The Road to Oxiana

by Robert Byron

  He came in an aeroplane with Mrs. Moore, a matriarch in a shawl, more than seventy years old and worth as many millions. Her two sisters, three maids, and a “manager” made up the party. We met them at tea at the American College. Christopher was appalled at the toadying that went on, but he has no sympathy with people whose work depends on private benefactions.

  PART V

  PART V

  Shahi (c. 300 ft.), April 22nd.—The first evening of our long-planned journey.

  Lady Hoare and Joseph got up early to breakfast with us under the wistaria. The winter aspect of the Legation compound, resembling a Victorian asylum, was now almost hidden by blossom and young leaves. And as we drove away, I remembered with infinite gratitude the kindness I had found in those ugly little houses, and among the English community in general. Such kindness is easy to forget and impossible to repay: it needs a rich man to offer the same degree of hospitality in England as two clean sheets and a bath represent after a journey in Persia. Worse than that, he who writes is apt to repay it with injury, in the form of political indiscretion, which makes life for the residents more difficult than it is already. But this, I must admit, leaves me impenitent, regrettable as it is from the personal point of view. To asperse a sunset in these days is a political indiscretion; and equally so, to praise it, if there happens to be a cement-factory in the foreground that ought to be praised instead. Somebody must trespass on the taboos of modern nationalism, in the interests of human reason. Business can’t. Diplomacy won’t. It has to be people like us.

  Once more the Khorasan road, poignant with memories! In spite of the spring, it was snowing at the pass which leads over the edge of the plateau down to the Caspian coast. Under the white blizzard occurred an extraordinary transition. In five minutes we had escaped from a world of stone and mud and sand and everlasting drought which had endured since Damascus, into one of wood and leaves and moisture, where the hills were clothed with bushes, the bushes grew into trees, and the trees, as the snow stopped, gathered into a glowing forest of bare trunks whose leafy vaults shut out the sky. The oppression of the plateau was suddenly remitted. It was only now I knew what a penalty had been levied on the spirit by the bare wind-swept deserts, the threatening mountains and the tumbledown villages. The relief was actually physical. Our bodies seemed to undergo a change of gravity, a return to normal buoyancy.

  These feelings were interrupted by a piercing whistle and a puff of white smoke. In the bottom of the valley Marjoribanks’s new railway was creeping up towards the plateau. There, after surmounting the second step of the Elburz at Firuzkuh by a tunnel in the form of a triple spiral, it should arrive at Teheran in three years’ time. It can never pay. The taxation imposed by the first two hundred miles of it is already depriving the peasants of their only luxuries, tea and sugar. But its purpose is a question of psychology rather than economics. For the modern Persian it is the symbol of national self-respect; it provides at last a fresh diet for that unconquerable vanity which has subsisted during two thousand years on the exploits of Darius. To us, after all we have suffered at the mercy of the internal combustion engine, the grunt of steam seemed as companionable and old-fashioned as the rattle of a four-wheeler. We felt twice befriended by the trees and the train.

  When we first crossed the pass, the lumber-shoots down the hills and the shingled eaves of the houses reminded me of Austria. Out on the coastal plain, where the fields are divided by hedges and brambles, and bracken and clumps of nettles flourish on the grass banks beneath them, we might have been in England on a wet afternoon—till we saw a tiger skin hanging outside somebody’s front-door. Among these pastoral surroundings, the bare-footed Mazandarani shepherd-boys in their black fleece hats looked curiously exotic. They have an air of effete savagery which seems to have been produced by the action of a semi-tropical environment on people who must once have been nomads.

  Shahi is a pioneer town called into existence by the railway. Four main streets from nowhere converge on an asphalt circus, which is dignified with pavements and shop-windows. The hotel is crowded with Russian, German, and Scandinavian engineers.

  Asterabad (300 ft.), April 23rd. There is a road from Shahi to Asterabad, but it has been allowed to fall into disrepair for the benefit of the railway. We could only drive as far as Ashraf.

  Two gardens and a palace still mark this royal pleasaunce, where Shah Abbas received Sir Dodmore Cotton in 1627. Seen from a distance, the palace on its wooded hill looks like an English country-house. But it is really very small, its tilework is coarse, and it is planned with the incapacity to make convenient use of a given space usually found in Persian secular buildings. Its main peculiarity is that by some strange coincidence the windows are of a type which Ruskin transferred from Florentine Quattrocento palaces to the suburbs of Oxford. The two gardens are more romantic. Long stone waterways proceed through gently sloping meadows, negotiating each fall in level with a flat stone glissade in the Mogul style. Wherever this style originated, in Persia, India, or Oxiana, it is proper to a barren landscape only. Here, framed in grass and bracken, it becomes slightly excessive, as an Italian garden is in Ireland.

  The larger garden illustrates the same scale of ideas as Shah Abbas put into effect at Isfahan. From the hill at the back, where pink orchids were flowering in the undergrowth, a cypress avenue descends through a walled enclosure of several acres, which is dotted with other cypresses in the manner of an English park. The waterway runs inside the avenue, and like that of the Villa Lante, passes between two pavilions, which are joined by a roofed arcade that acts as a bridge. At the bottom of the avenue stands a gate-house. Beyond this, a road carries on the line of the trees through the village of Ashraf and across a strip of cultivated plain, till the eye is brought to rest by the glinting horizon of the Caspian.

  Looking for somewhere to lunch, we chose one of the square pools, now dry, which used to receive each water-glissade and whose copings are carved with holes for fairy-lights in the form of wicks floating on oil. I took up the picnic-bag and jumped down into the long grass at the bottom. But the place was already occupied. Five feet of cinnamon-coloured snake, luckily more frightened than I was, lashed its way round my legs to a crevice in the masonry.

  When the train arrived the car was attached on a truck, and the servants remained in it, while we consorted with a crowd of holidaymakers from Teheran, come to inspect the new marvel. Five prohibitions in each carriage informed them of railway etiquette. At Bandar Shah, the new Caspian port where the railway ends, a regular seaside crowd met the train. Among them were the local Chief of Police and a representative of the War Office, who asked us where we were going.

  Gumbad-i-Kabus?

  Certainly. And we could also, if we liked, motor on to Meshed by the new military road through Bujnurd and the Turcoman country.

  This was a welcome surprise. When I asked for permission to visit Gumbad-i-Kabus in Teheran, Jam, the Minister of the Interior, sent me a private message begging me to withdraw the request, since the place was in a military zone and he could not grant it. Hearing this, Pybus, our Military Attaché, offered to put in a word for us with the General Staff. But he had had no answer when we left, and we had come thus far on chance. It was Diez’s picture of Gumbad-i-Kabus that decided me to come to Persia, and I would sooner, as far as I know, have missed any other building in the country.

  Even in the dark, we could perceive the steppe. The headlights died in space, finding nothing to reveal but a passing boar. There came a scent of sweet grass, as on a night in June at home before the hay is cut. At Asterabad the populace were celebrating Mohurram, marching through the streets behind a draped coffin and bearing aloft triangular banners of lights. Many wept and groaned, and such as had their hands free were tearing their clothes and beating themselves, as Shir Ahmad had described. We are staying with an old Turk, who used to be British vice-consul here, and offers to arrange a tiger-shoot for us.

  Gumbad-i-Kabus (200 ft.), April 24th.—After fo
llowing the Bandar Shah road a little way back, we turned to the right down a track between wattle fences. High reeds obscured the view. Suddenly, as a ship leaves an estuary, we came out on to the steppe: a dazzling open sea of green. I never saw that colour before. In other greens, of emerald, jade, or malachite, the harsh deep green of the Bengal jungle, the sad cool green of Ireland, the salad green of Mediterranean vineyards, the heavy fullblown green of English summer beeches, some element of blue or yellow predominates over the others. This was the pure essence of green, indissoluble, the colour of life itself. The sun was warm, the larks were singing up above. Behind us rose the misty Alpine blue of the wooded Elburz. In front, the glowing verdure stretched out to the rim of the earth.

  Bearings, landmarks, disappeared, as they would from a skiff in mid-Atlantic. We seemed to be always below the surrounding level, caught in the trough of a green swell. Sitting down, we might see for twenty feet: standing up, for twenty miles—and even then, twenty miles away, the curve of the earth was as green as the bank that touched the wheels, so that it was hard to tell which was which. Our only chart was by things whose scale we knew: groups of white-topped kibitkas, dotted like mushrooms on a lawn—though even in their case it needed an effort of reason to believe they were not mushrooms; and droves of cattle, mares with their foals, black and brown sheep, kine and camels—though the camels were deceptive in the opposite sense, seeming so tall that it needed another effort to believe they were not antediluvian monsters. As the huts and animals varied in size, we could plot their distances: half a mile, a mile, five miles. But it was not this that conveyed the size of the steppe so much as the multiplicity of these nomadic encampments, cropping up wherever the eye rested, yet invariably separate by a mile or two from their neighbours. There were hundreds of them, and the sight, therefore, seemed to embrace hundreds of miles.

  As plans of cities are inset on maps of countries, another chart on a larger scale lay right beneath our wheels. Here the green resolved, not into ordinary grass, but into wild corn, barley, and oats, which accounted for that vivid fire, as of a life within the green. And among these myriad bearded alleys lived a population of flowers, buttercups and poppies, pale purple irises and dark purple campanulas, and countless others, exhibiting all the colours, forms, and wonders that a child finds in its first garden. Then a puff of air would come, bending the corn to a silver ripple, while the flowers leaned with it; or a cloud-shadow, and all grow dark, as if for a moment’s sleep; though a few feet off there would be no ripple and no darkness; so that this whole inner world of the steppe was mapped on a system of infinite minute recessions, having just those gradations of distance that the outer lacked.

  Our spirits had risen when we left the plateau. Now they effervesced. We shouted for joy, stopping the car lest the minutes that were robbing us of the unrepeatable first vision should go faster. Even the larks in this paradise had lost their ordinary aloofness. One almost hit my hat in its inquisitiveness.

  We found the Gurgan river in a cutting thirty feet deep, whose bare earth cliffs traced a gash of desolation through the green. It was as wide as the Severn in its upper reaches, and we crossed it by an old brick bridge on tall pointed arches. This was defended, on the north bank, by a gate-house, whose overhanging upper storey had a broad-eaved tiled roof such as one sees in the Apennines. From here smooth green tracks began to radiate over the steppe in all directions, and we could hardly have found the way but for the occasional traffic of riders on horses and camels and high-wheeled gigs who pointed it out to us. They were all Turcomans, the ladies in red chintz covered with flowers, the men in plain red or more rarely in gorgeous multicoloured silks woven with lightning zigzags. But there were not many fleece hats. Most of the men wore Marjoribanks’s substitute, or at least a cardboard peak attached to a fleece cap.

  The Elburz now began to curve round in front of us, enclosing a green bay. In the middle of this, twenty miles away, a small cream needle stood up against the blue of the mountains, which we knew for the tower of Kabus. An hour later, steering by this point, we reached a small market town, whose broad straight streets recall the Russian occupation of the district before the War. The tower stands on the north of the town, helped into the sky by a green hillock of irregular shape, but artificial, and of great age.

  A tapering cylinder of café-au-lait brick springs from a round plinth to a pointed grey-green roof, which swallows it up like a candle extinguisher. The diameter at the plinth is fifty feet; the total height about a hundred and fifty. Up the cylinder, between plinth and roof, rush ten triangular buttresses, which cut across two narrow garters of Kufic text, one at the top underneath the cornice, one at the bottom over the slender black entrance.

  The bricks are long and thin, and as sharp as when they left the kiln, thus dividing the shadow from the sunshine of each buttress with knife-like precision. As the buttresses recede from the direction of the sun, the shadows extend on to the curving wall of the cylinder between them, so that the stripes of light and shade, varying in width, attain an extraordinary momentum. It is the opposition of this vertical momentum to the lateral embrace of the Kufic rings that gives the building its character, a character unlike anything else in architecture.

  There is nothing inside. The body of Kabus used to hang there, suspended from the roof in a glass coffin. He died in 1007. For more than a thousand years this lighthouse has announced his memory, and the genius of Persia, to the nomads of the Central Asian sea. Today it has a larger audience, which must wonder how the use of brick, at the beginning of the second millennium after Christ, came to produce a more heroic monument, and a happier play of surfaces and ornament, than has ever been seen in that material since.

  [Superlatives applied by travellers to objects which they have seen, but most people have not, are generally suspect; I know it, having been guilty of them. But re-reading this diary two years later, in as different an environment as possible (Pekin), I still hold the opinion I formed before going to Persia, and confirmed that evening on the steppe: that the Gumbad-i-Kabus ranks with the great buildings of the world.]

  The military Governor called at dinner-time, and told us of the tradition that something used to flash from the roof of the tower; it was of glass or crystal, and was believed to hold a lamp. The Russians, he said, took it away; though he did not explain how they reached it. This tradition may contain a distorted reference to Kabus’s glass coffin, which seems to have been genuine fact, as it was recorded by the Arab historian Jannabi soon after Kabus’s death.

  The country round here is covered with antiquities, if only we had time to stop and look for them. “Alexander’s Wall” is only a few miles north of the Gurgan, and the swamps along the river to the east are said to be crowded with ruins that no one has explored. There are also prehistoric remains. Not long ago some Turcoman families found a tumulus filled with bronze vessels, which they abstracted and put into domestic use. Then bad luck overtook them, and ascribing it to their desecration of a grave they returned to the tumulus and re-buried the vessels. One imagines the rush of professors to this archaeological Klondyke, if they knew where it was.

  The Governor also brings us the bad news that the road to Bujnurd is blocked by rain and landslides. We might get through, but a lorry has just crawled in here half wrecked, after spending five days on the journey, and we dare not risk the car, with Afghanistan before it. In consequence, we are considering a ride over the mountains to Shahrud, while the car goes back by Firuzkuh.

  Bandar Shah (sea-level), April 26th.—Under arrest! I am writing on a bed in the police-station.

  We are in the wrong, which makes it the more annoying. Having waited at Gumbad-i-Kabus till four o’clock, when there were still no horses to be had, we decided to go back with the car, and avoiding Asterabad, reached here at ten o’clock. There was nowhere to sleep but the station, and the station-master, a wilting young man, was not pleased at our disturbing him so late. The train this morning was due to leave at seven. He
told us to have the car ready by the siding at six. It was. But the truck for it did not arrive till ten to seven, and we suddenly saw that the station-master, out of spite, had sent the train off without us. The pent-up irritation of seven months exploded: we assaulted the man. There were loud shrieks, soldiers rushed in, and pinioning Christopher’s arms, some struck his back with the butts of their rifles, while their officer, who was scarcely four feet high and had the voice of a Neapolitan tenor, repeatedly slapped his face. I escaped these indignities, but we share the confinement, to the bewilderment of the police, who find us a nuisance.

  They threaten us with an “enquiry” into the “incident” in Teheran. We must grovel to avoid this at all costs. It would take weeks. I wonder—we both wonder—what madness came over us to jeopardise our journey in this way.

  Samnan (4000 ft.), April 27th.—The “incident” was settled by the German superintendent of the repair shops, an imperturbable old man, who lounged into the police-station, said “What’s this?”, and after seeing us shake hands with the station-master, took us off to his house for the night. This was the kinder of him, because his daughter and son-in-law, a Danish bank manager, had arrived unexpectedly from Teheran, and since there was only one spare room we had to put up our beds in the parlour.

  This morning as we left Shahi it was raining, and the road up to the pass was slippery and dangerous. Round the corner came a lorry out of control. We hit it broadside, lurched towards the precipice above the valley… this was the end; but no, we stayed on the road, and had only to deplore that my suitcase, which had been attached to the step, lay crushed by the lorry’s front wheel into a thin blue sandwich, extruding clothes, films, and drawing-paper. The insurance, which had lasted eight months, ran out last week.

  At Amiriya they said it had rained for fifteen days consecutively, and that such weather at this time of year had never been known before.