Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

by Vita Sackville-West

  The hillside, then, is alive with flocks. “Baa-a-a!” go the sheep, and “Meh-h-h!” go the goats. They bleat, they bleat; even today, in England, when a flock of sheep is turned loose into the meadow at the bottom of my garden, and their bleatings reach me, I whirl back to the Murvarid Pass, and feel the sun hot on my hands; a queer sensation, analogous to that sensation with which one wakes at night convinced that one’s bed has turned itself round the other way. There are thousands of them, jostling, leaping, hustling each other among the boulders. Some of them are very lame, but what of that? That is reality, not romance; lame or not lame, they must go forward. There are two hundred miles to cover before the sun gets too hot and the already scant pasture shrivels up. So the shepherds come after them with sticks. “Oh,” say the shepherds—a flat, English “Oh” that sounds curiously out of place on the Persian hills. Oh. A real Cockney vowel. But the beasts respond. They leap forward as if in terror. We, on our mules, sit motionless while they huddle by. The men take very little notice of us, unless they stop to ask a question; they do not seem to notice that we are Europeans, and, as such, figures of romance to them, surely, coming as we do from another place? No, to them we are simply a caravan travelling in the opposite direction, an obstacle, albeit a patient and long-suffering obstacle, to be passed. Oh. And the sea of backs surges round the legs of our mules. The smell of fleeces comes up to us, acrid. The men follow, in their blue linen coats and high black felt hats, and their sticks fall with a thud on the woolly backs. Oh. The sun is hot and high. The jade-green river flickers in the sun down in the ravine. The snow-mountains stretch out like a spine in the distance. An old woman passes us on foot, carrying across her shoulders a limp baby donkey. Some squawking, flapping hens pass, perched on a load of pots and pans on a pony’s back. A litter of puppies, that presently will be savage, camp-guarding dogs, but now are round, woolly, and frightened, pass clinging and sliding on another pack. They try to growl as they go by, but without much conviction. A child passes, beating up his flock of lambs and kids—youth put in charge of youth. Oh. And then a fresh shower of sheep and goats, animated boulders. How stony the road is! How slow our progression! Come along, come, along. Oh.

  This, then, was life shorn of all mechanical ingenuity. One forgets too readily that there are still places in the world which civilisation has been utterly unable to touch. Even the wheel, most elementary of mechanical devices, here did not, could not, exist. Dawn, the hour at which one started; dusk, the hour at which one stopped; springs, at which one drank; beasts of burden, to which one bound one’s moving home; a beast from the flock, which one slaughtered and ate fresh; fire; a story; sleep. There was nothing else.

  In the evenings we saw the nomads under a different aspect, when we had pitched our own camp, squatting by their black tents, the smoke of their pipes rising upwards with the smoke of their fires, while the women cooked and the animals strayed browsing. It was then, when they were at rest, and the sense of their weary progress was suspended, that the charm of a pastoral existence reasserted itself. Along the road, one was conscious only of harshness, violence, and fatigue. The limping horse, the dying ram, the woman near to her delivery, the man with his foot bound up in bloody rags—all these were painful sights, made more painful by the knowledge that there could be no respite and no relief. But in the evenings, in some quiet valley, with a spring gushing from a rock near by, and the moon newly risen from behind the hill, then the world did indeed seem to have returned to an early, limpid simplicity. Theocritus and the Bible took on a fresh and more vivid significance. The pastoral and the patriarchal, ceasing to be decorative merely as a convention of literature, became desirable also as a part of life.

  Meanwhile we climbed for most of that day, conquering step by step the Murvarid Pass, only to drop down again, having reached the top; and as evening fell we came down on the lovely valley of Deh Diz, with its single sentinel poplar and a ruined castle in the distance, and the long ridge of the snowy Kuh-i-Mangasht beyond. Our camping-place this time was in an orchard of pomegranates, beside a clear mountain stream, on a grassy terrace strewn with rocks and boulders. The ropes had already been untied; the packs had fallen to the ground; the men were bending over them sorting out our possessions; the little brown lamb which the Khans had given us, and which had trotted meekly all day beside our caravan, was hanging dead and skinned from a bough with a drop of blood at the end of its nose; a thread of blue smoke was already rising from our kitchen. The evening was very soft and serene, the surrounding hills enormous and shadowy. A sense of peace crept over our weary limbs, and a sense of sudden intimacy with this quiet spot, which none of us, almost certainly, would ever see again. Already its contours were familiar, and someone had picked a handful of the little wild pink gladiolus, and put it in a glass on our rickety camp table. It is curious how quickly, in this kind of life, any resting place becomes home. It is as though the mind, instinctively rejecting the implication of transitoriness, sought, by an excessive adaptability, for compensation. Yet we knew that when we left at daybreak on the following morning, no trace would remain of our passage but the blackened ring of our dead camp fire and four squares of trodden grass, that were the floor of our tents. The golden oriole will return to the myrtle bough, and the spring will bubble without any memory of those who stooped to fill their cups.

  XII

  But we were not destined to leave Deh Diz on the following morning. As we were sitting round the fire after dinner, we heard a distant clap of thunder, and the muleteers came running up to say that a storm was upon us. From the minutes between a flash of lightning and the next clap, we reckoned that we had twenty minutes in which to prepare. Everybody ran in different directions—some to knock the picket-pegs of the mules firmer into the ground, others to perform the same office for the tent-ropes, others to dig little trenches round the tents, others to carry our dinner table into shelter. Scarcely were we ready for the storm when it burst upon us. We five had all gathered together into the biggest tent, and as the storm crashed above us we hung on to the tent-pole with our united strength, expecting every moment to be carried away, tent and all, in the sudden gale of wind that tore screaming up the valley. The hail came down in torrents, battering on the canvas, and we thought thankfully of our little hastily dug trenches. Peeping through the flap, we could see the valley wholly illuminated by the magnificent flashes, with which the thunder was now continuous; the snow on the distant ranges gleamed white, and the valley showed an unearthly green, as the sky was torn asunder as with a swift and golden sword. The storm swept on; we heard it cracking over the hills; it was as though the wheels of a great chariot had driven over us, in the heavens, and were now rolling onwards, above the oak forests and the black tents of the crouching nomads, describing great circles, and returning now and then to visit our camp at intervals through the night.

  XIII

  When we looked out in the morning, we saw to our astonishment that the ground was white with snow. There was no chance of continuing our journey that day: the mules could never have carried the weight of the soaking tents. We were condemned to a day of inactivity at Deh Diz. By ten o’clock, however, a warm sun had melted all the snow and the tents were steaming like the flanks of a horse. We hung all the wet things we could find on the tent-ropes to dry, and stretched ourselves on rugs in the sun, to the delight of a circle of inquisitive villagers. It was a change to spend such a lazy day. We read the Apocrypha, I remember, and wandered a little, but not very far afield, not much further than the spring where we refilled our water bottles; we admired the village giant, a grand figure at least seven foot high; we talked with a wandering dervish, who strayed up to our camp carrying a sort of sceptre, surmounted by the extended hand of Ali in shining brass; we listened to a blind man chanting an interminable poem about hazrat-i-ísá (his Majesty Jesus); we watched the procession of women going to the spring. They crept past, with their empty goat-skins, stealing furtive glances at us out of their long dark eyes; th
en scurried on, in a burst of mischievous giggling, like a lot of children caught in a conspiracy. Presently they returned in a more sober mood, weighted down by the heavy, black, dripping goat-skins that lay shining across their shoulders and drenched their blue rags. We watched them, as one watches shy animals creeping out of a wood—the wood of their secret, unrevealed lives, spent in the mud-houses of Deh Diz, among bickerings and jealousies and hardships, crouched over a pot on a smoking fire, to the upraised voice of the mother-in-law, and the cry of the child, till the figure of a man darkened the entrance, and a babble arose, and a clutching for the partridges he carried in his hand. Very secretive they looked, as cunning as slaves and as silly as children, but pretty under their snoods of blue, with the characteristic surreptitious walk of those who go barefooted under heavy burdens. So we idled, becoming acquainted with the habits of village life in Deh Diz, while our mules wandered loose among the pomegranates, cropping at the grass, and the eagles circled high over the hills where the gladiolus and the gentian grew.

  XIV

  The stage between Deh Diz and Qaleh Madresseh lay through the most beautiful country we had as yet seen. We were now in the very heart of the ranges. The road after first leaving Deh Diz is rather dull; it follows the valley, in a switchback of small descents and small ascents, wearisome and monotonous. We had to find our interest where best we could—in immediate anticipation of the future, and distant memorials of the past—that is, in a man ploughing with two bullocks amongst a scatter of boulders, yelling and groaning at his beasts, as his primitive plough jerked up and down the slope, turning the sod which perhaps would grow him a handful of corn in autumn, perhaps, and perhaps not—in a wayside cemetery, where among blood-red poppies stone lions of archaic design commemorated the valour of bygone Bakhtiari. Poignant little cemeteries, these, lost in the hills. Lions used to abound in these mountains, and the Bakhtiari, when they did not want to fight the lion, had a special code for dealing with him. Lions were of two kinds, they said: Moslems and infidels. They might be known by their colour, the Moslem having a bright yellow coat, the infidel a darker coat, with a black mane. On meeting the Moslem it was sufficient to say, “O cat of Ali, I am the servant of Ali,” when the lion would retire into the mountains. On meeting the infidel, however, the wisest course was to take to your heels.

  Lions are reported even today in the Pusht-i-Kuh, the range stretching to the northwest of the Bakhtiari range, and bears are known to exist still in the Bakhtiari country; and leopards, notably the snow-leopard, but we never saw so much as the spoor of any such animal. Wolves, lynxes, and hyenas were also common in Layard’s [18th-century English archaeologist] day, adding to the dangers which that indubitably brave man had to face whenever he set out, sometimes alone, sometimes with a guide whom he justifiably mistrusted, to look for tombs or inscriptions among the unmapped hills and valleys. I thought of Layard often as I rode along. It is easy enough to confront dangers when one is in perfect health, but Layard himself never knew when an attack of ague would not compel him to dismount, and, lying on the ground with his horse’s bridle fastened to his wrist, spend two or three hours in delirium and unconsciousness. An unpleasant predicament, in a country infested by murderers, marauders, and wild animals. A brave man, I thought, as I looked at the stone lions among the poppies.

  By midday, we had rejoined the Karoun, and were riding along a rocky path sheer above the river, which presently brought us to the splendid gorge of Pul-i-Godar. Here the Karoun winds between pointed hills, to lose itself again in the intricacy of the ranges. We left it far below us, for after Pul-i-Godar the track rose steeply, bringing us to the top of a pass, with truly splendid views over the tumbled country. Strange geological convulsions had heaved up the hills; the strata, which were as definitely marked as though they had been gigantic slates laid flat one against the other, stood up on end instead of lying horizontally superimposed; in some of the hills the lines of strata were actually vertical, in others they were aslant, so that one could imagine one saw the huge processes still at work. In the course of ages, those masses of rock would shift under the weight of some unseen pressure; that which was now oblique would become perpendicular, and that which was now perpendicular would gradually heel over until it slanted to the opposite side. These mountains were being slowly turned upside down. It was not so much the grandeur of the landscape which impressed one—though that was sublime enough—as the awful evidence of nature labouring on a cosmic scale. The wild loneliness of the place, the ramifications of the valleys leading up into unknown fastnesses, the track made by generations of men crossing the mountains—all this produced a sense of some elemental strength which excited and yet sobered the imagination.

  And now came the tribes, the slow-moving, inevitable tribes, winding up through the hills in a long and constant stream. Dwarfed though they were by their native scenery, dwarfed into crawling battalions along the narrow ledges, they still seemed an integral part of the country. It seemed right that these mountains should witness their pilgrimage in the two temperate seasons, and right also that the mountains should be left to their own loneliness during the violence of summer and the desolation of winter. On the Murvarid Pass we had met the tribes coming down upon us; now, as we made our way down into the valley towards Qaleh Madrasseh, we met them coming up towards us, their upturned glances swiftly reckoning the best way to pass, their animals struggling up from rock to rock. Down, down, round the hairpin bends, seeing the path far below, still covered with that moving life; down, right down, into the valley where the black tents were plentifully sprinkled about. Then—rest, on an open grassy space hemmed in by hills; another day was over.

  But Rahim, the well-meaning and unfortunate, tripped over a tent-rope and upset our soup.

  XV

  What would happen to oneself, I wonder, if one were to spend a long time in such a place as Qaleh Madrasseh? A week, a month, a year, thirty years? Thirty years. If one were to go there at the age of thirty, and remain fixed till one was sixty—the most important years of life drifting by at Qaleh Madrasseh? One would explore the paths running up into the mountains, mere goat-tracks; one would come to some unmapped village; one would meet and talk with a number of fresh, ignorant, and unsophisticated people. One would come to know every wild flower in its season, and every change of light. But what would happen inside oneself? That is really the important thing. The only goat-tracks one wants to explore are the goat-tracks of the mind, running up into the mountains; the only sophistication one really wants to escape from is one’s own. To start afresh; unprejudiced; untaught. Changes of light, coming from the internal illumination, not from the play of limelight over a ready-set scene. Away from papers, away from talk (though not, I stipulate, wholly away from books); cast back on personal resources, personal and private enjoyments.

  Thirty years at Qaleh Madrasseh.

  Of what is civilised life composed? Of movement, news, emotions, conflict, and doubt. I think these headings may be expanded to fit every individual requirement? Now at Qaleh Madrasseh most of them would be deleted: movement certainly, except such slow and contemplative movement as could be performed on one’s own legs; news certainly, except such local and practical news as would brush one in passing by word of mouth. But what of the growth of the mind? The mind would have only its own rich pasture to browse upon. It would rise superior even to these tribes flowing backwards and forwards—and in the space of thirty years it would witness the flowing of the tide sixty times—it would be filled with the sense of its own inexhaustible riches, dependent upon no season, dependent upon no change of pasture from Malamir to Chahar Mahal, no exchanging of the south for the north. The mind would browse and brood; sow and reap. Few of us have known such leisure. Those who achieve it are called eccentrics for their pains: it seems to me that they are among the wise ones of the earth. The world is too much with us, late and soon; we are too stringily entangled in our network of obligations and relationships.

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  But I, when I say Qaleh Madrasseh, mean Qaleh Madrasseh. I mean that exact spot, whose contours I have learnt, whose clefts I have contemplated, enviously, running up into the mountains and had no leisure to explore. So far, at least, I am on solid ground. But of the effect of solitude in such a place I know no more than did Marlowe or Milton. That is a speculation which, no doubt, would never have occurred to either of those great poets or to their humbler contemporaries; they had not acquired the habit of playing with hypothetical complications as we have acquired it. The very mention of the name sufficed, Persepolis and Parthia, Ternate and Tidore, to hang an agreeably rosy veil between themselves and reality; it brushed an Orient glow across their pages; they felt no need to follow up the implications to their logical conclusion. Had anyone suggested their visiting Parthia or Persepolis, Tidore or Ternate, they would no doubt have recoiled in dismay. For one thing, they probably had but a very vague idea of where these places were situated. But I protest that, did occasion offer, I would eagerly embrace those thirty years at Qaleh Madrasseh, though with an equally vague idea of what the consequences might be. What, for instance, would become of one’s capacity for emotion? Would it become stultified through disuse, or sharpened through denial? What would become of one’s power for thought? Would that become blunted, in the absence of any whetstone whereon to grind itself? Or would a new, high wisdom arise, out of an inhuman sense of proportion, accomplishing nothing and desirous of no achievement, but attaining through contemplation a serene and perfectly tolerant estimate of the frailties of mankind? For one would arrive at Qaleh Madrasseh, at the beginning of the thirty years’ seclusion, not as an Oriental mystic, having no experience of the world of intellect, vanity, and science, but as a fully mapped exile from a European state in the agonies of its striving after civilisation. Glutted and weary with information, confused with creeds, the old words knocking against one another in the brain and producing no more than a tinny clatter, one would settle down either to a stagnant repose or else to a concentrated readjustment of values.