Shadow of the Silk Road (39 page)

Hulagu spared Rukn-ad-din so long as his life was useful. When the Grand Master ordered his other castles to surrender, many of them obeyed. Alamut capitulated within days, then the Mongols began clearing the valleys of the last Ismaili fortresses, massacring even the garrisons that gave in. Rukn-ad-din, it seems, lapsed into senility. He became obsessed by Bactrian camels–Hulagu gave him a hundred–and fell in love with a Mongol girl, whom he was allowed to marry. But soon afterwards, wrote a contemporary historian, he was ‘kicked to a pulp and then put to the sword…and he and his kindred became but a tale on men’s lips and a tradition in the world’.

The crags that interlock around Maimundiz were still snowless in mid-November, when Mahmoud drove me there. Above their red and pink foothills, frosted with dying thistles, the iron-grey mountains separated into a maze of defiles and abrupt valley walls. A British expedition in 1960 had located the castle here on a precipitous mountain beyond the village of Shams Kilaya, where its gutted chambers survived deep inside the rock.

Mahmoud and I hunted for two men rumoured to own climbing equipment; but one was absent and the other said the place was too dangerous. So Mahmoud drove back to his hospital, while inky clouds piled above Maimundiz. For an hour I tramped the oasis among swarthy men in black woollen caps, and wondered what to do, then found a room above a little restaurant. From my plank bed I watched the eerie storm-light playing across the face of the mountain, then the flash-bulbs of lightning, until at mid-afternoon, with a din like artillery, the storm broke. Far into the night it trembled like hail over the roof of my room. Iron and glass walls and a solitary bulb suspended me in a dim-lit cage above the village street, until the electricity failed, and I waited in the darkness to sleep, while muddled dreams succeeded one another.

Sleepily I wondered if any trace of Assassin blood endured in the valley. For the Mongols did not quite exterminate them. The Assassins even returned twenty years later, and fleetingly reoccupied their ruined Alamut. Gradually the sect dwindled into obscurity, steeped in millennial dreams, and thinned at last to a scattering of rural villages in Syria and central Asia. But the infant son of Rukn-ad-din was said to have survived, preserving the line of Ismaili imams down to the present Aga Khans.

In time the Assassins’ memory faded. But perhaps they were the first to devote themselves to terror through suicide. Even as I lay in the clattering darkness below Maimundiz, their heirs were grimly at work, dreaming of the same elysium. Yet no cultural memory connected them. The Assassins’ bitterness rose from sacred history, from the ingrained Shia sense of wrong; it did not know the violated heritage of their modern counterparts–Palestine, Chechnya, Iraq–an anger complicated by alienation from the worldly pantomime of the West, whose memory was growing daily stranger to me.

Dawn broke softly over the mountain. In the cleaned light, far beyond the orchards and poplars of Shams Kilaya, the castle precipice lifted two thousand feet above the valley floor in wrinkles of pink stone. Dogs were emptying garbage-cans in the street as I left. The air was cold. I went through cherry orchards, picking at ripe blackberries, while the rose-coloured bluff grew in front. Beyond a thin stream the slopes were furred in grass and climbed past a small shrine into wilderness.

Now the whole mountain spread above me. It was split by clefts which ate their way up half its height, then delved into artificial-looking caves. Scree and boulders loosened and cascaded under my feet. In the airy silence their brittle grating was the only sound, like pebbles dragged by the tide. Nothing moved in the stone valley. It was as if the stream below marked a divide between the present and a shunned past. I followed a goat-track along the foot of the bluffs. I had imagined them untouched: but now, vertically above me, I made out scarps which had once been plastered, and the swell of a round tower. In the south-west angle, a change of light awoke
walls reaching sixty feet up–a coating of brick stuccoed hard against the cliff, almost indistinguishable from it. Diagonal seams of rock might once have been stairways. The crescent of an arch showed clear in a cave, where swallows were flying in and out. The whole mountain was one vast, riddled sanctuary.

I longed to enter. But the cavern-mouths gaped sixty feet sheer above, blackened where fire had raged inside, their outer structures burnt away. When I scrutinised the fissures ascending to them, only one seemed to offer a few thin holds. Tentatively at first, I started to climb its crevice. But under my fingers the solid-looking cliff felt loose and friable, and I realised that the whole mountain–perhaps the stark crags of all this region–was not living rock but a coagulate of sand and shale.

At first my body seemed light to me, and swung easily into the spaces I planned for it. I was a little surprised. When I tested the soft-looking scarp, kicking or wrenching at it before each step, nothing crumbled. My trainers felt out invisible knobs and dents. Slowly, clambering from side to side, I was winching myself into space. Then stones began to skitter down below me, and echoed on the rocks. A sharp wind was blowing over the higher cliffs. Little by little, I became afraid. I had not really thought the ascent possible.

Halfway up, my nerve failed me. I stopped, spread-eagled against the rock-face. A few drops of rain fell. Above me the crevice–thirty feet of it–rose sheer. Beneath me was a drop to solid stone. I could see the autumn valley descending past the oasis of Shams Kilaya to hills like grey dust. I waited for my breathing to still. I noticed the hands clenching the rock close against my face: they were lean and broken-skinned, not hands that should be doing this. Then I looked up and glimpsed the ceiling of the cave-chamber I could not reach. It was sooted by Mongol fires.

With helpless excitement I began to crawl upwards again. It became too late to turn back. Years ago, young, I would have hurried in fear and perhaps fallen. Now I waited, with pained slowness, to secure a handhold here, a foothold there. I could hear my own heart. For the last ten feet the sides of the cleft were so close that I braced my body inside it. Once I felt my toes slipping;
then they held. I was afraid to look down. A broken arch appeared in the opening above. The scarp beside me had been cemented smooth.

Only when I heaved myself on to the level floor, heady with triumph, did I look down at the sixty-foot drop to stone, shaking with the thought of my descent. I was in a huge broken chamber. Outside, but close by, the hewn stone of a tower bulged from the plaster.

Now I can barely read what I wrote there. In my notebook half the sentences tremble indecipherably. But I think they say this:

I do not know where I am. In stables, maybe, or a guardhouse. An arch spans the cleft where a bastion once stood. Whatever passageway it connected has fallen in. A room has broken open above it. I am treading lightly, for fear of falling. All the ceilings are charred.

Somewhere I remember smoothing my hands over a long, mortared cistern. Beyond, I grope down a rough-hewn corridor fifty yards into the mountain, until it opens on a high vault. I have no torch, and cannot go farther. I sit down exhausted in the opening above the valley, gazing at the traces of stucco flaking round its threshold. I feel light and strange. The soot-stains are still vivid there. I think of Rukn-ad-din and his family hurrying down these passageways to some lost stairway, going to their surrender and to death. I steady my nerves for my own descent. Birds flitter and squeak in the fissures, and an invisible sun is shining out of storm-clouds over other mountains.

‘Britain! Football! Manchester United!’ Three youths expend their English on me before crying: ‘You Iraq! Why in Iraq?’ Not a soul I have met, between eastern China and western Iran, has applauded the invasion of Iraq. ‘Oil!’

Our minibus rattles over a factory-blackened plain, where apartment blocks of naked iron and brick jut out of scrubland. Its seats are banked with sacks of nuts and apples from the markets of
Qazvin, and the passengers have been rearranged so that nobody unrelated is sitting next to a woman. ‘Football very good! Iraq no!’ After an hour the flotsam of industry drifts away, but nothing gives you to expect what is coming. Then, across the level wastes, from a pool of orchards, the dome of Sultaniya lifts out of solitude.

I clamber from the bus into its shadow. Only a dwarfed village surrounds it, the alleys scoured by a howling wind. For a minute I shelter in its lee, then I walk free and gaze up through flying dust with a shock of elation. This is the resting-place of the Mongol sultan Oljeitu, built seven hundred years ago within living memory of Genghis Khan: one of the supreme monuments of Asia.

A giant octagon of lion-coloured brick rises for sixty feet, before it shadows into a gallery of triple arches grouped round each façade. Above them, like broken eyelashes, the remains of glazed tiles cling–azure starred with steel blue. From the topmost terrace, circled by turrets which were once minarets, the dome hangs in brilliant turquoise–a spiked crown 170 feet above the ground.

Here at Sultaniya, Oljeitu established the Ilkhanid capital after his great-grandfather Hulagu founded the dynasty from Balkh to Anatolia. A great city burgeoned overnight, filled by royal command with mosques and palaces, merchants and craftsmen, under a skyline–if early travellers are to be believed–forested in globular domes and even a ziggurat. An astonished peace had settled over the Silk Road. The Mongols’ havoc had died away, and from the Great Khanate of a conquered China their dynasties ruled unbroken to the Mediterranean. From the mid-thirteenth century, for close on a hundred years, trade flowed along routes overseen by forts and the posting-stations of imperial couriers. It was said that a virgin bearing a gold dish could walk unmolested from China to Turkey. Under this Pax Mongolica, the popes and kings of Europe sent monks as emissaries eastward, seeking alliance with the Mongols against the Arabs, and hunting for the elusive Christian realm of Prester John. A Turkic Nestorian monk from China turned up in the Vatican and the court of Philippe le Bel in Paris, and the Polo brothers travelled to the capital of Kublai Khan with a gift of oil from the Holy Sepulchre.

The markets of Sultaniya, meanwhile, were hung with newly
freed luxuries. The raw and woven silks of China penetrated overland again, with lacquer and musk. Genoese and Venetians set up shop. At this time, too, the knowledge of gunpowder passed from China to Europe, with silk-weaving machinery and the mechanical clock. Arabian horses and Turkish falcons appeared, and the textiles of Flanders and Italy, and the great days of the Tang returned with Indian spices and stones come up from the Persian Gulf, rubies and lapis lazuli, ivory and rhinoceros horn.

I wandered this vanished city under a flailing wind. The traces of its walls and towers ringed the dust in greenish stone, restored, and beyond Oljeitu’s tomb the ruffled ground was covered with blue shards. On the very day he died, it was said, fourteen thousand families abandoned Sultaniya, for it straddled no major crossroad, but was raised by the sultan’s fiat on the summer pastures of his fathers, which were temperate and rich in game. Every autumn the court forsook it for lower camping-grounds. They were still pastoralists at heart. Even Oljeitu’s mausoleum was orientated south, in the old Mongol way, not south-west toward Mecca, and his favourite holy man (I found his grave nearby) was a filthy shaman who went naked in a necklace of bells and bones and a felt hat sprouting cows’ horns.

All through Ilkhanid times the Mongols’ tents were more gorgeous than cities. Silk came into its own. There were silk tents raised on gold-plated and gold-nailed pillars; tents that became throne-rooms and ministries, tents that two hundred men could barely erect in twenty days. Silk lined the wagons of the Mongol princes, and was routinely demanded in tribute. A gold-woven fabric named
nasij
was especially prized, and skilled weavers were moved into the Mongol heartland from Samarkand and Herat to create it. Genghis Khan himself had marvelled at his silk-clad women, glittering ‘like a red-hot fire’, and Marco Polo described the whole court of Kublai Khan assembling in identical coloured silks, according to the feast-day.

As for their sepulchres, the Ilkhanids eventually broke with the Mongol custom of secret burial, and each vied with his forebears to be lavishly entombed. Their haunting model was the Seljuk
tomb of Sultan Sanjar at Merv. Yet the mausoleum of Oljeitu, as I entered, shed down a more complex richness. Even thicketed in scaffolding, its diffused light disclosed a vast, still space. The double tier of bays that encircled it, shaping the octagon, were carried within framing arches reaching to fifty feet, where stalactite ceilings were still stuck with faience fragments in turquoise and ultramarine. Under the gallery I circled painted ceilings which glowed in garnet and bronze, like a Persian carpet set in motion overhead. And within the arches of the sanctuary, climbing all their soffits and spandrels, there ebbed and flowed a broken river of mosaic tiles, polychrome plaster and bands of gilded script, dissolving at last to the slow curve of the dome into infinity.

A mysterious uncertainty in the tomb’s decor–a tracery of stucco had been plastered over the first, beautiful tilework–perhaps reflects the wavering of Oljeitu’s time or heart. He was born a Nestorian Christian (and baptised Nicholas after the current pope); he flirted with Buddhism, then adopted Sunni Islam. But in 1310, a sudden convert to Shiism, he decided to transport the corpses of Ali and Hussein to his half-built mausoleum, before reverting to Sunnism and resuming the tomb for himself. Often the Shia faience and Sunni plaster have survived side by side. Sometimes both have vanished. And high above the gallery, obscured in scaffolding and gurgling with pigeons, a band of tiles still twins the names of Ali and the Prophet.

It was on the railway platform in Zanjan that I realised people were no longer speaking Persian. A Turkish dialect was in the air (it had started at Qazvin). I was crossing another unmarked frontier. Here, where the plains start to rumple into tablelands, the ethnic Persians thin away before Turkic Azeris, who number quarter of Iran’s people, and far to the north-west the mountain corridors of the Caucasus, and Turkey itself, exert their faint, unseen presence.