Magic Bus by Rory Maclean

Author:Rory Maclean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2006-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

18. Eve of Destruction

The women crouched around the spring, their veils cast back, their men in the fields. Plum and wild apple trees grew around the shallow pool. The winter’s fodder, dew-green and freshly scythed, dried between the mud houses. Fariba, first wife of Said, was teasing her aunt.

‘Tell me again why your teeth are so white?’ Fariba asked her.

‘Praise to Allah, because my soul makes them clear,’ the old woman replied.

A little part of God was said to dwell in every man and woman.

‘Then I do not understand, Aunt,’ she went on, ‘why Uncle’s teeth are so yellow?’

The women bubbled as they filled their pitchers. They were in high spirits. The rush of water – unusual at this time of year – meant there was no need to walk the twenty minutes to the well.

Fariba was next at the spout. She held her pitcher under the stream and, as it filled, heard the clink of a pebble against clay. Once. Twice. Three times. She complained out loud, yet when she looked into the vessel she saw not pebbles but silver flashing in the dusty blue sunlight. The other women pushed forward, holding their pitchers under the spout, too, until each of them held more metal than water. Within minutes, the bottom of the pool glittered with coins.

‘Praise God’s protection and blessing.’ Fariba’s aunt was the first among them to speak. ‘But now we will have to walk to the well after all.’

‘No, Aunt, now we will ride there on a mule.’

That year, over 10,000 ancient coins were recovered from the spring. But the Mir Zakah discovery paled in comparison with the massive hoard uncovered in a nearby waterhole in 1993. Then, three tons of silver coins and fifty kilos of ancient gold jewellery were unearthed by Khoriuri Mangal tribesmen. The second largest treasure trove ever found included gold earrings as thick as tablespoons, silver Buddhist statues, classical Greek tableware, Scythian necklaces and Turkic bangles. The antiquities ranged in age from the fourth century BC to the first century AD. Several local people were murdered during the excavation. And because the nineties were a time of factional fighting – in 1994, 25,000 people were killed in Kabul alone – the entire find was smuggled over the border to Pakistan.

In Peshawar, the gold was sold off to American and Japanese collectors. Then, the dealers, embarrassed by the sheer quantity of coins – around twenty times the size of all the known collections of early Afghan coins in the world put together – melted down the ancient silver to make tourist trinkets.

In Kabul, I have one contact; an American who lived around the Muslim world and for thirty-five years considered Afghanistan to be her home. She is in a way a Grandmother Intrepid, an independent traveller whose wanderlust predates the Beatles and Beats. As Gertrude Stein and Paul Bowles – who, like Penny, she knew in Tangier – the defining purpose in her life has been to experience new peoples and lands.

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