The Road to Oxiana (29 page)

The military Governor called at dinner-time, and told us of the tradition that something used to flash from the roof of the tower; it was of glass or crystal, and was believed to hold a lamp. The Russians, he said, took it away; though he did not explain how they reached it. This tradition may contain a distorted reference to Kabus's glass coffin, which seems to have been genuine fact, as it was recorded by the Arab historian Jannabi soon after Kabus's death.

The country round here is covered with antiquities, if only we had time to stop and look for them. “Alexander's Wall” is only a few miles north of the Gurgan, and the swamps along the river to the east are said to be crowded with ruins that no one has explored. There are also prehistoric remains. Not long ago some Turcoman families found a tumulus filled with bronze vessels, which they abstracted and put into domestic use. Then bad luck overtook them, and ascribing it to their desecration of a grave they returned to the tumulus
and re-buried the vessels. One imagines the rush of professors to this archaeological Klondyke, if they knew where it was.

The Governor also brings us the bad news that the road to Bujnurd is blocked by rain and landslides. We might get through, but a lorry has just crawled in here half wrecked, after spending five days on the journey, and we dare not risk the car, with Afghanistan before it. In consequence, we are considering a ride over the mountains to Shahrud, while the car goes back by Firuzkuh.

Bandar Shah
(
sea-level
),
April 26th
.—Under arrest! I am writing on a bed in the police-station.

We are in the wrong, which makes it the more annoying. Having waited at Gumbad-i-Kabus till four o'clock, when there were still no horses to be had, we decided to go back with the car, and avoiding Asterabad, reached here at ten o'clock. There was nowhere to sleep but the station, and the station-master, a wilting young man, was not pleased at our disturbing him so late. The train this morning was due to leave at seven. He told us to have the car ready by the siding at six. It was. But the truck for it did not arrive till ten to seven, and we suddenly saw that the station-master, out of spite, had sent the train off without us. The pent-up irritation of seven months exploded: we assaulted the man. There were loud shrieks, soldiers rushed in, and pinioning Christopher's arms, some struck his back with the butts of their rifles, while their officer, who was scarcely four feet high and had the voice of a Neapolitan tenor, repeatedly slapped his face. I escaped these indignities, but we share the confinement, to the bewilderment of the police, who find us a nuisance.

They threaten us with an “enquiry” into the “incident” in Teheran. We must grovel to avoid this at all costs. It would take weeks. I wonder—we both wonder—what madness came over us to jeopardise our journey in this way.

Samnan
(4000
ft
.),
April 27th
.—The “incident” was settled by the German superintendent of the repair shops, an imperturbable old man, who lounged into the police-station, said “What's this?”, and after seeing us shake hands with the station-master, took us off to his house for the night. This was the kinder of him, because his daughter and son-in-law, a Danish bank manager, had arrived unexpectedly from Teheran, and since there was only one spare room we had to put up our beds in the parlour.

This morning as we left Shahi it was raining, and the road up to the pass was slippery and dangerous. Round the corner came a lorry out of control. We hit it broadside, lurched towards the precipice above the valley… this was the end; but no, we stayed on the road, and had only to deplore that my suitcase, which had been attached to the step, lay crushed by the lorry's front wheel into a thin blue sandwich, extruding clothes, films, and drawing-paper. The insurance, which had lasted eight months, ran out last week.

At Amiriya they said it had rained for fifteen days consecutively, and that such weather at this time of year had never been known before.

Damghan
(3900
ft
.),
April 28th
.—More disasters.

Twenty miles from Samnan the back axle broke. We
had a spare one, but it took five hours to fit, while Christopher and I, unable to help, wandered forlornly about the sodden, glistening desert, consoling ourselves with the yellow dwarf tulips just coming into flower, and occasionally scrambling eggs in a ruined tea-house.

“What language are you talking?” asked Christopher of the youth in charge.

“I talk Chakapakaru, the language of Samnan. Don't you?”

We don't. But it may be a treasure for the philologist.

The rain fell like a bath-waste. For miles at a time the road was a river, the desert a flood, and every mountain a cataract. But by some freak of Nature, a
river-bed
which ran beside the telegraph poles, and which was several feet below the level of the surrounding country, remained completely dry.

In one torrent a couple of lorries were already embedded without hope. The local population hauled us through, exacting the toll of wreckers before doing so, else they would have led the car into the deepest part and left it. Henceforth the road improved, and we were travelling at forty miles an hour on the straight when a small water-course, three feet wide, two deep, and as sharp as a coffin, flashed across our sight… it was the end again; but no; we jumped it, fell into a bog, and landed up alive with a shattering bump against a heap of gravel.

The front-wheels were the shape of duck's feet, but the axle had held, and we could just waddle into Damghan, where the blacksmith is now straightening it. Here we saw Pybus's Indian orderly, who told us that his master, returning from Meshed, had stuck in a river on the other side of the town. Pybus himself appeared soon after, at the head of a procession carrying his luggage. This included an old woman, bent double with
rheumatism and shrouded in blue checks, who was laboriously salving a minute portfolio.

We cheered Pybus up by telling him of our own misfortunes. Three bottles of Shahi wine, an orange salad, and Wishaw's cigars have cheered us all up.

Abbasabad
(c. 3000
ft
.),
April 29th
.—Even on my other two journeys, this accursed windy spot where they sell cigar-holders of green soapstone and the men wear red blouses, seemed the peak of misery. Now we have to spend the night here.

The river flowed right over Pybus's car. It was a new limousine. This morning it looked like Neptune's cave. After two lorries had failed to pull it out with chains, we went on.

It was still raining. Beyond Shahrud we ran into soft sand, which flew up into a paste on the windscreen, so that I had to drive with my head outside it, though never at less than thirty miles an hour or we should have stuck. The inky jagged hills and cloud-wracked skies of Khorasan were still the same. But a new vegetation had sprung up over the black water-logged desert: the sparse green of camel-thorn, strange asphodels, and a kind of stocky yellow cow-parsley, three feet high and as thick as a tree: an ugly, sinister flower.

They said here there was water four feet deep on the way to Sabzevar. We therefore stopped, and I have gone to bed with Gosse's
Father and Son
. Christopher has been buying a red blouse with as much fuss as if it was from Schiaparelli.

Meshed
,
May 1st
.—“Just in time for the ball!” shouted
Mrs. Gastrell, as we staggered up the steps of the Consulate.

Does the whole Indian Political Service travel about Asia with dressing-up boxes? Mrs. Gastrell was a negress in black skin-tights and a top-hat; Gastrell, who is seven feet high, danced a Scottish reel as Bluebeard, wearing cloth of gold and a caerulean beaver. Rose, of the same service, appeared as a Kate Greenaway schoolboy. Mrs. Hamber was a shepherdess, Hamber a Bokhara grandee in silks of a pattern larger than the human body. Before I could say how pleased I was to see them again, they were transforming me into a charwoman; while Christopher, pinioned by the Gastrells, was whisked into the regalia of an Arab sheikh. The missionaries were out in force. Mr. Donaldson, having spent half his life studying Shiah pilgrims, had very properly become one. When I asked him if it wasn't a sacrifice to have all his hair shaved off for one evening, he said, “Oh no, it fits very well. I always travel bald and am starting on a journey tomorrow to visit the Georgian villages between Abbasabad and Kuchan. The people are Mohammadans of course, but they still have a tradition of superior education.”

The charwoman forgot herself so far as to stab the Bokhara grandee in the back with a parasol during an apache duet.

Meshed
,
May 2nd
.—Lee of the Bank says he has been doing more business lately than for some time past. I asked him if this were due to the expulsion of the Jews from Afghanistan. He said it might be.

Those Jews had the lambskin trade in their hands, and I remember at Christmas Lee had been interested in my account of their exodus; though neither he nor I
knew at the time that it was due to a government order. The reason of his interest was that formerly a large proportion of this trade went through Meshed, to the profit of the town and the Bank. But when Marjori-banks started his policy of economic nationalism, this stopped. All trade stopped more or less, till at last the Khorasan customs service could not even pay its wages out of its receipts. But now that many of these Jews have entered Persia, they may have brought the lambskin business back with them.

One always hears of “Persian” lamb, and when I was in Afghanistan before I did not realise the economic significance of the trade to that country; though there was much conversation about lambskins in the Herat bazaar. Persia, it is true, exports lamb enough. But the fine fur, for which milliners in London and Paris pay up to
£
7 a skin, is a monopoly of Oxiana. This is due to a peculiar dry herbage which grows on the Oxus plain and makes the wool curl more tightly than it will elsewhere. Thus the really profitable part of the lambskin trade is shared between Russia and Afghanistan. But why the Afghans must needs get rid of the people who conduct their part of it, and so make Persian middlemen a present of the profits, is a mystery we have still to unravel.

Meshed
,
May 6th
.—A possible light on this mystery was vouchsafed us yesterday by my old friend the Afghan consul. We were discussing an announcement in the paper that the Afghan Government had decided to rebuild Balkh, and I asked him what the point was, since Mazar-i-Sherif, the capital of Afghan Turkestan and a flourishing city, is only seventeen miles away. He answered that Balkh was a historical city, the
Home of the Aryan Race
.

This mania must have spread from Germany. Till a
year ago the Afghans claimed that they themselves were Jews: the lost tribes of Israel. But nothing is too fantastic for Asiatic nationalism.

The days have passed pleasantly here. We ought to be off, but two things detain us. One is the arrival of a spare axle from Teheran. The other is the Shrine. In point of coloured mosaic, no building in Persia that I have seen or heard of can compare with the Musalla at Herat, except possibly the Shrine here, which was built by the same woman; in which case, being more or less intact, it is probably the finest example of colour in the whole of Mohammadan architecture. I had not grasped this probability when I was here before; I supposed that the faience at Isfahan would equal or surpass that of the Musalla. It does not. Sheikh Lutfullah is more gorgeous, but only as St. Peter's is more gorgeous than the Tempio at Rimini; the vernal inspiration of a Renascence is lacking. I will not leave this town without seeing Gohar Shad's only complete building.

We have cleared the ground. Our first move was to visit the new hospital, the apple of Assadi's eye, in order to be able to praise it to him when he returned from Teheran. This piece of tact put him in a good humour, but no more; he was still disinclined to take official responsibility for the safety of a foreigner inside the Shrine. Nevertheless, our call on him led indirectly to acquaintance with an amiable young schoolmaster in suède gloves, who offered to help us for the fun of the thing—for the fun, that is, of striking a blow for knowledge against the forces of ecclesiastical darkness. We met him last night to discuss matters, having first taken a room at the hotel so as to keep our plans secret from the Consulate. By the time he arrived I had become a Persian; at least he thought so, greeting me in Persian fashion and being astonished when the seedy Oriental
with eyes cast down and hands folded in his sleeves burst into a rude guffaw. This clinched it. He will take us tonight.

This morning we drove out to Chinaran, along the road to Askabad and the Russian frontier. From here a cart-track took us to within six miles of the tower of Radkan. We walked the rest of the way, at first over springy turf cropped short by droves of horses, then through a series of sticky saline marshes. Our guide was a furious little peasant with enormous whiskers.

“Do you know the way to Radkan?”

“How should I not know it?” he vociferated indignantly. But he only knew the way to Radkan village, and his anger passed all bounds when we dragged him through those marshes to the tower instead.

It was worth the effort: a massive cylindrical grave-tower with a conical roof, ninety feet high, and dating from the XIIIth century. The outside wall consists of columns two feet thick, which touch one another. Their brickwork, rusty red in colour, is arranged in tweed patterns, which give the building a sort of shine, as of a well-groomed horse. Unlike the Gumbad-i-Kabus, this tower has a staircase in the thickness of the wall.

On the way back, we turned off the main road to visit Tus. I was saying to Christopher that apart from the old bridge and mausoleum there, he ought to see the Firdaussi memorial, because it proved that a breath of architectural taste still lingered in modern Persia. The words froze on my lips: a crowd of workmen were busy demolishing it. Iron railings hid the pool. Municipal flower-beds lay ready for cannas and begonias. And at the end, instead of the pleasant unostentatious pyramid I admired in November, rose half-built copies of the bull's-head columns at Persepolis.