The Road to Oxiana (2 page)
Read The Road to Oxiana Online
Authors: Robert Byron
It was the passion for such monuments that drove Byron forward. An
intermittent hypochondriac, he hated what he called “adventure”. Yet
twice, endangering his life, he entered the forbidden mosque of Gohar Shad in disguise,
his face blackened by charcoal; and his journey from Herat to
Mazar-i-Sharifâhe and Sykes were the first Englishmen to attempt it, and Byron
made notes for Military Intelligenceâis still hard and perilous today. Travel,
he wrote to his mother, was “a grindstone to temper one's character
and get free of the cloying thoughts of Europe.”
If there is a defect in
The Road to Oxiana
it is that of
Byron's time and class. Despite his respect for Persian art and his disdain
for British convention, an ingrained condescension pervades his relationships with the
modern inhabitants. He rarely attempts empathy, and at worst he is downright choleric.
Several times he physically assaults people who infuriate him. And the diaries from
which his book was refined are, if anything, more intemperate still. “My point
of view,” he wrote to his mother, “is fundamentally that of the
artist rather than the district nurse.” His descriptions, like those of
Kinglake, are peppered with Anglocentric references. (A tweedy road supervisor looks
like Lloyd George; the Murghab river is “about the size of the Thames at
Windsor”, and an asphalt road down the Khyber Pass is as smooth as
Piccadilly.)
But Byron's overweening character and glittering mosaic of a
book were all of a piece. And its final excerpt brings him home to his beloved mother.
“What I have seen she taught me to see,” he writes, “and
will tell me if I have honoured it.” This was no idle accolade. After her
son's death she said: “I was always surprised when he struck out or
changed any words I didn't likeâimmediatelyâI was a very
hard critic.⦔
Almost a year and a half went byâmonths consumed
by lecturing, articles and the transposing of his first two travel
diariesâbefore Byron joined Desmond Parsons, who was living in Peking, and
began again on
The Road to Oxiana
. But this most celebrated of
twentieth-century travel books was restarted in profound dejection. Parsons was
diagnosed with the fatal Hodgkin's disease, and returned to London for
treatment. Byron remained through a bitter winter, struggling to write. He was struck
down by fever, then neuralgia. He worried about money. He started to drink, and to veer
out of control. At one dinner he smashed the china and glass at the British Embassy.
“My muse is dead,” he wrote to his sister.
But it was only sleeping. He settled at last to a discipline of six hours
a day, interspersed with herbal tea. Audaciously he kept the narrative form of his
diaries intact in all their freshness and panache, only pruning a little here, easing
the narrative flow there, and buttressed them with retrospective research. At the end he
wrote to his publisher, Harold Macmillan, that the book surprised him by its substance:
“I venture to think it is the best thing I have written.”
It is hard, in so individual a work, to trace what others may have
influenced it. Earlier travellers to Persia, like Lord Curzon, leave no perceptible
trace, and the travel books of Byron's contemporaries, notably Peter Fleming,
proceed in a time-honoured linear narrative. Byron admired Norman Douglas, whose works
were as erudite and richly styled as his own, but
The Road to Oxiana
, in its
fluent demotic voice, has survived more surely into the twenty-first century than
Douglas's
Old Calabria
.
Byron's book was published in 1937, to varying acclaim. Graham
Greene found it alternately brilliant, gossipy and “dryly
instructive”. Evelyn Waugh crossly accused it of self-centredness, yet praised
its gusto and dialogue; and G. M. Young, Byron's first mentor, in a long,
thoughtful review in the
Sunday Times
, placed Byron in the tradition of his
namesake: “the last and finest
fruit of the insolent
humanism of the eighteenth century.”
But by now all humanism was under threat, and Byron had flung himself into
a clamorous crusade against Fascism. The outbreak of war found him employed in
propaganda by the BBC, and in February 1941, under cover of journalism, he set sail for
Alexandria on an espionage mission to observe Russian activity in northeast Iran. He was
thirty-five. Three days out to sea, somewhere beyond Scotland's Cape Wrath,
his boat was torpedoed and sunk, and Byron presumed drowned, leaving behind bitter
speculation on all that he might have done.
Colin Thubron
PART I
PART I
Venice
,
August 20th
,
1933
.âHere as a joy-hog: a pleasant change after that pension on the Giudecca two years ago. We went to the Lido this morning, and the Doge's Palace looked more beautiful from a speed-boat than it ever did from a gondola. The bathing, on a calm day, must be the worst in Europe: water like hot saliva, cigar-ends floating into one's mouth, and shoals of jelly-fish.
Lifar came to dinner. Bertie mentioned that all whales have syphilis.
Venice
,
August 21st
.âAfter inspecting two palaces, the Labiena, containing Tiepolo's fresco of Cleopatra's Banquet, and the Pappadopoli, a stifling labyrinth of plush and royal photographs, we took sanctuary from culture in Harry's Bar. There was an ominous chatter, a quick-fire of greetings: the English are arriving.
In the evening we went back to Harry's Bar, where our host regaled us with a drink compounded of champagne and cherry brandy. “To have the right effect,” said Harry confidentially, “it must be the worst cherry brandy.” It was.
Before this my acquaintance with our host was limited to the hunting field. He looked unfamiliar in a green beach vest and white mess jacket.
Venice
,
August 22nd
.âIn a gondola to San Rocco, where Tintoretto's Crucifixion took away my breath; I had forgotten it. The old visitors' book with Lenin's
name in it had been removed. At the Lido there was a breeze; the sea was rough, cool, and free from refuse.
We motored out to tea at Malcontenta, by the new road over the lagoons beside the railway. Nine years ago Landsberg found Malcontenta, though celebrated in every book on Palladio, at the point of ruin, doorless and windowless, a granary of indeterminate farm-produce. He has made it a habitable dwelling. The proportions of the great hall and state rooms are a mathematical paean. Another man would have filled them with so-called Italian furniture, antique-dealers' rubbish, gilt. Landsberg has had the furniture made of plain wood in the local village. Nothing is “period” except the candles, which are necessary in the absence of electricity.
Outside, people argue over the sides and affect to deplore the back. The front asks no opinion. It is a precedent, a criterion. You can analyse itânothing could be more lucid; but you cannot question it. I stood with Diane on the lawn below the portico, as the glow before dusk defined for one moment more clearly every stage of the design. Europe could have bid me no fonder farewell than this triumphant affirmation of the European intellect. “It's a mistake to leave civilisation”, said Diane, knowing she proved the point by existing. I was lost in gloom.
Inside, the candles were lit and Lifar danced. We drove back through a rainstorm, and I went to bed with an alarm clock.
S.s. “Italia”
,
August 26th
.âThe moustachio'd and portly gondolier attached to the palace was waiting for me at five. All towns are the same at dawn; as even Oxford Street can look beautiful in its emptiness, so
Venice now seemed less insatiably picturesque. Give me Venice as Ruskin first saw itâwithout a railway; or give me a speed-boat and the international rich. The human museum is horrible, such as those islands off the coast of Holland where the Dutch retain their national dress.
The departure of this boat from Trieste was attended by scenes first performed in the Old Testament. Jewish refugees from Germany were leaving for Palestine. On the one hand was a venerable wonder-rabbi, whose orthodox ringlets and round beaver hat set the fashion for his disciples down to the age of eight; on the other, a flashy group of boys and girls in beach clothes, who stifled their emotions by singing. A crowd had assembled to see them off. As the boat unloosed, each one's personal concerns, the lost valise, the misappropriated corner, were forgotten. The wonder-rabbi and his attendant patriarchs broke into nerveless, uncontrollable waving; the boys and girls struck up a solemn hymn, in which the word Jerusalem was repeated on a note of triumph. The crowd on shore joined in, following the quay to its brink, where they stood till the ship was on the horizon. At that moment Ralph Stockley, A.D.C. to the High Commissioner in Palestine, also arrived on the quay, to find he had missed the boat. His agitation, and subsequent pursuit in a launch, relieved the tension.
A northerly wind flecks the sapphire sea with white, and has silenced those exuberant Jews below. Yesterday we sailed past the Ionian Islands. The familiar shores looked arid and unpeopled, but invincibly beautiful through the rosy air. At the south-west corner of Greece we turned east, passed Kalamata in its bay, and came to Gape Matapan, which I last saw from Taygetus outlined by the distant sea as though on a map. The rocky
faces turned to ruddy gold, the shadows to a gauzy blue. The sun sank, Greece became a ragged silhouette, and the southernmost lighthouse of Europe began to wink. Round the corner, in the next bay, twinkled the electricity of Gytheion.
Stockley recounted an anecdote of his Chief, who was shot in the legs during the Boer War and left for thirty-six hours before help came. Others had been shot likewise, for the Boers had fired low. Some were dead, and the vultures collected. So long as the wounded could move, however feebly, the birds kept off. When they could not, their eyes were pecked out while still alive. Stockley's Chief had described his feelings at the prospect of this fate, while the birds were hovering a few feet above him.
This morning the double peaks of Santorin cut across a red dawn. Rhodes is in sight. We reach Cyprus at midday to-morrow. I shall have a week to myself there before the Charcoal-Burners arrive at Beyrut on September 6th.
CYPRUS
:
Kyrenia
,
August 29th
.âHistory in this island is almost too profuse. It gives one a sort of mental indigestion. At Nicosia, a new Government House has replaced that which the riots destroyed in 1931. Outside it stands a cannon presented by Henry VIII of England to the Order of St. John of Jerusalem in 1527. This bears the Tudor arms. But the coinage, struck to commemorate the jubilee of British rule in 1928, bears the arms of Richard CÅur-de-Lion, who conquered the island and married there in 1191. I landed at Larnaca. A few miles off, in
A.D.
45, landed Paul and Barnabas. Lazarus is buried at Larnaca. So are two nephews of Bishop Ken, Ion and William, who died in 1693 and
1707. Dates begin with an Egyptian notice of 1450
B.C.
Fame arrived at the end of the XIIth century, with the rule and culture of the Lusignans: to King Peter I, authors so various as Boccaccio and St. Thomas Aquinas dedicated books. In 1489 Queen Catherine Cornaro surrendered her sovereignty to the Venetians, and eighty years later the last Venetian commander was flayed alive by the Turks. The three centuries of oblivion that followed were ended by the Treaty of Berlin, which leased the island to the English. In 1914 we annexed it.
