What visiting Afghanistan meant only thirty years ago is something that was very clearly described by the Italian archaeologist Maurizio Tosi to Nicolas Shakespeare, a talented writer and Bruce Chatwin’s official biographer.

“You will find yourself in a dry landscape, watching a roaming convoy of horses and camels moving along with their flocks and merchandise and - rising in the background – the most magnificent remains of splendid buildings erected by kings ruling peasants and artisans in large cities”.
In very few other countries were the remains from the past so omnipresent, and blending the most diversified civilizations, ranging from the Greeks to the Arabs and Mongolians, within a wildly intact natural environment, surrounded by a style of life in which the influence of modernity was hardly visible, time still had a value of its own, hospitality had its own codified dignity.

Towards the end of sixties, Afghanistan meant refined splendour, noble poverty, roses and rifles, trucks and bazaars, excavation campaigns and military obtuseness, dust, diseases, primordial snow and delicate daybreaks.
Then there came the Soviet invasion, the internal underground movement, the liberation, the Taliban counter-revolution, the American score settling: three decades of unprecedented devastations and today Afghanistan no longer exists, except for a huge and useless battlefield, where religious obtuseness has destroyed masterpieces, massive bombing have flattened tops and hollowed out fields, and war wreckage has replaced archaeological finds. If and when it will be possible to again travel through this country, it will be with a sour taste in one’s mouth, looking in vain for the enchanted haunts of one’s ideal childhood, the sacred land of myth and adventure.

Maurizio Tosi, whom we have mentioned at the beginning of this article, is the archaeologist to whom the English author Peter Levi has dedicated The Light Garden of the Angel King, which Einaudi is now publishing in Italian (298 pages, 16.50 Euro).

Tosi, who was born in 1944, and was heavily influenced during his youth by the Marxist revolution which had so much affected his generation, developed into a young man very keen on studies and excavations, which brought him a chair at Harvard University; Tosi is one of the Italians whom foreigners love and admire, and his fellow countrymen do not know. Chatwin, who first met with him when he was still thinking of busying himself with archaeology, amongst other things drew inspiration from him for his novel Utz and was the best man at, one of his weddings.
As far as Levi is concerned, it was thanks to him that he could visit the excavations of Ghazni, which were carried out in Afghanistan under the superintendency of Ismeo [Italian Institute for the Middle and Far East] and which unearthed the town’s fantastic monuments, raised between the last phase of Buddhism and looming Islam. Levi, who was a Lecturer at Oxford University, a poet and a Hellenist, died two years ago; having chosen to become a Jesuit, he left the religious order to get married when he was already over 40. The Light Garden was written when he still was a Jesuit, but the book bears no trace of such a background, except for a few poems that accompany the text.
The Flutes of Autumn is the title of his autobiography.
He was a pagan who did not know himself and subsequently found out about his real nature. Levi, who was of a Turkish-Hebrew extraction, went to Afghanistan on Alexander the Great’s trail, and this already speaks volumes on his character and on the purposes of his journey.
Tosi wrote that “seeking the Greeks in Afghanistan in the mind of a young Father from Oxford, who was Hebrew Catholic and English, had a double catalysing effect and the sense of an initiation experience which both Eastern and European poets have always ascribed to Alexander’s adventure.” It also meant seeking “the phantoms and remains of those whom, according to the most mysterious collective imagination of the West, represent the very symbol of restless search for knowledge, converting into travel and rejection of the entire domestic world”.
From Balkh, where Alexander married Roxana, to Ay Khanoum, Alexandria in Termez-Uzbekistan, with its temple, its Hellenic palaestra, its “sacred Kineas enclosure” where Clearcus, Aristotle’s disciple, reproduced the precepts seen in Delphi from the ancient wise men, to Kandahar, that is Iskander (which is the Arab version of Alexander’s name), Levi followed in the footsteps of what was a personal research rather than an archaeological expedition. This was a trip stimulated by the enthusiasm, the passion and the irony of an excited and happy thirty-year-old, despite fatigue, hardships and diseases.
“The ride lasted fourteen hours, with just a few brief breaks. In my case, the fever intensified the qualities of the landscape and, apart from the vomiting crises at midday, the brutalisation caused by fatigue upon arrival late in the evening, and the desire to cry when it was about time to cross the last stream of water, I must say I enjoyed the day very much. ”.
Chatwin and Levi
In Afghanistan Levi had an exceptional companion, Bruce Chatwin, who was still a writer at that time, but was already an expert explorer. According to the account provided by the former, this was a successful partnership and Levi rendered honours and thanks to his companion.
According to the account provided by the latter, things do not appear to have run just as smoothly: “His book makes me boil with anger” he wrote to his wife upon its publication. “I’d better not read it or I’ll have a heart attack. All my remarks have been reported word for word as an integral part of his text”.
Fifteen years later, his judgement was even more severe: “One of the most unpleasant experiences in my whole life. Peter thinks there always is a pot of gold at the end of each rainbow. He fills the pot with fragments and claims that they come from a Greek temple.”
As usual, truth lies halfway, and it depends on the age, the personality and the expectations of individual protagonists. In this journey, Levi knew what he was looking for. Chatwin didn’t. Levi had a purpose and an end, he viewed Chatwin as a childish character who made him smile. An altimeter that the former had bought and proudly operated signalled a height that could only be that of Mr. Everest …But over time, the childish Bruce had grown up and viewed his past and that of his friend according to a new and distorted perspective.
The book is full of lyric descriptions, of fierce blows of colour: “We found ourselves facing leafy walnut-trees and tall white poplars, with vine-shoots burdened with green grapes winding themselves round them; and also white and purple mulberries, and enormous climbing rosaries full of faded flowers resembling coloured paper shavings”.
And again: “We were overwhelmed with the fabulous richness of the landscape, with the opulence of the wooden architectural creations, with the green and yellow valleys of ripe maize and with the glittering trees”.
The title of the volume originates from the Babur mausoleum in Kabul, which unfortunately today is heavily damaged as a result of the war. It is a garden dominating the river: built in Kandahar marble, the inscription which used to stand out at its entrance said: “Only an extraordinarily beautiful mosque, a sublimely excellent temple, built for saints’ prayers and the epiphany of cherubs, was worthy of standing in this light garden of God’s favourite angel king”. It is a beautiful title, worthy of a poet rather than of a researcher. And indeed the book bears few scientific traces of a planned mission and many rhapsodies distinctive of somebody moving through a country in search of personal harmony, of tunings that may resonate depending on the circumstances, on luck, on need or on unforeseen events.
Who really wishes to follow Alexander the Great’s tracks may refer to Michael Wood’s volume, In the Footsteps of Alexander The Great (Bbc Books, 256 pages, 17,99 Pounds Sterling), published in 1997, which is the account of an accurate and perilous historical and geographical journey following the Macedonian Emperor step by step up into Afghanistan itself, where the Taliban regime was prevailing.
But those who believe that travels are journeys or projections of the mind, daydreams which are meant for finding out about our own nature rather than for seeking something else, will find in The Light Garden of the Angel King a compendium of happiness. (traslation by Interpres)