AFGHAN DWELLINGS.
The Residential streets of Kabul. Their appearance and arrangement.
The Police. Criminal Punishments. The Houses. Their internal
arrangement. Precautions to ensure privacy. Manner of building
for the rich and for the poor. Effect of rain and earthquake. The
warming of houses in the winter. Afternoon teas. Bath-houses. The
Afghan bath.
The same day that I attended the Hospital, I received an order to visit
a man of some importance, the brother of the Prince’s Chief Secretary
or Mirza. Although it was but a very short distance, I went on
horseback, for I found it was not usual for any man of position to walk
about the town. The patient was suffering from Paralysis agitans, or
Shaking palsy, and was of course incurable. I was not allowed to depart
until I had eaten some sweets and drank tea.
[Sidenote: Residential Streets.]
To reach his house we rode through the streets in which are the
living houses of Kabul. I think the most striking peculiarity of
these Residential streets is their narrowness, and the height and
irregular arrangement of the almost windowless walls. Generally, they
are simply narrow passages necessary to obtain access to one, or a
group, of the living houses. Few of the streets, except the bazaars,
can be called in any sense thoroughfares. They wind and twist about
most irregularly, sometimes open to the sky, sometimes covered in by
rooms belonging to the adjoining houses, and they usually end abruptly
at the closed door of a house or garden. When one or more rooms are
built over the street the builder rarely trusts to the strength of
the original wall: he fixes wooden uprights on each side to support
the cross beams. Dirtiness and want of ventilation are conspicuous.
Drainage and street scavenging are also conspicuous by their absence.
At one time it was exceedingly unsafe to traverse the streets after
nightfall--I mean for the Kabulis themselves. Robbery and murder were
every night occurrences. It is now, however, less dangerous. There are
sentries belonging to the military police posted at intervals, each
having a small oil lamp at his station. After ten o’clock at night
every passer-by must give the night word or be kept by the police till
the morning, when he is brought before a magistrate to give a reason
for his wanderings. And the Amîr now punishes the crimes of robbery and
murder most severely. For robbery and theft the hand of the criminal
is amputated in a rough and ready way. It is done in this manner. The
local butcher is called in. He knots a rope tightly just above the
wrist of the criminal, and with a short sharp knife he severs the
hand at the joint, plunging the raw stump into boiling oil. Then the
criminal becomes a patient and is sent to the hospital to be cured. No
flap of skin has been made to cover the end of the bone, and the skin
has been scalded for two inches or more by the oil, so that months
go by before the stump heals by cicatrization. A priest one day--he
may have been a humane Afghan--suggested to the Amîr that operations
of this and other kinds on criminals should be done by the European
doctor. The Amîr negatived the suggestion with a sharp reprimand.
For murder--hanging and other forms of putting to death were found
inadequate. So that now in addition to the murderer being given into
the hands of the deceased’s friends for them to kill as they please,
such a fine is put upon his whole family--father, brothers, uncles, and
cousins--that they are all ruined. Mere life is of no great value to
an Afghan, and at one time if a man found it inconvenient to kill his
enemy himself, he could easily get someone who for six thousand rupees
would do it for him and take the risk of being hung, so long as the
money was paid to his family.
[Sidenote: The Approach to the Kabul Dwelling-house.]
Supposing you have to visit a person in the town, you are conducted on
horseback along the narrow winding streets. You dismount at a door and
stumble into a dark winding passage with your head bent to avoid a bang
against an irregular beam, and you go slowly for fear of puddles and
holes which you cannot see. You come into the open, and find yourself
in a garden with flowers and trees, and a tank or pond in the middle,
or in a small courtyard with simply a well. The house is built round
the garden or yard, and consists of a series of rooms opening by doors
into one another and with the windows all looking into the garden.
[Sidenote: Internal Arrangement of the House.]
The richer men, especially those whose houses have been built within
the present reign, have large and beautiful gardens full of fruit-trees
and flowers, and through them ripples a stream or channel to supply the
tank with fresh water. A house so placed that a stream can be brought
through the garden from some irrigation canal is of greater value
than one where water can be obtained only from a well. These modern
houses are better built and much more elaborate than the older ones.
The windows, large and often filled with coloured glass, are made to
open and shut on hinges. The floors, though rarely boarded, are of
beaten earth carefully levelled. The rooms are decorated all round in
the Oriental way with “takchas,” or small niches having the Saracenic
arch. There is a frieze just below the ceiling, and below this is a
dado, with mouldings which are arranged also around the takchas and the
fireplace, if one exists. The mouldings are of a hard and fine cement
with which the whole wall is faced. The best cement is brown in colour,
very like Portland cement, and is found at Herat. Generally the wall
is whitewashed, and sometimes before the cement is dry it is sprinkled
with sparkling particles of talc. The ceiling may be boarded, but more
often the beams are hidden by crimson drapery stretched tightly across.
In the winter a crimson curtain is hung over the door. The windows,
except in the Amîr’s palace, are rarely curtained.
The takchas or recesses are filled with vases, lamps, or candlesticks,
and the floor is covered with beautiful Turkestan rugs or carpets.
These, with the addition of a velvet-covered mattress, properly
constitute the furniture of a room, for Orientals habitually sit
cross-legged on the ground. Now-a-days, however, no rich Afghan
townsman considers his room furnished without a chair or two; not that
he uses them much except when a distinguished foreigner calls, but it
is a sign that he knows what is correct. Sometimes you even see a small
table, but this is not usual. The houses of the richer men are in the
suburbs. They cover large spaces of ground and are rarely more than one
story high. They are not built level with the garden, but are raised
some three or four steps. The roof is flat, and a staircase leads to
the top. In the summer, on account of the heat, it is usual for a tent
to be erected on the top of the house, and for the owner to sleep
there. There are apartments which are devoted solely to the ladies of
the harem, and also kitchens and quarters for the servants and slaves.
The stables are, as a rule, in another enclosure. The whole house and
garden, surrounded by its high wall and entered by only one gate, is
absolutely private and screened entirely from any curious eye.
Generally there is a room arranged apart from the rest with its window
opening outside and not into the garden. This is often a story above
the others, and has a staircase of its own. It is for the reception of
male visitors who are not relatives or intimate friends of the host.
The houses of the less rich, particularly those in the heart of the
town where space is limited, are two, three, or even four stories
high. They are built on very much the same plan, though the garden is
replaced by a small cramped yard. Many of these are very old houses,
and their window sashes do not hang on hinges, but consist of three
shutters one above the other, sometimes beautifully carved. If the
owner can afford glass the top shutter has one small pane, the second,
two, and the third, three; generally, however, there is no glass. The
shutters all push up out of the way, and the window is generally wide
open, for in the spring, summer, and autumn, the heat is considerable.
It is only in the newest houses that you see fireplaces, and these are
rarely used, not because the winter is not cold, but because wood is
too expensive to burn in such an extravagant way. There is coal in the
country, but it is not in use. Even if mines were worked it would be
far too costly a proceeding in the absence of railways to bring the
coal to town. Quite lately a little inferior coal has been brought for
use in the Amîr’s workshops, but there is none for sale.
In the winter people keep themselves warm by means of a charcoal
brazier or sandali, which I will describe presently. In the city, the
houses being crowded so close to one another, it was to me a source of
wonder how the owners could prevent themselves being overlooked. I was
informed that if a man standing on the top of his house could see into
his neighbour’s enclosure, even into the garden, he was compelled by
law to build a wall or screen to cut off his view: a violation of the
privacy of a man’s dwelling by looking over the wall is a great offence
in Afghanistan.
[Sidenote: The Building of the House.]
When a house is to be built, a trench two feet deep is dug and large
stones or pieces of rock, unshaped, are packed in with a mixture of
clay and chopped straw. This is the foundation. The thickness of the
wall depends on the class of house and the height it is to be built.
Two feet is about the thickness of the wall of a house one story
high. In the poorer houses the wall is built of lumps of clay or mud
mixed with chopped straw: in the better houses, of sun-dried bricks
six inches square, an inch thick, and laid on the flat: in the best,
of similar bricks properly baked. The roof is supported on beams of
unshaped poplar. The wood being of poor quality the beams are arranged
close together, with a space of not more than two or three inches
between each. The beams are covered with rush matting, or, in some
houses, little pieces of wood, about four inches long and an inch
wide, are placed from beam to beam close together. Over this or the
matting is placed clay and chopped straw to the thickness of eight or
nine inches. Upper floors are made in precisely the same way. As there
is very little rain in the country, a house built in this manner will
stand for years, but it is necessary to repair the roof every autumn.
When a poor-class house is carried more than one story high, the upper
stories, often projecting beyond the lower, are framed with wooden
beams--poplar--and the interspaces filled in with sun-dried bricks,
making a wall one brick thick. The builder never trusts to the lower
wall alone to support a second or third story, but invariably fixes
uprights of wood in the ground against the wall to support the first
floor. This may be because the extra stories have been added on as
the need for more space became urgent. In the older houses the walls
are rarely perpendicular, but bulge and lean in all sorts of dreadful
ways. If a house seems inclined to tumble over on one side, several
extra props of wood are fixed under it. Sometimes an unusual amount
of rain in the autumn will wash a house down, and not infrequently an
earthquake will shake one to pieces. But considering how they are
built, and what they look like, it is astonishing how long they stand.
In the better class houses, built of brick, there is not so much need
of the wooden uprights, though even in these you generally see them.
The walls of these better houses are some of them very thick: this is
the case when they are from the commencement intended to be more than
one story high. The house that I lived in in Kabul, after I returned
from Turkestan, was one of the better class. It was arranged in two
wings at right angles to one another, and was two stories high. It
was built of brick coated with mud and chopped straw. The lower walls
were about four feet thick and the upper about two feet. Nevertheless,
wooden uprights supported the upper floor where I lived. Below were
the stables, the kitchen, and the servants’ quarters. I noticed in
the stable that one of the walls bulged alarmingly, so that I did not
feel any too comfortable when an earthquake--a common phenomenon in
Kabul--shook the house. The sensation produced by a slight earthquake
is somewhat similar to that produced when you are standing on the
platform of a small station and an express comes rushing through.
There is not so much noise, but the shaking is very similar. A severe
earthquake is very different. It commences mildly, and you think it
will stop soon--but it does not: it becomes worse and worse, the beams
creak, the windows and doors rattle, the house rocks, and you wonder
what is coming next. If it is daytime you escape from the house; if it
is night, and in the winter, with three feet of snow outside, you wait
for further developments, hoping your house will not fall on top of you.
[Sidenote: The Warming of the House.]
The houses, being built in this way with thick non-conducting walls and
roof, are wonderfully cool in spite of the intense heat of the sun in
summer. They should be equally warm in the winter, but, unfortunately,
the windows and doors never fit properly. There is no paint on the
woodwork, for paint is far too expensive to be used in such a wholesale
way, and the heat and dryness of the summer make great cracks appear.
Except in the Amîr’s palaces there are no latches to the doors such
as we have. The doors and windows are fastened by a chain which hooks
on to a staple. The windows of a room occupy nearly the whole of the
wall on the garden side of the room; and as passages are rare--one room
opening into another--there are two or more doors to each room. The
number and variety of draughts, therefore, can be imagined; so that
with the thermometer at zero, or below, it is utterly impossible to
keep a room warm with a wood fire in the fireplace--even if you have a
fireplace, which is unusual.
The Afghans do not attempt to keep the room warm. They keep themselves
warm, however, by means of the “sandali.” An iron pot or brazier is
placed in the middle of the room and filled with glowing charcoal.
Among poorer people simply a shallow hole is scraped in the earth of
the floor, and in this the charcoal is put. A large wooden stool is
placed over the charcoal and covered by a very large cotton-wool quilt,
or rezai. The people sit on the ground round the sandali, pulling the
quilt up to their chin. A big postîn over the shoulders keeps the back
warm, and the turban is always kept on the head. In the winter there is
not much work done, and the people sit by the sandali most of the day.
Supposing you make a call, you find them, masters and servants (all
men, of course), sitting round the sandali chatting together or playing
cards or chess. The ladies have their own sandali in the harem--you
don’t see them. Everyone rises as you enter, and room is politely made
for you at the sandali. One of the servants goes off to prepare tea,
making the water hot in the samovar. Another makes ready the chillim,
or hubble-bubble. The tray is brought in with an embroidered teacloth
over it, covering teapot, cups and saucers, and sugar-basin. The
servant places the tray on the floor and kneels down by the side of it,
folding up the cloth for a tea cosy. It is not etiquette for a servant
to sit crossed-legged in the presence of a visitor or a superior. In
the privacy of their own homes etiquette is, however, considerably
remitted. He puts two or three big lumps of sugar into the cup and
pours out the tea, breaking up the sugar with a spoon. He gets up and
hands you the cup and saucer with both hands. To use one hand would
be a rudeness. No milk or cream is drank with the tea, except in the
occasional cup of “kaimagh-chai.”
You must drink two cups of this sweet tea--it is flavoured with
cardamoms--and half a cup of tea without any sugar--“chai-i-talkh”--this
is to correct the sweetness. If you make two or three calls in an
afternoon, you feel it is as much as you can bear. In Afghanistan you
may call upon a man whenever you like, but you must not leave his
house without asking permission. I told them that in my country it was
different: people were not allowed to call upon us without invitation,
and they could go away as soon as they pleased. The Afghans seemed
to think this was very discourteous, for they are nothing if not
hospitable.
[Sidenote: The Bath House.]
All the larger houses have rooms for the Afghan bath; there is the
bath-room proper, and a small dressing-room. It is not a hot dry-air
bath like the Turkish bath, but a hot moist air, so that the heat is
never so great as in the Turkish bath. The walls are cemented, and
the floor either cemented or paved with an inferior marble that is
plentiful near Kabul. The cement is made of equal parts of wood-ashes
and lime moistened and beaten together for some days. In a recess in
one wall is a cistern or tank of stone or cement, with a fireplace
beneath it, which is fed from the stokehole outside the bath-room.
Public bath-rooms are quite an institution in Afghanistan. They are
rented by a bath-man or barber, who makes what he can out of them.
Some of the bath-houses belong to the Amîr. The bath is by no means
an expensive luxury: the poorer people pay about a halfpenny. Richer
people who engage the services of the bath-man or barber to shampoo
them, pay about eighteenpence. The plan I adopted was to engage the
bath-room and the shampooer for the day. It cost but a few shillings.
Having sent word a day or two beforehand, I used to start about ten
o’clock in the morning, accompanied by all my Afghan servants,
bringing bath-towel, soap and comb. It is the custom in Afghanistan
when the master has engaged the bath-room, for the Afghan servant to
seize the opportunity of having a free bath. Hindustani servants in
Kabul do not presume to accompany the Sahib on such an occasion. The
outside appearance of the bath-house is not very inviting. As a rule,
there is a large pool of stagnant water near by--the waste water of
the bath--and you dismount in a hesitating way. When you get into the
small dark unpaved entry, and slip about on the mud, the inclination is
to turn round and go out again. However, having got so far, you think
you may as well face it out. You find the dressing-room clean and dry,
and the bath proprietor (or tenant rather) comes out to receive you.
He is dressed--or undressed--ready to shampoo you, his only garment
being a waist-cloth. The servants pull off your boots, and help you to
get ready, and then fix a waist-cloth, which reaches the knees, very
tightly round the waist, fastening it with a particular twist. The
bath-man taking your hand, raises the curtain over the arched door of
the bath-room, and leads you carefully in. The reason is that the floor
being very smooth and wet, you are exceedingly likely, without great
care, to have a dangerous fall. When you enter, the air being damp as
well as hot, you feel almost suffocated.
[Sidenote: The Process of the Bath.]
A good class bath-room is generally octagonal, with a vaulted and
groined roof, not much decorated, but displaying a certain amount of
taste in the building. The windows are arched and glazed, and very
small, so that the room is rather dark. The Afghan servants quickly
follow you in, attired in the same way as yourself, and though they
treat you with due respect, all seem for the time, more or less, on an
equality, and as they dash the water over each other, they chat and
laugh quite unrestrainedly. The process of massage, or shampooing,
which the bath-men thoroughly understand, is rather a long one; and
it is not at all uncommon when bathing to spend a great part of the
day--four or five hours--in the bath-room. For myself, I found two
hours quite as much as I wanted. A cloth is folded up for a pillow, and
you lie on a warm part of the marble, or cement floor. You generally
see, at first with some disgust, a few large long-legged ants, running
quickly about near the walls: afterwards you become indifferent, for,
as the bath-man says, they are harmless, they don’t sting. There are
such swarms of insects of all kinds in the East, that you divide them
roughly into those that sting and those that don’t. The latter you take
no notice of, the former you treat with more respect. The shampooer,
having dashed on a little warm water, begins by stretching and kneading
the skin of one arm, the rubbing being done in the direction of the
blood current; the knuckles of the fingers he cracks with a sudden
jerk. Then he goes to the other arm. Having treated all the limbs
the same way, he places his two hands on the sides of the chest, and
suddenly throws his whole weight on to them, which stretches the skin,
and compressing the ribs, drives out the air from the chest with a
grunt and gasp. Then he kneads and rubs the muscles of the chest,
shoulders, and body. After that he brings you into sitting posture, and
fixing you with his knee, he seizes one shoulder and twists you round
as far as you can go, and with a sudden jerk in the same direction he
makes the back-bone crack. A similar twisting is done the other way
round. He then takes a coarse flesh glove and proceeds to rasp your
skin off. The more he can get off, the better pleased he is. They left
me the first time with a “fox bite” on the chest, which lasted for
days. On subsequent occasions I called attention to the fact that I
was an Englishman and not a cast-iron Afghan. After the flesh glove,
come two courses of “soaping”--how it smarts! hot water being dashed
on at frequent intervals. The Afghan shoe leaving a part of the instep
exposed, the skin becomes thick and coarse, and a piece of pumice stone
is used to scrub the feet with. This, after all the rest, was too much
for me, and I rebelled, excusing myself by explaining that my life was
of value to the Amîr on account of the number of sick poor in the city.
[Sidenote: The Lack of Ventilation.]
Finally you stand up, and two or three bucketfuls of hot water are
thrown over your head. Your servant then comes up, wraps you in a
bath-towel, and you go off to the dressing-room. There are no velvet
couches to lie on, so you proceed to rub down and dress: then tea is
brought, you have a cigarette, and ride languidly home. The Afghan bath
is an excellent institution for cleanliness in a hot climate, but it
certainly is neither exhilarating nor stimulating. There is little or
no arrangement made for ventilating the bath-room, and it is customary,
in the bitter cold of a Kabul winter, for poor people to obtain
permission to sleep there at night. It is a not uncommon occurrence for
one or two to be found suffocated in the morning.
[Illustration]