of the next. With all this came gusts of gale-force wind carrying enormous hailstones which took the skin off my nose where they struck it as I sat next to the window-that-wasn’t. There are limits even to Afghan toughness and when this demonstration started the bus stopped for the nine men on the roof to come below. As the ‘inside’ was already overcrowded beyond belief this meant that I had three children on my lap for the rest of the journey; I had only one two-year-old at the beginning. We waited for about fifteen minutes until the worst was over because to attempt to negotiate that winding track with the driver intermittently dazzled by lightning would have been suicidal. (To my mind the whole trip wasn’t far short of suicidal anyway.) Yet what an experience to see a landscape, dramatic in itself, under such melodramatic conditions – like some inspired choreographer’s setting for Faust**.
Soon after we had restarted, a melodrama of a different kind began. The system on these privately owned buses is that the owner-driver’s assistant, usually an adolescent known as a bacha, collects the fares during the journey. The bacha now asked twelve afghanis from everyone and a number of passengers protested that ten had been agreed on before the start. Hell then broke loose and while I was bundling the children under the seat an infuriated tribesman, brandishing his rifle, climbed over me, trying to get at the driver; the bacha pushed him, and he fell backwards, striking me a frightful blow on the ribs with the rifle-butt. I looked round to see a terrifying forest of rifle-barrels behind me – terrifying because in a jolting bus I imagined them going off accidentally; but of course these men know exactly what they are doing with their triggers, if not with their butts, and nothing of the sort happened. The unarmed bacha continued his heroic defence of the driver, the bus stopped yet again, the driver got out and stood grasping his gun and refusing to go another yard until everyone had paid their twelve afghanis and I hastily produced mine, vaguely hoping to set a good example. But I was completely ignored while the verbal battle raged and everyone fingered his trigger menacingly as though it wouldn’t be verbal much longer; the angry shouts of all concerned almost drowned both the thunder and the hiss of the hail
