The Road to Oxiana

by Robert Byron

  The second is also a soldier, if the word can be applied to a man who tries to make a war single-handed. In the autumn of 1914 a small body of Germans assembled in Constantinople on their way to make trouble for the British in Asia. Some stayed in Persia, among whom was Christopher’s hero Wassmuss. Some went on to Afghanistan, and how well the latter succeeded was proved by Amanullah’s attack on India in 1919, a year too late. Among these was Herr Oskar von Niedermayer. In 1924 his photographs of the country were published as a picture-book. To this Professor Ernst Diez contributed a preface, in which, by collating Niedermayer’s photographs with historical and travellers’ references, he identifies and dates most of the buildings here. Diez is an old acquaintance; I started out from Teheran with his Churasanische Baudenkmäler, a gigantic quarto whose weight probably broke the Morris’s axle. Niedermayer I did not know. By good luck I found his book in the Consulate at Meshed, when I called to leave the other Diez behind, lest it should expose Noel’s Rolls to a like fate.

  Enough of this for the moment. The local doctor has called.

  A friendly Punjabi, in the Afghan medical service. He came for news and to practise his English. I told him of my interview with the Governor, remarking that it was pleasant to escape from Persian suspicions into this freer atmosphere.

  “You make large mistake, sir, when you think there are no suspicions here. It is all suspicions. I tell you, sir, Persia cannot compare with Afghanistan in this respect. At the present time, twenty foreigners reside in this town, Indians and Russians. About one hundred and twenty agents are employed to watch them. You suppose they do not watch you? Downstairs they watch you now. I see them. They see me. They watch me all the time. They will report immediately that I have ascended to your room. Also the Russians watch you, I expect. Undoubtedly they are curious for your movements here. They are in everything here. I tell you for certain they control the post-office. In the beginning of this year I wrote a letter to a relative in England, in which by chance I referred to the Russian railway at Kushk and the distance from here. Yes, it is only eighty miles away. The next time I visited the Russian Consulate, professionally of course, they said to me straight out: ‘Why do you give away this kind of informations? You have no business.’ They were not pretending to hide that they had read my letter. So I have not written any letters since then at all.

  “It is bad time to be here, sir, in Afghanistan. There will be trouble now King Nadir Shah is murdered. In one month there will be trouble. Or perhaps in the spring, when the tribes can move better in the mountains. But I think in one month. Do what you want here, sir, quickly. See what you want. Then clear out, double time. I go on leave now. When I can arrange lorry, I and my family go. We go to Kandahar, and then to my home in Lahore. This is a bad country, sir. I hope I will not return ever.”

  Herat, November 23rd.—Keeping my two guides in my head, I walked up the northern of the four New Town roads in the direction of a gigantic mound, about 600 yards long, which appears to be artificial and must resemble, from all accounts, the mounds in the neighbourhood of Balkh. Hence one can climb up on to another wall, an outwork of the town’s defences, and survey the lie of the Musalla. This is the popular name for the whole of the seven minarets and the Mausoleum. But actually they were part of separate buildings built at different times, some in the reign of Shah Rukh, one in that of Hussein Baikara.

  All the minarets are between 100 and 130 feet high. They lean at various angles; their tops are broken, their bases twisted and eaten away. The furthest distance between them, stretching from west-south-west to east-north-east is about a quarter of a mile. The two on the west are fatter than the others, but like the four on the east have one balcony each. The middle one, which stands by itself, has two balconies. The Mausoleum lies between the two on the west, but to the north of them. It is only half their height, but from a distance seems less.

  This array of blue towers rising haphazard from a patchwork of brown fields and yellow orchards has a most unnatural look. The monarchs of Islam in early days had a habit of putting up isolated minarets, singly or in pairs: witness the Kutb at Delhi and the base of its fellow. But this did not extend till the XVth century, and never to such a number as seven. However, it can be seen from the insides of these minarets, where the tile-work stops short some forty feet from the ground, that they were originally joined by walls or arches and must have formed part of a series of mosques or colleges. What has happened to these buildings? Things on this scale may fall down, but they leave some ruin. They don’t vanish of their own accord without trace or clue, as these have done.

  It is a miserable story. Even Yate, who saw it happen, betrays an unsoldierly sigh. Ferrier thought these buildings, ruined as they then were, the finest in Asia. The other travellers concur in their extraordinary beauty, the radiance of their mosaic and the magnificence of their gilt inscriptions. Conolly, if I remember right, speaks of twenty or thirty minarets. In fact, allowing for the difference between English prose and Persian, his description is not unlike Khondemir’s of the buildings in their prime.

  In the seventies and eighties Herat was incessantly on English lips. It even crops up in Queen Victoria’s letters. If the Russians took it, as they were expected to do, the low-lying Kandahar road would be theirs for a railway to the Indian border. In 1885 the Panjdeh incident occurred. Though St. Petersburg had already agreed to the joint Boundary Commission, Russian troops attacked the Afghans south-east of Merv and drove them back. An advance on Herat was expected any day, and the Emir Abdurrahman sent orders that the town was to be placed in a state of defence. The Russians would approach from the north. All buildings, therefore, that might give them cover on this side of the town must be demolished. For years officers of the Indian Army had been advising on such measures. I suspect this particular order was of British inspiration; though proof must wait till the archives of Delhi and the War Office give up their dead. In any case the most glorious productions of Mohammadan architecture in the XVth century, having survived the barbarism of four centuries, were now rased to the ground under the eyes, and with the approval, of the English Commissioners. Nine minarets and the Mausoleum escaped.

  Even this epitaph of an epitaph is insecure. Two minarets have already disappeared since Niedermayer was here. They fell during an earthquake in 1931, which also destroyed a second domed mausoleum photographed by him. I saw the site of it yesterday, near the fork of the roads to Kushk and the Persian frontier: a mound of rubble. Unless repairs are done and foundations strengthened, the other monuments will soon be rubble too.

  However, there is enough left, and enough information, to show how the buildings stood up to 1885.

  The minarets that fell down the year before last were a pair to the two fat ones on the west. Together, the four marked the corners of a mosque. This was the real Musalla. According to an inscription on one of the minarets, which Niedermayer photographed and which must have perished in the earthquake, it was built, at her private expense, by Gohar Shad Begum, the wife of Shah Rukh, son of Timur, between the years 1417 and 1437. The architect, in all probability, was Kavam-ad-Din of Shiraz, who served Shah Rukh in that capacity during the greater part of his reign, and is mentioned by the historian Daulat Shah as one of the four great lights of his court.

  Diez, who knows the subject as well as anyone, and is not the slave of his journey’s emotions like me, says these minarets are adorned with such “fabulous richness and subtle taste” (märchenhafter Pracht und subtilem Geschmack) that no others in Islam can equal them. He speaks from photographs only. But no photograph, nor any description, can convey their colour of grape-blue with an azure bloom, or the intricate convolutions that make it so deep and luminous. On the bases, whose eight sides are supported by white marble panels carved with a baroque Kufic, yellow, white, olive green and rusty red mingle with the two blues in a maze of flowers, arabesques and texts as fine as the pattern on a tea-cup. The shafts above are covered with small diamond-shaped lozenges fill
ed with flowers, but still mainly grape-blue. Each of these is bordered with white faience in relief, so that the upper part of each minaret seems to be wrapped in a glittering net.

  In point of decoration minarets are generally the least elaborate parts of a building. If the mosaic on the rest of the Musalla surpassed or even equalled what survives today, there was never such a mosque before or since.

  Yet I don’t know. Gohar Shad built another mosque, inside the Shrine at Meshed. This mosque is still intact. I must see it somehow if I come back this way.

  Looked at in detail, the decoration of the Mausoleum is inferior to that of the two minarets. The drum of the dome is encircled with tall panels filled with hexagons of lilac mosaic combined with triangles of raised stucco. The dome itself is turquoise, and the ribs, like those of Timur’s Mausoleum at Samarcand, are scattered with black and white diamonds. Each rib is three-quarters in the round and as fat as a 64-foot organ-pipe. The walls below are bare, but for a few glazed bricks and a peculiar three-windowed bay that reminds one of a villa in Clapham. But the quality of these separate elements, if sometimes coarse, is transcended by the goodness of their proportions and the solidity of the whole idea. Few architectural devices can equal a ribbed dome for blind, monumental ostentation.

  This too seems to have been the work of Gohar Shad. Babur speaks of her three buildings: her Mosque, which is the Musalla; her Madrassa or College; and her Mausoleum. And Khondemir states several times that the Mausoleum was inside the College. She was certainly buried in the Mausoleum; Yate noted the inscription on her tombstone. He also noted those on five others, all of Timurid princes. Twenty-five years earlier Khanikov had noted nine altogether. Now there are only three, of a matt black stone, shaped like oblong boxes and carved with flower designs. One is smaller than the others.

  Next, on the east of the Mausoleum, stands the solitary minaret with two balconies. The origin of this baffles me. Its ornament of blue lozenges, jewelled with flowers but separated by plain brickwork, is not to be compared with that of the Musalla minarets. Perhaps it was part of Gohar Shad’s College. A College would naturally be more sober than a mosque. Babur speaks as if College, Mosque, and Mausoleum were all close together.

  I feel some curiosity about Gohar Shad, not on account of her piety in endowing religious foundations, but as a woman of artistic instinct. Either she had that instinct, or she knew how to employ people who had it. This shows character. And besides this, she was rich. Taste, character, and riches mean power, and powerful women, apart from charmers, are not common in Mohammadan history.

  Four minarets remain, near the bridge over a winding canal. They too are girt with a white network; though their blue is brighter than that of the Musalla minarets, so that from close at hand it seems as if one saw the sky through a net of shining hair and as if it had been planted, suddenly, with flowers. These mark the corners of the College of Hussein Baikara, who ruled Herat from 1469 to 1506. His grandfather’s tombstone, of the same type as those in the Mausoleum but known as the Stone of the Seven Pens from its more profuse carving, lies close by and is still revered as a popular shrine.

  The lyrical and less stately beauty of these minarets reflects the reign that produced it. Unlike Gohar Shad, Hussein Baikara is more than a name. His body at least is familiar. Bihzad drew it. Babur described it, and his amusements as well. He had slant-eyes, a white beard, and a slender waist. He dressed in red and green. Ordinarily he wore a small lambskin cap. But on feast-days he would “sometimes set up a threefold turban, wound broad and badly, and stick a heron’s plume in it and so go to prayers”. This was the least he could do; for towards the end of his life he was so crippled with rheumatism that he could not perform the prayers properly. Like small people, he enjoyed flying pigeons, and matching fighting cocks and fighting rams. He was also a poet, but published his verses anonymously. To meet he was cheerful and pleasant, but immoderate in temper and loud-spoken. In love, orthodox and unorthodox, he was insatiable. He had innumerable concubines and children who destroyed the peace of the state and his old age. As a result “what happened with his sons, the soldiers and the town was that everyone pursued vice and pleasure to excess”.

  Babur was not a Puritan. But the parties in Herat obliged him to get drunk. And in explaining how this happened, for the first time in his life, he reveals the effect of such an atmosphere on a young man’s equilibrium. Nevertheless, looking back to Herat when he himself had become great, he still writes with deference, as one has seen a great age, and having learned how to live, has seen it vanish—like Talleyrand. The humanism of that age was the model of his life. His achievement in history was to replant it, and leave descendants to cherish it, amid the drab heats and uncouth multitudes of Hindosan.

  The Mudir-i-Kharija tells me a lorry is leaving for Andkhoi in four days’ time. This will mean finding another from there to Mazer-i-Sherif. He adds that the road from Turkestan to Kabul is excellent, and that the post-lorries are still running.

  The Imperial Bank of Persia in Meshed gave me rupee drafts on its branch in Bombay to use in Afghanistan. This morning I went to change one with the Shirkat Asharmi, the newly established State Trading Company. No one in the office could read the draft or even its figures. But they took my word for its being worth 100 rupees, and after discovering, apparently by telepathy, the current rate of exchange in Kandahar, counted out 672 silver coins each the size of a shilling. These I took away in two sacks, plodding through the bazaar crowds like a millionaire in a cartoon.

  Herat, November 24th.—Local suspicion came out into the open today.

  I have mentioned the Citadel of Ikhtiar-ad-Din on the north of the walls. It was built originally by the Kart Maliks of the XIVth century, presumably when they threw off their allegiance to the Mongols. The revival of Persian nationalism denoted by this act was short-lived. At the end of the century another wave poured out of Central Asia; the armies of Timur destroyed both the Karts and their castle. Later, Shah Rukh found he needed a castle. In 1415 he put 7000 men to the work of rebuilding the old one, and the political history of Herat has revolved round it ever since. It is now the seat of the Commander-in-Chief and garrison.

  The north face consists of a massive rampart nearly a quarter of a mile long and bulging at intervals into semicircular towers, of which the westernmost has a pattern of blue bricks set in its mud surface: an unusual combination of materials suggesting that this tower, if any, may date from Shah Rukh’s restoration. When I had examined it, I walked back to the furthest corner of the walled parade-ground that separates the Citadel from the New Town, to take a photograph. This led me near to an artillery park of about twenty guns, which might have been mistaken, at a distance, for a dump of dismantled perambulators. I then went back to the hotel to fetch some chalks with which to copy a Kufic inscription at the bottom of the tower. Simultaneously, the old fellow appointed by the Mudir-i-Kharija to look after me went off to his lunch.

  When he came back, I said we must return to the Citadel for the inscription. He replied that the parade-ground was shut.

  “Shut, do you say? We were there an hour ago.”

  “Yes, we were, but now it is shut.”

  “All right, we will go tomorrow instead.”

  “It will be shut tomorrow too.”

  “In that case I shall go at once.”

  And I set off at a fast pace, while the old fellow lumbered after me protesting. As I expected, the gate of the parade-ground was still wide open. But on a whisper from my attendant, the sentry fetched me out. I argued that the Governor himself had told me I could visit the Citadel. Never mind, said the old fellow, these were the Mudir Sahib’s orders.

  Back in the hotel I found the doctor. He was on his way to the Citadel, to attend the Commander-in-Chief. Half an hour later he returned with an officer, who said the Commander-in-Chief saw no objection to my copying the inscription. He would accompany me.

  I now kept my eyes off the artillery park in order not to embarrass
him. But my fancy lusted after it. I held the secret of a formidable armament, capable of withstanding, or worse, expediting, an advance of the Soviet army on India. I saw myself earning the V.C. and probably a seat in the Cabinet, by reporting its existence.

  It was interesting to discover, from personal experience, how spies find their vocation.

  There is a cab-rank outside the parade-ground. As we came out, two young horses reared forward, dragging no gossamer chariot but a thundering blue landau blazoned with the royal arms of Persia and quilted inside with sky-blue satin. Seated in this equipage, the old fellow and I drove out to the shrine of Gazar Gah, which stands on the first slopes of the mountains to the north-east of the town.

  Everyone goes to Gazar Gah. Babur went. Humayun went. Shah Abbas improved the water supply. It is still the Heratis’ favourite resort, and their greatest pride in face of visitors. There are three enclosures. The first contains a grove of umbrella-pines and a decagonal pavilion of two storeys for picnics. The second is surrounded by irregular buildings; in the middle is a pool shaded by mulberries and rose bushes. The third is oblong in shape and filled entirely with graves, among which is that of the Emir Dost Mohammad. At the further end rises a tall arch in a wall eighty feet high, an ivan properly called, whose interior mosaic shows Chinese influence. In front of this, beneath an old ilex tree, lies the tomb of the saint. Its headstone, of white marble, is inscribed with his history, to which legends have been added.

  Khoja Abdullah Ansari died in the year 1088 at the age of eighty-four, because some boys threw stones at him while he was at penance. One sympathises with those boys: even among saints he was a prodigious bore. He spoke in the cradle; he began to preach at fourteen; during his life he held intercourse with 1000 sheikhs, learnt 100,000 verses by heart (some say 1,200,000) and composed as many more. He doted on cats. Shah Rukh conceived a particular devotion for him, and rebuilt the shrine in its present form in 1428. This was the period of the Chinese embassies, which may account for the patterns in the ivan. Later in the century some of the lesser Timurids, for whom there was no room in the Mausoleum, were buried here. Khanikov noted five of their tombs, including that of Mohammad-al-Muzaffar, brother of Hussein Baikara, whose inscription, rejecting funerary platitudes, informs posterity that he was murdered by his cousin Mohammad, son of Baisanghor. In the cells that line the side arcades I found one royal tomb of black stone, even better carved, on three different planes, than the Stone of the Seven Pens. I could not identify the others.