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of the unemployed mullahs and the illiterate gunmen discussing cousin-marriage. No one was buying anything; everything, it seemed, was bartered or given. Everyone knew each other. Two young men talked to each other about me, where England was, and what a foreigner ate and carried and enjoyed. It was an easy rolling chain of speculation that didn't require my participation.
    "He may be tougher than he looks," one of them said as I passed, "but I don't think he understands what he is doing." They smiled at me and I grinned back.
 
    Men resting
    After half an hour, Qasim and Abdul Haq reappeared with another soldier and suggested we visit the garden outside the bazaar. About a kilometer away, we turned toward a cemetery up an avenue of cypresses that hid us from the village. The men were all carrying their rifles and Qasim's new friend was for some reason holding a naked bayonet. I was still trying to understand Afghanistan, as I did other countries, in terms of its scenery, history, and architecture. But this was a country at war and I was not in control of the gunmen beside me. I still could not believe the Security Service had any interest in protecting me for free. Nor could I believe that they would let me walk across the province if they thought I was a spy. It was possible that they had simply told Qasim and Abdul Haq to take me outside the city and kill me. No one would notice in the middle of a war. I felt it would be ludicrous to be killed only eight kilometers into my journey and not for the first time worried that when I was killed people would think me foolhardy.
    But the soldiers weren't thinking of killing me. They only wanted to show me other people's graves. They left me and climbed onto the roof of an abandoned building to smoke cannabis.
    "This is the shrine and mausoleum of Saint Ulya," Qasim shouted down. "He was a very important man; he was 'Ten-Feet-Tall.'" It was a fittingly large grave. I returned to looking at the landscape. In front of me was a two-hundred-foot-long mud wall with a gate. I entered and continued down a dark tunnel for about thirty feet until a courtyard opened on my left. From the sunken floor, mud surfaces billowed twenty feet into the air, forming steps and roofs, walls and courtyards. I watched the play of shade and refracted sunlight on curving ramparts, wooden struts, granite keystones, and beehive domes. At one of the miniature windows a pair of young eyes, above a veil, appeared and disappeared. The floor was scattered with grain husks from the autumn harvest and the door frames were stained with soot. I climbed some stairs onto the roof and found a lean-to of dead branches that served as a kitchen, containing two faded machinemade rugs, a hurricane lamp, and a tea towel depicting a mosque.
    "That is all that the family possesses," Qasim shouted up, appearing with the others. "One hundred people live in this building." I could not understand this medieval tenement block—a village in a single building with circular stairs, half-stories, and abortive tunnels.
    "They are very poor," I said.
    " Jang-e bist-o-se saal bud. Ab nist. Mardom-e-karia gharib..., " he replied. I did not need him to complete the phrase because I had heard it word for word from men in Herat and Kabul. "There has been war for twenty-four years. There is no water. The villagers are poor, illiterate, mad, and dangerous. Afghanistan is destroyed." In this standard analysis, Islam and ethnicity did not feature and violence was the product of crazy rural illiterates. It suggested a little education, money, and counseling might restore a golden age that existed before Afghanistan was "destroyed." But I was not sure how the exact words of the slogan had become so fixed or what part the media had played in it all. It told me nothing about this community.
    We walked back into the garden. Beyond the avenue was a shriveled, formal box parterre and faded roses, and in the center a dry concrete pool. Despite twenty-four