Shadow of the Silk Road (36 page)

‘You are very kind, sir. I will help you everywhere. Where you go, I will take you. You are free. Look at these old women. That is the old culture. It is wrong. Out, out! Never mind. In the Shah’s time you could speak what you liked. [You couldn’t.] But now, if you are truthful, you are a terrorist. There was not this bigotry, bogarty. That is my hypothesis. Look, these young women are good. The chador pressed back to show the hair. That is culture. A utopia of the mind. Thinking is the future. I hate the Sunni, more free is the Shia. You are very kind, sir. Utopia! That is my favourite word. Never mind. What do you think of my ideas?…’

He rushes me from place to place, showing me off to friends, officials, nearly anyone who crosses our path. He is greeted everywhere with affectionate bewilderment. In a brief hour he cures me of all my yearning for talk.

‘…Look at those women. They are veiled, dangerous. It is the
old culture, very peril to the mind…’ We circle back at last to my hotel. ‘Tomorrow I will take you everywhere. Tomorrow we will see the tomb of Attar, the tomb of Omar Khayyám. A utopian hypothesis, sir! I am at your service, never mind. Tomorrow…’

Tomorrow, to my relief, he is not there, and I make my way alone to the grave of Omar Khayyám, in silence. Omar is an old friend, indulged in adolescence, when I found his
Rubáiyát
–in the translation of Edward Fitzgerald–ravishingly meaningful and sad; and as I walk through the shabby town, a whiff of that nostalgia lingers. Out beyond the southern suburbs, where the lines and hummocks of old ramparts are, the city of Nishapur, capital of the first, great Seljuk Turks, has all but vanished. Early in the twelfth century, in Omar Khayyám’s day, it was a sanctum of learning, magnificent for libraries, and seat of a sultanate that stretched into Anatolia. And Omar’s patron was the Seljuk grand vizier Nizam al-Mulk himself, the premier statesman of his age.

The suburbs fall behind at last, and I walk into a garden of slanting shadows. The air is musky with old scents. Under a blue-domed mausoleum, high among pines, devotees are padding to and fro. In 1135, thirteen years after Omar’s death, a disciple found his grave beside the cemetery wall, under drifts of pear and peach blossom. Later it was incorporated into the mausoleum of a local holy man, and it is this shrine that I am seeing.

But something else is ahead. A monstrous cone of concrete lozenges shoots up fifty feet in the air. It is hideously tiled, and scrawled with Omar’s poetry. Seventy years ago this cement wigwam was concocted above the poet’s relocated grave. Nobody is here. Everybody is too busy supplicating the holy man–except for me, shambling about in disgust. I am a boy again, and my Orient has evaporated. The scent of Omar’s poetry–the emptied wine-cup, the overgrown gardens and the nightingale–all expire in the concrete tent. In the absence of Westerners–international terror has kept them away–the place is as deserted as when Omar’s solitary disciple was shown a grave by a garden wall.

For the Iranians do not much esteem Omar Khayyám. They prefer the poet Attar, who is entombed more prettily nearby. Even
in his own day Omar was respected rather as an astronomer and mathematician (and as the inventor of clay scarecrows). He wrote a learned commentary on Euclid, which still exists. In 1074 he helped to construct an observatory for the sultan Malekshah, and composed astronomical tables for a calendar more accurate than the future Gregorian. Waspish and taciturn, he debated with al-Ghazali, who disliked him. He was called a free-thinker and an atheist. He probably frightened people.

Nine hundred years later, a melancholy Victorian recluse named Edward Fitzgerald reinvented Omar in the spirit of his own time. With a fair knowledge of Farsi, he pored over the verses attributed to the Persian poet and composed in their spirit a work distinctively his own. Here, for instance, is a literal translation of an Omar quatrain:

From which Fitzgerald rather wonderfully elicits:

Within sight of Omar’s grave, as if the foreboding of his
Rubáiyát
had come to pass, the remains of old Nishapur are ridges under the earth. I walk there over fields of sunflowers. Excavators have just uncovered some stone-paved streets and a plastered wall, thrown down by earthquake seven hundred years ago. In the house foundations, two skeletons–a man and a woman–sprawl where they fell, their heads turned to one another. Across the street, in a neighbouring house, a second man lies as if in foetal sleep. Beyond them a citadel looms in a whale-back of mud out of the stubble. Seventy years ago American archaeologists found its chambers
decorated with Seljuk plasterwork. Now the clay bricks are impacting into one another. The town museum has gathered almost nothing, and has jumbled up its ages: a coin of Alexander, some elegant bronze warriors, a surgical bowl for cupping blood. A tiny Buddha waves his hand in blessing.

Something terrible has happened to these places: Balkh, Tus, Nishapur, Merv, Rey, where I am going. They were not just laid in ruins; they were all but extinguished. The Mongols herded their inhabitants outside the gates–men, women, children–and massacred them, even dogs and cats, then ploughed every dwelling into the ground. Of Nishapur’s population, sixteen escaped. As for their ruins, they never knew the permanence of stone, and their baked brick, wherever exposed, has crumbled and coagulated back into its earth. In the horror of contemporary historians, nothing survived. The Mongol invasions, it is said, marked a psychic watershed. Over the centuries the lyrical hedonism in Persian poetry–the delight in a winsome companion, the joys of wine–faltered and darkened. Its loves turned unobtainable, its wine a refuge. As for Omar Khayyám, his melancholy truth grew impossible to endure, and his pagan quatrains were reinterpreted as a mystical yearning for God.

For more than five hundred miles, through a half-ruined land of bleached plains and villages, the road goes west towards ancient Rey and the suburbs of Tehran. This was an invader’s highway, sick with the tramp of armies going east–Persians, Macedonians, Arabs–and with Turkic and Mongol cavalry swarming west, and its Silk Road was too rich and vulnerable for lasting peace. To the north the Elburz mountains begin, with the Caspian Sea beyond; to the south the plateaux of Khorasan smooth into the saline deserts at Iran’s heart.

In late autumn the road traversed a near-desert plain. From time to time a faint, brown wash overhung the horizon, as if a water-colourist had started painting mountains there, then forgotten them. Sometimes they drew closer, discoloured ranges in orange,
dun and cream, or detached themselves to hazy islands. Even in the last century Turcoman slave-raiders would erupt on their hardy horses through these ethereal-looking passes, and the country was pocked with fortified enclosures raised in terror and now falling to dust. The shells of watch-towers still loured over lonely settlements; caravanserais disintegrated like old forts; and even towns were ringed by walls.

On my map the country was crammed with villages. On the ground, solitary hamlets stood in wilderness. The road stretched a wrinkled line between them. A few cars travelled it, and trucks driving by flair and threat, carrying cement, cables, chickens. Hold out a hand on any open road, and a van or a Paykan car (descendant of the long-extinct Hillman Hunter) will clatter to a stop beside you, and turn itself into a taxi for a few pence. For four days I went in a chain of clapped-out cars and buses. Only once, with a nervous driver, was I stopped and searched for drugs by police, our baggage scoured, the Paykan stripped of its upholstery.

I slept in small hotels and empty guesthouses, and grew used to the same food: streetside kebabs and ovals of fresh-baked nan, sometimes so large that people carried them home like towels over their arms. In night-time restaurants I swilled down chicken and rice with black tea or a heretical Zamzam Cola named from the holy well at Mecca.

And out of the land’s monotony, from time to time, a prodigy rose. The 120-foot minaret of a vanished Seljuk mosque tapered in wasteland, still banded by six bracelets of decorative brick. A Mongol tomb-tower radiated thirty-odd flanges in razor chiaroscuro. And at Qadamgah, where the waters of a sacred spring slipped out from an underground chamber, two outsize footprints were indented in black larval rock: the tracks of the Eighth Imam. They were soft-edged, primitive; and I recalled, with muffled surprise, the footprints of the Yellow Emperor in the hills of China.

In the most feared stretch of the road, ‘the Tract of Terror’, the giant caravanserai of Miandasht lunged into sight behind brick parapets muscled with round towers. As late as the nineteenth century two fortified courtyards bigger than football fields had
been added to the elegant sixteenth-century inn. I walked here amazed. In the long galleries of the dormitories, twilit through perforated domes, the platform steps were still in place where the merchants had mounted to sleep, and the flues of hooded fireplaces wound up to the roof. Thick with smoke and gossip, these platforms were the airwaves and newsprint of their day, where men discussed the worth of things, and broke into poetry or prayer, while their camels and horses shuffled and roared beneath. Vaulted shafts went down to cisterns white with salt, and the tethering-holes for beasts were still smooth in the stone. Outside, over the memory of the Silk Road, a lonely traffic murmured.

When the caravanserai was abandoned, I could not tell. For hundreds of years the Silk Road had stayed in gentle decline. In the mid-fifteenth century, as Central Asia splintered into belligerent Turkic and Mongol khanates, China closed itself away. In an astonishing act of self-isolation, the Ming dynasty unrigged its entire heavy merchant fleet of 3,500 ships, and abandoned trade contacts by both land and sea. Little by little the road that had once joined the Pacific to the Mediterranean fractured and stilled.

In 1498 the Portuguese pioneered the seaway round Africa: a harbinger of all that was to come. As in some deep tectonic shift, the weight of the civilised world was changing. European sea-dogs were on the move, with triple-masted galleon and compass, and gradually the frontierless ocean–free from ruinous middlemen–turned to a teeming highway. By the nineteenth century a few camel-trains were still bearing brick-tea from an enfeebled China into Siberia, and sometimes the nomads drove their horse herds for sale at the Great Wall. But there was little else. For three centuries the eastern Mediterranean had turned silent before the roar of the Atlantic seaboard.

If there was a fatal moment in the nemesis of the Silk Road, it was perhaps not the capture of Constantinople nor the closure of the Ming nor the landfall of Columbus. It was the day, sometime in the tenth century, when an unknown Chinese discovered the maritime compass.

Nearly two centuries ago, a British traveller named James Fraser,
traversing the same bleak highway as I, strayed into the village of Mazinan, and while his camels rested, explored a maze of ruins. Amongst them, he was told, a monumental tomb covered the bones of Ismail, progenitor of the sect from which the fearsome order of Assassins grew. These Ismailis were an offshoot of the Shia–heresy of a heresy–and if the story were true, the man buried here was their founding imam. Somewhere beyond Tehran the Assassin heartland was dense with castle ruins, and the sect still survived in the Ismaili of the Aga Khan, scattered through Syria and India, Mombasa and Badakshan.

A stoic driver veered off the road down a pot-holed track to a half-deserted village. Beyond it, across worn-out fields and troughs of lost irrigation, Fraser’s ruins glimmered clear under a weak sun, like ancient follies. We found the tomb beyond them. It stood, with another shrine, adrift in scrub. They were built in brick the colour of cinnamon, and ringed by a high, cracked wall. The larger was a mosque, it seemed, topped by a ziggurat dome. The walls of the smaller, split by rains, lifted to an octagonal drum and a cupola of dense herringbone brick.

I gazed at them a long time. No sign betrayed their identity. I wondered, as Fraser had, if it could be true: that the founding holiness of this great sect lay not in Medina, as believed, but desolate beside an unknown Iranian village. The buildings looked as if they had been locked up years ago, then abandoned. A cold wind was whining over the scrub. The driver left his car to join me, but we had no language between us. For a while I circled the wall uneasily, then levered myself over its parapet. Warily, with a qualm of violation, I made for the smaller shrine. My feet crackled over dying carob plants, then sunken paving. There was no other sound. As I went, I realised I was walking over gravestones. The faces of their dead, crudely engraved, stared up at me from the dust.

I pushed gently at the tomb’s door. I was sure it was a tomb now. The door was made of iron, and did not yield. But the meshes of its bars, for the height of a man, were dripping with a mane of knotted rags, left by some mysterious faithful.

Later, walking across the scrubland, I met a lone farmer. By
signs and isolated words, I learnt what I already imagined. That the older building was a grave (he laid his head on his arm). That the place was forbidden. And that in the village (he touched his heart), the memory of Ismail was still alive.

Someone opens a door in an alley of Damghan, and you enter the oldest mosque in Iran. It was built about 760. Like the Piyada mosque near Balkh, it belongs not to the sky-domed Islamic future, but to the earthbound Sassanian past. Round its square courtyard the arcades are carried on immense round piers, which mass three deep at their end to form a tunnelled prayer-hall. The arches, for the first time in Islam here, are slightly pointed. Its plaster is cracked, the vaults poorly restored. But in the suddenly blazing sun, a monumental stillness settles over it. The gracious Seljuk minaret which rises alongside looks frivolous. And you imagine a faith at peace.