Full Tilt (5 page)

Roz and I left Teheran at 6.30 a.m. and arrived here soon after 6 p.m. having covered 108 miles because of a strong following wind.

The road remained reasonable by Persian standards, though if I had met it at home I would have taken one horrified look and gone the other way round; it’s amazing how quickly one becomes conditioned. It was such glorious cycling weather that I seemed to have boundless energy and did the last ten miles feeling positively fresh.

This really is a beautiful country and every mile from Teheran was pure joy – as much the joy of space and silence as of visual loveliness. These extravagantly sweeping lines of plain and mountain are
intoxicating
to an islander and the blending of shades on the barren hillsides is a symphony of colour. Yet that’s only one aspect of the region; as a background to daily life it’s cruel and contemptuous country where cultivation is a fight all the way, with victory not worth much.

The main crop is wheat and to come on a few little fields of it, looking so fresh and green, is a physical rest for the eyes after twenty or thirty miles of harsh, grey-brown desert, shuddering in the midday heat-haze. The mud villages of this area are much better designed than those of western Persia, where the houses are as primitive as you could find anywhere. Here they are most attractive, with domed roofs and miniature ‘Gothic’ windows and endless variations between one house and another. I longed to take a few photographs but Muslims being so sensitive on the subject it seemed wiser not to risk spoiling the good relations I’d achieved with the locals.

Twice I left the road to explore villages formerly belonging to the Shah and now handed over to the peasants. These people are totally different to the Azerbaijan toughs: I found them friendly and polite and there were no ‘hands-out-for-baksheesh’ though they went to endless trouble showing me round the farms. It may sound silly, but I maintain that I know instinctively the temper of a place, after being five minutes with the inhabitants. So today I hadn’t the slightest qualm about abandoning Roz and my kit in the centre of the villages, and though on my return I found her surrounded by at least a hundred filthy, ragged children, nothing had been touched. In my experience this is the prevailing standard of honesty in Turkey and Persia at least towards guests and Azerbaijan was the unhappy exception.

On one of these farms I saw my very first tractor since entering Persia – it was the common property of a village. Elsewhere oxen are still pulling the most primitive form of all-wooden plough. There are very few camels in this area, oddly enough, nor are there many horses or cattle. Hundreds of sturdy little donkeys provide transportation for both people and goods and a few herds of sheep and goats are grazed by each village.

It was a most moving experience to see the pride and joy of those men and boys at
owning
their land. Some of the youths spoke a little English and repeatedly I heard the phrases ‘This is
our
land’, ‘
We
own this’, ‘This belongs to
us
’, as they all beamed with fond pride at their pathetic few fertile acres in the midst of hundreds of square miles of desert. Obviously they can’t quite believe it yet. Many of them carry photographs of the Shah in their pockets (I had to admire about thirty-five of these individually) and pictures of His Imperial Majesty and the Empress and the Crown Prince are in almost every home. They genuinely love their Shah – and would you blame them! Political commentators may question the motives behind his Land Reform but the effect for the peasants remains wholly good. When I think of those wretched Mullahs who try to persuade the villagers that it’s immoral and against the Koran for the masses to
own
land – just because they themselves own so much of it …! I suppose the nearest analogy in Christendom is the Spanish Church, even if its tactics were slightly
more subtle. It’s disconcerting how the men in the religious saddle repeatedly abuse their spiritual authority for personal gain.

Eighty per cent of the land here is useless for anything, yet when you observe how the irrigated patches flourish it becomes clear that a few hundred more dams are the answer, as the cultivated land is basically the same as the rest. When I first saw the whitened surface of the plain today I thought it had been snowing a little, even though that seemed wildly unlikely. Then I stopped and tasted the concentrated salt which forms a light film over everything; we’re now just north of the Great Salt Desert.

On arriving at this little village I went straight to the gendarmerie barracks, left Roz there and walked beyond the sun-gold huddle of mud houses to attempt to get some pictures of the goat and sheep herds being penned for the night. I was followed by scores of children, all obviously regarding me as a sort of circus; they didn’t beg but just wanted to be with me. I had to tell the gendarmerie to let them come as their tendency was literally to beat the infants back lest the visitor be annoyed. Actually it did me good to be able to provide so much innocent amusement by merely arriving in the village and soon my photography expedition degenerated into games for all, with me
pretending
to be a sheep-dog and the children convulsed by giggles and then me being a donkey (not difficult!) crawling around the sand on all fours, braying loudly, with two or three toddlers on my back.

This barrack where I’m staying the night is a huge old fort, built entirely of mud but very impressively proportioned. I’m half-blind now from writing by a feeble oil-lamp – you’d think they’d have enough oil here in Persia!

It’s very funny – around here the idea of a woman travelling alone is so completely outside the experience and beyond the imagination of everyone that it’s universally assumed I’m a man. This convenient illusion is fostered by the very short haircut I deliberately got in Teheran, and by a contour-obliterating shirt presented to me at Adabile by the US Army in the Middle East, who also donated a
wonderful pair of boots – the most comfortable footwear I’ve ever had and ideal for tramping these stony roads. The result of the locals’ little error of judgement is that last night and tonight I was shown to my bed in the gendarmerie dormitory. These beds consist of wooden planks with padded sleeping-bags laid on them and I have the bed of one of those on night-patrol. There are no problems involved as ‘getting ready for bed’ consists of removing boots, gun and belt and sliding into a flea-bag so I simply do likewise and that’s that! Incidentally, these barracks are kept spotlessly clean: as much as an accidental crumb or cigarette ash isn’t allowed on the mud floor and everything is neat and tidy. I bring in my own food and get hot water for coffee from the lads. I’m now sitting on the edge of my bed writing by a little oil-lamp while six gendarmes sleep soundly around me.

We left Deh-Namak at 5.30 a.m. when the sun was just up and the air pleasantly cool. Though the road was much worse than yesterday we covered eighty-two miles, arriving here at 6.40 p.m. I stopped for lunch at 12.30 p.m. and slept for an hour in blazing sun; apart from sunburn (there was no shade available) this is perfectly safe, as in the wide open spaces between villages there are no men, beasts, insects or reptiles to molest one, but I suspect I’m in for trouble with sunburnt arms as I was using my wind-cheater to cover Roz’s tyres while I slept. Actually it is only when stationary that one is aware of the sun’s power, whilst moving there’s no sensation of it being ‘too hot’. I believe it’ll be the same in Afghanistan, before becoming intolerably hot in Pakistan and India. (I feel I’ve earned a few months of perfect weather!)

Soon after lunch I abandoned the road for over ten miles and cycled along a dried-up river-bed where the baked mud was firm and smooth and the boulders en route seemed a mere triviality as compared with the excruciating, sharp-edged gravel on a road with an inexorably corrugated surface. When I found the river-bed veering too much to the south I reluctantly left it and walked over a mile or so of desert back to the road. The last thirty miles were through another
magnificent
mountain range with a very stiff climb up to this village. I passed the scene of a ghastly smash-up reported a few days ago in the
English-language Teheran paper. A truck and bus were in a head-on collision on a V-bend – both went into a ravine and fifty-one were killed. Something similar happens almost every day somewhere in Persia and the drivers are always blamed. Watching Persian buses on mountain roads makes me feel quite ill; when I see the dust-cloud that heralds one I dismount and remove myself to a safe distance. During ten days in Teheran I witnessed seven bad traffic accidents, four of them involving the deaths of nine people.

This is a tiny village of some twenty domed mud huts, a tea-house and the barracks. There should be a level road tomorrow as the map shows no passes – but probably we’ll have a worse surface each day.

How right can you be! We only covered sixty-six miles today (5.45 a.m.–6.50 p.m.) and I had to walk over twenty-five of them, not because of hills, but because no one with any regard for their cycle would ride it over this sort of infernal track. I haven’t seen one private car or one lorry since leaving Teheran, though many buses pass, packed with people and overloaded on the roofs with rolls of carpet, bicycles, crates of hens, lambs and kids (alive and kicking – literally!) and diverse bundles containing God knows what. These buses unload for lunch (between 12 and 3) at village eating-houses, which have streams running beside them and a few green trees shading the carpet-covered ‘tables’ on which everyone sits
cross-legged
eating their bread and chives and hard-boiled eggs and minced-meat balls and
mast
(the Persian yoghourt). Before the meal all babies present have their napkins changed and these are washed in the stream (as are the chives and everybody’s teeth after eating) and spread out to dry before the resumption of the journey. Today I joined one of these parties (obviously a pilgrimage returning from Meshed) and though I was addressed as ‘Monsieur’ the mere fact that I was from a Christian country provoked hostility. I didn’t dare use the camera, though I would have valued a few shots of those fanatical-looking chaps in filthy rags and tatters. Many of them were adolescents, so it’s going to take H.I.M. a long, long time to tame this
lot. The children were terrified of me and wouldn’t come for the sweets I offered and the whole atmosphere was so unpleasant that I removed myself sooner than I would have otherwise and took my siesta in the safety of the desert a few miles away.

A phenomenon that intrigues me is the number of Catholic religious oleographs in all these eating-houses and tea-houses – Christ as a baby in the manger or working in the carpenter’s shop, the Immaculate Heart of Mary picture, highly coloured, Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, Our Lady of Good Counsel, cheap prints of the Raphael Madonna, and St Joseph. These are in addition, of course, to the Shah, the Empress and baby Prince in various stages of growth, not to mention luscious semi-nude females advertising Pepsi-Cola and aspirin. But how all these Christian pictures got here baffles me; granted the Muslims are devoted to Christ as a Prophet and to Our Lady, but I wouldn’t have thought their devotion would go so far.

When I arrived on the outskirts of this town a car overtook me and the driver (manager of a local sugar factory and reader of the daily paper) stopped and said, ‘Dervla going to India, yes?’ I blushed with becoming modesty at this proof of fame and replied that I was indeed Dervla going to India, so he invited me to spend the night at his home, where I now am, having had a shower and a huge supper. It’s quite impossible to retain one’s youthful curves in these countries: to refuse food is an insult so one merely unbuttons one’s slacks in a surreptitious way and goes on and on eating. Before the meal everyone consumes a vast amount of biscuits, oranges, pastries, figs stuffed with almonds, toffees and bon-bons of all descriptions, pistachio nuts and endless glasses of tea. Then you’re expected to welcome with a glad smile a mound of rice you can hardly see over and masses of meat and vegetables.

This is a big town (8,000 population) with electricity, no less! My host’s house is full of mod cons, including a telephone, fridge and washing-machine. But inevitably there’s no bath because of the Islamic law about washing in running water – the bathroom is a marble-floored outfit with a shower. (In fact every room in every Persian house is marble- or mud-floored because of the shortage of
wood.) My host’s wife is away in Teheran on a Now Ruz visit to her family and will be home tomorrow. This is the last day of the Now Ruz festival but my route today was so gloriously desolate that I saw little evidence of the traditional picnicking in the open. The four children here are delightful – two boys, two girls – and are tickled to bits by my arrival, having read about me in the Teheran paper. We were joined for supper by a twenty-year-old nephew of my host, with his sixteen-year-old wife – a made match that was clearly not working very well.

I’m in for torture with sunburn on my right arm – not, I now realise, the result of lying in the sun, but the result of cycling every day due east so that this arm is continuously exposed; and though I don’t feel it when cycling it is a fierce sun. There’s nothing like carrying six tubes of sunburn lotion across two continents and then forgetting to use it in time!

We covered eighty-three miles today, but that meant breaking my ‘not-after-dark’ rule and cycling till 9.30 p.m. However, in such uninhabited country I don’t think there’s any danger and bright moonlight showed the way; it was indescribably beautiful on the huge sand-dunes, which look like mountains. I’m at last getting used to the uncanny silence of desert landscape and to the odd experience of seeing things that disappear as you approach them. Also I’ve discovered that what looks like a village two miles ahead is actually a village twenty miles ahead, and I’ve got acclimatised to fine dust permeating every crevice of self and kit. In short, I’m broken in!