Kabul 25-7-03 Farewell tour 2: bricks
27 Jul 2003
[786w]
So on with the farewell tour.
Drive out of Kabul on the Lataband road, the old highway to Jalalabad via Gandomak, before modern engineering made the Kabul river gorge a going concern, along which Elphinstone’s doomed army shuffled and staggered in the New Year snows of 1842; drive out on the Lataband road and you come to brickland. What this is, is, miles and miles of bell-shaped structures, like huge smoking beehives. It’s an even more apocalyptic landscape than usual. It’s a Terry Gilliam vision of heavy industry in hell. But it’s all benign.
So these beehives. The permanent structure is in fact not a whole bell shape. It’s a hole in the ground ten feet deep and six or ten feet across. It has a grid of brick arches at about ground level. And then there’s a thick circular wall all around it, wider at the bottom, stepped, and narrower at the top. On the windward side there’s a ramp leading down into the earth, giving onto a door into the big hole. One day I’ll get a digital camera and this’ll all make sense.
Okey. In brickland there are guzzillions of these structures. Some out of use for now, most at one stage or another of production. How does it work? First you make bricks out of mud. You dig trenches and water and mix the mud and then you have a wooden mould with four brick-shaped compartments. You scatter a little sand in the mould to stop the mud sticking, then pat in the mud, shape it off and dump them out. Arrange them in neat patterns like a giant Turner Prize installation, and leave them to dry.
When they’re dry, you could just build with them then and there. In rural locations sun dried bricks are often the height of aspiration. But this is Kabul. So now you get a gang of chaps and you pass the bricks up in a chain into the mystery structure I described above. Inside the structure you have a more high skill guy who packs them in neatly, building them together so that they don’t fall through the cracks into the hole below, and building them up above the top of the retaining wall so finally inside the structure you have a tower of unbaked bricks six to ten feet in diameter and ten or fifteen feet tall.
Then you light a fire underneath. And for six days you keep stoking the fire. I say six days because one of the men I tried to interrogate in sign language did rather compelling gestures whilst saying “shash” – which means six. I could be wrong. But the ones that are being fired generally have two or three men by them, and a little tent. So I think it’s a residential job. Anyway, you bet it’s hot work. And it looks like it uses a volume of firewood greater than the volume of the bricks. In this period it’s very dark-satanic-mill, the soot blackened top tiers of baking bricks breathing smoke through the many gaps, firewood being cast down into the pit, everyone sweating.
Then when they’re cooked you leave them to cool down, and you get the same team of guys back, often wearing nifty little pads of rubber from old tires strapped onto the palms of their hands, and goggles and headcloths as if they didn’t already look like extras in a Mad Max movie, to chain the bricks out of the beehive and into the truck. Off they go to be part of the Kabul building boom.
I surveyed the Lataband road five years ago. I’d already noticed the Jalalabad brickworks but I was passing through and hadn’t the time to gratify my curiosity. Yet I didn’t register any brickworks to the east of Kabul. If I’m right then brickland only got going in the last few years. Which says something for the capacity of Afghanistan to rebuild itself.
Then we drove around and around trying to find our way to Pul-I-Charki, where we hoped to cross the Kabul river and drive back into town on the tarmacced main Jalalabad road. Pul means bridge, so it should be alright. But when we drove out of the desert and into the streets of Pul-I-Charki some helpful chaps diverted us down an alley to a ford. Someobody had blown up the bridge.
Back to town covered in dust. And I mustn’t go on. I’ve tried your patience already. But I love this place, I have to tell you.
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