GEOLOGICAL CONDITIONS OF THE COUNTRY
Kabul valley once crater of volcano—Earthquakes—Kabul once
a large lake—Mines outcropping, gold, lead, copper, coal,
etc.—Rivers, and gold in them—Existence of kept secret for
fear of trouble—Turkestan mines—The question of fuel for Kabul
workshops—Local supply exhausted—Coal under the valley of Kabul.
It is probable that the Valley of Kabul is the crater of an ancient
volcano, for, in addition to other indications, there are in many places
in the surrounding hills traces of volcanic action to be seen in the way
of lava cones. At many places, also, are large beds of mingled lava and
small stones, which have the appearance of extensive concrete blocks, and
they might readily be mistaken for them. Several of these beds are many
hundred yards in length and breadth, and they mostly lie at the foot of
a hill, where they look like the foundations of a large fort or palace,
from which the superstructure has crumbled and disappeared, and the rain
of centuries has washed away the surrounding earth and left only the
concrete beds to mark the spot where they stood. It seems likely that the
molten lava flowing down the adjoining hillside picked up small stones in
its progress, and on reaching the level ground below spread itself out
over the land and cooled down into a solid block.
The strata of the ground surrounding Kabul is in a very disturbed
condition, some of the hills and mountains about showing the strata
standing perpendicularly, as though the earth of a flat country had been
lifted bodily and thrown up on end, as, no doubt, it had been.
Earthquakes are of very common occurrence, and usually the greater
number and those of most violence occur in October or November. The
one which was worse than all others that I experienced there happened
at the end of December, and as the walls of the Kabul houses are built
of mud bricks, with very heavy roofs superimposed, many houses were
brought down by the shock, and several people killed through the walls
and roofs falling on them. Preceding this earthquake a violent storm of
wind arose, which broke off large branches from the trees and threatened
to beat the windows in, and when the wind had been raging for an hour
or so, the earthquake commenced. It came on about ten o’clock at night,
and at the time it commenced I was standing before one of the windows
of the guest house, which is fortunately solidly built, and when the
shaking and rattling of the windows began, I thought it was due to the
wind, and remarked to the others in the room that if it continued in
violence the windows would soon be blown in; but while I was speaking the
floor started swinging from side to side, and then I made a dash for the
doorway, and stood there until the disturbance ceased. The doorways are
safer than other places in a house during an earthquake, as, should the
roof fall in, one stands a chance of escaping unhurt. It is difficult to
judge the length of time an earthquake lasts, for one is more interested
in the probabilities attending it, but it seemed four or five minutes
before the tremors finally ceased, and then I saw that large cracks had
been formed down the walls of the room, although they are five or six
feet thick, and the next day I heard of different houses completely
thrown down and the people in them killed.
The late Amir, who was ill with gout at the time, was sitting in durbar,
and as soon as the earthquake commenced, all those with him ran out at
once and left him sitting there, unable to move. With his constitutional
dread of earthquakes, his feelings, when he found himself deserted,
may be imagined; but he was not left for long, for three or four of
the slave-boys rushed back as soon as the violence began to subside,
and carried him out into the garden. The shock, however, affected the
Amir so much that, as a thanksgiving for his escape from harm, on the
following day he ordered three to four hundred prisoners to be released.
My Hindustani servants were asleep in their room when the disturbance
started, and, roused from sleep by the violence of the shaking, and not
knowing the cause, for this was their first experience of an earthquake,
they rushed out into the open, lightly clad as they were, and, sinking
on their knees in the snow, prayed aloud to be protected from the
calamity that was upon them, and they were down with fever the next day,
the result of exposure and nervous shock.
In Kohistan, close to Kabul, earthquakes of such violence occur at times
that the mangers for feeding horses are thrown down. These mangers,
which are built of stone and mud, stand some three feet high only, and
are fairly thick, so that the shaking of the earth may be imagined when
such are overthrown. In 1899 the fortune-tellers prophesied that in the
month which corresponded to November of that year many earthquakes would
be experienced, and the last earthquake of all would happen on a certain
day, which they specified, and would be of such violence that all Kabul
would be demolished. Strangely enough, towards the end of that month
earthquakes were of continued occurrence for about two weeks, and not
a day passed without at least one shock being felt, and on some days
there were many, both during the day and night. Although earthquakes are
usual towards the end of the year, a prolonged continuation was very
exceptional, and the fortune-tellers’ prediction affected the people to
such extent that those who had tents pitched them on the ground outside
the city walls, and lived in them, for they fully believed that as the
prophecy was in part fulfilled, the rest of it would come about also, and
that it was foolish to live in a house that was appointed to fall on a
certain day, and in its fall would crush them. The Amir, however, who
had consulted his own fortune-tellers, gave orders that any person found
living in a tent outside the city on the day following his proclamation
would be imprisoned, so all of them had perforce to return to their
houses. But, in spite of the Amir’s assurance, the appointed day for the
overthrowing of Kabul was passed in fear and trembling by the majority
of the people, which was not allayed by the day commencing with one huge
shock, which made the whole city tremble. However, no further shocks
happened, and that was the last one felt for several months.
Some of the earthquakes which occurred from time to time were of the
nature of a single bump, while others were of a rumbling and shaking
character. I have noticed that the latter sort, which on one or two
occasions occurred at night when all was quiet, and I was lying in bed
before falling asleep, could be heard coming before they could be felt
under the house to make it shake, and could also be heard pass on,
travelling from the south-west towards the north-east. These earthquakes
resembled a very heavy drag driven along a bumpy underground road, which,
as it passed immediately underneath, made the house vibrate, and then
could be heard passing on until lost in the distance.
The subsoil indications show that the valley of Kabul was at one time a
large lake, and that the valley was not once, but many times submerged,
and it is said by the people a story has been handed down to them that
where Kabul is now was once a great lake of many miles in circumference.
It is probable that at the point where the river flows through a cleft in
the mountains which surround Kabul on its way down to India, landslips
occurred at times, which blocked up the outlet of the river, and caused
the water to rise until all the surrounding country was submerged, and
the water went on rising until it was so high that the dam caused by the
landslip was unable to hold it back, and then the obstacle would be swept
away, and the valley drained of its water, and remain dry until another
landslip blocked the river’s progress once again. From the appearance
of the sub-strata when making excavations, I concluded that there had
been many inundations, and the thicknesses of the different deposits
superimposed one on the other, showed the floods to have lasted for
varying periods of time. On the mountain sides around Kabul there are
also rocks and boulders which have the appearance of being water-washed,
and in some places the under-part of rocky cliffs are holed through and
worn smooth by the action of water, similar to cliffs on the seashore,
and as some of these appear at very high levels, it would lead one to
suppose that the Kabul valley was at one time of much greater extent,
and subterranean disturbances subsequently threw up high some of those
portions of the land which were formerly under water. The rocks on the
Asman Heights, past which the river flows, are water-marked and worn up
to some fifty yards above the level of the river, which is probably the
height to which some of the floods rose.
In the mountains near Khurd Kabul, about thirty miles from Kabul, thin
seams of new coal have been found outcropping. There are several seams
deposited one on the other, and they vary in thickness from a sixteenth
of an inch to eight or nine inches, and are separated by thin layers of
clay, the thicker seams of coal being lower than the thinner ones. In
some cases three inches in thickness of the strata show about twelve
different deposits of carbonaceous matter, and point to various short
periods of inundation following in rapid succession.
Throughout Afghanistan the strata are in a most disturbed condition, and
in innumerable places veins of ore, which are rich in metal, are found
outcropping on the mountain sides. Ores of copper, lead, silver, zinc,
tin, nickel, etc., are numerous. Gold is found in the sand of several of
the northern rivers, and it is said the river Oxus is rich in it too.
Gold-bearing quartz was found within a couple of miles of Kandahar, but
it has been exhausted. Samples which have been kept of the gold embedded
in a matrix of quartz show the mine to have been a rich one, and it is
said that large quantities of gold were obtained from it by former Amirs.
Many of the copper ores sent me to assay were very rich in metal, and
samples containing thirty to forty per cent. of copper were common, and
there were others with about sixty per cent. of metal, while in some of
the veins of ore native copper was present. Lead ores of over seventy per
cent. of metal are worked to obtain the required quantity of lead for
bullet-moulding, and one lead ore which was sent me for assay contained
a little over ten per cent. of silver. In the Sher Darwaza Heights is a
vein of copper ore which runs throughout its length, outcropping here and
there, but it is a thin seam and rather poor in metal, as compared with
other ores round about, but the percentage is enough to pay handsomely
for its working. In other parts of the mountains round Kabul, however,
are veins of copper ore of sufficient extent and richness to supply
the requirements of Europe for several years, and if the country was
thoroughly prospected, it is probable that the existence of still further
deposits would be revealed.
The people of the country are very chary of giving information of the
existence of ores in their locality, fearing that if such are known to
exist, the Amir will have the mines worked, and then the people of the
neighbourhood will be pressed to labour on them, and as that means taking
them away from their fields and crops to work hard and long on a small
pay, the prospect does not appeal to them. Should the Amir decide to
take advantage of the mineral wealth of his country, this is what would
happen, no doubt; but, for some unknown reason, the Amir prefers that
these mines, of the richness of which he is cognisant, should remain
unworked; and yet he appointed several sappers and miners to prospect
the whole of the country and bring in samples of all rocks, etc., which
had the appearance of being of value and were different in colour and
weight to the common rocks and earth; and these men were placed under
me, and I had orders to go over the samples they brought in and assay
and report on those which contained metals. From this I gathered the
impression that the Amir eventually intended working the mines, but up to
the time I left the country nothing had been said or done to this end.
The lead ores are worked for the use of the Government, and the Amir has
proved that his people are sufficiently intelligent to learn and carry
out any work taught them, and he had sufficient confidence in my report
on ores to send the lead-smelting men to work on another ore which I
recommended when that of the old working ran out, so that it is difficult
to understand why the exploitation of the mines is not put in hand; but
I have sometimes thought that the Amir perhaps fears the cupidity of his
powerful neighbours, should he by working the mines of his country give
practical evidence of its richness, and thereby lose it.
The people of Turkestan, when speaking of the richness of their country
in mineral wealth, claim that it is much more wealthy than the rest of
Afghanistan, but no ores from that country were sent to me for assay.
One Turkistani chief brought with him, when on a visit to the Amir, an
ore which he said contained gold, but it turned out to be iron pyrites.
This chief is not the only man who has made that mistake, for ores of
iron pyrites exemplify the old saying that all is not gold that glitters.
At Durrah-i-Yusef, in Turkestan, a seam of coal outcrops in the valley,
but it is new coal or lignite. The seam has been described to me as some
six feet in thickness, and of considerable extent. There are many uses
to which this coal could be put, and several tons of it were brought
to Kabul to try as fuel in the boiler-house instead of wood, and the
experiment was successful; but the cost of carrying the coal by camels
over the intervening ranges of mountains, a three weeks’ journey, was
prohibitive.
The question of obtaining fuel for the boilers in the Kabul workshops
has lately become of urgent importance, for the trees of the country up
to several days’ journey from Kabul have been used up, and further fuel
is barely obtainable, while the young trees which have been planted in
places for a future supply of fuel will not be ready for cutting for
eight years or more to come. In an effort to remedy matters, the present
Amir, a year or so ago, issued a proclamation offering a large reward to
any one finding coal near to Kabul. The reward was to be thirty thousand
rupees for coal found within five miles of the city, twenty thousand
rupees within ten miles, ten thousand within twenty miles, and so on. But
there was one stipulation, and that was, that the coal found should be
so located that a road could be constructed up to within a mile of the
mine for wheeled traffic, otherwise the amount of reward would be reduced
in proportion to the distance from the mine to which carts could be
brought. The proclamation resulted in the country for many miles around
being very thoroughly prospected by the people, and although very few of
them had ever seen coal, they eventually found thin seams outcropping in
several places, which evidently belonged to one original bed or field of
coal before subterranean disturbances dislocated the sub-strata around.
I was sent to inspect and report on these outcrops, and found that it
was new coal in such thin seams that the yield would not repay the cost
of working, and borings failed to reveal the existence of thicker seams
within easy reach below. A gang of my men, who were appointed to search
further afield, found thick seams of new coal at Sheikh Ali, some six
days’ journey from Kabul towards Hazara, and further outcrops were
discovered at other places on the same range of mountains; but in this
case also the intervening mountains made the cost of camel transport far
too expensive for the Government to take advantage of the find, and the
Amir is strongly prejudiced against anything in the way of tram or light
railways, which would be the only way of carrying coal thence cheaply.
It is more than probable that the Kabul workshops will have to close soon
for want of fuel to keep the machines running, and the Amir told me,
shortly before I left Kabul, that the local supply of wood is exhausted,
and that there is little likelihood of coal being found near enough to be
of value. The last winter I spent in Kabul, wood was so scarce that it
realized three times the price of five years before, and there was very
little to be had even at that price.
From the indications given, it seems probable that good coal lies under
the valley of Kabul; but the late Amir pronounced the coal-boring work
I commenced as mad-headed, and wanted to know what was the advantage of
making known the existence of coal many hundred feet below the surface,
for who could get coal from the bowels of the earth, which were full of
water, as the wells about proved. This he said in durbar, and not to
me, so I had no chance of vindicating my action in the matter. To me he
simply wrote that he wished the men who were employed on that work to be
sent about the country to see if coal could not be found on the hillside,
as it was in Turkestan; and it was not my duty to dispute a definite
order, nor was the Amir the kind of man to listen had I done so, for he
would never acknowledge himself in the wrong after forming an opinion.