Full Tilt by Dervla Murphy Page B

ever descended to Persia’s present depths. Is it that if a nation expends sufficient energy to get to a peak she hasn’t enough left to maintain herself there and falls far, whereas if she remains at a certain restricted level a limited degree of national well-being can be maintained indefinitely? I suppose history proves that this is the pattern.
    But to get back to 4.30 a.m., when I set off down the road and after fifty yards was held up by two police, this time wearing the jackets of their uniforms to emphasise the solemnity of the occasion. They said I’d have to go by autobus to Khandahar, and I said, ‘What rot!’ and showed my pass from the Commander in Herat. Then they pointed to a petrol-tanker and signed that it couldn’t go on either, and to their own jeep containing two soldiers with machine-guns! (You never saw anything quite so unhappy as an Afghan soldier wearing Western uniform – the poor lads looked as though they were in a torture-chamber .) I began to wonder now whether ( a ) World War III had started or ( b ) a little local war with Russia was brewing. Anyway something was happening somewhere so I retired to the tea-house and went asleep again until 7 a.m., having been told that the bus was coming at 7.30. Eventually it came at 10 a.m. and all the passengers tumbled out for chi and hands and face washing in the jube , and lavatory work in an adjacent field; unlike Turkish and Persian tea-houses , Afghan tea-houses have no lavatories attached. Two women were travelling on the roof amidst everyone’s goods and chattels – very symbolic! I simply can’t imagine what torture it must have been for them. Of course they don’t often travel at all and my horror was multiplied by ten when I discovered that these two were going to Kabul hospital because they were very ill ; yet for 1,000 km they had to adhere to the top of a bouncing bus on an awful road through blazing sun and cold night air and choking dust.
    The bus looked like something left on a municipal dump for a year and then retrieved during a National Emergency. It was almost entirelyhome-made with no cover on the engine and no doors or windows. You could read on the ceiling inside that it was constructed partly from wooden boxes in which something had been imported from the USSR. The wheels had belonged to a truck and were far too big for the body and the seats were planks across which you scrambled to get to your place as no space was wasted on an aisle down the middle. The bus had been so overcrowded on leaving Herat that my entry made no difference to the general misery (not that the Afghans seemed to regard it as misery) of being tightly wedged with nothing to lean on back or front and no chance to move an inch in any direction once you sat down. Eventually at 11 a.m. we set off and about ten miles from Robat the road petered out – not merely the good road, but any road at all. For the next two hours we bumped on over the hard rock and baked sand of the desert till the faintest trace of a track reappeared – which was worse than the desert. In the agony of the journey I’d forgotten to wonder why we were being compelled to travel in convoy but towards evening we passed a Land-Rover with its windshield shattered and its doors riddled by bullet-holes and two soldiers on guard.
    I won’t go into all the harrowing details, beyond saying that it took us twenty-two and a half hours to cover 420 miles. Apart from some eighty miles of sheer desert it would have been good cycling country with lots of mountains – not in the least as monotonous as I’d expected. But the road – or lack of road – would have made it very gruelling. With the seven days I estimate I’ve saved I’m planning to go up from Kabul to Mazar-i-Sharif via Bamian and return via Kunduz – I think it is permitted to go up from the east side.
    The one compensation last night was the beauty of that wonderfully desolate landscape by moonlight, never to be forgotten. We