by Mary Morris
Besides having a manor, we have a demesne as well, a fair demesne of lavender tufts that grow thick over the hills; and their odourous blossoms, drying in the sun, mingle their fresh, salt perfume with the heavier odour of the pines. Our only labour is to gather these blossoms; but so regal is our idleness that we have much ado to accomplish it.
Going to and fro, we have made the acquaintance of certain neighbouring princes and princesses whose kingdoms lie round about. There are, in the first place, two little girls, whom we meet every day seeking pasture for their goat. As the goat supplies the milk and butter for the family, it is most necessary that she should have good grass; and that, on this arid coast, is not easy to find in September. When they have found a green spot, they carefully tether her, and with many parting injunctions to her not to run away, and to eat all she can, and be a good little goat, they leave her. Then there is the old man who lives in a thatch on the hillside, from whom we buy figs; and the woman who goes about with scales and basket, selling lobsters. At the hotel there is an old Parisian who has exiled himself from the gaieties of the capital, and is living out the remainder of a misspent life in the solitudes of his native south. His eyes fairly devour anyone who comes from Paris, and he beams when a bicyclist or two pump into Lavandou to solace his loneliness. For several days he has been the only guest at the hotel besides ourselves, and he eats his lobster and sips his benedictine in sadness.
The other day we left our manor long enough to make a royal progress to Cavalaire, a village six miles down the coast. The road is a wild one: on one side the steep hillside, on the other the sea. If we had not tested the kindliness of these southerners before, we might have been rather intimidated by the loneliness of the road. We met nothing more terrible than a sailor boy sitting on the stone coping of a bridge, trying to tie up a badly bruised foot in a piece of cloth torn from the sash about his waist. He had been put ashore that morning off a freight boat because his foot disabled him, and was limping along to St. Praid, twenty-five miles down the coast, where his people lived. He did not ask for charity, nor vouchsafe his story until he was questioned. We gave him some money, and a pin to keep the cloth on his foot, and as we were returning late in the afternoon, we met him limping on his way. We met also a few fishermen, and several women walking beside little carts drawn by a donkey no bigger than a sheep, and every woman was knitting busily as she walked, stopping only long enough to greet us. The village of Cavalaire consists of a station house and a little tavern by the roadside. The station agent lay asleep on a bench beside his door, and his old mother and wife were knitting beside him. The place is not a little like certain lonely way stations in Wyoming and Colorado. Before we reached our own village that night the moon was already throwing her tracks of troubled light across the sea.
But always we come back to the principality of pines and decide there is nothing else quite so good. As I said before, there is nothing but a little cardboard house of stucco, and a plateau of brown pine needles, and green fir trees, the scent of dried lavender always in the air, and the sea reaching like a wide blue road into the sky. But what a thing it is to lie there all day in the fine breeze, with the pine needles dropping on one, only to return to the hotel at night so hungry that the dinner, however homely, is a fête, and the menu finer reading than the best poetry in the world! Yet we are to leave all this for the glare and blaze of Nice and Monte Carlo; which is proof enough that one cannot become really acclimated to happiness.
VITA SACKVILLE-WEST
(1892–1962)
Virginia Woolf wrote of the best work of her lifelong friend Vita Sackville-West that one gets “the sense of all the fine things you have dropped in to it, so that it is full of beauty in itself when nothing is happening.” Few among her contemporaries extolled the virtues and beauty of the little things in life as Sackville-West did. Sackville-West eschewed traversing deserts, climbing mountaintops, and fording dangerous rivers for her material. Her work is meditative, consistently brushing up against poetry. In her travels, recorded in Passenger to Teheran, she visited in 1925 the countries of the Middle East and went home to England by way of Russia. While on the journey she attended the coronation of the reigning Shah of Persia.
from PASSENGER TO TEHERAN
Ever since I have been in Persia I have been looking for a garden and have not yet found one. Yet Persian gardens enjoy a great reputation. Hafiz and Sa-adi sang frequently, even wearisomely, of roses. Yet there is no word for rose in the Persian language; the best they can manage is “red flower.” It looks as though a misconception had arisen somewhere. Indeed I think the misconception is ours, sprung from that national characteristic by which the English exact that everything should be the same, even in Central Asia, as it is in England, and grumble when it is not. “Garden?” we say; and think of lawns and herbaceous borders, which is manifestly absurd. There is no turf in this parched country; and as for herbaceous borders, they postulate a lush shapeliness unimaginable to the Persian mind. Here, everything is dry and untidy, crumbling and decayed; a dusty poverty, exposed for eight months of the year to a cruel sun. For all that, there are gardens in Persia.
But they are gardens of trees, not of flowers; green wildernesses. Imagine that you have ridden in summer for four days across a plain; that you have then come to a barrier of snow-mountains and ridden up the pass; that from the top of the pass you have seen a second plain, with a second barrier of mountains in the distance, a hundred miles away; that you know that beyond these mountains lies yet another plain, and another, and another; and that for days, even weeks, you must ride, with no shade, and the sun overhead, and nothing but the bleached bones of dead animals strewing the track. Then when you come to trees and running water, you will call it a garden. It will not be flowers and their garishness that your eyes crave for, but a green cavern full of shadow, and pools where goldfish dart, and the sound of little streams. That is the meaning of a garden in Persia, a country where the long slow caravan is an everyday fact, and not a romantic name.
Such gardens there are; many of them abandoned, and these one may share with the cricket and the tortoise undisturbed through the hours of the long afternoon. In such a one I write. It lies on a southward slope, at the foot of the snowy Elburz, looking over the plain. It is a tangle of briars and grey sage, and here and there a judas tree in full flower stains the whiteness of the tall planes with its incredible magenta. A cloud of pink, down in a dip, betrays the peach trees in blossom. Water flows everywhere, either in little wild runnels, or guided into a straight channel paved with blue tiles, which pours down the slope into a broken fountain between four cypresses. There, too, is the little pavilion, ruined, like everything else; the tiles of the façade have fallen out and lie smashed upon the terrace; people have built, but, seemingly, never repaired; they have built, and gone away, leaving nature to turn their handiwork into this melancholy beauty. Nor is it so sad as it might be, for in this spacious, ancient country it is not of man that one thinks; he has made no impression on the soil, even his villages of brown mud remain invisible until one comes close up to them, and, once ruined, might have been ruined for five or five hundred years, indifferently; no, one thinks only of the haven that this tangled enclosure affords, after the great spaces. One is no longer that small insect creeping across the pitiless distances.
There is something satisfying in this contrast between the garden and the enormous geographical simplicity that lies beyond. The mud walls that surround the garden are crumbling, and through the breaches appears the great brown plain, crossed by the three pale roads: to the east, the road to Meshed and Samarcand; to the west, the road to Bagdad; to the south, the road to Isfahan. The eye may travel, or, alternately, return to dwell upon the little grape-hyacinth growing close at hand. These Asian plains are of exceeding beauty, but their company is severe, and the mind turns gratefully for a change to something of more manageable size. The garden is a place of spiritual reprieve, as well as a place of shadows. The plains a
re lonely, the garden is inhabited; not by men, but by birds and beasts and lowly flowers; by hoopoes, crying “Who? Who?” among the branches; by lizards rustling like dry leaves; by the tiny sea-green iris. A garden in England seems an unnecessary luxury, where the whole countryside is so circumscribed, easy and secure; but here, one begins to understand why the garden drew such notes from Sa-adi and from Hafiz. As a breeze at evening after a hot day, as a well in the desert, so is the garden to the Persian.
The sense of property, too, is blessedly absent; I suppose that this garden has an owner somewhere, but I do not know who he is, nor can any one tell me. No one will come up and say that I am trespassing; I may have the garden to myself; I may share it with a beggar; I may see a shepherd drive in his brown and black flock, and, sitting down to watch them browse, sing a snatch of the song that all Persians sing at the turn of the year, for the first three weeks of spring. All are equally free to come and enjoy. Indeed there is nothing to steal, except the blossom from the peach trees, and no damage to do that has not already been done by time and nature. The same is true of the whole country. There are no evidences of law anywhere, no sign-posts or milestones to show the way; the caravanserais stand open for any one to go in and rest his beasts; you may travel along any of those three roads for hundreds of miles in any direction, without meeting any one or anything to control you; even the rule of the road is nominal, and you pass by as best you can. If you prefer to leave the track and take to the open, then you are free to do so. One remembers—sometimes with irritation, sometimes with longing, according to the fortunes of the journey—the close organisation of European countries.
The shadows lengthen, and the intense light of sunset begins to spread over the plain. The brown earth darkens to the rich velvet of burnt umber. The light creeps like a tide up the foothills, staining the red rock to the colour of porphyry. High up, above the range of the Elburz, towers the white cone of Demavend, white no longer now, but glowing like a coal; that white loneliness, for ten minutes of every day, suddenly comes to life. It is time to leave the garden, where the little owls are beginning to hoot, answering one another, and to go down into the plain, where the blue smoke of the evening fires is already rising, and a single star hangs prophetic in the west.
ALEXANDRA DAVID-NEEL
(1868–1969)
No writer in this volume prepared herself for as long or in the way Alexandra David-Neel did for a single journey. In 1923 David-Neel was the first Western woman to pass through the gates of Lhasa. Twelve years earlier, she had met the Dalai Lama in India and had become enchanted with Tibetan religion. Then she met Yongden, a young priest whom she would later adopt and with whom she shared all her travels. Together they went to Burma, Bhutan, Japan, and Korea, before returning to a monastery on the Sino-Tibetan frontier. It was there that for three years she perfected the ancient practice of thumo reskiang, the ability to raise body temperature through meditation. David-Neel’s purpose in traveling and studying was to prepare herself for a pilgrimage through treacherous mountain passes to Lhasa, the place she called her spiritual home but a place at the time closed to women. The Frenchwoman wrote scholarly books on Tibetan mysticism and in 1937 went to live in China for eight years. She died in Provence at the age of one hundred.
from MY JOURNEY TO LHASA
We ought to have left the dokpas’ camp in the middle of the night to cross the pass at noon. But we were tired, and the warmth that we felt, lying next to a big fire, kept us sleeping longer than we had planned. I shrank also from the idea of starting without eating and drinking hot tea, for on the higher level we would find no fuel. What would happen? What would the road be like? We could not guess. Was the pass even practicable? People had only told us that it might be. Yongden, of course, felt reluctant to go so far to fetch water, inasmuch as the few places where the stream flowed freely in daytime might be covered with ice after dark. Anyhow, he went, and we drank our tea. But the day broke before we had left the place.
Later in the morning we reached a latza, which, from a distance, we had taken as marking the top of the pass. Behind it extended a completely barren valley enclosed between a high ridge of crumbling reddish stones on one side, and perpendicular cliffs of various pretty greyish and mauve shades on the other. In the middle of this valley we again saw the river, the water of which we had drunk at our breakfast. It fell nearly straight down in a narrow gorge from the upper valley to the lower one. I looked for traces of dokpas’ summer encampments—those low stone walls forming enclosures in which cattle are penned, but there were none. I could understand from the barrenness of the landscape that cattle were probably never brought so high.
A nearly straight reddish line—the sharp summit of a ridge it seemed—blocked the horizon at the end of that desolate valley. The distance without being considerable, appeared great enough to people ascending with loads on their backs, in the rarefied air of these high altitudes. Still, the hope of seeing the end of the climb gave us courage, and we endeavoured to accelerate our pace. One thing, however, made me uneasy—I did not discover any latza on that ridge, and Thibetans never fail to erect at least one, at the top of a pass. The explanation came when we had reached the point from which we had supposed that we would descend the opposite side of the mountain.
How could I express what we felt at that moment? It was a mixture of admiration and grief. We were at the same time wonderstricken and terrified. Quite suddenly an awe-inspiring landscape, which had previously been shut from our sight by the walls of the valley, burst upon us.
Think of an immensity of snow, an undulating tableland limited far away at our left by a straight wall of blue-green glaciers and peaks wrapped in everlasting, immaculate whiteness. At our right extended a wide valley which ascended in a gentle slope until we reached the neighbouring summits on the sky line. In front, a similar but wider stretch of gradually sloping ground vanished in the distance, without our being able to discern whether it led to the pass or to another tableland.
Words cannot give an idea of such winter scenery as we saw on these heights. It was one of those overpowering spectacles that make believers bend their knees, as before the veil that hides the Supreme Face.
But Yongden and I, after our first admiration had subsided, only looked at each other in silence. No talk was needed; we clearly understood the situation.
Which was the way, we did not know! It could just as well be to our right, as ahead of us. The snow did not allow one to see any trace of a trail. It was already late in the afternoon, and to miss the road meant to remain wandering all night on these frozen summits. We had a sufficient experience in mountaineering in Thibet to know what it would mean—the exploration would be ended at its first step, and the explorers would never live to tell their tale.
I looked at my watch; it was three in the afternoon. We had still several hours of daylight before us, and, happily, the moon would shine brightly at night. We had not yet cause to be really alarmed—the important thing was to avoid missing the road and to make haste.
I looked once more at the valley on our right, then decided: “Let us proceed straight forward.” And so we went.
I grew excited and, although the snow became deeper and deeper, I walked rather quickly. We had not been able to follow the advice of the Tashi Tse villagers and carry much food with us. Our host could only sell us a small quantity of tsampa. His neighbours had hardly enough for themselves. They informed us that we could buy some from the servants of the pönpo. To avoid giving them cause to talk we had said that we would go to the zong early the next morning, which, of course, we didn’t! My bag was, therefore, rather light, whereas Yongden, carrying the tent, its iron pegs, and sundries, was much more heavily loaded.
I forged quickly ahead. Dominated by the idea of reaching the top of the pass, or of discovering if we were going in a wrong direction, I tramped with the utmost energy through the snow that reached my knees.
Was the lama far behind? I turned to look at him. Never s
hall I forget the sight! Far, far below, amidst the white silent immensity, a small black spot, like a tiny Lilliputian insect, seemed to be crawling slowly up. The disproportion between the giant glacier range, that wild and endless slope, and the two puny travellers who had ventured alone in that extraordinarily phantasmagoric land of the heights, impressed me as it had never done before. An inexpressible feeling of compassion moved me to the bottom of my heart. It could not be possible that my young friend, the companion of so many of my adventurous travels, should meet his end in a few hours on that hill. I would find the pass; it was my duty. I knew that I would!
There was no time for useless emotion. Evening was already beginning to dim the shining whiteness of the landscape. We ought by then to have been far beyond and below the pass. I strode on, now through the snow field, jumping sometimes with the help of my long staff, proceeding I could not say how, but progressing quickly. At last I discerned a white mound and emerging from it, branches on which hung flags covered with snow and fringed with ice. It was the latza, the top of the pass! I signalled to Yongden, who appeared still more distant and tiny. He did not see me at once, but after a while he too waved his staff. He had understood that I had arrived.