HistoryThe Khyber Pass is the gateway to India, the only route between the vast, contested territory of Eurasia and the rich pickings of the subcontinent.
It is only 30 miles long, but every step of the way is a step nearer ambush and death. At places the road narrows to just a few feet and the cliff faces are close enough to touch. Above sit forts and look-outs manned by wild, turbaned Afghans armed to the teeth with home-made guns. On a bitter November day in 1842, British soldiers were trudging wearily through the narrow defile on their retreat from Kabul. Among them was a subaltern called John Nicholson. Around the corner they found his 17-year-old brother, dead, with his genitals crammed in his mouth.
This is all stirring stuff, and it would make a great travel piece for a Sunday newspaper, but it is not the subject of this book. The jacket, with The Khyber Pass in big gold letters above a heart-wrenching scene from the Afghan War, promises more of the same. But the giveaway lies in the subtitle: A History of Empire and Invasion. That is it - a history of every empire and every invasion since the days of Cyrus the Great, with the Khyber Pass acting not as an agent but as a conduit.
Persians and Greeks, Mauryans and Kushans, Sasanians and White Huns, Mongols and Mughals, all do indeed march through the Khyber Pass, but most of the time they are busy elsewhere - in capturing Jerusalem, introducing new coinage or safeguarding trade routes into China. Interesting though this is, you do wonder what it has to do with the Khyber Pass. Then, just as you are beginning to lose faith in the book altogether, the author pulls you back. "Imagine the scene", he says, as he embarks on a yet another colourful sketch in which Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan or Timur leads his troops into India, clad in silk and furs, weapons clanking at his sides, eyes scanning the horizon for the first glimpse of his prey.
But these moments of imaginative re-creation are only sporadic, as are any genuine descriptions of the landscape and people. The author did venture up the pass, with a driver and armed guard, and bought a new outfit for the occasion. As proof, there is a photograph of him standing on a rock, wearing a rolled-up hat and a shalwar kameez still creased from its packet. But it is clear that he spent more time in the cool recesses of the Bodleian than the hostile reaches of the Khyber Pass.
The result is a virtuoso exercise in historical abbreviation. In deft, rapid strokes Docherty traces the many empires that have risen and vanished in Central Asia. This great flux of conquest took Greek culture to northern India and Islam into south-east Asia. It allowed Buddhism to spread far into China. It left in its wake beautiful mosques and gardens, rock-hewn Buddhas, painted manuscripts and exquisite poetry, but also towering pyramids of human heads and simmering hatreds that threaten the modern world.
As a summary this book can scarcely be bettered. Anyone looking for an introduction to the rise of Islam, the Mughal invasions of India or the machinations whereby the East India Company won control of the entire subcontinent might be well satisfied. All the key moments are there, with neat digressions on the expansionist nature of nomadism or the pacific effects of Buddhism. Only in the last chapter, in the brisk trot through the Russian and American engagement in Afghanistan, does Docherty's approach seem trite and dilute. What is lacking, and what history doesn't provide, is a narrative arch. Instead, we have a narrative motorway, stretching into infinity and littered with the corpses of defunct empires. There are dozens of walk-on parts, some the great heroes and villains of history, but others unknown. Docherty makes valiant attempts to flesh them out with the help of the meagre documentary references and visual sources, but few offer scope for sympathetic engagement.
The problem ultimately lies in the book's dual nature. On the one hand, it represents the Lawrence of Arabia school of history, with Paddy Docherty as director and costume designer. On the other hand it is a textbook survey of 2,500 years of conquest and cultural exchange. It certainly is not the story of the Khyber Pass, despite the claims of the title and jacket.
Lucy Trench works at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She went to a mujahideen base camp during a visit to Pakistan in 1987
The Khyber Pass: A History of Empire and Invasion By Paddy Docherty Faber & Faber, 261pp. £17.99