Nazeer ran along with us, a little behind and to the left of my horse. I glanced over my shoulder and exchanged equally wide eyed, bewildered looks with him. The horse was making me look good. It's gonna be okay, I whispered to myself, knowing, as the words trotted through the thick fog of vain hope in my mind, that I'd uttered the certain jinx formula. The saying, pride goeth... before a fall... is condensed from the second collection of the Book of Proverbs, 16:18-Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall. It's attributed to Solomon. If he did say it, Solomon was a man who knew horses intimately well; much better than I did as I clicked up to Khader's group and reined the horse in as though I knew-as though I would ever know - what I was doing in a saddle.
Khader was speaking in Pashto and Urdu and Farsi, giving the men last-minute instructions. I leaned across to whisper to Ahmed Zadeh.
"Where's the pass? I can't see it in the dark."
"What pass?" he whispered back.
"The pass through the mountains."
"You mean Chaman?" he asked, mystified by the question. "It's back there, thirty kilometres behind us."
"No, I mean how do we get through those mountains into Afghanistan?" I asked, nodding toward the sheer rock walls that began to rise less than a kilometre away from us, and peaked in the black night sky above.
"We don't go through the mountains," Ahmed replied, gesturing a little jab with the reins in his hands. "We go over them."
"Over... them..."
"Oui."
"Tonight."
"Oui."
"In the dark."
"Oui," he repeated seriously. "But no problem. Habib, the fou, the crazy one, he knows the way. He will lead us."
"I'm glad you told me that. I was worried, I admit, but I feel a lot better about it now." His white teeth flashed a laugh at me and then, with a signal from Khaled, we moved off, churning slowly into a single column that stretched to almost a hundred metres. There were ten men walking, twenty men riding, fifteen packhorses, and a herd of ten goats. I noticed with deep chagrin that Nazeer was one of the men walking. It was absurd and unnatural, somehow, that such a fine horseman was walking while I rode. I watched him, ahead of me in the darkness, watched the rhythmic roll of his thick, slightly bowed legs, and I swore to myself that I would convince him, at the first rest break, to take turns with me in riding my horse. I did eventually succeed in that resolve, but Nazeer was so reluctantly persuaded that he glowered miserably at me from the saddle, and only ever brightened when our positions reversed and he looked up at me from the rocky path.
You don't ride a horse over a mountain, of course. You push and drag and sometimes help to _carry a horse over a mountain. As we neared the base of the sheer cliffs that form the Chaman range, dividing the southwestern part of Afghanistan from Pakistan, it became clear that there were in fact gaps and pathways and trails leading into and over them. What had seemed to be smooth walls of bare, mountainous rock proved on closer inspection to be formed in undulating waves of ravines and tiered crevices. Ledges of stone and lime-encrusted barren earth wound through those rocky slopes. In places the ledges were so wide and well flattened as to seem like a man-made road. In places they were so jagged and narrow that every footstep of horse or man was brooded over with careful, trembling consideration before it was made. And the whole of it, the whole stumbling, slipping, dragging, shoving breach of the mountain barrier, was done in the dark.
Ours was a small caravan when compared to the once mighty tribal processions that had plied the silk route between Turkey and China and India, but in that time of war our numbers were remarkable. The fear of being seen from the air was a constant worry. Khaderbhai imposed a strict blackout: no cigarettes, torches, or lamps on the march. There was a quarter moon that first night, but occasionally the slippery paths led us through narrow defiles where smooth rock rose up sharply, drowning us in shadows. In those black-walled corridors it was impossible to see my own hand held in front of my face. The whole column inched its way along the blind clefts in the rock wall, men and horses and goats pressed hard against the stone, and shuffling into one another.
In the centre of just such a black ravine, I heard a low whining sound that rose quickly in pitch. I was walking, or sliding my feet, between two horses. I had the reins of my horse in my right hand, and the tail of the horse in front wrapped around my left hand. My face was sliding against the granite wall, and the path beneath my feet was no wider than the length of my arm. As the sound rose in its pitch and intensity, the two horses reared in the same instinct, and stamped their hooves in staccato fear.
Then the whining sound suddenly erupted in a roar that rattled the whole mountain, and ripped into an explosive, shrieking scream of satanic noise directly over our heads.
