The deserts in this part of the world are linked by a topography that respects no artificially created geographical borders. On Lissie’s map, the Dasht-i-Margo here in Afghanistan seems only an extension of the Dasht-i-Lut in Iran. As she squints her eyes against the eastern sun into which the truck is driving head-on, she spots upon the horizon a band of nomads riding mules, not camels, and herding before them a dozen or more beasts that look like long-horned cattle. The men are wearing turbans and smocks over baggy pants and sandals, all a dusty white, men and animals blending with the furrowed, windblown sand behind them. The small caravan shimmers like a mirage in the morning sun, and then is gone as the truck rounds a hilly curve. The shade is merciful but brief, the shadow of the hill embracing the truck for only an instant before it emerges again into full sunlight. There is only the desert now — and the unblinking sky.
The Greek driver stinks of garlic. He is prone to farting as well, and his effusive, effluvial stenches — combined with the heat and the desert dust that assail the open windows — are making Lissie a trifle ill. Ahead, she sees in the distance what appears to be a roadside bazaar, and as they approach it, another smell joins the pervasive mix in the cab of the truck: the unmistakable aroma of mutton cooking in oil. She has been sniffing this same scent halfway across Asia now. It is usually accompanied, as it is now, by the sweeter smell of rice frying with raisins and nuts, and this heady combination wafts back toward the truck now to comingle with the stench of the Greek’s flatus, the Greek’s halitosis, the stifling desert heat, the choking desert dust — she will vomit.
But the Greek slows the truck to avoid running down the jabbering crowd of people clustered about the jerry-built bazaar, and finally stops the vehicle altogether. Announcing in Greek, with appropriate, unmistakable, hand-to-mouth gestures, that he is going to have some breakfast, he climbs down from the truck, accompanied by the miasma of his body odors, trailing his various stenches behind him, wrapping them around him like the vaporous clinging veils on the women who crowd the meat vendor’s stand.
Lissie buys herself a piece of the ubiquitous thin bread (here in Afghanistan it is called nan) and a cup of hot green tea. Paul, sitting cross-legged beside the Greek driver, is eating mutton and rice. He complains the mutton is stringy. They leave the bazaar at seven-thirty that morning. The wind blowing in off the desert is hot and dry. Lissie tilts onto her face the straw hat she bought at the Covered Bazaar in Istanbul. She closes her eyes. She hears the Greek driver trying some English on Paul. He gives up after a few sentences. The desert is still again. She dozes.
Shahnur is only eleven hours away.
It must be close to noon when they approach Yakchal. Ahead, she can hear the muezzin calling as the truck slows down outside the village. She can see a dozen men touching their foreheads to the ground before a gray wall with an arched niche in it. Their feet are bare, their exposed soles dirty against the white humps of their massed backs bent in supplication to Mohammed. At a turn in the road a bit farther on, a group of silent barefooted children stand beside a peeling wooden gate in an ancient stone wall. One of the girls — Lissie guesses she is eleven or twelve — is wearing a beaded necklace around her throat; it reminds Lissie of a necklace Grandmother Harding gave her when she was nine. The driver shifts gears after rounding the curve, and the truck gains speed again. Lissie yawns. In a little while she is dozing again.
She does not catch the name of the next town; she awakens someplace in the center of it when the driver begins honking his horn. The cause of his impatience is a flock of sheep being led by a turbaned boy carrying a stick. The highway here has become a narrow dirt road pressed on either side by gray-walled buildings, and the sheep are crowding the road from curb to curb, leisurely bleating as the boy indolently flicks his stick at them and the Greek driver angrily honks his horn. Several men at the curb gesture for him to shut up.
The flock of sheep parts to let the truck through. The boy with the stick makes a gesture remarkably like that of throwing a finger back home — has he met many Americans? — and the truck eases through amid a cacophony of its own honking horn, the bleating sheep, and the shouting street merchants. Whatever the name of the town (she misses it again, craning for a look at the sign on their way out) they are through it and on the highway again by 2:00 P.M.
In just four hours, they will meet the dogs of Shahnur.
The driver and Paul both want to push on for Kabul, which is the capital and which they are both sure they can reach before midnight. The roads will be less crowded after dark, they will make better time, and so on. But Lissie is exhausted, and she tells Paul she cannot spend another moment in the cramped cab of the truck; they have been driving steadily since early yesterday morning; her legs are stiff; this seems like a nice little village where she’s sure they can find a room for the night. She thanks the driver in English, and climbs down from the cab, almost stumbling. Paul, behind her, is clearly annoyed that they will be spending the night here. She tells him that she’s just about to get her period, which is one of the reasons she has chosen not to spend the next five or six hours in a truck with a flatulating Greek.
The village is situated in the valley through which the Arghandab River runs. As they stand on the dusty road, watching the truck rumble off northward and westward toward Kabul, she hears the first echoing chant of the muezzin calling worshippers to their sunset prayers, and sees the jagged edges of the mountaintops turning molten as though in religious response. She is desperately hungry, she realizes; she has had nothing to eat since the nan and tea early this morning. She is exhausted as well, and a bit irritable, and she wants only to find a place to eat, a place to stay before it gets dark. In the fields beyond, she can see the black felt tents of the nomad shepherds, glowing now in the rays of the setting sun. On the bank of the river, several women wearing black chadris — as the tentlike veils are called here in Afghanistan — pause in the washing of clothes and kneel to Mecca, their heads bowed, their hands clasped, behind a turbaned old man who similarly kneels and offers his prayers on the grassy bank. Lissie and Paul walk on the dirt road above the river. The shadows are lengthening.
She has not seen many dogs since they crossed the Bosphorus into Asia proper. She does not know if this has anything to do with religious belief (she knows, for example, that Islamic law does not permit the depiction of human beings or animals) or if it has only to do with exotic appetites; do they eat dogs in Muslim nations? Or is it possible that these people simply cannot afford to keep pets? She does not at first associate the skinny mongrel who comes around the side of the building with the black felt tents she sees just beyond, nor with the nomads’ sheep grazing on the greensward. She and Paul have been following the familiar aroma of broiling mutton, and are entering a walled courtyard which, they realize as soon as they see the stacked garbage, is on the kitchen side, at the rear of the low flat building. They are about to turn and retrace their steps when they see the dog entering the courtyard from the opposite end.
He is a spotted animal standing some two feet high, brown and white, with a pointed snout and glittering black eyes, a mongrel who seems to be a cross between a Doberman and a Dalmatian. “Hey there, boy,” Paul says, and is smiling and hefting his duffel onto his shoulder again when the dog’s ears go back and he bares his teeth. A low growl starts somewhere deep in his throat. He stands rooted to the spot near the cans of garbage stacked outside the kitchen, and Lissie realizes that he is only protecting his discovered turf, this treasure trove of inedible shit he has stumbled upon, and she whispers to Paul, “Let’s get out of here,” and they are backing away from the dog when suddenly he multiplies himself by two, and then by four, and there are eight dogs in that cloistered courtyard where only the spotted mongrel speaks in his low growl and in the distance the chant of the muezzin echoes and fades.