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18 five A Small Travel Library, I Books are essential to understanding a country , learning its history, discovering the thoughts of those who came before us. In modern Afghanistan, books are even more indispensable because the conflict is a barrier to many places, and the destruction of the last thirty years has left little of what was once there. I arranged my little travel library in the bedroom of my new home, a dozen or so volumes, all I’d been able to fit into my suitcase and carry-on bag. But I was in no doubt that this would be another of those occasions when I would see the number grow rapidly, as it had everywhere else I’d lived and worked. I’d heard about a downtown bookstore, which went by the name of the “Bookseller of Kabul” and sold books in English and French, but it was mainly the city’s proximity to India that sowed a seed in my bookworm mind. New Delhi bookstores were little more than an hour away by air, and if I could find a way to get there, I would discover every imaginable book about this part of the world. Maybe I could give it a try in November, during the All Saints holiday, or in December, for the Christmas break. For the time being, I’d have to make do with what I’d brought from Rome. Geopolitics and anthropology essays were a necessary part of my job; the others, especially the travel books, were for my own pleasure. Along with the Baburnama, I started reading The Light Garden of the Angel King by Peter Levi, one of the best books I’ve ever come across about Afghanistan. Levi describes his research of ancient Greece among the secluded valleys of the Hindu Kush and his pilgrimage to the ruins of the ancient city of Ai-Khanoum on the banks of the Amu Darya, in northern Afghanistan. It was 1969 when Peter Levi, a Jesuit priest with a passion for archaeology, traveled with Bruce and Elizabeth Chatwin to a 05-2423-0 ch5.indd 18 6/3/13 1:50 PM A Small Travel Library, I 19 country that had not yet become a theater of war. It was untouched, hospitable , a gold mine of marvels. The book’s title comes from an inscription on the tomb of Emperor Babur, which can still be seen in the garden dedicated to him, in one of the city’s rare green nooks. Chris Alexander, the UN’s deputy special representative, walked there every Friday morning and suggested I do the same. The trail started from the Bala Hissar fort and climbed a ridge that hugged the old city walls. The forty-minute hike reached the top of one of the mountains overlooking Kabul, and from there it took another half hour to get to the garden, lying on the southern slopes. The Agha Khan Foundation had completely refurbished the garden, in an attempt to restore it to its former glory, and people had started going back in recent months, taking picnics on holidays, bringing melons and watermelons from home. After a security officer had checked the route, the hike from Bala Hissar to Babur’s gardens became one of my few regular habits, whenever I decided to take some free time on a Friday morning . For the Tuscania Regiment boys it was an added task, and sometimes I felt guilty when I asked the escort chief to come with me. But I realized that they enjoyed some outdoor exercise as much as I did, and, climbing higher along the route, the city appeared as it did from a plane, so we were finally able to understand something of its layout. The area where we were stationed was the only one with a shred of surviving greenery, along with the Shar-e Naw district. The city center, on the other hand, a couple of miles from the ISAF headquarter, was a palette of grays, enveloped in foul-smelling clouds of exhaust and heating gases, while the district out toward parliament was a parched wasteland with the destruction of the 1990s still clearly visible. of course my miniature library included a copy of Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, the legendary book on Central Asia that generations of travelers had used to plan their itineraries. I’d already come across it some fifteen years before, although at the time I hadn’t realized what...

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