by Robert Byron
(mf) “Your Excellency”, say Shah, (cr) “Your Excellency has forbid Persians weeping in Mohurram-time. I also forbid. (Roaring ff) Next year they shall NOT weep. I have given orders.”
(pp) Now Mohurram-time comes again. We shall see. (cr) We shall see.
Teheran, January 18th.—Madame Nasr-al-Mulk gave a reception yesterday in the Karagozlu mansion. The Karagozlus are another tribal family, from Hamadan, but have so far escaped royal displeasure. Indeed Madame Nasr-al-Mulk is said to be the one person living who occasionally speaks her mind to Marjoribanks. I can believe it. She spoke her mind to me when she thought I was going to spill some lemonade over a brocade chair.
It lasted from five to eight. There were about 300 people and a jazz band. The rumour went round that Sardar Assad has “died” in prison.
A Russian architect named Markov has opened a rest-home here for newly escaped Russian refugees. In a small house near the Meshed Gate we found about fifty people exhaling that same old Russian smell—what does it come from? They all looked healthy enough, but for two wretched little girls; old clothes and toys for the children had been collected from various sources. One was a priest from Samarra, who spent three years getting jobs nearer and nearer the frontier before he could sneak across it. He had a fine old icon with him, but those which the other families had so laboriously saved were hideous and worthless.
The purpose of the home is to receive the refugees as they arrive, give them a rest and good food after the journey, and fit them out with boots and clothes before they are distributed to Isfahan, Kirman, and other places in the middle of the country. Apart from Turcomans, of whom 25,000 crossed the border last year alone, people are escaping from Russia to Persia at the rate of 1000 a year. Most of them are not anti-Bolshevik; they simply flee from starvation. If their accounts are true of the heaps of empty tortoise-shells that surround the workmen’s houses in some places, tortoises being their staple food, it is no wonder that foreigners are discouraged from visiting Russian Central Asia.
To discover if this discouragement amounts to denial, I have been hobnobbing with M. Datiev, the Russian consul. He is not so austere as some comrades, dresses in loud tweeds like Bloomsbury in the country, and wears a hat instead of a cap. The first time I went to see him, he regaled me with a cherry tart, the second time with crème de menthe.
Teheran, January 22nd.—Christopher has bought a car, and we intended to leave for Isfahan yesterday. But the road is blocked by snow. The bag and its messenger are lost between here and Hamadan.
To increase the tedium, there has been a performance of Othello in Armenian. The chief part was taken by Papatzian, a Moscow star, who certainly upheld the Muscovite reputation for finished acting. The rest were local amateurs, and knowing no other models of our bygone costumes, had dressed themselves after the Europeans in the frescoes at Isfahan.
On top of this, Blücher the German Minister gave a party in a cinema to see the Nazi propaganda film Deutschland Erwacht. Hitler, Goebbels, and the rest of them roared away. Tea and cakes in the interval. Datiev in his hat, his ambassador in a cap. I felt sorry for Blücher and thankful I was not a German.
Teheran, January 25th.—Still here. Still snow. The bag and its messenger still lost.
Walking into the local stationer’s to buy some drawing paper, I found the Papal Nuncio at the counter, and could think of nothing to say outside my own train of thought.
“Bonjour, Monseigneur.”
“Bonjour, Monsieur.”
Silence.
“Vous êtes artiste, Monseigneur?”
“Quoi?”
“Vous êtes peintre? Vous achetez des crayons, des couleurs?”
Horror ravaged his saintly countenance.
“Certainement non. J’achète des cartes d’invitation.”
Shir Ahmad and Tommy Jacks, the resident director of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, came to dinner at the club. It was a good dinner: caviare, beetroot, bortsch, grilled salmon, roast partridge with mushrooms, potato chips and salad, hot meringue pudding with an ice in the middle, and mulled claret.
Shir Ahmad (mf): Madame Jacks where she is? (dim) She is pretty lady.
Jacks: She could not come.
Shir Ahmad (roaring ff): WHY NOT? (Purring furiously mf) I am very angree, (cr) very angree.
We played bridge afterwards, but could not finish a rubber, as Shir Ahmad continually left the table to illustrate his stories by acting. The history of the Afghan royal family took half an hour, in which it transpired that Shir Ahmad’s cousinship to both Amanullah and the present king was due to its founder’s having had 120 children. After the next hand, he proceeded to Amanullah’s tour of Europe. Attended by various noble Italians they were in a box at the Roman opera.
(m) Italian lady she sit beside me. She is (eyes blazing ff) big lady, yah! great? no, fat. (mf) She more fat than Madame Egypt [the Egyptian Ministress] and her breast is (cr) too big. (mf) It fall out of box, so. Much diamonds and gold on it. (pp) I am frightened. I see if it shall be in my face (f) I suffocate.
The scene moved to the State Banquet at Buckingham Palace.
(m) Prince of Wales he talk to me. (p) I tell him, “Your Royal High-ness (ff) you are fool! (roaring) You are FOOL!” (m) Prince of Wales he say, (p) “Why am I fool?” (m) I tell him, “Sir, because you steeple-jump. It is dangerous, (cr) dangerous, (p) English peoples not pleased if Your Royal Highness die.” (m) King he hear. He tell Queen, “Mary, His Excellency call our son fool”. He very angree, (cr) very angree. (mf) Queen she ask me why her son fool. I say because he steeple-jump. Queen say to me, (dim) “Your Excellency, Your Excellency, you are right”. (cr) you are right”, (m) Queen thank me. King thank me.
Teheran, January 29th.—Still here.
Yesterday morning we got up at three and were out of the town by six, intending to make Isfahan in one day. After ten miles the road became an ice-floe; a drift had thawed and frozen again. I accelerated. We crashed on twenty yards, nearly overturned, and came to a lugubrious full-stop. At this moment the sun rose, a twinkle of fire lit the snowy plain, the white range of the Elburz was suffused with blue and gold, and a breath of warmth endeared the icy wind. Cheered by the beauty of the scene, we returned to the capital.
To relieve the claustrophobia, we spent the day in the mountains above Darbend, where Marjoribanks has a palace. Christopher got into conversation with one of the royal gardeners. It appears that Marjoribanks likes flowers.
Teheran, February 6th.—Still here.
Christopher left on the third. I was taken ill the night before, from that same Afghan infection, and had to go to the nursing-home instead of Isfahan, where I have been poulticed, lanced, cupped, and purged 100 times a day. The nursing-home is English, and a credit to the colony; but its management is such a source of contention between the Legation and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company that it may not survive.
The doctor says I can leave the day after tomorrow.
Kum (3200 ft.), February 8th.—I have left.
Mr. and Mrs. Hoyland are transporting me. He has been consul at Kirmanshah; and being now transferred to Shiraz they are moving house with two cars and a black spaniel. It rained for twenty-four hours before we started, and we have made bad time; a boat would have been faster than a car today.
The Shrine here, though rebuilt in the early XIXth century, makes a good group with its tall gold dome and four blue minarets.
Delijan (5000 ft.), February 9th.—Stuck again.
We were expecting to be in Isfahan for tea, when a turn of the road disclosed two lorries and a Ford embedded in a torrent fifty yards wide. There was nothing to do but come back to this village, where we have hired the chief house. It has two wind-towers, giving on to secret chambers that can be opened in summer to induce the proper draught, and a large room adorned with patterns of looking-glass in the plaster, beneath which hang cabinet photographs of gentlemen in Norfolk jackets taken at Bombay in the eighties. As Mrs. Hoyland led her spaniel over the t
hreshold, a cross-eyed witch burst into protest, lest the unclean animal should defile the place where a certain holy man once slept. She was silenced by the brothers who own the house and wanted our rent.
In the afternoon, I drew the courtyard: one pollarded tree-stump, an empty pond, and a line of washing all dripping with rain, give a new idea of a Persian Garden. At the end stood a vaulted summer-house, but just as I put pencil to it, the whole thing collapsed in a heap. Since then there have been other crashes in the distance. As building material, the mud of Delijan is unstated to bad weather.
I sit in my own little room beside a blazing wood fire, while Aga Mahmud, the eldest of the brothers, reads to me about Hazrat Hassan from the Shiah scriptures. From time to time he pauses, to whisper that the house is his, and that the rent must be paid to him alone.
Delijan, February 10th.—We drove to the river. It is higher than ever. But the sun is out and we have hope.
The bombardment of falling architecture continued all night. There is hardly a roof intact in the whole village.
Isfahan (5200 ft.), February 11th.—We arrived this afternoon. I ought to have been here, but for weather and illness, exactly three weeks ago.
It rained in the night again at Delijan. We dressed in despair, and were eating a leisurely breakfast when news came that the river had subsided but was rising again fast. In five minutes we were tearing down the road for dear life, with a peasant carrying a spade on the step of each car. Hoyland took the torrent in a dashing zigzag and landed safe on the other side. Mrs. Hoyland and I stuck, till twenty men pushed us out.
There was time to drive round Isfahan before dark. Passing the Chihil Sutun, long familiar from pictures of its pool-reflected pines and huge verandah, I entered the Maidan. Blind whitewashed arcades, in two tiers, enclose a space a quarter of a mile long by 150 yards wide. At the near end, by me, stands the ruin of the Bazaar Gate; at the far, facing it, the blue portal of the Masjid-i-Shah, with dome, ivan, and minarets clumped obliquely behind it in the direction of Mecca; in front of each, a pair of marble goal-posts for polo. On the right rises that brick boot-box the Ali Gapu; opposite, the flowered saucer dome of the Mosque of Sheikh Lutfullah, skewed sideways over a blue recess. Symmetry; but not too much. The beauty lies in the contrast between a formal space and a romantic diversity of buildings. To spoil this effect, and to show that Bakhtiari gentlemen are no longer allowed to play polo or exercise their horses here, Progress has constructed a sheet of ornamental water in the middle. This is surrounded by a Gothic iron railing and incipient petunia-beds.
The Maidan and its monuments date from the XVIIth century. The Friday Mosque, in the heart of the town, is older; it was built in the XIth. Here, as in the same mosque at Herat, the whole history of the town is pictured in a single building and its restorations; the charm of Safavid colour, like that of Timurid, recedes before its venerable grandeur. Much of it is clumsy, some ugly. But the great egg-dome of plain brick, erected by Malek Shah the Seljuk, has few equals for that blind expression of content which is the virtue of Mohammadan domes.
Dusk was falling when I reached the College of the Mother of the Shah which was built by Sultan Hussein the Safavid in 1710. Through the entrance a narrow sunk pool led to a black arch and doubled it un-rippled, creating, as it were, an architectural playing-card. The old white-stemmed poplars had just been pollarded; twigs and branches were scattered over the paving. I emerged into the Char Bagh, Shah Abbas’s avenue, and drove beneath the double line of trees to the bridge of Ali Verdi Khan, which carries the road to Shiraz, and the royal vista, across the river to a slope a mile long. The bridge encloses the road by arched walls, on the outside of which runs a miniature arcade for foot passengers. This was crowded with people, and all the town was hurrying to join them; there was never such a flood in living memory. The lights came out. A little breeze stirred, and for the first time in four months I felt a wind that had no chill in it. I smelt the spring, and the rising sap. One of those rare moments of absolute peace, when the body is loose, the mind asks no questions, and the world is a triumph, was mine. So much it meant to have escaped from Teheran.
Isfahan, February 13th.—There is a lot of missionary effort here, of the muscular, wicked-to-smoke-or-drink type. Men in spectacles, tweed coats, and flannel trousers go striding down the Char Bagh accompanied by small boys and bearing the unmistakable imprint of the British schoolmaster; their behinds stick out as if their spines were too righteous to bend. Behind it all lurks an Anglican Bishop, who has lately become an apostle of the Oxford Group Movement. Buchmanism in Isfahan! This is a cruel revenge for the Bahais in Chicago.
A more humane exponent of English ethics was Archdeacon Garland, who lived here thirty years. During that time, he used to say, he made one convert. She was an old woman, who was ostracised for her apostasy, so that on her deathbed the Archdeacon was the only friend she could send for. She had one last request, she told him.
“What is it?” asked the Archdeacon, anxious to ease his protégée’s last moments.
“Please summon a mullah.”
He did so, and repeated the story afterwards.
The pleasure of a walk in the rain this afternoon was completed by the clutch of a corpse. It was passing on a stretcher, the road was a bog, and we collided; the hands and feet, escaping from a check table-cloth, beckoned convulsively.
There is an Armenian cathedral at Julfa across the river, which resembles a Mohammadan shrine of the XVIIth century. Inside, the walls are covered with oil paintings in the Italian tradition of that date. Attached to it is a museum, but the treasures are of historic rather than artistic interest.
Abadeh (6100 ft.), February 14th.—Persia can be very pleasant when the officials give rein to their natural good nature.
The Hoylands and I arrived here early; seeing a good horse in the street, I asked the Chief of Police if he could mount me for an hour. Two foaming steeds were immediately at the rest-house gate. And we set off across the fields at a racing gallop, full in the face of the setting sun, so that I could see neither ditches nor banks as the horse took them in its stride. Our objective was a lonely garden. For some minutes Habibullah the policeman sat silent, entranced by the sound and twinkle of a stream. “You should come here in summer”, he said sentimentally. And then, as though ashamed of his emotion, talked of the shooting: gazelle and moufflon.
Since the brown horse I rode was his, I gave him ten crowns. Later in the evening he brought the money back, by order of the Chief of Police. If I wanted to do him a good turn, I could recommend him to the Chief of Police at Shiraz.
Abadeh is a favoured village. The main street is neatly gravelled; the inhabitants are prosperous—they make the best shoes in Persia. It is very dry. Even now, when everywhere else is flooded, they have had no rain.
The red wine of Julfa tastes of a Burgundy grown in Greece. We have drunk a bottle apiece today.
Shiraz (5000 ft.), February 17th.—The South, the blessed South! It gives me the same exhilaration as a first morning by the Mediterranean. The sky shines without a cloud. The black spires of cypresses cut across the eggshell-coloured hills and the snow-capped purple of distant mountains. Turquoise leek-shaped domes on tall stems rise from a sea of flat mud roofs. Tangerines hang from the trees in the hotel garden. I am writing in bed, the windows are open, and the soft spring air breathes paradise into last night’s frousty cubicle.
We stopped a few minutes at Persepolis on the way from Abadeh, running up the great ballroom staircase on to the platform. I have always been curious about the stone used there. The columns are of white marble, which has weathered to cream, brown, and black; it has a pinkish glow, but is chalkier and less translucent than that of Pentelicon, lacking that impress of absorbed sunshine which is the beauty of the Parthenon. The reliefs are carved in dull grey stone, quite opaque and very fine in texture, which exposure has turned to mottled black.
There was no time to see the new staircase, but we left cards on Herzfeld
to prepare him for a longer visit.
Arrival at the Consulate was a crucial moment for the Hoylands, who have to make it their home for the next three years. As we sat at tea, Christopher came in, much pleased with his discoveries anent the villainy of Wassmuss, that mysterious agent to the Persian tribes in the War, who, if the Germans had won it, would now occupy the place of Colonel Lawrence. We are going to Firuzabad together, where the topography of a battle between British soldiers and the tribes thus disaffected will occupy him, and the Palace of Ardeshir me.
There are still relics of the British occupation here. The cabs bear advertisements for Tennant’s beer. The manager of the hotel offered us potato-cheeps for dinner. Nature, before the War, planted a singular mountain in the vicinity, which completes the prospect of the main street with a Lysippus-portrait of Lord Balfour lying on his back. This is now called the Kuh-i-Barfi, which means mountain of snow. It might seem a rational name if there was ever any snow on it. But there isn’t. The real name is Kuh-i-Balfour, of which Barfi is a Persian corruption.
When I went to the English Mission to have an injection, Dr. Mess, a lady doctor, offered me a cigarette and took one herself. The South again!
The monuments of Shiraz are curious rather than important; though the facing of the court in the Friday Mosque, itself in ruins, seems to cover masonry of great antiquity. A sort of stone tabernacle stands in the middle of the court, flanked by four fat round pillars built of cut stone. The tops of these, which now support nothing, are encircled with texts cut out of stone but surrounded by a blue background. This is the only example I have seen of stone and faience used together. It is not a happy combination, as one can tell from Sarre’s reproductions of Konia.
The court of the College is also ruined, a state which improves its XVIIIth-century tilework of pink and yellow flowers. The chief ornament is a spreading fig tree beside an octagonal pool. A pretty octagonal vestibule gives access to it, covered by a saucer-dome on shallow bat’s-wing squinches. These are embellished with a rich cold mosaic of the XVIIth century.