“AFTER FORTY EIGHT YEARS, IT’S TIME TO CLOSE THE DOORS!” SAYS EMMETT EILAND
Ino longer remember how my brother Murray and I reached the Bamiyan Valley in Northwestern Afghanistan. It must have been sometime in 1973. I seem to recall a flight from Kabul in a small airplane over the barren Hindu Kush mountains and then a sudden drop into a green valley. We had come to see the world’s largest standing Buddha, carved fifteen hundred years before our time from the side of a sheer sandstone cliff. On the night of our arrival, we rested in a yurt offered by Bamiyan’s one hotel. Yurts are Turkman tents, round and infinite. They have no start nor finish nor corners. They hug and they comfort. I slept in ours that night like a child. In the morning, the air at more than eight thousand feet was crisp. The scent of roasting lamb and baking naan already filled the air. As we set out to see the Bamiyan Buddha, we were dressed like fools. Murray wore a blue sports coat and I had on my double-knit slacks, guaranteed not to wrinkle. We struck out on foot to take a close look at the Buddha, me in my wingtips. Even from a distance, the Buddha dominated the valley. Finally, we stood just a hundred yards from the Buddha and gazed up at the statue’s magnificent body and its ruined face. Buddhist monks living in nearby caves had sculpted Solsol, as they called the statue. Even after they were expelled from the Bamiyan Valley, their Muslim successors lived peacefully with the Buddha for centuries. Finally, in the 19th century, an Afghan king ordered the destruction of the Buddha’s face. I photographed Murray standing at the statue’s feet. Though just a speck in the distance, Murray seems lit up by the colossus behind him. As we gazed, local men drifted up and offered to guide us to the top for a small fee. Sure, we said. Let’s go. I have no memory of the ascent now except that here and there I could see patches of color on the walls surrounding the Buddha. A thousand years earlier the Buddha had been colorfully painted, but now just specks of paint survived. When we had finally climbed to the top of the Buddha’s head, and as we looked out at the valley’s oxen-tilled fields and round-topped yurts in the distance, I snapped another photo of Murray. When I look at it today, forty-five years later, he looks younger than I remember his ever having been. Three decades after we climbed the Bahmiyan Buddha, the news reached the West that Sosol was gone forever. In 2001, the Taliban dynamited the Buddha off the face of the earth. Where he had stood looking over the valley for fifteen hundred years, there is now a cavity in a sandstone wall. There is talk of rebuilding the Buddha. Perhaps there are plans in place. If it happens I would like to think that I will return to the Bamiyan Valley. Next time, I’ll wear sneakers. - Excerpted from a memoir in progress by Emmett Eiland Emmett Eiland graduated from Cal in 1966 “with a degree in English,” he says, “and no idea of how to make a living.” By 1969, he had turned an interest in antique Oriental rugs into a rug business on Solano Avenue in Berkeley. “I had to invent my own way of running a store,” he says. “I sure didn’t learn how in college. Mine was a very naïve business model, but it was honest. I just told the truth and I rarely bargained. A sign in the store still reads, ‘The Price is the Price.’ I had very few sale events.” In 1990, Emmett moved The Oriental Rug Company to a large showroom at 1326 Ninth St. in Berkeley, where he is still located today. While conducting business, Emmett still found time to write Oriental Rugs Today (Berkeley Hills Books, 1984 and 2nd. ed. 1986). He and his wife Natasha co-wrote a novel, The Last Resort (Berkeley Hills Books, 1987), and Emmett published articles about antique carpets in Hali, a London based Oriental rug magazine. He made a film on ‘The Repair and Restoration of Oriental Rugs,” conducted seminars at UC Extension in San Francisco and UCLA, and taught a course on rugs at UC Extension in Berkeley. In 2009, he published a second novel, When a Dragon Winks. Today he is working on a memoir. “I got some nice attention from the San Francisco Chronicle along the way,” Emmett says. “The Chronicle reviewed The Last Resort and had nice things to say about it. And in an article about my store, a reporter called me “a straight shooter in an industry often known for its shady sales tactics and suspect characters.” “But most of all, as I prepare to retire, I appreciate the people who have made it possible for me to reach home in pretty good shape- my customers and my staff. They will never know how much they have meant to me for nearly fifty years.” Emmett Eiland’s Oriental Rug Company will close forever before Christmas. The store is putting up every rug and kilim at end-of-an-era prices. Not just rugs… everything: a samovar, an ornate antique sword, tent bands, a loom, a spinning wheel, kimonos, carved wood, all the interesting artifacts Emmett collected during years of travel. Visit InternetRugs.com or hurry to 1326 9th Street in Berkeley. Open Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 5:30. Open Sunday noon to 5pm. Closed Monday. 510 526-1087.