by Jill Worrall
The architects had lavished much decorative detail on the building, as befitted its status. A round lantern dome sheds light into the entrance foyer and in the centre of the courtyards are underground cisterns, their roofs doubling as unloading platforms for the camels.
The sound of thumping generators and rattling concrete mixers emanates from the Qajar courtyard, which a large sign in Farsi announces is out of bounds to visitors. Instead we disappear into the silent corridors of one of the Safavid buildings. The raised alcoves are in deep shadow, but we can still make out the wooden tethering rods that had been set into their bases. Camels were once brought in here, tied up and the valuable goods they carried unloaded directly onto their masters’ platforms.
The caravanserai is set in the middle of an immense plain ringed by distant mountains. Where the two meet, the land shimmers in the light and white mist seems to be wreathed around the base of the mountains, but on a second glance the mist has flowed out across the plain transforming into a glistening salt lake. From a distance it is impossible to tell what is mirage and what is reality.
Reza and I are sitting in the back seat shelling walnuts while the green van consumes the kilometres. Reza B throws a plastic bag of seeds over to us. About the length of a pumpkin seed, they are thinner and striped silver and black. I take a few, put them in my mouth, crunch them up, swallow – and promptly choke.
Reza’s cry of ‘You don’t eat them whole!’ comes a moment too late.
Patiently, as if to a rather backward four-year-old child, he then shows me how the seed should be placed vertically between one’s top teeth, split delicately, the tiny kernel inside extracted and the seed casing spat out discreetly.
‘It’s very simple,’ Reza says, watching with bemusement as I inelegantly spit out mangled and soggy seeds, their insides indistinguishable in the mess.
Reza B is watching in his rear vision mirror and has a question for me.
‘Reza says don’t you eat seeds like this in New Zealand?’ I say no and he goes into a long soliloquy, which Reza once more translates.
‘He wants to know what do you eat when you are on a long journey when you don’t have seeds, pistachios and fresh dates?’
I cringe at the thought of telling them both that I’d grown up on a travelling diet that consisted largely of Mackintosh’s toffees, pineapple lumps and the occasional ice cream.
Luckily I am saved from answering by Reza B’s cellphone bursting into life. This is no ordinary ring tone however. He’d downloaded a chant used by devoted Shia Moslems especially at Moharram, a time when they mourn the death of the third imam Hussein who was killed at Kerbala (in modern-day Iraq).
During the annual Moharram processions, particularly devout men and boys parade through towns, beating their chests to this chant as a sign of their grief at the death of Hussein.
As soon as the phone bursts into song, both Rezas rhythmically tap their chests over their hearts with the palms of their right hands, none too seriously echoing the annual rite.
The previously featureless plain on our right is suddenly studded with black dots which, as we approach, morph into a herd of wild camels. We stop to watch them as they graze among the wiry grass. Baby camels gaze at us with mock alarm before bouncing off towards their mothers.
This prompts more questions from Reza B. He is surprised to know that where I come from there are no wild camels. But he’s deeply impressed when Reza tells him we can lay claim to 40 million sheep.
Reza B digests this for some kilometres and then announces he thinks he’d like to become a Kiwi shepherd.
I conjure up a picture of Reza B with his luxuriant moustache striding through the tussocks of the South Island high country, his cellphone broadcasting the Moharram chant to his team of bewildered dogs. Both parties would probably adapt quite well, I decide, but I suspect he would soon be investigating how he might import vital supplies, such as the edible seeds of which he is so fond.
We eat lunch among a handful of diners in an echoing marble-floored hotel dining room in Sabzevar that can seat several hundred people. The multi-storeyed hotel is the tallest building by far in the town.
As we drive out of town the outline of three curiously shaped buildings appear silhouetted in the late afternoon sun. They look like three inverted funnels, their circular walls stepped gradually from base to top. The only aperture is an arched doorway set at ground level on the northern, shady side.
These are icehouses, this trio now long disused and, unlike some in Iran, not restored, so they are slowly blending back into the landscape. Icehouses ( yakhchal in Farsi, meaning ice pit) are found in few other places in the world.
Persian engineers seemed to have cracked the method for keeping ice frozen in the pitiless heat of the Iranian plateau summers in about 400BC. In winter shallow ponds, with high walls on the sunny side, were filled with water. When this had frozen, the ice was chipped out and transferred into the icehouse. What can be seen above ground is only a portion of the entire structure – much of it lies underground. Some icehouses can be up to 20 metres high and their underground section can be 6 metres deep.
Ice stored here could be kept frozen all summer thanks to the combination of the thick walls (2 metres at the base) and the building’s shape (cooling winds could spiral down the exterior) would keep the ice frozen for the summer (this was especially crucial anywhere where Persian royalty was staying as faludeh, or Persian ice cream, was a favourite of the upper classes). The single door would be insulated with a blanket of dry grass.
The Zafaraniyeh icehouse walls are crumbling badly but we can still make out some of the ingredients in the unique construction material. Icehouses were usually built of a mixture of sand, clay, egg white, lime, ash and goat hair. When we lean against the doorway of one of the icehouse we are met by the sight of mounds of decaying rubbish and a sea of plastic bags.
‘Bloody plastic bags,’ Reza says, as I baulk at the scene. ‘The problem in Iran is that with so much oil it is so cheap to make plastic and now we are drowning in it.’
Zafaraniyeh’s caravanserai is going the same way as its icehouses. Its main entrance is padlocked but we climb in through a gaping wound in the side, taking a wide berth around a mangy black dog tied up inside. What it is protecting we can’t discern – there are piles of rubble in all the corridors and the ground is strewn with rubbish, including a number of disposable nappies.
When we climb out, a group of women is gathering up their washing from beside a narrow irrigation channel that separates the caravanserai from their village with its mass of domed roofs. When they see Reza they draw their chadors further around their faces and turn their backs to us.
By now the sun is hovering low in the sky and Reza B has left the van to come to tell us to hurry up. We arrive at Neyshabur, 114 km from Mashhad, just as the azan – the call to prayer – for sunset prayers starts.
The nondescript arid plain we have been driving across is suddenly transformed with the appearance of trees, lush grass and rose beds. Neyshabur is the resting place of two great poets, one a household name in the West, the other virtually unknown. Water has been lavished on the gardens surrounding their tombs to create the Persian idea of a touch of paradise on earth.
We walk alongside the long narrow pool towards the mausoleum of Farid od-Din Attar, a Sufi poet who died in about 1220. Rumi, a fellow Sufi poet who is today widely read in the West, regarded Attar as the ‘Lord of All Sufis’.
‘Rumi once said that Attar had visited the seven cities of love while we were still lost in the alleys of the first city,’ observes Reza.
It’s possible Attar died at the time as the Mongol invasion when the entire city’s population was put to the sword by the army of Ghengis Khan. Their arrival was the death knell for a city that was briefly, in the 11th century, one of the most important intellectual centres for Sunni Islam. It did, however, remain an important staging point along the silk road that connected the Iranian plateau with Central
Asia.
Attar’s tomb is a blue confection comprising a single tiled dome set on a deep circular drum that in turn rests on an octagonal building decorated with mosaic work. Attar’s most famous work, The Conference of the Birds, is one that I always struggle to read. But as the sun sets through the pine trees in the garden surrounding his tomb we read English and Farsi versions of his short poem Looking for your own Face, which ends rather enigmatically: ‘What you most want, what you travel around wishing to find, lose yourself as lovers lose themselves, and you’ll be that.’
Night is about to fall with a bang so there is no more time to reflect on Attar. We have to run out the gate, and into the almost-moving van; Reza B is in fast-getaway mode. He drives a few kilometres through a forest of pines to a large car park. While we were the only visitors to Attar’s tomb we are not alone at the grave of Omar Khayyam. I am, however, the only foreign tourist. As we walk to the entrance to his tomb, a man in an old suit coat starts playing a lilting melody on a small wooden flute. Another tows a scruffy, dispirited horse and tries to persuade Reza that he’s sure that I’d much rather go for a ride than visit the tomb. Reza B meanwhile is trying to brush off the attentions of a third vendor trying to sell him a range of fluorescent hair ties.
Thankfully, the vendors are not allowed inside the enclosed garden that surrounds Omar Khayyam’s tomb. Although it is now past sunset, the fountains along the central pool are still playing and a loudspeaker is broadcasting his Rubiyat.
Khayyam’s tomb is set under a tall circle of elongated diamonds that ends in a small dome. It’s said to resemble an upside-down wine cup. Wine, somewhat incongruously now – given Iran’s ‘dry’ status – is a constant theme that flows though Khayyam’s poetry.
To me the shape seems to resemble arms stretched protectively over the grave.
It is apt that even Khayyam’s tomb can be open to interpretation because the meaning of his poetry has been debated for centuries, including the intriguing issue of whether he actually believed in life after death (a core belief in Islam).
Iranians’ reverence for their poets is always evident in the rituals that accompany a pilgrimage to their tombs. Ahead of us, visitors approach the tomb, and then bend low to touch it, speaking softly.
‘Maybe they are saying the start of the sura (the key words in the daily prayer routine): “Besmellahe, rahmane rahim” – in the name of God, the most merciful the most beneficient, and then perhaps some lines of Khayyam,’ Reza explains as we sit down on a stone bench nearby to watch.
The lights come on, flooding over Khayyam’s tomb and creating a tracery of shadows among the trees in the garden. There is no one talking to Khayyam now so it is time for my own pilgrimage.
Omar Khayyam had been a feature of my childhood because it was one of my father’s favourite books. He had once given a slim, green volume of the Rubiyat to my mother as a birthday present, but would often read it himself. I’d occasionally find it placed seemingly randomly in one of our many bookcases, sometimes wedged between books on animal husbandry or Churchill’s history of World War II.
It was not until I was in my twenties that I realised that the Rubiyat was about the only piece of fictional writing my father ever read. And it was only after his death that I realised I’d never asked him why. This sense of regret only deepened when I began to read Khayyam properly for myself – what had drawn my rather undemonstrative and often very prosaic father to Persian poetry?
My fingertips touching the tomb, I tell Dad this visit is for him and that I’m saying ‘hello’ to Khayyam from him. I am no more the wiser about Dad’s interest in Khayyam, but I am sure he’s pleased I’m paying homage. As the loudspeakers crackle out a Persian song I imagine I can hear a ‘Well done, old stick’ amongst the music.
When I sit down beside Reza again, and blow my nose, he passes me a book of poetry.
‘I think your father would like it if we read some Khayyam out loud.’
Under Khayyam’s floodlit wine cup we read:
‘Awake! For morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight
And Lo! The Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.’
I’ve choked up and can’t read any more so Reza decrees it is time for a cup of tea – Iranians seem to have the same faith in the restorative properties of tea as the English.
Despite the fact that it is late winter and night has fallen it is still warm enough to sit outside where we can see Khayyam’s tomb through the trees. There are other latecomers – beside us sit two teenage girls with their parents. Both girls are eating ice cream, while one is texting on her phone.
I pour out the tea and Reza drops sugar lumps into both cups, reciting in Farsi as he does so. The family nearby turns, smiles and applauds. He then translates for me:
‘Ah, fill the Cup – what boots it to repeat
How time is slipping underneath our Feet:
Unborn tomorrow, and dead yesterday,
Why fret about them if today be sweet.’
On the title page of my father’s gift of Khayyam to my mother he’d written the page and stanza numbers to these same four lines of poetry.
Reza B, however, is feeling less poetic when we finally return to the van. Just as the caravans of old had often travelled at night so, too, do thousands of Iran’s fleet of trucks. Mashhad might be Iran’s most holy city but it’s also the country’s second-largest and as such is a major industrial and business centre as well as attracting 20 million pilgrims a year. Reza B knows the road will be clogged with trucks and buses.
We drive through the darkness, sandwiched at times between juggernauts, some of which bear Turkmen and Uzbek licence plates. Occasionally we are overtaken by a bus, its curtained windows revealing glimpses of slumbering pilgrims.
Reza has chosen a cheap, pilgrims’ apartment hotel for us all to stay in, but he’s not been there before and neither has the other Reza. As we hit the city’s outskirts we ring the hotel for directions. The trucks and buses melt away as we thread our way into the city’s heart, but the streets are gridlocked with cars. It is after I’ve spotted the same fountain in the centre of a roundabout for the third time that I know we are lost.
It doesn’t help that we are compounding the city’s traffic woes by stopping on street corners while Reza winds down the window and asks passers-by for help. A long, and I thought fruitful, conversation follows at the first of these stops.
‘That’s sounds hopeful,’ I say.
‘No, he had no idea where the hotel is,’ Reza replies.
Apparently most of the conversation was a string of Persian pleasantries and polite wishes for our health and safety. We could hardly blame the man – there are hundreds of hotels in Mashhad to cater for the influx of pilgrims, with new ones being opened every few months.
After our fourth pass along one of the main roads leading directly to the Imam Reza shrine Reza rings the hotel again. This time, maybe sensing a booking about to slip away, the manager sends a minion on a motorbike out to the nearest major intersection to lead us to the right place.
It’s no wonder we couldn’t find the hotel ourselves situated as it is among a labyrinth of narrow alleyways alongside which many of the old buildings are being demolished and new apartment blocks, grown old before their time due to hasty and shoddy building techniques, have risen from the rubble, almost overnight.
‘If this had been a few centuries ago we’d never have had this problem,’ Reza says as we try to tidy the back seat of the van of pistachio shells, seeds and fruit peelings before Reza B sees it. ‘If there’d been a minaret with a fire burning at the top, we’d have had no trouble at all.’
4
WHERE THE SUN RISES
Mashhad to Yazd
We should play games in the rain
We should write, talk, sow morning-glory seeds in the rain
Life is a series of successive drenchings
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Life is taking a dip in the basin of This Moment.
Sohrab Sepehri, 20th century Persian poet
This morning we say goodbye to Ferengis as she must return to Tehran. We, however, are heading south to Tabas on the edge of the Dasht-e Kavir, Iran’s largest desert, one of the most arid places on the planet and one of the most sparsely populated regions in the country. The region of Khorasan is the realm of white space on the map of Iran and its name translates to ‘where the sun rises’, but few Iranians from beyond its boundaries would have seen dawn breaking in the east here, and only a handful of foreigners.
While in Mashhad, Ferengis spent many hours in the Imam Reza shrine, but also found time to shop diligently for the family; she’s got numerous plastic carrier bags full of saffron and sugar swizzle sticks that she’ll have to nurse through the 14-hour bus trip to Tehran. When Ferengis and I say a tearful goodbye she says something in Farsi to Reza and then orders him to translate for me.
‘Ferengis says you are not a tourist, you are now a Mashhadi – a pilgrim like her,’ he says.
The brilliant blue sky that features during our first few days of travel is replaced today with overcast pearly grey. Mountain ranges fade into a blue haze to our left. Little more than 100 kilometres away three countries meet: Iran, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan.
A rubbly wasteland of ochre rock stretches away from both sides of the highway. Reza B is deep in conversation with the soft toy in the shape of a kiwi bird that I’d given him when we left Tehran.
‘He’s grumpy today – look at the way he’s glaring at me,’ Reza B says, tickling the kiwi under its diminutive beak. ‘I think it was cold in the van last night.’
Reza is at the back of the van, ferreting among the books in the library. He returns with my Persian textbook and notebook.