Journeys in Afghanistan

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33141, 3 February 1973, Page 10

Journeys in Afghanistan

The Light Garden of the Angel King. Journeys in Afghanistan. By Peter Levi. Collins. 287 pp. Afghanistan might be likened to the Cardiff Arms Park of civilisations ana religions. Alexander led his Macedonians, Babur his Moghuls, Roberts his British forces, to decisive or indecisive trials of strength in ana through this mountainous crucible of Asia. Jewish, Christian. Moslem, Pars:, Buddhist, Brahmin and Communist missionaries have sipped the mountain air for meditation or confrontation. Poems, prayers, epitaphs remain as the more literate records of these cosmic stirrings, but the real eloquence rests with the architects and the archaeologists- , . . And as refered to all this fervent scrummaging, rucking, chain-passing, who so fit as Father Peter Levi. His grandfather was a Jewish indigo merchant and carpet dealer in Istanbul, his father, one of 20 children, was converted late in life to Catholicism m London. He himself became a Jesuit priest, classically educated at Beaumont and Oxford. Father Levi, accompanied by a friend named Bruce, who supplied the finest cooking and the best jokes on the expedition, set out on a three months’ exploration of the mam archaeological treasures and mountainous landscapes of the country. The somewhat fantastical title, “Light Garden of the Angel King, gives one a foretaste of the allusiveclassical style in which the book is written. The epitaph from which the title is derived is worth quoting m full for its evocative power: Only this mosque of beauty, this temple of nobility, constructed for the prayer of saints and the epiphany of cherubs, was fit to stand in so venerable a sanctuary as this highway of archangels, this theatre of Heaven, the light garden of the Godforgiven angel

King whose rest is in the garden of Heaven, Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur the conqueror. The author has a fine sense of the transcience of history and the permanence of archaeology. On page 27 he writes: “As late as 30 8.C., when nomads not unlike the Parthians had already overrun the important and wealthy Greek cities of Russian middle Asia and Afghanistan, there was still one Greek king south of the Khyber Pass; but Greek India, like the whole of Greek Asia, was politically shortlived. It lasted, that is. about as long as British India, only that what seems iron-shod in recent history in the past seems shadow-footed.” For pertinent and impertinent elucidation of historical, geographical, religious and literary byways. Peter Levi can have few peers. He writes of the night sky above Teheran as being "like a star-eaten black blanket,” and he gives a lucent chromograph of the transition of light from the “equable glow of eighteenth-century summer” and characterises England, through the increasing intensity of Ankara and Teheran, until it culminates in the “crisp blaze” of the highlands of Afghanistan. For those who long for a change from the "gorgeous technicolour” of conventional travelogues, this reviewer can prescribe nothing more satisfying than the fizzy, cerebral coruscations of this tireless observer, who combines the verbal felicities of the poet Catullus with the pristine irreverences of Fra Angelico. The endpapers supply a clear map of the country; there are 32 pages of notes both learned and lively, a score of outstanding photographs and the book closes with some travel lyrics that Horace, one believes, would have signed with delight.