The grandson of the King told my wife and me at dinner that we were ‘the only two tourists in Kabul’! In fact, we nearly did not arrive because on the eve of our flight, the aid-worker Gayle Williams was shot dead by the Taleban in broad daylight. The incident made world headlines and the Afghan capital suddenly more dangerous. I was at a shoot and all my fellow guns thought I would be mad to go. But I also knew that I would go mad if I did not. For assurance, I telephoned the inimitable Rory Stewart on the ground. He was too polite to insist on our visit, but sounded calm — not exactly unexpected from someone who had walked across the entire breadth of Afghanistan and was a deputy governor of an Iraqi province. So my wife and I packed — she with a large scarf and I with my oldest clothes (that fitted).
There was no one in the arrivals hall at Kabul airport, because no one was allowed in the arrivals hall at Kabul. Everyone had to walk a gauntlet of 500 yards of barricades from the airport building. But Rory Stewart was not anyone. He had arranged, impressively, a diplomatic car right in front of the entrance of the airport, except there was no one around to be impressed. We drove off in the heat and dust. There was a lot of dust: on the roads, in the air, and all over the surrounding mountains of the Hindu Kush. You could feel that Kabul, in that magical location, was steeped in history. Indeed, the city was supposed to have been founded by Cain and Abel, and Genghis Khan had had a go at destroying it.
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