Walking across Afghanistan

There can’t be many more walks more extreme than the one described by Rory Stewart in his book The places in between.  He takes us with him on a journey he made, entirely on foot, across the central regions of Afghanistan in 2002, from Herat to Kabul, soon after the US-led invasion of the country and the expulsion of the Taliban.

If the story had been told by a different narrator, in the third person, you wouldn’t give Stewart much of chance of reaching Kabul alive.  He survived all kinds of threat: official obstruction, bullets aimed at him, stoning and other personal attacks, hunger and thirst, man-sized snowdrifts and much suspicion and enmity.  Yet he did make it.  His book reveals much about a society almost permanently in armed conflict, and about traditional rural customs, like inter-village vendettas, and, crucially, hospitality to strangers – a social practice that served him well throughout his journey.

Why he made the journey isn’t clear.  Nor why he chose to make it exclusively on foot.  He seems to be as uncertain and confused as the reader.  The first words of the book are: ‘I’m not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan.’  His initial explanation is hardly convincing: ‘Perhaps I did it because it was an adventure.’  Reading old-fashioned boys’ adventure stories by writers like Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan no doubt had a part to play, for a person of his upper class background, but there are less potentially fatal ways of finding adventure.

More important western writers for him as an adult, you suspect, are those who fell in love with the Near East and got to know its lands and peoples well.  These are the ‘Orientalists’ whom Edward Said wrote about:  Richard Burton, T.E. Lawrence, Robert Byron, Wilfred Thesiger and others.  The one he seems to be closest to is Charles Doughty, author of Travels in Arabia deserta.  Like Doughty, Stewart immersed himself in the life, languages and history of his hosts, and, again like Doughty, invited personal privation, suffering and personal danger in order to do so.

He made the Afghan trip, Stewart explains, to fill in a gap in his larger plan to walk across Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal.  He’s a ‘completist’, not satisfied until he’s fulfilled his ambition in total, and refuses all vehicle lifts, even when they offer a way of reducing imminent peril.  He’s also happiest when walking alone, or alone with his adopted dog, Babur, rather than being lumbered with official minders, as when he sets off from Herat.  Though he doesn’t reject the offer of guides out of villages (an expert guide often comes as part of the accommodation and food offer when he asks for hospitality).

If he’s elusive about his reasons for taking the walk, Stewart also offers different versions of the act of walking.  At first, like any long-distance walker starting out, he savours his fitness:

I began to take longer and faster strides, half racing along the dirt track.  My anxiety faded and I revelled in the movement of my muscles, remembering that in forty days the walk might be over …  I watched the pebbles flashing past beneath me and felt that with the strike of each heel step I was marking Afghanistan.  I wanted to touch as much as possible of the country with my feet.  I remembered why I had once thought of walking right round the world.

When he can shake off his companions and walk ahead of them, the rhythmic movement of walking gives him a sense not far from rapture:

I leaned forward against the weight of my pack, blinking the sweat out of my eyes.  With each pace, I stretched further into my stride, jabbing the metal-tipped staff through the ice beside the track.  My feet beat out a steady muffled rhythm …  I found it difficult to believe I had been allowed to do the walk.  Despite my anxieties about the route and my companions I felt I had been given a great gift.  For two hours I was entirely absorbed in walking, feeling confident, elated and free.

Later, Stewart begins to think about the deeper meanings of walking: ‘I thought about evolutionary historians who argued that walking was a central part of what it meant to be human.’  Walking distinguished human from apes, freed our hands to use tools, allowed us to migrate from Africa, and was essential to our contact with other humans.  Some writers went further in their elevation of the human foot:

Bruce Chatwin concluded from all this that we would think and live better and be closer to our purposes as humans if we moved continually on foot across the surface of the earth.  I was not sure that I was living or thinking any better.

As the dusty journey goes on, Stewart starts to become more and more similar in appearance to the Afghans he meets: ‘I was more of a tramp than a mystic, but as I wrote, I felt at peace … I wondered if walking was not a form of dancing.’  Towards the end, extreme fatigue replaces his earlier energy: ‘My head came down to watch the path; my thoughts settled, burrowing into the movement.  I moved in slow steps like the donkey.’  Finally, having completed the journey, he gives us the closest statement we read in the book about the reasons why he made the trip, and why he walked:

Whatever I had experienced when walking would never approach the hardness of daily life in a village.  But I had felt I no longer needed to explain myself to my hosts – that I was at last entitled to sit alongside them and share their food – and I loved that night and those men for it.

In other words, it was through walking – and insisting on using no transport other than walking – that he was able to get as near as he possibly could in a short time to the people of the country and their way of life.

This essentially social thought isn’t quite Stewart’s last word.  He’s careful throughout his narrative to avoid anything approaching transcendentalism, but now, unusually, he makes a claim that the walk brought about a change in his personal consciousness.  As he walked, he says, thoughts fell away and he became unusually aware of the sharpness and intense colours of the landscape he’d passed through:

This was the last day of my walk.  To feel in these final hours, after months of frustration, an unexplained completion, seemed too neat.  But the recognition was immediate and incontrovertible.  I had no words for it.  Now, writing, I am tempted to say that I felt the world had been given uniquely to me and also equally to each person alone.  I had completed walking and could go home.