"Safety Among The Unconquered"
Peshawar, Pakistan
November 7, 1984
Dear Folks,
After escaping from the brutal police commander in eastern Turkey, I had no choice but to make my way back to Greece. With my imprisonment by the Turkey police being but a stone's throw from Iran, I had in effect accomplished my goal of crossing all of Turkey on foot.
In Athens, Greece, I rested and made preparations for the second half of the Worldwalk. I then flew onward to Pakistan. On the long flight aboard the Russian Aeroflot jet--first to a freezing Moscow, then to a steaming Karachi--bouts of frustration gripped at my insides from time to time.
I was mulling over my failure to gain the permission I'd needed to cross Iran on foot from Turkey to Pakistan. I had visited the Iranian consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, before my return to Greece, in the faint hope of finding a way to cross its interior on foot. But, alas, the results were as disheartening as ever. I was told I must wait up to eight weeks for a visa, and then I could only visit (not on foot) certain areas for a very short period. Any way I looked at the conditions offered, it amounted to a waste of my time and energies.
Perhaps it is as well that I had to go around Iran, for while inside the consulate I had studied a map which showed that much of Iran's western area, even up near the U.S.S.R., had suffered attacks by the Iraqi army or air force. Also, there were posters and blown-up photos on the walls--dozens of them, all screaming of death and the glory of spilling blood.
It was so saddening to think the once beautiful Persia had aged into something so wretched and devoid of smiles. Had she no more compassion or love or humbleness? If she did, they hid themselves well from my eyes.
Iran now lies behind, a missing link in the walk's growing chain. The empty pages that should have held her stories now must serve to remind me of how vulnerable learning is to tyranny.
In Karachi, Pakistan, I bid the hefty stewardesses of the world's largest airline good-bye and descended onto the opposite side of our world. Now it is Pakistan--a nation that, from what I have seen these past several days, still simmers in a heat and a humanity as stifling as when it was known as the Western Province of India.
As in other poor areas of my journey, the beggars still defy the imagination in their variety of
contorted frames and afflictions. Also in their numbers, as one is never far from their reaching arms. And, too, there is the endless crowd of loosely-garbed humans still rushing and buzzing as if possessed with the energy and mindlessness of insects.
Such commotion I have never witnessed. There is the temptation to conclude that, here, man has lost all control of society, that somewhere in the past he suddenly went mad and is becoming all the more so with each minute. This is the land that many who should know of such things have said the worldwalk's final chapter will be written. So frightening have their views of my chances been, that I have come to wonder if by coming here I, too, have lost my mind.
Way back, in the worldwalk's dawn, there were those like Pakistan's own embassy officials in Washington: "You will not walk there!" the consulate director had shouted, angrily flinging his eyeglasses across his desk top. "There are too many thieves! You will be killed, of that I am certain! You must take a train or a bus."
Then later, there would be many like Phillip, a seasoned traveler who had been to that still distant nation: "In Africa you stand a chance because the bandits have only knives. But in Pakistan"--his eyes narrowed--"they carry rifles. Life there has no value. They'll shoot you for less than your shirt."
And now, just a little over two weeks ago, there was this written warning from my own nation's embassy in Athens: . . . a high incidence of nighttime robbery by bandits. Visitors should be certain to reach their destination before dark. Bandits have been engaged in robbery, abductions and shootings directed against road travelers in daylight hours . . .
As I write these words to you, I am being mercilessly rocked about in the dusty carriage of a train taking me to the Khyber Pass on Afghanistan's northeast border with Pakistan. The land rushing past my window has, for the most part, been flat and hazy with dust being kicked up by camels, oxen, and the sandaled feet of what has seemed like a million fragile brown-skinned figures. Today the world has shown her age and her weariness in trying to support so many for so long without any sleep.
Yet, I am not unduly worried. Soon the scenery will be young again. Soon, in only a few hundred kilometers, nature will once again sing and man will be reveling, not suffering. It is said that where I am going the snow on the distant Himilayan peaks rivals the sun in brightness, that the fields are full of fruit and the perfume of rare flowers, and that the people are so fiercely independent they have never been conquered by any army, from Alexander the Great's to those of the British colonizers.
It is the land of the Pathans I dream of--the largest tribal society in the world. It is beneath their turbaned heads and handmade guns that pass the most famous routes from the Middle East and Central Asia to the Indian sub-continent. So great is their determination to live as they wish, that the military rulers of this young nation (formed in 1947 for India's Muslims) have not dared to wrest from those men their many guns.
Perhaps some may consider me a fool for entrusting myself during the first part of my walk across Pakistan to so much pride and cold steel. However, I think it is my safest option in a nation filled with so much lawlessness. It has been my experience on this journey that those peoples whom others speak of with much awe and reverence are always societies in which law and order dominate, where there is a heightened sense of what is right and what is wrong.
And, especially important in my case, such esteemed peoples generally are all too aware of the painful consequences to be suffered by any of their own who dare to act dishonorably.
Steven