Well then, it almost always turns out that the next day, in spite of the indications of the map, you have to go down through valleys and lowlands, and that instead of the cold you expected, there is such a heat that you want to take off literally all your clothes. And as the warm things are neither packed up nor fastened tightly on the backs of the animals, they slip and shift at every step, disturbing the balance and bothering not only the animals but also the travellers themselves. And what it means to have to repack on the way, he alone can understand who has had to do it, even if only once, on a long day’s journey over the mountains.
Of course, for journeys undertaken on behalf of some government or other for a certain political aim and for which large sums are allocated, or on a journey for which the funds are disbursed by a banker’s widow, an ardent Theosophist, one might hire as many porters as one wishes to pack and unpack everything. But a genuine traveller has to do all this himself, and even if he should have servants he would be bound to help them, as in the midst of the hardships of travel it is difficult for a normal man to look on idly at the exertions of others.
These contemporary maps are what they are, evidently because they are prepared by methods such as I myself once witnessed. It was when I was travelling with several members of the group, Seekers of Truth, through the Pamirs, past theAlexander III Peak. At that time the headquarters of the surveyors from the Turkestan Military Topographic Department was located in one of the valleys near this peak. The chief surveyor was a certain colonel, a good friend of one of our travelling companions, and because of this we made a special visit to their camp.
The colonel had several young staff officers with him as assistants. They welcomed us with great joy as they had been living for several months in places where, for hundreds of miles, there was scarcely a single living soul. We stayed with them three days, intending to have a good rest in their tents.
When we were getting ready to leave one of the young officers begged permission to come with us, as he had to make a map of a locality two days distant in the direction we were going. He brought along two private soldiers to assist him.
In a certain valley we came across a camp of nomad Kara-Kirghiz and entered into conversation with them. The officer who was with us also spoke their language. One of the Kara-Kirghiz was elderly, and obviously an experienced man. The officer, one of my friends and I asked this Kara-Kirghiz to share a meal with us, hoping that we might profit by his knowledge of these places to extract from him such information as we needed.
We ate and spoke. We had brought bags made of sheep’s stomachs which had been stuffed with excellent kovurma, and the officer also had vodka, which he had brought from Tashkent and which these nomads greatly relish, particularly when none of their own people see what they are drinking. While pouring down the vodka, the Kara-Kirghiz gave us various hints about these regions and indicated where certain points of interest were to be found. Pointing to a perpetually snow-capped mountain which was already familiar to us, he said: ‘You see that summit yonder? Well, just behind it there is this ... and that ... and there is also the famous cave of Iskander.’ The officer sketched all this down on paper. He was, by the way, rather a good artist.
When we had finished eating and the Kara-Kirghiz had gone back to his camp, I looked at the drawing which the officer had made and saw that he had put everything that the old man had described not behind the mountain as the latter had indicated, but in front of it. I pointed out this discrepancy to him and it appeared that the officer had confused ‘in front of’ with ‘behind’ as in that language the words ‘behind’ and ‘in front of’, bou-ti and pou-ti, are almost the same, and to someone who does not know this language well they sound almost alike, especially when they are pronounced quickly with other words.
When I explained all this to the officer, he merely said: ‘Oh, well, devil take it!’ and he slammed his sketch-book shut. He had been drawing for almost two hours and of course did not wish to do it all over again, the more so as we were all ready to proceed on our way.
I am sure that this sketch was afterwards embodied in a map exactly as the officer had made it. Later, the printer of the maps, having never been to these regions, would place those details not on the side of the mountain where they belong but on the other side, and of course that is where our brother traveller will expect to find them. With few exceptions everything connected with the making of these maps proceeds in this way. Therefore, when a map indicates that you are approaching a river, you should not be surprised to come across one of the ‘gorgeous daughters of Mr. Himalaya’.
And so we continued for several days at random, without a guide, observing great caution to avoid meeting any of those bands of brigands who, particularly at that time, were not great lovers of the Europeans who fell into their hands, and transformed them with solemn ceremony into captives and later, with no less ceremony, exchanged them with some other tribe inhabiting this part of the surface of our dear planet for a good horse, or a rifle of the latest model, or simply for a young girl, also, of course, a captive.
Moving from place to place, we reached a small stream and decided to follow its course, reckoning that it must ultimately lead us somewhere. We did not even know whether it would lead us north or south, as the area we were in was a watershed.
We followed the banks of this stream as long as we could, but soon, when they became very steep and almost impassable, we decided to go along the bed of the stream itself.
We had not gone more than a few miles in this way when it was apparent that the stream, swollen by the water from numerous small tributaries, was rising to such a height that it was becoming impossible to continue our journey along its bed, and we were obliged to stop and deliberate seriously how to proceed.
After long discussions, we decided to slaughter all the goats, which we had brought with us for transporting our things and for our subsistence, in order to make bourdiouks out of their skins which we could inflate and attach to a raft, and thus float further down the river.
To carry out this decision of ours, we chose a convenient place not far from the stream, where we could easily defend ourselves against any danger, and set up our camp. Finding that it was too late to do anything more that day, we pitched our tents and, lighting fires in our customary way, we ate and lay down to sleep, having of course arranged watchmen to take turns during the night.
The first thing next day, with the consent of our consciences, degenerated like those of all contemporary people and corresponding exactly to the requirements of Hell, we killed all the goats, which only the day before we had regarded as our sincere friends and associates in overcoming the difficulties of the journey.
After this admirable Christian-Mohammedan manifestation, one of us began to cut their meat into small pieces in order to roast it and fill some of the skins; some began to prepare the bourdiouks and inflate them; others twisted the goats’ intestines to make cords for tying the raft together and attaching the bourdiouks; and still others, including myself, took axes and went to look for hard wood suitable for the raft.
In our search we wandered rather a long distance from our camp. We were looking for a kind of plane tree called there karagatch and for a fibrous birch. Of all the wood to be found in that neighbourhood, only these two kinds were, in our opinion, strong enough to withstand collisions with boulders and rocks in the narrow passages and over the rapids.
Near our camp we came across chiefly fig-trees and other varieties not hard enough for our purpose. As we were going along examining trees, we suddenly saw, sitting on the ground, a man belonging to one of the local tribes. Having talked it over amongst ourselves, we decided to go up to him and ask him where the trees we needed were to be found. Approaching nearer, we saw that he was clothed in rags, and we could tell by his face that he was a kind of ez-ezounavouran, that is, a man who was working on himself for the salvation of his soul, or as Europeans would say, a fakir.
As I have happened to use the wor
d ‘fakir’, I do not consider it superfluous to digress a little in order to throw some light on this famous word. It is, indeed, one of the many empty words which, on account of the incorrect meaning given them, particularly in recent times, has an automatic action upon all contemporary Europeans and has become one of the chief causes of the progressive dwindling of their thinking capacity.
Although the word ‘fakir’ in the meaning given it by Europeans is unknown to the peoples of Asia, nevertheless, this same word is in use there almost everywhere. Fakir, or more correctly fakhr, has as its root the Turkoman word meaning ‘beggar’, and among almost all the peoples of the continent of Asia whose speech is derived from ancient Turkoman, this word has come down to our day with the meaning of ‘swindler’ or ‘cheat’.
As a matter of fact, to express this meaning of ‘swindler’ or ‘cheat’ two different words are used among these peoples, both derived from ancient Turkoman. One is this word ‘fakir’ and the other is lourie. The former is the word used for a cheat or swindler who uses his guile to take advantage of others by way of their religiousness, while the latter is applied to someone who simply takes advantage of their stupidity. The name lourie, by the way, is given to all gypsies, both as a people and as individuals.
Generally speaking, gypsies are found among all other peoples and everywhere lead a nomadic life. They are chiefly engaged in dealing in horses, tinkering, in singing at feasts, fortune-telling and kindred occupations. They usually make their camps near populated places and deceive naive townspeople and villagers by every kind of cunning. Consequently the word lourie, denoting the gypsy people, has from long ago come to be used in Asia for every person, regardless of race, who is a swindler or a cheat.
For conveying the meaning which Europeans wrongly ascribe to the word ‘fakir’, several words are employed among Asiatic peoples, the most widely used being ez-ezounavouran, which comes from the Turkoman spoken language and means ‘he who beats himself’.
I have myself read and heard many statements by Europeans about these so-called fakirs, asserting that their tricks are supernatural and miraculous, whereas actually, in the judgement of all more or less normal people in Asia, such tricks are performed by unconscionable swindlers and cheats of the highest order.
To show what confusion the wrong use of this word has caused among Europeans, I think it will be sufficient to say that, although I have travelled in almost all the countries where these fakirs, as imagined by Europeans, are supposed to live, I have never seen a single one of them; but I did have the good fortune recently to see a genuine fakhr, in the sense used by people of the continent of Asia, only not in India or any of those countries where Europeans think they live, but in the very heart of Europe, in the city of Berlin.
I was strolling one day along Kurfurstendamm in the direction of the main entrance to the Zoological Gardens, when I saw on the pavement, on a little hand-wagon, a cripple who had lost both legs, turning an antediluvian musical-box.
In Berlin, the capital city of Germany, as in other large centres representing, as it were, the epitome of contemporary civilization, it is forbidden to ask for charity directly, but anyone who wishes may beg and will not be bothered by the police, if he grinds an old barrel-organ, or sells empty match-boxes or indecent postcards and various kindred literature.
This beggar, dressed like a German soldier, was turning his musical-box, which had half its notes missing. As I passed by I threw him a few small coins and, happening to glance at him, his face seemed familiar to me. I did not question him, as in general I did not then, any more than now, risk speaking alone with strangers in my broken German, but I began to think where I could have seen him before.
When I had finished my business, I returned along the same street. The cripple was still there. I approached very slowly and looked at him closely, trying to recall why his face was so familiar, but at that moment I could not. It was only on arriving at the Romanische Café, that it suddenly came to me that the man was no other than the husband of a lady who, several years before in Constantinople, was sent to me by a close friend of mine, with a letter of introduction appealing to me to give her medical treatment. The lady’s husband was a former Russian officer who, it seems, had been evacuated from Russia to Constantinople with Wrangel’s Army.
I then remembered how the young lady had come to me with a dislocated shoulder and her body covered with bruises. While I was busy with her arm, she told me that her husband had beaten her because she had refused to sell herself for a good sum to a certain Spanish Jew. Somehow or other with the help of Drs. Victorov and Maximovitch I put her shoulder right, after which she left.
Two or three weeks after that I was sitting in a Russian restaurant in Constantinople called the ‘Black Rose’, when this lady approached me. Nodding in the direction of a man with whom she had been sitting, she said: ‘There he is—my husband,’ and added, ‘I have made it up with him again. He is really quite a good man although he does lose his temper at times.’ Having told me this, she quickly left. It was only then that I understood what kind of woman she was. Afterwards, I sat there and scrutinized the face of this officer for a long time, as I was interested in such a rare type.
And now here was this same officer, a legless cripple, in the uniform of a German soldier, turning a musical-box and collecting small German coins. In the course of a day a great many small coins were thrown by kind-hearted passers-by to this unfortunate victim of the warl
This man in my opinion was a genuine fakhr in the sense understood by all Asiatic peoples; as for his legs, would to God that mine were as sound and strong as his!
Well, enough about this; let us return to the story we had begun....
And so we approached that ez-ezounavouran, and after appropriate greetings sat down beside him. Before asking him what we wanted to know, we began to speak with him, observing the various conventional courtesies habitual among these people.
It is interesting to remark that the psyche of the people inhabiting these regions is totally different from that of Europeans. Among the latter, almost always what is in the thoughts is on the tongue. Among Asiatics this is not the case—the duality of the psyche is highly developed. Any person of these regions, however polite and friendly he may be outwardly, may none the less inwardly hate you and be thinking out all kinds of harm for you.
Many Europeans who have lived among Asiatics for decades without understanding this particularity of theirs, and who judge them according to themselves, always lose a great deal as a result of this and create many misunderstandings which might have been avoided. These people of Asia are full of pride and self-love. Each of them, irrespective of his position, demands from everyone a certain attitude towards himself as a person.
Among them the main thing is kept in the background, and one must lead up to it as if it were just by the way; if not, at the best, they will for instance direct you to the right when your road lies to the left. On the other hand, if you do everything as it should be done, then not only will they give you accurate directions, but will even be eager to help you, if possible themselves, to reach your intended destination.
Therefore, when we approached this man, we did not begin by asking him what we wanted to know. God forbid that we should do so before observing the necessary conventions.
After sitting down beside him, we spoke of the beauty of the scenery and told him that we were there for the first time, asked how the surrounding conditions suited him, and so on. And only much later I remarked as if in passing: ‘We need such and such wood for a certain purpose, but we are not able to find it anywhere around here.’
He replied that he greatly regretted that he did not know where it could be found, as he had only been in the neighbourhood a short time, but that a certain respected old man, who was his teacher, might know. He lived behind the hill in a cave, and had been there a long time and knew the locality very well.
He thereupon got up to go to him, but Dr. Sari-Ogli stopped him a
nd asked whether we could see his respected teacher and 118 ask him ourselves about the wood we needed. He replied: ‘Of course; let us go together. He is a man who is almost a saint and is always ready to help anyone.’
As we went, we saw from a long way off a man sitting in a meadow under a tree, and our guide, without waiting for us, ran to him and, after telling him something, beckoned to us to approach.
We exchanged the customary greetings and sat down beside him. At that moment another of the local inhabitants came and sat down beside us. As it turned out later he also was a pupil of this venerable ez-ezounavouran.
The face of this old man appeared to us so benevolent and not of ordinary humankind that, without any of the usual preliminary manipulations and without concealing anything, we told him what had happened to us and how we thought of making our way out of that region. We also told him why we had come to him.
He listened to us with great attention and, after thinking a little, said that the stream by whose banks we had stopped was a tributary of the river Chitral, which flows into the river Kabul, which in its turn flows into the Indus. There were many roads, he told us, leading out of that region, but they were all long and arduous. If we were able to travel as we had planned, and if we were fortunate enough to avoid the banks inhabited by people who were not at all friendly to strangers, then our plan would be the best that could be devised. As for the kind of wood we were seeking, he thought it was not at all suitable, and that the best wood for the purpose would be Cornelian cherry, and added that there was a dell to the left of the path by which we had come where thick clumps of these trees grew.
Meetings With Remarkable Men Page 24