The Road to Oxiana (24 page)

In its prime, when the walls were mud and the roofs wood, it may have looked rather shoddy—rather as it would look, in fact, if reconstructed at Hollywood. Today, at least it is not shoddy. Only the stone has survived, but for a few of Alexander's ashes which they dig up now and then. And stone worked with such opulence and precision has great splendour, whatever one may think of the forms employed on it. This is increased by the contrast between the stones used, the hard opaque grey and the more lucent white. Isolated ornaments have also been discovered in a jet-black marble without vein or blemish.

Is that all?

Patience! In the old days you arrived by horse. You rode up the steps on to the platform. You made a camp there, while the columns and winged beasts kept their solitude beneath the stars, and not a sound or movement disturbed the empty moonlit plain. You thought of Darius and Xerxes and Alexander. You were alone with the ancient world. You saw Asia as the Greeks saw it, and you felt their magic breath stretching out towards China itself. Such emotions left no room for the aesthetic question, or for any question.

Today you step out of a motor, while a couple of
lorries thunder by in a cloud of dust. You find the approaches defended by walls. You enter by leave of a porter, and are greeted, on reaching the platform, by a light railway, a neo-German hostel, and a code of academic malice controlled from Chicago. These useful additions clarify the intelligence. You may persuade yourself, in spite of them, into a mood of romance. But the mood they invite is that of a critic at an exhibition. This is the penalty of greater knowledge. It isn't my fault. No one would have been more pleased than I to leave the brain idle in a dream of history and landscape and light and wind and other impalpable accidents. But if circumstances insist on showing me more than I want to see, it is no good telling lies about it.

The columns, therefore, can be disposed of in a word. They are surprising, as Sir Gilbert Scott's town-hall in Bombay is surprising because it combines Hindu themes with Gothic. Like mules, these crosses are infertile. They have no bearing on the general course of architecture, and hold no precepts for it. You may like them in a casual way, if they happen to agree with some current of contemporary fashion. The columns at Persepolis don't.

The columns jump to the eye first. Other architectural features are the stairs, the platform, and the palace doors. The stairs are fine because there are so many of them. The platform is fine because its massive blocks have posed, and solved, an engineering problem. Neither has any art. But the doorways have. They, and they alone, boast a gleam of true invention; they suggest ideas, they utter a comment, with regard to other doorways. Their proportions are narrow and thick, thus inviting a perpetual to and fro; whereas our doors ask the figure to pause and frame itself. Like the arches at Stonehenge, they are made of monoliths, one for each side and one on top. But their mouldings and angles are as sharp and delicate as if cut by a machine.

Then comes the decoration. Those reliefs hold a
horrid shock for anyone who has known them in photographs. Where they have been exposed to the weather, their line and rhythm emerges poetically from the black-mottled stone. The ones inside the doorways, and the ones that Herzfeld has dug up, have exactly the same line and rhythm. But their stone, owing to its extreme hardness, has proved impervious to age; it remains a bright smooth grey, as slick as an aluminium saucepan. This cleanness reacts on the carving like sunlight on a fake old master; it reveals, instead of the genius one expected, a disconcerting void. I see only too well what Christopher meant when he said the sculptures were “unemotional without being intellectual”. My involuntary thought, as Herzfeld showed me the new staircase, was: “How much did this cost? Was it made in a factory? No, it wasn't. Then how many workmen for how many years chiselled and polished these endless figures?” Certainly they are not mechanical figures; nor are they guilty of elaboration for its own sake; nor are they cheap in the sense of lacking technical skill. But they are what the French call
faux bons
. They have art, but not spontaneous art, and certainly not great art. Instead of mind or feeling, they exhale a soulless refinement, a veneer adopted by the Asiatic whose own artistic instinct has been fettered and devitalised by contact with the Mediterranean. To see what that instinct really was, and how it differs from this, one can look at the Assyrian reliefs in the British Museum.

A lesser shock is administered by the crenellations along the parapet and balustrades of the staircase. Herzfeld found them in almost perfect condition; each has three steps and looks as if it had been built from a child's box of bricks. These jagged excrescences adorned all the palaces; Krefter has reproduced them with care on his. They are ugly enough in themselves. But adjacent to the reliefs, their clumsy iteration and angular shadows spoil the delicacy of the carving as well. Herzfeld said:
“They give it life”. They do. But it isn't a pretty life and it kills everything else.

Abadeh
,
March 3rd
.—Ali Asgar couldn't bear the teahouse any more. We left Persepolis after lunch.

A newly planted avenue led off the Isfahan road to Cyrus's tomb, a sarcophagus of white marble on a high, stepped plinth, standing by itself among the ploughed fields. It looks its age: every stone has been separately kissed, and every joint stroked hollow, as though by the action of the sea. No ornament or cry for notice disturbs its lonely serenity. Enough that Alexander was its first tourist. There used to be a temple round it. One can still see how this stood from the bases of the columns.

Since then, it has become the Tomb of the Mother of Solomon. In deference to this transformation, a miniature mihrab and an arabic inscription have been carved on one of the inside walls. Across the mihrab hangs a bunch of rags and bells; leaves of an old Koran were blowing about the floor. The ground inside the temple boundary is occupied by Mohammadan graves.

Haifa mile further on stood a platform of the Persepolis type, supporting one plain white pillar; and near this, the ruin of a tomb-house like the one at Naksh-i-Rustam. At length, while the sun's last rays spurted from a bank of rain-clouds, I trudged over the plough to that solitary marble stele which bears the four-winged effigy of Cyrus. Now indeed I could imagine how the visitor to Persepolis used to feel; and so dreaming was lost in the dark, till rescued by the flash of the car's headlights.

Isfahan
.
March 5th
finds me staying with Wishaw, the “captain of the oil”; in other words, manager of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company's local branch.

The name of the Governor of Isfahan is Mr. Trump-of-Raphael. Before calling on him, I asked one of Wishaw's clerks to translate my letter of recommendation:

H.E. The Governor-General, Isfahan.

Mr Birn, one of the learnedmen of England, is proceeding yours to pay visit to the History Buildings etc. of that districts, who will also take photos of the said buildings.

Please issue necessary instructions to the Authorities concerned to render him any assistance he may require.

Sgd—
M
AHMOOD
J
AM
(
Sealed
) M
INISTRY
OF
I
NTERIOR

Mr. Trump-of-Raphael told me his plans for improving the Maidan. The first instalment of them has got him into trouble, since Marjoribanks disapproves of the new tank on the ground that it may breed the anopheles mosquito. Nevertheless he will proceed with the rest. The arcaded walls are to be enriched with tilework. And where the road cuts across in front of the bazaar entrance at the north-east end, it will pass under big tiled archways on either side. The architect is a German who works under a supervising committee consisting of Herzfeld, Godard, and other savants.

Isfahan
,
March 9th
.—Muzaffar the painter, who exhibited at the London exhibition and afterwards did a picture for the Queen, takes one back to the days before artistic temperament, when artists did as they were told. He comes of generations of painters, and has inherited their craftsmen's attitude; in fact he started by decorating pen-boxes. I asked him to do a miniature of me. Certainly, he said, if I would give him a photograph to
copy. That, I replied, was just what I would not do, as my purpose in giving him the commission was to see if he could draw from life. He can. He has done a portrait, and got a likeness, quite in the Persian style. But I had to design the picture, say how the head must be spaced on the paper, and decide if the background should be plain or enriched. His pupils do the backgrounds and borders from a repertory of traditional patterns.

He prides himself on having two manners, Persian and European. I have seen some miniatures he did from photographs; they were simply the photographs themselves, only tinted. The other day he designed an appalling poster of two peacocks for a brand of local cigarette. “There!” he announced proudly. “I can do miniatures and I can do this. Rubens couldn't have done both.”

Why Rubens? Why Rubens particularly?

Isfahan
,
March 13th
.—Christopher is now a prisoner in the Residency at Bushire, according to news from Teheran. Ayrum, the Chief of Police, still says it is the fault of the General Staff. The Minister of Foreign Affairs says it is due to Ayrum's personal orders.

Mrs. Budge Bulkeley, worth £32,000,000, has arrived here accompanied by some lesser millionairesses. They are in great misery because the caviare is running out. Altogether, they are travelling in much less comfort than I do. A dozen couriers (they have two) on their dignity are not worth one servant who can cook and can turn a pigsty into one's ordinary bedroom at five minutes' notice—for such is Ali Asgar.

One of the party was heard to say of Mrs. Moore, who is on her way here by aeroplane: “Rich? Why she could buy us all up four times over.”

Mr. Trump-of-Raphael gave a tea-party for them. I sat between the English bishop and a Kajar prince.

“Why are you out here?” asked the bishop angrily.

“Travelling.”

“What in?”

Isfahan
,
March 16th
.—Yesterday was Marjoribanks's birthday. As Persian custom ordains, the Governor held a reception the night before.

This sudden use brought the Chihil Sutun to life again, transforming it from a stale summerhouse into the stately pleasure-dome it originally was. Spread with carpets, lit with pyramids of lamps, and filled with several hundred people, the verandah looked enormous; its wooden pillars and painted canopy towered away into the night; the glass niche at the back, glittering through its gold filigree, seemed infinitely distant. The Persians sat in black rows, with their hands folded and their feet under their chairs. Dr. Wolff, the German dentist, wore a bowler hat. In the front stood tables heaped with cakes and tangerines. Waiters handed endless cups of tea.

Mr. Trump-of-Raphael arrived in a dinner-jacket, over which flapped a mackintosh. He was so evidently pleased to see everyone there that everyone was pleased to see him. He shook hands with all he could reach, and acted the host instead of the official dummy, as an English governor would have done.

A brass band of Armenian boys from Julfa struck up, and we moved to the front to watch the fireworks. These exploded beside the long tank, rockets, catherine-wheels, and the rest, till at last two lines of golden fountains were pouring into the black water, and Marjoribanks himself spluttered vengefully into flame at the further end. The band played the National Anthem and that was the end of the first reception.

The second was more select. About fifty people collected in a long vaulted room, beneath those languid Safavid frescoes which have vied with Omar Khayam to give the world a false idea of Persian art and sentiment. The German bank manager's wife acted as hostess. Another band from Julfa played jazz inside a glass cupboard. At the end of the room was a cold buffet, which dispensed red cup from large bowls. Being composed of three parts arak and one Julfa wine, it was not so innocent as it looked.

No Persian would venture to entertain a single guest, much less give a party, without carpets. When dancing began, the floor rose like an angry sea, and not until several couples had been wrecked were nails employed to quiet the woollen breakers. At the buffet, Kajar princes hobnobbed with their official enemies the Governor and Chief of Police. Their faultless smokings and Cartier studs would have made my borrowed suit feel shabby but for the German element, which can be relied on anywhere to make other nationalities feel smart. One of them, seven feet high, wearing a tail-coat, a collar without an opening four inches deep, and a buff hunting waistcoat, had the audacity to leer at my cummerbund.

It was a pleasant evening, and when Mr. Trump-of-Raphael in a touching manner asked me what I thought of it I honestly applauded his good taste. There was nothing pretentious, no self-conscious nationalist anti-quarianism or self-conscious Parisian modernity, to spoil the guests' enjoyment. Persians have a gift of social ease. This taste of it made me feel quite affectionately towards the old monster whose life we had been celebrating. Besides, not everyone can say he has danced in the Chihil Sutun.

The whole Char Bagh was illuminated as I walked back to Wishaw's house over the river. Tiers of lamps
and candles were ranged at intervals under the trees, great wedding-cakes of light thirty feet high, draped in red and backed with gilt mirrors. In the midst of all this blaze, put forth by the Municipality at much trouble and expense to prove its loyalty, the mullahs of the College had quietly gone one better. From the parapet of the great portal they had let down three cut-glass chandeliers, whose pale candles, flickering against the black void of the arch, revealed three globes of goldfish suspended between them.

The next afternoon there was a procession. Having spent the morning decorating the Anglo-Persian car, I fell asleep after lunch and missed it. Wishaw missed it too, because all his employees had gone out and he had to stay behind to guard the store-yard.