In Xanadu (17 page)

BOOK: In Xanadu

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The Seljuks did not invent the caravanserai. There were
han
and
rabat
all over Turkestan and Persia. But the Seljuks were the first to build a planned network along their trade routes so that ideally there was a caravanserai every eighteen miles, the distance it took a laden camel to travel in a day. In practice most trade routes went without rest houses, but the main roads were well provided for. According to the thirteenth-century Muslim traveller, ibn Sa'id, there were over twenty
han
between Sivas and Kayseri, a distance of only seventy miles.

The
han
would have been forty years old by the time Marco Polo passed its doors. There is no reason to believe that he and his father did not spend the night here. I climbed up the flight of steps above the gateway and looked down over the
mescat
towards the great stable-hall. The
han
was well preserved, but it was as empty as any ruined abbey, and as difficult to fill with imagined inhabitants. What would Polo have seen when he walked within the gateway?
I
thought of the famous nineteenth-century description of caravanserai life given by Chateaubriand:

Turkish merchants were seated cross-legged on carpets in groups round the fires at which slaves were busily employed in dressing pilau. Other travellers were smoking their pipes at the door... chewing opium and telling stories . . . hucksters went about from fire to fire offering cakes, fruits and poultry for sale. Singers were amusing the crowd; imams were performing their ablutions . . . camel drivers lay snoring on the ground....

Would it have been like this in Seljuk times? No contemporary accounts survive, and modern authorities disagree. Some historians pack the buildings with earnest craftsmen providing a while-you-wait veterinary and engineering service; others envisage a more luxurious regime of pastry cooks, musicians and dancing girls. Certainly they were lively places, free to all merchants after payment of an annual trade tax, and seem to have been infinitely preferable to most of the hotels we stayed in - as, indeed, I said to Laura as we returned to the car to search for the village of Sarikli. It was here that the old men in the Sivas
cay
shop had suggested we might still find some carpet making.

The policemen pointed us back up the road to Sivas; the man at the gates of the caravanserai thought Sarikli lay somewhere in the opposite direction towards Kayseri. The pump attendant at the filling station had never heard eitherof Sarikli orof the manufacture of carpets.
'Yok;
he said, in answer to all our questions, jerking his head skywards, a gesture which means something in between 'It doesn't exist,' 'I don't know whether it exists,' and 'I couldn't give a monkey's whether it exists or not.' Then Laura found a footnote in Yule which claimed that Anatolian carpet manufacture had died out before the nineteenth century, in which case, said Laura, it hardly mattered where Sarikli was anyway. Another glass of tea and we decided to follow the policemen's instructions and search for the carpets on the road back to Sivas. If they did not exist, at least we would be heading back towards the welcomingarms of Mr Orhan Ghazi, and the possibility of some of his comb honey for tea.

Things, of course, did not work out as we had planned. They rarely do in Asia.

I remember being directed off the main road, our sleek black Chevrolet bumping over hard, parched, stubble fields and fouling itself in a stream-side dung pile; I remember Laura predicting disaster and our driver's long, caressing first-aid to his ailing motor car on the far side of the river. And I remember the village idiot, and the punctures, both of them, and the slow, relentless fall down the slope and the impact into the shack at the bottom then the heroic attempts to keep believing in the carpets, and that long, circular conversation we had with the Turk who lived inside the shack.

WD:

Hali?

Laura:

Carpets.

Turk:

Car-pets.

Laura:

Do you speak English? Listen, William, this

man speaks English.

Turk:

Car-pets.

Laura:

Yes, that's right. We want carpets.

Turk:

Car-pets.

Laura:

WE
(pause)
WANT
(pause)
CAR-PETS.

Turk
(nodding):
Car-pets.

(Driver here explains in Turkish that we are searching for carpets. Turk looks horrified. Then he says
"Yok".
We depart at 10m.p.h. our ailing motor pursued
by
a jailbreak of shaven-headed children.

It got worse before it got better. We recrossed the river, had another puncture, and were forced to negotiate a new rate for the outing; I fought with Laura, who I suspected of plotting with the driver. Then we patched up a compromise. I was to be allowed to ask one more peasant for directions; we were to follow those directions for a maximum of quarter of an hour, and we were then to return home, with or without carpets.

The first peasant we came across was clearly a halfwit. He was sitting vacantly by the roadside wearing scarecrow rags, and had on his face that dim, incomprehending look which is unique to Turkish labourers. When asked the way to Sarikli he pointed first to the sky, then to the ground, and finally towards a field of hayricks in the near-distance. With unexpected fidelity to our arrangement, the other two agreed to go to the field and see if any carpets were being made there. There weren't, but from the field a track led off downhill towards a small group of huts, and as a last gesture towards compromise Laura and the driver agreed to go to the village, if only to get a glass of tea before heading back to Sivas.

That the village was Sarikli, and that one house still contained a loom on which carpets were still being made, took me as much by surprise as it did the others. I had long before given up hope of finding any carpets, and was continuing the search only out of a stubborn refusal to admit the foolishness of the expedition, and also out of a vague sense of loyalty to Trinity College, which had after all sponsored me to hire Chevrolets to dung-heap villages, searching for freak survivals of once-healthy cottage industries. What Laura and the driver had forgotten was that we were supposed to be pushing back the frontiers of knowledge.

Our loom lived in a large, two-storey mud-thatch house belonging to a small Geordie in a tea-cosy hat. He must have been a more potent gentleman than he looked, for he had a brood of children which rivalled that of our friend in the shack. They chased our car past the hayricks, past the duck pond and the fountain covered with climbing roses, past the donkeys and flocks of bantams until the Chevrolet drew to a hall outside the loom house. Their mother sat on the ground bearing a pile of old goatskins with a heavy wooden stick. It was she who operated the loom, though clearly infrequently: it lay it the back of the room, behind bags of wheat, old twig brushes and a single, sleeping cow. Nor, in the event of the loom actually being used, did it produce carpets in the European sense of the word. The main frame of the machine was less than five feet wide, and it produced a piece of material about half that, a small gaudy rug of bright primary colours known as a
kilim.
Nevertheless, the loom did work and the woman did know how to use it.

While our driver disappeared under the bonnet of his car, Laura and I watched the woman at work. With unexpectedly nimble fingers, she passed different coloured threads of wool through the matrix of taut strings looped around the two rough-hewn wooden cross-shafts of the loom frame. She knotted the threads, cut them with a rusty dagger, then thumped the knot down into the main weft of the
kilim
with a heav copper wool-comb. She continued in this manner, gathering speed as she went and working entirely from memory, until me reached the end of a line. Then she would pause, put down the comb and trim the pattern with a pair of long, Strewelpeter thumb-scissors. It was a hypnotic and strangely thrilling sight. This was certainly small-scale production, even by thirteenth-century standards, yet the techniques cannot have been any different from those witnessed by Marco Polo. Yule was wrong. If only on this much-reduced scale, carpet production had survived in the uplands of Anatolia.

Even the demand for double the agreed rate from the driver did not diminish the sense that, if nothing else, we had at least achieved something on the journey.

We walked through the lamplight as the last pony traps were rattling home along the cobbles. At the
kebabji
that evening forty Turks were watching one television. We sat down with a plate of shavings from the great elephant's-leg of doner kebab, and breathed in the bitter, acrid stench of
nargile.
The fat cook turned the doner spit. No one spoke. It was only after we had begun eating supper that we noticed that the programme was a Turkish-dubbed version of the BBC series
little Lord Fauntleroy
and I sat for a while, writing postcards and trying to imagine what the Turks thought was going on during the scenes of village cricket matches and port-swilling country house dinner parties.

After a few minutes the two German trans-Andes bicyclists wandered in. They were wearing matching blue tracksuits, and they made a great show of looking for dirt on the seats before they sat down. After wiping the covers with Kleenex they settled at the next table to us. The man leaned over.