Afghanistan

Extract

A first visit to the quarter of a million odd, landlocked square miles of Afghanistan should act on any but a finished, finite clod rather in the same way as Samuel Johnson’s tour of the Hebrides did on him. The analogy is not entirely inapposite for, like the Hebrides, Afghanistan is a land of rock; and where one is lashed by the cleansing sea, the other is bathed in the cleansing light of brilliant sunshine out of clear skies, so that both (and one has St Patrick’s Breastplate in mind) may be considered similarly to uplift the susceptible spirit.

Afghanistan’s rocks, however, are threaded through the valleys down which, in sharp contrast to mauve and grey stone and biscuit-coloured sand, stretch strips of green (from the air, black) cultivation, the fields of corn and millet turning yellow, lush vineyards, apple trees and screens of poplar and willow, the more lacey and delicate for the harsh contrast of the major portions of a country clustered round the southwestern spurs of the majestic Hindu Kush.

What a formidable thing and an evocative word the Hindu Kush is! No wonder the Afghan people, ethnographically varied though they be, are all brave and bright eyed, tending to tallness and litheness of limb—men capable of leaping from rock to rock with the long muskets of independence in a land where everyone is his own Khan. Here might be recalled the answer to a question. In a garden of the Kabul Valley, a garden of gaily coloured flowers, high in the hills with a stream rushing down over the rocks, when some peasants appeared an Afghan host was asked: ‘Do they belong here?’—meaning ‘Are they the men who look after this garden?’ The reply was: ‘No. “Here” belongs to them’.