—a series of quotations from the Curán. These, in the light admitted through the fine reticulations of the lattice windows, appeared remarkable fresh and bright, though untouched since their first production a century ago. We doffed our hats as we entered the sacred precincts, as our attendants took off their shoes at the threshold, excepting only the Saggid and General Safdar Ali and Colonel Táj Muhammad, who were much too tightly strapped in their odd compounds of Asiatic and European military uniforms to attempt any such disarrangement of their evidently unaccustomed habiliments. The mujawwir, or keeper of the shrine—for amongst this saint-loving people the tenant of so grand a tomb could hardly escape being converted into so holy a character—was quite pleased at this mark of respect on our part, and made himself very agreeable by his welcome and readiness to afford information. “I know,” said he, with a hasty and timid glance at the shodden feet of our companions, “that this is the manner in which Europeans testify their reverence for holy places. The officers who visited this tomb when the British army was here observed the same custom, and always uncovered the head on entering beneath this roof. It is quite correct. Every nation has its own customs; you uncover the head, and we uncover the feet. In either case, respect for the departed great is the object, and by either observance it is manifested. It is all right.” The old man told us he was seventy-two years old, and had not been beyond the precincts of the tomb for the last thirty years. It was his world. He had not been as far as the bazaars in all this time, nor had he seen the cantonments built by the British outside the city. This sounds incredible, but I don’t think it improbable, for I know of three or four instances amongst the Yusufzais of the Peshawar valley, in which old men have assured me that in their whole lives they had never moved beyond the limits of their own villages, not even so far as to visit the next village, hardly three miles distant. How the old mujawwir managed to exist so long—for one can hardly say live with propriety—in this vile stinking corner of this filthy city, is not to be understood except on the explanation of habit becoming second nature. Both the confinement and the atmosphere had however left their mark upon him, and had blanched his gaunt sickly visage as white as the beard that graced his tall lank figure.

From the mausoleum we passed through a quarter of the city which had evidently not been prepared for our visit. The narrow lanes were filthy in the extreme, the shops were very poorly stocked, and altogether the place looked oppressed, as indeed it is, by the unpaid, ill-clad, and hungry soldiery we found lounging about its alleys. We were glad to pass out of the Topkhana gate, and once more breathe the fresh air of the open country.