IT SEEMS an age ago now. I remember standing on the blackened shell of a Russian tank looking up the Panjshir Valley towards the peaks of the Hindu Kush, as the early sun finally peeped above the great brown ridges which plunge down to the Panjshir River. I was following the route of Alexander the Great through Afghanistan with a film crew in the late 1990s. Below us the valley was breathtaking: sparkling, ice-blue water; bright green gardens and fields; neat brown mud-brick houses, with splashes of colour from the bright heaps of apricots drying on their flat roofs. Above us bare-ribbed mountains, which keep the sun off the valley bottom for the first couple of hours of the morning till it suddenly flashes across the peaks and floods your cold bones with warmth after the chill night. Our guide turned to us: “If Two Horned Iskandar came so long before Islam: How do you know where he went, and what he did?”
I scrabbled in the side pocket of my rucksack and pulled out a dog-eared paperback: “Well, you see, the generals who went with him wrote the story down: and later people used them to write histories of the war. Like this.”
In my hands was my old copy of Arrian’s Life of Alexander from the Penguin Classics, translated by Aubrey de Selincourt, with its famous creamy white cover edged with a brown band; on the front a black woodcut of Alexander from one of his coins: large chin, big nose, curly hair, the ram’s horns of the Egyptian god Ammon.
The book’s spine was long gone, and as I fumbled with it, a gust of wind took the back cover sailing away down the valley. The guide laughed: “Iskandar is in the Holy Koran you know. We Afghans were once a great civilisation,” he continued, ruefully: “We once had these books too.”
What precious things books are. And great inspirers, too, aren’t they? Sometimes almost against your will, they lead you on strange roads to wild and wonderful places. They can come back years later to haunt you.
Like so many people, my first contact with many great literatures — and especially the Greek and Roman classics — was the Penguin Classics. I can still remember when I bought my first one. It was a Saturday morning in 1962. I was a schoolboy. I went to Sherratt and Hughes’s bookshop in St Anne’s Square in Manchester with my pocket money to buy Tactitus’ Annals — and Arrian’s Alexander. First contact with the real thing. A red letter day.
Over the next year or two I bought more of them — and then tried to make up the set, so now on my shelf I have a complete run of the original white covered Classics, one of the great publishing ventures. In its initial surge of optimism the series brought out quite a few obscure works, some of them real discoveries (isn’t A. C. Graham’s Poems of the Late T’ang, now alas out of print, a perfect book?) Some understandably bit the dust for lack of demand (Walter Hilton; Lucan; Camoens) but others, Chaucer and Homer among them, were among the biggest paperback bestsellers. For millions they ignited that spark of reading, that first encounter with great literature, which stays with you for the rest of your life and leads to who knows what.
In my case it has led me to many fascinating places in my profession as filmmaker. When we made a series on the legend of Troy 20 years ago Homer, of course, led the way: we even filmed the Iliad coming off the presses at Bungay. I took Pausanias’ Guide to Greece along the Sacred Way from Athens to Eleusis; Bernal Diaz, Zarate and Las Casas were in my rucksack as we followed the amazing stories of the conquistadors on the ground over the volcanoes of Mexico into the High Andes and Amazonia.
But I still have a soft spot for Arrian, the first. My copy had started to fall to bits around 1970, but with such memories, I could never bring myself to throw it out, and of course, when I set off to follow the route of Alexander, it had to come with me. It went into the rucksack along with the emergency food supplies — and the Penguin Curtius and Plutarch too. There is nothing like reading historians in the landscapes where their stories happened. The ancient texts become living tales once more, and suddenly the barrier of time slips away.
So rereading my Arrian on the Hindu Kush became a strangely touching experience. As if a childhood passion had found fruition in part through the book itself. That night in the Panjshir Valley we stopped at a cluster of mud-brick houses, and amidst sweet resinous woodsmoke we ate gruel with hot coarse bitter bread, and green tea flavoured with cardamoms. We bedded down with our fellow travellers in the stable on a plank floor above the horses. There, by the light of an oil lamp, snug in my sleeping bag, I opened Arrian again and found myself imagining that moment back in the freezing winter of 330-329BC, here on the Hindu Kush, when Alexander made his attack over the mountains into Central Asia: icy snow whipping off the peaks into the faces of Alexander’s troops as they hunched their shoulders and trudged on into the blizzard.
Many of the men were suffering from snow blindness and altitude sickness; all were hungry. Alexander’s enemies, Arrian tells us, “had laid waste the lands around the foot of the Hindu Kush mountains in the hope that if all the crops and everything edible were destroyed Alexander would be stopped by sheer lack of supplies”. Inevitably the army ran out of food, and the quartermasters asked for permission to kill the pack animals. But there was no wood with which to make cooking fires, and they were reduced to eating the flesh raw. To fight of illness, Arrian says they used the juice of a plant which grew on the mountains. He calls it sylphion. Historians have often wondered about this tale. Puzzling over it next morning, I asked our horse handlers. Outside our stables they showed me the plant: with a big stem thick as your wrist, it grows in the spring and is widely used as medicine; in the Middle Ages it was produced in bulk and sold in the bazaars of Merv and Bukhara. Even during the Russian occupation, we were told, the Mujahidin guerrillas used it to heal wounds and cure stomach upsets.
It was a tiny detail, but one which lingered in the mind long after we had loaded up our packhorses and headed off towards the summit of the Khawak and down the road to the River Oxus and the fabled land of Bactria. “Nothing put him off,” says Arrian: “the cold, starvation, he just kept coming on and on, and in the end his enemies were struck with fear at the speed of his advance”.
Our journey is long over now, and the world Alexander marched through has changed dramatically even since we went through. The hills of Afghanistan have been pounded by B52s; even the most high-tech weaponry in the world could not pin down the guerrillas in the Tora Bora; the warlords are back, looting the site of Alexandria-on-the-Oxus. And back in grey North London I have my old Arrian on my desk as I write: no back cover, grains of sand from the Makran desert caught in what’s left of the binding; a bill for hot drinks from the Hotel Wonderland in Hoshiarpur in the Indian Punjab, the place where Alexander turned back. Just one book of many Penguin Classics, but as with all great books, to open its pages is to experience the thrill of entering another world and another way of seeing.
- Michael Wood is completing a BBC2 four-part documentary series on the life and times of William Shakespeare to be transmitted in May/June 2003. His book Shakespeare — His Life and Times will accompany the series.
