Through many moves from state to state, book collections tend to shrink. One inevitably starts to drop a ton or two of paper along the way, giving books to friends and selling them to used-book stores. The books that follow along become all the more precious for surviving the winnowing.

One such book in my shrunken collection is The Light Garden of the Angel King, Peter Levi’s description of travelling through Afghanistan in 1969 with Bruce and Elizabeth Chatwin. They admired the Buddhas of Bamiyan, minarets and stupas, markets and ancient cities, cold mountain rivers and mysterious reminders of Alexander the Great’s progress through those same mountains. It is a book full of light and shadow -- sunlight on mountaintops and shadows under willows -- vivid and specific.

Peter Levi was born into a Jewish family which had converted to Catholicism. He was British with ties to Istanbul; his aunt made rose-petal jam and there were family stories about the East. He lived for a time a Jesuit priest, taught at Oxford and died as a married man. He was passionately devoted to the classics, though not the most academic of men, being too sparklingly imaginative in his writing. He was too given to sharp, even eccentric metaphor to fit perfectly into the literary critic’s niche. Levi produced twenty-two books of poetry and a long string of entertaining translations, including a highly-regarded translation of the second-century travel-writer, Pausanias.

This book, The Light Garden of the Angel King, looks at the rugged and, even then, ruined landscape of Afghanistan with appreciation and affection. Levi has an ability to describe the bleak and sorrowful country with such attention to detail and brilliant intensity that it remains alive in this book, at a point before the USSR war. Before Afghanistan was locked into its own misery by civil war. Before the Taliban. Before September 11, 2001.

The meaning of Afghanistan has changed drastically and dreadfully since the book was written. Most of the archeological treasures of the country, The Buddhas of Bamiyan, the traces of Barbur, the Angel King of the title, have been destroyed by the Taliban, who seem to regard their own country’s dignified, ancient and beautiful monuments as evil. The marketplaces, stupas and minarets, seen by Peter Levi are no doubt gone or changed beyond recognition.

The people he met, nomads, shepherds, young men with guns are now gone or old men. Other young men have taken their places and taken up their guns. When he was there, women travellers were welcome in the country. A Christian man with a Jewish surname could travel there without fear. Singers, musicians and actors entertained Peter Levi and the Chatwins with classical performances. There was interest in archeology and in history.

Since then, terrible fires have been called down on the innocent mountaintops and the vicious thugs in the camps. Kabul, the city of the Angel King, barely exists anymore. The retreat of an ancient and civilized country into dust, rubble and fanatical hatred is something we can all mourn. Bruce Chatwin’s ordinary but cheerful photos and Peter Levi’s incandescent prose now carry the extra meaning of the irretrivably lost country, a destination which can never, now, be reached, like youth.

Peter Levi provides a few translations of Afghani poems at the end of the book. Among them are these lines:

On this terrace not one leaf of the roses will survive
In the bitter breath of autumn.
Let them be glad of a few days of peace in my garden.....
....The dignity and glory of this garden do not survive.

Khushal Khan, b. 1613