by Robert Byron
Damghan (3900 ft.), April 28th.—More disasters.
Twenty miles from Samnan the back axle broke. We had a spare one, but it took five hours to fit, while Christopher and I, unable to help, wandered forlornly about the sodden, glistening desert, consoling ourselves with the yellow dwarf tulips just coming into flower, and occasionally scrambling eggs in a ruined tea-house.
“What language are you talking?” asked Christopher of the youth in charge.
“I talk Chakapakaru, the language of Samnan. Don’t you?”
We don’t. But it may be a treasure for the philologist.
The rain fell like a bath-waste. For miles at a time the road was a river, the desert a flood, and every mountain a cataract. But by some freak of Nature, a river-bed which ran beside the telegraph poles, and which was several feet below the level of the surrounding country, remained completely dry.
In one torrent a couple of lorries were already embedded without hope. The local population hauled us through, exacting the toll of wreckers before doing so, else they would have led the car into the deepest part and left it. Henceforth the road improved, and we were travelling at forty miles an hour on the straight when a small water-course, three feet wide, two deep, and as sharp as a coffin, flashed across our sight… it was the end again; but no; we jumped it, fell into a bog, and landed up alive with a shattering bump against a heap of gravel.
The front-wheels were the shape of duck’s feet, but the axle had held, and we could just waddle into Damghan, where the blacksmith is now straightening it. Here we saw Pybus’s Indian orderly, who told us that his master, returning from Meshed, had stuck in a river on the other side of the town. Pybus himself appeared soon after, at the head of a procession carrying his luggage. This included an old woman, bent double with rheumatism and shrouded in blue checks, who was laboriously salving a minute portfolio.
We cheered Pybus up by telling him of our own misfortunes. Three bottles of Shahi wine, an orange salad, and Wishaw’s cigars have cheered us all up.
Abbasabad (c. 3000 ft.), April 29th.—Even on my other two journeys, this accursed windy spot where they sell cigar-holders of green soapstone and the men wear red blouses, seemed the peak of misery. Now we have to spend the night here.
The river flowed right over Pybus’s car. It was a new limousine. This morning it looked like Neptune’s cave. After two lorries had failed to pull it out with chains, we went on.
It was still raining. Beyond Shahrud we ran into soft sand, which flew up into a paste on the windscreen, so that I had to drive with my head outside it, though never at less than thirty miles an hour or we should have stuck. The inky jagged hills and cloud-wracked skies of Khorasan were still the same. But a new vegetation had sprung up over the black water-logged desert: the sparse green of camel-thorn, strange asphodels, and a kind of stocky yellow cow-parsley, three feet high and as thick as a tree: an ugly, sinister flower.
They said here there was water four feet deep on the way to Sabzevar. We therefore stopped, and I have gone to bed with Gosse’s Father and Son. Christopher has been buying a red blouse with as much fuss as if it was from Schiaparelli.
Meshed, May 1st.—“Just in time for the ball!” shouted Mrs. Gastrell, as we staggered up the steps of the Consulate.
Does the whole Indian Political Service travel about Asia with dressing-up boxes? Mrs. Gastrell was a negress in black skin-tights and a top-hat; Gastrell, who is seven feet high, danced a Scottish reel as Bluebeard, wearing cloth of gold and a caerulean beaver. Rose, of the same service, appeared as a Kate Greenaway schoolboy. Mrs. Hamber was a shepherdess, Hamber a Bokhara grandee in silks of a pattern larger than the human body. Before I could say how pleased I was to see them again, they were transforming me into a charwoman; while Christopher, pinioned by the Gastrells, was whisked into the regalia of an Arab sheikh. The missionaries were out in force. Mr. Donaldson, having spent half his life studying Shiah pilgrims, had very properly become one. When I asked him if it wasn’t a sacrifice to have all his hair shaved off for one evening, he said, “Oh no, it fits very well. I always travel bald and am starting on a journey tomorrow to visit the Georgian villages between Abbasabad and Kuchan. The people are Mohammadans of course, but they still have a tradition of superior education.”
The charwoman forgot herself so far as to stab the Bokhara grandee in the back with a parasol during an apache duet.
Meshed, May 2nd.—Lee of the Bank says he has been doing more business lately than for some time past. I asked him if this were due to the expulsion of the Jews from Afghanistan. He said it might be.
Those Jews had the lambskin trade in their hands, and I remember at Christmas Lee had been interested in my account of their exodus; though neither he nor I knew at the time that it was due to a government order. The reason of his interest was that formerly a large proportion of this trade went through Meshed, to the profit of the town and the Bank. But when Marjori-banks started his policy of economic nationalism, this stopped. All trade stopped more or less, till at last the Khorasan customs service could not even pay its wages out of its receipts. But now that many of these Jews have entered Persia, they may have brought the lambskin business back with them.
One always hears of “Persian” lamb, and when I was in Afghanistan before I did not realise the economic significance of the trade to that country; though there was much conversation about lambskins in the Herat bazaar. Persia, it is true, exports lamb enough. But the fine fur, for which milliners in London and Paris pay up to £7 a skin, is a monopoly of Oxiana. This is due to a peculiar dry herbage which grows on the Oxus plain and makes the wool curl more tightly than it will elsewhere. Thus the really profitable part of the lambskin trade is shared between Russia and Afghanistan. But why the Afghans must needs get rid of the people who conduct their part of it, and so make Persian middlemen a present of the profits, is a mystery we have still to unravel.
Meshed, May 6th.—A possible light on this mystery was vouchsafed us yesterday by my old friend the Afghan consul. We were discussing an announcement in the paper that the Afghan Government had decided to rebuild Balkh, and I asked him what the point was, since Mazar-i-Sherif, the capital of Afghan Turkestan and a flourishing city, is only seventeen miles away. He answered that Balkh was a historical city, the Home of the Aryan Race.
This mania must have spread from Germany. Till a year ago the Afghans claimed that they themselves were Jews: the lost tribes of Israel. But nothing is too fantastic for Asiatic nationalism.
The days have passed pleasantly here. We ought to be off, but two things detain us. One is the arrival of a spare axle from Teheran. The other is the Shrine. In point of coloured mosaic, no building in Persia that I have seen or heard of can compare with the Musalla at Herat, except possibly the Shrine here, which was built by the same woman; in which case, being more or less intact, it is probably the finest example of colour in the whole of Mohammadan architecture. I had not grasped this probability when I was here before; I supposed that the faience at Isfahan would equal or surpass that of the Musalla. It does not. Sheikh Lutfullah is more gorgeous, but only as St. Peter’s is more gorgeous than the Tempio at Rimini; the vernal inspiration of a Renascence is lacking. I will not leave this town without seeing Gohar Shad’s only complete building.
We have cleared the ground. Our first move was to visit the new hospital, the apple of Assadi’s eye, in order to be able to praise it to him when he returned from Teheran. This piece of tact put him in a good humour, but no more; he was still disinclined to take official responsibility for the safety of a foreigner inside the Shrine. Nevertheless, our call on him led indirectly to acquaintance with an amiable young schoolmaster in suède gloves, who offered to help us for the fun of the thing—for the fun, that is, of striking a blow for knowledge against the forces of ecclesiastical darkness. We met him last night to discuss matters, having first taken a room at the hotel so as to keep our plans secret from the Consulate. By the time he arrived I had become a Persian; a
t least he thought so, greeting me in Persian fashion and being astonished when the seedy Oriental with eyes cast down and hands folded in his sleeves burst into a rude guffaw. This clinched it. He will take us tonight.
This morning we drove out to Chinaran, along the road to Askabad and the Russian frontier. From here a cart-track took us to within six miles of the tower of Radkan. We walked the rest of the way, at first over springy turf cropped short by droves of horses, then through a series of sticky saline marshes. Our guide was a furious little peasant with enormous whiskers.
“Do you know the way to Radkan?”
“How should I not know it?” he vociferated indignantly. But he only knew the way to Radkan village, and his anger passed all bounds when we dragged him through those marshes to the tower instead.
It was worth the effort: a massive cylindrical grave-tower with a conical roof, ninety feet high, and dating from the XIIIth century. The outside wall consists of columns two feet thick, which touch one another. Their brickwork, rusty red in colour, is arranged in tweed patterns, which give the building a sort of shine, as of a well-groomed horse. Unlike the Gumbad-i-Kabus, this tower has a staircase in the thickness of the wall.
On the way back, we turned off the main road to visit Tus. I was saying to Christopher that apart from the old bridge and mausoleum there, he ought to see the Firdaussi memorial, because it proved that a breath of architectural taste still lingered in modern Persia. The words froze on my lips: a crowd of workmen were busy demolishing it. Iron railings hid the pool. Municipal flower-beds lay ready for cannas and begonias. And at the end, instead of the pleasant unostentatious pyramid I admired in November, rose half-built copies of the bull's-head columns at Persepolis.
I apologised for my enthusiasm and we drove away. Marjoribanks, it appears, saw a photograph of the first memorial, and said it was too plain.
Meshed, May 7th.—Last night, excusing ourselves from the Consulate, we dined at the hotel. Christopher observed that an up-to-date guide to Meshed might contain a sentence such as: “Visitors intending to inspect the Shrine of the Imam Riza usually dine and make up at the Hotel de Paris”. We finished with vanilla ices, and primed ourselves with a miserable sour Caucasian burgundy. At eight o’clock, I had just applied the last shred of cork to the nape of Christopher’s neck when our friend the schoolmaster arrived with an Armenian lady, who had come to see the heroes start. She saw them into a broken-down victoria. This drove to the main gate of the Shrine, where we dismounted, but instead of entering, turned to the right up the circular avenue. “Are you ready?” said the guide, and dived into a dark tunnel. We followed like rabbits, found ourselves in a little yard, scurried down a lighted bazaar full of booths and purchasers, and came out into the great court of the Mosque of Gohar Shad.
Amber lights twinkled in the void, glowing unseen from the mighty arch before the sanctuary, reflecting a soft blaze over the gilded entrance to the Tomb opposite, and revealing, as the eye adapted itself, a vast quadrilateral defined by ranks of arches. An upper tier rose out of reach of the lights, and, passing through a zone of invisibility, reappeared as a black parapet against the stars. Turbaned mullahs, white-robed Afghans, vanished like ghosts between the orbits of the lamps, gliding across the black pavement to prostrate themselves beneath the golden doorway. A sound of chanting was heard from the sanctuary, where a single tiny figure could be seen abased in the dimness, at the foot of its lustred mihrab.
Islam! Iran! Asia! Mystic, languid, inscrutable!!
One can hear a Frenchman saying that, the silly fool—as if it was an opium den in Marseilles. We felt the opposite; that is why I mention it. Every circumstance of sight, sound, and trespass conspired to swamp the intelligence. The message of a work of art overcame this conspiracy, forcing its way out of the shadows, insisting on structure and proportion, on the impress of superlative quality, and on the intellect behind them. How this message was conveyed is difficult to say. Glimpses of arabesques so liquid, so delicately interlaced, that they looked no more like mosaic than a carpet looks like stitches; of larger patterns lost in the murk above our heads; of vaults and friezes alive with calligraphy—these were its actual words. But the sense was larger. An epoch, the Timurids, Gohar Shad herself, and her architect Kavam-ad-Din, ruled the night.
“Please blow your nose”, whispered our guide to Christopher.
“Why?”
“I ask you, blow it, and continue to blow it. You must cover your beard.”
Our guide was well known to the mullahs and policemen on duty. They greeted him without noticing the shabby plebeian at his side or the sneezing consumptive at his heels. We walked twice round the quadrangle, very slowly, bowing to the Tomb each time; then quickened our pace through the other two great courts, an ethereal vision of silver-white niches in double tiers.
“Now”, hissed our guide, “we are coming to the main gate. I shall talk to you, Mr. Byron, when we go out. You, Mr. Sykes, please blow your nose and walk behind.”
Guards, porters, and ecclesiastics stood up respectfully as they saw him come. He seemed entirely preoccupied with his own conversation, which took the form of a charwoman’s monologue and sounded so remarkable in Persian that I had no need to simulate interest: “So I said to him rumble rumble rumble rumble Rumble he said rumble Rumble? I said I said and rumble rumble Rumble rumble he said to me I said Rumble! rumblerumblerumblerumble.…” Everyone bowed. Our guide cast an eye over his shoulder to see that Christopher was following, and we were out, got a cab, and were soon scrubbing our faces at the hotel before returning to the Consulate.
We thanked him profusely. But in the same breath I was obliged to tell him that having seen this much, no amount of gratitude could prevent my begging him to take me again by daylight. Noticing his reluctance, Christopher offered not to come, as his beard was evidently an embarrassment. This relieved our guide. He arranged to call for me at two o’clock today.
This morning, when I entered the hotel, the bedroom attendant brought me a plate of corks and charcoal without being asked for them. It was another thing to make up for daylight with these crude materials: my moustache looked green instead of black, and turned out brindled; my eyes were still blue, inside lashes semi-black and sore with scrubbing. But the costume was subtle: brown shoes with tight black trousers four inches too short; grey coat; gold stud instead of a tie; our servant’s mackintosh; and a black Pahlevi hat which I aged by kicking it—these components created the perfect type of Marjoribanks’s Persia. Alas! my work of art was hardly complete before a telephone message informed me that our guide had funked at the last minute.
Not daring to take a cab by myself, I had to walk the mile and a half to the Shrine. The sun was at my back; I sweated under the mackintosh as I invented a quick Persian-looking trot of short high steps that would prevent me from tripping over uneven paving-stones; but no one looked at me. The goal grew nearer. There was the main gate. There the little tunnel. Without looking round, I was in it, found the yard, realised there were trees there, and then saw that the further exit was completely blocked by a group of mullahs, my potential assaulters, who were discussing the wares of a small bookshop.
Everything depended on my pace. I was keyed to it, and by it. If it faltered, I was exposed. So I kept to it, and clove that group of mullahs as a torpedo cleaves the waves. By the time they noticed me, grumbling at such ill manners, there was only my back to notice.
I hastened down the dark bazaar, found the dome where I turned to the left, and was greeted, on coming out into the court, by such a fanfare of colour and light that I stopped a moment, half blinded. It was as if someone had switched on another sun.
The whole quadrangle was a garden of turquoise, pink, dark red, and dark blue, with touches of purple, green, and yellow, planted among paths of plain buff brick. Huge white arabesques whirled above the ivan arches. The ivans themselves hid other gardens, shadier, fritillary-coloured. The great minarets beside the sanctuary, rising from bases encircled wi
th Kufic the size of a boy, were bedizened with a network of jewelled lozenges. The swollen sea-green dome adorned with yellow tendrils appeared between them. At the opposite end glinted the top of a gold minaret. But in all this variety, the principle of union, the life-spark of the whole blazing apparition, was kindled by two great texts: the one, a frieze of white suls writing powdered over a field of gentian blue along the skyline of the entire quadrangle; the other, a border of the same alphabet in daisy white and yellow on a sapphire field, interlaced with turquoise Kufic along its inner edge, and enclosing, in the form of a three-sided oblong, the arch of the main ivan between the minarets. The latter was actually designed, it says, by “Baisanghor, son of Shah Rukh, son of Timur Gurkani (Tamerlane), with hope in God, in the year 821 (A.D.1418)”. Baisanghor was a famous calligrapher; and being the son of Gohar Shad also, he celebrated his mother’s munificence with an inscription whose glory explains for ever the joy felt by Islam in writing on the face of architecture.
This vision was a matter of seconds. Simultaneously I began to feel insecure. I had intended to follow last night’s plan of walking slowly round the court, but was prevented by two crowds, one listening to a preacher before the main ivan, one praying before the Tomb opposite; so that either way I was threatened by religious etiquette. Other pilgrims were squatting along the walls, many of them Afghans, all quite different in clothes and manner from my lower middle-class Persian self, and eyeing me, so I imagined, with hawk-like scowls as I walked to and fro between the two crowds. At last it was no longer imagination: my gaping inquisitiveness attracted notice. I scuttled back into the bazaar. The mullahs were no longer in the passage. Out in the street stood Christopher, leering wantonly as I passed him with eyes averted. Now, on the way back, the sun was in my face, and people turned to look at me as I passed. There was something wrong. Whatever it was, Mrs. Gastrell did not jump to it. She was drying her hair by the fire, and was highly incensed when her privacy was abused by an unknown native.