The Road to Oxiana

by Robert Byron

  I have learned what I wanted to know: first, that the use of coloured mosaic out of doors reached its climax at the Timurid Renascence; and second, that the beauty of it in the Shrine here is nevertheless surpassed on six of the seven minarets at Herat, whose remains have an even finer quality and purer colour, and are not interrupted by plain brickwork. The few travellers who have visited Samarcand and Bokhara as well as the Shrine of the Imam Riza, say that nothing in those two towns can equal the last. If they are right, the Mosque of Gohar Shad must be the greatest surviving monument of the period, while the ruins of Herat show that there was once a greater.

  I tremble to think that of the four finest buildings in Persia, the Gumbad-i-Kabus, the small dome-chamber in the Friday Mosque at Isfahan, the Mosque of Gohar Shad here, and the Mosque of Sheikh Lutfullah at Isfahan, my acquaintance with two was postponed till my last fortnight in the country.

  Kariz (3000 ft.), May 8th.—We meant to stop at Seng-best to examine an XIth-century mausoleum and minaret which are visible a mile off the road. But a rainy sky made us push on to Turbat-i-Sheikh Jam. The Shrine there was disappointing. So was our lunch. It was in Isfahan I decided sandwiches were insupportable, and bought a blue bowl, which Ali Asgar used to fill with chicken mayonnaise before starting on a journey. Today there had been treachery in the Gastrells’ kitchen, and it was filled with mutton. Worse than that, we have run out of wine.

  Then began that end-of-the-world feeling which I had noticed before on the plain where Persia and Afghanistan meet, and which now struck Christopher too. Fields of opium poppies surrounded the infrequent villages, shining their fresh green leaves against the storm-inked sky. Purple lightning danced on the horizon. It had rained here already, and out in the desert we could smell the aromatic camel-thorn as if it was on fire. Yellow lupins mingled with big clumps of mauve and white iris. Kariz itself was pervaded by an overpowering scent, as sweet as bean-flowers, but more languid, more poetic. I walked out to try and place it. The opium flowers called me, glowing in the dusk like lamps of ice. But it was not from them.

  Kariz, May 9th.—It rained in the night. We tried to start, but came back after five hundred yards.

  Kariz, May 10th.—This morning we took horses to inspect the road and try out our army saddles. I mounted a bay mare, old, small, and starved; Christopher a white stallion, young, big, and wall-eyed. The difference in sex ensured all the pace that could be got out of them.

  At the Persian block-house in no-man’s-land we found an officer who had only been two days in command there and was already depressed beyond speech by the companionship of his few troopers, a savage dog, and a yardful of scraggy mares with their new-born foals. Not a tree nor a stream nor any hint of garden warded off the sodden yellow cow-parsleys of the desert. We offered him some cake, and said we must be getting on, to see the worst of the road where it crosses the marsh.

  He demurred, maintaining it was unsafe, but, seeing we were determined, came with us for the sake of company, riding with a rifle under his left thigh. A couple of troopers came too, and the whole party scattered out in line to reconnoitre all possible tracks We had gone a kilometre or so, when the officer shouted to me to observe a sleeping shepherd. Another of his scares, I thought, when I saw flies—too many of them—on the bare legs. A blue-brown mask, swollen to the size of a pumpkin, was cricked backwards: the eyes were shut, the black lips open.

  The officer was distraught. How could the man have died so near the block-house? When had he died? And what had caused his death? Did we think he could have been run over by a motor? Looking round at the plain dead level for ten miles in every direction, and remembering that the average traffic was one lorry a day, we did not think so: thus dashing our Persian’s last hope of pretending that a corpse in our path, if untoward, was still a sign of Progress.

  At length he took courage, dismounted, and lifted the body up. Its contents rattled. The limbs were crook’d and rigid. It had a bullet wound over the left eye, and another over the left breast. The man was a Kazak. His greying beard was thin enough to count the hairs. His knobbled stick had fallen where he fell, and seemed, as it lay there, a more human thing than the rotting hulk beside it.

  The officer said he must go back at once, to write a report. When we answered, of course, but we must go on, he grew frantic. The dilemma was solved by the appearance on the horizon of a solitary cavalier from the direction of Islamkillah. Christopher and I rode off to meet him. The officer followed, groaning. The stranger was an Afghan horse-coper, and told us that even his horse had got into difficulties on the road across the marsh; the mud had come up to his belly, as we could see. This was all we needed to know. After drinking tea at the block-house, we left the officer composing his report, and started to ride back by an alternative road.

  This led us, after an attack by dogs from a nomad encampment which took the stallion on its blind side and made it snort with fear, to the garrison town of Yusufabad, where an officer entertained us with sugar cakes in a clean carpeted room overlooking a garden of flowering broom and acacias. He was a handsome young fellow, smartly turned out, and had the politeness to sympathise with our interest in his country’s monuments.

  “Vous avez raison, Messieurs. Cette tour de Gumbad-i-Kabus, je la trouve unique dans le monde entier. Vous avez été à Isfahan? Naturellement. C’est épatant, n’est-ce pas? Il y a encore des antiquités ici… oui, toutes proches.” And he described the minaret of Kerat, which Diez illustrates and whose whereabouts all maps and enquiries had so far failed to elicit. If that was too far—as unluckily it was—there was the Maulana at Tayabad only a mile away, which was 504 years old.

  He also told us of a second road across the frontier to Islamkillah, which runs south-east from Yusufabad till it reaches the hills, thus avoiding the marsh. We may try it, as it seems that the ordinary road will need three or four days’ sun to dry it. The sky was cloudier than ever as we rode back to Kariz.

  AFGHANISTAN: Herat, May 12th.— Dear old Herat!

  Again I inhabit a square bare room with white walls and a blue dado and a ceiling of poles. The clang of the metalsmiths below brings back a memory of gloomy autumn days, of waiting, waiting. A curious procession reintegrates: the Noel party, the Indians, the Hungarian, the Punjabi doctor and the Charcoal-Burners, all menaced by winter and the closing of the roads. Now we have summer before us; yet the air blows chill through the open doors as I lie in bed watching the early-morning bustle of the street. There is a new car in the town, a dark blue Chevrolet, 1933 model. But the royal barouche is there too. The Commander-in-Chief is standing at the corner. Fewer people are carrying rifles than formerly, though everyone grasps a rose, or has one in his mouth. Perhaps roses have displaced rifles. There is certainly no sign of that “trouble in the spring”.

  I have just been down to get some tea, and seen the minarets in the dawn light from the roof at the head of the stairs. That light has altered. Five months ago it was a mournful gleam, waning day by day, weighing on my spirits even more than dawns when there was no light and rain uttered its hopeless patter on the tin roof. Now it will be stronger every morning. We can walk to Mazar if we want, instead of racing the winter and losing by a day.

  Our arrival here last night surprised ourselves as much as our hosts. Yesterday morning, about half-past ten, Christopher and I rode off to Yusufabad in a leisurely mood, intending to spend the day at the Maulana at Tayabad. On our way back the night before, we had noticed various low-lying points on the road that were still too deep in water for a car to pass them. Now they were almost dry. Simultaneously we saw a new storm rolling up behind us from Persia. It looked as if we must cross the frontier at once or endure another three days’ wait. We were better mounted than the day before. Christopher galloped back to fetch the car and luggage. I galloped on, found the Maulana, which had a beautiful stucco inscription backed by turquoise glaze, and reached Yusufabad again one minute before the car. Bundling in my saddle and saddle-bags, we set off under the
guidance of a peasant who wore a long crimson blouse sprigged with white leaves and whose hair was cut to the bob and fringe of a mediaeval page. There were no difficulties as far as Hajiabad, a small village near the hills. But after that, as we made our way along their lower slopes, we came to loose sand and could not have found the track without our guide. Monstrous cow-parsleys standing upright in the middle of it showed it had borne no other traffic this season. After a time we could see Islamkillah, a solitary fortress in the blue distance of the plain below, and eventually came out on the Herat road two miles beyond it, but dutifully drove back to comply with the frontier regulations. They gave us a dish of poached eggs as a reward.

  The hotel in Herat had been warned by telephone that foreigners were coming, and Seyid Mahmud was standing on the threshold. When he saw me, his eyes nearly fell out of his head, and he struck up a sort of antique chorus: “Mister-é-Bairun mariz bud, Mister-é-Bairun was ill. He has come back. Was ill, was ill. came back, came back. Mister-é-Bairun was ill, came back, was ill, came back”, etc., till Christopher, not knowing the signs of Afghan affection, thought he was in a madhouse. Do I flatter myself? Moss-roses were placed in our button-holes, the best carpets in our rooms, and pots of geraniums on our tables. Two kinds of sherbet were brought out. Sponge-cakes and my favourite jam would be ready tomorrow. The luggage was up in a twinkling.

  “Thank God for a country where things are done with gusto again,” said Christopher.

  Our delay at Kariz had one advantage: Thrush has gone on to Kandahar. He wrote a testimonial in Seyid Mahmud’s book, saying that by European standards the hotel was rather a pity, but by Afghan ones he supposed he had no complaints. This is the man who revels in discomfort.

  Herat, May 13th.—The municipal improvement mania has spread here from Persia. A small bandstand now shelters the policeman at the cross-roads, from which, if a cab totters round the corner, he intimidates it with a red truncheon and a whistling fit to scare the Chicago underworld. They are also pulling down the bazaar, and replacing it by a series of little piazzas for the different trades. This really is an improvement. The old tunnel is a fearsome place, desperately cold in winter, and of no architectural value.

  Nature has made other alterations. At Gazar Gah, where I last saw marigolds and petunias, the pool in the outer court is overhung with single white roses growing as thick as snow; instead of the whistle of the autumn wind, doves are fluttering about the pines and families making holiday in the decagonal pavilion. And seen from the terrace outside, the whole plain between the mountains and the Hari river is now a sea of varying greens and silver streams.

  Walking out to the Musalla with this diary under my arm, in search of peace to write it, I recognise each field, each bank, each twinkling ditch—but only as one recognises a face in strange clothes. Even the minarets have changed; their blue has grown more vivid, as if in answer to the landscape’s challenge. The huge round bases, that rose before out of the bare earth, rise now from lush emerald corn, in whose depths flourishes a bright purple monkshood; or from the shining white and filling grey-green pods of the opium crops; or from those low trees, scattered with gold when I first saw them, and bare as bones when I left, that have now turned into bushy deep-green mulberries. The sun dispenses a temperate heat from a sky of temperate blue. And over all presides that elusive languid scent which first met us at Kariz, borne from its petalled cave on the caressing summer breeze.

  People are talking on the other side of the Mausoleum. There is a platform there, facing the mountains, where I was intending to sit. But no; some mullahs have taken it. Books are spread out on the ground, and a group of downy-bearded novices are receiving instruction; while two others are sitting on a wall near by, reading to themselves. A frown from the mullah who is declaiming, and whose white turban is wound round a purple cone, asks me to keep away. I find a place opposite them, at a respectable distance, from which the tall black entrance and the big blue melon-dome above it dwarf the pied group on the platform. It is a pity they are so preoccupied. I might ask them else why they choose this site for lessons. Is it in honour of the people who are buried there? And if so, what do they know about them? Stories of Gohar Shad were still common talk here in the last century.

  It is not her beauty these stories recount; still less her patronage of the arts. To the people of Herat, who knew her for sixty years, she was a personality. The versatility of her life and the violence of her death made her the type of her age, an age when Herat was capital of an empire stretching from the Tigris to Sinkiang.

  One thinks of our own queens, Elizabeth and Victoria. Women of this kind are rare in Mohammadan annals. That is why, perhaps, Mohun Lai heard her still described, four hundred years later, as “the most incomparable woman in the world”. But the Timurids, though leaders of Mohammadan society, were Mongols by birth and tradition; their ideas of domestic life came from China, that paradise of masterful women. Timur’s first wife rode at her husband’s side through his early hardships and adventures. And later, in the palmy days at Samarcand, Clavijo records how his other wives and his daughters-in-law gave parties independently of their husbands, at which their chief amusement was to make the men drunk. Gohar Shad, herself the daughter of a Jagatay noble, took advantage of Mongol custom to indulge more serious tastes.

  Her father was the Emir Ghiyas-ad-Din, whose ancestor had saved the life of Jenghis Khan. She was married to Shah Rukh, probably in 1388, certainly before 1394 when their son Ulugh Beg was born. It was a successful marriage, according to the ballads of Herat, which sing of Shah Rukh’s love for her. But little is known of their first forty years together, except what concerns her buildings. She founded the Mosque at Meshed, for instance, in 1405, and took Shah Rukh to see it in August 1419, when he praised the patterns and workmanship and dedicated a gold lamp to the tomb of the saint. It is only later she comes to the front of the stage, first as the consort of Shah Rukh’s old age, and then as his widow.

  I was right about the single minaret over there, in thinking it was part of her College. A sketch done by Major Durand of the Boundary Commission in 1885, just before the demolition, shows the quadrangle of the College standing adjacent to the Musalla, and this minaret attached to its main gate. So I imagine it, overlooking the royal foundress and her two hundred ladies, as they arrived from the town on that visit of inspection that had such amiable consequences for the students of the College. On account of the ladies, whose emotions were liable to get the better of them, the students had been sent out; all except one, who had fallen asleep—it may have been a scented summer afternoon like this. On waking up, and looking from his window to see what the noise was, he caught the eye of “a ruby-lipped lady”, who hastened to his room, but was betrayed, on rejoining the royal party, by the “irregularity of her dress and manners”. To prevent further incidents of this kind, or rather to bless them, Gohar Shad forthwith married all her two hundred attendants to the students, who had previously been ordered to avoid the society of women. She furnished each student with clothes, a salary, and a bed. And she ruled that husband and wife should meet once a week, on condition that the former attended to his studies. “She did all this”, adds Mohun Lai piously, “to arrest the progress of adultery.”

  Shah Rukh had eight sons, of whom Ulugh Beg, the eldest, and Baisanghor, the fifth, were also sons of Gohar Shad. Intellectually, these two fulfilled the promise of their parentage; they and their mother became the central figures of the Renascence. Ulugh Beg leaves the stage of Herat for that of Transoxiana. In 1410 his father made him Viceroy of Samarcand, and ten years later his mother visited him there to see his new observatory. His astronomical calculations led him to reform the calendar, and brought him posthumous honour at Oxford, where they were published in 1665.

  Baisanghor, living beside his parents in Herat, played no part in politics beyond that of president of his father’s council. His court was of poets and musicians, and he extended his mother’s passion for building to painting
and book-production. A corps of forty illuminators, binders and calligraphers worked under his immediate eye. Among the latter he himself held an eminent place, and that this was not accorded him out of flattery can be seen from his inscription at Meshed, which I must compare one day with the other specimens of his hand in the library there and the Serai at Constantinople.

  Like so many of his family, this talented prince failed to discriminate between the pleasures of the mind and the body. He died of drink in 1433. Forty days’ mourning were decreed, and a vast concourse lined the route of the funeral cortège from his residence of the White Garden to his mother’s College. There, in the College quadrangle, Gohar Shad had built a mausoleum. The College has disappeared, all save that one minaret. But looking across the fields, I see that the Mausoleum is still a scene of theological study, and that the happy band of students who married Gohar Shad’s ladies have been followed by others down to the present time.

  Gohar Shad by now was rising sixty, and had another quarter of a century to live. It was her affection for Baisanghor’s son, Ala-ad-Daula, that brought her into politics. For the rest of her life she worked to secure his interest in the succession, to her ultimate undoing.

  Her partiality made enemies of those it aimed to exclude, particularly of her other grandson Abdullatif, son of Ulugh Beg, who had been brought up at his grandparents’ court in Herat. Furious at the attentions lavished on Ala-ad-Daula, he removed himself to his father in Samarcand, at which Shah Rukh, who adored him, was inconsolable. Gohar Shad, therefore, to please her ageing husband, set out to bring him back, travelling up the road we shall take tomorrow, in the heart of winter. Abdullatif may have had reason for his flight. For the old lady, having fetched him back, turned her spleen instead on Mohammad Juki, Shah Rukh’s youngest son, to such effect that he expired, as Khondemir puts it, of mortification. He also was buried in the Mausoleum.