At the Court of the Amîr: A Narrative

by John Alfred Gray

CHAPTER V.
Afghan Dwellings.

The Residential streets of Kabul. Their appearance and arrangement. The Police. Criminal Punishments. The Houses. Their internal arrangement. Precautions to ensure privacy. Manner of building for the rich and for the poor. Effect of rain and earthquake. The warming of houses in the winter. Afternoon teas. Bath-houses. The Afghan bath.

The same day that I attended the Hospital, I received an order to visit a man of some importance, the brother of the Prince’s Chief Secretary or Mirza. Although it was but a very short distance, I went on horseback, for I found it was not usual for any man of position to walk about the town. The patient was suffering from Paralysis agitans, or Shaking palsy, and was of course incurable. I was not allowed to depart until I had eaten some sweets and drank tea.

Residential Streets.

To reach his house we rode through the streets in which are the living houses of Kabul. I think the most striking peculiarity of these Residential streets is their narrowness, and the height and irregular arrangement of the almost windowless walls. Generally, they are simply narrow passages necessary to obtain access to one, or a group, of the living houses. Few of the streets, except the bazaars, can be called in any sense thoroughfares. They wind and twist about most irregularly, sometimes open to the sky, sometimes covered in by rooms belonging to the adjoining houses, and they usually end abruptly at the closed door of a house or garden. When one or more rooms are built over the street the builder rarely trusts to the strength of the original wall: he fixes wooden uprights on each side to support the cross beams. Dirtiness and want of ventilation are conspicuous. Drainage and street scavenging are also conspicuous by their absence. At one time it was exceedingly unsafe to traverse the streets after nightfall—I mean for the Kabulis themselves. Robbery and murder were every night occurrences. It is now, however, less dangerous. There are sentries belonging to the military police posted at intervals, each having a small oil lamp at his station. After ten o’clock at night every passer-by must give the night word or be kept by the police till the morning, when he is brought before a magistrate to give a reason for his wanderings. And the Amîr now punishes the crimes of robbery and murder most severely. For robbery and theft the hand of the criminal is amputated in a rough and ready way. It is done in this manner. The local butcher is called in. He knots a rope tightly just above the wrist of the criminal, and with a short sharp knife he severs the hand at the joint, plunging the raw stump into boiling oil. Then the criminal becomes a patient and is sent to the hospital to be cured. No flap of skin has been made to cover the end of the bone, and the skin has been scalded for two inches or more by the oil, so that months go by before the stump heals by cicatrization. A priest one day—he may have been a humane Afghan—suggested to the Amîr that operations of this and other kinds on criminals should be done by the European doctor. The Amîr negatived the suggestion with a sharp reprimand.

For murder—hanging and other forms of putting to death were found inadequate. So that now in addition to the murderer being given into the hands of the deceased’s friends for them to kill as they please, such a fine is put upon his whole family—father, brothers, uncles, and cousins—that they are all ruined. Mere life is of no great value to an Afghan, and at one time if a man found it inconvenient to kill his enemy himself, he could easily get someone who for six thousand rupees would do it for him and take the risk of being hung, so long as the money was paid to his family.

The Approach to the Kabul Dwelling-house.

Supposing you have to visit a person in the town, you are conducted on horseback along the narrow winding streets. You dismount at a door and stumble into a dark winding passage with your head bent to avoid a bang against an irregular beam, and you go slowly for fear of puddles and holes which you cannot see. You come into the open, and find yourself in a garden with flowers and trees, and a tank or pond in the middle, or in a small courtyard with simply a well. The house is built round the garden or yard, and consists of a series of rooms opening by doors into one another and with the windows all looking into the garden.