The Road to Oxiana (20 page)

Wine is another boon of the Persian South. Its fame has spread, and etymologists dispute as to whether sherry derives its name from Xerez or Shiraz. So far we have discovered three varieties here: a very dry golden wine, which I prefer to any sherry, though its taste is not so storied; a dry red claret, nondescript at first but acceptable with meals; and a sweeter vin rosé, which induces a delicious well-being. If the vineyards had names, and the makers corks, enabling different wines to be distinguished and stored, Shiraz might produce real vintages. But Persians, broad as their views on religion are, drink mainly for the sin of it and care little for the taste. While if foreigners introduce these improvements, they will inevitably try to imitate their own brands, as the Germans have done at Tabriz. Second-rate hock is drinkable, but not interesting; I prefer a worse wine with a taste of its own. Meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. Hoyland, who have lived much in the Mediterranean, are planning a systematic research of the vineyards in the coming autumn.

Shiraz, February 18th
.—The charm of Shiraz has evaporated.

Christopher and I called on the Chief of Police to complete the ordinary formalities, and to ask permission to go to Firuzabad, which is not generally granted owing to the lawlessness of the Kashgais; indeed Herzfeld and Aurel Stein seem to be the only people who have looked at the monuments there since Dieulafoy in the eighties.

“You”, said the Chief, looking hard at me, “can go. But you must go alone.”

“I don't understand. Do you mean that I can go and Mr. Sykes can't?”

“Exactly.”

This was mortifying enough. But worse followed. As we sought to drive out of the town for a breath of mountain air, the police at the Allah-ho-Akbar Gate stopped the car, and only allowed us to proceed on foot.

Later, I called on the Governor, a man of wide interests. Translation, he said, was an art, as he had learnt from rendering Plato and Oscar Wilde into Persian. When I told him of our encounters with the police, he telephoned to the Chief, who said there had been no mistake.

On hearing this, Christopher went again to the police-station and asked for an explanation. Thus cornered, the Chief revealed that he had had orders from Teheran to prevent Christopher from leaving the town. No, he could not go to Firuzabad; nor on to Bushire; nor out shooting; nor even, in future, for a country walk.

Of all the foreigners I have met in this country, diplomats, business men, and archaeologists of many nationalities and varying terms of residence, Christopher is the only one who likes its inhabitants, sympathises with their nationalist growing-pains, and consistently upholds their virtues, sometimes to the point of unreason. The Persian authorities, in their present fit of xenophobia, should have picked on him last instead of first. Poor old Marjoribanks is so sensitive to European comment that revenge is easy. But the satisfaction of driving a senile megalomaniac into a tantrum is not much compensation for the destruction of one's immediate pleasure in the country.

Kavar
(
c. 5200 ft
.),
February 20th
.—The start of a journey in Persia resembles an algebraical equation: it may or may not come out. I gave all yesterday to it, and we got off at six this morning; but have spent the rest of the day here awaiting cavalry and horses.

There are two kinds of police: the Nasmiya, which controls the towns; and the Amniya, which controls the roads and such of the hinterland as admits the law. On the advice of the Chief of the Nasmiya, I called on the Chief of the Amniya, since his men must be responsible for my journey to Firuzabad. He was a fat, jocular fellow, and was anxious to help me.

The Governor had already telephoned to him, explaining my purpose and identity. His first act, therefore, was to telephone to the Governor enquiring my purpose and identity. Having received a satisfactory answer, he bethought himself, and the Governor concurred, that the matter would be simplified if the Governor were to set forth my purpose and identity in a letter.

Before going to fetch the letter, I asked him if I ought to have an escort, since there were rumours of thieves on the road. Quite unnecessary, he replied, quite unnecessary. Hurrying in a cab to the Ark, I rattled off the polite formulas, complimented the Governor on his orange trees, and asked if the letter was ready.

“Don't you think”, he said pensively, “that you ought to have an escort for the journey?”

“Really, Your Excellency must advise me on that point. The Reis-i-Amniya says it is unnecessary.”

“I will telephone to him.…”

“Certainly,” answered the Reis-i-Amniya over the wire, “certainly he must have an escort. He can't possibly go without.” But there was a difficulty. The local Finance Minister had just started on a tour of land assessment (to include, among others, the property of the Kavam-al-Mulk) and had taken 100 mounted guards with him; thus there were no horses left, and any escort with me would have to go on foot.

“In that case,” I said, “let me hire horses for them.”

The Governor and the Reis-i-Amniya thought this an excellent solution.

Meanwhile, the secretary in the next room was writing the Governor's letter to the Reis-i-Amniya. When the Governor had approved it, a fair copy was made. This he signed and sealed and handed to me. I jumped into the cab, and was back at the Amniya within two hours of leaving it.

“Do you think, perhaps,” asked the Reis-i-Amniya blandly, “that you ought to have an escort to take you to Firuzabad?”

“Really, Your Eminence must advise me on that point.”

“In my opinion, you ought. Will one man be enough?”

“Certainly. I am not a millionaire to hire horses for a troop.”

“Of course not; who is? Five men will be enough, I imagine. Naturally, they will all be mounted on Government horses; we have plenty to spare. And it may facilitate matters if you take an officer with you in the car as far as Kavar. He will arrange your own horses there. I will tell him to call on you at the hotel at five o'clock, to arrange things.”

“Your Eminence is too kind. Gould he come at eight instead of five, as I am going out to tea?”

“Just as you wish. I will tell him to come at seven.”

We left in a Ford, the party consisting of my new servant Ali Asgar, the Sultan, which means Captain, the chauffeur, his assistant, and myself, together with luggage, food, and wine. I am travelling en prince for once, to save time; without a servant, one spends half every day packing and unpacking.

As we approached the tribal country, the Sultan stopped to inspect the Amniya block-houses, bare workmanlike places whose parapets were pierced by loopholes. It was interesting to see the machinery of tribal subjection, and watch the Amniya at work. They are a fine corps, the best of Marjoribanks's innovations.

Block-houses and motor-track ended at Kavar, a village belonging to Haji Abdul Karim Shirazi, who has just built himself a new house. This makes me unusually comfortable, though the mud on the walls is still wet. The pool in the courtyard is kept clear by a stream, which spurts from a stone gargoyle.

Outside the village, he has an old garden of about twelve acres. The gardener let me in by a wicket in a thatched wall, and I spent the afternoon wandering about the straight grass paths that divide Persian gardens into squares and oblongs. Each path is an avenue of poplars or planes, and is accompanied by irrigation runnels; inside these, each square contains fruit trees or bare plough. Squares sound formal; but really, Plantation or Wilderness is the proper word to describe a Persian garden. Winter and spring had met on this afternoon. A strong warm wind carried a sound of chopping with it and a rustle of dead plane-leaves; through those leaves perked the green crooks of young ferns. Here and there the rose-leaves had budded too early, and were blackened with frost. The bare apple branches bore tangles of dead mistletoe; another such tangle in the fork of a massive chestnut some hundreds of years old, was the nest of a
palamdar
—according to the gardener; did he mean magpie or squirrel? its dome was of one or the other. The first butterflies were out: a dusty white, of a kind I did not know, newly hatched and flying in a puzzled sort of way as if the world was still too brown for it; and a painted lady, newly awakened, and surveying the garden it knew in September with familiar swoops from point to point. There were some flowers for them. A peach (or plum) was in blossom, and I caught my breath at the dazzle of its red buds, white transparent petals and black stalks defined by the shimmering blue sky. From over the wall peered the endless mountains, mauve and lion-coloured, deathly barren. The bleating of lambs and kids drew me to the
gate again. A little girl was guarding them beside the village graveyard, where stood three giant weeping conifers of the cypress family. “Those are called
Karj
,” said the Sultan, “but why say they are big? You have not seen the ones at Burujird in Luristan.” A grey owl flew out of the first, from a hole it was inspecting. On a marshy pond dotted with the yellow bullet-heads of water lilies, the moorhens were already nesting.

I am lying in bed over a bottle of vin rosé. Ali Asgar, who was cook to a British regiment in the War, is “baking” a partridge in a pot. The cavalry have collected and horses been paraded. They say it is a two days' ride to Firuzabad, but I hope to do it in one.

Firuzabad
(
4400 ft
.),
February 22nd
.—I did, with an effort; though it was hard on the rest of the party. Opinion at Kavar gave the distance as nine farsakhs, thirty-six miles. I rode eleven hours, excluding one stop for lunch, and as the good going and the bad were about equal, I can hardly have averaged less than four miles an hour. It must have been more than forty miles.

After the usual mishaps, a broken girth, luggage thrown to the ground by a bucking horse, we left at seven. A sounder of pig crossed the path, running in file according to size. The ground was too stony for us to head them off, though one of the escort tried; but a gallop along the path brought us level with them, and the man shouted, “Do you want one?” The fact that I didn't, combined with some dim inhibition implanted by the English game-laws, made me hesitate. They veered away, and I lost my chance of seeing a Persian shoot from the saddle at full gallop.

The mountainside was covered with bushes and wild fruit trees in pink blossom. Beneath one lay a dead
wolf. After a hard climb, ending in a glissade of shale which was difficult for the horses, we reached the top of the Muk Pass; thence we followed a stream whose banks were dotted with deep blue grape-hyacinths. This brought us to the Zanjiran gorge, a narrow gate between two overhanging cliffs and a famous place for robbers. The path disappeared. There was only room for the stream, which was blocked to an unusual depth by a confusion of crags, tree-trunks, and brambles, so that the horses could hardly force a passage. Directly the water escaped from the gorge, it was collected into irrigation channels branching this way and that at different levels.

A hot scrubby plain intervened, separated from another like it by a step of 100 feet, from whose brink we saw villages in the distance. A black cleft in the opposite mountains was our object: the Tang-Ab or Water Pass. At Ismailabad I sat under a tree on a patch of emerald grass strewn with ox bones, and ate a bowl of curds.

It was a tumbledown place, and the headman was frightened out of his wits; for the police are seldom seen in these parts. “You should have gone to Ibrahimabad over there”, he said apologetically. When I asked him to fetch my horse, he misunderstood and thought I wanted a new one, which he produced. This was too great a convenience to forgo. I gave him five crowns, which he was loath to accept, till I employed the unfailing formula: “For your children”.

The cliffs of the Water Pass are stratified diagonally, as though the mountain had been cloven by an axe and would fit together again if pushed; I have seen nothing like it, or the gorge that followed, since those of Aghia Rumeli on the south coast of Crete. As we approached it, a river, which had come along the base of the hills from the east, suddenly turned at right angles into the gate, and seemed to be flowing rapidly uphill,
an illusion which persisted during the whole four miles of the gorge. This extraordinary formation varies in width from half a mile to 100 yards; its cliffs are from 500 to 800 feet high. The path crosses and recrosses the river in its serpentine course. About the middle, I saw the first signs of antiquity: a Sasanian castle perched on a salient of the east cliff, and connected by a long wall with a lesser stronghold. These two buildings are known as the Kala-i-Dukhtar and Kala-i-Pisa.
Kala
means castle, and
Dukhtar
maiden, being the same as our word daughter. But I had forgotten this for the moment, and when I asked Ali Asgar what it was, he suddenly answered in English: “Dukhtar, Sahib? Dukhtar—baby missis.”

Fantastic strata led up this eastern cliff, composed of huge rectangular blocks thirty feet long and twenty broad; I thought at first they were artificial roads, such as the Incas built to Cuzco. By now the light was going. Ali Asgar and the luggage were miles behind. He had three of the escort with him, but the two with me grew more and more worried.

“What is the matter?” I asked.

“Robbers.”

“But the great Riza Shah-in-Shah has destroyed all the robbers in Persia.”

“Oh, has he? Last month they shot four horses under me, and wounded me in the head. They would murder Your Excellency for a crown.”

We emerged at last by the south gate on the east bank of the river. There was just light enough to distinguish, half a mile away on the other, the vaulted phantom of Ardeshir's great palace, which my men called the Artish-Khana or House of Fire. And later, among the open fields, there was starlight enough to silhouette a minaret of enormous thickness. The men had no idea where the town was, but a village, where they wanted to stop, directed them in order to get rid
of us. In half an hour we found ourselves among silent streets and moonwashed walls. A passing wraith showed us to the Governor's house.