They issued me the last ticket to see the Great Buddha. Then they collected the stubs and the visitor's books and bundled them into the sacks of documents to be buried. The remaining staff of the Department for Preservation of Historical Monuments had orders to hide even some things as innocuous as the books that recorded the impressions of visitors from six continents about the monuments of Bamian. A potato patch will be the resting place for the archives documenting 20 years of war.
I was pleased to have a chance to wander round the Buddhas again. The rock-cut Buddhas of Bamian are cultural sites of great significance, and were once the centre of Afghanistan's mass tourist trade. In historical times, these Buddhas were targeted by zealots. Their survival (including several friezes of original paint work) through the two decades of war is amazing. Once again, there is fear that zealous conquerors might just try to prove their anti-idolatry credentials by further destroying them.
At night there was an air of the Day of Judgement in Bamian, as the local people, the Hazaras, tried to guess how long it would be before the Taliban arrived. The sound of haunting nocturnal congregational prayers carried across the valley. The faithful feared that the Taliban would wreak revenge for 20 years of defiance and for their share of casualties in previous Hazara-Pushtoon fighting. This fighting had seen some of the civil war's bitterest encounters, and the locals prayed for deliverance. The threat to the Bamian Buddhas is symbolic of the one hanging over much of the population of central Afghanistan.
I emptied my camera reel and headed for the security of Islamabad. My host, the head of the Department for Preservation of Historical Monuments, was busy closing up his office, loading his gelims (the famous rough-woven Afghani rugs) and a few personal belongings into his jeep. He had done what he could to preserve central Afghanistan's share of the world's heritage. It was now time for Haji Sahib to return to his wife to share the agonising worry at the disappearance of their son, a lecturer in journalism at the University of Balkh in the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, which had been overrun by the Taliban a week before. Haji Sahib's agony is shared by thousands of families, who fear that relatives in Mazar-e-Sharif may face a slaughter. As the Taliban close in, the statelet of the Hazaras, built up in central Afghanistan over the past 20 years, totters on the brink of collapse.