Salon Wanderlust | Passages: In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great

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Are you more tempted to have a romantic fling while traveling? Bare all in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y
The Inuit Olympics
By Mary Roach
Inuit Games: Head Pulls, Knuckle Hops and other madness
(01/07/98)
Mayan dreaming
By Douglas Cruickshank
Mind-bending visions in the Yucatan
(01/06/98)
History and hallucination
By Jan Morris
Gdánsk stands as a symbol of enduring truth -- and stirring resurrection
(01/05/98)
Wires and buyers and scares -- oh my!
By Don George
Some questions about the year in travel
(12/24/97)
Christmas in Syria
By Louis CasaBianca
Christmas in Syria: The tale of an unexpected gift
(12/23/97)

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_____I N__T H E__F O O T S T E P S__O F

alexanderthegreat_

| E X C E R P T |

By Michael Wood
256 pages
Nonfiction
The University of California Press
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"In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great" is the tale of journalist and filmmaker Michael Wood's journey via Land Rover, camel, foot and boat in the path of the ancient conquerer, from Greece to Asia. Using ancient historians as his guide, Wood interweaves past and present, looking at Alexander's army's struggles and wars in the view of contemporary conflicts and political climates. In the following excerpt, Wood and crew are in Afghanistan, crossing the Hindu Kush through the perilous Khawak Pass.

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JOURNEY TO THE HINDU KUSH BY MICHAEL WOOD
By early spring Alexander was ready to go. He had to cross the Hindu Kush, the great rampart of mountains which rises north of Kabul -- the "killer of Hindus" as it was called by the Muslim conquerors who came this way in the Middle Ages. This was the great route used by all invaders of the subcontinent. There are about sixteen passes, some up to 5 or 6000 metres in height, but only three have really counted in history. The main one today is the Salang Pass, now a modern road and tunnel used by the Russian convoys on their way up from Termez. The second route is westwards to Bamian, one of the most extraordinary sites in Asia -- the Valley of the Great Buddhas. This hauntingly beautiful place, with its gigantic statues carved into the cliffs, was visited by Marco Polo and by the Chinese explorers who came overland to bring back the Buddhist sacred texts from India. But this, and the Salang, were probably barred to Alexander because Bessus had devastated the countryside beyond them all the way to Balkh, the capital of Bactria. Alexander's intelligence would have informed him that supplying his army was out of the question on those routes. That left him one obvious alternative -- the Khawak Pass. This is the eastern route rising up on a gentle gradient. It was used by Tamerlane, Genghis Khan and other invaders of India. This was the route we decided to take.
We prepared for our expedition by renovating the old BBC Landrover and getting hold of a back-up Jeep, with spare axles and tyres (no mean feat in Kabul these days). Then, as the storm-clouds of war gathered over Kabul, with Taliban attacks growing in intensity, we headed north towards Chakrikar and the Panjshir valley to follow once more in Alexander's footsteps.
At Begram, near Charikar, he founded Alexandria under the Caucasus, with several thousand retired veterans, invalids and press-ganged locals. It is a wide and pleasant plain, 2000 metres up, but sheltered in the lee of the great spurs of the mountains. Fertile and well-watered, the vine and the olive will grow here, some compensation, perhaps, for the men Alexander forced to stay behind. He then continued up the Panjshir valley and into the mountains. The Greeks called these ranges the Caucasus, believing them to be close to the ends of the earth. Here, the army entered mythical space and time: marching under mountains where, so it was said, the Titan Prometheus had been tortured for aeons by Zeus for revealing to humankind the secret of fire and the arts of civilization. Here, as elsewhere with the tales of Hercules and Dionysus, real and mythological history merged in the impressionable mind of the young Alexander.
It took us two days on a very rough road to negotiate the 80 kilometres of the Panjshir valley, driving slowly under great brown ridges which keep the sun off the valley bottoms for the fist two hours of the morning. All along the road we passed ruined Russian gear (this had been one of the main routes by which the Mujahaddin resistance kept up pressure on the invaders). It is a harsh terrain for modern armies, and wrecked APCs (armoured-personnel carriers) lay everywhere. They had met fierce resistance here and, in the end, for all their technological superiority the poor Russian conscripts from Omsk and Tomsk just couldn't take it. The Macedonians though, like Afghans, were a mountain people, hard as nails. The valley was beautiful: the cold blue water of the river, green gardens and fields, neat brown mud-brick houses, with vivid splashes of colour from the maize and apricots drying on their roofs. And above, the great bare-ribbed mountains.
Alexander's army must have moved forward only slowly; an immense column miles long; a logistical headache for the high command and for the quartermasters who had to supply and feed them. Even by Landrover it was slow progress, crossing and recrossing the river. The vehicle broke down, ran out of petrol and, at one point, a landslide blocked the route for a night. Then, towards the end of the valley, the stony track began to rise up into the mountains and we passed single lines of travellers on foot and on horseback. Suddenly, it was easy to imagine the Macedonian army stretched out all the way down the Panjshir.
Finally, on the third day, we reached the village of Ao Khawak. It stands at the junction of two fast-flowing mountain rivers. Ahead the path goes up into the mountains of Nuristan, and to the north a rough dirt-track led off towards the Khawak Pass. From there it is about 80 kilometres down into the Pul i Kumri valley. We crossed the Khawak river by a wooden bridge and entered what looks like a nest of brigands and footpads: a huddle of hovels, stables and warehouses of squat stone, timber roofs weighed with heavy stones. There were clusters of dank hostels and smoke-blackened shanties where meals are cooked round the clock for traders and travellers. In the street, there was a great hubbub of activity for, although much of the goods and the people are brought here by truck, this is the jumping-off place for an older kind of travel, by foot and horseback on one of the ancient routes between India and Asia. From here, to get to north Afghanistan, we would have to walk.
In the middle of all this, surrounded by roaring waters and overlooked by the pyramid peak of Deh Parian, we found an open space for hundreds of horses, thin ribby animals with cloth nosebags, wicker panniers, ropes and harnesses. Their drivers are mostly young (old men would not last such a hard life). Wiry young jockeys, thin and sun-blackened, they charge 60,000 Afghanis (about £ 12) to take you and your baggage across the mountains. In charge is the redoubtable commander Khalil, a shaggy giant of a man with a long black beard and a gimlet eye. He chose our horses, drivers and arranged for armed guards to accompany us the following day, to ward off the bandits which he said might attack us on the path. We were five strong, Peter, Tim, David, me, and Hanif Sharzat, an Afghan friend and journalist, who had gamely volunteered to be our translator. Hanif speaks Pashto, Farsi, Uzbek, Urdu and Russian, which he reckoned should be enough to talk our way out of the clutches of the various warlords across our path, and get us through to the Afghan-Uzbek border.
We were travelling now only with what we and three horses could carry. Before we set out I experienced another sharp pang of excitement. Once again, as nearly as we could, we were about to experience what the Greeks had gone through, and the sense of treading right in their footsteps was palpable. We had stripped down to essentials: a warm jacket, rucksack, sleeping bag, some emergency food (apples, nuts, and some stony chunks of dried mulberries) and, as always, Arrian and Curtius. We loaded the camera stock-box and the other film gear into rope and cloth panniers, and in the early afternoon our drivers led the horses off over the bridge and up the river valley alongside the rushing torrent. Soon we were into the ravines, then up a narrow dirt path on the first precipitous climb above the river. By three in the afternoon the air was unexpectedly chilly, and the valley bottoms were already in deep shadow as we left Nuristan behind us, the Land of Light, and headed north towards the snowy peaks of the Hindu Kush and, beyond, the fabled Oxus.
N E X T+P A G E+| Vicious wars past and present


All titles may not be immediately available. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E_T A L K Are you more tempted to have a romantic fling while traveling? Bare all in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y The Inuit Olympics By Mary Roach Inuit Games: Head Pulls, Knuckle Hops and other madness (01/07/98) Mayan dreaming By Douglas Cruickshank Mind-bending visions in the Yucatan (01/06/98) History and hallucination By Jan Morris Gdánsk stands as a symbol of enduring truth -- and stirring resurrection (01/05/98) Wires and buyers and scares -- oh my! By Don George Some questions about the year in travel (12/24/97) Christmas in Syria By Louis CasaBianca Christmas in Syria: The tale of an unexpected gift (12/23/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Passages archives		_____I N__T H E__F O O T S T E P S__O F `alexanderthegreat`_ \| E X C E R P T \| By Michael Wood 256 pages Nonfiction The University of California Press - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - "In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great" is the tale of journalist and filmmaker Michael Wood's journey via Land Rover, camel, foot and boat in the path of the ancient conquerer, from Greece to Asia. Using ancient historians as his guide, Wood interweaves past and present, looking at Alexander's army's struggles and wars in the view of contemporary conflicts and political climates. In the following excerpt, Wood and crew are in Afghanistan, crossing the Hindu Kush through the perilous Khawak Pass. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - JOURNEY TO THE HINDU KUSH BY MICHAEL WOOD By early spring Alexander was ready to go. He had to cross the Hindu Kush, the great rampart of mountains which rises north of Kabul -- the "killer of Hindus" as it was called by the Muslim conquerors who came this way in the Middle Ages. This was the great route used by all invaders of the subcontinent. There are about sixteen passes, some up to 5 or 6000 metres in height, but only three have really counted in history. The main one today is the Salang Pass, now a modern road and tunnel used by the Russian convoys on their way up from Termez. The second route is westwards to Bamian, one of the most extraordinary sites in Asia -- the Valley of the Great Buddhas. This hauntingly beautiful place, with its gigantic statues carved into the cliffs, was visited by Marco Polo and by the Chinese explorers who came overland to bring back the Buddhist sacred texts from India. But this, and the Salang, were probably barred to Alexander because Bessus had devastated the countryside beyond them all the way to Balkh, the capital of Bactria. Alexander's intelligence would have informed him that supplying his army was out of the question on those routes. That left him one obvious alternative -- the Khawak Pass. This is the eastern route rising up on a gentle gradient. It was used by Tamerlane, Genghis Khan and other invaders of India. This was the route we decided to take. We prepared for our expedition by renovating the old BBC Landrover and getting hold of a back-up Jeep, with spare axles and tyres (no mean feat in Kabul these days). Then, as the storm-clouds of war gathered over Kabul, with Taliban attacks growing in intensity, we headed north towards Chakrikar and the Panjshir valley to follow once more in Alexander's footsteps. At Begram, near Charikar, he founded Alexandria under the Caucasus, with several thousand retired veterans, invalids and press-ganged locals. It is a wide and pleasant plain, 2000 metres up, but sheltered in the lee of the great spurs of the mountains. Fertile and well-watered, the vine and the olive will grow here, some compensation, perhaps, for the men Alexander forced to stay behind. He then continued up the Panjshir valley and into the mountains. The Greeks called these ranges the Caucasus, believing them to be close to the ends of the earth. Here, the army entered mythical space and time: marching under mountains where, so it was said, the Titan Prometheus had been tortured for aeons by Zeus for revealing to humankind the secret of fire and the arts of civilization. Here, as elsewhere with the tales of Hercules and Dionysus, real and mythological history merged in the impressionable mind of the young Alexander. It took us two days on a very rough road to negotiate the 80 kilometres of the Panjshir valley, driving slowly under great brown ridges which keep the sun off the valley bottoms for the fist two hours of the morning. All along the road we passed ruined Russian gear (this had been one of the main routes by which the Mujahaddin resistance kept up pressure on the invaders). It is a harsh terrain for modern armies, and wrecked APCs (armoured-personnel carriers) lay everywhere. They had met fierce resistance here and, in the end, for all their technological superiority the poor Russian conscripts from Omsk and Tomsk just couldn't take it. The Macedonians though, like Afghans, were a mountain people, hard as nails. The valley was beautiful: the cold blue water of the river, green gardens and fields, neat brown mud-brick houses, with vivid splashes of colour from the maize and apricots drying on their roofs. And above, the great bare-ribbed mountains. Alexander's army must have moved forward only slowly; an immense column miles long; a logistical headache for the high command and for the quartermasters who had to supply and feed them. Even by Landrover it was slow progress, crossing and recrossing the river. The vehicle broke down, ran out of petrol and, at one point, a landslide blocked the route for a night. Then, towards the end of the valley, the stony track began to rise up into the mountains and we passed single lines of travellers on foot and on horseback. Suddenly, it was easy to imagine the Macedonian army stretched out all the way down the Panjshir. Finally, on the third day, we reached the village of Ao Khawak. It stands at the junction of two fast-flowing mountain rivers. Ahead the path goes up into the mountains of Nuristan, and to the north a rough dirt-track led off towards the Khawak Pass. From there it is about 80 kilometres down into the Pul i Kumri valley. We crossed the Khawak river by a wooden bridge and entered what looks like a nest of brigands and footpads: a huddle of hovels, stables and warehouses of squat stone, timber roofs weighed with heavy stones. There were clusters of dank hostels and smoke-blackened shanties where meals are cooked round the clock for traders and travellers. In the street, there was a great hubbub of activity for, although much of the goods and the people are brought here by truck, this is the jumping-off place for an older kind of travel, by foot and horseback on one of the ancient routes between India and Asia. From here, to get to north Afghanistan, we would have to walk. In the middle of all this, surrounded by roaring waters and overlooked by the pyramid peak of Deh Parian, we found an open space for hundreds of horses, thin ribby animals with cloth nosebags, wicker panniers, ropes and harnesses. Their drivers are mostly young (old men would not last such a hard life). Wiry young jockeys, thin and sun-blackened, they charge 60,000 Afghanis (about £ 12) to take you and your baggage across the mountains. In charge is the redoubtable commander Khalil, a shaggy giant of a man with a long black beard and a gimlet eye. He chose our horses, drivers and arranged for armed guards to accompany us the following day, to ward off the bandits which he said might attack us on the path. We were five strong, Peter, Tim, David, me, and Hanif Sharzat, an Afghan friend and journalist, who had gamely volunteered to be our translator. Hanif speaks Pashto, Farsi, Uzbek, Urdu and Russian, which he reckoned should be enough to talk our way out of the clutches of the various warlords across our path, and get us through to the Afghan-Uzbek border. We were travelling now only with what we and three horses could carry. Before we set out I experienced another sharp pang of excitement. Once again, as nearly as we could, we were about to experience what the Greeks had gone through, and the sense of treading right in their footsteps was palpable. We had stripped down to essentials: a warm jacket, rucksack, sleeping bag, some emergency food (apples, nuts, and some stony chunks of dried mulberries) and, as always, Arrian and Curtius. We loaded the camera stock-box and the other film gear into rope and cloth panniers, and in the early afternoon our drivers led the horses off over the bridge and up the river valley alongside the rushing torrent. Soon we were into the ravines, then up a narrow dirt path on the first precipitous climb above the river. By three in the afternoon the air was unexpectedly chilly, and the valley bottoms were already in deep shadow as we left Nuristan behind us, the Land of Light, and headed north towards the snowy peaks of the Hindu Kush and, beyond, the fabled Oxus. N E X T+P A G E+\| Vicious wars past and present