The Places In Between

The Places In Between

Rory Stewart

Language: English

Pages: 297

ISBN: 0156031566

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


In January 2002 Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan-surviving by his wits, his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs, and the kindness of strangers. By day he passed through mountains covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations. By night he slept on villagers' floors, shared their meals, and listened to their stories of the recent and ancient past. Along the way Stewart met heroes and rogues, tribal elders and teenage soldiers, Taliban commanders and foreign-aid workers. He was also adopted by an unexpected companion-a retired fighting mastiff he named Babur in honor of Afghanistan's first Mughal emperor, in whose footsteps the pair was following.

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

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