The Road to Oxiana

by Robert Byron

  There was a tea-party at the Consulate this afternoon, followed by games. The Chief of Police, who looks like, and possibly is, an executioner, presented a curious spectacle tied by the arm to an American missionary lady in a hunt-the-thimble competition. I met Mr. Donaldson, the head of the American mission, who instead of—or perhaps besides—bothering about converts, has just published a book on the Shiah religion.

  A telegram from Teheran says the Charcoal-Burners have arrived there and are coming on here as soon as the customs release their guns. There is no sense in waiting for them. We must meet in Mazar-i-Sherif if we meet at all. Even now the road may be closed by snow.

  Noel now thinks he will try and get visas for Afghanistan too.

  AFGHANISTAN: Herat (3000 ft.), November 21st—Noel got visas and brought me here; or rather, I brought him. Having driven the whole way from London, he was glad to give the wheel to someone else. He left this afternoon by the southern road to Kandahar.

  But for the staff of the Russian Consulate, who lead the life of prisoners, I am the only European in the place, and am on my best behaviour; the public stare demands it. There is company at the hotel in three Parsi Indians, who are riding round the world on bicycles and have come from Mazar-i-Sherif by the new road opened this summer. They met various Russians on the way, who had escaped over the Oxus and were proceeding under escort to Chinese Turkestan by the Wakhan-Pamir road. One of these was a journalist, who gave them a letter describing his sufferings. His boots were already in holes, but he was intending to walk to Pekin.

  Herat has its own Secretary for Foreign Affairs, who is known as the Mudir-i-Kharija and says that if I can find transport, I may proceed to Turkestan. I also had audience of the Governor, Abdul Rahim Khan, a handsome old fellow wearing a tall black astrakhan hat and grey Hindenburg moustaches. He too gives me leave to go where I want, and will furnish me with letters to the authorities en route.

  Later I called on the Muntazim-i-Telegraph, who speaks English.

  “Where is Amanullah Khan?” he asked suddenly, glancing out of the window to see that no one was about.

  “In Rome, I suppose.”

  “Is he coming back?”

  “You ought to know better than I do.”

  “I know nothing.”

  “His brother, Inyatullah, is in Teheran now.”

  The Muntazim sat up. “When did he arrive?”

  “He lives there.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Plays golf. He plays so badly that the foreign diplomats avoid him. But as soon as they knew King Nadir Khan had been assassinated, they all telephoned inviting him to play.”

  The Muntazim shook his head over this sinister information. “What is golf?” he asked.

  A gentleman from the Municipality called this evening to know if I was comfortable. I admitted I should be more comfortable if the windows of my room had glass in them. The hotel is managed by Seyid Mahmud, an Afridi by the look of him, who used to work in a hotel at Karachi. He showed me his visitors’ book, from which I saw that Graf von Bassewitz, the German Consul in Calcutta, stayed here in August on his way back from leave. This is the first I have heard of him since 1929.

  Herat, November 22nd.—Herat stands in a long cultivated plain stretching east and west, being three miles equidistant from the Hari river on the south and the last spurs of the Paropamisus mountains on the north. There are two towns. The old is a maze of narrow twisting streets enclosed by square ramparts, and bisected diagonally by the tunnel of the main bazaar, which is two miles long; on the north stands the Citadel, an imposing mediaeval fortress built on a mound, whence it dominates the surrounding plain. Opposite this lies the New Town, which consists of one broad street leading northward from the bazaar entrance, and a similar street intersecting it at right-angles. These streets are lined with open-fronted shops. Above them towers the second storey of the hotel, situated among the coppersmiths, whose clang between dawn and sunset deters the guests from sloth. Further on, at the crossroads, is the ticket office for lorries, where passengers assemble daily among bales of merchandise and vats of Russian petrol in wooden crates.

  Engrossed by the contrast with Persia, I return the people’s stare. The appearance of the ordinary Persian, as dressed by Marjoribanks’s sumptuary laws, is a slur on human dignity; impossible, one thinks, for this swarm of seedy mongrels to be really the race that have endeared themselves to countless travellers with their manners, gardens, horsemanship, and love of literature. How the Afghans may endear themselves remains to be seen. Their clothes and their walk are credential enough to begin with. A few, the officials, wear European suits, surmounted by a dashing lambskin hat. The townsmen too sport an occasional waistcoat in the Victorian style, or the high-collared frock-coat of the Indian Mussulman. But these importations, when accompanied by a turban as big as a heap of bedclothes, a cloak of particoloured blanket, and loose white peg-top trousers reaching down to gold-embroidered shoes of gondola shape, have an exotic gaiety, like an Indian shawl at the Opera. This is the southern fashion, favoured by the Afghans proper. The Tajiks, or Persian element, prefer the quilted gown of Turkestan. Turcomans wear high black boots, long red coats, and busbies of silky black goats’ curls. The most singular costume is that of the neighbouring Highlanders, who sail through the streets in surtouts of stiff white serge, dangling false sleeves, almost wings, that stretch to the back of the knee and are pierced in patterns like a stencil. Now and then a calico bee-hive with a window at the top flits across the scene. This is a woman.

  Hawk-eyed and eagle-beaked, the swarthy loose-knit men swing through the dark bazaar with a devil-may-care self-confidence. They carry rifles to go shopping as Londoners carry umbrellas. Such ferocity is partly histrionic. The rifles may not go off. The physique is not so impressive in the close-fitting uniform of the soldiers. Even the glare of the eyes is often due to makeup. But it is a tradition; in a country where the law runs uncertainly, the mere appearance of force is half the battle of ordinary business. It may be an inconvenient tradition, from the point of view of government. But at least it has preserved the people’s poise and their belief in themselves. They expect the European to conform to their standards, instead of themselves to his, a fact which came home to me this morning when I tried to buy some arak; there is not a drop of alcohol to be had in the whole town. Here at last is Asia without an inferiority complex. Amanullah, the story goes, boasted to Marjoribanks that he would westernise Afghanistan faster than Marjoribanks could westernise Persia. This was the end of Amanullah, and may like pronouncements long be the end of his successors.

  On approaching Herat, the road from Persia keeps close under the mountains till it meets the road from Kushk, when it turns downhill towards the town. We arrived on a dark but starlit night. This kind of night is always mysterious; in an unknown country, after a sight of the wild frontier guards, it produced an excitement such as I have seldom felt. Suddenly the road entered a grove of giant chimneys, whose black outlines regrouped themselves against the stars as we passed. For a second, I was dumbfounded—expecting anything on earth, but not a factory; until, dwarfed by these vast trunks, appeared the silhouette of a broken dome, curiously ribbed, like a melon. There is only one dome in the world like that, I thought, that anyone knows of: the Tomb of Tamerlane at Samarcand. The chimneys therefore must be minarets. I went to bed like a child on Christmas Eve, scarcely able to wait for the morning.

  Morning comes. Stepping out on to a roof adjoining the hotel, I see seven sky-blue pillars rise out of the bare fields against the delicate heather-coloured mountains. Down each the dawn casts a highlight of pale gold. In their midst shines a blue melon-dome with the top bitten off. Their beauty is more than scenic, depending on light or landscape. On closer view, every tile, every flower, every petal of mosaic contributes its genius to the whole. Even in ruin, such architecture tells of a golden age. Has history forgotten it?

  Not quite. The miniatures of Herat in the XVth century are fam
ous, both for themselves and as the source of Persian and Mogul painting afterwards. But the life and the men that produced them, and these buildings as well, hold no great place in the world’s memory.

  The reason is that Herat lies in Afghanistan; while Samarcand, the capital of Timur, but not of the Timurids, has a railway to it. Afghanistan, till literally the other day, has been inaccessible. Samarcand, for the last fifty years, has attracted scholars, painters, and photographers. Thus the setting of the Timurid Renascence is conceived as Samarcand and Transoxiana, while its proper capital, Herat, remains but a name and a ghost. Now the position is reversed. The Russians have closed Turkestan. The Afghans have opened their country. And the opportunity arrives to redress the balance. Strolling up the road towards the minarets, I feel as one might feel who has lighted on the lost books of Livy or an unknown Botticelli. It is impossible, I suppose, to communicate such a feeling. The Timurids are too remote for most people to romance over them. But such is the reward of my journey to me.

  All the same, these Oriental Medici were an extraordinary race. With the exception of Shah Rukh, Timur’s son, and of Babur who conquered India, they sacrificed public security to private ambitions; each remained, in politics, what Timur himself had been, a freebooter in search of a kingdom. Timur, in founding an empire by this impulse, had delivered Oxiana from the nomads and brought the Turks of Central Asia within the orbit of Persian civilisation. His descendants, by the same impulse, undid this work and destroyed themselves. They recognised no law of succession. They murdered their cousins, and boast among them one parricide. One after another they drank themselves to death. Yet if pleasure was the object of their lives, these princes believed the arts to be the highest form of pleasure, and their subjects followed their example; so that to be a gentleman was to be, if not an artist oneself, at least a devotee of the arts. When the famous minister Ali Shir Nevai records of Shah Rukh, that though he did not write poetry, he often quoted it, there is an accent of surprise on the first part of the statement. Their taste was inventive. They sent to China for new ideas in painting. Not content with classical Persian, they wrote in Turki as well, a more forcible medium of expression, such as Dante, not content with Latin, found in Italian. Among the gifts of the age was an instinct for biographical detail. Though its chronology is insupportable, a tedious record of intrigue and civil war, the actors are flesh and blood. Their characters correspond with our own acquaintance. We know very often, from portraits, how they looked, dressed, and sat. And the monuments they built have a similar impress. There is a personal idiosyncrasy about them which tells of that rare phenomenon in Mohammadan history, an age of humanism.

  Judged by European standards, it was humanism within limits. The Timurid Renascence, like ours, took place in the XVth century, owed its course to the patronage of princes, and preceded the emergence of nationalist states. But in one respect the two movements differed. While the European was largely a reaction against faith in favour of reason, the Timurid coincided with a new consolidation of the power of faith. The Turks of Central Asia had already lost contact with Chinese materialism; and it was Timur who led them to the acceptance of Islam, not merely as a religion, for that was already accomplished, but as a basis of social institutions. Turks, in any case, are not much given to intellectual speculation. Timur’s descendants, in diverting the flow of Persian culture to their own enjoyment, were concerned with the pleasures of this world, not of the next. The purpose of life they left to the saints and theologians, whom they endowed in life and commemorated in death. But the practice of it, inside the Mohammadan framework, they conducted according to their own common sense, without prejudice or sentiment except in favour of a rational intelligence.

  The quality of mind thus fostered is preserved in the Memoirs of Babur, which were written in Turki at the beginning of the XVIth century and have been twice translated into English. They show a man as concerned with day-to-day amenities, conversation, clothes, faces, parties, music, houses, and gardens, as with the loss of a princedom in Oxiana and the acquisition of an empire in India; as interested in the natural world as the political, and so remarking such facts as the distance swum by Indian frogs; and as honest about himself as others, so that in this picture of himself-so real that even in translation one can almost hear him speak-he has left a picture of his whole line. Born in the sixth generation after Timur, it was not until the end of his life that he conquered India and became the first Mogul. Even that was only second-best, after he had spent thirty years trying to re-establish himself in Oxiana. But as a man of taste he did what he could to make life possible in so odious a country, and his comments on it show the standards he aspired to. He thought the Indians ugly, their conversation a bore, their fruit tasteless, and their animals ill-bred; “in handicraft and work there is no form or symmetry, method or quality… for then-buildings they study neither elegance nor climate, appearance nor regularity”. He denounces their habits as Macaulay denounced their learning, or as Gibbon denounced the Byzantines, by the light of a classical tradition. And since that tradition, after the Uzbeg conquest of Oxiana and Herat, was extinguished elsewhere, he set about implanting it anew. He and his successors changed the face of India. They gave it a lingua franca, a new school of painting and a new architecture. They revived again that theory of Indian unity which was to become the basis of British rule. Their last emperor died in exile at Rangoon in 1862, to make way for Queen Victoria. And the posterity of Timur survives to this day, in poverty and pride, among the labyrinths of Delhi.

  To return to my hotel in the coppersmiths’ bazaar, where Babur, in Mrs. Beveridge’s translation, occupies the table and I am in my flea-bag on the floor. Herat lies midway between the two halves of Timur’s empire, Persia and Oxiana; and of the two roads that join them, it commands the easier, the one that I shall take; for the other, via Merv, is desert and waterless. Geographically, therefore, it was more suited to be capital than Samarcand; and on Timur’s death, in 1405, Shah Rukh made it so. Politically, culturally, and commercially it became the metropolis of middle Asia. Embassies came to it from Cairo, Constantinople, and Pekin; Bretschneider in Mediaeval Researches from Eastern Asiatic Sources gives the Chinese descriptions of it. After the twenty years’ confusion that followed Shah Rukh’s death in 1447, it was taken by Hussein Baikara, a descendant of Timur’s son Omar Sheikh. And he gave it peace for another forty years. This was the summer of the Renascence, when Mirkhond and Khondemir were writing their histories, Jami was singing, Bihzad painting, and Ali Shir Nevai was the champion of literary Turki. It was the Herat of this epoch, when the Uzbegs were on the march and Samarcand had already fallen, that Babur saw as a young man. “The whole habitable world”, he recalls afterwards, “had not such a town as Herat had become under Sultan Hussein Mirza.… Khorasan, and Herat above all, was filled with learned and matchless men. Whatever work a man took up, he aimed and aspired to bring it to perfection.”

  Babur was here for three weeks in the autumn of 1506. He may have had the same sort of weather: crisp, sunny days growing shorter and colder. Every day he rode out sight-seeing. This morning I followed him and looked at the buildings he looked at. There is not much left. Seven minarets and a broken mausoleum are all my portrait of the age. But their history supplies the rest, and for this I must turn to later writers, soldiers and archaeologists. Two in particular have guided my curiosity here.

  There was a long interval before they came; for the light of the Timurid Renascence went out in 1507, when Herat fell to the Uzbegs. Babur, seeing that it would, had removed himself, and vents his annoyance by recording how Shaibani, their leader, was so puffed up of his own culture that he presumed to correct Bihzad’s drawing. Three years later it was taken by Shah Ismail and joined to his new Persia. The shadows deepen. A last flicker of the old splendour greets the arrival of Humayun, Babur’s son, on his way from India to visit Shah Tahmasp at Isfahan in 1544. Three hundred years later, the curtain lifts on the fragments of Nadir Shah’
s empire and the military travellers of the XIXth century.

  Several British officers visited Herat in the early part of that century. One of them, Eldred Pottinger, organised the town’s defences against a Persian army in 1838 and has become the hero of a novel by Maud Diver; not a bad one either, if you like the Flora Annie Steel school of fiction. Another was Burnes, later assassinated in Kabul, whose Indian secretary, Mohun Lal, published a notice of the monuments in the Journal of the Bengal Asiatic Society for 1834. There was also Ferrier, a French soldier of fortune, who in 1845 made two attempts to reach Kabul in disguise and was eventually turned back. He too sits on my table, though the weight of the book has hardly been worth the confusion. Then, in the middle of the century came two scholars, the Hungarian Vambéry and the Russian Khanikov. The authenticity of Vambéry’s journey to Bokhara has often been doubted; certainly his description of Herat contains nothing he could not have gleaned from such officers as Conolly and Abbott. Khanikov is almost equally disappointing. Though he was in Herat a whole winter, his account in the Journal Asiatique of 1860 contains only a few inscriptions and a plan.

  In 1885 the military come to the rescue after all. Russian troops were massing on the north-west frontier of Afghanistan, and the Government of India could not stop them because neither it nor the Afghans knew where the frontier was. A joint commission was arranged between the two powers to settle it, whose historians, on the English side, were two brothers, A. C. and C. E. Yate. Travelling through what was then almost unknown country, they reported on everything with soldierly precision, and the latter devotes a chapter to the antiquities of Herat as if they were a new field gun—though he was by no means insensible to their beauty. He is the first of my two main guides, and I have transferred him from the table to my lap.