Picador £17.99 pp324
In the middle of 2000, Rory Stewart went for a walk. Not a stroll to the pub or a hike over the hills, but a serious walk, across Asia. “I’m not good at explaining why,” he confesses. Perhaps he wanted to do something different after jumping out of military and diplomatic service. Perhaps he needed a challenge. Perhaps he was spying; plenty of people in Asia assumed he was. Whatever the reason, he crossed Iran, India, Pakistan and Nepal, but was unable to get into Afghanistan. Then the Taliban fell and he found himself in Herat at the start of a 36-day walk to Kabul, some of it along a section of the old Silk Road. He also had the opening of his book. His departure from Herat would have put off a less determined traveller. Picked up by security service agents, he is interrogated and then told, “It is midwinter: there are three metres of snow on the high passes, there are wolves and this is a war. You will die.” All very reasonable, but Stewart has influential friends and understands how the system of patronage works: Ismail Khan, the liberator of Herat, offers his protection. Eventually, Stewart leaves with two gunmen as escorts.
Glad to be stretching his legs again, he conjures well the pleasure of activity, but not everything is rosy: his reluctant companions are loath to be walking eight hours a day, and he is reluctant to be seen with gunmen ready to shoot children who don’t immediately offer hospitality. In the mountains and the snow, he swaps the gunmen for a 10-stone mastiff with no ears. The obstacles are still formidable and include tribal and sectarian rivalries (not everyone among the Aimaq, Ghor, Hazara and other peoples he meets thinks that the Taliban were a bad thing), unmarked minefields, snow drifts, a variety of intestinal infections, hungry wolves, a cocktail of languages and a lack of food, the result of a four-year drought. All this he finds his way around. But in a country where westerners are usually seen in Mercedes, Land Cruisers or uniform, there is one thing he cannot negotiate: most Afghans simply do not understand why he is travelling on foot. “Is it a problem of money?” one person asks.
The walk also creates another problem: he is always on the move. So although he meets many men, few are given space to express themselves; on several occasions, one wishes that Stewart would drop his pack and dig a little deeper. At times, this is not possible. Although Afghani hospitality provides him with somewhere to sleep and something to eat in villages along the way, it doesn’t give him the freedom to pry or the luxury of staying for more than a night. When he does linger in a place or over a character, as, for instance, when describing the archeological plundering of the Turquoise Mountain, he understands the issues, asks the right questions and writes some of the book’s most memorable passages.
In considering an account of a journey from Herat to Kabul, it is impossible not to mention Robert Byron, who blazed this trail in as much style as was possible 70 years ago, and wrote about it in The Road to Oxiana. Byron embellished his account with history, made sharp personal comments and even sharper artistic judgments: the now-destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas were dismissed as lacking “even the dignity of labour”. Stewart mentions Byron once, early on, but it is enough: the ghost of the late traveller haunts the book and seems to ask what we want from our travelling writers.
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Since the appearance of The Road to Oxiana, we have favoured many-layered travel narratives that mix the internal with the historical, the cultural with the physical. But Stewart is a different sort of writer travelling at a very different time and he has produced a much leaner, tougher account of an extraordinary journey across one of world’s most unsettled countries. It is impossible not to wish for more riches. But what we have — the accumulations of meetings and slowly changing landscapes, the tragedy of war and the humour of its survivors, the sight of men throwing open their doors and the occasional boys flinging stones — all this casts light on a part of the world about which we have heard a great deal and about which we know little. And that, after all, is one of the things we want from travel writing.
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