by Robert Byron
Our guest spoke with foreboding of the future. He was resigned to it, he said. Persia had always been like this. The only thing to do was to have patience till the tyrant died.
Teheran, November 11th.—Saturday. Still here.
I decided to leave on Tuesday. On Monday I found a Morris car for sale at £30. This seemed a bargain. In fact I actually supposed it would enable me to leave next day.
The sequence, which then began, of getting possession of the car, getting a licence to drive it with, getting a permit to stay in Persia at all, getting a permit to go to Meshed, getting a letter to the Governor of Meshed, and getting other letters to the governors en route, obliterated four days. I was said to be “recalcitrant de la loi” for having no identity card. To obtain one, I furnished the state archives with the secret of my mother’s birthplace, in triplicate. Meanwhile, the owner of the car had left Teheran, confiding his power of attorney to a very old lawyer in a pink tweed frock-coat. A bargain was struck; signatures were officially witnessed; but the police refused to register the transaction because, although the lawyer’s power of attorney extended to all his employer’s worldly goods, a Morris car was not mentioned in the list of those goods. This decision was reversed, on appeal to a higher police official, who telephoned the fact to his subordinate. But when we returned to the other department, 300 yards away, they knew nothing of it. Neighbouring departments were asked if they had had the message. At last someone remembered that the person who must have answered the telephone had gone out. Heaven favoured us; we met him in the street, and followed him to his desk. This annoyed him. He would do nothing, he said, without a copy of the power of attorney. Till it was ready, perhaps we would be good enough to leave him in peace. The lawyer hobbled off to buy a clean sheet of paper. We, the owner’s son, the garage proprietor and myself, sought asylum on the pavement of the main square, squatting round the crabbed old scribe while his spectacles fell off his nose, and his pen harpooned the paper till it looked like a stencil. A sentence was not finished before the police moved us on; another scarcely begun, before they did so again. Like a colony of disturbed toads, we scuttled round and round the square, jabbing down a word here and there, while dusk deepened into night. When the copy was presented, it had again to be copied, in the office. The square had been better than this; for the office electricity had failed, and matches had to be struck in such quantities that our fingers were burned to the quick. I laughed; the others laughed; the police laughed like madmen; but suddenly becoming serious, said the certificate of ownership could not after all be ready for three days. An hour’s argument evoked a promise of next morning. Next morning I went in search of it; again they said three days. But now, being alone, I had the advantage, speaking enough Persian to say what I wanted, but not enough to understand a refusal. Once more we trooped off to the officer across the street. Men rushed from room to room. The telephone spluttered. The document was born. And all this, let me add, was only a tithe, a mere sample, of my fate during these last four days.
The date of the car is 1926, and its engine has needed some attention. After testing it yesterday, I proposed to start at six this morning. But by the end of the test, the battery had failed. I shall leave at midday and hope to make Amiriya tonight, where the worst of the passes but one will be over.
The Noel party arrived last night in two Rolls-Royces. They threw the charcoal apparatus away at Dover. The original Charcoal-Burners, they say, spent five nights in the desert between Damascus and Baghdad, and broke two big-ends, which are now being repaired. I still have no certainty of their advent here. It is impossible to wait on chance. The passes may be blocked any day after the fifteenth.
Ayn Varzan (c. 5000 ft.), later 7.30 p.m.—The back axle has broken, sixty miles from Teheran.
“To Khorasan! To Khorasan!” shouted the policeman at the city gate. I felt a wonderful exhilaration as we chugged through the Elburz defiles. Up or down, the engine was always in bottom gear; only this could save us from being precipitated, backwards or forwards as the case might be, over the last or next hairpin bend.
Seven chanting peasants pushed the car uphill to a shed in this village. It is a total loss. But I won’t go back to Teheran.
Shahrud (4400 ft.), November 13th.—A bus arrived next morning at Ayn Varzan, full of lady pilgrims on their way to Meshed. Their chatter in the yard below woke me up. Five minutes later I was beside the driver, and my luggage underneath the ladies.
From the pass above Amiriya we looked back over a mounting array of peaks, ranges, and buttresses to the white cone of Demavend in the top of the sky; and forward over a plain of boundless distances, where mountains rippled up and sighed away like the wash of a tide, dark here, shining there, while shadow and sunshine followed their masters the clouds across the earth’s arena. Trees of autumn yellow embowered the lonely villages. Elsewhere, desert; the stony black-lustred desert of eastern Persia. At Samnan, while the ladies drank tea in a brick caravanserai, I heard of an old minaret, which I found before the police found me. When they did, I ate sorrow, as the expression is, that I could stay no longer in their beautiful city, and we drove away into the dusk. “Come with us to Meshed”, said the driver, who was a negro, offering a price which indicated friendship. Obstinately, I descended at Damghan.
There are two circular grave-towers in that place, which are inscribed and dated as built in the XIth century, and are constructed of fine but loosely mortared café-au-lait brick. A ruined mosque, known as the Tarikh Khana or “History House”, is even older; its round squat pillars recall an English village church of the Norman period, and must have inherited their unexpected Romanesque form from Sasanian tradition. The whole of Islamic architecture borrowed from this tradition, once Islam had conquered Persia. But it is interesting to see the process beginning thus crudely, before it attains artistic value.
The police, good-natured fellows, began to faint with hunger as I kept them out beyond their lunch-time. Late in the afternoon, a lorry came in from the west, and they bundled me on to it as the only hope of their getting a meal that day. We reached Shahrud at eight, and are to leave at midnight.
That admirable institution, the Persian caravanserai, has refused to be ousted by modern transport. Garages are everywhere, certainly. But they reproduce the old plan. This consists of a quadrangle, as big as an Oxford college, and defended by huge doors. Near the doors, beside the arched entrance, are rooms for cooking, eating, communal sleeping, and the transaction of business. Round the other three sides are rows of smaller rooms, which resemble monastic cells, and accommodation for horses and motors. Comfort varies. Here, in the Garage Massis, I have a spring bed, a carpet, and a stove; and have eaten a tender chicken, followed by some sweet grapes. At Damghan there was no furniture at all, and the food was lumps of tepid rice.
Nishapur (4000 ft.), November 14th.—One can become a connoisseur of anything. Never in all Persia was there such a lorry as I caught at Damghan: a brand new Reo Speed Waggon, on its maiden voyage, capable of thirty-five miles an hour on the flat, with double wheels, ever-cool radiator, and lights in the driver’s cabin. Mahmud and Ismail are making record time from Teheran to the Indian frontier. They ask after my health every five minutes, and want me to go right down to Duzdab with them.
Dawn, like a smile from the gallows, pierced the gusty, drizzling night. I ate a bit of cheese, and the other side of the chicken’s breast from Shahrud. Two stunted willows and a tea-house hove out of the murky desert. Mahmud and Ismail went inside, to greet other cronies of the road. I dozed where I sat.
At Abbasabad we huddled over a fire, while the people of the place tried to sell us beads, cigarette-holders, and dice, of a soft grey-green stone. They wore scarlet Russian blouses, and are descended from Georgian colonists planted by Shah Abbas. Then on, against the wind and wet, over the grey hummocky wastes. The grey zeppelin clouds drive low and fast. The grey infrequent villages are desolate of people. Clustering round their ruined citadels, those ancient
shapes, the bee-hive dome and ziggurat, are melting in the rain. They have melted thus since the dawn of history; and when summer comes, they will rise again out of new mud bricks till history closes. Streams in purple spate swirl through the walled lanes into the fields, and out into the desert. The track itself becomes a watercourse. In a night, the poplars have lost their leaves, though the planes hold theirs for a day more. Strings of camels sway alongside us—boom goes the bull-camel’s bell—boom, and is gone. Shepherds in white tabards tack through the gale after pebble-grazing flocks. Black tents and black fleece-hats announce the Turcomans and the verge of Central Asia. So this is the Golden Road. Eight centuries ago, the minaret of Khosrugird watched the traffic as it watches us. Sabzevar is two miles further. The caravanserai produces kabob, curds, pomegranates, and a bottle of local claret.
Soon after dark, the lorry’s lights went out. That feckless couple of record-breakers, Mahmud and Ismail, had not a match nor a wick between them. I had both, but the defect was not easily repaired, and instead of reaching Meshed, we have had to put up here.
The home, curse it, of Omar Khayam.
Meshed (3100 ft.), November 16th.—The distance from Nishapur to Meshed is ninety miles. I supposed I should be here by midday.
But my beautiful Speed Waggon could not go, and it was nine o’clock before I found a seat in a British Bedford pilgrim bus. At Kadam Gah, sixteen miles down the road, the driver obligingly stopped while I walked up to the shrine. This pretty little octagon, surmounted by a bulbous dome, was built in the middle of the XVIIth century, and commemorates a resting-place of the Imam Riza. It sits on a platform beneath a rocky cliff, surrounded by tall umbrella-pines and tinkling streams. The sun struck the tiles, which glittered blue and pink and yellow against the dark foliage and lowering sky. A bearded seyid in a black turban asked for money. Hopping and tapping, the halt and blind converged with terrible rapidity. I fled back to the bus.
That vehicle was carrying twice its proper number of passengers, and their luggage as well. Exhilarated at the prospect of his journey’s end the driver tore downhill at forty miles an hour, lurched across a stream-bed, and had just rebounded against the opposite slope, when to my great surprise the off front wheel ran back towards me, buckled the running-board with a crunch, and escaped into the desert. “Are you English?” asked the driver in disgust. “Look at that.” An inch of British steel had broken clean through.
It took an hour and a half to fit another joint. The pilgrims huddled down with their backs to the wind, men beneath their yellow sheepskins, women veiled in black shrouds. Three chickens, tied to each other by the leg, enjoyed a temporary freedom. But their clucking boded little hope. When we started again, the driver was seized with a palsy of caution. He proceeded at five miles an hour, stopping at every caravanserai to refresh his nerves with tea; till at last we reached a small pass and a new view.
Tiers of firelit mountains encircled the horizon. Night, and a surf of clouds, were rolling in from the east. Down in the plain, a blur of smoke, trees, and houses announced Meshed, the holy city of the Shiahs. A gold dome flashed, a blue dome loomed, out of the cold autumnal haze. Century by century, since the Imam Riza was interred beside the Caliph Harun-al-Rashid, this vision has refreshed the desert-weary sight of pilgrims, merchants, armies, kings, and travellers—to become the last hope of several dozen fretful passengers in a damaged motor-bus.
A number of cairns marked the sacred vantage. The male pilgrims descended to pray, turning their backs on Meshed in favour of Mecca. The driver descended to collect his dues, and since the husbands were engaged, perforce approached their wives. A screech of protest, rising to a furious and sustained crescendo, blasted the moment of thanksgiving. On prayed the pious husbands, bashing their foreheads on the cairns, lacerating their stockinged feet, heaving sighs and rolling eyes to heaven, in their resolve to postpone the inevitable reckoning. Round the bus danced the driver and his assistant, repulsed by the hooded harpies in their wire cage. One by one the husbands tried to dodge back to their places unseen. One by one the chauffeurs caught them. Each protested for a separate quarter of an hour. But only three refused to pay in the end, and these, snarling and cursing, were ejected from the company with blows and kicks. Led by a whining pharisee, the most active of the devotees, who had been my neighbour on the front seat of the bus, they started away down the hill at a lolloping trot.
The bus had hardly begun to follow them, before the women at the back set up a threefold clamour. With their fists and household implements they would soon have demolished the thin wooden partition that separated them from the driver and myself. Once more we stopped. Letting fall their veils, the foaming viragos appealed to me to retrieve their three men. By now I had no interest save to reach a hotel before dark. “Either take the men back”, I told the driver, “or go on. You’ll lose my fare too, if we stay here any longer.” This argument prevailed. He caught up the men, who were still tearing down the road, and invited them to return. They refused. Backing into the gutter, they refused point-blank thus to favour the monster who had defiled the most hallowed moment of their lives. Again the women shrieked and battered. Again the partition cracked. The whole bus began to creak. “GO ON!” I yelled, stamping till the floor-boards were entangled in the brake. Jumping out, the driver seized the deserters, belaboured them till they groaned for mercy, and dragged them back to the bus. The pharisee sought his old place in front, by me. But now it was my turn to go mad. I would not have him near me, I said. In reply, he seized my hand, and pressing it to his prickly, saliva-trickling beard, sprayed it with kisses. A shove sent him sprawling, while I leapt out on the other side, declaring to the now befogged, exhausted, and unhappy driver that rather than suffer further contact with the man, I would walk into Meshed on my own feet and keep what I owed him in my pocket. At this, the women turned their abuse to the pharisee. The cringing brute was hoisted into the back. And we set off for the holy city at a pace fit to smash a gun-carriage.
The driver and I looked at one another. We laughed.
Meshed, November 17th.—The Shrine dominates the town. Turcomans, Kazaks, Afghans, Tajiks, and Hazaras throng its approaches, mingling with the dingy crowd of pseudo-European Persians. The police are frightened of these fanatics; so that access to the Shrine is still denied to infidels, despite the official anti-clerical policy which is opening the mosques elsewhere. “If you really want to go in,” said the man in the hotel, “you can borrow my hat. That’s all you need.” I looked with distaste on that battered symbol of Marjoribanks’s rule, parody of a French képi, and concluded that it would hardly pass muster with blue eyes and a fair moustache.
Not long ago, Marjoribanks paid a first visit to Sistan. To gratify his appetite for modern street-planning, the terrified local authorities built a whole new town, Potemkin-wise, whose walls, though festooned with electricity, enclosed nothing but fields. A lorry preceded him by a day, bearing children’s clothes. Next morning, the school assembled dressed like a French kindergarten. The monarch drove up, stopped long enough to sack the schoolmaster because the children’s clothes were backward, and drove on; but not before the clothes had been whisked off the children and bundled back into the lorry, to precede him at the next place. Persia is still the country of Haji Baba.
The Noel party arrived yesterday. I have taken a seat for Herat in an Afghan lorry painted all over with roses. It aspires to leave the day after tomorrow.
Meshed, November 18th.—Tus, the home of Firdaussi, existed before Meshed, which grew up round the bones of the Imam Riza. It lies eighteen miles to the northwest, just off the road to Askabad on the Russian frontier.
Mounds and ridges betray the outlines of the old city. An antique bridge of eight arches spans the river. And a massive domed mausoleum, whose brick is the colour of dead rose-leaves, stands up against the blue mountains. No one knows whom this commemorated; though from its resemblance to the mausoleum of Sultan Sanjar at Merv, it seems to have been built in the
XIIth century. It alone survives of the splendours of Tus.
However, next year will see the thousandth anniversary of Firdaussi’s birth. Foreigners have heard of Firdaussi. They esteem him as only a poet can be esteemed whom no one has ever read. And it is expected, therefore, that their tributes will flatter not his work so much as his nationality. Such at least is the Persian hope. A programme of celebrations is already announced. Governments whose frontiers or other interests march with Persia’s, are sending delegations to remind Marjoribanks that while his compatriots were making epics, theirs were wearing woad. Nor, they will observe, is the comparison inappropriate today. His Majesty’s new railway, his impartial and open justice, his passion for lounge suits, offer hope to a distracted world. In fact, Shah Riza Pahlevi has left Firdaussi standing.
Tus, long silent between the mountains and the desert, will be the stage of these fragrant utterances. A cenotaph will be unveiled, situated with approximate probability on the site of the poet’s grave. This object, which is almost built, proved a pleasant surprise. A square cone, to be covered with white stone, stands on a broad flight of steps. In front of it lies a long pool, framed by lines of trees and announced by a pair of classical pavilions. Given the limitations of Oriental taste when confronted with a Western idea, the design is admirable. The Western part of it, the cenotaph, is as simple as can be; the Persian part, the garden, is beautiful as always; and the two are blended by good proportions. When the ceremonies are over, and only the tinkling goat-bells are heard again, the Firdaussi-lover may find a grateful peace in this unpretentious shrine.