The Road to Oxiana (9 page)

Saoma
(c. 5500
ft
.),
October 18th
.—Abbas and the muleteers were too chloroformed with opium this morning to start punctually. When we complained, they laughed in our faces. In fact their manners are vile; and in a country which sets a premium on manners, there is no need to be good-humoured about it. This evening, therefore, when they began to settle down in our room, I shooed them out, hubble-bubble, samovar, and all. At this Christopher was perturbed, saying it was against custom, and illustrating his point by a story of how once, when he was staying with a Bakhtiari chief and wished to say something in private, he positively appalled his host by suggesting that the servants should be sent out of the room. I answered that I also have customs, and one of them is not to be inconvenienced by the pipe or presence of muleteers in my own employ.

We rode five farsakhs today, sustained by a single bowl of curds and tortured by the wooden saddles. Soon after Tasr Kand, the road crossed a fine old bridge whose three arches, alternating with two little ones above the stone piers, were again of a mellow red brick. Thereafter we ascended into rolling highlands, broad, bare, and sombre in the closing autumn. Parts were ploughed, showing a rich brown earth; but the whole country is cultivable, and could support a larger population than it does. This was the first large village. In the middle of it stands a massive stone slab upheld by a primitive stone ram, on which the villagers make their oil.

We occupy the best room of the headman's house, which is over the stable and smells of it. The walls are
newly whitewashed; there is a proper fireplace at one end; and round the walls are niches holding household objects, ewers, basins, and mugs of pewter, some of which contain a pot-pourri of rose-leaves and herbs. There is no furniture but carpets. Along the wainscot lie heaps of bolsters and quilts, covered with old-fashioned chintzes. Before the War these chintzes were specially made in Russia for the Central Asian market: one bolster depicts steamships, early motor-cars, and the first aeroplane, vignetted in circles of flowers on a vermilion background. They look gay and clean. But a flea has just hopped off my hand, and I dread the night, not for myself who am never bitten, but for Christopher to whom fleas are more than a music-hall joke.

A bowl of milk has arrived warm from the cow. We have opened the whisky in its honour.

When speaking Persian, the Azerbaijanis pronounce
k
like
ch
. But when they come to
ch
they pronounce it
ts
.

Kala Julk
(c. 5500
ft
.),
October 19th
.—Small clouds are shining in the blue. We rise by gentle slopes to a panorama of dun rolling country, chequered with red and black plough, and sheltering grey, turreted villages in its folds; breaking against the far mountains into hills streaked with pink and lemon; bounded at last by range upon range of jagged lilac. The twin peaks above Tabriz go with us. So do a flight of yellow butterflies. Far below a horseman approaches. “Peace to you.” “Peace to you.” Clip, clop, clip, clop, clip, clop.… We are alone again.

Yesterday Christopher gave our host a two-toman note to change. This morning Abbas, who took the change, refused to give it up. “Are you a thief?” asked Christopher. “Yes I am”, he replied. He then complained bitterly of the insult, said he had 1000 tomans in his
pocket, and in the same breath asked how he could live without a present now and then. Our relations with him, already cool enough, were further strained when he tried to steal the money we paid for the loan of a house to lunch in. He raised his whip against the owner, an old man, and would have struck him if I had not ridden them apart and called Abbas the son of a burnt father.

It was thus humiliating to discover, as we were riding by a salt stream through a lonely breathless valley, that Christopher had lost his wallet with our money in it; for we are now entirely dependent on Abbas to beg shelter for us gratis. At the moment he was behind, having said he must visit an outlying village, and we suspected that having found the wallet, he had absconded for good. A few minutes later he rejoined us. We explained our predicament. He triumphed slightly, but has sent back one of the muleteers to look for the wallet.

As a slight compensation, we have been most hospitably received here by the steward of some local magnate, and are now reclining beside a sweet-smelling fire over a game of two-handed bridge. There is comfort in the simmering of the samovar. Pray God the muleteer has been successful—he has just come in. No he hasn't; in fact he hasn't started yet, and now wants Haji Baba to go with him, at the price of a toman each. I have given them two out of my remaining twelve, and here we are in the middle of Azerbaijan with just over a pound to get us back to Teheran.

Later
.—Christopher has found the wallet buttoned in his shirt. It is too late to stop the muleteers, but we have given Abbas two to mans to make up for our suspicions, unspoken though they were.

Ak Bulagh
(c. 5500
ft
.),
October 20th
—Christopher was ill when he woke up, from the fleas. Seeing this, the steward
brought him a cone of black honey and said that if he ate this for four days, at the same time abstaining from curds and rogand, the rancid butter in which everything is cooked, the fleas would avoid him as they do me. While we breakfasted by the fire off milk and eggs, a boy of some fourteen years old walked in attended by an old man and a train of servants. This, it appeared, was the squire, to whom we owed so much good food and attention, and the old man was his uncle. His name is Mohammad Ali Khan, and our host of tonight describes him as “the lord of all the villages”.

The muleteers walked twenty miles in the night, to the village where we lunched, and back. They were as active as usual today, perhaps more so, having had no opium.

One farsakh brought us to Saraskand, a village-town dignified by an old brick tea-house. Here we bought some grapes at a shop which also sold Bavarian pencils, steel nibs, and chintz. In the afternoon we came to Dash Bulagh, and rested by a stream to contemplate the little cluster of grey mud houses, the conical towers overspread with drying dung, and the tall white stems of golden-green trees against the bare rose-tinted hills.

Ak Bulagh is higher and very exposed; one stunted, wind-blown tree is all its shelter. The sun has set behind the twin peaks. By lantern-light in our squalid windowless room I have been sponging Christopher with cold water, as the flea-bites have given him fever; in fact some are so raw that we have put whisky on them, in lieu of any other disinfectant. Fortunately he is not too ill to repay the headman's courtesies:

“Peace to you.”

“Peace to you.”

“The condition of Your Highness is good, God willing?”

“Thanks be to God, owing to the kindness of Your Excellency, it is very good.”

“Everything Your Highness commands your loving slave will endeavour to perform. This house is your house. May I be your sacrifice.”

“May the shadow of Your Excellency never grow less.”

He is a grave old man, sitting in the ceremonial way, with his legs under him, his hands hid, and his eyelids dropped, while we sprawl about the carpets like babies out of arms. Seventeen years ago, he says, four Russians came here; before and since they have never seen a Frank. His son Ismail sits beside him, a delicate child, who was so ill a few years ago that his father went to Meshed to pray for him.

For medicine Christopher has taken a dose of opium and a bowl of liquid black honey. It is the best we can do.

Zinjan
,
October 22nd
.—“Grand Hotel—Town Hall” again.

The long descent to Miana grew increasingly tedious as that place refused to appear. A shepherd-boy dressed like Darius asked us for a “papyrus”, meaning the Russian word for cigarette. We were often addressed in Russian at the tea-houses along the road, but it seemed strange to hear it up in these remote hills. The muleteers and Abbas smoked their midday pipe in a lonely blockhouse, which was the only house we passed in twenty miles. When Miana came in sight the horses quickened, though it was still two hours away. After crossing a broad river-bed, we entered the town from the west.

We might have dropped from heaven. People rushed
from their thresholds. A crowd besieged us. I took the brunt of the Civil Police. Christopher called on the Road Police, to which Abbas belongs, and returned with its captain. He was extremely suspicious.

“Did you photograph anything on the road?”

“Yes,” answered Christopher blandly, “a delicious old stone, a ram in fact, at Saoma. Really, aga, you ought to go and look at it yourself.”

His suspicions were not allayed when Abbas confirmed the truth of this statement.

The muleteers of course had been told to collect more money than was due to them. Christopher gave them one of his Persian visiting cards, and suggested they should either knock their employer down or complain to the British Consul in Tabriz. We hopped into a lorry, reached here at one in the morning, and were given the box-room to sleep in. This morning I killed sixteen bugs, five fleas, and a louse in my sleeping-bag.

Christopher is in a sad state. His legs are swollen up to the knee and covered with water blisters. We have taken seats in a car which leaves here this afternoon, and should reach Teheran by midnight.

PART III

Teheran, October 25th
.—A telegram from Rutter, which has been waiting for me, says the Charcoal-Burners were leaving Beyrut on the 21st. As this was sent off a week before the 21st, there is still no proof that they have even reached Marseilles. Now, I suppose, I ought to wait here till they arrive, or till I hear they never will. But it is a tantalising waste of time when winter is so close.

We are living in the Coq d'Or, a pension kept by M. and Mme. Pitrau and overrun with their pets. Pitrau used to be chef to the Japanese ambassador; he started his career as kitchen-boy to Lord Derby in Paris. The de Bathes are here too, with Karagozlu, their Turkish sheep-dog.

Christopher has gone to the nursing-home, where his legs are swathed in plaster bandages. These must not be moved for ten days, and even then it may take a month before the sores heal. The fleas of Azerbaijan are a formidable enemy.

I went to the Gulistan, where the Shah gives public audience, a fantasy of eccentric XIXth-century tiles and cut-glass stalactites. The Peacock Throne is well suited to such an environment; only the jewelled and enamelled relief of a lion below the seat looks old enough to have formed part of the original throne from Delhi. There is also another throne, which the Kajars brought from Shiraz and which is kept in a sort of Durbar hall open to the garden. This takes the form of a platform supported on figures, and is carved from a translucent yellow-grey-green marble or soapstone, with occasional
gilding. On the platform, in front of the Shah's seat, is a little pool.

Teheran
,
November 6th
.—Still here.

No word from the Charcoal-Burners. But the latest courier from Baghdad brings a rumour that the cars have finally broken down. Meanwhile a cutting from
The Times
says that Colonel Noel has started off from London to India in a Rolls-Royce driven by the same charcoal apparatus. He must have seen the account of the expedition's first departure in
The Times
, and have thought that sufficient voucher for the invention. Good luck to him!

In despair, I nearly set out for Afghanistan on my own two days ago. It was a narrow escape.

Wadsworth, the American chargé d'affaires, introduced me to Farquharson. I beheld an unattractive countenance, prognathous yet weedy, with hair growing to a point on the bridge of the nose. From the mouth issued a whining monotone. Still, I thought, one must make allowances. Now that Christopher is laid up, it will be difficult to find anyone else to travel with.

R. B.
: I hear you're thinking of going to Afghanistan. Perhaps we could join up, if you really———

Farquharson
: Now I must explain to you first of all that I'm here to make a
vurry
hurried trip. I've already spent two days in Teheran. They tell me I ought to see the Peacock Throne, whatever that may be. I don't know that I'm particularly keen on seeing it. Frankly I'm naht interested in seeing things. I'm interested in history. I'm interested in liberty. Even in America liberty is naht what it was. I'd have you understand of course that I am
vurry
pressed for
time. My parents were naht anxious for me to come on this trip. My father has recently founded an advertising business in Memphis, and he said he hoped I'd be back home by Christmas. Perhaps I'll stay over till January. It depends how things work out. There's the southern trip, with a day in Isfahann, and another in Shiraz. There's Tabriz. And there's Afghanistan. Frankly, if Afghanistan is pahssible, I should like to go there. My plans aren't fixed. I wasn't sure even, when I left, if I'd come to Persia. People in the States told me it was dangerous. People here say the same about Afghanistan. They may be right. I doubt it. I've travelled considerably. There's no European country, including Iceland and excepting Russia, I haven't visited. I once slept in a ditch in Albania. Of course that wasn't
vurry
difficult, though I talked about it afterwards in Memphis a good deal. So if it is pahssible, I should like to go to Afghanistan. But I could only make a
vurry
hurried trip. We might get through to Kabul, we might not. If we did, I might rent a plane back here. I'm naht anxious to see India for the moment. It's a big place and I'm saving it for another fall. I've already spent two days in Teheran. Those two days have been mainly occupied socially. I've enjoyed them. But that's naht what I came for. I'm here, you understand, to make a
vurry
hurried trip. Now if Afghanistan is pahssible, I should like to start tomorrow. Mr. Wadsworth, who also comes from Memphis, gave me a letter to the Afghan Ambassador. When I lost it, he gave me another. I went round this morning, but the Ambassador couldn't see me. He had some ladies with him. I saw a secretary instead, but he didn't speak English, and my French is only college French, so we didn't get
vurry
far. I may get the visa, I may naht. In any case I should like to start
tomorrow morning. You see, I'm here to make a
vurry
hurried trip.