Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

by Vita Sackville-West

  Already the promise of summer hung over Persia; the planes were heavy in leaf, and the trickle of water became more persistent, as the gardeners (with one trouser leg rolled up to the thigh, a fashion I could never wholly explain) released the pent-up streams and allowed them to pour over the thirsty beds, or padded bare-footed about the garden, splashing water to lay the dust in the early morning. We no longer courted the sun, but darkened the house all day with reed blinds, raising them only in the evening when the snows of Demavend turned red, and the dusk came quickly, and the little owls began to hoot, and the frogs hopped on the garden path, and the breeze rose and sighed in the planes. The imminence of departure oppressed me; I was beginning to say, “This time next week…” and to suffer when I heard people making plans for a date, not very far distant, when I should no longer be there; heartlessly they made their plans, the people for whom life flowed continuous, while I sat by and listened, under sentence of death; then the days began to rush, and the day came which was still an ordinary day for other people, but for me was a day so different. An early start, so like, so unlike, the start for Isfahan; the motor at the door; luggage being carried out; the curtained windows of other houses, whose inhabitants still slept, would sleep for three hours longer, by which time I should be sixty miles away; the early morning life just stirring, the white pony going his rounds with the water-casks; a freshness over everything; the dogs wanting to come; being refused; the servants wishing me a good journey, and bringing me little presents; the fat cook coming out in his white shoes with a basket of little cakes. My room empty upstairs, but my books still on the shelves; my handwriting, reversed, still on the blotting-paper; good-bye, good-bye; for Heaven’s sake let us get this over. The guard at the gate saluting, then the streets, the Kasvin gate, the Kasvin road; what a difference, between arrival and departure! then, everything had been new, I had looked with curiosity, Demavend himself had had to be pointed out to me and named, I had not known what to expect next round the turn of the road; now, everything was a landmark to be left behind, every place had a meaning and an association; there was the shop where we had bought the pots, there was the place of meeting for the paper-chase, there was the track that led up to Var-dar-Var, where we had first found the wild almond in flower, and had marked off an unknown shrub with a ring of stones. Still the donkeys trailed along the road, though camels were few, for they had gone up to Gilan for the spring grazing; and every one I met going towards Teheran I envied; and every one I overtook going towards Kasvin I pitied for being in the same plight as I.

  After Kasvin the road was unfamiliar, and the character of the landscape changed with surprising abruptness. We were no longer on the roof; the high, arid plateaus were gone; the vegetation became lush and green, the climate changed from the clear air of four thousand feet to the mild, steamy atmosphere of sub-tropical sea-level. We had dropped from over four thousand feet in a few hours, down a precipitous road into the valley of the White River. The scenery was fine, in its way; groves of trees descended the steep slopes to the banks of the river, and between the trees could be seen green meadows, as green as Devonshire, with cows peacefully grazing or—an odd effect—camels grazing in this Devonshire landscape, as who should come upon a herd of camels in the meadows above the Dart; the valley of the White River had its beauty, but it was not Persia as I understood it, and I resolved that I would never bring any one into Persia for the first time by that road, but would subject them to the rigours of the plains and passes of Kermanshah and Hamadan. Evening fell; we seemed to have been travelling interminably; the continual hairpin corners made driving very tiring; we met strings of hooded waggons, whose miserable teams could scarcely drag them up the hill; men were shouting, and tugging at the bridles, and thrashing the stumbling horses; we got past them all somehow, and drew up in a village by the river where a notice-board proclaimed the Hotel Fantasia.

  It was well named, for a crazier building I never saw; an outside staircase, with two steps missing, led up to a wooden balcony, and here we pitched our camp-beds and slept as well as the fleas would allow us. There had been no fleas at Dililjan or at Kum; the rooms there had been bare and clean; it was typical of the difference between that happy and this miserable journey. There, we had gone to sleep conscious of the free space all around us; here, we were in a narrow valley with the river roaring in a brown flood fifty yards away, and no sense of Asia.…

  SELECTIONS FROM TWELVE DAYS (1928)

  Long out of print, the highly colorful chapters of Vita’s Twelve Days, subtitled in the American edition “An Account of a Journey Across the Bakhtiari Mountains in Southwestern Persia,” figure among her best travel writing. She may not have seen a “pleasing curve” in them, or any particular shape, but this most adventuresome of her adventures was clearly worth recording, with its vast spaces and arduous mountains.

  TWELVE DAYS

  I

  For a long time I believed that it would be impossible to make a book out of these experiences; I could see no shape in them, no pleasing curve; nothing but a series of anti-climaxes, and too much repetition of what I had done, and written down, before. Yet I was loath to let the whole thing go unrecorded. Was it for this that I had gone footsore, cold, hot, wet, hungry? climbed up, and scrambled down? covered all those miles? looked at all those goats? Surely not. There must be a possible book in it somewhere. The book was always in my mind, teasing at me, and little by little, as time receded, it began to take shape, a meaning began to rise up out of the welter, a few definite conclusions which really had some bearing on half-formulated ideas; besides, the fingers which have once grown accustomed to a pen soon itch to hold one again: it is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind; how the observation of last year seems childish, superficial; how this year—even this week—even with this new phrase—it seems to us that we have grown to a new maturity. It may be a fallacious persuasion, but at least it is stimulating, and so long as it persists, one does not stagnate.

  I look back as through a telescope, and see, in the little bright circle of the glass, moving flocks and ruined cities.

  II

  There they are, a long way off, and looking at the map of Asia, a kind of awe comes over me that I should be able to visualise the place represented by a name in cold black print. I know how vast are the spaces which on the map cover one inch. I know how high and arduous are the mountains which on the map deepen only into a stronger shade of brown. I think of life going on there, the same today as when I, so briefly, brushed past it. The nomads are on the move; their black tents dot the plain; the fierce dogs rush out barking, as a wild figure on horseback gallops up and flings himself from the saddle. At night the black tents cower between red fires. It is exactly the same for them this year as last, and the days which stand out so vividly for me were for them merely the uncalendared days of ordinary existence. Malamir today scorches in the sun. Do-Pulan sleeps in the shadow of the hill by the banks of the Karoun. In the dripping gorge below Gandom Kar the crown imperials rear their brilliant orange among the rocks.

  The Bakhtiari country. “Bakhtiari,” says the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “are one of the great nomad tribes of Persia.” It goes on to mention the Haft-lang and the Chahar-lang as the two main divisions of the tribe; it records a stormy and blood-stained history. “Here,” says Lord Curzon, “in a mise en scène which unites all the elements of natural grandeur—snowy crags, rugged hills, mountain ravines—are the yelaks or summer quarters of the tribes.” Alas, how bleak and brief is the written word.

  One of the great nomad tribes of Persia, the Bakhtiari are Lurs, but who the Lurs are and whence they came, as Lord Curzon says, is one of the unsolved
riddles of history. “A people without a history, a literature, or even a tradition,” he says, “presents a phenomenon in face of which science stands abashed. Are they Turks? Are they Persians? Are they Semites? All three hypotheses have been urged. They appear to belong to the same ethnical group as the Kurds, their neighbours on the north; nor does their language, which is a dialect of Persian, differ materially from the Kurdish tongue. On the other hand, they consider it an insult to be confounded with the Kurds, whom they call Leks; and the majority of writers have agreed in regarding them as the veritable relics of the old Aryan or Iranian stock, who preceded Arabs, Turks, and Tartars in the land. Whilst, however, we may accept this as the most probable hypothesis, and may even be led thereby to regard with heightened interest these last survivals of an illustrious stock, we are not compelled to endorse the conjectural connection of Bakhtiari with Bactria, which has been propounded by some writers, or to localise their ancestral home. (Some have gone so far as to base on this resemblance the assertion that the Bakhtiari are the relics of one of the Greek colonies left by Alexander in Asia, an hypothesis for which the further support is claimed of a similarity in the Greek and Bakhtiari national dances.) It is sufficient to believe that they are Aryans by descent, and to know that they have lived for centuries in their present mountains.” Rawlinson, who travelled among the Bakhtiari, characterised them as “the most wild and barbarous of all the inhabitants of Persia”; but we, making plans for our expedition, were less interested in the history and nature of the tribe than in the road which we should have to travel.

  We had spent many an evening in Teheran, poring over maps and discussing our journey across the Bakhtiari country. It had not been easy to get information; the maps were most inadequate; there seemed to be no books in Teheran available on the subject of more recent date than Sir Henry Layard’s, which related an expedition undertaken in 1840, nor were there any Europeans in Teheran who had travelled over the Bakhtiari Road. We had to rely on a few letters, none of which were very reassuring. A young officer in the Indian Army wrote that he had never been so exhausted in his life, and other accounts spoke of precipices and crazy bridges, and swirling rivers to ford—all of which, save for the wail about exhaustion, proved to be completely misleading. Travellers like to exaggerate the perils they have run; so, not to fall into the common error, I say at the outset that never at any moment were our brittle limbs in the slightest danger. The Bakhtiari Road, certainly, is not for those who like a country stroll; but it may be undertaken by the most cowardly if they are but sufficiently active. Indeed, the only intrepidity which we displayed was our determination to go despite the romantic discouragement which we received.

  The Bakhtiari Khans living in Teheran gave a different account of their own country. Either they were loath to acknowledge that their famous Road was not made of asphalt, or else in the amiable mendacious way of the East they wished to flatter our ears with pleasant hearing; I remember that on asking one of them if it was possible to ride over the Road, or if one must go on foot, I obtained the startling reply, “Ride? but you can go in a motor!” Now this was not true. It was indeed magnificently untrue: it was a lie on the grand scale. By courtesy it is known as the Bakhtiari Road, but actually it is a trail, a track, which leads, now up, now down, over wild and mountainous country; and as for wheeled traffic, no one could push even a wheelbarrow over it. My neighbour at dinner must have known how soon and how thoroughly his words would be disproved; but after the manner of his race he no doubt thought it more agreeable to produce a comfortable impression at the moment, leaving the future to take care of itself. Familiar with the Persian habit, I forbore from argument. Sitting there at dinner in the sumptuous house of the rich Khans, the Road seemed remote enough; a large façade of civilisation seemed to have been erected, a façade built up out of the French language, poker and poker chips, and the innovation by which the Persians laid aside their kolahs after dinner; but behind it rose the mountains which turned all this sophistication to a sham. The Salon pictures of 1880, the candelabra, the ormolu, even the acetylene lamps on the table—giving a glaring white light and known frequently to explode—could not wholly eliminate the sense of a certain primitive, feudal organisation in the background—the source of wealth, the domain and territory where our suave hosts abandoned their pretences, and went back to the brutalities they had known as little boys. Those carpets hanging on the walls, those amorini, that representation of Omar accepting a draught of wine from the cup-bearer—those had been woven by women of the tribes, rocking a cradle with one hand while with the other they threaded the swift shuttle. Soft and polite, our hosts had, elsewhere, a complete, separate existence. They had no intention of talking about it. Of course not. The Road? The Bakhtiari Road? Why, you can go by motor. Who among us betrays his family secrets to a stranger? All is for the best; and we talk least about what we know most intimately. In fact, the more glibly a man talks, the more you may mistrust his knowledge. Complete, detailed intimacy begets reticence. The mountains rise in the background, willy-nilly; but they are blocked out by the poker-chips; it is the façade which we all put up.

  Little by little, our expedition began to take shape. The dates were settled and a letter despatched to Isfahan ordering tents and mules. Our Bakhtiari friends in Teheran promised us an escort. (An escort? Here was a hint, surely, that the Road was not quite the Route Nationale they would have us believe?) We dragged out our camp equipment, and sorted it on the landing at the top of the stairs: two beds, two sleeping-bags, a Rawkee chair, a folding table, a green canvas bucket, two felt-covered water bottles, a blue tin basin. My camera. My films, in tin cylinders. An amphora full of apricot jam. So much, and no more, would Harold Nicolson and I provide. Our dogs nosed round uneasily, scenting departure. Meanwhile, the caravan increased: to Harold Nicolson, Gladwyn Jebb, and myself, the original three, were added Copley Amory from the American Legation in Teheran, and Lionel Smith, who by letter announced his intention of coming up from Baghdad to join us; so that altogether we were five Europeans setting out on the Bakhtiari Road.

  XI

  Down at the foot of the hill, in the gorge where the bright-green river crept between the rocks, we halted and looked up at the hill we had to climb. The whole hillside was noisy with bleatings. It seemed, as we gazed upwards at the trail, that the hillside was in fact coming down upon us; as though the stones and boulders had been loosened, and leapt down the hill, now singly, now in a moving flood, pouring down steadily from the very summit, with incessant cries among the stunted oaks. Far overhead, in the blue, planed a couple of eagles. The morning sun blazed still in the east, throwing long blue shadows on the distant snow-mountains. And the air was filled with the distressful cries of the flock as they poured down the precipitous slopes, driven onward by the voice of the shepherds.

  Twice a year, in spring and autumn, the tribes move. In spring they go up from the scorched plains towards which we ourselves were travelling, to the higher plains of Chahar Mahal; in the autumn they come down again, driving all their possessions before them, over the two hundred miles of the road. And here were we in the midst of them—very literally in the midst, for the flocks surged round our mules, making progress impossible, and we had to sit patient in the saddle, looking down upon the sea of backs, till the way was cleared and the mules were able to scramble a few yards further, up the steep rocky tract, with a sudden straining of the muscles, a sudden putting forth of strength; and when we stopped again, the green river below us seemed a little further away, the beat of the sun a little more powerful. We were going against all that moving life … we ourselves felt pleasantly exalted by the flattery of travelling in the opposite direction.

  So many thousand faces. The long, silly faces of sheep, the satyric faces of goats with their little black horns; the patient faces of tiny donkeys, picking their way under their heavy loads;… a litter of puppies slithering about on a mule’s pack, a baby in a cradle slung across its mother’s shoulders. The hens
travelled too, perched on the back of a donkey. Behind each separate herd—for each herd, in its way, represented a self-contained little family—came the men, beating the stragglers up with sticks and uttering strange cries which the beasts recognise and obey; then came the women, also beating up the stragglers, young women in bright red and yellow shawls, old women who must have crossed the mountains a hundred times. They were all too weary or too apathetic to stare much at us. Some, indeed, stopped us to make a practical enquiry: was the snow deep on the passes? were the rivers in flood? was the mud bad? for we had come down the way they must go up, and in those hills news circulates only by word of mouth. We reassured them; they nodded dully, and passed on.

  We had come down the way that they must go up, and knew the exhaustion that lay before them, the passes to be climbed, the steep descents that would lead them down on the other side, the changes of weather, the long stretches up the ravines where the greasy mud checks every footstep. But for us, each difficulty conquered was conquered for ever and left behind; we should not pass that way again. For them it was different. It was only one journey among many journeys, renewed twice a year from the cradle to the grave.

  * * *

  The men who drive the flocks are tired. The women who follow the men are tired too; often they have just become, or are on the point of becoming, mothers. The children who drag along after their parents limp and whimper. To us, who come from Europe, there is something poetic in a Persian shepherd calling to his goats and sheep; but the Persian shepherd himself sees nothing except the everyday business of getting a lot of tiresome animals along. Since romance is the reality of somewhere else or of some other period, here, on the Bakhtiari Road, this truth is doubly applicable. Persia is certainly somewhere else, and a long way, too, in relation to England, and this Biblical form of existence certainly belongs to a period other than the twentieth century—it is an anachronism in our eyes, and therefore romantic; the double elements of space and time, geographical and chronological, necessary to romance, are thus amply satisfied. We are on the Bakhtiari Road, in one of the wildest parts of Persia; let us accept it at its face value, and see what is to be got out of it in terms of the picturesque. Let us be quite cynical about it; let us, by all means, be romantic while we may.