At the Court of the Amîr: A Narrative

by John Alfred Gray

“Another you have,” said he, and off he went. He presently returned with my dressing-gown. I objected; but, no, there was nothing extraordinary in it; in fact, it was very like an Afghan robe. I wore it, therefore, though it did not seem a very suitable riding coat.

Mountain Climbing.

It was a cold march as we crunched along through the snow, in spite of the fact that the sun was shining brightly. We were at an altitude of over sixteen thousand feet, and had to make long detours, for the road was in places blocked or rendered unsafe by the snow. In some of the detours where there was no path, we scrambled up and down terrifying slopes. My saddle, a hunting one, could not be kept in place, and we had to extemporize a breast-plate with string. In one ravine where we halted, trying to find a way out, there was a sudden crack and a splash. We had stopped over a stream crusted with ice and covered with snow, and the horse of one of the soldiers went through. The stream, however, was shallow, and only the man’s feet were wetted. There was a laugh as he urged his horse out.

We descended from the region of snow into valleys where the air quivered with heat, and one’s face was nearly blistered. In one, where we stopped for lunch, I put a clinical thermometer for a moment against my coat sleeve. The mercury shot up to the top at once. I was glad when we moved on again. We passed a spring bubbling up near the road, whose waters were impregnated with iron, the ground all round being stained brown. Jan Mahomed said the water contained copper and was poisonous.

I remember one narrow but wild rocky ravine, with a river foaming and roaring down it. The road ran along a few yards above the water. There was a natural bridge of rock, over which the road ran, and just beyond, a waterfall of some depth, where, at the bottom of the fall, the water rushed under an arch of rock and was lost to sight. It reappeared, I was told, in a valley about two miles off, and they said His Highness the Amîr one day, when travelling by, offered a prize of a hundred rupees to the man who would plunge in and explore the underground river. A duck had been put in and had reappeared alive in the valley. A soldier undertook the adventure at once, and was preparing for his perilous journey when the Amîr forbad it. His Highness said, “If he is drowned I lose a man of courage, and if he succeed what gain is there? Give him the rupees.”

Camp in the Bamian Valley.

We were now about ninety miles from Kabul. For the first forty miles we travelled due west, after that north-west, till we entered the ravine I spoke of, which led nearly due north. As we rode on, the ravine descended and opened into a large and very fertile valley. The mountain at the west of the gorge was red in colour, quite different from those we had been travelling among. Looking up with some interest at it, I distinguished battlemented walls and towers leading up the mountain, and, at the top, clusters of ruined houses and walls. There was no sign of life. The city was deserted. They told me the place was called Zohàk-i-Marhan, and was built a thousand years ago (“hazar sol”) by the Emperor Alexander (“Sekunder”).

I did not, however, in the style of architecture see anything that could lead one to suppose the buildings were of Greek origin. It is interesting to note that there is in Afghanistan a tribe called Zohàk, which is a division of the Ushturyani (the Stauri of Pliny), who formerly occupied the district west of Bamian. Zohàk is stated by Dr. Bellew to be the same as Zàk and Sàk, and stands for the ancient inhabitants of Sistàn and Makràn, Assyrian subjects of Nimrod, king of Babylon.

We descended into the valley and camped not far from the red mountain, near the village of Topchi.

It was the month of May, the sun shone brightly, and the fields around were green. Jan Mahomed had brought the musicians—but not the dancing girls—with him. We luxuriated after the bitter winds and sleet of the mountains, and the heat and weariness of the stony valleys. When lunch was over Jan Mahomed sent me some sweets and a bottle of champagne. I found that my servants, though Mahomedans, felt they were justified after their fatigues in finishing the bottle. The musicians sat playing in Jan Mahomed’s tent, and as I lay in mine reading a novel, the quaint music, softened by the distance, was more pleasing than I had supposed possible. For years afterwards the twang of the rubarb, the irregular thud of the drums, and the monotonous sound of the singing, brought back vividly to me that day in the Bamian valley, when I was a new comer in the country.