I began wondering about a distillation method I’d heard about. Could I distill this water using plastic wrap and two bowls? My fellow kayakers had bowls. There was even a small piece of plastic wrap, used to wrap brownies. It was too small to cover the bowls. So I gathered a jar of the water to try once I reached home.

Here’s what I did:

1. I poured the silty water into a large bowl.
2. I put a smaller bowl inside the large bowl.
3. I stretched plastic wrap tightly over the large bowl.
4. I weighted the plastic wrap with materials at hand so that it sagged over the small bowl.
5. I set the apparatus in the sun.

Here’s what happened:

1. Sunlight evaporated the water and it condensed on the plastic wrap.
2. The condensation ran down the slope of the weighted plastic wrap and dripped into the small bowl.
3. After several days, clear water collected in the small bowl.
4. Silt remained behind in the large bowl.
5. I drank the clear water.

Questions:

1.Was it safe to drink? What about bacteria? My friend David Benefiel, who is a real scientist, reminded me wryly that only water will evaporate; not bacteria. Yes, it was clean enough to drink.

2. How would oily residue effect the distillation? A kayaker familiar with the San Juan River asked me where I had collected the water. I had collected it at Mexican Hat. “Ah,” he said. “Below that point, the river collects oil from old mining operations. I wonder how that would affect your experiment?” That question remains to be answered after I make another trip and can collect another sample!

3. How could I speed up the process? I would have died of thirst, probably, if I had relied on the slow method I used. An engineer friend reminded me that condensation occurs more rapidly if the water is cooled (as it hits the plastic wrap). How could that be accomplished? My distiller sat outside at night and the cooler temps weren’t enough to hurry things along. In the desert, I wouldn’t have had ice. Hmmm?

me,

Aqeel my right-hand man (although he wasn’t yet 20 years old)

Mr. Momeen nominal head of Afghan work team, and

a group of English teachers who had been drafted into translating.

The English teachers resented translating mightily. They weren’t interested in science, they said. It wasn’t their subject and they didn’t want to invest energy in translating my lessons. Furthermore, they had previously enjoyed using their time as they saw fit, which often meant sitting in some unused classroom and listening to music from their mobile devices.

Aqeel was fantastic…most of the time. Like youth everywhere, he had learned how to use computer software and his English was good enough that he could have found work as a translator. But he had a stubborn streak which I discovered when I asked him to do the unthinkable – like help washing up dishes used in science experiments. “That’s women’s work!”

We needed photos of the set up: glass jars full of water colored with ink from the stationers, tubing bought at the new science supply store down the street (sometimes closed due to neighborhood riots), stools to hold the water at the right height, a bucket to catch the water. Aqeel was ready with the camera.  Here was the problem: we needed a photo of someone to suck on the siphon to get it going. I couldn’t do it, because we didn’t want a middle-aged white woman; we wanted to show Afghans doing the experiments themselves.  Ah, but we were in the midst of Ramazan (Afghan spelling of Ramadan) and no one would agree to suck on the tube because they might get water in their mouth which they felt was distinctly forbidden except in emergencies.

After much wheedling I persuaded one of the English teachers to fake the photo (below).

Siphons

Major Science Concept: Air Pressure Exerts Force

Subject: Physics

A siphon is a wonderful device for moving water with neither power nor pump. You can even make water move against gravity, uphill, effortlessly! Siphons work on the principle of air pressure.

Project #1 – Create a simple siphon

1)    Fill two clear pitchers or jars with differing amounts of water. For visibility, it is helpful to color the water with different colored inks, but this is not necessary. (Use fresh, clean water)

2)    Put one end of a clear plastic tube in one of the jars on the table. Lower the other jar to a floor or chair below the table.

3)    Suck the loose end of the tube until water begins to flow, then quickly insert the flowing end into the lower jar. If you get water into your mouth, remember that you began with clean water! (fig 1)

It began with my search for cattail pollen in the reeds along the irrigation ditches on the way to Winters. I was looking for cattail heads to use in tomorrow’s science class: making cattail pancakes with the golden pollen. After stopping at several likely locations, I did find a marshy patch of cattails with pollen heads intact. The cattails were growing ankle deep (their ankles, and mine too) in water. The only way to reach the pollen heads was to wade right in. My flipflops kept sticking in the mud, so I removed them and waded barefoot. (“What I do for science,” I was thinking. Also, “I don’t think water moccasins live in California.”)

I rinsed my toes as carefully as possible after scrambling up the clay-ey banks, but mud remained. That was OK; I had over 50 heads for my efforts. Cattails don’t reproduce via pollen, so I certainly wasn’t damaging the cattail population. They reproduce with runners. I pulled up a few young cattails to show the children the root system. As I was kneeling close to the water, I saw lots of tadpoles, so…

I went back to my car and emptied out the cup containing cherry tomatoes, on which I’d been munching during my drive. I took the cup and a large mixing bowl which had been intended for cattail pancake batter and returned to the ditch. Using bowl and cup simultaneously, I gathered several tadpoles and replaced my cup in the cupholder in my car, hoping I would remember that it was NOT coffee. The tadpoles will be fun to show my students. However, before returning to my car, I saw the snake…

I jumped when I first saw it. After all, I was wearing flipflops and rattlers are common here abouts. This long snake must have just died. It was still warm and flexible, and completely undamaged by tire marks. Before picking it up, I checked for life, and for rattles. There was neither. I think it’s a gopher snake. What a find.

My friend Chet Lloyd has shown me how he skins rattlers and mounts the skin. I hope he will help me with this snake. So I put it in the bowl and headed toward Winters. Some girls stepped right out in front of my car at a dusky sunset intersection and I put the brakes on hard. The bowl tipped over, spilling the snake onto my lap. I hurriedly put it back where it belonged – who knows, maybe the snake was just playing dead?!

When I got to my husband’s house, I logged onto the internet to see how to preserve a snake for skinning. It appears that you can freeze reptiles until you want to use them, so the snake is now wrapped in Saran wrap in my husband’s freezer.

An Afghan friend and I went to lunch today at the beautiful Wakhan restaurant, a local place I had never discovered, just blocks from my guesthouse. I had not noticed it because there is only a Dari sign written on a chalkboard set up on the sidewalk and it was unintelligible to me. We ordered plates of mantu, an Afghan delicacy: meat-filled dumplings with a delicate yogurt sauce. As we ate, my friend filled me in on the situation in Afghanistan, and also some news from America I had not followed.

“The Americans are having a budget crisis so  congress is cutting their aid to Afghanistan. Why are they doing this? They should be increasing their aid. The taliban will only return if the Americans leave.” (I’ve been on a news-break since coming here, but Afghans are very interested in everything the American govt is up to. Several of them have told me that our federal govt has declared a budget stand-still and no one is being paid at home. True? You tell me.)

I told him that I’d had dinner with the USAID representative to Afghanistan last night and she told me of plans to work deeply with the Afghan Education Ministry to build teacher capacity. He was happy to hear that, but added, “The Americans should not give their money directly to Afghans, because the money will not be spent properly. It will go into people’s pockets. The ministers here are making over $13,000 per month. $13,000 per month! That is wasted money.”

Then he told me about a bureaucrat here whom we both know. My friend works for an international  NGO which has been providing scholarships to young women to go teacher-training colleges in the provinces. I wrote about this organization’s work in my blog last summer. It is a wonderful program. They send Afghan representatives to rural villages to speak with elders and parents, persuading them to send their daughters to the provincial teacher-training colleges. It is often difficult to persuade these villagers of the value of women-work and education, but they are successful partly because they pay the young women a scholarship to attend the teacher-training schools. Now this Afghan bureaucrat says the program will be discontinued unless the international NGO agrees to put it directly under the ownership of this bureaucrat’s agency. The international NGO says no, so the bureaucrat has declared that the scholarships will be discontinued, and the women “should vanish their faces from the teacher-training colleges.” My friend will probably have to find work elsewhere, since the two parties cannot find common ground. And the women…well, they will probably return to a quiet life indoors and their families will feel that once again they have been cheated by forces outside their control.

Changing the conversation, my friend said he was leaving for the weekend to go visit his family in a distant province. A fellow friend will travel on the bus with him. “My friend works in a mental health clinic,” he said.

“Ah,” I said. “Tell me about suicides here. Are there many?”

He misunderstood me, thinking I meant suicide bombers. “No, no, there are not many in Kabul.”

I clarified my question, “No, I’m talking about suicides. Not suicide bombers.”

“Oh, I see. Well, we don’t really have many of those either. Except women, of course. Women burn themselves many times here, because they are forced by their parents into a marriage they do not like. That is all. You see, this is a very bad thing. Fathers don’t ask a suitor, ‘Are you educated? Are you a good man? Are you an honest person?’ They only ask, ‘How much will you pay me for my daughter?’ If the price is high enough, they tell their daughter she must marry him. These girls have no choice! Then, when they kill themselves, only the parents are to blame! It is their fault!”

“Do you think the parents ever blame themselves?”

“No, no, of course not! And they never talk about it. They are ashamed.”

The issue of dowry payments has historically been a contentious issue in Afghanistan. When the Russians came, they outlawed dowries, believing girls would be treated more fairly. Even various Afghan regimes  have tried over the years to control or eliminate dowries. But it is tradition. Some say that it is a good thing, because it means a young man cannot take a bride until he has saved enough to provide for her. But more modern Afghans say the bad outweighs the good. I can say personally that I know many young men who tell me they will not be able to marry for years because they have not saved enough money.

………

An American friend of mine who originally came from Afghanistan visited the Commission on Human Rights, headed by an Afghan woman here in Kabul. The director spoke in English in front of my friend and some other women she brought, and described the many programs for women here. Then my friend and the director continued their conversation in Dari, during which the director admitted, “But, you know, nothing has really changed here. It is still the same old story for women: no rights.”

……..

I met an American who has founded a small program working with intelligent girls to bring their English skills up-to-snuff so that they can then come to America as exchange students. He described one young woman, age 16, who founded a school in her village by persuading elders to donate land and fund teacher salaries. She is now at university in England but plans to return to Afghanistan to continue her work rebuilding the education system here. The American gentleman traveled to her village, deep within a taliban-infested region to meet her parents. He said to her father, “Thank you for letting your daughter come to my program for education.” and the father answered with tears in his eyes, “No, I thank YOU for taking my daughter into your program!”

……

Two young women work near my desk at the education center where I work on my book. They have both graduated from Kabul university, one in world history and the other in chemistry. Their jobs at the education center are dull, it seems to me, and  I told them I thought they could be working at better jobs. “What would you rather be doing?” I asked during lunch the other day. “Nothing, really,” they answered with a small shrug. They are waiting for their parents to choose husbands for them.

…..

Most of the computer and graphics staff where I am editing my book are young men. You can almost point to the ones who are married. They are, as a rule, the ones who work steadily. The unmarried guys are frisky, sometimes reading text messages aloud to each other from girlfriends, sometimes playing computer games with pictures of steamy women on the side. There have been two parties for men who have recently become engaged. Everyone brings cookies (kolchas) and special tea and put a garland of flowers around the neck of the lucky young man.

There is alot of horseplay and joking among the younger men, in which sometimes they include me. Today they were joking about each other.

“His last name (here they pointed) is ‘garbage’! Don’t you think it suits him?”

“Well, his name is cauliflower head! Look at his face! Doesn’t it look like a cauliflower?” They pointed to a handsome guy with a roundish face, who just laughed along. I was trying unsuccessfully not to laugh.

“Well,” that man countered. “His head looks like a brush!”  “Yeah, a toilet brush!” Lots more laughing.

“And, Camilla, you are sitting at someone else’s desk. You must pay rent for that space!”

I told them I would pay the rent in kolchas brought on the next work day, Saturday. They nodded approval. Kolcha rent.

…………

I learned for the first time, in a book I just finished on the subject, that musicians are considered a lower class in Afghanistan, almost pariahs. I confirmed this with an Afghan who grew up here in the 70’s. She said it was certainly true then, and even somewhat now. There are several theories on how this came to be. Some people say musicians originally came from a gypsy caste in India. Others say it is because Mohammed instructed followers to not associate with musicians, nor play music. Many professional musicians seem to have once, and not so long ago, been barbers or sieve-makers. Because of their work with skins (sieves were made of sinew) these professions were seen as the lowest of the low. Female singers were assumed as a matter of fact to be prostitutes. The taleban certainly forbid music of any kind and broke musical instrument wherever they found them.  With increased exposure to Western media, this is changing. People here in Kabul play music on the car radios, buy CD’s, and watch TV musical programs. Still the idea that musicians are smutty remains a lingering idea.

That’s it for Kabul news tonight.

“Surq Sia is what we call them!” Azeem laughed. Red-black was certainly not what these bugs were called. They have no name. A group of men had gathered once again to see what I was discovering. Two red and black beetles were attached together at their ends. One pulled the other in one direction; then the other pulled in her direction. What were they up to? Other pairs of beetles were doing the same thing, and I was taking photos.

“We sometimes just call these bugs insects,” Mr. Momeen came beside me. “We don’t have other names for these things.”

I read a book about Moslem sciences last night. The book explained that the only original Islamic sciences were astronomy and geography. All other sciences were “foreign” and long considered suspect.

Mr. Momeen said, “There is another animal we know. We call them night butterflies. They have no eyes, but do not need them to find their home. They can fly like that (he made a zooming motion) to find their homes even with no eyes.” I think he meant moths. I nodded. “Yes, they use their antennae to smell.”

“And another thing: there are birds,” he said in awe, “that fly in a V shape. The bird at the head of the V is the leader. But when she becomes tired, she drops behind and another bird takes her place. They work together like this, with no fighting about who will be leader. It is truly wonderful. People fight so much over who will be the leader. So many crimes are committed over this.”

Just moments before I had been watching karachs, the large indigenous sow bug. They dig large holes and move in and out of them, jockeying for position, pushing one another out. Azeem told me that the Afghans called Russian tanks after these bugs – “Shasht pipi.” Shasht pipi means “six legs.”

“But they don’t have six legs,” I countered, picking one up and holding it upside down.

“You have counted them?” Another man asked.

“Yes. They have 14 legs.”

He counted the squiggling legs and agreed. “And what are these?” I explained those were the antennae waving in front.

If you have been reading this blog, you will already know that I am working on the final edit (one hopes!) of a book of hands-on science lesson plans titled Science Without a Laboratory. Here are two pages partially formatted for publication, translated into the Dari language. These two pages are drawn from the chapter on physics, and relate to density.  You can see the types of graphics which will be included with each lesson: photos and illustrations drawn by my good friend Azeem at the Ministry of Education.

Pulling this book together has required many hours of staff- and my time. It has been translated, checked by Professors at Kabul University for accuracy, combined with photos taken locally and hand-drawn illustrations. Now it is being drawn into Word templates; then Corel Draw templates. The Ministry of Education has a detailed list of print standards: font size, picture format, etc., against which the book will be checked and rechecked. Then the entire book will go to printers for a bid price. Finally, all willing, the book will go to press and be distributed to 22,000 teachers nationwide on the first printing. The Director of Curriculum, Mr. Khalil, believes many more reprints will follow.

I may have to extend my stay to see this project through.

A couple of days ago Najib and I took a taxi through the early morning traffic to the edge of the huge Kabul bazaar. Piles of cloth, electric irons, immersion heaters, thermo jugs, elastic pant bands, glassware, religious charms, zippers, and all sorts of miscellany were spread out on plastic tarps between the road and the river. The taxi pulled up, we hopped out and wound through the crowds and down a narrow alley over muddy puddles and scrappy litter, down to the dead end where we could hear the Sufi musicians warming up their instruments.

These musicians play in a very small room each Tuesday morning. Before playing, friends gather beforehand for breakfast and prayer. It seems this morning we had arrived late and missed that part – my favorite part, actually. I have only one more Tuesday before leaving and I must make sure Najib comes early enough that we can share this special time with them. Everyone contributes some food, and I purchased special plump-dried fruit from my home near Davis, California just to share.

We discovered the room was packed full of men sitting on the floor waiting for the music. They shuffled and moved aside to make room for us. One of them pointed graciously to a wooden stool for me to sit. Another man then jumped up to get a coat, which he folded to put between me and the hard wood seat. I glanced at the musicians. They were wearing special costumes today; something was going on. Several of them saw me enter and nodded their heads and smiled at me; they knew me from last summer. The harmonium player raised his hand in salute. He had given me advice on purchasing a harmonium last summer.

It turns out the musicians were being filmed for a video documentary to be shown to Afghans living in Europe. The cameraman was interested in my presence. He asked if I would introduce the Sufi group for the video and explain why I was there.  I am so honored to be included as though I were a part of that group!

Reg Rawan looms over its bazaar

In an old book I read about the sands of Reg Rawan, drifting high against a hill to the east of Charikar.  People said that the sands were so fine that your feet would sink deeply into them, making it difficult to get to the top. The author hadn’t been there, but she recounted a legend about them. A famous Sunni Imam had been cornered there some centuries ago, fighting infidels. He knew there was no escape, so he prayed for deliverance. Allah split the side of the mountain and the Imam entered, never to be seen again. Local people said they could hear cymbals playing from the interior of the rocky mount at night, since the Imam sat there on a wonderful thrown surrounded by jewels and presumably aides.  One day the Imam will reappear in glory from this spot.

I asked my drivers about this legend and one of them said he had heard it, too. We decided to make a trip.

We drove down country roads, asking for directions at each intersection, since none of us knew the way. We drove through a small bazaar and saw the sands at the end of the road. At the base of the mountain was a shrine to the Imam. Two gentlemen and a group of children gathered around us. One of the men told us something about the sand dune, “Reg Rawan (moving sands) are given that name because if you take even a grain of sand from this place, it will return here.” That might have disappointed me, since I had intended to take a small bag for my sand collection.

An Imam's Shrine

We asked about the shrine. The children wanted to lead us inside. One of the men, who lived across the street in a village home, told us,

“The shrine is to the Imam buried under the mountain. Inside the shrine are three tunnels. One leads inside the mountain, the second tunnel leads to Ghazni (hundreds of miles distant), and no one knows where the third tunnel goes.”

“Who dug them?” I asked.

No one knew the history of the tunnels, just where they went.

“Is this an old legend that is no longer believed, or is this a true story?” I asked, since one of the men had already expressed some doubt that the Imam was really inside the mountain.

“It’s true,” he answered simply.

“How do you know?”

“Because our fathers told us, and their fathers told them. Plus,” he added, “a test was performed. A cat was chosen, and an earring put into its ear. The cat was sent down the tunnel, and she reappeared in Ghazni – with the earring proving it was the same cat.”

A girl pulled at my hand to show me the tunnels inside the shrine. The roof on one side had collapsed and the door locked. The another door led down a set of stairs… At the end of the steps, the darkness gaped into the dirt. I scrambled down after the girl. My friends stayed at the top, but handed us their cellphones to use as flashlights.

The tunnels under the shrine

There were indeed three tunnels leading…where? The cellphones barely made a dent in the blackness. I felt the walls with my hands: packed dirt. The girl was crouched before me, willing to go further, but I would have had to crawl on my hands and knees and then back out. I decided to leave it for a future trip, one with better lights.

Then we drove to the base of the great sand dune. Young boys were selling fruit drinks at the bottom, for tourists, but we were the only ones there. I kicked off my shoes and started to the top, one of my friends Naseef following behind. The dune was very steep and even with crossing back and forth, I grew disappointingly exhausted. Naseef was huffing, too.  On the other hand, he was at least 30 years my junior. The boys came scampering up after us; then they would fling themselves down the dune in somersaults and return again. One of them climbed up with a drink, which I gulped down. As I rested, I picked up rocks laying scattered all around. They were a beautiful blue. The mountain seemed to be made of blue limestone. I could see no source on the plains below for the reddish sand. At the very top, we could see much of the Shamali plain spread with orchards and villages, a river coursing through it.

Then I ran and jumped my way downhill.

A young boy was playing on the packed dirt in front of his home and ran out to join us as walked up a goat trail (Dana wouldn’t find any plants here) above the Panshir River.  The waters of the river rushed gray with sediment through the gorge and mountains rose on all sides, layers of limestone tilted sideways. The trail was gravelly and our shoes slipped underneath us as we scrambled up the slope.  The boy pointed across the river to his school. It was a lovely new building with trees planted in the courtyard and window sills painted a cheerful green. He asked if I could come teach science at their school; his teachers didn’t seem to know very much. I told him, yes I could imagine building a small home on this side of the river near his house and crossing the bridge to teach every day.

A gaggle of girls ran out their front door. One of them, dressed in a long red dress and pants, waved and smiled; then she galloped up to meet us and stuck her hand out right at me in a greeting. I grinned broadly. “Chai mekwahid?” (Will you take tea with us?) she asked, and we accepted. Her sisters led us through the large wooden door of their compound into a courtyard. A boulder with a sledge hammer laying nearby was in the center. Someone had been breaking it up the hard way. A smoky door led into the kitchen. We were ushered into a greeting room, spread with carpets and pads against the wall. The ceiling was covered with bright cloth. There was nothing else in the simple room, nothing but cleanliness and fresh air. We sat on the cushions until the mother and other sisters came in to join us. Suddenly Dana asked if it was really appropriate that we had come into this home – especially he and Najib – without a male present. He turned out to be prescient because shortly afterward, a young man entered the room and we stood up to greet him. He was the eldest son. He didn’t smile as he greeted us. He spoke to the mother and they left the room together with the girls. We sat in the room with a younger brother, whom we had met on the other side of the bridge. He continued smiling, but outside we could hear shouting.

We stood up to take our exit, apologizing to the younger son. As we left the house, more yelling and this time, the sounds of hitting. I looked back at the doorway of the house and the small boy who had joined us on our hike came running out, crying and holding the back of his head. Who knows what was happening to the bright young girl who had bounded up the hill to meet us.

Najib was very disturbed. He said in all his travels he had never met such a man. Neither had I. Afghans are overwhelmingly welcoming. However, in this country, it is the men who rule the household and they can behave as they wish. As I watched, the elder son came out of the door and stood gazing at us near the bridge. I stared back. Then I shook my finger back and forth in the age-old gesture, “For shame!”

Alleyway up the mountain

Three of us from the guesthouse decided to hike to the top of the mountain overlooking Karte Char (the fourth quarter in Kabul), despite warnings from Naqib that there were bandits there. He was originally going to be part of our outing, but decided against it when he saw exactly which mountain we had chosen.  He shrugged and grimaced, washing his hands of the entire affair, and went back to the guesthouse.

We looked at each other: a female science teacher, a botanist from Washington who had only been to Afghanistan once before on a supervised tour, and an Iranian gentleman in his 60’s who had never set foot in the country. We decided that it was unlikely we would be molested and set out.  Knowing how Afghans generally want to protect foreigners, we figured there would be plenty of saviors if someone did try to jump us. The way led up a narrow alley, and turned between houses before leading under a building that crossed above the narrow way. A man dressed in black country clothes was climbing the same set of steps and overheard us wondering if we were taking the right path. He stopped to suggest that we follow him; he was going the same way. The four of us passed a group of young men pouring water into large plastic vegetable containers at the community pump. They glanced at us, then smiled and greeted us. Curtains were pulled aside in upstairs windows and children, women looked down at us. All of them were smiling. They seemed to think it an honor that westerners would visit their neighborhood. Most foreigners never get up into this section of town, a place where only the most determined Afghan returnees would live.

Smiling Children

Up here on the steep rocky slope of the mountain, the land is government owned and free to anyone who will work to make a home here. We stopped to talk to a group of Panshiri men who were hewing a foundation hole in the limestone, using pick and shovel.  They had left their valley to come to Kabul because of their hopes of finding work. The home would be very small, crowded at the top of the hill just above the roofs of houses below. Although we saw others carrying jugs of water up stairways to their home, these men said they could get piped water from a reservoir above. As for electricity, that was available too. They pointed to a wire passing over our heads. That would be their tie-in. Public utilities had recently been brought to this mountain, but the men would have to pay monthly fees. Maybe the families carrying water couldn’t afford the fees.

A Rocky Homesite

A group of school-aged boys were hanging around a small storefront. They asked where we were going. “Koh,” we said. (to the mountain). “We will come, too,” the oldest one said, and so we were accompanied by a flock of running and jumping boys. When they discovered one of us was especially interested in flowering plants, they began pointing out every gul (flower) they could see. Our Iranian friend stooped down to pick a large-leafed plant. “If you are thirsty, eat this,” he said. “We eat this in Iran.” He chewed the stem, then offered me a bite. It was refreshing, juicy like celery. The boys gathered some dry rust-colored lichen. “We use this for medicine when we feel bad, mixed with milk.” The boys knew enough English from school to speak with us, aided by our friend’s translation.

A Plant with Juicy Stems

“Do you know how to swim?” one boy asked me. He said sometimes he plays in a neighborhood swimming pool, but cannot swim. Far below in the smoggy Kabul mist I could just make out the swimming pool he pointed to.  He added that only boys are allowed into the pool. I replied with lite-self-righteousness that in America, girls could swim too. “Of course!” he answered. “In America, you are free!”

We had climbed way past the last house, up to the edge of an ancient stone wall that bisects the mountain from top to bottom. The story of this wall, the boys said, was that there was a king whose sons were fighting over their inheritance to the Kabul region. Finally they decided to build the wall to divide it. How many years ago was this?  The boys didn’t know. Holes in the lower part of the wall aimed straight down to the other side. Defenders could pour hot oil onto attackers climbing up from below.

The Dividing Wall

I stopped to pick up rocks: quartz, serpentine, granite. Seeing this, the boys would look for colorful rocks to hand me. If I had accepted each of their gifts, I would have brought half the mountainside downhill with me. Then we walked amid shallow caves dug by mujaheddin, still full of spent cartridges. I held one and turned it over in my hands. This rusty shell would be exactly the right size for a bud vase. I put it in my pocket.

Until the 1960’s, Kabul had a noon gun for marking time. I’d read about it many times, because it had been famous in its day. The hill had once been called Cannon Hill, but I’d never been able to discover where it was. Simple timekeeping methods have always interested me.  On an inspiration, I asked the boys if they knew about the old cannon. Not only did they know of it, they pointed to a flattened spot just a few feet away from where we stood. That was where the cannon had been mounted!

Playing shotput on Cannon Hill

We reached the very top of the peak after a couple of hours of walking, then returned by a different path leading down the other side of the mountain. We passed more mujaheddin shelters, then reached the swelter of homes where we said goodbye to the boys. Mehdi, our Iranian companion,  laughed, “Do you know what they said to me? They said it was my duty to convert you two into Muslims!”

At the Top

At the bottom, we three found an ice cream shop where we stopped to rest over ice cream cones and pepsi. A small group of young men followed us inside and sat at the next table, eating their own ice cream and watching wrestling on the TV over the door.

When we told Naqib we had encountered no bandits, he explained the real reason he had not wanted to join us. He is Tajik, and the hill neighborhood is Pashtun. There has always been bad blood between these two ethnic groups, he said. Possibly, he added, it was like the blacks and whites in America.