A Writer's World (7 page)

It is another world across that frontier, bland and barred, as if some totally foreign and aloof civilization has implanted itself there. The Arabs can only look across and wonder, but they live in the second holiest city of Islam, and their own world survives. The glorious Dome of the Rock was damaged in the fighting, but surrounded by its wide courtyards, its arches and stairways and old walls, it is still of a shimmering splendour, and the peasants still stand reverent and awestruck before it.

Christians too, as they wander the sacred sites, may feel their philosophies secure. The Franciscan pilgrims make their way as always along the Via Dolorosa, the brown-robed monks, the American women in their cotton frocks, the family of Italians kneeling on the hard cobblestones beside the Stations of the Cross. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, split, shuttered, disfigured and profaned by ancient schisms and rivalries, the Latins process each evening: cultured voices and Gregorian chants, a visiting English priest, a stream of pilgrims carrying
lighted tapers. A few moments later come the Greeks, their music harsh and discordant, their aged bishop so enshrouded in his vestments that only his spectacles and a few white hairs can be glimpsed beneath his hood in the half-light. An old woman lays down her stick and raises her hands in worship in the subterranean chapel of the Armenians; a tall Abyssinian monk stands, lost in meditation, silent among the pillars; in the little Coptic chapel behind the Sepulchre a moon-faced kitchen clock ticks tinnily upon the altar.

So the piety of Old Jerusalem survives, and countless sects of Islam and Christendom still thrive among its walls. But this city is never at ease, and in its southern section, inside the Dung Gate, there is a wide expanse of ruin, flattened houses and crumbling courtyards, inhabited only by unhappy scabrous refugees begging
bakitesh
. The Jews have left their quarter of Jerusalem, and their houses are laid waste. The Wailing Wall is deserted, with never a crumpled paper inserted between Herod’s gigantic stones, and cabbages grow in the Jewish cemetery above the Vale of Kedron.

Persia makes its own rules. There never was such a tortuous, inside-out, back-to-front way of thinking as the Persian way; never such a fascinating, will-o’-the-wisp, unpredictable community of people; nowhere buildings so inexpressibly lovely, nowhere a landscape more peculiar than the wide Iranian plain, sometimes bleak beyond description, sometimes warm and multi-coloured, often queerly criss-crossed with the big round craters that
mark the passage of underground water channels. Ask a Persian which is his right ear, and he will put his left hand behind his head and point it out from behind.

Life in Persia is largely governed by a sense of humour, and depends for its continuity upon a series of non sequiturs, so that affairs there progress bumpily but soothingly, like an opiate with grit in it. It has long been so, for through centuries of despotism the Persian has erected around himself an indefinable screen of humour, slipperiness and oddity, a smoke-screen or camouflage, a false trail, a tear gas, behind which he can dive when trouble approaches him, to the bewildered chagrin of his tormentors. All this old tang and quiddity of Persia is best sniffed or experienced in the bazaars of Isfahan. Of all the splendid bazaars of the Middle East I enjoy these most. They are winding and rambling and mysterious, lit by shafts of sunshine streaming through the roof, full of fabrics and carpets and jewellery and vegetables, with exotic turbaned figures wandering through them, and a constant pushing and tumbling and shouting and bargaining; the whole conducted in a series of vaulted corridors of faintly ecclesiastical character. Women get short shrift in this Islamic mart, and are pushed out of the way with donkeys or sworn at mercilessly, and sometimes the vivid gusto of the place evolves into the macabre or the eerie.

I was once walking through the bazaars when a young man fell off his bicycle; a package wrapped in newspaper, fastened to the carrier rack, came undone, and there rolled on to the pavement the complete head of a horned sheep, its eyes glassy, a thin trickle of blood oozing from its neck. Obscurely disturbing, too, is the antique camel mill which works in a kind of dungeon near the entrance to the bazaars. You enter it down a flight of worn steps, and find yourself standing in a windowless subterranean cavern. In the middle of this awful place two aged camels, their eyes padded, lope round and round a grinding mill in the half-light, with a smell of dung, hair, straw and burning wood, and the flicker of a flame from a distant corner where three old camel-men in rags are cooking themselves a meal.

In such a place you can clearly hear the beat of the Persian heart – old, shuttered, wily, erratic. There is an edgy feeling to the crowds that shuffle and barge through these draughty arcades, and in the Persian’s eye, though he has a gaudy streak of the buffoon to his make-up, there is always a look of deep and calculating introspection. You never feel remote from the desert in Isfahan; you are never divorced from Islam; there are many reminders that the city stands on the brink of wild, unworldly territories, inhabited by roaming bands of tribesmen and coloured by many a lingering
taboo and superstition. This is the home of the Zoroastrians and the great Persian mystics, and the nurturing-place of the fragile Persian poets of antiquity. To this day, up more than one winding and rickety staircase in the bazaars, amid the dust and the sweet smoke of the hubble-bubbles, you will find the miniaturists still at work, squatting cross-legged on their benches with their pupils around them.

Isfahan is both bitter and perfumed: and if you are ever lulled into sentimentality by the charm of it all, there will soon come swaggering by some figure of glorious insouciance in turban, cloak, fur hat, sheepskin boots, cummerbund, limpid gown or tight-belted jerkin, the very personification of the perennial Persia. His astringent image haunts the scene, and breathes a spiced breath upon most of its activities.

It is said of the great Reza Shah that he was once making an inspection tour down his new trans-Iranian railway when a preceding locomotive was derailed and capsized beside the track. The railway workers did not want His Imperial Majesty to see this evidence of their ineptitude. Desperately they worked to put the engine on the track again, or at least on its wheels, as the royal train sped down the line towards them. But they failed to move it an inch, and only just in time hit upon a spaciously Persian solution. They buried it.

Persia’s ambiance is pungent and defensive – as distinctive a national flavour, perhaps, as any on earth – and the foreigner is easily absorbed by it. In the vaults of the Central Bank of Persia, in Tehran, are kept the Crown Jewels, an astonishing collection of gems and objets d’art which provide backing for the national currency. They have been assembled over several royal generations, and are rich in spoils of war, begemmed weapons, enormously expensive baubles and gifts from other kingly dynasties. Kept in a huge underground strongroom seething with plain-clothes men, the collection has become a great tourist attraction.

I was down there one crowded weekday morning, among the blue-rinsed coiffures and jangling charm bracelets of my fellow marvellers, when I came across an agreeable case of brooches and little jewelled
watches – more to my scale, I thought, than the colossal diamonds and tiered crowns that set the general tone of the exhibition. I stooped to examine these ornaments more closely, and as I did so the treasure-house suddenly reverberated with the ear-splitting blast of an alarm hooter. Everyone froze. Not a word was spoken. Not a pixie-charm tinkled. We waited aghast for the sound of splintered glass, gunshots, handcuffs or explosions. The hooter went on hooting. For a moment nothing else happened: then a smart young woman in green walked with composure across the room. She avoided the case containing the Gika of Nadir Shah, with its diamond ornaments of bayonets and gun-barrels around a monumental emerald. She ignored the sceptre presented to Reza Shah by the people of Azerbaijan, with its gold lions rampant around a jewelled globe. She took no notice of the Sea of Light, sibling to the Koh-i-Noor, inherited from the first Mogul emperor of India by way of the treasury of the Qajar tribe. Instead she walked calmly, with a loud clicking of her heels, directly across the vault to me.

‘May I please ask you’, she said with an amiable smile, ‘to remove your elbow from that metal bar around the jewel-case?’ I moved my arm. The hooter stopped. She thanked me. I kicked the last sand over the buried railway-engine, and the glory of Persia proceeded.

In the courtyard of the palace there stood a stubby, powerful American truck, piled high with baggage, and beside it the Sultan stopped and unfolded the map. I stood over him, taller by a foot or more, and examined
his face while he pointed out the route to me. He was only 44, but the voluminous dignity of his robes, his stately bearing, his heavy turban and his luxuriant beard all combined to make him look much older. His eyes were large, dark, long-lashed and very serious. His mouth, though kindly and humorous, looked to me capable of an occasional sneer, and often seemed to act independently of the rest of his features. It was an antique, melancholy face, such as you might see in old pictures of the East, as profoundly enigmatic, I thought, as the Pyramids.

The driver of the truck stood trembling beside its door, and the Sultan climbed in athletically. I watched him hitch up his robe, adjust his sword, arrange his papers and settle himself in the front seat. With deliberate care he put on a pair of sunglasses, and the driver jumped in and started the engine.

‘Now, Mr Morris,’ said the Sultan. ‘If you are ready I think we might start. It will be an interesting journey, I think. I hope you will be comfortable, and if there is anything at all you want, please let my people know.’

I bowed; he smiled; the retainers clanked their rifles; and I walked from the inner courtyard into the big yard outside. There stood our convoy, ready for the journey. There were six more American trucks, all identical, piled almost to overturning with stores and bags. Each carried its complement of strong Negro slaves, wearing blue jerseys like sailors of the Royal Navy or skippers of
Skylarks
at faraway piers. In one vehicle five small goats, doomed but stoical, stood with their heads just showing above its sides, their ears waggling vigorously. In the front seats of others a strange assortment of dignitaries was sitting, and I had a smudged glimpse of beards, turbans, rifles, daggers and bright eyes as I hastened across the yard. There was a champagne feeling in the air.

The Sultan was evidently a man of punctuality. The engines were already racing, the slaves were clinging precariously to the mountains of stores. ‘Here, Sahib! This way!’ said two smiling Negroes, running across the yard to meet me. ‘Your bags are in. Welcome!’ And practically frogmarching me across the yard they guided me to my truck, its door already open, its driver grinning at me from inside. I jumped into my seat; the slaves climbed agilely up behind; and at that very instant there was a loud insistent blare of the Sultan’s horn. The trucks leapt away like dogs from the leash, manoeuvring for position. Exhaust smoke billowed about the palace. We were off! The slaves struck up a loud unison
fatha
, invoking blessings on our mission. The household retainers lining the several courtyards bowed low and very humbly, and some of the men prostrated
themselves. The keepers of the portals swung open the gates with a crash. The bystanders waved their sticks and shouted loyal greetings. Slave-girls, after preliminary reconnaissance, ran giggling into their houses with flying draperies. With a tremendous roaring of engines we rushed through the town and into the plain, and even the old camels, labouring around their wells, looked up for a bleary moment to watch us pass.

First went a truck flying the red flag of Muscat. Beside its driver sat our Beduin guide, a small withered man with an avaricious look about him. Next rode the Sultan, his big turban bobbing up and down with the bumps of the track. In the third truck sat an elderly functionary with a long white beard; in the fourth were two splendid desert sheikhs, crowded together over the gearbox, with their rifles protruding from the window; in the fifth was a very old
qadi
of saintly bearing; and the rest of us followed behind, at tremendous speed, jolting wildly over the plain like raiders hot on the heels of an enemy. The flag flapped bravely. The big slaves laughed at each other and clutched their weapons. The little goats huddled together for company. It was a gloriously exhilarating start.