The Road to Oxiana (21 page)

I walked upstairs.

There was no furniture in the room. In the middle of the floor stood a tall brass lamp, casting a cold white blaze over the red carpets and bare white walls. It stood between two pewter bowls, one filled with branches of pink fruit blossom, the other with a posy of big yellow jonquils wrapped round a bunch of violets. By the jonquils sat the Governor, with his legs crossed and his hands folded in his sleeves; by the blossom his young son, whose oval face, black eyes and curving lashes were the ideal beauty of the Persian miniaturist. They had nothing to occupy them, neither book nor pen nor food nor drink. Father and son were lost in the sight and the smell of spring.

The irruption of the barbarian, dusty, unshaved, and lurching tired, was a trial of manners to which they rose, not without astonishment, but with a bustle and goodwill that must have hurt their mood of poetic contemplation. While I lowered myself to the floor, creaking and sprawling like a dog in a doll's-house, and feasted my nose in the jonquils, fire was kindled, the samovar re-lit, and thick red wine poured out; with his own hands the Governor chopped and skewered the meat to make me a kabob, and roasted it over the charcoal embers; then he was dismembering tangerines and sugaring them, for my pudding. In the end he went so far as to offer me his own bed. I explained that mine was coming, and begged the room below to put it in.

There are no police in this small tribal market town, neither Amniya nor Nasmiya; the Governor's safety depends on a few soldiers. People dress as they will, the men wearing striped gowns, loose cummerbunds stuck
with weapons, and black bun-shaped hats without brims. The Pahlevi hat is a rare exception. This at last is that other Persia which so many travellers fell in love with, and having found it I would willingly stay here a week if I could. But if Christopher and I are to reach Afghanistan in time to forestall that much prophesied “trouble in the spring”, we ought to leave Teheran by April 15th, and I can't dawdle. Not that there is really much likelihood of trouble. But the mere rumour of it would be enough to close the country to foreigners for a month or two.

It was thus with an energy quite opposed to my inclinations that I set out to see the ruins this morning. The Governor offered me a horse, knowing mine must be tired. I thanked him, explaining that the mere mention of a saddle made me groan, and began to walk. Firuzabad is actually further south than Bushire. It was very hot. From outside the town I saw palms waving over the flat roofs. I had covered the two and a half miles to Gur, the city that Ardeshir founded about
A.D
. 220, and was regretting my refusal of a mount, when the clatter of horses in pursuit made me turn. First rode the Governor on a rearing brown stallion, followed by his son on a bucking grey; next the mayor and some other gentlemen; then a posse of armed soldiers, one mounted on a strawberry roan. In the middle of the cavalcade pranced a huge white ass, carrying a mountain of carpets but no rider. “This”, said the Governor, “is for you. Our guests do not walk.”

The “minaret” of the night before proved to be a solid square shaft eighty to a hundred feet high, and twenty broad, built of coarse Sasanian masonry and having no entrance or trace of one. The sides gave evidence of an ascending ramp, which must have engaged the shaft in a four-sided spiral. I remember now
that Herzfeld in his
Reisebericht
suggests that the ramp was enclosed in its turn, the whole thus forming a tower with an interior ascent of which only the core remains. Dieulafoy, more picturesque, believes the column served as a fire-altar and pictures the priests filing up its ramp in full view of the populace below, as though it were an Aztec teocalli. But neither theory explains what purpose, other than megalomania, can have prompted the erection of 40,000 cubic feet of solid stone in this form. Even the pyramids were slightly hollow.

The tower has no name, but is said to mark the site of a stone fallen from heaven. All round it, within a radius of half a mile, the ground shows the contours of Ardeshir's capital. Many of the foundations, or of the walls that fell on them, seem to be only a foot or two below the earth, and there is one platform still above it. This is built of rectangular blocks, neatly cut and fitted in the Achemenian way, and very different from the higgledy-piggledy masonry of the tower, where stones of any shape are embedded in a sea of mortar. I should like to dig here; it must be the richest site in Persia still untouched. Sasanian fragments are seldom beautiful. But they document an obscure passage of history at the junction of the ancient and modern worlds.

The others mounted their horses and I the ass, which beat the Governor's stallion by a nose at every corner, flapping its ears and hopping its ditches as if it could outpace any horse living. We stopped at a garden on the way back, to recline beneath a grove of old orange trees, and drink curds with nutmeg. Outside the town, three ragged children salaamed the Governor from the back of a camel. Reining back the stallion on his hindlegs, as though the scene were another Field of the Cloth of Gold, he gave them in return the polite formulas: “Peace to you. Your Excellencies' health is good by the grace of God?” It was a great joke, we all laughed, and so did the children. But it was also a true
benevolence, that warmed my heart towards Haji Seyid Mansur Abtahi Shirazi, the Governor of Firuzabad.

Ibrahimabad
(
c. 4400 ft
.),
February 23rd
.—That charming man had intended to come with me to the gorge, but was engaged, today being Friday, in entertaining the Municipality to a picnic in the garden of Nasrabad. He had not believed I would leave so soon, and had expected me at the picnic too. Indeed he was almost offended by my going. But I could assure him, with truth for once, that his grief was nothing to mine.

Today has been the perfect day, the one day which, even if there is no other like it, makes the whole journey from England worth while.

The start was unpropitious. Last night, as my horse from Ismailabad was being shod in the bazaar, it broke its halter and fled. The escort promised me one of theirs instead, but were late in getting up, thinking they now had the advantage of me. Outside the town, we found the missing horse, which delayed us still further. It was nibbling the road with that air of hopeless indecision characteristic of lost horses, vacantly looking up now and then as if in search of some kind person to take it home. Having wasted half an hour trying to effect this kindness, during which our own horses were goaded into a lather while the truant remained as cool, as vacant, and as helplessly innocent as before, we drove the brute into the gorge. One of the escort stayed on guard at our end, so that if it did escape by the other it could only arrive at its native place.

The Palace of Ardeshir assumed enormous dimensions as we crossed the river and could distinguish the small-ness of two Kashgai tents encamped on a lawn below it. These tents were black and oblong, and were stretched
over low stone walls. Dogs, children, lambs, and chickens tottered about the grass, enlarging still further the uncouth skeleton above them. Two women wearing full pleated skirts were pounding corn on a cloth by means of pestles attached to long staves.

There was not time to measure the palace properly. But I soon saw that Dieulafoy's elevation was wrong. This is interesting, considering the importance of the building in the history of architecture and the fact that Dieulafoy's has so far been the only information available to writers on the subject.

The entrance was originally on the south, through a big barrel-vaulted ivan. Today what appears to be the main façade faces east, looking across the river towards the mouth of the gorge. Behind it, at either end, are two courts, the southern covering about half an acre, the northern rather less. These are divided from one another by a series of three domed chambers, which stretch right across the Palace from side to side one behind the other. Only half the east chamber is still standing, with half its dome above it; so that the line of the façade appears at first sight to be interrupted by an open vestibule thirty feet across and fifty high. But one soon sees that really there is no façade at all—though I use the term for convenience—and that the whole of the east wall, having stood on the brink of the green slope now supporting the Kashgais, has gradually collapsed and taken the front of the first chamber with it.

The two inner chambers are also about thirty feet square, and their domes, resting directly on simple corner squinches, have the same diameter. The apex of each dome is pierced by a broad hole, round which the outside masonry projects upwards. At present these holes afford the only light there is; if they were originally enclosed, the chambers beneath must have been artificially lit, and each dome must have been surmounted
by a sort of rough cupola, thus discovering a precedent for those extraordinary nipples on the Romanesque domes of Perigueux. The dome of the middle chamber is some fifteen feet higher than the other two. Higher still is the elliptical cupola which separates it from the front dome, and which roofs the passage between the middle chamber and the outer ruined one. This passage is divided into two storeys; but a light well in the floor of the upper enables the hole in the cupola to illuminate the lower. A similar passage separates the middle and hinder chambers. This is roofed by a massive barrel-vault and is entirely unlighted.

Dieulafoy makes all three domes the same height, and omits the cupolas of the passages altogether.

It would need a long time to make sense from the maze of internal walls and heaps of fallen masonry that occupy the two courts. One can see, however, that a barrel-vaulted room, or succession of rooms, ran beside the dome-chambers on the north. The vault is gone, but two of the transverse walls whose semicircular tops supported it still stand. These walls are pierced at the bottom by shallow archways like those of a bridge, whose curve, being less than that of the vault above, is rendered doubly hideous by a pier at the apex necessary to support the weight of the wall.

Most of the walls are about five feet thick. The stones are uncut and the mortar fills the gaps. Stucco adorned the three chambers, whose refinements are of two styles. One we call Romanesque: the squinches rest on a dogtooth cornice; doorways with rounded tops are framed in concentric mouldings; and a similar niche in the south court has these mouldings also dog-toothed. The other is bastard Egyptian, copied from Persepolis: arched doorways are surmounted by horizontal canopies which are scalloped, as they spread forwards and outwards, with a radiating feather design. This convention is unattractive enough in its own country and original stone.
As a third-hand reminiscence, in cheaper material, it foreshadows the taste of the London County Council in the early XXth century.

However, only archaeologists see beauty in Sasanian architecture. The interest here is historical. This palace, founded at the beginning of the IIIrd century
A.D.
, is a landmark in the development of building. Its revelation of the squinch, a simple arch across the angle of two walls, coincides with the appearance of the pendentive, a kite-shaped vault supported by an angle pier, in Syria; and from these two inventions derive two primary architectural styles, in the wake of two religions: mediaeval Persian, branching into Mesopotamia, the Levant, and India; and Byzantine-Romanesque, spreading to the confines of northern Europe. Previously, there was no means of placing a dome on four square walls, or on a building of any shape whose inside area much exceeded that of the dome itself. Henceforth, as squinches and pendentives became enlarged, and as the former were multiplied into zones of stalactites and bats'-wings, a dome became possible to buildings of all shapes and sizes. The Christian expansion of this possibility reached its height in St. Sophia at Constantinople, and began a second life with Brunelleschi's dome at Florence. The Mohammadan is waiting to be mapped, by anyone who can keep his temper among the jealousies of modern archaeology. But one thing is certain. Without these two principles, of which one has its prototype here, architecture as we know it would be different, and many objects most familiar to the world's eye, such as St. Peter's, the Capitol, and the Taj Mahal, would not exist.

I wish I could go to Sarvistan. It is nearer Shiraz than this, and has another Sasanian palace, in which a row of arches that spring from the wall are supported by round pillars. Here perhaps is the germ of that other great feature of Mohammadan architecture, the arcade. Pillars
certainly played their part in Sasanian architecture, as the excavations at Damghan have shown, and in view of the Sasanian aptitude for vaulting, it is probable that they were used in most cases to support arches.

Fired by this train of revelation, I clambered down from the roof to find the Kashgais had made tea for us. An old tribesman obligingly produced an awl and thread to mend the cross-piece of my saddle-bags. One of the younger men, having said he knew the path up to the Kala-i-Dukhtar, had gone ahead to await us in the gorge. He hailed us from above as we rode by. The climb was easier than it looked, but nasty enough.

Seen from behind, the castle stands on a promontory, and is thus defended on three sides by precipices that fall almost sheer from its outer walls. The last stage of the climb was up a saddle connecting the promontory with the main cliff. This leads to the back of the building, which faces north, a mighty rampart lacking door or window and curved as though it contained a stadium. Tall thin buttresses support it at close intervals, and are joined at the top by rounded arches.

Creeping gingerly round the edge of the wall, for there was a high wind, I attained the central chamber.

The castle is built in three terraces. From the gorge below a gaping black arch can be seen, which gives entrance to a basement on the east side. This I could not reach as the spiral ramp communicating with it was blocked and I had no wish to climb down the outside. There are two such ramps, contained in square turrets which led originally from the bottom of the building, past the east corners of the chamber I stood in, to a third level above.