The Road to Oxiana (30 page)

I apologised for my enthusiasm and we drove away. Marjoribanks, it appears, saw a photograph of the first memorial, and said it was too plain.

Meshed
,
May 7th
.—Last night, excusing ourselves from the Consulate, we dined at the hotel. Christopher observed that an up-to-date guide to Meshed might contain a sentence such as: “Visitors intending to inspect the Shrine of the Imam Riza usually dine and make up at the Hotel de Paris”. We finished with vanilla ices, and primed ourselves with a miserable sour Caucasian burgundy. At eight o'clock, I had just applied the last shred of cork to the nape of Christopher's neck when our friend the schoolmaster arrived with an Armenian lady, who had come to see the heroes start. She saw them into a broken-down victoria. This drove to the main gate of the Shrine, where we dismounted, but instead of entering, turned to the right up the circular avenue. “Are you ready?” said the guide, and dived into a dark tunnel. We followed like rabbits, found ourselves in a little yard, scurried down a lighted bazaar full of booths and purchasers, and came out into the great court of the Mosque of Gohar Shad.

Amber lights twinkled in the void, glowing unseen from the mighty arch before the sanctuary, reflecting a soft blaze over the gilded entrance to the Tomb opposite, and revealing, as the eye adapted itself, a vast quadrilateral defined by ranks of arches. An upper tier rose out of reach of the lights, and, passing through a zone of invisibility, reappeared as a black parapet against the stars. Turbaned mullahs, white-robed Afghans, vanished like ghosts between the orbits of the lamps, gliding across the black pavement to prostrate themselves beneath the golden doorway. A sound of chanting was heard from the sanctuary, where a single tiny figure
could be seen abased in the dimness, at the foot of its lustred mihrab.

Islam! Iran! Asia! Mystic, languid, inscrutable!!

One can hear a Frenchman saying that, the silly fool—as if it was an opium den in Marseilles. We felt the opposite; that is why I mention it. Every circumstance of sight, sound, and trespass conspired to swamp the intelligence. The message of a work of art overcame this conspiracy, forcing its way out of the shadows, insisting on structure and proportion, on the impress of superlative quality, and on the intellect behind them. How this message was conveyed is difficult to say. Glimpses of arabesques so liquid, so delicately interlaced, that they looked no more like mosaic than a carpet looks like stitches; of larger patterns lost in the murk above our heads; of vaults and friezes alive with calligraphy—these were its actual words. But the sense was larger. An epoch, the Timurids, Gohar Shad herself, and her architect Kavam-ad-Din, ruled the night.

“Please blow your nose”, whispered our guide to Christopher.

“Why?”

“I ask you, blow it, and continue to blow it. You must cover your beard.”

Our guide was well known to the mullahs and policemen on duty. They greeted him without noticing the shabby plebeian at his side or the sneezing consumptive at his heels. We walked twice round the quadrangle, very slowly, bowing to the Tomb each time; then quickened our pace through the other two great courts, an ethereal vision of silver-white niches in double tiers.

“Now”, hissed our guide, “we are coming to the main gate. I shall talk to you, Mr. Byron, when we go out. You, Mr. Sykes, please blow your nose and walk behind.”

Guards, porters, and ecclesiastics stood up respectfully
as they saw him come. He seemed entirely preoccupied with his own conversation, which took the form of a charwoman's monologue and sounded so remarkable in Persian that I had no need to simulate interest: “So I said to him rumble rumble rumble rumble Rumble he said rumble Rumble? I said I said and rumble rumble Rumble rumble he said to me I said Rumble! rumblerumblerumblerumble.…” Everyone bowed. Our guide cast an eye over his shoulder to see that Christopher was following, and we were out, got a cab, and were soon scrubbing our faces at the hotel before returning to the Consulate.

We thanked him profusely. But in the same breath I was obliged to tell him that having seen this much, no amount of gratitude could prevent my begging him to take me again by daylight. Noticing his reluctance, Christopher offered not to come, as his beard was evidently an embarrassment. This relieved our guide. He arranged to call for me at two o'clock today.

This morning, when I entered the hotel, the bedroom attendant brought me a plate of corks and charcoal without being asked for them. It was another thing to make up for daylight with these crude materials: my moustache looked green instead of black, and turned out brindled; my eyes were still blue, inside lashes semi-black and sore with scrubbing. But the costume was subtle: brown shoes with tight black trousers four inches too short; grey coat; gold stud instead of a tie; our servant's mackintosh; and a black Pahlevi hat which I aged by kicking it—these components created the perfect type of Marjoribanks's Persia. Alas! my work of art was hardly complete before a telephone message informed me that our guide had funked at the last minute.

Not daring to take a cab by myself, I had to walk the mile and a half to the Shrine. The sun was at my back; I sweated under the mackintosh as I invented a quick
Persian-looking trot of short high steps that would prevent me from tripping over uneven paving-stones; but no one looked at me. The goal grew nearer. There was the main gate. There the little tunnel. Without looking round, I was in it, found the yard, realised there were trees there, and then saw that the further exit was completely blocked by a group of mullahs, my potential assaulters, who were discussing the wares of a small bookshop.

Everything depended on my pace. I was keyed to it, and by it. If it faltered, I was exposed. So I kept to it, and clove that group of mullahs as a torpedo cleaves the waves. By the time they noticed me, grumbling at such ill manners, there was only my back to notice.

I hastened down the dark bazaar, found the dome where I turned to the left, and was greeted, on coming out into the court, by such a fanfare of colour and light that I stopped a moment, half blinded. It was as if someone had switched on another sun.

The whole quadrangle was a garden of turquoise, pink, dark red, and dark blue, with touches of purple, green, and yellow, planted among paths of plain buff brick. Huge white arabesques whirled above the ivan arches. The ivans themselves hid other gardens, shadier, fritillary-coloured. The great minarets beside the sanctuary, rising from bases encircled with Kufic the size of a boy, were bedizened with a network of jewelled lozenges. The swollen sea-green dome adorned with yellow tendrils appeared between them. At the opposite end glinted the top of a gold minaret. But in all this variety, the principle of union, the life-spark of the whole blazing apparition, was kindled by two great texts: the one, a frieze of white
suls
writing powdered over a field of gentian blue along the skyline of the entire quadrangle; the other, a border of the same alphabet in daisy white and yellow on a sapphire field, interlaced with
turquoise Kufic along its inner edge, and enclosing, in the form of a three-sided oblong, the arch of the main ivan between the minarets. The latter was actually designed, it says, by “Baisanghor, son of Shah Rukh, son of Timur Gurkani (Tamerlane), with hope in God, in the year
821 (A.D.1418)
”. Baisanghor was a famous calligrapher; and being the son of Gohar Shad also, he celebrated his mother's munificence with an inscription whose glory explains for ever the joy felt by Islam in writing on the face of architecture.

This vision was a matter of seconds. Simultaneously I began to feel insecure. I had intended to follow last night's plan of walking slowly round the court, but was prevented by two crowds, one listening to a preacher before the main ivan, one praying before the Tomb opposite; so that either way I was threatened by religious etiquette. Other pilgrims were squatting along the walls, many of them Afghans, all quite different in clothes and manner from my lower middle-class Persian self, and eyeing me, so I imagined, with hawk-like scowls as I walked to and fro between the two crowds. At last it was no longer imagination: my gaping inquisitiveness attracted notice. I scuttled back into the bazaar. The mullahs were no longer in the passage. Out in the street stood Christopher, leering wantonly as I passed him with eyes averted. Now, on the way back, the sun was in my face, and people turned to look at me as I passed. There was something wrong. Whatever it was, Mrs. Gastrell did not jump to it. She was drying her hair by the fire, and was highly incensed when her privacy was abused by an unknown native.

I have learned what I wanted to know: first, that the use of coloured mosaic out of doors reached its climax at the Timurid Renascence; and second, that the beauty of it in the Shrine here is nevertheless surpassed on six
of the seven minarets at Herat, whose remains have an even finer quality and purer colour, and are not interrupted by plain brickwork. The few travellers who have visited Samarcand and Bokhara as well as the Shrine of the Imam Riza, say that nothing in those two towns can equal the last. If they are right, the Mosque of Gohar Shad must be the greatest surviving monument of the period, while the ruins of Herat show that there was once a greater.

I tremble to think that of the four finest buildings in Persia, the Gumbad-i-Kabus, the small dome-chamber in the Friday Mosque at Isfahan, the Mosque of Gohar Shad here, and the Mosque of Sheikh Lutfullah at Isfahan, my acquaintance with two was postponed till my last fortnight in the country.

Kariz
(3000
ft
.),
May 8th
.—We meant to stop at Seng-best to examine an XIth-century mausoleum and minaret which are visible a mile off the road. But a rainy sky made us push on to Turbat-i-Sheikh Jam. The Shrine there was disappointing. So was our lunch. It was in Isfahan I decided sandwiches were insupportable, and bought a blue bowl, which Ali Asgar used to fill with chicken mayonnaise before starting on a journey. Today there had been treachery in the Gastrells' kitchen, and it was filled with mutton. Worse than that, we have run out of wine.

Then began that end-of-the-world feeling which I had noticed before on the plain where Persia and Afghanistan meet, and which now struck Christopher too. Fields of opium poppies surrounded the infrequent villages, shining their fresh green leaves against the storm-inked sky. Purple lightning danced on the horizon. It had rained here already, and out in the
desert we could smell the aromatic camel-thorn as if it was on fire. Yellow lupins mingled with big clumps of mauve and white iris. Kariz itself was pervaded by an overpowering scent, as sweet as bean-flowers, but more languid, more poetic. I walked out to try and place it. The opium flowers called me, glowing in the dusk like lamps of ice. But it was not from them.

Kariz
,
May 9th
.—It rained in the night. We tried to start, but came back after five hundred yards.

Kariz
,
May 10th
.—This morning we took horses to inspect the road and try out our army saddles. I mounted a bay mare, old, small, and starved; Christopher a white stallion, young, big, and wall-eyed. The difference in sex ensured all the pace that could be got out of them.

At the Persian block-house in no-man's-land we found an officer who had only been two days in command there and was already depressed beyond speech by the companionship of his few troopers, a savage dog, and a yardful of scraggy mares with their new-born foals. Not a tree nor a stream nor any hint of garden warded off the sodden yellow cow-parsleys of the desert. We offered him some cake, and said we must be getting on, to see the worst of the road where it crosses the marsh.

He demurred, maintaining it was unsafe, but, seeing we were determined, came with us for the sake of company, riding with a rifle under his left thigh. A couple of troopers came too, and the whole party scattered out in line to reconnoitre all possible tracks We had gone a kilometre or so, when the officer shouted to me to observe a sleeping shepherd. Another of his scares, I thought, when I saw flies—too many of them—
on the bare legs. A blue-brown mask, swollen to the size of a pumpkin, was cricked backwards: the eyes were shut, the black lips open.

The officer was distraught. How could the man have died so near the block-house? When had he died? And what had caused his death? Did we think he could have been run over by a motor? Looking round at the plain dead level for ten miles in every direction, and remembering that the average traffic was one lorry a day, we did not think so: thus dashing our Persian's last hope of pretending that a corpse in our path, if untoward, was still a sign of Progress.

At length he took courage, dismounted, and lifted the body up. Its contents rattled. The limbs were crook'd and rigid. It had a bullet wound over the left eye, and another over the left breast. The man was a Kazak. His greying beard was thin enough to count the hairs. His knobbled stick had fallen where he fell, and seemed, as it lay there, a more human thing than the rotting hulk beside it.

The officer said he must go back at once, to write a report. When we answered, of course, but we must go on, he grew frantic. The dilemma was solved by the appearance on the horizon of a solitary cavalier from the direction of Islamkillah. Christopher and I rode off to meet him. The officer followed, groaning. The stranger was an Afghan horse-coper, and told us that even his horse had got into difficulties on the road across the marsh; the mud had come up to his belly, as we could see. This was all we needed to know. After drinking tea at the block-house, we left the officer composing his report, and started to ride back by an alternative road.

This led us, after an attack by dogs from a nomad encampment which took the stallion on its blind side and made it snort with fear, to the garrison town of
Yusufabad, where an officer entertained us with sugar cakes in a clean carpeted room overlooking a garden of flowering broom and acacias. He was a handsome young fellow, smartly turned out, and had the politeness to sympathise with our interest in his country's monuments.