Caravans by James A. Michener Read Free Book Online

is she?” Shah Khan asked.
    “Seventeen,” Moheb replied. “She prefers things American and we thought …”
    “It’s a good school,” I said. “Coeducational. Boys and girls.”
    “It isn’t a convent?” Shah Khan asked with some surprise.
    “Oh, no!”
    “That takes care of America,” Shah Khan growled. “Off she goes to Paris. But what Moheb said earlier is true. The forces that drove Islam to plural marriage will operate throughout the world. In France, for example, I thought their handling of the problem was pathetic … mistresses, liaisons, scandal, murder.”
    “But Moheb referred to America,” I pointed out
    The young diplomat sipped his whiskey, then reflected, “Do you know the thing which impressed me most in America? The frightening excess of women over men. In some cities like Washingtonand New York the situation was scandalous.”
    “You were there during wartime,” I pointed out.
    “And peacetime,” he reminded me. “You not only have more women than men in the population, but you also have an increasing number of young men who remove themselves from the marriage market. Homosexuality, Oedipus complexes, withdrawal from competition, psychological crippling …”
    Shah Khan interrupted to observe gently, “The point is, Miller Sahib, that brilliant young men like you come to Afghanistan and say, ‘Such a quaint land beset by such quaint problems.’ When I go to France or Moheb to America we make exactly the same observation.”
    “And the most quaint,” Moheb laughed, “is the way in which your society pretends to be shocked when some man is caught with two wives, legal or otherwise. What do you expect a girl to do when she realizes there aren’t enough husbands to go around? Grab someone else’s … I would.”
    Since I had not come to Shah Khan’s for a lecture on the shortcomings of my country, I asked abruptly, “Then Ellen Jaspar was last heard of in Kandahar?”
    “Not exactly,” Shah Khan replied. “We know she was there, because one day some mullahs attacked her on the street. Not wearing the chaderi. She distinguished herself by fighting back, and her husband joined her. Between them they kicked the devil out of the mullahs, and I’m glad they did.”
    “Must have made her popular in Kandahar,” I suggested.
    “Didn’t matter one way or the other,” Shah Khanlaughed. “Most of us in government are bloody well fed up with mullahs, but we don’t know what to do about them. At any rate, her outburst didn’t harm Nazrullah’s chances, for shortly he was promoted to the best engineering job in the country. Set up headquarters in the old fortress at Qala Bist.”
    The old man’s eyes misted over at the mention of this great name in Afghan history and he asked, “Monsieur Miller, have you ever seen Qala Bist?”
    I hadn’t, but I refrained from comment because I didn’t want to get the old patriot off on a tirade about the vanished glories of Afghanistan. My trick didn’t work, for he said quietly, “This fantastic arch rising from the desert and reflected in the river. It’s as beautiful an arch as there is in the world. I much prefer it to Ctesiphon. No one recalls when it was built, but the building it was attached to must have been immense. There’s a fort nearby which surely housed ten thousand men, and an abandoned city of perhaps half a million. Now we don’t even remember what the city was named.”
    “What’s he doing at Qala Bist?” I asked, for I had learned at previous meetings that when Shah Khan started talking about the lost glories of Afghanistan, reaching back long before the days of Alexander the Great, there was no stopping him. In fact, I had acquired much of my Afghan history from such reminiscences, for unlike those of other men, the reflections of old Shah Khan were founded in fact. If he said Qala Bist had once been a city of half a million, it had been, and now even the history of the city was lost.
    “Nazrullah and his