Orient Express (10 page)

It seems to be the custom in Persia to turn in immediately after supper, and that night in Kasvin when I was left alone with my bedding in one of the upper rooms of the house, I was seized with an uncontrollable desire to walk about the streets. No use, for the house door was sure to be locked and I was afraid if I wandered out of my room I'd get into the women's apartments. As a substitute I managed to crawl through my tiny window on to a little roof from which I could see the flat roofs and the inky-shadowed courtyards of the town stretching away in every direction under the moon. Opposite me was the fat dome and the stumpy tiled minaret of the Friday Mosque. On many of the roofs one could see figures in blankets rolled up asleep; occasionally there was some movement in a courtyard. I thought of a story of de Maupassant's in which a girl stands up darkly naked in the moonlight on the flat roof of a house in Morocco. And for some reason a spasm of revolt against the romantic Morris Gest sort of Orient, and there's tons of it even in the East, came over me to the point of climbing in through the window again and filling up pages of my notebook about it. Admitting the spectacle, the crimson beards and the saffron beards and the huge turbans and the high-domed hats of felt and the rugs and the gaudily caparisoned white horses and the beautiful gestures of old men and the shrouded ghosts of women and the camels with their long soft strides and the dim richness of the lofty vaulted storerooms in bazaars, was not all this dead routine, a half-forgotten rite learned ages ago? It is in the West that blood flows hot and that the world is disorderly, romantic, that fantastic unexpected things happen. Here everything has been tried, experienced, worn out. Wishing myself at Broadway and Forty-second Street I lay down on my soft mattress. As soon as I was quiet I heard a drumbeat in the distance and voices throaty, taut, ferocious, shouting in quick alternate rhythm Hassan, Hussein, Hassan Hussein, as if it had been yesterday that Hussein, the gentle grandson of the prophet, had died thirsty at Kerbela.

In the morning before we left Kasvin the Sayyid performed an operation; then we jingled off in state, escorted by several officers of gendarmerie on their horses, leaving the victim bloody and groaning through his ether on a rickety table in the governor's dispensary. We ate grapes as the phaeton dragged with impressive slowness through dusty roads and the Sayyid talked about the revolt of Asia. First, he said, it was the collapse of Russia in the war with Japan that made Asia wonder whether it had been eternally ordained in the books of fate that her people should be slaves of Europe. Then the Turkish Constitution and the Persian Constitution had shown that the shady and dilapidated groves of the Orient had not been entirely withered under the killing blast of energy out of the west. And during the war, while Europe was fighting, Asia was thinking. Things moved very slowly in Asia, so slowly Europeans did not notice and said they moved not at all, but the time would come when the exploiting powers would suddenly find they did not know the road they were walking on. That was how things moved in Asia—Look at me, said the Sayyid shrilly,—when I was a small boy, I thought the Europeans a superior race, they seemed to have done so much five or six years ago; I thought the best thing that could happen to Persia was to be ruled by the British. But now.… I have seen all countries, I have heard all their propaganda, I have seen the money they gave in bribes, and their methods of fighting, all these highly civilized exalted races of Europe, and I know what I know. And what I know the muledrivers know, and the makers of clay pots and the men who rub you down in the baths and the farmers and the nomads. No, I will die gladly before my country is dominated by any European nation. And I am not the only one.

—As for the British here in Persia.… yes, I know they are a great people. I spent three days in London once; it rained all the time, but I went about and saw the people, and I knew then that they were braves gens. But here it is not so, not towards us, and for that reason I shall fight against them, avec diplomatik, as long as I live. And among the Turks it is the same, and among the Arabs it is the same, and among the Afghans it is the same. First we liked the British because they were better than the Russians, but now there is no pressure from Russia, and the British have changed. And there is not so much resignation in Islam as there used to be. Europe is teaching us, giving us weapons.

8.
The Little People in Persia

Later as we drove before dawn on the last stage to Teheran, the Sayyid said again:—What is the mistake all the European powers make with regard to Persia? I will tell you. They think only of the great personages. They do not realize that there are little people, like me, doctors, mollahs, small merchants, and that even the peasants talk politik in the teahouses along the roadside. They know they can bribe and threaten the great personages and they think they have the country in the palm of their hands. But they cannot bribe us, the little people, because we are too many. If they buy me over or get me killed there will be hundreds of others who think just like me to take my place. What good will it do them?

It was just dawn; the sharp upward angle of Damavand, the great mountain that overlooks Teheran, was edged with a brittle band of gold. The wind had a sharpness almost of snowfields about it.

—And when you go back to your country, said the Sayyid,—do not forget to tell the Americans that there are little people in Asia.

VII. MOHARRAM

For Z. C. B.

1.
Darvish

Outside the gate where the dusty road winds off under the planetrees towards the hills sits an old man dressed in white with a blue turban. His beard is dense as if moulded out of silver. He sits motionless, staring straight ahead of him out of frowning hawkeyes. In one hand he holds up a curved sword, in the other hand resting in his lap he holds a book. The sword or the Koran. The horns of the swelling crescent drawing together on the world. People as they pass leave coppers on the corners of the prayer rug he sits on. The old man sits without moving, regardless of the swirling dust, squats beside the road on a piece of Manchester carpet with the face of an emir leading Islam into holy war.

In Persia there is a sort of holiness in the very fact of beggary. A beggar is an instrument by which a believer may lay up for himself treasures in heaven. In Mianej at the khan there was a merchant whose caravan had been plundered by bandits. He had a certificate from some mujtahid that Allah had bereft him of worldly goods and was sitting in the upper chamber patiently waiting for travellers to make him presents so that he might eventually start in business again. He had the face of a very happy man, of one who had stopped struggling against adverse currents. Not for nothing does Islam mean submission, self-abandonment.

And in every teahouse along the road you find merry fellows, ragged and footsore, men of all ages and conditions who have given up working and drift along the highroads, exploiting as best they can the holiness of poverty. They are certainly the happiest people in Persia. They have no worry about tax collectors or raids from the hilltribes or bandits in the passes. They go about starving and singing prayers, parched by the sun and wind, carrying epidemics and the word of God from the Gobi desert to the Euphrates. Tramps exist everywhere, but in what we can vaguely call the East, going on the bum is a religious act. All madness, all restlessness is from God. If a man loses his only child or his loved wife or suffers some other irreparable calamity he strips off his clothes and runs out-of-doors and lets his hair grow long and wanders over the world begging and praising God. A man becomes a dervish as in the Middle Ages in Europe he would have gone into a monastery.

I used to think deeply of all these things on my way back and forth to the telegraph station during those weeks in Teheran when my bag of silver krans had dwindled to a handful and my hotel bill grew and grew and every cable for money cost a week's board. It was in the early days of Moharram, the month of mourning, when there is no music or dancing, the month of the passion of Hosein, the son of Fatima, daughter of the Prophet. Every day Teheran was filling more and more with beggars and religion and hatred of foreigners. I used to wonder how it would be to sit under a planetree beside the road telling the story of the Shiah martyrs to a circle of villagers while people brought you tea and a bowl of rice with tears running down their faces at the tales of the sufferings of the great Imaum, son of Ali, whose flesh was infused with the substances of God, done to death by the falseness of the men of Kufa, dogs and sons of dogs, and by the wiles of Sheitan, the stoned one.

With the name of Allah for all baggage you could travel from the Great Wall of China to the Niger and be fairly sure of food and often of money, if only you were ready to touch your forehead in the dust five times a day, and put away self and the glamorous West.

And yet the West is conquering. Henry Ford's gospel of multiple production and interchangeable parts will win hearts that stood firm against Thales and Democritus, against Galileo and Faraday. There is no god strong enough to withstand the Universal Suburb.

Within our time the dervish, the symbol of mystery errant on the face of the world, will become a simple vagrant as he is in civilized countries.

2.
The Teahouse

Hot afternoons the E.A. sat in a covered courtyard beside a fountain where goldfish swam, drinking glass after glass of tea and eating a curious cool jelly flavored with roses. There were few people in the teahouse: an occasional Armenian in European clothes, a Turk in fez and frock coat. In the month of mourning people stay in their houses. In a far corner the serving boys talked in low whispers. A fountain tinkled; there was the buzz of an occasional fly. The few sounds were flaws in the bright crystal silence.

Caught tight in the intent stillness of autumn afternoons, the E.A. used to wonder and puzzle on a continual jerky roundabout of ways and means. At the bottom of a vast still contentedness something miniature kept going round and round: how to get to Isfahan, how to get to Khorasan eastward, eastward to Kabul, to the Afghan mountains, to Canton, to Frisco. He pulled off ring after ring, but never the brass ring that carries the prize.

But what do I want to drag myself round the Orient for anyway? What do I care about these withered fragments of old orders, these dead religions, these ruins swarming with the maggots of history? Old men, toothless eunuchs asleep in the sun. It's in the West that life is, terrible, destroying sprouts of the new among the litter of Russian trainyards, out of the smell of burnt gasoline in Detroit garages. To hand Samarcand on a platter to that little Polish girl in the funicular at Tiflis.

As a sideshow it's still pretty fine, this vanishing East. The inexpressible soft, lithe swinging length of a two-humped camel's stride; the old men with crimson beards, the enormous turbans, white, blue, black, green, perched on shaved polls, boys with their hair curling troubadour-fashion from under their skullcaps, the hooded ghosts of women, the high-domed felt hats, the gaudy rags, the robes of parrot-green silk, trees the violent green of manganese spurting out of yellow hills, quick watercourses, white asses, the robin's-egg domes, the fields of white opium poppies.

If one were old enough and one's blood were cool enough there would be the delight of these quiet gardens of poplar-trees, the deferential bringing of the samovar, the subtle half smiles across the rim of tiny glasses of tea, the glint of scurrying water in the runnel in the center of the room, the bright calm of sunny changeless courts, the effortless life of submission to the Written.

But there are things worth trying first.

The E.A. gets to his feet dizzy with a sudden choked feeling of inaction and walks out into the broad street where the twilight flutters down like scraps of colored paper through the broad leaves of the planes. Hassan, Hosein. Hassan, Hosein.… To a sound of drums a procession is passing, gruff voices savagely passing, the warlike banners and standards of Islam, the hand of Fatima, the mare's tails, the crescent. It is the caravan of Hosein, sweet-bearded trusting old man, leaving Medina for Kufa on the last journey. There is no grief yet, but a sense of something circling overhead, wings of doom that plane above the dimming twilight, through the streets the drumbeat and the tramp of feet and the gruff cry of triumph, Hassan, Hosein.

After all are these gods so dead?

3.
Malaria

The Russian engineer who said he owned a Ford looked at the thermometer and shook his head. Then he fetched his wife, who looked at the thermometer and shook her head. The room was full of people looking at thermometers and shaking their heads; a voice travelled from an immense distance and said: Nonsense, I feel fine. The bed was strangely soft, billowy, soaring above the heads of the Russian engineer who said he owned a Ford and his wife and the Hôtel de France and the cries beating out of brass throats, Hosein, Hassan.

There was a chasm. The City Without Bedbugs stood on the edge of the chasm. Insh'allah, said the Russian engineers, the city will not fall into the chasm, which is a hundred and five degrees deep. Then there arose a great prophet and he said, Ah mon ami, j'ai trouvé un poux. Avec le typhus qu'il a c'est très dangereux. Bismillah, cried the villagers. The city is going to fall into the chasm. Then spake the prophet: The City Without Bedbugs is doomed to slide into the gulf. Bismillah, cried the villagers. We must fill up the gulf or chasm. Whereupon they began throwing in their furniture and their possessions and their houses and their wives and children and lastly themselves. Intra venos, said the Sayyid rolling his eyes and shot in a tumblerful of quinine.

Then I was lying very long and cold and brittle on the stony tundra of my bed, and the Russian engineer who said he owned a Ford was explaining his plans to me in careful French. In a day or two the road would be open to Recht on the Caspian. Riza Khan was at this moment cleaning up the remnants of the Republic of Ghilan. Then we could drive the Ford to Recht, there load it with caviar that can be bought for nothing on the Caspian and drive back to Kasvin, Hamadan, Kermanshah and Baghdad, where the British would pay through the nose and buy by the grain what we had bought by the kilo. The only thing that stood between us and riches was a few hundred pounds capital to buy gasoline with. Now if I spent the sum I would eventually spend on the fare to Baghdad on gasoline and caviar, we would all get to Baghdad for nothing and have a substantial profit when we got there.