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Outside Magazine December 2003
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The Kabul Express (cont.)

LEAP OF FAITH: crossing the Harirud river from the Minaret of Jam (photograph by Seamus Murphy)
THERE WERE TWO guns under my pillow at Jam. To reach this spot in central Afghanistan's Ghor province, we'd doubled back to Kabul and flown west to Herat on Ariana Airlines, a.k.a. Air Inshallah—"God Willing." (The ticket's fine print noted that my family was entitled to 32,200 grams of pure silver if I died.) In the disappointingly dusty old city, we'd commandeered a Toyota HiLux 4x4 and a new driver—shopkeeper Gul Agha Karime's car and his 19-year-old nephew—plus a 21-year-old translator. Both young men were named Wahid. We headed back east on the Central Route, through a wide valley dotted with camels, following the Harirud upstream. Here Afghanistan seemed to be made of kitty litter, piled into mountains.

The two Wahids promptly blew their young minds. During a short break along the Harirud, we caught them smoking hashish—the famous Afghan Black, dark and oily. Driver Wahid was already a virtuoso nitwit, but as we climbed into the tortuous Qasa Murg Range, his judgment collapsed. When we slid toward a 1,000-foot precipice, he simply giggled, looking in the mirror to see if we were mad at him.

We were. We confiscated the hashish and ground onward, through the sad village of Chest-i-Sharif, where the teahouse television offered a documentary about Sebastian Junger in Afghanistan that left the crowd stone-faced. The next day, after six more hours, we finally reached the valley of Jam. In a narrow gorge we picked up Bahabadin, the headman of the tiny Persian-speaking Jam community, dressed in a plaid vest, with a plaid turban tailing down his back. I made a show of handing over the brass seal, and he made a show of being pleased. He piled in, and after Wahid rammed us into a sharp rock, causing our third flat, we finally came to the confluence of two streams, and stopped, and got out, and stared, speechless.

At 215 feet, the Minaret of Jam is the second-tallest minaret in the world, after the mosque of Qutab Minar, in New Delhi. Covered in terra-cotta lacework with geometric and floral patterns, it was built in the 12th century and retains a richness of detailing lost in every other ancient site in Afghanistan, preserved here only by the utter isolation of this tiny canyon.

The tower is tilting, its base partly eroded, and in 2002 a UNESCO team led by Gul Agha Karime and a French archaeologist threw up a stabilizing wall and erected a primitive guest house, a cement hut with eight small cells and no furniture. The two complimentary AK-47s under my pillow were loaded; the metal was rusty and battered. Even the guns here were exhausted with war.

Some barefoot shepherds appeared and removed the rifles, under Bahabadin's orders. I had settled in with Dupree's guidebook when a red SUV skidded in, parked ten feet from the base of the leaning minaret, and discharged two foreigners.

Finally, Western tourists—women in their thirties, a Swiss-German redhead and a Hong Kong Chinese. They were in western Afghanistan on NGO business. They took some pictures and then sipped tea with us inside the cool guest house.

You can still travel from one end of this country to the other without ever meeting or speaking to a female Afghan. The foreign women deal with it differently: Some go about as honorary men, unveiled, while others adopt a respectful cover of Afghan ways. These two wore traditional burqas and veils, and traveled everywhere with two Afghan men, their driver and translator. They had had no problems, they said, but they wouldn't say much else: They wouldn't give their names, and were eerily shy. It was only when they signed the guest book—the 24th party in three years—that I realized why. Their employer was International Assistance Mission, a Christian humanitarian agency. The IAM was thrown out of the country by the Taliban two weeks before September 11 for proselytizing, but now it's back and keeping a low profile. Christians—whether wearing humanitarian veils or U.S. Army helmets—have been deeply controversial here, but that is nothing new: The tower at Jam bears a Koranic inscription warning against Christian doctrines. It is a message to the heathen, and still valid.

After the women left, I clambered through a hole in the base of the tower and scrambled up the crumbling spiral stairs inside. Archaeologists have argued for decades over why the tower is here. It can't have been a watchtower—thanks to the enveloping mountains, I couldn't see a mile in any direction. But as a pilgrimage site, Jam still offers the necessary ratio of extended suffering to sudden enlightenment. Coming out of the burning desert into this oasis lent the trip an almost spiritual dimension, as is true in all of Afghanistan, really, where 80 percent of the land is arid mountains and only 12 percent is arable. Centuries ago, Babur wrote of the "pleasant shocks" of traveling in his country, passing "from distress to ease; from suffering to enjoyment." It was at once exhausting and exhilarating, the natural state for revelation.

Alas, the real purpose of Jam may have been more political than divine. The next day, we crossed the Harirud on a frayed wire cable, and Bahabadin led us up a canyon. Local people have always claimed that Jam was the great capital of Firuzkoh, the fabled "Turquoise City" of ancient narrative. Archaeologists dismissed this idea in the 1970s, but they didn't dig deep enough: Scattered up the canyon, less than a mile from the minaret, were hundreds of new holes, dug by looters who'd uncovered ancient homes beneath the soft loess. Every scrape of my boot uncovered green, blue, and turquoise potsherds.

Many of Jam's secrets have been lost to looting. In recent years, Bahabadin's own people have rushed in to dig up artifacts, until Bahabadin himself was hired to stop the looting—the poacher turned gamekeeper. "This is illegal now," he explained. "Last year, yes."

UNESCO is supposedly protecting sites around Afghanistan, too, but some are skeptical. "I don't think anybody thinks [looting] has really stopped," said Rory Stewart, a 30-year-old Scot on the staff of the British Foreign Office. In early 2002, Stewart walked from Herat to Jam and on to Kabul, researching his forthcoming book on central Afghanistan, The Places In Between. "The number of sites is so many, it is impossible to monitor, and the demand for objects is growing all the time." The best pieces migrate upward, Stewart said. He described stolen artifacts passing to Peshawar and on to New York, London, Tokyo, and Paris.

The only real hope was that the many sites like Jam could eventually divulge fresh artifacts to replace the ones stolen or, like those in the National Museum, bombed. It's not impossible. Charred wood lies about Jam in profusion, perfectly preserved for 800 years by the dry climate. Bahabadin held up a blackened timber: "Genghis," he said.

After dark, Seamus and I sat by the minaret and watched a perfectly Muslim crescent moon set on the peaks. We were leaving the next day, and to prevent the Wahids from getting dangerously stoned, we decided to get rid of the confiscated hashish—by burning it. The Afghan Black was harsh, and I coughed badly.

Ten minutes later I was laughing so hard I was crying. For the next hour we lay on the rough ground, giggling, watching the planets give way to magnitudes of stars. The earth shook with the tromp of a khan's 200,000-horsepower army. We ate candy bars. I resolved to throw out my furniture and live entirely on rugs. A meteor flashed across the sky, exploding in silence. So there you have it. Thirty years later the drugs still work.


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