The slopes heaved bleakly round us. Beneath their skin of thistles the bones of a slatey, lichened rock were pressing, and stones littered the hills. I asked: ‘What about Khomeini?’
‘He was good, mostly, but he only had one idea. And now the mullahs just cry Allah! Allah! Allah is fine, but not all these mosques going up, all these saints. We need hospitals and businesses. And you know who’s behind the mullahs?’ He glanced at me without rancour. ‘Your government. The British.’ I heard this fantasy with only small surprise. Suspicion of Britain had long preceded that of the United States. It clung like moss. ‘They want to keep our country poor.’
Beyond a last ridge we were dropping into another land. Between its naked slopes rose the golden spires of poplars, with maples and reddening cherry orchards. The morning sun traced the rivers in splintered silver down their clefts, and suddenly the whole wall of the Shah Rud valley surged up to meet us: a vast, unbroken battlement where erosion tossed mauve foothills this way and that, and villages clung to near-perpendicular scarps.
We corkscrewed down to where the Shah Rud river wound and forked between gravel shoals. Ricefields appeared, and salt pans. The farmers looked darker, wilder. In the valleys above, where the grim sect of the Assassins had scattered its castles, I lost my bearings. But somewhere an iron bridge crossed the Alamut river at a village which the driver called Shutur Khan, and here, I remembered, the writer Freya Stark, a loved friend of my youth, had collapsed with malaria after exploring the castles in 1931, when the going was harder. Her map was in my rucksack. Almost half a century later, walking with her in the hills of the Italian Veneto, I remembered her speaking with elation of this country, where my truck now jarred to a halt beyond the river. I got out into still air. I wondered if any memory remained of the sharp-eyed Englishwoman who had lain sick in the headman’s house, listening to the rivulet diverted through his garden for her pleasure, not knowing if she was going to die.
But the village since her time was unrecognisable: a single street of tractor repair yards and barracks. After my truck left, I found nobody to speak with. I rested a while by the river, until another driver took me on in silence into the mountains, where the rock Alamut, the Assassin nerve-centre, was filling up the sky.
The implacable sect was an offshoot of the Ismaili, whose founder’s lonely tomb, perhaps, I had stumbled upon five hundred miles east at Mazinan. An early history records that the Assassins’ progenitor, the darkly brilliant Hasan-i-Sabah, was a schoolmate in Nishapur of Omar Khayyám and Nizam al-Mulk. The three became blood-brothers, swearing that the first to attain eminence would help the others. After Nizam was appointed grand vizier of the Seljuk empire in 1063, his friends arrived to claim their promise, and he offered them provincial governorships. Omar Khayyám claimed a modest pension instead, happy to return to his studies. But Hasan-i-Sabah sought higher office, and from there he began to undermine his benefactor, who was at last forced to exile him.
This unlikely story–its dates conflict–became part of the Assassin legend. In fact Hasan-i-Sabah converted early to Ismailism, was outlawed for sedition from his native Rey and gathered followers who seized the castle of Alamut by trickery. His power spread through the valleys, subverting other fortresses, until it reached even to Syria. By now he had refined his disciples into a ruthless order of messianic secrecy, dedicated to overturning the Seljuk and Sunni imperium, indoctrinating followers who murdered in the certain hope of paradise, making no attempt to flee; and his successors continued his terror for a century and a half.
In the Western imagination the Assassin lord, ‘the Old Man of the Mountain’, wielded a ghoulish magic. Marco Polo spoke of an enclosed garden beside Alamut, where his drugged agents awoke among young women and rivulets of wine, to imagine themselves in paradise, and this memory never left them. They were falsely said to be hashashin, drugged on hashish, and bequeathed the name Assassin to the world.
No one was safe from their hand. The religious divines who condemned them and the generals who fought them might all die by the dagger. Their first victim was Nizam al-Mulk, stabbed in his litter as he left his audience chamber. Over the years there followed two caliphs of Baghdad and a Seljuk sultan, the Fatimid caliph of Egypt and his vizier, the Christian Patriarch of Jerusalem and the Crusader Count Raymond of Tripoli. Sometimes the Assassins waited for years, inveigled into the service of their victim. ‘Like the devil,’ wrote a German priest, ‘they transfigure themselves into angels of light, by imitating the gestures, garments, customs and acts of various nations and peoples.’ The ruler of Damascus, surrounded by armed guards, was yet struck down by men who seemed his protectors. Conrad of Montferrat, the Crusader king of Jerusalem, was murdered by agents robed as Christian monks, and the ruler of Homs by men masquerading as Sufis. They killed the Qadi of Isfahan during Friday prayer, and Philip of Montfort as he knelt in church. Rulers who opposed them walked in a thicket of bodyguards, with armour beneath their robes. Edward I of England, while still a prince on Crusade, was stabbed near-fatally (legend had his queen, Eleanor of Castile, sucking the poison from his wound), and Saladin himself was saved only by a cap of mail beneath his turban. As far away as Mongolia, the Great Khan went in fear, while the Seljuk sultan Sanjar awoke trembling in the night to find a warning dagger by his bedside.
Now the rock of Alamut swam like a battleship across the valley. Nine hundred feet above the village of Gazur Khan, it loomed with no sign of access. I was walking toward sheer cliffs. But as I skirted their northern foot, the enormous overhang, plunged in shadow, disclosed a beetling path among the rocks. Snow-peaks broke over the eastern horizon as I climbed. In the cliff-face towering beside me I glimpsed fragmentary walls and an arch bridging a gully. I could hear the wind howling over the heights above, but here in the rock’s lee clouds of thistledown were drifting. Around the escarpment the path lifted at last to the wreckage of a curtain wall. Its rubble core, shorn of hewn stone, still lurched up fifty feet, and beyond, its ramparts torn away, the long, precipitous spine of the castle reached into space.
For hours I picked among its stones. There was almost nothing left. The Mongols, muscling through the valley with their own mercilessness, had extinguished the enfeebled sect in 1256, and tipped their battlements into the abyss. Years later the place became a prison, and often I could not tell their foundations apart. Here and there a leftover skin of Ismaili brick coated the sheer wall sliding a thousand feet into the valley; and on the heights above it the same brick traced a few rooms or the circle of a cistern. I wondered where the great library and archives had been, destroyed as heresy, or the room where Hasan-i-Sabah, in grim seclusion, had taught and studied, never passing through the castle gate for thirty years.
I stumbled among lost chambers in the tearing wind. On all sides the labyrinthine mountains were awash with scudding clouds, and rust-brown hills banked into crags or faded to snow in the east. Almost at my feet a tributary of the Alamut river filled the valley with orchards and a faint shine of water, and a narrow road shadowed the track where the messengers of the Old Man of the Mountain had brought him the news that rejoiced his heart.
A pair of builders–hospitable, bored–invited me to their camp for the night. In an isolated valley thirty miles away, they were constructing a hospital–its steel frame was already up–but the track there had been torn up by rains the year before. Our Land-Cruiser plunged between torrent-strewn boulders as big as cottages, before weaving to the valley’s end and a village misted in walnut and apple orchards.
They lived with three others in a two-room hut of mud walls hung with overalls. In their makeshift kitchen they brewed up a supper of chicken garnished with hazel nuts, which we ate on the earth floor. I felt curiously at peace, as if nothing else mattered–not the deepening cold, the stench of the lavatory outside nor the insects crawling over the timber ceiling–except the unruffled courtesy around me. These men–two of them spoke tentative English–were touched by a delicacy which I was starting to recog
nise, of people educated for something else, derailed by hard times.
The foreman Mahmoud, suave, grey-locked, sat like a vizier cross-legged on the polished earth; while his frail assistant Daniel, whose domed forehead seemed to touch him with learning, confided wrecked dreams. He had wanted to be a market gardener. ‘Greenhouses were what I loved. Years ago I started a business, and built greenhouses under Mount Demavend, but they were blown away in a gale. Cucumbers, tomatoes, I had, and a special banana shrub only two metres high, which produced’–he laughed–‘rather bad bananas.’ He had been trained as an agricultural engineer, yet now he was a builder’s aide. ‘But one day, if my country gets better, I will go back to greenhouses.’ He flexed his fingers. ‘Tomatoes…cucumbers…’
Later Mahmoud dragged an old television from under a quilt and we settled, replete with chicken, before its flickering box. To my astonishment a bare-shouldered chanteuse with streaked hair walked across the screen. ‘I thought that was forbidden!’ I cried. ‘Is that from Iran?’
They burst into laughter. ‘Never!’
They had wired a video machine to the back of the television, and we were viewing pirated programmes. ‘There’s a fellow here with a computer who gets them off the internet,’ Mahmoud said, ‘and we have videos of our own.’
I watched in mute amazement. Even from this village of a hundred and twenty, somebody had accessed the world outside. Theirs were black-and-white films for the most part, shot at pop festivals among the Iranian diaspora in Los Angeles and Germany. Even after twenty-five years of Western exile the singers looked demure, almost grave, while the expatriate audience around them stood in rapt nostalgia–old and young–listening to songs now banned at home, the music of their severed past, perhaps singing itself into extinction. The builders’ favourite was a programme acquired by Mahmoud ten years before. Swathed in quilts against the dirt and cold, they listened with the hunger of dissidents. But the film staged no rebellion, no anger, no sex: only a portly middle-aged chanteuse who lilted and trilled and careened up and down marble stairways, shadowed by an obese tenor in baggy trousers.
When this ended we went out into the starlight to look at the hospital. A month before, they had unearthed its foundations from twenty feet of rubble, where the cliff above had crumbled into avalanche, and they had started again. Now a gaping geometry of doors and passageways hovered before us like a Meccano set, and the loose-bouldered cliff still loomed behind, so that I imagined the next rains washing everything away again.
Soon the villagers, seeing the builders’ return, filtered into the hut with questions. Their ancestors, in local tradition, had come up from the Caspian long after the Mongols swept through the valleys, and had survived here in isolation. ‘They belong to just two families, intermarried,’ Daniel said. ‘They’re all called Hosseini or Rashvand. No, it can’t be good. I’ve seen four or five imbecile children here, and at least one mad adult. I think the girls would marry outside if they could. You sense it, the way they look at you…’
Employed as casual labour, villagers arrived with petitions or simply to sit, when the television became too boring, and gaze in unblinking puzzlement at the foreigner. In my frayed shirt and trousers I imagined myself little different from them. The day before, when I glanced in a mirror, a hardened face had glared back at me through seething eyes. But its harshness, of course–with its windburn and darkening stubble–was temporary. Life had been kinder to it than to these others, whose ruggedness had accrued like tree-rings, and whose hands hung knotted at their sides. Standing before Mahmoud they were mumbling and deferential. A driver couldn’t understand the hours he should come and go, and an old plasterer was frightened that somebody else–perhaps me–was being drafted in to replace him. Sometimes, after the foreman had explained very slowly, patiently, what had to be done, a sweet smile would spread over the beard-blackened faces, and they would bow their thanks with an old-world humility before leaving.
Only by midnight did we curl under our quilts on the hard floor, the timber ceiling shifting with insects above us, and sleep to the mechanical pipe of winter cicadas from the orchards outside, and the howl of the village dogs.
For a century and a half the Assassin heartland in these valleys remained unassailable. Then nemesis came suddenly. In 1256 the Mongol khan Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, crossed the Oxus with an immense army. The last Grand Master of the Assassins, Rukn-ad-din, walled himself up in his palace-castle of Maimundiz, and hoped to endure until snows choked the valleys. But that year winter was the mildest in memory. For four miles the Mongols set up siege works around the cliff-castle, while their Chinese engineers bombarded it from mangonels and giant crossbows which shot bolts of fire into the battlements. The defenders answered with a blizzard of catapulted rocks, and the first Mongol assault was repulsed. But the flaming arrows drove the defenders inside the cliff-face, and the Grand Master–a poor wraith of his predecessors–lost his nerve and sued for peace. Some of his soldiers, hardier than he, retreated to an upper keep and sold themselves dearly. Then the castle–with all its immured chambers and galleries–was put to the torch.
Hulagu spared Rukn-ad-din so long as his life was useful. When the Grand Master ordered his other castles to surrender, many of them obeyed. Alamut capitulated within days, then the Mongols began clearing the valleys of the last Ismaili fortresses, massacring even the garrisons that gave in. Rukn-ad-din, it seems, lapsed into senility. He became obsessed by Bactrian camels–Hulagu gave him a hundred–and fell in love with a Mongol girl, whom he was allowed to marry. But soon afterwards, wrote a contemporary historian, he was ‘kicked to a pulp and then put to the sword…and he and his kindred became but a tale on men’s lips and a tradition in the world’.
The crags that interlock around Maimundiz were still snowless in mid-November, when Mahmoud drove me there. Above their red and pink foothills, frosted with dying thistles, the iron-grey mountains separated into a maze of defiles and abrupt valley walls. A British expedition in 1960 had located the castle here on a precipitous mountain beyond the village of Shams Kilaya, where its gutted chambers survived deep inside the rock.
Mahmoud and I hunted for two men rumoured to own climbing equipment; but one was absent and the other said the place was too dangerous. So Mahmoud drove back to his hospital, while inky clouds piled above Maimundiz. For an hour I tramped the oasis among swarthy men in black woollen caps, and wondered what to do, then found a room above a little restaurant. From my plank bed I watched the eerie storm-light playing across the face of the mountain, then the flash-bulbs of lightning, until at mid-afternoon, with a din like artillery, the storm broke. Far into the night it trembled like hail over the roof of my room. Iron and glass walls and a solitary bulb suspended me in a dim-lit cage above the village street, until the electricity failed, and I waited in the darkness to sleep, while muddled dreams succeeded one another.
Sleepily I wondered if any trace of Assassin blood endured in the valley. For the Mongols did not quite exterminate them. The Assassins even returned twenty years later, and fleetingly reoccupied their ruined Alamut. Gradually the sect dwindled into obscurity, steeped in millennial dreams, and thinned at last to a scattering of rural villages in Syria and central Asia. But the infant son of Rukn-ad-din was said to have survived, preserving the line of Ismaili imams down to the present Aga Khans.
In time the Assassins’ memory faded. But perhaps they were the first to devote themselves to terror through suicide. Even as I lay in the clattering darkness below Maimundiz, their heirs were grimly at work, dreaming of the same elysium. Yet no cultural memory connected them. The Assassins’ bitterness rose from sacred history, from the ingrained Shia sense of wrong; it did not know the violated heritage of their modern counterparts–Palestine, Chechnya, Iraq–an anger complicated by alienation from the worldly pantomime of the West, whose memory was growing daily stranger to me.
Dawn broke softly over the mountain. In the cleaned light, far beyond the orchards and poplars o
f Shams Kilaya, the castle precipice lifted two thousand feet above the valley floor in wrinkles of pink stone. Dogs were emptying garbage-cans in the street as I left. The air was cold. I went through cherry orchards, picking at ripe blackberries, while the rose-coloured bluff grew in front. Beyond a thin stream the slopes were furred in grass and climbed past a small shrine into wilderness.
Now the whole mountain spread above me. It was split by clefts which ate their way up half its height, then delved into artificial-looking caves. Scree and boulders loosened and cascaded under my feet. In the airy silence their brittle grating was the only sound, like pebbles dragged by the tide. Nothing moved in the stone valley. It was as if the stream below marked a divide between the present and a shunned past. I followed a goat-track along the foot of the bluffs. I had imagined them untouched: but now, vertically above me, I made out scarps which had once been plastered, and the swell of a round tower. In the south-west angle, a change of light awoke walls reaching sixty feet up–a coating of brick stuccoed hard against the cliff, almost indistinguishable from it. Diagonal seams of rock might once have been stairways. The crescent of an arch showed clear in a cave, where swallows were flying in and out. The whole mountain was one vast, riddled sanctuary.
I longed to enter. But the cavern-mouths gaped sixty feet sheer above, blackened where fire had raged inside, their outer structures burnt away. When I scrutinised the fissures ascending to them, only one seemed to offer a few thin holds. Tentatively at first, I started to climb its crevice. But under my fingers the solid-looking cliff felt loose and friable, and I realised that the whole mountain–perhaps the stark crags of all this region–was not living rock but a coagulate of sand and shale.
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