In celebration of the ten-year anniversary of Paul Salopek's first steps on his Out of Eden Walk journey, this dispatch is now available for educational use in fifth- and eighth-grade reading levels. The original text is available as the default reading level, as well as on the Out of Eden Walk website.
This article is part of a collection called Out of Eden 10th Anniversary: Water. It is also included in the idea set, Exploring Water With the Out of Eden Walk.
By Paul Salopek
PIGISH, AFGHANISTAN (10/23/2013)
In remotest Afghanistan, a 2,000-year-old technology still churns out flour—and life.
The hut is tiny and windowless and constructed of round river stones, and it stands alone in a high wild valley in Afghanistan.
From 20 paces away you can hear it hum: Its walls emit a strange, wavering sound like an extended sigh—a soft, dry, droning song that rarely ceases. Occasionally a man and a boy duck out of the blackened doorway into sunlight. They are covered from head to toe in white dust. They look like pale beings from another world. They wipe their faces with a rag. They go back inside.
Is this some sort of ceremonial site? Is the rock hut a shrine to a forgotten cult? Are the man and boy ghosts?
The answer to all these questions is: yes.
Inside the small building a 600-pound granite wheel whirs on a walnut spindle. The spindle is mortised to wooden vanes. A gush of ice water inside a canal shoves the vanes in tireless circles. The water drains a faraway glacier on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. In an act of magic, nature’s fluid power atomizes seeds of wheat into clouds of flour—a staple of life among the local farmers, whose principal meals are bread and tea. The man and boy work effortlessly together, dim figures inside a mist of gluten. They are father and son. That they love each other very much is clear: The father cleans the boy’s powdered face. The undersized boy watches his father carefully, eager to obey commands. They both belong, perhaps, to the last generations of waterwheel millers in the world.
Humans have been harnessing the power of water to crush grain at least since the first century B.C.
Around that time, the historian Strabo included a flour mill in the list of plunder acquired through the Roman conquest of southern Turkey. Earlier, another Classical scribe, possibly Antipatros of Thessaly, celebrated in a poem the liberating effect of water mills on Greek women who once sweated their lives away bent over grinding stones, or querns, to pulverize their crops:
Women who toil at the querns, cease now your grinding;
Sleep late though the crowing of cocks announces the dawn.
Your task is now for the (water) nymphs . . .
Water mills were the first robots of ancient times.
Their ubiquity across the agrarian world, from China to Arabia to Europe, attests to their effectiveness. The Domesday Book records some 6,000 gristmills in operation in England alone by 1066 A.D. This hydropower grid represented about one mill for every 40 households. Yet by 1900 fossil fuels consigned most of humankind’s water mills to memory.
Except in the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan.
Isolated by 20,000-foot mountains and years of civil war, and rich in tumbling glacial creeks, the people of this remote territory of Badakhshan Province depend on the flexed green muscle of running water to survive—to eat.
In the tiny village of Pigish, inhabited by peaceful Shia Ismaili farmers, five busy water mills hum through the autumn harvest season. Just as in medieval Europe, each mill is taxed by the government, and each mill is family owned. Milling is a time-honored profession, passed down through bloodlines for decades, centuries. The farmers push their sacks of wheat to the mills in wheelbarrows. These barrows are often made of rough planks. The people of the Wakhan also construct their own mud-brick houses, hew their own poplar roof beams, stitch their own burlap donkey saddles, braid their own yak hair ropes, carve their own wooden shovels, and build their own stone aqueducts. These handmade surfaces of life make the Wakhan Corridor a pleasure to walk through. Lay your palms on the skin-polished grip of a willow ax handle: The body remembers.
Sultan, 38, who like some Afghans uses only one name, works the small stone water mill with his nine-year-old son, Shambe.
I see them last on break. They sit in blanched rags, on a blanket outside the mill. They don’t speak. The mill speaks. They stare together up the sunlit valley, a delicate formality between them, almost shyly sipping from cups of tea they pour each other from a dented iron kettle.
View the original dispatch to see a video of Sultan at work in the mill.
