The Places In Between
Rory Stewart
Language: English
Pages: 297
ISBN: 0156031566
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Through these encounters-by turns touching, con-founding, surprising, and funny-Stewart makes tangible the forces of tradition, ideology, and allegiance that shape life in the map's countless places in between.
country had been at war for twenty-five years; the new government had been in place for only two weeks; there was no electricity between Herat and Kabul, no television and no T-shirts. Villages combined medieval etiquette with new political ideologies. In many houses the only piece of foreign technology was a Kalashnikov, and the only global brand was Islam. All that had made Afghanistan seem backward, peripheral, and irrelevant now made it the center of the world's attention. The country is
ambushed two years ago in the Taliban era." "By the Taliban?" "No, no, two men from Gawashik, looking for money," said Qasim. "I was in a jeep and they stepped out from behind that boulder so I shot them both through the windshield, dragged their corpses back behind the boulder. That's where I also found their motorcycle. I still have it." "But I thought road security was good under the Taliban." "Yes," he replied. "Road security was very good under the Taliban. The Taliban were very good
from my introductory speech. "I have walked here from Chaghcharan," I said. "On the first night I stayed with Commandant Maududi in Badgah, on the second with Abdul Rauf Ghafuri in Daulatyar, on the third with Bushire Khan in Sang-i-zard, and last night with the nephew of Mir Ali Hussein Beg in Katlish. They have treated me very well." Then I took out my notebook and showed him the pictures I had drawn of these men. He looked at the pictures and said, "You can stay here tonight and someone
halter and dribbling over its tight double bit. First Qoudus covered its back with the julum blanket he said had taken his wife a month to weave. It was a two-meter-long kilim with thirty bands of alternating black, white, and red designs, fringed with a line of quivering tassels. He laid a separate saddlecloth over the julum and tied a bright orange and green band, called a taule, around the horse's neck. He smoothed the tassels lying on the horse's nose and neck and flicked the glinting metal
sheer cliff, the Medians had placed the facade of a shrine; or that beside a volcano cone and beyond livid copper walls, the Persians had built water temples. The Ghorids seem to have shared this delight in the shape and color of rock. Unlike the Seljuks or the Mongols, they were not nomads from the steppes but instead, like the Phrygians, Medians, and Persians, people who had lived for centuries among their mountains. [back] *** 21 A pride reflected in the Ghorids' use of the epithet