At the Court of the Amîr: A Narrative

by John Alfred Gray

Internal Arrangement of the House.

The richer men, especially those whose houses have been built within the present reign, have large and beautiful gardens full of fruit-trees and flowers, and through them ripples a stream or channel to supply the tank with fresh water. A house so placed that a stream can be brought through the garden from some irrigation canal is of greater value than one where water can be obtained only from a well. These modern houses are better built and much more elaborate than the older ones. The windows, large and often filled with coloured glass, are made to open and shut on hinges. The floors, though rarely boarded, are of beaten earth carefully levelled. The rooms are decorated all round in the Oriental way with “takchas,” or small niches having the Saracenic arch. There is a frieze just below the ceiling, and below this is a dado, with mouldings which are arranged also around the takchas and the fireplace, if one exists. The mouldings are of a hard and fine cement with which the whole wall is faced. The best cement is brown in colour, very like Portland cement, and is found at Herat. Generally the wall is whitewashed, and sometimes before the cement is dry it is sprinkled with sparkling particles of talc. The ceiling may be boarded, but more often the beams are hidden by crimson drapery stretched tightly across. In the winter a crimson curtain is hung over the door. The windows, except in the Amîr’s palace, are rarely curtained.

The takchas or recesses are filled with vases, lamps, or candlesticks, and the floor is covered with beautiful Turkestan rugs or carpets. These, with the addition of a velvet-covered mattress, properly constitute the furniture of a room, for Orientals habitually sit cross-legged on the ground. Now-a-days, however, no rich Afghan townsman considers his room furnished without a chair or two; not that he uses them much except when a distinguished foreigner calls, but it is a sign that he knows what is correct. Sometimes you even see a small table, but this is not usual. The houses of the richer men are in the suburbs. They cover large spaces of ground and are rarely more than one story high. They are not built level with the garden, but are raised some three or four steps. The roof is flat, and a staircase leads to the top. In the summer, on account of the heat, it is usual for a tent to be erected on the top of the house, and for the owner to sleep there. There are apartments which are devoted solely to the ladies of the harem, and also kitchens and quarters for the servants and slaves. The stables are, as a rule, in another enclosure. The whole house and garden, surrounded by its high wall and entered by only one gate, is absolutely private and screened entirely from any curious eye.

Generally there is a room arranged apart from the rest with its window opening outside and not into the garden. This is often a story above the others, and has a staircase of its own. It is for the reception of male visitors who are not relatives or intimate friends of the host.

The houses of the less rich, particularly those in the heart of the town where space is limited, are two, three, or even four stories high. They are built on very much the same plan, though the garden is replaced by a small cramped yard. Many of these are very old houses, and their window sashes do not hang on hinges, but consist of three shutters one above the other, sometimes beautifully carved. If the owner can afford glass the top shutter has one small pane, the second, two, and the third, three; generally, however, there is no glass. The shutters all push up out of the way, and the window is generally wide open, for in the spring, summer, and autumn, the heat is considerable. It is only in the newest houses that you see fireplaces, and these are rarely used, not because the winter is not cold, but because wood is too expensive to burn in such an extravagant way. There is coal in the country, but it is not in use. Even if mines were worked it would be far too costly a proceeding in the absence of railways to bring the coal to town. Quite lately a little inferior coal has been brought for use in the Amîr’s workshops, but there is none for sale.

In the winter people keep themselves warm by means of a charcoal brazier or sandali, which I will describe presently. In the city, the houses being crowded so close to one another, it was to me a source of wonder how the owners could prevent themselves being overlooked. I was informed that if a man standing on the top of his house could see into his neighbour’s enclosure, even into the garden, he was compelled by law to build a wall or screen to cut off his view: a violation of the privacy of a man’s dwelling by looking over the wall is a great offence in Afghanistan.

The Building of the House.

When a house is to be built, a trench two feet deep is dug and large stones or pieces of rock, unshaped, are packed in with a mixture of clay and chopped straw. This is the foundation. The thickness of the wall depends on the class of house and the height it is to be built. Two feet is about the thickness of the wall of a house one story high. In the poorer houses the wall is built of lumps of clay or mud mixed with chopped straw: in the better houses, of sun-dried bricks six inches square, an inch thick, and laid on the flat: in the best, of similar bricks properly baked. The roof is supported on beams of unshaped poplar. The wood being of poor quality the beams are arranged close together, with a space of not more than two or three inches between each. The beams are covered with rush matting, or, in some houses, little pieces of wood, about four inches long and an inch wide, are placed from beam to beam close together. Over this or the matting is placed clay and chopped straw to the thickness of eight or nine inches. Upper floors are made in precisely the same way. As there is very little rain in the country, a house built in this manner will stand for years, but it is necessary to repair the roof every autumn. When a poor-class house is carried more than one story high, the upper stories, often projecting beyond the lower, are framed with wooden beams—poplar—and the interspaces filled in with sun-dried bricks, making a wall one brick thick. The builder never trusts to the lower wall alone to support a second or third story, but invariably fixes uprights of wood in the ground against the wall to support the first floor. This may be because the extra stories have been added on as the need for more space became urgent. In the older houses the walls are rarely perpendicular, but bulge and lean in all sorts of dreadful ways. If a house seems inclined to tumble over on one side, several extra props of wood are fixed under it. Sometimes an unusual amount of rain in the autumn will wash a house down, and not infrequently an earthquake will shake one to pieces. But considering how they are built, and what they look like, it is astonishing how long they stand.

In the better class houses, built of brick, there is not so much need of the wooden uprights, though even in these you generally see them. The walls of these better houses are some of them very thick: this is the case when they are from the commencement intended to be more than one story high. The house that I lived in in Kabul, after I returned from Turkestan, was one of the better class. It was arranged in two wings at right angles to one another, and was two stories high. It was built of brick coated with mud and chopped straw. The lower walls were about four feet thick and the upper about two feet. Nevertheless, wooden uprights supported the upper floor where I lived. Below were the stables, the kitchen, and the servants’ quarters. I noticed in the stable that one of the walls bulged alarmingly, so that I did not feel any too comfortable when an earthquake—a common phenomenon in Kabul—shook the house. The sensation produced by a slight earthquake is somewhat similar to that produced when you are standing on the platform of a small station and an express comes rushing through. There is not so much noise, but the shaking is very similar. A severe earthquake is very different. It commences mildly, and you think it will stop soon—but it does not: it becomes worse and worse, the beams creak, the windows and doors rattle, the house rocks, and you wonder what is coming next. If it is daytime you escape from the house; if it is night, and in the winter, with three feet of snow outside, you wait for further developments, hoping your house will not fall on top of you.

The Warming of the House.