Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

Their dialogue was absolutely petrifying. I hired a blanket and pillow from the conductor, who demanded only a token bribe, had a gin anaesthetic, and went to sleep.

The hooting of the train woke me early the next morning for the sight of camels grazing among brown bushes and great herds of sheep bunched together on sandy hillsides. The villages were few, but their design was extraordinary; they were walled and low and resembled the kind of sand castles you see parents making for their children at the seashore, with a bucket and spade. They had tiny windows, crumbling ramparts, and inexact crenellations; impressive at a distance, up close they were visibly coming apart, the fortifications merely a feeble challenge to intruders. Women squatted in front of the walls in a stiff wind, keeping their veils against their faces by biting on a corner, holding the cloth in their teeth.

Meshed appeared abruptly from the desert, a city of gold-domed mosques and the white quills of minarets. At the station, pilgrims piled out of the train dragging carpetbags and bedrolls. This station, 4000 miles from London, is the end of the line: between this easternmost station of Iranian National Railways and the little Pakistani station at Landi Kotal in the Khyber Pass, lies Afghanistan, a country without a single inch of railway track.

After an hour in Meshed I was anxious to leave. It was Ramadhan, the Muslim period of fasting, and no food was being sold during the day. I ate my Iranian processed cheese and found two hippies, chiefs who seemed to have lost the rest of their tribe. They couldn't understand why I didn't want to stay in Meshed. 'It's good,' one said. 'It's funky, it's loose. You could hang out here.'

'I'm trying to get to Pakistan,' I said.

'First you have to cross Afghanistan,' the other said. He was little, bearded, and carried a guitar. 'It's in the way, like.'

'Come with us if you want. We're going to move out. We've been this way so many times we just get in that train, pull down the shades, and crash.' He was wearing Indian pyjamas, sandals, an embroidered waistcoat, a beaded necklace, and bangles, like a Turk in a Victorian etching, but without the scimitar or turban. 'Hurry up if you're coming, or we'll miss the bus.'

'I hate buses,' I said.

'Hear that, Bobby? He hates buses.'

But Bobby didn't reply. He was staring at a girl, probably American, who was leaving the station. She clomped unsteadily in a pair of high-soled wooden clogs.

'Those shoes really get me,' said Bobby. 'Chicks can't even walk in them. I'll bet the guy that invented them is some screamer who really hates chicks.'

Afghanistan is a nuisance. Formerly it was cheap and barbarous, and people went there to buy lumps of hashish – they would spend weeks in the filthy hotels of Herat and Kabul, staying high. But there was a military coup in 1973, and the king (who was sunning himself in Italy) was deposed. Now Afghanistan is expensive but just as barbarous as before. Even the hippies have begun to find it intolerable. The food smells of cholera, travel there is always uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous, and the Afghans are lazy, idle, and violent. I had not been there long before I regretted having changed my plans to take the southern route. True, there was a war in Baluchistan, but Baluchistan was small. I was determined to deal with Afghanistan swiftly and put that discomfort into parentheses. But it was a week before I boarded another train.

The Customs Office was closed for the night. We could not go back to the Iranian frontier; we could not proceed into Herat. So we remained on a strip of earth, neither Afghanistan nor Iran, in a hotel without a name. There was no electricity in this hotel, there was no toilet, and there was enough water for only one cup of tea apiece. Bobby and his friend, who went under the name Lopez (his real name was Morris), became frightfully happy when the Afghan in the candlelit foyer told us our beds would cost thirty-five cents each. Lopez asked for hashish. The Afghan said there was none. Lopez called him a 'scumbag'. The Afghan brought a piece the size of a dog's turd and we spent the rest of the evening smoking it. At about midnight a telephone rang in the darkness. Lopez said, 'If it's for me, tell them I'm not here!'

On our way into Herat the next day an Afghan passenger fired his shotgun through the roof of the bus and there was a fight to determine who would pay to have the hole mended. My ears were still ringing from the explosion a day later in Herat, as I watched groups of hippies standing in the thorn bushes complaining about the exchange rate. At three o'clock the next morning there was a parade down the main street of Herat, farting cornets and snare drums: it was the sort of bizarre nightmare old men have in German novels. I asked Lopez if he'd heard the parade, but he brushed my question aside. He was worried, he said; cawing like a broker, and waving his bangled wrists despairingly, he told his bad news: the dollar was quoted at fifty afghanis. 'It's a rip-off!'

I went, by bus and plane, to Kabul, via Mazar-i-Sharif. Two incidents in Kabul stay in my mind: a visit to the Kabul Insane Asylum, where I failed to gain the release of a Canadian who had been put there by mistake (he said he didn't mind staying there as long as he had a supply of chocolate bars; it was better than going back to Canada), and, later that week, passing a Pathan tent encampment and seeing a camel suddenly collapse under

a great load of wood – a moment later the Pathans pounced, dismembering and skinning the poor beast. I had no wish to stay longer in Kabul. I took a bus east, to the top of the Khyber Pass. I had a train to catch there, at Landi Kotal, for Peshawar; and I dreaded missing it, because there is only one train a week, a Sunday local called the '132-Down'.

The Khyber Pass on the Afghanistan side of the frontier is rockier, higher, and more dramatic than on the Pakistan side, but at Tor Kham – the border – it turns green, and for this foliage one feels enormous gratitude. It was the first continuous greenery I had seen since leaving Istanbul. It begins as lichen on the rock faces, and pale clumps of weed sprouting from crevices; then bushes and low trees the wind has twisted into a mass of elbows, and finally grassy slopes, turning leafy as one nears Peshawar. It is like a seasonal change in the space of a day, this movement from the sharp-featured heights and gorges outside Jalalabad to the cliffs of Landi Khana, bearded with windblown bouquets of wild flowers. The change is abrupt; there cannot be many countries so close geographically and yet so distinctly different. The landscape softens where the border line on the map begins, and the grizzled faces of Afghans, whose heads are sloppily swathed in white turbans, are replaced by the angular beakiness of Pakistanis, who wear narrow slippers and have the thin scornful moustaches of magicians and movie villains.

And there is the Khyber Railway, a further pleasure. Built fifty years ago at great cost, it is an engineering marvel. It has thirty-four tunnels, ninety-two bridges and culverts, and climbs to 3600 feet. The train is well guarded: on bluffs above the track, in little garrisons and pillboxes, the Khyber Rifles stand sentry duty, staring blankly at the plummeting blue black ravines on Afghanistan's inhospitable edge.

There is only one train a week on the Khyber Railway, and practically all the passengers are what the Pakistanis refer to as 'tribal people', the Kuki, Malikdin, Kambar, and Zakka Khel, indistinguishable in their rags. They use the train for their weekly visit to the bazaar in Peshawar. It is an outing for them, this day in town, so the platform at Landi Kotal station in the Khyber Pass is mobbed with excited tribesmen tramping up and down in their bare feet, waiting for the train to start. I found a seat in the last car and watched a tribesman, who was almost certainly insane, quarrelling on the platform with some beggars. A beggar would limp over to a waiting family and stick his hand out. The lunatic would then rush up to the beggar and scream at him. Some of the beggars ignored him; one hit back, rather lazily slapping him until a policeman intervened.