James A. Michener · 1963 · overland

James Michener's 1963 novel. In 1946 the young American diplomat Mark Miller sets out from Kabul to find Ellen Jaspar, a woman who vanished into Afghanistan after marrying an Afghan. His search carries him to Kandahar and the ruins at Qala Bist, out into the deserts of the south, and at last among the Kochi nomads and their caravans winding north toward the passes of the Hindu Kush.

1. 1
   Kabul

   From the American embassy in Kabul, the young diplomat Mark Miller is handed a thankless task: find Ellen Jaspar, a headstrong girl from Pennsylvania who married an Afghan engineer and then disappeared into the interior.

2. 2
   Kandahar

   The trail leads southwest to Kandahar, city of orchards and fierce old codes, where Miller begins to grasp how completely a foreign woman can vanish into a land that lives by its own ancient rules.

3. 3
   Qala Bist

   At the great ruined arch of Qala Bist on the Helmand he finds Ellen's husband Nazrullah - but not Ellen. She has fled again, and Miller presses on into the desert on her trail through heat and danger.

4. 4
   The Registan

   Far out in the southern desert, at a lonely caravanserai, Miller at last finds Ellen - living free among the Kochi nomads, wife now to their proud chieftain Zulfiqar, and unwilling to be rescued from the life she has chosen.

5. 5
   The Hindu Kush

   Miller travels on with the caravan as it winds north with the seasons, up out of the desert toward the high passes and ancient cities below the Hindu Kush - carried into an older Afghanistan that is already beginning to fade.