The Road to Oxiana (17 page)

Yes, the Indians had gone, and also the Hungarian. Some other Franks had come in the meantime, friends of mine he believed. Ah, here they were.

In the door stood the Charcoal-Burners.

“Hullo”, I said from my corner.

“YOU? er—Hullo.”

“I'm sorry I've finished the whisky.”

“Not at all.”

“On account of my health.”

“We heard you were ill.”

“Do you find it cold in Afghanistan?”

“The rain has inconvenienced us.”

“But you like the buildings, I hope.”

“Oh, charming.”

It was not the reunion we had imagined. Being ten days too late for Turkestan, they must now go south to Kandahar. They expect me to go with them.

A partridge for dinner brightened things up.

Herat
,
December 11th
.—They have gone by themselves. Turkestan was my objective, not a charcoal demonstration. It still is. I shall go back to Persia and wait for the spring.

PERSIA
:
Meshed
,
December 17th
.—A vile journey, which has knocked me up. Hence the interval.

Still, we were lucky in the weather. The road had just dried and the going was good. A party of pilgrims on their way to Nejef occupied the back of the lorry. Beside me in front sat a sanctimonious young seyid dressed in a black turban and brown camel's-hair cloak, who had come from Irak to see the cities of Islam and was now on his way to India, via Duzdab and Quetta. After sleeping at Islamkillah, the frontier post, we bumped across the twelve-mile strip of no-man's-land that separates the two countries, accompanied by flocks of marsh birds and their gloomy plaints. At Kariz, while the Persian customs delayed us, a German accosted me. He had just escaped from Russia, where he had been naturalised, and had walked this far on his way to India, only to be turned back by the Afghan authorities. His wife was ill in the village; they were penniless and desperate. I was fumbling for some money to give him, when he vanished in a fit of pride.

A pustule had developed on my thigh, which was now of such a size that the whole leg was swollen from the ankle to the groin; I could hardly walk. To drown the pain, I ordered some arak, at which the seyid protested a theatrical horror. Pussyfooting in Persia was no business of his, I thought. Whisking out the cork, I thrust the mouth of the bottle into his beard. He fled like a raped nun; but in the lorry there was no escape. Whenever the bottle appeared, he swooned on to the steering-wheel as though overcome by the fumes, calling on God
and the driver to avenge the impiety. The driver laughed. God took no action till Turbat-i-Sheikh Jam, where we arrived at midnight.

Here, as I was unloading my luggage in the caravanserai, some soldiers stole my saddle-bags. Thinking their door was locked, I launched myself against it with all the strength of my sound leg. But it wasn't, and the vigour of my entry sent four of them sprawling, including one whose behind, as he bent over the loot, unexpectedly met my knee. The rest were furious, and chased me, still hopping like a locust, to the kitchen, where the crowd laughed them to shame. I then asked where I could sleep, and was shown ceremoniously to the edge of a mat near the stove already occupied by five others. Taking a teapot of hot water, I sought a ruin across the court, where I poulticed my leg in peace; three separate draughts froze the bandage to my flesh. “Is it comfortable here?” asked the seyid, creeping up behind me with a white bundle in his arms. I exorcised him with the arak bottle.

No pilgrim was ever so glad as I to see the domes of Meshed. Mrs. Hamber, at the Consulate, had asked me to stay if I came back; I had no strength to pretend hesitation. My leg was cupped at the American hospital. Next morning, waking up to find clean sheets against my chin and breakfast on a tray, I wondered at a forgotten world.

Meshed
,
December 21st
.—Energy and good spirits are returning—mainly thanks to
Anna Karenina
, which I had not read before. My leg is so reduced that I can dress it myself. This saves me the intimacies of the hospital. Yesterday, while I was in the room, one man had seven teeth removed without anaesthetic, while another was being examined for cancer in the testicles.

People who abuse missionaries have not seen their medical work. The whole health of Khorasan depends on them. For this, not for their conversions, the authorities hate and hamper them; there is nothing to be jealous of in a religion which has no more appeal here than a Mohammadan mission would have in Rome. The Persians have a talent for cutting off their nose to spite their face. They stopped the Junkers air service because it exhibited foreign superiority. They make roads, but their customs duties prohibit the import of motors. They want a tourist traffic, but forbid photographing because somebody once published a picture of an Iranian beggar, while conformity with their police regulations is a profession in itself, as I have discovered in the last day or two. Indeed Marjoribanks-land ablaze with Progress offers a depressing contrast with Afghanistan. I am reminded of the hare and the tortoise.

Meshed
,
December 24th
.—Mrs. Hamber has gone to India. Hamber has most kindly asked me to keep him company for Christmas.

Every morning I take a two-horse cab to the shrine of Khoja Rabi, where I sit and draw, at peace with the world, as long as the short winter days allow. It was built in 1621 by Shah Abbas, and stands in a garden outside the town. The gay tiles, turquoise, lapis, violet, and yellow, have a singular melancholy among the bare trees and empty beds a-flutter with dead leaves. It suits my mood.

Other monuments here are the Masjid-i-Shah, a ruined mosque in the bazaar dating from 1451, which has two minarets spangled with blue and purple in the same fashion as the two-balconied minaret at Herat; and the Musalla, a ruined arch of later date, which is
faced with intricate but unbeautiful mosaic. There is also the great Shrine of the Imam Riza.

This congeries of mosques, mausoleums, booths, bazaars, and labyrinths is the hub of the town. The sacred area has recently been insulated by a broad circular street, whence the other main streets radiate in all directions, so that every vista is completed by domes and minarets. On my first arrival at dusk, a huge sea-blue dome hovered in the misty sky; a gold dome shone dully beside it; between the ghostly minarets hung a string of fairy lights.

Two funerals transferred the capital of Khorasan from Tus to Meshed. In 809 the Caliph Harun-al-Rashid was disturbed by a rebellion in Transoxiana. His son Mamun marched ahead to Merv; the Caliph, in following, was taken ill at Tus, died, and was buried in a holy place twenty miles off, which is now Meshed. Mamun stayed at Merv, and in 816 he summoned thither the eighth Imam of the Shiahs, Ali-ar-Riza of Medina, whom he proclaimed heir to the Caliphate. But two years later the Imam also died at Tus, while accompanying Mamun on a visit to his father's grave. In orthodox doctrine, he died of a surfeit of grapes. But the Shiahs believe Mamun poisoned him. In any case he was buried next to Harun-al-Rashid, and his tomb became, after that of Ali at Nejef, the holiest place in the Shiah world.

So the Shrine grew up, and the city round it. Pilgrims, when they adore the Imam's tomb, still spit on that of Harun-al-Rashid. To us that name suggests all the splendours of Asia. To the Shiahs it recalls no more than the father of the murderer of a saint.

Attended by an unhappy police officer, I spent the morning on various roofs examining the Shrine through field-glasses from the other side of the circular street.
There are three main courts, each with four ivans (no other word will describe those huge open-fronted halls with pointed vaults and high façades, which are the special feature of Persian mosque architecture). Two of the courts point north and south, and are situated end to end, though not on the same axis; the tilework in these, from a distance, looks like chintz and must date from the XVIIth or XVIIIth centuries. Between them rises a helm-shaped dome plated in gold, which marks the tomb of the Imam and was erected by Shah Abbas in 1607; Chardin, in 1672, saw plates being made at Isfahan to repair it after an earthquake. Beside it stands a gold minaret, and there is another such minaret to the east of the southern court.

The third court points west, at right angles to the north and south courts. This is the mosque which Gohar Shad built between 1405 and 1418. Above the sanctuary chamber at the end, which is flanked by two enormous minarets, rises the sea-blue dome, bulbous in shape, inscribed on the bulge with bold black Kufic, and festooned from the apex with thin yellow tendrils.

The mosaic of the whole court appears to be still intact. Even from a quarter of a mile away I could see the difference in quality of its colour from that of the other courts. Here is the clue to the vanished glories of Herat. I must and will penetrate this mosque before I leave Persia. But not now; I haven't the initiative. It must wait till the spring, by which time perhaps I shall have found out more about Gohar Shad.

Meshed
,
Christmas Day
.—Hamber and I had lunch with Mr. and Mrs. Hart, also in the Consulate, and their little son Keith. I ate too much pudding, felt sick as one always does on Christmas afternoon, and was in form again for dinner. To this Hamber entertained the whole American mission, the Harts, and a German girl
from Bolivia, governess to a family here, who was mondaine in a Teutonic cocktail-sniggering sort of way. Games followed. I won a fountain pen, the men's prize for trimming a lady's hat.

Teheran
,
January 9th
.—It was a sad moment when I exchanged Hamber's kind home for the brutal world again.

On the way back I stopped at Shahrud. It was early in the morning, and being now Ramadan, which means that no one gets up till midday, I took a horse without permission and rode off to Bostam, a sleepy little place on the way over the mountains to Asterabad. The XIVth-century Shrine of Bayazid had so pastoral an exterior, with its towers like Kentish oast-houses, that the richness of the cut stucco mihrab inside it was a surprise. Indeed this technique is always a surprise; its effect is out of all proportion to its plain material. Here it is not exuberant as at Hamadan, depending more on line than relief. But it has the same virtues of splendour without ostentation and intricacy without incoherence. Near the mosque stands a grave-tower, built at the beginning of the century, whose round shell is encased by small sharp-edged buttresses. The brickwork has a fine texture, which results from the ends of the bricks, as they alternate with the sides, being stamped in a small design.

I was arrested on returning to Shahrud, but the Chief of Police was amiable enough when I produced my documents. I explained that much as I sympathised with the habit of turning night into day during Ramadan, it could not profit me to adopt it, in my search for monuments. He assented—rather shamefacedly. Probably some ridiculous edict has been circulated that Ramadan is backward.

To ears still throbbing with the noise of a lorry on
low gear, Teheran seemed a city of velvet-footed ghouls. I was laced into an evening suit at the Anglo-Persian mess and taken to the New Year's Eve ball. Expecting only that casual politeness which seeks to prevent the returned traveller's reminiscences, I was touched at people's interest in my excursion. Suddenly I saw Busk, the new secretary at the Legation, and showed my astonishment that he was taller than myself; for at school, since when we had not met, he had been one of the shortest boys.

“But I wasn't a
notorious
dwarf, was I?” he asked plaintively.

PART IV

Teheran
,
January 15th
.—Damn this place.

Soon after I left in November, Marjoribanks thought himself threatened with a coup d'état. He had gone to Asterabad to see his new railway and attend the Turcoman races. With him was Sardar Assad, the Minister of War and chief of the Bakhtiari Khans. The first public indication of a plot was Sardar Assad's unexpected return to Teheran by lorry: an unusual mode of travel for the richest and most prominent member of the tribal aristocracy. He and his brothers, including Sardar Bahadur and Emir-i-Jang whom we met at tea with Mirza Yantz, are now in prison; troops and aeroplanes have been sent to the Bakhtiari country south of Isfahan. Meanwhile, suspicion has fallen on the Kavam-al-Mulk, a Kashgai magnate from Shiraz, who has hitherto enjoyed the dangerous honour of being Marjoribanks's chief confidant. He at present is confined to his house, and Miss Palmer-Smith, his daughters' companion, is in an ecstasy of apprehension about poison in the food.

No one knows if there really was a plot. But everyone now thinks there will be. There are rumours that Marjoribanks has cancer in the stomach, that the Crown Prince will be murdered on his return from school in Switzerland, that the tribes will revolt in the spring. I don't believe any of them; dictatorships always breed these rumours. What annoys me is the anti-foreign feeling that has come to a head. The disgrace of the Bakhtiaris is partly ascribed to their friendship with the English; visitors anxious to see the more civilised side of Persian life, always travelled through
their country. In consequence, all Persians, except those officially instructed to associate with foreigners, shudder away as though one were a mad dog.