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Title: Passenger to Teheran
Author: Sackville-West, Vita [Victoria Mary] (1892-1962)
Date of first publication: 1926
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Hogarth Press, 1926
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 22 November 2013
Date last updated: 22 November 2013
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1130

This ebook was produced by Al Haines and Mark Akrigg






[Frontispiece: A PERSIAN SHEPHERD]




  _PASSENGER TO TEHERAN_

  _V. Sackville-West_

  _Author of "Seducers in Ecuador", "The Land", etc._




  _Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the
  Hogarth Press, 52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.
  1926_




TO

HAROLD NICOLSON



Printed in Great Britain by R. & R. CLARK LIMITED, Edinburgh.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER I

Introductory


CHAPTER II

To Egypt


CHAPTER III

To Iraq


CHAPTER IV

Into Persia


CHAPTER V

Round Teheran


CHAPTER VI

To Isfahan


CHAPTER VII

Kum


CHAPTER VIII

The Coronation of Reza Khan


CHAPTER IX

Russia




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


    A Persian Shepherd . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
    1. The Oasis of Amari
    2. Egyptian Potters
    3. Karnak
   *4. Into Persia
   *5. Into Persia
    6. The Assadabad Pass
   *7. The Kasvin Road
    8. The Kasvin Gate, Teheran
    9. A City Gate, Teheran
   10. A Garden
   11. The Elburz from Doshan Tapeh
   12. The Elburz from Doshan Tapeh
  *13. A Street in Teheran
   14. Camels: on the Road to Isfahan
   15. Isfahan: the Hall of 40 Columns
   16. The Road to Isfahan
   17. Dilijan: our Host and our Lodging
   18. Dilijan: Women Spinning
   19. On the Road to Isfahan
   20. On the Road to Isfahan
   21. Isfahan: Entrance to the Bazaars
   22. Isfahan: the Meidan
   23. Isfahan: Carpet-makers
   24. Isfahan: the Madrasseh
  *25. The Valiahd
  *26. Street Decoration
  *27. The Coronation of Reza Khan
   28. Turcomans
   29. The Coronation Procession: Kurds and Bakhtiaris
   30. Baluchis
  *31. Gilan: on the Road to Resht

_For permission to reproduce those plates marked with an asterisk, I am
indebted to the courtesy of the "Daily Mirror"_




CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

Travel is the most private of pleasures.  There is no greater bore than
the travel bore.  We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen
in Hong-Kong.  Not only do we not want to hear it verbally, but we do
not want--we do not really want, not if we are to achieve a degree of
honesty greater than that within the reach of most civilised beings--to
hear it by letter either.  Possibly this is because there is something
intrinsically wrong about letters.  For one thing they are not
instantaneous.  If I write home to-day and say (as is actually the
fact), "At this moment of writing I am sailing along the coast of
Baluchistan", that is perfectly vivid for me, who have but to raise my
eyes from my paper to refresh them with those pink cliffs in the
morning light; but for the recipient of my letter, opening it in
England at three weeks' remove, I am no longer coasting Baluchistan; I
am driving in a cab in Bagdad, or reading in a train, or asleep, or
dead; the present tense has become meaningless.  Nor is this the only
trouble about letters.  They do not arrive often enough.  A letter
which has been passionately awaited should be immediately supplemented
by another one, to counteract the feeling of flatness that comes upon
us when the agonising delights of anticipation have been replaced by
the colder flood of fulfilment.  Now when notes may be sent by hand, as
between lovers living in the same town, this refinement of
correspondence is easy to arrange, but when letters have to be
transported by the complex and altogether improbable mechanism of
foreign mails (those bags lying heaped in the hold!), it is impossible.
For weeks we have waited; every day has dawned in hope (except Sunday,
and that is a day to be blacked out of the calendar); it may have waned
in disappointment, but the morrow will soon be here, and who knows what
to-morrow's post may not bring?  Then at last it comes; is torn open;
devoured;--and all is over.  It is gone in a flash, and it has not
sufficed to feed our hunger.  It has told us either too much or too
little.  For a letter, by its arrival, defrauds us of a whole secret
region of our existence, the only region indeed in which the true
pleasure of life may be tasted, the region of imagination, creative and
protean, the clouds and beautiful shapes of whose heaven are destroyed
by the wind of reality.  For observe, that to hope for Paradise is to
live in Paradise, a very different thing from actually getting there.

The poor letter is not so much in itself to blame,--and there is, I
think, a peculiar pathos in the thought of the writer of that letter,
taking pains, pouring on to his page so much desire to please, so human
a wish to communicate something of himself, in his exile,--not so much
to blame in the inadequacy of its content, as in the fact that it has
committed the error of arriving, of turning up.  "Le rle d'une femme,"
said an astute Frenchman once, "est non de se donner, mais de se
laisser dsirer."

The art of reading letters, too, is at least as great as the art of
writing them, and possessed by as few.  The reader's co-operation is
essential.  There is always more to be extracted from a letter than at
first sight appears, as indeed is true of all good literature, and
letters certainly deserve to be approached as good literature, for they
share this with good literature: that they are made out of the intimate
experience of the writer, begotten of something personally endured.
But it is not every one who knows how to read.  Many a word, wrung out
of the pen, many an indication, gets thrown on to the dust-heap because
it stood alone, unamplified and unsupported.  Only the ideal reader
appreciates the poignancy of understatement.

Furthermore, to letters of travel attaches a special disability.  The
link between two persons must indeed be close before one of them is
really eager to visualise the background against which the other moves;
to see with his eyes, hear with his ears, be transplanted to the heat
of his plains or the rigours of his mountains.  If this link exist,
well and good; and certainly it is a fine and delicate form of mental
exercise to reconstruct a landscape, to capture so subtle a thing as
the atmospheric significance of a place, from the indications given;
rather, reconstruction and capture are words too gross for the lovelier
unreality that emerges, a country wholly of the invention, like those
roseate landscapes of the romantic Italian painters, but it is an art
in itself, a luxury for the idle and speculative, repaid--with a
freakish twist--when later on we tread with our mortal feet that place
which for so long served as the imaginary country of our wanderings
(for nothing is harder than to re-evoke a place as we knew it before we
went there, so tenuous was the fabric of our weavings, so swiftly
dispelled, for all its apparent solidity and its detail; as a place
that we knew in childhood, now wrongly remembered in colour and size,
under the fresh but not necessarily truer impression of our actual
beholding).  But if this stimulus be absent, then it is, let us confess
it, with a weary conscientiousness that we read the descriptive
passages of our nomad friends.  Even those letters which were not
addressed to us, nor to any of our generation, the letters of Beckford,
let us say, or of Lady Mary Montagu, we read less for the sake of the
countries described than for their historical curiosity (in itself an
adventitious thing), or as we read a diary, for the strokes of vigour,
humour, or downrightness which unconsciously build up the personality
of the writer.  "As a diary," in fact, is no bad comparison, for in a
diary, even though compiled by the most illiterate of pens, that which
stands out, in the ultimate and cumulative sense, is its
convincingness, investing, by its bald, gradual, and uncompromising
method, even the dullest record with the indisputable effect of truth.

There would seem, then, to be something definitely wrong about all
letters of travel, and even about books of travel, since the letters of
another age, collected into library editions, may fairly claim to rank
as books rather than as mere correspondence.  There would seem, going a
step further, to be something wrong about travel itself.  Of what use
is it, if we may communicate our experience neither verbally nor on
paper?  And the wish to communicate our experience is one of the most
natural, though not one of the most estimable, of human weaknesses.
Not one of the most estimable, for it is sthetically unprofitable
(since a pleasure shared is a pleasure halved), and, as an attempt, in
the last resort fallacious (since no experience can ever be truly
communicated, and the only version we can hope to get through to
another person but a garbled, deceptive account of what really happened
to us).  Travel is in sad case.  It is uncomfortable, it is expensive;
it is a source of annoyance to our friends, and of loneliness to
ourselves.  Of course to the true solitary this last is a great
recommendation; but loneliness and solitude are not even first cousins.
The true solitary will savour his apartness; he will feel that he is
himself only when he is alone; when he is in company he will feel that
he perjures himself, prostitutes himself to the exactions of others; he
will feel that time spent in company is time lost; he will be conscious
only of his impatience to get back to his true life.  Alone,--for
although he may put on carpet slippers the furnishings of his mind are
fastidious in the extreme,--he will draw a book from his shelf, or from
his store of images some toy that delights him, rolling it round in his
mind as the gourmet a grape in his mouth, tasting the one sweet escaped
drop of its juice before he bursts it into its full flood against his
palate.

It may be that language, that distorted labyrinthine universe, was
never designed to replace or even to complete the much simpler
functions of the eye.  We look; and there is the image in its entirety,
three-dimensional, instantaneous.  Language follows, a tortoise
competing with the velocity of light; and after five pages of print
succeeds in reproducing but a fraction of the registered vision.  It
reminds one of the Oriental who with engaging naivety thought that by
photographing the muezzin he would record also the notes of his call to
prayer.  The most--but what a most!--that language can hope to achieve
is suggestion; for the art of words is not an exact science.  We do not
indeed reflect often enough how strange a world-within-the-world we
have created by this habit of language, so strongly rooted in us by
tradition and custom, so taken for granted, that we are no longer
capable of imagining life without it, as one of those ideas which the
mind is unable to conceive, like the end of time or the infinity of
space.  Thought is impossible without words; and the process of thought
appears to us a desirable exercise; but how are we to know what
relation thought bears to the world of fact? whether any true relation
at all, or merely a conventionalised, stylised relation such as is
borne by art, that extraordinary phenomenon, that supreme paradox of
conveying truth through various conventions of falsity?  Such may well
be the secure and presumptuous position of language, but since we are
moving in a vicious circle, having no weapon against words but other
words, it seems improbable that we shall ever be able to judge.  It is
said that the new-born child knows no emotion but that of fear induced
by noise; consequently all other emotions, and all other ideas, must be
the result of learning and association; but from the baby startled by
the beating of a gong to the finest and most complicated product of the
civilised brain is a terrifying road to travel.  Give a thing a name,
and it immediately achieves an existence; but either that thing had an
existence before it had a name, or else the reverse is the case; we
cannot tell which.  Thus for the Hindu, 'to-morrow' and 'yesterday'
have but one denomination, so that we may assume his idea of relative
time to be very different from our own, or surely he would have forged
a word to suit the needs of his enlarged perceptions.  We have no means
of apprehending those ideas which we cannot clothe in words, any more
than we are capable of imagining a form of life into which none of the
elements already familiar to us should enter; yet it would be no more
reasonable for us to pretend that such ideas may not exist, than for a
child to crumple in a temper a handbook of higher mathematics.  We are
the slaves of language, strictly limited by our tyrant.

Moreover, the contradictions contained within the capacities of
language are violent and astonishing.  At one moment it seems that
there is nothing (within the limits of our experience) that may not be
expressed in words, down to the finest hair-stroke of a Proust or a
Henry James; next moment we recognise in despair, so poor is our
self-imposed vehicle, our incapacity truly to communicate to one
another the simplest experience of our factual or emotional life.  Who
amongst us could boast that, transplanted into the mind of another
person, even though that person be his nearest, he would not find
himself in a strange country, recognising here and there a feature that
he knew, but on the whole baffled by unexpected grouping, shape, and
proportion?  There is only one province of life with which language is
almost fitted to deal: the province of the intellect, because that is
the province, so to speak, begotten by language itself, which without
language would never, could never, have come into existence.  Those
things which are felt, and those things which are seen, because they
exist independently, and in no ratio to the degree of our
articulateness, are not the business of words.

One must concede then, and sadly, that travel is a private pleasure,
since it consists entirely of things felt and things seen,--of
sensations received and impressions visually enjoyed.  There is no
intellectual interest in travelling, and most intellectuals have been
stay-at-homes.  They prefer, wisely perhaps, to doze by the gas fire
and let the minarets and cupolas arise without risking the
discouragements of disillusion.  Or, more probably even, they never
think of the minarets and cupolas at all, but root their interest in
the stray, perplexing souls of their friends.  Travel is simply a
taste, not to be logically defended; nor standing in any need of
defence, since it cannot be argued away, but remains there like a good
concrete fact, not to be talked into nothingness, but sticking up as
solidly when the mists of argument have cleared, as it did when their
futile miasma began to arise.  Nothing is an adventure until it becomes
an adventure in the mind; and if it be an adventure in the mind, then
no circumstance, however trifling, shall be deemed unworthy of so high
a name.  In common with all the irrational passions it has to be
accepted; irritating it may be, but it is there.

And like all irrational passions it is exceedingly romantic.  At first
sight it would appear to be too materialistic for romance, being based
on material things, such as geography, which is concrete and finite.
Ships leave London daily for antipodean ports; nothing easier, if we
have the means, than to buy a ticket and hire a cab to take us down to
Tilbury.  But this is not the end of the matter.  The spirit is the
thing.  We must have the sharpest sense of excursion into the unknown;
into a region, that is, which is not habitually our own.  It is
necessary, above all, to take nothing for granted.  The wise traveller
is he who is perpetually surprised.  The stay-at-home knows that
peacocks fly wild in India as starlings in England, and sees nothing to
exclaim at in the fact.  But the truth is, that it is a very astounding
thing indeed to watch wild peacocks spread their tails in the light of
an eastern sunset.  Nature, with a fine rightness, planned her animals
against the background of their own landscapes; it is we who have taken
them away and put them in the wrong place.

So, if we are not to be surprised, or pleased with a deep, right
pleasure, or are not prepared to endure an exciting but essential
loneliness, we had best remain by the gas fire, looking forward to the
presence of our friends at dinner.  But, for my part, I would not forgo
the memory of an Egyptian dawn, and the flight of herons across the
morning moon.

[Illustration: THE OASIS OF AMARI.]




CHAPTER II

TO EGYPT


I

In the preface to _Eothen_, Kinglake says: "I believe I may truly
acknowledge that from all details of geographical discovery or
antiquarian research,--from all display of sound learning and religious
knowledge,--from all historical and scientific illustrations,--from all
useful statistics,--from all political disquisitions,--and from all
good moral reflections, the volume is thoroughly free."  It reads like
the Litany: Good Lord, deliver us.  Kinglake said this for his volume;
I hope I shall be able to say as much for mine.  He goes on to defend
the egotism of the traveller: "His very selfishness,--his habit of
referring the whole external world to his own sensations, compels him,
as it were, in the writings, to observe the laws of perspective,--he
tells you of objects, not as he knows them to be, but as they seemed to
him,"--a very reassuring passage to come upon in the writings of so
creditable an authority.  Yet, when I come to think of it, why, really,
should I cite Kinglake or anybody else instead of stating the opinion
boldly as my own?  We are a great deal too ready to revere a man
because he died before we ourselves saw the light.  Just as I had
finished copying the passage from Kinglake, and still pleased as I was
with its appositeness, one of my favourite authors (one who bangs the
language about and makes it perform every antic with an air of ease)
came to put me sharply in my place.  "Didactic and polemical writers,"
he said, as I read him, propped open with a fork on the dinner-table,
"quote passages from others to support themselves or to provide
themselves with something to controvert....  A writer expresses himself
in words that have been used before because they give his meaning
better than he can give it himself, or because they are beautiful or
witty, or because he expects them to touch a chord of association in
the reader, or because he wishes to show that he is learned or
well-read.  Quotations due to the last motive are invariably
ill-advised; the discerning reader detects it, and is contemptuous; the
undiscerning is perhaps impressed, but even then is at the same time
repelled, pretentious quotations being the surest road to tedium; the
less experienced a writer is, and therefore on the whole the less
well-read he is also, the more is he tempted to this error; the
experienced knows he had better avoid it; and the well-read, aware that
he could quote if he would, is not afraid that readers will think he
cannot."  That was enough to make me examine my conscience pretty
severely; and having done so, to discover for which of those many
reasons I had dragged Kinglake in, I came to the conclusion that I had
dragged him in simply because he had given my meaning better than I
could hope to give it myself.  Learned I am not; well-read only in
scraps; polemical not at all; didactic: I hope not, but am not very
sure.  Anyway, intimidated I would not be, so I let the Kinglake stand.
He said what I meant.  What more odious than the informative book of
travel? unless, indeed, it sets out to be frankly so, in which case it
enters into a different category, and must become, in the language of
reviewers, 'monumental', 'scholarly', 'a fine tribute to the history
and genius of the ... nation'.  If not that, then by all means let it
be frankly personal, reflecting the weaknesses, the predilections, even
the sentimentalities, of the writer; let him be unashamed; let him
write to his public as to a familiar friend.  The art of writing,
however, is a peculiar one, labouring under this disadvantage, that the
arbiter is the public, uninitiated to the formul of the literary
creed, and judging literary work by the public's own standard: the
purely human, workaday standard; "good, oh, of course, good, but too
depressing," we hear of some novel that has not provided the happy
ending, all judgement of skill, or surprising, personal angle of
vision, left out; which leads one to believe that nothing but an escape
from workaday life is demanded from literature; that literature, in
fact, is to-day but a pleasant survival, a means of escape into a world
of soothing, romantic unreality; rather like looking at suits of armour
in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

This, alas, is not the function of literature as those who love letters
and the English tongue conceive it.  For them, there is an art which
depends not merely on the agreeable or the disagreeable, the
disquieting,--and although this age is disquieting in the extreme,
there is no reason why an opiate should be found in literature rather
than elsewhere,--a perennial art, which (although in itself probably as
fallacious as all other arts) must hold its own, independent of the
uncomfortable everyday disquiet of the age in which it exists.  But all
this is irrelevant; this book is not fiction, and as for the happy
ending it is obvious that the author (who may stand for hero, heroine,
and all the other characters as well) cannot meet with a tragic death
in the closing pages, or the book would never have been written at all.

One January morning, then, I set out; not on a very adventurous
journey, perhaps, but on one that should take me to an unexploited
country whose very name, printed on my luggage labels, seemed to distil
a faint, far aroma in the chill air of Victoria Station: PERSIA.  It
was quite unnecessary for me to have had those labels printed.  They
did not help the railway authorities or the porters in the least.  But
I enjoyed seeing my fellow-passengers squint at the address,
fellow-passengers whose destination was Mrren or Cannes, and if I put
my bag in the rack myself I always managed to let the label dangle, a
little orange flag of ostentation.  How subtle is the relationship
between the traveller and his luggage!  He knows, as no one else knows,
its idiosyncrasies, its contents; he may have for it a feeling of
tenderness or a great loathing; but, for better or worse, he is bound
to it; its loss is his despair; to recover it he will forego railway
tickets and steamship berths; it is still with him even when he has
locked himself away in the drab bedroom of a strange hotel.  There is
the friendly box, which contains his immediate requisites, and which is
opened and shut a dozen times a day; there are the boxes which will not
shut, and which therefore he takes care never to open, however badly he
may need an object lurking in their depths; to unpack them altogether
is unthinkable, as bad as trying to put the djinn back into the bottle.
There are the miscellaneous bits--a hold-all with rugs and coats; and
always some small nuisance which he wishes he had not brought; had
known, indeed, before starting that he would regret it, but brought it
all the same.  With what a distinction, too, are invested those of his
possessions which have been chosen to accompany him; he knows that he
has left behind him an untidy room, with open drawers and ransacked
cupboards, the floor strewn with bits of tissue paper and string; a
room abandoned for somebody else to tidy up, while he sits smug in his
carriage, having got away and escaped; and with him go, stowed away in
the dark rectangular jumble of pigskin, fibre, or alligator, those
patient, faithful indispensables which will see the light again in
bewilderingly changed surroundings, but which for him will emerge
always with the association of his own dressing-table, his own
washstand, and all the close familiarity of home.  They have shared his
ordinary life; now they are sharing his truancy; when he and they get
home again, they will look at one another with the glance of complicity.

There is a great art in knowing what to take.  The box which is to be
opened and shut a dozen times a day must be an expanding box, and to
start with it must be packed at its minimum, not its maximum, capacity.
This is the first rule, and all temptations to break it by last-minute
cramming must be resisted.  A cushion or a pillow is a bulky bother,
but well worth it for comfort; an air-cushion is less of a bother, but
also less of a comfort.  A Jaeger sleeping-bag (which goes in the
hold-all) makes the whole difference to life on a long and varied
journey; but it ought to be lined with a second bag made out of a
sheet, or else it tickles.  I had neglected this precaution.  Thermos
bottles are overrated; they either break or leak or both; and there are
few places where you cannot get tea.  Other essentials are a knife and
a corkscrew, and a hat which will not blow off.  An implement for
picking stones out of horses' hooves is not necessary.  Quinine for hot
countries, iodine, aspirin, chlorodyne, sticking-plaster.  I would say:
avoid all registered luggage, but there are few who will follow this
sound advice.  I did not follow it myself.  I had a green cabin trunk,
which I grew to hate, and left behind in Persia.  I had, however, the
excuse that I must provide against a variety of climates; I expected to
be now boiled, now frozen; must have a fur cap and a sun-helmet, a fur
coat and silk garments.  My belongings had looked very incongruous when
they lay scattered about my room.

Equipped, then, and as self-contained as the snail, the English
traveller makes the most of the two hours between London and Dover.  He
looks out over the fields which, on the other side of the Channel, will
widen out into the hedgeless sweeps of Northern France.  For my part I
know that line all too well; it takes me through my own fields, past my
own station, and a curious mixture stirs in me; there is a dragging at
the heart, and then to correct it I think deliberately how often I have
seen this very train hurtle through the station, and have had a
different dragging at the heart as 'Continental Boat Express' whisked
past me--a wish to be off, an envy of those people sitting at the
Pullman windows; but no, that was not a dragging at the heart, but at
the spirit; it is home which drags the heart; it is the spirit which is
beckoned by the unknown.  The heart wants to stay in the familiar
safety; the spirit, pricking, wants to explore, to leap off the cliffs.
All the landmarks flash past me: there are the two factory pistons
which go up and down, near Orpington, plunging up and down alternately,
but never quite together; that is to say, one of them is not quite
risen before the other has begun to fall; ever since I was a child
those pistons have distressed me, because I could not get them to work
in unison, side by side as they are.  I know that I shall remember
them, travelling across Asia; and that on my return I shall see them
again, still going up and down, and still a little wrong.  Then comes
my own station, and Yew Tree Cottage, and the path across the fields.
But would I, if I could, get out of the train and run home by that path
across the fields?  There is the orange label dangling: PERSIA.  In
half an hour I should be home; and my spaniel, sitting on my glove,
would run out astonished; but meanwhile the train has rushed me into
less poignant country; I am carried beyond that little patch of acres,
beyond the woods where the orchis grows.  I wonder whether the things
in my luggage have felt a similar pull? responded, as the needle of the
compass to the north?

Everything begins to recede: home, friends; a pleasant feeling of
superiority mops up, like a sponge, the trailing melancholy of
departure.  An effort of will; and in a twinkling I have thought myself
over into the other mood, the dangerous mood, the mood of going-out.
How exhilarating it is, to be thus self-contained; to depend for
happiness on no material comfort; to be rid of such sentimentality as
attaches to the dear familiar; to be open, vulnerable, receptive!  If
there is a pain growling somewhere in me, I shall ignore it.  Life is
too rich for us to stick doggedly to the one humour.

France is familiar still, and too thickly crowded with cheap
associations to be really satisfactory.  Italy, under a white blanket
of snow, wears an odd contrary look; for I have never seen this Lombard
plain in winter, but remember it always in spring or autumn, either
fresh with Star-of-Bethlehem and grape hyacinths (so sweet scented
here, as they never are in England), or burnished with maize and vines.
The very names of stations have a warm, autumnal smell about them:
Brescia, Verona; and I remember how once I woke in Verona to hear
midnight striking, and lay awake, overcome by the Shakespearean romance
of it, quite sufficient already; but then, five minutes later, heard
midnight strike again, on a different, dissentient clock; two Veronese
midnights, where one alone had sufficed to fill me with delight!  This
obvious, silly thing humbled me with gratitude, as a beggar that has
been suddenly enriched with royal alms.  I savoured the special
pleasure of travelling over ground already sharpened by a previous
experience; of dwelling with a sensuous slowness on old, revived
memories; when the future is full of the promise of new experience,
pregnant with a prophetic sense of memory, as though the spirit had
rushed forward and had come back, bringing with it hints of treasure,
as the spies brought fruits from the promised land.

Then at Trieste I stepped off the edge of Europe; saw portions of
Europe still, from deck: the coast of Greece at dawn, the coast of
Crete at sunset, a rainbow standing marvellously on end on the bare
cliffs; but knew that I should set no foot on Europe till I returned
again out of Asia.  Meanwhile the ship, being top-heavy, rolled as
though she meant to turn turtle; passengers drifted away, and
reappeared no more; very few remained to eat or even to admire the food
devised by the playful Italian fancy: polar-bears made of sugar
stalking one another round a rock of ice internally illuminated by
electric light; glass and crockery rushed from one side of the ship to
the other as she rolled, no provision apparently having been made for
their restraint; but on the fourth morning we woke in summer, the rough
January seas left behind, and presently on the horizon appeared the low
coast of Africa.


II

Earlier memories of Cairo were scarcely agreeable; very young, very
shy, and very awkward, I had been made to stay with Kitchener.  I had
not wanted to stay with him; I had protested loudly; my relations, who
thought they knew better, said that some day I should be glad to have
gone.  I was not then, and am not yet, glad; for the recollection
survives with horror, a sort of scar on the mind.  I had arrived at the
Residency suffering from a sunstroke and complete loss of voice--not an
ideal condition in which to confront that formidable soldier.  Craving
only for bed and a dark room, I had gone down to dinner.  Six or eight
speechless, intimidated officers sat round the table; Kitchener's
bleary eye roamed over them; my own hoarse whisper alone punctuated the
silence.  Egyptian art came up as a topic.  "I can't," growled
Kitchener, "think much of a people who drew cats the same for four
thousand years."  I could think of nothing more to say, even had I been
physically capable of saying it.  Worse followed; for as we sat on the
terrace after dinner, looking across the garden towards the Nile, a
quick, happy patter came across the bare floor and in trotted an alert
yellow mongrel.  "Good gracious, what's that? a dog?" cried Kitchener,
glaring at his A.D.C.  The sanctity of the Residency was outraged; a
dozen swords were ready to leap from their scabbards.  I could not sit
by and see murder done; I had to own that the dog was mine.

Next day, however, my host took me to the Zoo, as pleased as a child
with the baby elephant which had been taught to salute him with its
trunk.  The ice was broken.

This time, after the lapse of years, I was irresponsibly in Egypt
again; no dog to conceal, no servants, no Kitchener, no sunstroke.  I
went to Luxor.  I had nine days' grace between ship and ship.  Blankets
of magenta bougainvillea hung over the white walls of Luxor; four
creamy Nubian camels knelt beside the Nile.  I remembered how on that
previous occasion in Luxor I had lain in a cool dark room, sick with
headache, but thankful to have escaped and to have my sunstroke at last
to myself.  Instead of going to the Valley of the Kings I had lain
watching the bars of sunlight between the slats of the Venetian blinds,
and hearing, with the peculiar vividness that only the concentrated
egoism of illness brings, the drops of water falling on the tiled floor
outside, as the servant splashed it from a bucket; a pleasant way of
spending the days,--and even the pain seemed to add something, to mark
off that week from ordinary life,--I was not resentful, only a little
wistful at having to come as far as Luxor in order to do it.  Now all
was changed, and full of energy I took the dazzling, naked road that
leads to the Valley of the Kings.  How far away now appeared the
English fields,--yet the two pistons were still going unevenly up and
down;--small and very brightly green they appeared, as though seen down
the wrong end of a telescope, when I thought suddenly of them in the
midst of the Theban hills.  But above all they presented themselves to
me as extremely populous, full of small busy life, rabbits at evening
coming out from the spinneys, hares sitting on their haunches among the
clods of ploughed lands, field-mice, stoats, slinking through the
leaves, and birds innumerable hopping in branches; a multitudinous
population of tiny things, with plenty of rich corn and undergrowth to
shelter them; very soft, green, and cushioned Kent appeared to me, as I
paused in the white dust of that lifeless landscape.  A hoopoe? a
lizard? a snake? no, there was nothing; only the tumbled boulders and
the glare of the sun.  This silence and lifelessness frightened me.
The rocks closed in on the road, threatening.  There is a keen
excitement in not knowing what one is going to see next; the mind,
strung up, reaches forward for an image to expect, and finds nothing;
it is like picking up a jug of water which you believe to be full, and
finding it empty.  I had formed no image of the burial-ground of the
Pharaohs.  Indeed, it seemed incredible that within a few moments I
should behold it with my eyes, and know for the rest of my life
thereafter exactly what it looked like.  Then it would seem equally
incredible that I should not always have known.  These small but
stinging reflections kept me lingering; I was loth to part with my
ignorance; I reproached myself with having wasted so many years in not
speculating on this royal sepulchre.  Never again would that delight be
within my reach; for the pleasures of the imagination I was about to
exchange the dreary fact of knowledge.  Already I had seen the road,
and, even were I magically to be whisked back to Luxor, or, like
Habakkuk, picked up by the hair of the head and through the vehemency
of an angelic spirit set down to give my luncheon to some one a
thousand leagues distant, still I should have seen the road and might
form some idea, on a solid basis, of what was likely to be revealed
round the corner.  It was no good turning round and going back, out of
this wilderness to the narrow green reaches of the Nile: I went forward.


III

Then there were other days at Luxor; the day when I went to the
potters' village on the edge of the desert, through the fields of young
corn where the white egrets stalked and the water-wheel complained, as
it poured its little buckets into the irrigation trench.  I liked
getting away from the roads, into the region of country life, where
only the peasants laboured, bending down over the dark earth.
Everything there was slow, quiet, and regular; husbandry is of all ages
and all countries.  Nothing dates.  There is a special concentration in
this husbandry of the valley of the Nile; everything is drawn tightly
together; there is no sprawling.  The very centuries shrink up, and the
life of man with his beasts becomes very close.  They seem to have
acquired the same gait and colour, through long association with each
other and with the earth.  In long files, flat as a fresco, they trail
along the dykes, mud-coloured: the camels, the buffaloes, the little
donkeys, and the man.  Slouching they go, in an eternal procession;
with the Egyptian genius for design, as though they were drawn with a
hard, sharp pencil on the sky.  First the camels' heads, swaying on
their long necks; then the buffaloes, slouching as though they had just
dragged themselves out of the primeval slime; then the donkeys, with a
little boy sitting on the last rump, drumming his heels.  Then the man,
small but erect, driving the lot before him.  He drives, but he is part
of the procession; he brings up the rear.  He completes the pattern.
Yet he is not so very different from his beasts, only perpendicular
whereas they are horizontal; he is the same colour, though he plies a
stick.  Where they are all going to Heaven knows; they all seem to be
trailing on an eternal pilgrimage.  It is a relief to come upon a party
of peasants at work in static attitudes, bent down over the earth, not
walking on towards something else; with a camel near by, safely yoked,
and turning the water-wheel from morning to night in the same trodden
groove; this is a kind of triumph over the camel, which (with its
outstretched neck) might be an animal designed to slouch onward, always
at the same gait, always over the same desert, purpose subservient to
pattern.  A camel yoked is nature's design defeated, for the camel
looks like a natural traveller, and not like a creature intended to
walk round and round in the same circle.  The wooden cogs squeal as
they rub against one another, in the shadow of the tamarisk, and the
little pitchers come up dripping out of the deep well, spilling half
their water before it gets tipped out into the trench; a wasteful
process, but one upon which the centuries have not been able to
improve.  There is a downright, primitive simplicity about these
Egyptian methods, but it appears to be effective, for enviable crops
spring from the black earth.  Water is the constant preoccupation, from
the anxiety about the year's Nile--a good Nile, or a bad Nile--to the
more controllable problem of irrigation.  So the mind of the Egyptian
peasant must be filled with the noise and flow of water, as the mind of
every worker is shaped by the detail and exigency of his craft; he sees
the pitchers dip and spill, as though they had become a part of
himself, grown into his bones; he hears the shrill whining of the cogs,
that sing a peculiar tune, like an incantation, all day as the feet of
the camel pad round in the groove.

The peasants raised their heads at the sight of a stranger, for the
tourists stick to the tombs and temples, and do not wander in the
fields.  The blue shirts showed above the corn as the labourers
straightened their bent backs, and paused to stare.  In the villages
the dogs rushed out to bark, and hordes of children appeared from
nowhere, with little grinning faces and outstretched palms, and bare
feet scuffling in the dust.  These people live in conditions of
unbelievable simplicity.  Their houses are mere shelters of sun-dried
mud, without any furniture of even the roughest description; there are
simply four walls and a trodden floor; that is all.  Sometimes a rude
door keeps the entrance from the village street, but more often the
entrance is just a hole in the wall, and anybody can look in.  The
potters' village was largely built of broken pots, embedded in mud;
under a roof of plaited reeds, two potters sat at their work, the wheel
spinning beneath the kick of their foot, their arms plunged up to the
elbow in the dark wet clay, which in a minute was transformed from a
shapeless lump into a jar of plain but faultless line--a precision of
workmanship which contrasted oddly with the almost bestial condition of
their dwellings.  These are the people who can do one thing, and will
continue to do it all their lives, as their ancestors did it before
them, through the burning summers when no tourist dreams of going to
Luxor, as through the more merciful winter when foreigners with the
whole complexity of civilisation seething in their brains come to
intercept for a brief moment this different current of human existence.
The potters scarcely troubled to look up, they gave one dull,
indifferent glance, then flung another slab of clay on the twirling
wheel, and spun it out into the slender throat of the pitcher.

[Illustration: EGYPTIAN POTTERS.]

A patient people.  I had watched them working at some excavations, a
long stream of them, ascending and descending like the angels on
Jacob's ladder, carrying little baskets of sand and rubbish on their
heads.  So must the children of Israel have laboured under the lash of
the taskmaster, for even now in the twentieth century the taskmasters
stood by, curling their knotted thongs round the ragged limbs of the
laggards.  Nothing could have given so poignantly the sense of the
cheapness and abundance of labour as the size of the little baskets;
not much bigger than a punnet of strawberries, they were scarcely a
load for a child, yet young men and women fetched them from out of the
deep tomb, carried them up, and emptied them on the growing heap where
the sun glared on the rocks.  As they climbed and descended, they
chanted a monotonous song; when the lash fell on them, they skipped
into the air, but very good-humouredly, as though the lash were all in
the day's work and fell with impartiality, more to keep the ranks on
the move than to chastise the individual; so they gradually emptied the
tomb which their forefathers had dug, and which time had silted up
until the day should come for the curious foreigner to expose again the
underground chambers, the rigid images of god and Pharaoh; only when
the sunset whistle suddenly blew did they turn from beasts of burden
into human beings, breaking their ranks and scattering like a flock of
starlings at the clapping of hands.  Then they ran and leapt over the
rocks, some going away to ease themselves, others to drink thirstily
from pannikins, but all joyful at their release, and childish in their
demonstrations of pleasure.  Blue rags and brown rags, white teeth and
sinewy shanks, they must have looked very much the same when they
honeycombed the Valley of the Kings, under the peaked hill, tunnelling
a city underground, with passages and chambers, for the extraordinary
apparatus of royal death.  Nor had they themselves, among their
plebeian number, been without honour, for a Pharaoh gave his gardener a
tomb, and painted the roof and walls with leaves, grapes, and peaches;
so that going from the royal catacombs, with their conventionalised,
meaningless frescoes, into that small sepulchre overhung with fruits,
was like passing from an empty palace into a living arbour.  The
symbols of fertility of Amon-Ra were gross and unconvincing beside the
touching evidence of the gardener's toil and his master's gratitude.

The potters had pigeons for neighbours in the next village.  It was a
village, not of houses, but of round dove-cotes.  The inhabitants
arrived and departed by air, entering and leaving not by doors, but by
little arched holes twenty feet above ground, and the whole place was
full of the swish of wings and amorous conversation.  I wondered
whether they had evolved any form of self-government, like ants and
bees, but they certainly seemed to be bent on nothing but courtship,
preening and prinking round one another there in the Egyptian dust
exactly like pigeons on a barn roof in Sussex.  It was no pretty fancy,
but practical observation, that gave the pigeons to Aphrodite; and
these Egyptian swains were as true as the Greek to their reputation.
It was a regular little town that man had built for them, with a street
down the middle, and a palm-grove, and a sort of square where they
might hold their civic meetings, and then those tall, round towers,
honeycombed with entrances, and little ledges to sit on in the
stillness of the evening.

I was reminded of all the stories in which an entire population is
metamorphosed by magic into some kind of animal; and I felt that, could
I but pronounce the necessary words, the whole of this gentle community
would at once be restored to their rightful forms.


IV

The moon happened to be at the full while I was at Luxor, so I went out
to Karnak one night after dinner, to the quick trot of two little
horses.  This was a thing that many people had done many times before;
but to me it was egotistically invested with a special excitement; for
among the ambitions that smouldered vaguely at the back of my mind, one
was to see Karnak by moonlight, another was to row about Karnak in a
boat; and now the first ambition was to be fulfilled.  At first the
horses trotted softly along the sandy track, between the trees, the
clicking of their hooves forming a busy, brisk little rhythm; then the
landscape began to resolve itself into its characteristic properties:
an obelisk appeared, then the square portico of a lesser temple on the
left, then a broken avenue of squat shapes, toad-like among the
shadows, then finally the mass of Karnak itself in an open space
suddenly spreading out beyond the narrow road and the trees.  A strange
plain country, Egypt! so true to type, so expected, so
platitudinous--yet so grandly transcending all these things, making
sophistication appear so trivial, putting to shame all pedantry with
that perennial simplicity recognised by sophisticated and primitive
minds alike.  There is no escape.  Fastidiousness must split the hair
down to its narrowest filament; but, tired, returns again to the
simplest forms for an ultimate satisfaction.  We come back, always, to
those odd, false, true relationships, which stir our emotions in
response to our finer, not our more educated, judgement: such
relationships as that of a pagan temple under the moon--though why the
moon should have any bearing on the temple we do not know, except that
both are old, so old that both have become unreal to us; unreal, and
charged with a significance we are quite at a loss reasonably to
interpret, only we know obscurely that it is there; obscurely,
unscientifically, and in ignorance; perhaps mistakenly, but anyway with
an inward, intuitive certainty; the conjunction stirs us as an sthetic
harmony stirs us: and who shall explain such mysteries as conjunction
and rhythm, intuitively felt, but not by our present crude terminology
to be defined?  Who shall explain, either, the bearing of visual
experience upon psychical experience?  That which we apprehend through
the eyes can surely have no bearing on that which we experience through
the spirit?  But all these words are so vague: 'spiritually',
'emotionally', 'intellectually', what does all that really mean?  We
fumble, knowing that somewhere round the corner lies the last,
satisfying co-ordination.  Meanwhile, certain queer comings together,
such as are made by rhythm, or by pattern, or by lights and shadows, do
produce a natural harmony: a harmony suggesting that the part does
probably fit, somewhere, into the whole.

[Illustration: KARNAK.]

Leaning against Karnak, I thought: what was a work of art if not the
deliberate attempt to produce, artificially, such a harmony, which in
nature emerges only by accident, and with the help of such adventitious
advantages as Karnak itself now enjoyed, as, the moon casting shadows,
and familiar constellations wryly tilted overhead.  So, architecture
was not and could never be a pure art, depending as it must on natural,
accidental things.  But there was no denying that architecture and
nature made an astounding pair of allies.  I had often puzzled over the
architect's platitude, that the sthetic value of a building was
independent of its site, as a picture was independent of its frame, and
now understood it less than ever.  This Karnak, that rose out of rock
and sand, with its columns like gigantic palm-trees and its capitals
like spreading lotus, gave the violent lie to such a theory.  It
sprawled like a magnificent monster on Egypt, enhanced by all that
Egypt could give.  An obelisk, rising out of the desert, gained
something surely by its spiky contrast with the broad rolling waste; I
floundered ignorantly, arrogantly but still apologetically, among
problems I did not understand.  It seemed to me that, since I had
embarked on this journey, I had shed everything but the primitive
pleasures of sensation.  I knew myself, theoretically, to be a
reasonably educated person, ready to produce theories on several
subjects; yet when I called on theory now, it behaved like an
ill-trained dog that will not come to the whistle, snuffing rather at
new, delicious scents in the hedgerow, flushing a bird, jumping after
it into the air, and landing on all fours again with a mouthful of
tail-feathers.  Like Kinglake's traveller, I was fit only to report of
objects, not as I knew them to be, but as they seemed to me--and to
read into them, I might add, a great many attributes they could not
really possess.

Walking into Karnak was like walking into one of Piranesi's Prisons,
solidified suddenly into stone, and grown to natural, nay, to heroic
size.  Piled on fantastic ruin, obelisks pricked the sky; the colossal
aisle soared, its base plunged in the deepest shadow, its head lifted
to the moon; shafts of light struck the columns, lay in silver druggets
across the floor.  The black, enormous temple was shot through and
through by those broad beams of light.  Beyond the aisle, a vast space
littered with fallen masonry lay open to the sky.  Cavernous openings,
porticos, colonnades, blocks of masonry; obelisks, statues of Pharaohs,
some upright, some prone; and beyond them, beyond this magnificent
desolation, shrilled the thin piping of the frogs.  At every point of
the compass, turn which way one might, this temple, this etching by a
mad genius, offered some new aspect, now beautiful, now terrible; some
massing of shadow, some lofty soaring into light.  It crushed the mind,
since it was not the human mind that had conceived it as it now
appeared, but such inhuman factors as time upon earth; and, in the sky,
the mechanism of astronomy which brought the moon once more to that
path overhead.  But, out of the awful shadows, came suddenly a human
voice, insistent, clamant for recognition.  "I am a twin," it said.

I turned, and beheld a figure in noble draperies standing beside me in
a patch of light.  It was my dragoman, a young Bedouin of proud and
handsome appearance.  He was in a state of extraordinary excitement, as
though he could not contain his news, but must, under compulsion,
communicate it to somebody.  "I am two months older than my brother,"
he said, his eyes burning with pride.  "My mother kept my brother two
months longer than she kept me.  My father gave me two nurses," he
said, expressively rounding his hands over his breast, "two nurses, for
pleasure that I came so soon.  My father never looks at my brother, he
looks only at me.  When my father dies, I shall be the headman of our
village.  I get three crops a year."  He broke off, and bounded nimbly
up a sort of Giant's Causeway of fallen stone; paused there, tall in
his flowing robes against the sky.  "Listen!" he cried, and rapped on a
prostrate monolith.  It gave out a note like twanged steel.  He laughed
with delight, as though this performance on the part of the quarried
granite were one with his own excitement and his simple vanity.




CHAPTER III

TO IRAQ


I

Our return from Luxor to Cairo must have looked like a triumphal
progress through the night, seen from the desert by any stray Bedouin,
for the dining-car caught fire and trailed after us like the tail of a
comet down the line.  The train was stopped once, certainly, and some
half-hearted efforts were made to put the fire out, but these being
unavailing, we started off again and hoped for the best.  My handsome
dragoman was terribly frightened; he forgot about being a twin, he
forgot about his prowess as a hunter, and insisted that the carriage
would soon "be lying down on her side".  Besides, he added, robbers
were in the habit of putting boulders across the line, to stop the
train and plunder such passengers as might survive the accident.  Our
particular engine-driver was a devil, it appeared, and would charge any
obstacle rather than run the risk of being thought in league with the
robbers.  I had seen the engine-driver, a little black man with a red
handkerchief knotted round his head; he had come along from his engine
to watch while the railway men tried to extinguish the dining-car, most
contemptuous, with a cigarette dangling from his lips; the flames lit
up his dark greasy face, and he had replied scornfully to any anxious
enquiries.  Finally I persuaded Nasr to go back to his own compartment,
which he did, remarking that he would rather break in a rogue camel
than go in a train again.  As nothing happened, however, and as we
arrived safely in Cairo next morning, he forgot his fears and implored
me to take him on to Persia.  He had seen France, England, Spain, and
Italy; he had told his father he would not marry until he had seen all
the world; would I not, therefore, take him to Asia that he might the
more speedily settle down with a wife?  He looked crestfallen when I
said it was impossible, but soon brightened again.  If I would not do
that, would I at least send him a packet of post cards (coloured) of
Shakespeare's house at Stratford?  This I was able to promise, and he
ran along beside the train as it moved out of Cairo station, explaining
that he had left eighteenpence with the post-card shop at Stratford,
but that they had never sent the post cards ... but here we reached the
end of the platform, and the last I saw of him was the flutter of his
white robe as he stood waving and looking after the train which might
have carried him on the way to the coveted places.

He was a great dandy, and I missed him.  His luggage had been a mystery
to me, for he apparently carried a roll of blanket only, yet every day
in Luxor he had produced new, voluminous clothes, green, purple, and
white, and scarves embroidered with gold thread, and leather shoes in
purple and yellow.  I wished I had his receipt.  My own baggage by now
had increased considerably, and my supply of orange labels was giving
out; I had acquired a gramophone, an ice-box, and a large canvas bag
which took the overflow of my books.  The gramophone and the ice-box I
had accepted in Cairo to save them from being thrown into the Nile; as
they had already travelled with forty-seven other pieces of luggage
over Thibet on the backs of yaks, I thought it a pity they should not
continue their career.

With this paraphernalia I arrived at Port Said; learnt that the ship
was late; slept in an hotel on the quay-side; and woke in the morning
to find the liner moored under my windows.


II

In due course we came to Aden, which of all outposts of empire seemed
to me the most forlorn and disagreeable, though an old soldier on board
told me it was "not so bad,--you get cheap polo, and shoot lion in
Somaliland".  I hope this proves a compensation to the unfortunate
regiments stationed there; for my part, I would as soon throw myself to
the sharks as live in that arid, salty hell.  That Rimbaud should have
endured it, should have endured the Htel de l'Univers, is a real
tribute to the horrors of Aden; for it was to be expected that Rimbaud,
with that perversity which made him renounce literature at the age of
nineteen, should inflict upon himself a sojourn in precisely the most
repulsive corner of the world he could find.  Nevertheless, that day at
Aden had a certain style of its own, if style is to be held to depend
upon judicious exaggeration; it was grotesque, it was nightmareish.
Some Parsee friends I had made on the boat induced me to land; we were
taken off in a motor-launch by a very old and distinguished Parsee
merchant in a shiny black hat, who placed his secretary, a dark
scornful young man in white ducks, and his motor at our disposal for
the rest of the day.  In this ramshackle machine we were driven at a
furious rate, and in a howling gale, over the whole of that unpleasant
region.  First up to the chain of tanks, vast cement pits of unknown
antiquity and Dantesque fearfulness, situated where a narrow gorge
descended from the hills; designed to hold water, in a district where
no rivers run and rain falls once in ten years, one of them--the
largest--did display a green, stagnant puddle at the bottom, but
otherwise the bone-dry nakedness of their concrete slopes resembled
nothing so much as the Mappin terraces at the Zoo, inhabited not by
bears, but by two small, nude, black boys, who beat with their fists on
their stomachs, producing a curious reverberation, and cried
incessantly, "No fader, no moder, thank-you," to the party of strangers
peering over the top.  Incongruous figures in the scene were some
Scotch soldiers, gazing wistfully at the tanks which they must have
seen a hundred times before; kilts at Aden!  We are too well accustomed
to the kilt, but present it to the foreign eye and observe the effect;
is it not Mme. de Noailles who speaks so appreciatively of the
"_miroitement des genoux roses_"?  We left the Scotch soldiers, who
transferred their wistful gaze to us, fortunate birds of passage while
they must remain behind, re-entered the motor, and were driven away at
the same furious rate, into the bowels of the earth this time, with
screaming siren down a long tunnel, scattering camels and shaven
Somalis as we went, only to emerge on a landscape more hideous than any
we had yet seen.  It was perfectly flat and desolate, blanched by great
patches of salt.  There are few manifestations of nature which are
wholly ugly, but salt is one of them.  It spreads over the ground like
a sort of leprosy, till 'salt of the earth' seems dubious praise.
Quite in vain we protested that we did not want to see the salt-fields;
the scornful young secretary was determined, and, lolling beside the
chauffeur, urged him along the road with a flick of the hand, while we
in the back clung to our hats and tried at the same time to safeguard
ourselves against being jolted out of the motor.  After what seemed
miles of travelling we reached the salt-fields; the air was bitter with
brine, great heaps of white salt stood like rows of tents, disused
windmills spread their motionless sails.  The secretary invited us to
admire; we were thankful for the breathing space; we shook out our
clothes and tried to rub some of the dust out of our eyes.  Now,
surely, we might be allowed to return to Aden.  Not at all, there was a
garden we must visit.  Remorselessly we were hurled towards the garden,
through a Somali village; flew through the garden, in at one gate and
out of the other, then back towards Aden, dashing round corners,
tearing down hills, all the while with the hot wind howling across the
sand and raising clouds of grit that lashed our faces.  Mazeppa himself
had not a more horrific ride.  The secretary alone seemed pleased.  We
arrived at the town, and were already beginning to think of the
peaceful cabins of our anchored ship, when the car stopped with a jerk
outside a Ford garage, and we were invited to alight.  Too dazed by now
to offer resistance, we followed the secretary into the yard, where
stood a quantity of scrap-iron and broken-down lorries.  Was this one
of the sights of Aden?  "Lions," observed the secretary with pride, and
there indeed among the lorries and lumber were two mangy lions in an
exceedingly small cage.  We looked dutifully at these two poor animals,
who stared past us after the manner of their kind in the direction of
their native Africa; the secretary lolled by the cage, a supercilious
smile on his lips.  We were not yet to escape him, for he then took us
firmly to his master's house.  After the tanks, the tunnel, the wind,
the salt, and the lions, this was an agreeable place, and one that
might have done for the setting of a Conrad novel.  A low, dark,
aromatic, apothecary's shop on the ground floor; high, airy rooms
upstairs, with marble floors, models of ships in glass vases, bunches
of herbs hung in festoons across the lintels of the doors, ledgers
scattered upon the tables.  Here, after one of those uncomfortable
waits during which, because one is in a stranger's house, one talks in
a lowered voice, the old Parsee joined us.  He was accompanied this
time by his granddaughter, a yellow-faced child wearing on her dark
black hair a round cap like a golden muffin.  The secretary lolled in
the doorway, sucking the top of his cane.  Bare-footed Indian servants
brought tea and sweet biscuits.  Conversation was a little difficult;
we did not like to pass any comments on Aden to this old
merchant-prince, who by virtue of his wealth and importance in the town
was entitled to call himself Adenvala, and who sat stirring his tea,
his eyes downcast, a slight and unexplained smile wrinkling the corners
of his mouth.  We could only admire his photograph of the Prince of
Wales, and a rather faded group taken on board the _Ophir_, while he
expressed--cynical and shrewd old trader that he was--his loyalty to
the British flag.

I hope I shall never have cause to call myself Adenvala.  I leant over
the side of the ship that evening while the hawks and gulls circled
with wild cries disputing between them the ship's refuse, and wondered
whether I should ever see Aden, with its tanks and lions, or Mr.
Kaikobad Cavasjee Dinshaw Adenvala again.  I determined at least that I
would not travel to Persia again by that route if I could help it.


III

To one ignorant of the principles of navigation it seems miraculous
that after four days of steaming across apparently unidentifiable
wastes of ocean the ship should hit off with such exactitude the
correct but narrow harbour-bar on a distant strand.  That she should,
sooner or later, with the aid of the compass, hit, at some point, the
coast of India seems plausible enough, but that she should slide thus
unerringly between the buoys of Bombay, without having first to feel
about for them, remains one of those mysteries which no amount of
explanation will ever lessen.  I could not believe my eyes when, waking
at four o'clock one morning in an unnatural stillness, I looked out of
my porthole and saw, instead of the familiar circle of waters, the dawn
scarlet behind a range of hills.  Small craft were dotted about; kites
swept over the placid surface; yellow lights ringed the water's edge;
rigging pencilled the flaming sky.  Here was all the business of land
again, albeit a land unawakened as yet, unmindful of the ship that
stole thus clandestinely to her berth in the sleeping hours before the
renewed activity of early day.  So the maps had been right after all,
and there was a continent on the other side of that interminable ocean!
I had grown so quickly accustomed to running up on deck at dawn, and to
watching the day grow over what might well have been the same ring of
ocean morning after morning, that I now looked with astonishment at
quays and buildings, and at the solid India that rose beyond the
amphitheatre of the harbour.


IV

Curiously little remains to me of India: it seems to me now that I have
never been there; only a few things stand out, but they are detached,
as though I had seen them through a hole cut in a mask, with their
enormous surroundings blacked out, leaving them bright and isolated.  A
bridge over a river, crowded with animals; horns and patient faces; a
sea of animals' backs; I see the sticks of the drivers rising and
falling on the grey, bristly backs of buffaloes; I see the horned heads
turning, in a meek, uncomprehending wish to obey; I see the glittering
river below, and the stretches of white dazzling sand; and then again
the shadowy bridge, with that great, slowly moving concourse, as though
all the herds in the world were being driven to the final slaughter.
Then I see a long road at twilight, bordered by trees, and a jackal
looking at me out of the scrub.  Then I see a red city straggling over
a hill; there are shrill green parrots there, and monkeys; and the
curved brown body of a man falling from an immense height into a green
pool below.  A red city, and the genius of Akbar; a white city, and the
genius of Lutyens; the Moghul Empire, and the British.  But none of
this bears any relation to India; India is too vast, too diverse, to be
grasped as a whole, therefore only details emerge.  I know that for two
days and nights I travelled shut up in a stifling little box with
smoked windows, which was a railway carriage but which seemed to me
like the Black Hole of Calcutta on wheels, and that through the windows
I watched the enormous areas go past, disappointingly like an English
park down in the plains, but climbing through Bhopal into Gwalior up a
track cut through the jungle, crossing ravines and passing hills of
square sugar-loaf shape; leaning out I could look down the long
serpent-like curve of the train, and see a forest of brown legs and
arms hanging out of the windows to cool; and that was India, but almost
before I knew it I was back in Bombay harbour, on another boat, heading
north for Karachi and the Persian Gulf.


V

By this time I had come to look on my journey as a series of zigzag
lines, shooting across the map: a long dash south, to Aden; a long dash
east, to Bombay--nearly straight, those two lines;--now there was to be
added a long dash north-west to Bagdad, a line with several obtuse
angles in it, and finally an easterly line, shooting like the beam of a
searchlight into Asia.  Long thin lines they were, no thicker than
lines made with an etching pen.

I had looked forward to sailing up the Persian Gulf.  There are some
places whose names invest them with every kind of suggestion, and this
was one of them; its name in French, too, had an odd little twist to
it: _le Golfe Persique_.  Why _persique_?  Why not _persan_?  I
imagined that I should see pearl-fisheries, and the extraordinary
Phoenician mounds of Bahrein; I went over all the names of ports:
Muscat, Hormuz, Koweit, Bunder Abbas, Bushire.  And it was one of the
hottest places on the earth; so torrid, that the inhabitants said that
only a sheet of paper was spread there between man and hell.  It would
not be hot at that time of the year, but surely the heat to come would
be felt as a threat, an unescapable thing awaited in terror; the
terrible summer to come, and all the past summers that had been
endured?  The more I thought about it, the more did it work on my
imagination, till I was in a state of superstitious trepidation about
the Gulf.  That wedge of sea driven up between Arabia and Persia, that
place of fever, pearls, and monsoons.

But, like most things to which one has looked forward, the Gulf turned
out a disappointment.  It was not only a disappointment, but a
nightmare.  For one thing, I had sprained my ankle the day before
embarking at Bombay, and it is not much fun hopping up gangways, and up
and down a ship's companion, on two sticks with one dangling foot.
That, however, I could have borne; but before we had been twenty-four
hours at sea my temperature rushed up to a hundred and four.  It was
very hot and damp.  I lay in my tiny cabin and wished to die.  A little
black steward in white ducks brought me lime-juice; he was a kindly
little man, and never left my cabin without turning round to make a bow
and to say ceremoniously, "I am sor-ry," but to my disordered mind he
was merely sinister, a figure out of a Conrad novel, with his black
face and hands, and his white clothes, and his eternal glass of
lime-juice with the two straws sticking out of it.  He was, however,
the only human being I saw for three days, except when once I crawled
on deck and watched the Hindu steerage passengers throwing cocoanuts
into the sea to propitiate the deity of a temple dimly visible on the
skyline.  This was before we came to Karachi, our port of call, where
we finally turned our backs on India.  For some reason I had made up my
mind that I had got diphtheria, and should be landed at Karachi to die
there in hospital, so it was with relief that I heard the anchor being
got up at Karachi, and the engine throb again, and knew that for better
or worse they must now take me on to Basrah.  Such were my forlorn and
absurd imaginings.  The days passed somehow, in a haze of sleep and
fever; I had three principal amusements: taking my temperature, which
fluctuated wildly; gargling; and examining my ankle, with a certain
snobbish regret that I had no one to exhibit it to, for by now it had
developed all the colours of a stormy sunset.  At the end of four days
I decided that I was tired of being ill; smashed my thermometer;
dressed; and then, weak, thin, and hot, limped up on deck.  The little
ship was steaming along on a grey, placid sea.  The pink cliffs of
Baluchistan stretched along the horizon.  I fetched a deck-chair, pen,
and paper, and began this book.


VI

Fever sharpens the wits and improves the perceptions; loneliness
performs the same good office.  I had no one to talk to, except the
captain, a jovial Scotchman who accepted his fate with the usual
philosophy of such men.  Yes, he said, it could be quite warm enough in
the Gulf, certainly; and yes, the monsoons did give you a bit of a
dusting.  "But it's surprising," he added, "what a hammering a ship
will take from the sea and come up smiling."  A sea-faring life begets,
not a lyrical, but a matter-of-fact point of view; there is, mentally,
a family likeness among sailors, and this captain reminded me of
another one who, on returning a borrowed copy of _Typhoon_, remarked
only, "Seems to have been a bit of dirty weather knocking about."  The
captain, however, had to go back to his bridge and I was left to my own
devices.  There was not much to look at: Baluchistan was very faint,
more like a long, low, pink cloud than solid land, nor had we any
prospect of future sights, for the captain told me that we should pass
through the narrow Gulf of Oman during the night.  Ships seem to take a
pleasure in passing during the dark hours any object which might be of
interest to their passengers.  So my hand flew over the paper, covering
sheet after sheet, and a school of porpoises followed the ship, turning
over and over because they are still looking for Solomon's ring, which
he dropped off his finger in the Persian Gulf.  Presently back came the
captain, and pointed to the coast.  "Persia," he said laconically.


VII

The next two days were rough and cold; no land was in sight; we might
have been in the North Sea instead of the Persian Gulf.  The fever
returned with fury.  But I was so elated that I did not care: I had
begun a book, and I had seen Persia.  Since I might not behold the
pearls of Bahrain, I took refuge in the pearls of Proust, heavy on the
white throat of the duchesse de Guermantes; I dived into my canvas bag
and brought out those shabby volumes which had won me such black looks
when they lay scattered round me on the deck of the P. & O.; for
although parson and colonel's lady had enough French and enough
Biblical knowledge to understand the titles, I doubt whether they had
ever heard of Proust; anyway, I fished them out again now, and lost
myself in that brilliant world, so real in its unreality.  To read of
Proust's parties in the Persian Gulf is an experience I can recommend,
as a paradox which may please the most fastidious taste.  Indeed, I
came to believe that every book should be read in the most incongruous
surroundings possible, for then it imposes its own unity in a way that
startles the reader when he has to emerge again into his own world;
thus, when I passed from a ball at the htel de Guermantes into the
little dining-saloon of s.s. _Varela_, Proust's world was still truer
than the ship and I was puzzled to know, really, where I was.

Then we came to Mohammerah, and, with other ships, waited outside the
bar till we could begin to go up the Shatt-el-Arab.  It was then
twilight; the ships' lights came out one by one over a wide expanse of
water; the smooth sky was streaked with red and orange behind the
groves of palms; again it seemed miraculous that the ship should have
made her land-fall, but less miraculous this time, at the head of a
narrow sea, than after the opal wastes of the Indian Ocean.  So we
waited for a little at the gateway to Iraq, with the engines stilled,
in a peace like the peace of a lagoon.  Slowly we moved up the river;
it was dark by now, and the waterway was narrow: a low coast, thick
with groves of date palms, through which we glided all night; from time
to time I got up and looked through the porthole, but saw nothing
beyond the thick, tall trees, that made an opaque wall along the banks,
but whose fronded tops waved gently against a clear sky.


VIII

From Basrah to Bagdad the train runs straight over the desert; yellow,
hideous, and as flat as the sea, the desert comes right up to the
railway line, and stretches away to the circular horizon, unbroken save
by a little scrub, a few leprous patches of salt, or the skeleton of a
camel.  Once, the monotony is interrupted by a mound: this is Ur of the
Chaldees.  Otherwise there is nothing.  At one station a notice-board
says: Change for Babylon.  But one does not see Babylon from the train.
So I was glad enough to reach Bagdad at seven in the morning, to hear
the shouts with which all movement is conducted in the East, and to see
the goats picking their way with pastoral simplicity between the
railway trucks.  I had had quite enough by then of fending for myself,
and wished only to forget about the Persian Gulf and Basrah as quickly
as possible; Bagdad to me meant no Arabian Nights, but the much greater
and more comforting romance of friends.

This was lucky, for any one who goes to Bagdad in search of romance
will be disappointed.  The Tigris rushes its yellow flood through the
city, and the houses which line its banks share the inevitable
picturesqueness of all houses lining a waterway; the round coracles,
which cross the river laden with bales and donkeys, swirling in the
flood, looking impossibly unseaworthy, have a peculiar character of
their own; but for the rest Bagdad is a dusty jumble of mean buildings
connected by atrocious streets, quagmires of mud in rainy weather, and
in dry weather a series of pits and holes over which an English farmer
might well hesitate to drive a waggon.  In Bagdad, however, drivers are
not so particular.  Ford cars, battered, bent, with broken wind-screens
and no trace of paint, bump hooting down the street, while camels,
donkeys, and Arabs get out of the way, as best they can: any road, in
the East, is a road for a motor.  I confess that I was startled by the
roads of Bagdad, especially after we had turned out of the main street
and drove between high, blank walls along a track still studded with
the stumps of palm trees recently felled; the mud was not dry here and
we skidded and slithered, hitting a tree-stump and getting straightened
on our course again, racketing along, tilting occasionally at an angle
which defied all the laws of balance, and which in England would
certainly have overturned the more conventionally minded motor.

Then: a door in the blank wall, a jerky stop, a creaking of hinges, a
broadly smiling servant, a rush of dogs, a vista of garden path edged
with carnations in pots, a little verandah and a little low house at
the end of the path, an English voice--Gertrude Bell.

I had known her first in Constantinople, where she had arrived straight
out of the desert, with all the evening dresses and cutlery and napery
that she insisted on taking with her on her wanderings; and then in
England; but here she was in her right place, in Iraq, in her own
house, with her office in the city, and her white pony in a corner of
the garden, and her Arab servants, and her English books, and her
Babylonian shards on the mantelpiece, and her long thin nose, and her
irrepressible vitality.  I felt all my loneliness and despair lifted
from me in a second.  Had it been very hot in the Gulf? got fever, had
I? but quinine would put that right; and a sprained ankle,--too
bad!--and would I like breakfast first, or a bath? and I would like to
see her museum, wouldn't I? did I know she was Director of Antiquities
in Iraq? wasn't that a joke? and would I like to come to tea with the
King? and yes, there were lots of letters for me.  I limped after her
as she led me down the path, talking all the time, now in English to
me, now in Arabic to the eager servants.  She had the gift of making
every one feel suddenly eager; of making you feel that life was full
and rich and exciting.  I found myself laughing for the first time in
ten days.  The garden was small, but cool and friendly; her spaniel
wagged not only his tail but his whole little body; the pony looked
over the loose-box door and whinnied gently; a tame partridge hopped
about the verandah; some native babies who were playing in a corner
stopped playing to stare and grin.  A tall, grey sloughi came out of
the house, beating his tail against the posts of the verandah; "I want
one like that," I said, "to take up into Persia."  I did want one, but
I had reckoned without Gertrude's promptness.  She rushed to the
telephone, and as I poured cream over my porridge I heard her
explaining--a friend of hers had arrived--must have a sloughi at
once--was leaving for Persia next day--a selection of sloughis must be
sent round that morning.  Then she was back in her chair, pouring out
information: the state of Iraq, the excavations at Ur, the need for a
decent museum, what new books had come out? what was happening in
England?  The doctors had told her she ought not to go through another
summer in Bagdad, but what should she do in England, eating out her
heart for Iraq?  Next year, perhaps ... but I couldn't say she looked
ill, could I?  I could, and did.  She laughed and brushed that aside.
Then, jumping up--for all her movements were quick and impatient--if I
had finished my breakfast wouldn't I like my bath? and she must go to
her office, but would be back for luncheon.  Oh yes, and there were
people to luncheon; and so, still talking, still laughing, she pinned
on a hat without looking in the glass, and took her departure.

I had my bath--her house was extremely simple, and the bath just a tin
saucer on the floor--and then the sloughis began to arrive.  They
slouched in, led on strings by Arabs in white woollen robes, sheepishly
smiling.  Left in command, I was somewhat taken aback, so I had them
all tied up to the posts of the verandah till Gertrude should return,
an army of desert dogs, yellow, white, grey, elegant, but black with
fleas and lumpy with ticks.  I dared not go near them, but they curled
up contentedly and went to sleep in the shade, and the partridge
prinked round them on her dainty pink legs, investigating.  At one
o'clock Gertrude returned, just as my spirits were beginning to flag
again, laughed heartily at this collection of dogs which her telephone
message (miraculously, as it seemed to me) had called into being,
shouted to the servants, ordered a bath to be prepared for the dog I
should choose, unpinned her hat, set down some pansies on her luncheon
table, closed the shutters, and gave me a rapid biography of her guests.

She was a wonderful hostess, and I felt that her personality held
together and made a centre for all those exiled Englishmen whose other
common bond was their service for Iraq.  They all seemed to be informed
by the same spirit of constructive enthusiasm; but I could not help
feeling that their mission there would have been more in the nature of
drudgery than of zeal, but for the radiant ardour of Gertrude Bell.
Whatever subject she touched, she lit up; such vitality was
irresistible.  We laid plans, alas, for when I should return to Bagdad
in the autumn: we would go to Babylon, we would go to Ctesiphon, she
would have got her new museum by then.  When she went back to England,
if, indeed, she was compelled to go, she would write another book....
So we sat talking, as friends talk who have not seen one another for a
long time, until the shadows lengthened and she said it was time to go
and see the King.

The King's house lay just outside the town; a wretched building in a
sad state of disrepair, the paving-stones of the terrace forced up by
weeds, the plaster flaking off the walls and discoloured by large
patches of damp.  The King himself was a tall, dark, slim, handsome
man, looking as though he were the prey to a romantic, an almost
Byronic, melancholy; he spoke rather bad French, addressing himself in
Arabic to Gertrude when his vocabulary failed him.  They discussed what
linoleum he should have in the kitchen of his new country house.  Then
tea was brought in, and a sort of pyramid of fanciful cakes, which
delighted Feisal, and they discussed at great length the merits of his
new cook.  Gertrude seemed to be conversant with every detail of his
housekeeping as well as with every detail of the government of his
kingdom, and to bring as much interest to bear upon the one as upon the
other.  His melancholy vanished as she twitted and chaffed him, and I
watched them both--the Arab prince and the Englishwoman who were trying
to build up a new Mesopotamia between them.  "You see," she had said to
me, "we feel here that we are trying to do something worth while,
something creative and constructive"; and in spite of her deference to
his royalty, in spite of the 'Sidi' that now and then she slipped into
her conversation, there could be very little doubt as to which of the
two was the real genius of Iraq.  As we drove back into Bagdad she
spoke of his loneliness; "He likes me to ring up and ask to go to tea,"
she said.  I could readily believe it.

Her house had the peculiar property of making one feel that one was a
familiar inhabitant; at the end of a day I felt already that I was part
of it, like the spaniel, the pony, and the partridge (the partridge,
indeed, slept in my bedroom that night, on the top of the cupboard); I
suppose her life was so vivid, so vital, in every detail, that its
unity could not fail to make an immediate, finished impression on the
mind.  But I was only a bird of passage.  Next evening I left for
Persia, the moon hanging full over Bagdad, and my heart warmed with the
anticipation of a return to that friendly little house which now I
shall never see again.  The finally selected sloughi sat beside me; she
must be called Zurcha, said Gertrude, meaning 'yellow one'; in every
street caf a gramophone brayed, through the fog of smoke rising from
the hubble-bubbles of the Arabs.  These smoky, lighted interiors slid
past me as my cab bumped towards the station; but I, clinging on to my
bouncing luggage, had no leisure for their tinsel or their discord.
What were Arabs to me or I to them, as we thus briefly crossed one
another? they in their robes, noble and squalid, of impenetrable life;
and I a traveller, making for the station?  They had all the desert
behind them, and I all Asia before me, Bagdad just a point of focus, a
last shout of civilisation, lit by that keen spirit, that active life;
and lying for me now--as though I looked down upon it from a
height--between Arabia and Asia, midway between a silence and a silence.




CHAPTER IV

INTO PERSIA


I

Heaven knows Bagdad had seemed remote enough, at Victoria on a January
morning; but now, looking towards the east, it appeared almost
suburban, and the great spaces only on the point of opening out.  This
was the last train I should see; the last time I should be jolted with
that familiar railway-clanking into the night.

A poor little train it was too, taking ten laborious hours to cover the
hundred miles of its journey.  It climbed from the plain into the
hills, and a frosty dawn found it steaming and stationary at the
railhead.  Railheads are not commonly seen in Europe.  In England we
see them, because otherwise at certain points the train would have no
choice but to run on into the sea; at Dover, at Brighton, we see
them--though even at Brighton there is a branch line which goes, at a
right angle, along the coast to Worthing.  But in Europe we do not
often see them, unless we go to Lisbon or Constantinople.  Even Venice
is a cheat, because the train after backing curves round again and goes
merrily off through the Balkans.  We are accustomed to see the rails
shining away over fresh country, after we have got out and are left
standing beside our luggage on the platform.  But here, at Khaniquin,
there was no geographical reason why the rails should leave off; why,
instead of going on for a thousand, two thousand, ten thousand shining
miles, they should end in a pair of blunt buffers.

Mountain air at five o'clock in the morning makes one hungry.  I found
the little canteen in occupation of a fellow-traveller.  He was a stout
man, dressed in complete riding-kit--breeches, leather gaiters, even to
the hunting-crop.  He recommended the porridge and we got into
conversation.  I said something about walking to the cars.  "Walk?" he
said, "I have just walked eleven thousand miles."  I asked if this was
the first time he had been to Persia.  "_Been to Persia?_" he said, "I
have been round the world seventeen times."  From his accent I thought
he was Scotch, but he gave me his name, told me he spoke twenty-five
languages, and was a Belgian marquis.  He had a secretary with him, a
silent, downtrodden young man, hung with cameras, thermos bottles, and
field-glasses.  I never heard him speak, and I never discovered his
nationality.  He simply ate his breakfast as though he were not sure
when he would next replenish his larder.  In this he reminded me of the
sloughi, who, a true camp-follower, had a perfectly definite attitude
towards life: eat when you can and sleep when you can, for you never
know when your next meal and your next rest are coming.

There was a delay over starting, the usual delay, and meanwhile the sky
turned pink behind the hills, and a long caravan of camels got up and
lurched away across the plateau, their bells sounding more faintly and
their extraordinary silhouettes growing blacker and more precise as
they trailed out against the morning sky.  Then the sun came up, the
snow flushed on the distant hills, the grey morning had gone, the whole
plateau was full of light.  It elated me to see that the road led
straight into the dawn.  "The sun rises in the east," we are accustomed
to say; and a new significance welled up into that empty maxim.  The
sun was leading the way.  Indeed, to wander about the world is to
become very intimately mixed up with astronomy.  Familiar stars tilt,
and even disappear; the Bear performs antics, Orion climbs.  We become
conscious of the path of the sun.  At home, the heavenly phenomena pass
and repass over our heads, without our troubling to lift our eyes to
this display of punctual and stupendous mechanism.  But the traveller
notices.

Outside the station the cars were waiting, muddy, loaded, the legend
TRANS-DESERT MAIL in white paint on their bonnets.  They had come from
Beyrout, and looked it.  The marquis, smacking his gaiters with his
crop, was fussing round, like the fly round the coach in the fable.
Avoiding the marquis, I got the front seat in the other car, with
Zurcha, who although as leggy as a colt, folded up into a surprisingly
small space and immediately went to sleep.  I was glad to see this, as
I had not looked forward to restraining a struggling dog over five
hundred miles of country, and had not been at all easy in my mind as to
what a sloughi straight out of the desert would make of a motor.  That
yellow nomad, however, accepted whatever life sent her with a perfect
and even slightly irritating philosophy.  Warmth and food she insisted
on; shared my luncheon and crawled under my sheepskin, but otherwise
gave no trouble.  I was relieved, but felt it a little ungrateful of
her not to notice that she was being taken into Persia.

[Illustration: INTO PERSIA.]

I was myself very vividly aware of going into Persia.  The nose of the
motor pointed straight at the sun; this way had come Alexander, but not
Marco Polo, not Mme. Dieulafoy, not M. de Gobineau, not even Lord
Curzon.  This road, which lay between the two wild provinces of
Kurdistan and Luristan, had, until the war, existed only as a caravan
route between Persia and Bagdad; no traveller dreamt of risking his
property and possibly his life that way.  True, Nasr-ed-Din Shah had
made an expedition, summoning the tribal chiefs of the Kurds and Lurs
to meet him, but, being informed that among these superstitious and
ignorant brigands the Shah was commonly supposed to be a giant fifteen
feet high, and being warned that the disappointment of seeing a man of
mere ordinary stature might prove subversive to their loyalty, yet
being determined to show himself to his predatory vassals, he hit upon
an ingenious expedient.  Having caused his tent to be pitched so that
the rays of the rising sun should strike full upon it, he ordered the
breast of his uniform to be sewn from collar to hem with every diamond
in the Persian treasury.  The chiefs assembled at dawn.  Then, as the
sun rose, the flap of the Shah's pavilion was thrown open, and in the
sun's illumination appeared that motionless and resplendent figure.
The chiefs prostrated themselves; but when they again raised their
dazzled eyes, the Shah had vanished.

I asked my driver if he had ever been held up on the road.  No, he
said, he hadn't, but several of his mates had, because they were fools
enough to stop when ordered.  "Now if anybody comes at me," he added,
"I drive straight at them."  With that, he let in his gears, and we
started.  The first few miles were atrocious, and populous.  We
overtook the long string of camels, and innumerable donkeys loaded with
petrol tins; waggons too, with drivers asleep; lorries full of grain,
some advancing, others stuck askew in the mud.  Streams crossed the
track every hundred yards or so, and this meant mud up to the axles; in
between the streams the road was less a road full of holes, than a
series of holes connected by fragments of road.  Our luggage truck
bounded and bounced ahead of us.  There was a great deal of shouting
and of digging out of stranded lorries in progress, and mingled with
the shouts of the men came the grave note of the camel bells, and the
creaking of the overloaded waggons.  They all seemed to be going east;
we met no one coming the other way.  They trailed across the rolling
ground towards the frontier, a straggling concourse, in the clear
morning.

The Iraq frontier consisted of a post-house, a crazy gate hung across
the road, and a few strands of barbed wire.  Inside the post-house we
were given tea and cigarettes while our passports were being stamped,
and admired the collection of visiting-cards with which the walls were
papered.  The marquis took a number of photographs with different
kodaks.  Three woolly puppies tumbled in the dust.  Meanwhile the
traffic accumulated into a block of waggons and animals, which we left
behind us, jostling and abusive, as we swung into the No-man's land
between Iraq and Persia.  The Persian frontier lay about five miles
ahead; here we were offered an escort of soldiers, which we declined;
the pole that barred the road was raised; we moved forward; we were in
Persia.

I discovered then that not one of the various intelligent people I had
spoken with in England had been able to tell me anything about Persia
at all--the truth being, I suppose, that different persons observe
different things, and attribute to them a different degree of
importance.  Such a diversity of information I should not have
resented; but here I was obliged to recognise that they had told me
simply nothing.  No one, for instance, had mentioned the beauty of the
country, though they had dwelt at length, and with much exaggeration,
on the discomforts of the way.  It reminded me of nothing so much as
the traditional reply of the nigger, who, when asked, "How far is it to
such-and-such a place?" replies, "Not too far."  "Is the road steep?" I
had asked, and had been told, "Not too steep," which was true enough of
the road across the plains, but quite untrue of the road over the
passes, which climbs to ten thousand feet in a seven-mile series of
hairpin bends.  No one had told me that I must take my own provisions
for three or four days; but that, fortunately, I had found out in
Bagdad.  No one had told me that I might have to spend several nights
in a mud hut by the roadside, held up by a fresh fall of snow, though
that was constantly happening to travellers less lucky than I.  No one,
in fact, had made one single useful or illuminating remark.  It had its
advantages, and allowed me to enter Persia with an open mind.  I had no
idea whatever of what I was going to see.

I saw, as, with the sun, we swept onwards, a country unlike anything I
had ever seen before.  England, France, Germany, Poland have their
points in common; a sense of care and cultivation; snug little
villages; homesteads tiled and self-contained; evidences of husbandry,
in ploughed fields, meadows, ricks; a trim landscape, a landscape
ordered by man, and submissive to his needs.  Italy and Spain have
their points in common; a landscape again submissive to man, though
compelling him to work on lines dictated by the rougher lie of the
land: he has had to make terraces for his vines, his cities wear a rude
medival aspect, the general wild beauty of the country has been
conquered indeed, but only after a struggle; murder and pillage, Moors
and tyrants, still stalk those slopes.  Russia has the green rolling
steppe; predominantly the face of the dry land is cultivated, it is
used, it is forced to be of service to man and his creatures, it is
green.  But Persia had been left as it was before man's advent.  Here
and there he had scraped a bit of the surface, and scattered a little
grain; here and there, in an oasis of poplars and fruit trees outlining
a stream, he had raised a village, and his black lambs skipped under
the peach-blossom; but for miles there was no sign of him, nothing but
the brown plains and the blue or white mountains, and the sense of
space.  The crowds of Europe suddenly rushed at me, overwhelmed me; I
was drowning under the pressure, when they cleared away, and I was
left, breathing, with space all round me, and a serenity that looked
down from the peaks on to the great bowl of the plain.  The motor, as
it swept up and down the hills, might have been an eagle swooping; no
sooner had it reached the top of an eminence than it swept down again
and was off, eating up the long road, till the smooth monotony of our
movement lulled me into a sort of hypnotic state, through which I
perceived the landscape rushing past; the shadows of clouds bowling
over the plain as though to race the car; the occasional dark patch
made by a grazing flock.  We were in Kurdistan.  Such peasants as we
met wore long blue coats with a broad, twisted sash; high, brimless
hats of felt, their black hair curling out from underneath, in the
medival fashion; their legs were bound in rags; they carried staves
and drove animals before them.  From their ragged, medival appearance
they might have been stragglers from some routed army.  They travelled
on foot, on horseback, or in waggons; hooded waggons, going at a foot's
pace, drawn by four little horses abreast; long strings of waggons,
trailing along, heaped with rugs and household goods; a wretched,
starved-looking procession.  If the distances seemed great to us,
sweeping along in a powerful motor, what must they have seemed to that
crawling string, whose day's journey meant no change of scene, no
appreciable lessening of the stretch between mountain-range and range?

[Illustration: INTO PERSIA.]

We stopped to eat, that first day, by a brawling river at the foot of
our first mountain-pass; then left the plain and climbed, round dizzy
precipitous corners, squeezing past waggons and camels--for there is
always more traffic on a pass than elsewhere: the horses cannot drag
their loads, and have to be unharnessed and reharnessed as
trace-horses, and started off again, scrambling and slipping on the
stony surface.  We met little donkeys, coming down, stepping
delicately, and camels, swaying down on their soft padded feet.
Looking up, we could see the whole road of the pass zigzagging up the
cliff-side, populous with animals and shouting, thrashing men.  Looking
back, as we climbed, we could see the immense prospect of the plain
stretching away behind us.  A savage, desolating country! but one that
filled me with extraordinary elation.  I had never seen anything that
pleased me so well as these Persian uplands, with their enormous views,
clear light, and rocky grandeur.  This was, in detail, in actuality,
the region labelled "Persia" on the maps.  Let me be aware, I said; let
me savour every mile of the way.  But there were too many miles, and
although I gazed, sitting in the front seat, the warm body of the dog
pressed against me, the pungent smell of the sheepskin in my nostrils,
it is only the general horizon that I remember, and not every unfolding
of the way.  This question of horizon, however; how important it is;
how it alters the shape of the mind; how it expresses, essentially,
one's ultimate sense of country!  That is what can never be told in
words: the exact size, proportion, contour; the new standard to which
the mind must adjust itself.

After the top of the pass I expected to drop down again, to come down
on the other side; the experience of remaining up, once one has
climbed, had not yet become familiar to me.  I was not yet accustomed
to motoring along a level road, in the close company of mountain tops.
But these were the high levels of Asia.  All day we continued, until
darkness fell, and the shapes of hills became like the shapes of
crouching beasts, uncertain, disquieting.  This country, which all the
day had been flooded with light, and which now and then had softened
from its austerity into the gentler swell of hills like English downs,
rounded, and bathed in light like the pink light of sunset--even at
midday--now reverted to its pristine secrecy; the secrecy of days when
no traveller passed that way, but only the nomad Kurds driving their
flocks to other pastures; the secrecy of darker days, when the armies
of Alexander and Darius, making for Ecbatana, penetrated the unmapped,
tumbled region, seizing a peasant to act as guide; captain and emperor
surveying from a summit the unknown distances.  The moon came up from
behind a hill; the full moon, whose birth I had seen netted in the
rigging, in an opalescent dawn on the Indian Ocean.  I watched, turning
to human things, the blunt, young profile of the chauffeur under his
peaked cap.  I talked to him, as the air freshened and the moon
climbed, and Zurcha settled closer into my arms with a contented sigh,
as though I had not plucked her out of the Arabian desert, away from
the life of tents and the weary sleep beside the camels' packs.  He
drove, his eyes on the road whitened by the stream of the headlights,
and as he drove he talked, with a soft Scotch accent among the Persian
hills.  He was on the desert service usually, he said, Beyrout to
Bagdad; that meant thirty-six hours' continuous driving, with an hour's
stop for dinner, rough going part of the way, no regular track, and
plenty of rocks and gullies to look out for; smooth going part of the
way, as smooth as a hard tennis court, and that meant seventy miles an
hour for a matter of two hundred miles; this route he travelled
sometimes twice a week, if drivers were short; arrived in Bagdad, he
might be told to turn his car round and drive straight back.  Well, he
said, with a grin, we do sometimes drop asleep at the wheel.  But he
did not much mind, he said--one got used to it--for the pay was good,
and his wife was in Beyrout.  Little by little his story came out.  The
son of a Scotch crofter, he had gone to Russia fourteen years ago, to
work on the railways; had been caught there by the war; enlisted in the
Russian army; did not like it; deserted; came to England, enlisted
afresh, went to France a week later, tried to return to Russia after
the war, but so far had not succeeded in getting farther than Syria or
Persia.  He had married, but his wife went mad in Bagdad, and he had
been obliged to drive her across the desert to put her into a mad-house
in Beyrout.  Such was the life-history which, without the air of
thinking it in the least unusual, he unfolded to me.  I had already
heard him speak Russian and Persian with equal fluency--but our
conversation was interrupted, for a wild, coloured figure on horseback
came at full gallop into the glare of our headlights.

True to his word, the driver trod on the accelerator and the motor
leaped at the horseman.  I thought we must go straight into him, in
which case he would have got the worst of it, for the car was a heavy
one, and the pony he rode was a lean, rough animal like a Cossack pony,
which must certainly have gone rolling with its rider into the ditch.
Unfortunately we missed him; or, rather, with miraculous skill he
swerved his pony, clearing the mud-guard by a couple of inches, and we
heard the hooves go clattering down the road.  The driver looked at me
and grinned.  "That's their trick," he said.  "They come at you, and
most people pull up.  If I'd pulled up there would have been four or
five of them round us in a minute.  This is the worst part of the
road."  We drove on.  Already, in passing through a village, a Kurd had
sprung out and struck at the motor with a knobbed stick, and we had had
one or two little indications of anxiety: at the toll-gates we were
stopped, and escorts were offered, for telephone messages had come
through from Kermanshah asking for news of our passage--it was strange
to be greeted with telephone messages on that wild and lonely road; but
we could not be bothered with an escort, and preferred to take our
chance unhindered.  I was glad we had refused those escorts, for I
would not for the world have missed the brief encounter with that
marauding apparition.  I had felt, in seeing him, as one might feel who
sees a wild animal suddenly revealed in the jungle.  I was almost sorry
when we saw ahead of us the lights of Kermanshah.


II

Next day we reached the snow.  The first part of the way took us over
plains again; the landscape altered a little, became more typically
Persian: snow mountains in the distance, on the rim of the plain, blue
and white; foothills nearer at hand, like north-country fells, tawny in
the curious, intense light, tawny through every shade of brown, from
yellow through ochre to burnt umber.  This colour of the hills cannot
be exaggerated; in variety, richness, and unexpectedness I had never
seen anything to equal it.  The rockier portions looked painted,
artificial; patches of blue-green rock appeared, looking as though they
had been sprayed with copper sulphate--copper overgrown with verdigris;
rocks of pale malachite; then a ridge of blood-red rock; rocks of
porphyry.  The typical caravanserais began: square enclosures of dried
mud, a courtyard in the middle, where the camels might spend the night;
little domes of mud over the gateway.  These occurred, or the ruins of
them, every twenty miles or so, twenty miles being a day's march for a
camel.  The huts began, so-called tea-houses; mud huts, where the brass
samovar boils all day, and tea may be drunk in glasses; huts which may
be put to a more urgent use, as shelters, night after night, when the
roads are blocked, and the traveller claims the hospitality of a mud
shelf on which to spread his sheepskin, and lies there, his eyes
smarting from the charcoal smoke, his drowsy gaze wandering over the
group of men round the brazier, when the wind howls outside, and
benighted peasants come in, stamping the snow from their shoes and
rubbing their chilled fingers above the embers.  As we reached the foot
of the pass, and saw the road beginning to rise until it lost itself
among the peaks of the summit, we could not help wondering whether we
should be compelled to seek refuge in such a hut; already our ideas had
begun to accommodate themselves to the emergencies of Persian travel;
we had wooden shovels ominously strapped to the back of the car; we had
overheard discussions as to the state of the road: a car had come
through yesterday, much delayed, but between yesterday and to-day
conditions might have changed; a fresh fall up there, on the top, might
have blocked the road, and indeed we had met no car to-day coming in
the opposite direction, from Assadabad; so we speculated, not without
apprehension, but we could not linger at the foot of the pass, and
started on the upward climb, the road growing steeper, the corners
sharper, until the snow began, and the wheels skidded in the mud.  We
rose higher and higher; the snow was everywhere now, only the black,
muddy road gashed it, fields of white snow, and the black road climbing
in hairpin bends, littered with waggons, the flanks of the horses
steaming on the air.  Now the snow rose in ramparts; the road was
simply a lane cut between ramparts of snow, twenty feet high, towering
above the motor.  Gangs of men were at work, clearing the snow; with
black spectacles over their eyes, and mufflers over their mouths, they
wielded their great wooden shovels; their coloured rags, and those
primitive tools, whose long handles projected in black lines across the
snow, gave them the aspect of the armed peasants of the French
Revolution.  Three thousand men, we were told, were at work, keeping
the road open to let the grain lorries through, to save Teheran from
famine.  We crept upward, between the snow walls, and the cold
increased, until we topped the summit at ten thousand feet.  Here, snow
lay all around us, and ahead of us lay a great white plain; only behind
us, looking back over the way we had come, we looked down on to the
brown plain, crossed by the ribbon of road, so that we might have been
looking down on summer out of the depth of winter.  Again that new
sensation of staying up; for we dropped very little, and reached
Hamadan to find the poplars rooted in snow, and tales of wolves current
in the town.

[Illustration: THE ASSADABAD PASS.]



III

This was Ecbatana, and in the path of Alexander and Darius we pursued
the way.  Then I remember a monotony of white plains, and another
pass,--the Aveh,--less dramatic, but more unpleasant, for a bitter wind
howled across it; and then the climate softened imperceptibly as we
came down, and the earth appeared again, though still streaked with
snow, and through groves of pistachio trees the road led us into
Kasvin.  Muddy, tired, and impatient, we were of course held up at the
gate.  These little ceremonies at the gates of cities always amused me;
names must be given, papers produced, and particulars copied down with
the stump of a pencil into a greasy and undecipherable notebook.  Then
you may go forward.  This evidence of municipal care contrasts so oddly
with the complete indifference to your fate once you have passed out
into the country, where you may be robbed, murdered, or drowned for all
that any one cares.  Then on the fourth day we entered on the last lap
of that journey.  We were done with the snow, for which I was thankful,
for the white blanket obscured the beautiful colours of the country,
and hid its shapes under the soft, cotton-wool depths that were broken
not even by the tracks of an animal; but here from the plain of Kasvin
the foothills rose bare again, and only the tops of the Elburz and of
the distant mountains were ridged with snow.  The road ran perfectly
straight over the plain for a hundred miles; and because it was the
highway between Teheran and Kasvin, a stream of animals and vehicles
flowed along it, dejected, dilapidated, with merchandise for the
capital; droves of donkeys, huge caravans of camels,--which at evening
turned into the caravanserais, loose, swaying heads and a forest of
legs, knobbly, with great knees, all turning vaguely in the same
direction, lounging in through the gateway, a forest of camels, taller
than the motor, their ugly pendulous mouths swaying above us;--carts
drawn by men, two in front and two behind, simply beasts of burden, who
sweated and crawled onwards, not making two miles in an hour, men so
low and bestial that it seemed they had not the imagination to compel
an animal to serve them, but accepted their lot as slaves, plying on
the Kasvin road with carts too heavy, until the strength was worn out
of them.  All these signs indicated that we were in the
neighbourhood--as neighbourhoods go in these parts--of a town; the
centre which we had travelled so many days to reach.  But there were no
other signs; none of those straggling outposts that begin long before
the town is reached, in Europe; no detached houses, or other roads
converging; only the one road, drawn like a line across the plain, with
the men and beasts going along it.  Vultures flapped away, rising from
their horrid meal by the roadside, where a mule or a camel had fallen;
thus the desert encroached, even up to the walls of the city.  The city
itself was not visible, though we knew we could not be more than twenty
miles distant, once we had come round the elbow of the hills at Karedj,
and saw Demavend before us, the smooth white mountain, the beacon,
soaring into the sky.  Teheran must lie there, somewhere, in the dip.
To the right glimmered a golden dome, far away; the mosque of Shah
Abdul Azim, said some one, and little heaps of stones appeared like
mole-heaps by the road, for in Persia, where you first catch sight of
your place of pilgrimage, you must raise a heap of stones to the
fulfilment of your vow.  I felt inclined to add my heap to the others,
for it seemed to me incredible that I should at last be within walking
distance of Teheran.  But where was that city?  A patch of green trees
away to the left, a faint haze of blue smoke; otherwise nothing, only
the open country, the mountains, the desert, and little streams in
flood pouring at intervals across the road.  It all seemed as forlorn
and uninhabited as the loneliest stretches of Kurdistan.  Yet there
stood a gate, suddenly, barring the way; a gate of coloured tiles, a
wide ditch, and a mud rampart, and a sentry stopping us, notebook in
hand.  Persian towns do surely spring upon one unawares, rising in
their compact, walled circle out of the desert.  But this, no doubt
about it, was Teheran.

[Illustration: THE KASVIN ROAD.]

[Illustration: THE KASVIN GATE, TEHERAN.]




CHAPTER V

ROUND TEHERAN


I

This country through which I have been hurled for four days has become
stationary at last; instead of rushing past me, it has slowed down and
finally stopped; the hills stand still, they allow me to observe them;
I no longer catch but a passing glimpse of them in a certain light, but
may watch their changes during any hour of the day; I may walk over
them and see their stones lying quiet, may become acquainted with the
small life of their insects and lichens; I am no longer a traveller,
but an inhabitant.  I have my own house, dogs, and servants; my luggage
has at last been unpacked.  The ice-box is in the kitchen, the
gramophone on the table, and my books are on the shelves.  It is
spring; long avenues of judas trees have come into flower along the
roads, the valleys are full of peach-blossom, the snow is beginning to
melt on the Elburz.  The air, at this altitude of nearly four thousand
feet, is as pure as the note of a violin.  There is everywhere a sense
of openness and of being at a great height; that sense of grime and
over-population, never wholly absent in European countries, is wholly
absent here; it is like being lifted up and set above the world on a
great, wide roof--the plateau of Iran.

Teheran itself, except for the bazaars, lacks charm; it is a squalid
city of bad roads, rubbish-heaps, and pariah dogs; crazy little
victorias with wretched horses; a few pretentious buildings, and mean
houses on the verge of collapse.  But the moment you get outside the
city everything changes.  For one thing, the city remains definitely
contained within its mud rampart, there are no straggling suburbs, the
town is the town and the country is the country, sharply divided.  For
another thing, the city is so low that at a little distance it is
scarcely visible; it appears as a large patch of greenery, threaded
with blue smoke.  I call it a city, but it is more like an enormous
village.  The legend here is, that a certain speculator went to the
Shah and said, "King of Kings, if I build you a rampart round your
city, will you give me all the land within the rampart that is not yet
built over?" and the Shah, thinking the man a fool, agreed.  But the
man was not a fool, and he built the rampart in so wide a circle that
the city has not yet grown out to its walls.

[Illustration: A CITY GATE, TEHERAN.]

You cannot enter or leave Teheran except by a gate, which is named
according to the direction of the road that leads away from it: the
Meshed Gate, the Kasvin Gate, the Isfahan Gate, and so on.  They are
picturesque, coloured structures, faced with tiles--blue tiles, or
black and yellow tiles--but dilapidated of course, like everything
else.  If you sit by the gate you will see the life of the city
streaming disconnectedly in and out of it: a string of camels, a drove
of donkeys; some pedestrians; some veiled women; a car or two; some
bicyclists--for every one in Persia rides a bicycle, and falls off it
the moment he sees another vehicle approaching.  It is quite
instructive to sit by the gate for a couple of hours.  You get a very
good impression of the farmyard life of eastern countries, man so
indissolubly jumbled up with his animals, especially here in Persia
(even more so, if that were possible, than in Egypt or in India), here
in Persia, where motor transport is new, and railways nil, and where
everything must be done on the back of pack animals.  The camels arrive
with boxes and bales from Bagdad, having been six or eight or ten weeks
on the way; they arrive with petrol from the south, and very odd it is
to see the English words on the crates: HIGHLY INFLAMMABLE; then the
donkeys come in, tiny grey donkeys, almost invisible, but for four poor
little legs, under an enormous load of camel-thorn for fuel; then comes
a flock of sheep, brown and black, their hard little hooves pattering
just like rain over the gravel; then a gaggle of geese, driven by a
child; then a man carrying two chickens.  It is most remarkable, the
extent to which the Persians carry chickens.  Why they should walk
about carrying them, in the way they do, is a mystery I never could
fathom.  They walk down the street, a chicken tucked under each arm, as
a child might affectionately carry puppies.  The fowls, too, display a
special mentality in this country, for at any street corner you may see
a man squatting beside a brass tray, on which sit two or more hens
beside a couple of dozen eggs in a contented fashion quite unknown to
the hen in England.  Even the most crowded corner of the bazaar does
not disturb them.  It is equally likely that on the tray, instead of
the hens, you will see a brood of young partridges, showing no more
than the hens a disposition to stray.  Heaven knows that no love of
animals prompts this close and continuous relationship; Persia is no
place for a lover of animals.  Indeed, I would rather witness a
bull-fight than some of the scenes I have been treated to in this
country.  To the skeletons one very rapidly grows accustomed; that is
nothing; a skeleton is a clean thing.  Even to the more recently dead
one grows accustomed: to the mule or camel fallen by the wayside, still
a recognisable object, with hairy coat and glazed eyes, the dogs from
the nearest village gorging themselves on its entrails while the
vultures hover, waiting for a nastier meal; this, after the first day
or two (and it is surprising how quickly the sensibility coarsens), is
nothing: one is only glad that the beast should be at last dead,
insentient.  It is the living that stir one's horror, one's
indignation, and one's pity.  The white horse limping along an endless
road; the team that cannot drag the waggon up the hill, piteously
willing but underfed, overloaded, straining, stumbling, sweating, with
wrung withers and gangrened hocks; the donkey dying under its load by
the roadside, still struggling to rise and carry on a mile or two
farther; why should they serve men as they do serve them, anxious,
faithful, wistful?  I remember things that I cannot bring myself to
write.  It is not that these people are cruel, but that they are
ignorant; this I do believe, for the Persians are gentle by
inclination, fond of children, and easily moved to laughter in a simple
way.  But they seem to be ignorant of suffering; which is as much as to
say, they are childish, they are untaught.  It is no uncommon sight to
see a man lying on the pavement, vomiting blood or dying of starvation,
while all pass him by; yet they are open-handed to their beggars, so
long as a man has the strength in him to remain upright and to stretch
out his palm.  It is simply ignorance and lack of imagination, but the
result is the same, and whoever is inclined to grumble against his lot,
would do well to remember that he was not born a beast of burden in
Persia.  It is particularly unfortunate that this country should be so
dependent on its beasts, with its vast distances and its lack of
transport.  It is a country of contradictions; there is nothing to
bridge the gulf between the dark ages and the twentieth century; thus,
although the postal system between province and province is ramshackle,
unreliable, and dilatory in the extreme, you may hear Big Ben striking
on the wireless in Teheran--with such discrepancy in time that although
black night covers Persia, London still basks in a June evening;--news
comes to us no later than it flickers round the electric sign in
Trafalgar Square; thus, again, though it will take a camel thirty days'
good going to carry your merchandise from Teheran to Meshed, you may
yourself fly the distance in six hours; it is a country of extremes,
one of the few countries where the intervening, that is to say the
nineteenth century, conveniences of civilisation will perhaps never be
known.  Such strange things happen in these forgotten regions of the
world.  As a consequence, all questions of transport furnish an endless
topic of conversation.  Whether so-and-so will arrive, or some one else
be able to leave; whether he is to be expected on the Wednesday or the
Thursday; whether the post will come to-night or not until to-morrow
morning, or, indeed, be delayed for a week--all these speculations form
an integral part of life.  Are the floods over the Kasvin road?  Has
the bridge been swept away again between here and Kum?  Then some one
comes into the town with news of the road, and the information is
passed round by word of mouth to all whom it may concern; and, more or
less, and for one reason or another, it concerns everybody.  So you get
the curious spectacle of silk-hatted gentlemen and upholstered ladies
engaged in the discussion of these truly medival difficulties.  "He is
stuck in the mud in the desert," you hear; "they sent out an aeroplane
for him, but that has stuck too."  The modern and the medival jostle
in the same phrase.  It is all taken quite as a matter of course.

So we are at the mercy of snow and flood, and also at the mercy of limp
Oriental methods; three cases of wine, despatched from England in
October, have not reached Teheran in May.  True, they were heard of two
months ago, about two hundred miles up the road, but where are they
now?  Nobody knows.  No doubt the camels came on a patch of green, and
have been turned out to graze.  All that we know for certain is that
they were once "seen passing through Hamadan"; the rest is silence.
Beyond looking with interest at every camel I meet lurching along the
street, and trying to read the address upside down on the crate he
bears, I accept this silence with philosophy and drink the
amber-coloured wine of Shiraz instead.  The post at least arrives with
fortnightly regularity, corded on to the splashboards of a muddy motor,
an Indian soldier on the box; the headlights stream suddenly down the
road, lighting the white trunks of the plane trees, and then there is a
scramble to sort the letters as some one empties the bags out on to the
table, and every one carries off his budget greedily and jealously,
much as a squirrel carries off a nut to his drey.  It is almost as
hard, in Persia, to believe in the existence of England, as it is, in
England, to believe in the existence of Persia; and to piece together,
from various letters, what has really been happening to our friends, is
like playing a game, or fitting a puzzle: very neat and fascinating,
but hard to conceive of as related to any real life.  And yet it has
its value, for it cuts a new facet on the gem of friendship; to keep in
touch with our friends by means of letters only, shows them to us under
a new aspect; they are detached, divorced from the apparatus of
personality; appearance, voice, gestures are no longer there to mislead
and confuse; what we get is an essence, incomplete certainly, and
fragmentary, but pure so far as it goes.  Then letters become really an
enchanting game; we are compelled to contribute all the resources of
our imagination; then we find little scraps put away in our memory,
little puzzling scraps, that now fall into place, and we enjoy a
triumph that at so remote a distance we should yet have made so
illuminating a discovery.  We shall go back to our friends treading on
firmer ground; not, as might be expected, with a gulf between their
life and ours.

But this is the exile's pleasure, and it is not to be hoped that those
friends in England, with their full life, should have the time to idle
over us as we do over them.  Yet this, too, may be turned into a
satisfaction, for it puts us into the superior position of having found
out a number of things while remaining ourselves undiscovered.  Sitting
on a rock, with the yellow tulips blowing all about me, and a little
herd of gazelle moving down in the plain, I dwell with a new intensity
on my friends.  I know quite well that they are not thinking of me.
But they have become my prey, and they are not there to correct or to
contradict.  It might well be a little alarming for them, this solitary
dissection; much more alarming than gregarious gossip, which is bad
enough, and makes most people nervous; but fortunately they know
nothing about it, so I have the laugh over them.  I hold them here,
quite tiny, but bright and sharp, in the merciless space of Persia.
All old habits of mind have left me, so that it is possible to approach
the old ideas with a new eye.  The heart is renewed, and winds have
blown away the cobwebs.

I had, however, strolled as far as the gate, with no intention of
speaking of any of these things, but the amplitude and leisure of the
place lead me into discursiveness; there is no hurry, and very little
to do except sit and stare.  I do not think it a waste of time to
absorb in idleness the austere splendour of this place; also I am aware
that its colour stains me through and through.  Crudely speaking, the
plain is brown, the mountains blue or white, the foothills tawny or
purple; but what are those words?  Plain and hills are capable of a
hundred shades that with the changing light slip over the face of the
land and melt into a subtlety no words can reproduce.  The light here
is a living thing, as varied as the human temperament and as hard to
capture; now lowering, now gay, now sensuous, now tender; but whatever
the mood may be, it is superimposed on a basis always grand, always
austere, never sentimental.  The bones and architecture of the country
are there, whatever light and colour may sweep across them; a soft
thing passing over a hard thing, which is as it should be.  The quality
of the light suits this country of great distances.  Hills a hundred
miles away are clearly scored with the clefts of their valleys, so that
their remoteness is unbelievable; Demavend himself, seventy miles
distant, looks as though he overhung the town, and might at any moment
revive, to annihilate it, his dead volcanic fires.  The shapes and
promontories of the hills grow familiar: the spur which juts out into
the plain near Karedj, the claret-coloured spine of Rhey, the great
white backbone of the Elburz, beyond which lie the sub-tropical
provinces of the Caspian.  They stand with the hardness of an old
country; one does not feel that here once swayed the sea, not so very
long ago, geologically speaking; on the contrary, this plateau is among
the ancient places of the earth, and something of that extreme
antiquity has passed into its features, into the jagged profile of its
rocks, worn by the weather for untold centuries until it could wear
them no more--until it had reduced them to the first shape, and
whittled them down to a primal design beneath which it was powerless to
delve.  Age has left only the bones.

[Illustration: A GARDEN.]

Some complain that it is bleak; surely the rich and changing light
removes such a reproach.  The light, and the space, and the colour that
sweeps in waves, like a blush over a proud and sensitive face.
Besides, those who say that it is bleak have not looked, or, looking,
have not seen.  It is, rather, full of life; but that life is tiny,
delicate, and shy, escaping the broader glance.  Close and constant
observation is necessary, for the population changes from week to week,
almost from day to day; a shower of rain will bring out a crop of
miniature anemones, a day of hot sun will shrivel them; the tortoises
will wake with the warmth; the waste land stirs.  It is necessary to
look towards the distance, and then into the few square yards
immediately beneath the foot; to be at one and the same time
long-sighted and near-sighted.


II

Ever since I have been in Persia I have been looking for a garden and
have not yet found one.  Yet Persian gardens enjoy a great reputation.
Hafiz and Sa-adi sang frequently, even wearisomely, of roses.  Yet
there is no word for rose in the Persian language; the best they can
manage is 'red flower'.  It looks as though a misconception had arisen
somewhere.  Indeed I think the misconception is ours, sprung from that
national characteristic by which the English exact that everything
should be the same, even in Central Asia, as it is in England, and
grumble when it is not.  "Garden?" we say; and think of lawns and
herbaceous borders, which is manifestly absurd.  There is no turf in
this parched country; and as for herbaceous borders, they postulate a
lush shapeliness unimaginable to the Persian mind.  Here, everything is
dry and untidy, crumbling and decayed; a dusty poverty, exposed for
eight months of the year to a cruel sun.  For all that, there are
gardens in Persia.

But they are gardens of trees, not of flowers; green wildernesses.
Imagine that you have ridden in summer for four days across a plain;
that you have then come to a barrier of snow-mountains and ridden up
the pass; that from the top of the pass you have seen a second plain,
with a second barrier of mountains in the distance, a hundred miles
away; that you know that beyond these mountains lies yet another plain,
and another, and another; and that for days, even weeks, you must ride,
with no shade, and the sun overhead, and nothing but the bleached bones
of dead animals strewing the track.  Then when you come to trees and
running water, you will call it a garden.  It will not be flowers and
their garishness that your eyes crave for, but a green cavern full of
shadow, and pools where goldfish dart, and the sound of little streams.
That is the meaning of a garden in Persia, a country where the long
slow caravan is an everyday fact, and not a romantic name.

Such gardens there are; many of them abandoned, and these one may share
with the cricket and the tortoise, undisturbed through the hours of the
long afternoon.  In such a one I write.  It lies on a southward slope,
at the foot of the snowy Elburz, looking over the plain.  It is a
tangle of briars and grey sage, and here and there a judas tree in full
flower stains the whiteness of the tall planes with its incredible
magenta.  A cloud of pink, down in a dip, betrays the peach trees in
blossom.  Water flows everywhere, either in little wild runnels, or
guided into a straight channel paved with blue tiles, which pours down
the slope into a broken fountain between four cypresses.  There, too,
is the little pavilion, ruined, like everything else; the tiles of the
faade have fallen out and lie smashed upon the terrace; people have
built, but, seemingly, never repaired; they have built, and gone away,
leaving nature to turn their handiwork into this melancholy beauty.
Nor is it so sad as it might be, for in this spacious, ancient country
it is not of man that one thinks; he has made no impression on the
soil, even his villages of brown mud remain invisible until one comes
close up to them, and, once ruined, might have been ruined for five or
five hundred years, indifferently; no, one thinks only of the haven
that this tangled enclosure affords, after the great spaces.  One is no
longer that small insect creeping across the pitiless distances.

There is something satisfying in this contrast between the garden and
the enormous geographical simplicity that lies beyond.  The mud walls
that surround the garden are crumbling, and through the breaches
appears the great brown plain, crossed by the three pale roads: to the
east, the road to Meshed and Samarcand; to the west, the road to
Bagdad; to the south, the road to Isfahan.  The eye may travel, or,
alternately, return to dwell upon the little grape-hyacinth growing
close at hand.  These Asian plains are of exceeding beauty, but their
company is severe, and the mind turns gratefully for a change to
something of more manageable size.  The garden is a place of spiritual
reprieve, as well as a place of shadows.  The plains are lonely, the
garden is inhabited; not by men, but by birds and beasts and lowly
flowers; by hoopoes, crying "Who?  Who?" among the branches; by lizards
rustling like dry leaves; by the tiny sea-green iris.  A garden in
England seems an unnecessary luxury, where the whole countryside is so
circumscribed, easy and secure; but here, one begins to understand why
the garden drew such notes from Sa-adi and from Hafiz.  As a breeze at
evening after a hot day, as a well in the desert, so is the garden to
the Persian.

The sense of property, too, is blessedly absent; I suppose that this
garden has an owner somewhere, but I do not know who he is, nor can any
one tell me.  No one will come up and say that I am trespassing; I may
have the garden to myself; I may share it with a beggar; I may see a
shepherd drive in his brown and black flock, and, sitting down to watch
them browse, sing a snatch of the song that all Persians sing at the
turn of the year, for the first three weeks of spring.  All are equally
free to come and enjoy.  Indeed there is nothing to steal, except the
blossom from the peach trees, and no damage to do that has not already
been done by time and nature.  The same is true of the whole country.
There are no evidences of law anywhere, no sign-posts or milestones to
show the way; the caravanserais stand open for any one to go in and
rest his beasts; you may travel along any of those three roads for
hundreds of miles in any direction, without meeting any one or anything
to control you; even the rule of the road is nominal, and you pass by
as best you can.  If you prefer to leave the track and take to the
open, then you are free to do so.  One remembers--sometimes with
irritation, sometimes with longing, according to the fortunes of the
journey--the close organisation of European countries.

The shadows lengthen, and the intense light of sunset begins to spread
over the plain.  The brown earth darkens to the rich velvet of burnt
umber.  The light creeps like a tide up the foothills, staining the red
rock to the colour of porphyry.  High up, above the range of the
Elburz, towers the white cone of Demavend, white no longer now, but
glowing like a coal; that white loneliness, for ten minutes of every
day, suddenly comes to life.  It is time to leave the garden, where the
little owls are beginning to hoot, answering one another, and to go
down into the plain, where the blue smoke of the evening fires is
already rising, and a single star hangs prophetic in the west.


III

There is another forsaken palace, of very different aspect, which I
frequent.  It is on a high, sudden hill, starting up out of the plain;
a small hill, whose summit is entirely occupied by those dilapidated
buildings, looking from a distance like a tiny Carcassonne.  This is
Doshan Tapeh--the hill of the hare.  It is of the colour of hares, too;
rocks pale buff, plaster pale buff, turning pink at sunset.  There is
no seclusion here; the palace, certainly, has its garden, but it lies
at the foot of the hill, quite separate; a walled-in square,
symmetrically planted with trees, where Nasr-ed-Din Shah kept his wild
animals; but the palace itself, or, rather, the ruins of it, craggy on
its eminence, stands as bare and exposed as the rocks of the
surrounding mountains.  The views from its broken arcades are
magnificent.  As the backbone of the north stretches the whole range of
the Elburz; to the south-east the Djarjarud hills split dramatically
into what is known as the Meshed gap, where the great road crosses on
its way to Meshed and Samarcand; to the south and west lies the open
plain, bounded only by the very distant mountains beyond Kasvin.  Down
in the plain lies Teheran, so low and mud-coloured as to be almost
invisible, but for the threads of smoke that give it the appearance of
some nomad encampment.  Never did any capital look less of a capital,
even of Persia, partly, I daresay, because it is dwarfed by the
immensity in which it lies; yet in fact it is a great rambling place,
with its bazaars that wander for miles, breaking now and then into open
lanes between mud-walls, but always creeping again beneath vaulted
tunnels, like an animal going into its burrow.

Doshan Tapeh still keeps traces of its former splendours.  It must have
been a gay, coquettish little pavilion, with its bright tiles, columns
and arcades, and two terraces, all so airy and high up, the sky and
mountains so wide around it.  But the ceilings of the poor rooms are
all fallen in, and lie in dusty heaps of plaster and tiles on the
floor.  It is the same story everywhere.

[Illustration: THE ELBURZ FROM DOSHAN TAPEH.]

A track leads up to the pavilion, so steep, and crooked with so sharp a
bend that surely no carriage can ever have climbed it.  Nasr-ed-Din,
when he came here, as he often did, for it was his favourite
hunting-box, must have ridden, those famous black moustachios of his
waving at the head of the cavalcade.  Now, the hillside is full of sage
and the wild lavender with the big pink flower.  I have never yet seen
a hare there, though I found a porcupine not so very far off, on the
hills behind the tiny Kasr-i-Firouze, where the wild tulips grow, the
white ones that are so sweet-scented, and the yellow ones that have no
scent at all, but are of a beautiful pure buttercup yellow and of an
exquisite clear shape, like a pointed goblet designed by some early
draughtsman with a right instinct for line.  These wild tulips are very
capricious; you may walk for miles without coming upon a trace of them,
then suddenly a whole hillside is sprinkled with them, bending and
glistening in the sun and the fresh breeze.  Nothing more lovely than
the natural rock-gardens on these hills, though, to tell the truth, the
flowers are disappointing in their limited variety.  They make it up,
however, in other ways, not least by the genius they display in showing
themselves off.  When they do this in the obvious way, by coming out
into the open and blowing among the stones on narrow ledges, they are
charming enough; but when they do it paradoxically, by concealing
themselves in a crevice or under a jutting rock, then they are truly
enticing and irresistible.  One soon gets to know their habits, like
the idiosyncrasies of friends; I know that down in the desert I shall
find the tiny poppies, red and purple, and the tiny scarlet
ranunculus--perhaps, if they were transferred to a more kindly soil,
they might grow larger; but when I start to climb I shall come upon the
tulips, who like a slope or even a cliff--how rightly! for the sloping
ground shows off their straightness better, by contrast, than would the
level.  The first comer is the native _Iris persica_, which grows
indifferently in high and low places, usually in couples, like
marriage, one greenish-white, and one bluish-white, a few yards apart,
though occasionally you will find a whole family of six or eight, and
sometimes a triangular arrangement of three.  The yellow squills are
everywhere, very strongly scented.  The shrubby things interest me
less, because I like my flowers small and delicate,--the taste of all
gardeners, as their discrimination increases, dwindles towards the
microscopic,--but the shrubs have their point too, for they are nearly
all pleasantly grey and aromatic.  There is one thorny shrub, smothered
in spring with pale pink or cherry-pink flowers, which I have not been
able to identify; some one told me it was called by the Persians the
snow-flower, but as he was wrong about everything else I suspect that
he was wrong about this also.  It is, at all events, a very pretty
thing, making a round bush like a bright pink sponge, about three feet
high; it grows in the stoniest ground, apparently independent of water.
I wish I were a botanist, instead of a mere dilettante; but do I wish
it really? for I am not sure that pure enjoyment does not wane as
technical knowledge waxes; I am tempted to put it to the test, by
studying botany till I can distinguish Scrophulariace from
Caryophyllace, but that I am too much afraid of finding, when I have
digested all this knowledge, that I have lost the delights of
ignorance.  Few delights bear the strain of investigation; they bruise,
as tender fruits after handling.  It is safer not to know too much.  I
could scarcely enjoy more than I do at present these random hunts after
the flowers of a Persian spring; it does not matter in the least if the
day reveals nothing new, for there is always hope round the corner or
over the brow of the hill; and the valley where I first found the wild
almond, a ravine driven straight into the heart of the mountains, all
blossom and tumbling water, was in itself a reward.  So one is drawn
onward, over miles of country as over reams of paper, and still there
is a hill to climb, and still a sentence to write, and no reason why
either should ever come to an end, so long as something remains to be
discovered beyond.  I scarcely know how I have strayed so far from
Doshan Tapeh, with Nasr-ed-Din riding up the track, and where now only
the innermost room of his palace remains more or less intact, the empty
windows gaping towards the northern mountains, and illustrations from
the _Illustrated London News_ of 1860 papering the walls.


IV

It would seem, however, that Persia is a country made for wandering
onward; there is so much room, and no boundaries anywhere, and time is
marked only by the sun.  Nor is it only in the open country that one
wanders, but in the bazaars too, where the Europeans never go, and of
which they speak with a surprised contempt.  The Europeans like to
pretend that they are living in Europe; each European house is a little
resolute camp, and any coming and going between house and house is done
with closed eyes.  If Persia has to be referred to, it is in a tone of
grievance, as though the speaker were a martyr condemned for his sins
to endure a term of punishment.  There are exceptions, but that is the
general rule.  No doubt there is much that is irritating in Persia; it
is irritating not to be able to get a broken blind repaired, or to buy
a piece of glass without a bubble in it; irritating to be so much at
the mercy of nature in the shape of snow, flood, and mud, impeding our
journeys, delaying our posts, and generally interrupting our
communications; irritating to see the universal wastage and decay;
irritating to hear of corruption and peculation with the elaborate and
wearisome system that they involve; but Asia is not Europe, and all
countries bestow different gifts.  Resignation is essential here, if
one does not wish to live in a condition of perpetual fury.  Then,
having emptied the mind of European preconceptions, one is at liberty
to turn round and absorb an entirely new set of conditions.

But in the meantime the Europeans go on with their tea-parties, and
their leaving of cards, and their speculations as to why some one was
not to be seen, yesterday, at some one else's house.  How wonderful and
perplexing is this system of social intercourse!  These people are not
friends; they do not, they cannot, enjoy one another's society; there
is no intimacy, no truth between them; moreover, no external power
condemns them to this treadmill, why then in the name of human liberty
do they remain stepping on it until they step themselves off into their
graves?  The problem is beyond me; I give it up, and stand aside to
marvel.  For, personally, I prefer the bazaars to the drawing-rooms;
not that I cherish any idea that I am seeing "the life of the people";
no foreigner can ever do that, although some talk a great deal of
nonsense about it; but I like to look.  It is a harmless taste, and
disturbs nobody except myself.  Nobody takes any notice of one in the
bazaars; certainly far less notice than we should take of a dervish
were he to walk down Piccadilly.  Even the shopkeepers show no anxiety
to sell their wares; one may pause and turn over a bundle of silks, or
point, admire, and discuss, without hearing the "Buy! buy!" that
assails one in Cairo or Constantinople.  Whether this proceeds from the
natural apathy of the Persians, or from the fact that they so rarely
see tourists, and have not yet learnt about the resources of the
tourist's pocket, I do not know.  In Cairo the rival merchants tug at
one's sleeve: "This is the best shop," they say; "he no good, next
door."  But the Persians only watch one from under sleepy lids.

The bazaars are vaulted, shadowy, and lit by shafts of sunlight into a
Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro.  They ramble literally for miles.  They are
lined with little shops, less shops than stalls.  It is impossible to
say that one shop is larger than another, though it is possible to say
that some are smaller than others.  These, the smaller ones, are no
bigger than cupboards, mere recesses in the wall; in them squat vendors
of shoes--white canvas shoes, with blue rag soles--or old-clothes
merchants; henna-dyed beards and green turbans among the coloured
assortment of rags and tatters.  There are the shops hung with harness:
tassels, striped nose-bags, bells, scarlet reins with big blue woollen
blobs, red saddles.  Then there are bazaars devoted to one industry:
the leather-workers' street, which is very quiet, industrious, and rich
in tone; the coppersmiths' street, filled with the sound as of an army
beating on gongs, and resplendent with huge copper trays hanging like
shields on the wall, and shelves of silver ewers of the lovely
traditional shape seen in sixteenth-century miniatures.  Very robust
and masculine, the red copper; very luminous and feminine the pale
silver, shaped like some elegant, paradisaical flower.

But best of all I like the dun-coloured shops where they sell grain, so
harmonious and sober in their tonality.  The brass scales gleam among
the pyramidal heaps of grain; brown, ochre, fawn, neutral, with twine
and sacking, and brown men scooping up the wheat in wooden measures.  I
cannot think of the east as gaudy, but always as brown: earth, and dark
skins, the colour of age.  How sombre, for instance, are the bazaars; a
string of camels passes, laden with bales, or a donkey carrying green
vegetables in panniers, a little oil-lamp alight on his back, making an
altar of his load, like the sacrifice of Abel.

[Illustration: THE ELBURZ FROM DOSHAN TAPEH.]

Darkness is the keynote of this vaulted warren, darkness cleft with
sudden beams.  The round holes in the roof correspond to the round
stains of sunlight on the floor.  And it is a darkness not only of
fact, but also of impression; a sense of obscure and pullulating life,
hurrying about unknown business.  Strange, harsh faces pass by; and
women secreted behind the eternal veil; women chaffering for bread; but
these people, all bent on some practical affair, have their life, their
beliefs, their creed, their fanaticism; the bazaar rumours originate
amongst them: men, smoking in cafs, talk politics, give credence to
extraordinary legends: the Russians have mislaid an army corps
somewhere on the frontiers of the Caucasus, the English have organised
a plot to assassinate the Shah; all this passes from mouth to mouth;
the Persians, who for the most part cannot read, are still great
story-tellers, and those stories which do or might affect current
events find most favour amongst them.  But one does not hear this going
on; one is oppressed only by the sense of dark life; then one imagines
these separate, hurrying people coagulated suddenly into a mob,
pressing forward with some ardent purpose uniting them, and the same
intent burning in all those dark eyes.

This is simply an effect of one's own strangeness; there is nothing
really sinister about these people.  But a life of which one knows
nothing, seeing only the surface, does suggest something cabalistic and
latent.  One is so ignorant oneself, where _they_ move with so close a
familiarity.  To us they are all anonymous, for one thing; but to one
another they are named, their fathers are known, they are interrelated;
that door in the wall admits you into the house of Hossein the leather
merchant, and in the next street lives his brother; their houses are
back to back, and in the evening their women meet to gossip on the flat
mud roofs.  (The story of David, Uriah, and Bathsheba gains in
verisimilitude.)  How curious a fact it is, that in a strange country,
and more especially in the east, one should be so much concerned with
the common people; at home one does not (except for more serious
purposes) speculate about the secrets of the slums; further, the
expressions that one picks first out of a strange language are apt to
be expressions of cab-drivers, porters, shopkeepers--as though an
Asiatic gentleman travelling in England should pride himself on
shouting "Piper!" like a newsboy.  Driving a car in the streets of
Teheran, I am more tempted to cry "_Havar dar!_" with the muleteers
than to use the horn.  From the same instinct springs that infuriating
habit of authors of sprinkling their pages with foreign words, usually
spelt wrong, or used in the wrong connection like _le footing, le
streughel-feur-lifeur_, or the English heroes and heroines of French
novels, Sir Coglowox, and lady Nonatten.  It must come from a sort of
snobbishness, a desire to associate oneself, to pretend initiation;
but, with literary if not poetic justice, brings its own punishment,
for the attempt invariably miscarries.  I have a suspicion that I am
myself falling into the same trap by this predilection for the bazaars,
and wonder whether I should not glance in surprise at a foreigner who
aired his enthusiasm for Smithfield market.  One has not even the
excuse of looking for works of art, for the shops are exceedingly
humble, devoted to the necessities of life; there is a pale-blue shop,
with silver trays hanging on the walls, and huge bowls of blue glaze,
containing 'mast,' a sort of curdled milk; a little boy in white stirs
the 'mast' with a long spoon; the whole interior is so pale and cool,
that to look into it from the dark bazaar is like looking into the
milky window of an aquarium.  The bread shops are not recessed, but are
simply a section of wall, stepped, and on the steps descend the brown
blankets of bread, exactly like a drugget laid down a staircase; you
buy the bread by weight, and carry it away thrown over your arm like a
travelling-rug.

Then the bazaars are full of surprises; in one place it is a sword
stuck up to the hilt into the wall, Rustem's sword, they say, Rustem
being their favourite heroic character; and in another place it is an
open courtyard, shaded by large trees, where one can buy all kinds of
junk, laid out in little chess-board squares on the ground, for a few
farthings, every kind of thing from old sardine-tins to silver kettles
pawned by Russian refugees.  Nothing more tragic than this evidence of
the Russian catastrophe; here is an old gramophone record, and here a
pair of high button boots, very small in the foot, with a pair of
skates screwed on; they speak, not only of present-day personal misery,
but of a life once lived in gaiety; and all theoretical sympathy with
Lenin vanishes at the sight of this human, personal sacrifice made on
the altar of a compulsory brotherhood.  Russia seems very near.
Indeed, in Asia the different countries do seem nearer to one another,
more mingled, than do different countries in Europe, by some
contradiction, despite the enormous distances; here in Persia one
cannot lose sight of the fact that China, Russia, Turkestan, Arabia,
surround us, remote though they may be, and buried each in a separate
darkness; perhaps because vagrants from out of these neighbouring
regions find their way to the Persian bazaars, and wander with an air
of strangeness, in different clothes that proclaim the country of their
origin, an Arab in his burnous, a Russian in his belted shirt, a
Turcoman in his shaggy busby, unlike Europeans, who differ from one
another, if at all, only by their complexions.  In the open courtyard
of the bazaars, the green field as it is called, nationalities jostle,
poking amongst the junk-stalls for some scrap of treasure, a buckle, or
a collar-stud, while the vendors squat near at hand, with lack-lustre
eye, less concerned to sell than to see that nothing is stolen.

[Illustration: A STREET IN TEHERAN.]

Such a desultory life I lead, and the life of England falls away, or
remains only as an image seen in an enchanted mirror, little separate
images over which I pore, learning more from them than ever I learnt
from the reality.  I lead, in fact, two lives; an unfair advantage.
This roof of the world, blowing with yellow tulips; these dark bazaars,
crawling with a mazy life; that tiny, far-off England; and what am I?
and where am I?  That is the problem: and where is my heart, home-sick
at one moment, excited beyond reason the next?  But at least I live, I
feel, I endure the agonies of constancy and inconstancy; it is better
to be alive and sentient, than dead and stagnant.  "Let us," I said, as
we emerged from the bazaars, "go to Isfahan."




CHAPTER VI

TO ISFAHAN


I

Kinglake, who was a good excitable traveller although his patches may
have been a trifle too purple (but that was the fashion of his day),
makes an excellent observation about eastern travel.  His route lay
then through mere Servia, but in the middle of the nineteenth century,
so that what he lost in geographical advantage was compensated by
historical difficulty of progress.  "The actual movement from one place
to another," he says, "in Europeanised countries is a process so
temporary--it occupies, I mean, so small a proportion of the
traveller's entire time, that his mind remains unsettled so long as the
wheels are going; he may be alive enough to external objects of
interest, and to the crowding ideas which are often invited by the
excitement of a changing scene, but he is still conscious of being in a
provisional state, and his mind is for ever recurring to the expected
end of his journey; his ordinary ways of thought have been interrupted,
and before any new mental habits can have been formed he is quietly
fixed in his hotel.  It will be otherwise with you when you journey in
the east.  Day after day, perhaps week after week, and month after
month, your foot is in the stirrup.  To taste the cold breath of the
earliest morn, and to lead or follow your bright cavalcade till sunset
through forests and mountain passes, through valleys and desolate
plains, all this becomes your MODE of LIFE, and you ride, eat, drink,
and curse the mosquitoes as systematically as your friends in England
eat, drink, sleep.  If you are wise you will not look upon the long
period of time thus occupied in actual movement as the mere gulf
dividing you from the end of your journey, but rather as one of those
rare and plastic seasons of your life from which, perhaps, in after
times, you may love to date the moulding of your character--that is,
your very identity.  Once feel this, and you will soon grow happy and
contented in your saddle home."  How right was Kinglake! as right as
when he speaks, in another place, of the "testing of the poet's words
by map and compass".  Not until I had experienced what he had
experienced, did I really appreciate his full meaning.  As to copy out
a passage, in one's own handwriting, in the slow and detailed process
of script, is to weigh the value of words and to extract (from what
might have seemed a cursory phrase) the heavier significance of a
careful, measured statement, so to adopt the MODE of LIFE is to enter
personally into the full significance of that life.  It is true that I
had not, as had Kinglake, to accommodate myself to the stirrup and the
"saddle-home," but only to the driving-seat of a Ford car; but even so
the familiarity of the method became a part of me, as surely as the
loading of his pack-horse became a part of Kinglake; by the end of the
first day it had become instinctive in me to glance over the side to
see whether the corded petrol-tins had slipped, or whether the canvas
bags that held our bedding still retained their slant along the
mud-guard; each object of necessity had its place: the enamel
washing-basin that was for ever getting mixed up, under my feet, with
the clutch-pedal and the brake, the big sheepskin that was now
ungratefully tossed into the back, now dragged forward as the wind
whistled over the draughty passes.  A remarkable amount of stuff can be
packed on to a motor if you know how to do it and don't mind about the
paint.  The example of the Persians teaches one this, for they treat a
motor exactly as though it were a pack-animal.  For generations they
have been accustomed to heap their camels and their donkeys with
various merchandise, desisting only when the animals' legs actually
begin to give way, and so with their new, swifter beast of burden they
desist from their loading only when the springs begin to grate and the
tyres to flatten.  You meet upon the road objects which the average
English chauffeur would scarcely recognise as motor-cars.  The poor
little Fords almost disappear under the huge bales that swell out over
the mud-guards; and then, as though that were not enough, eight or nine
men crowd on to the motor that was built for five; they perch on the
bales as sparrows on a hay-stack, squat in the hood, and are not above
sitting astride the bonnet.  Even then the pedestrian as they overtake
him will cheerfully hail the car and ask for a lift; and he, too,
hitches himself on somehow, and the unwieldy affair goes off again,
driven at its top speed always, regardless of bumps and ditches.  We
ourselves travelled after the Persian fashion, independent of food and
even, at a pinch, of lodging, with camp beds and blankets, food in
knapsacks, water-bottles packed into a green canvas bucket; and very
pleasant was the resulting sense of freedom, all the finicky clutter of
ordinary life and unnecessary possessions cleared away.  It was indeed
one of those "rare and plastic seasons," not to be measured in
time--for we were only four days and nights on the road--but by a
clearing of the spirit, an alteration of material values, a liberation.

[Illustration: CAMELS: ON THE ROAD TO ISFAHAN.]


II

We had intended to start three days earlier, but a fall of snow delayed
us.  Such a fall, we were assured, had never been known before in
April; and indeed the effect was very strange: irises, wistaria, lilac,
roses, in full flower, weighted down by the white load, one season
trespassing on another season, winter on spring.  The Elburz, whose
snows had been rapidly shrinking up towards the summit, appeared
suddenly white again one morning; Demavend, whose lower slopes had been
streaked with darker ground, again presented a smooth white surface.
Such snow meant floods, for it would melt as quickly as it had come.
Some people returning from Isfahan reported floods on the road; they
had been driving all night, and arrived at four in the morning,
drenched with blizzard, half dead with anxiety and fatigue; they
advised delay.  Such delays and modifications of plan, due to a sudden
anger of nature, were too common to be accepted with anything but
resignation: we waited two days, till the snow shrank again on the
hillside and the earth was brown.

[Illustration: ISFAHAN: THE HALL OF 40 COLUMNS.]

Leaving Teheran at dawn, through the streets still fresh from the
efforts of the water-men, who in their unscientific but efficacious way
fling the contents of jugs and pails (even of saucepans) across the
road, scooped out from the stream in the gutter, we came presently to
Kum, its great gold mosque gleaming brilliant above a field of young
wheat.  We had crossed nearly a hundred miles of strange, desolate
country.  Curious geological formations twisted the landscape into a
sort of dead-world scenery; so might appear regions of the moon, and
quite as lifeless, but for the blue jays and the blue-and-orange
bee-eaters, and an occasional brown vulture who spread his wings and
flapped away in that flight which is so ungainly near the ground, and
so noble when risen to the heights where he properly belongs.  We had
experienced that sensation so common in Persia, of topping a ridge of
hills and of looking down over a new stretch of country, not exactly a
plain in this instance, for it was always a plain broken by many
accidents; broken by those strange rocks which seemed to advance in
battalions, like the dreams of some mad painter, not beautiful, but
curious and freakish, and lending themselves to wild resemblances in
the imagination.  Now it seemed that a regiment of giant tortoises
advanced, evil under the cliff of their shells; now like murderous
engines of war a promontory of rocks threatened, frozen in their array;
now the monotonous brown was stained by a crimson cliff, and now by a
patch of sick-turquoise green, as though some sinister chemical had
been sprayed upon it.

[Illustration: THE ROAD TO ISFAHAN.]

Then we came beyond that region, and topped its further boundary, and
saw below us the salt lake, shimmering like an opal, milky and wide,
looking innocent of the many caravans swallowed by its quicksands.
There was scarcely a dwelling in all those miles, once we had passed
the oasis of Shah Abdul Azim and the swamps of Hassanabad, till we came
to Kum, where the wheat was springing, and the mosque rose out of the
wheat across the river; but we could not stop at Kum, and pressed
onward again, after filling our eyes with the beauty of the great gold
dome so rounded above the brown roofs and the green fertility of the
fields.  We pressed forward, and the landscape changed; we were on the
high plateaux now, and the hills were sharper; snow reappeared on their
peaks, and the deep blue shadows again carved their flanks.  Once more
we had climbed to the roof of Asia.  And now we were accompanied by a
familiar and yet an unfamiliar spectacle: the cone of Demavend which,
seen as a daily companion from Teheran, had taken his place merely as a
mountain among the other mountains, but which, seen now from a distance
of over a hundred miles, so overtopped his fellows that on discovering
him we stared incredulous.  There he was, so distant and so enormous;
so high, that at first we thought a cloud had aped his contours.  Then,
as the sun sank, we saw his base cut off by some effect of the light,
so that the cone alone remained, detached, smooth, and white, but
presently flushed to pink--a pink island floating in the blue.  We were
travelling away from him, but for a long time he remained, a red beacon
in the north, till darkness came, and he silently and mysteriously
disappeared.

Meanwhile we had had enough to look at in our immediate surroundings,
without turning our heads to watch Demavend like a red flamingo flying
across the sky, for the sunset on our high lonely plateau had excelled
itself in beauty.  Lonely, indeed, for we passed only a shepherd with
his flock, or a single horseman crossing the plain on his way to some
village on the hills.  But for these--who had been immemorially the
same--such sunsets as we now beheld had spilt themselves out unnoted
since first that very ancient portion of the earth hardened after the
primeval convulsions into its definite forms.  We were seizing only one
moment out of all that prodigality; yet dawn continues to break over
those Asian heights while England still lies in sleep, and sunset
stains those hills while England works in the full activity of
afternoon.  At three o'clock I may think of the hills turning red on
the east, and in the west deepening to blue under a yellow sky, in a
loneliness as great as that which reigned before the world was peopled.

[Illustration: DILIJAN: OUR HOST AND OUR LODGING.]

An hour after dark we came to Dilijan, which we had begun to think
existed on the map but not elsewhere, and, turning aside from the road,
made our way up narrow lanes between the mud walls to the house of the
village headman.  The moon was risen by now, casting deep shadows,
lighting up little courtyards through the black span of arches.  The
village was like a walled city of the Middle Ages, as labyrinthine, and
as secret.  A couple of men ran before us, showing the way, and stopped
us before an arched entrance; this was the headman's house, where we
should be given a room for the night.  The house, more or less
tumble-down, surrounded a courtyard after the manner of all Persian
houses; a lake of moonlight lay across the middle of the court, and in
a dark corner crouched the figures of women round an open brazier.  The
room we were given was plain and clean, whitewashed, with three arches
opening on to the court.  It contained no furniture, only rows of lamps
and teapots standing in the alcoves.  We sat in the arches, smoking,
content with silence, and feeling that a long journey in time as well
as in space separated us in this moonlight of a lost Persian village
from the dawn that had seen our departure from Teheran.  Journeys by
train give no intimacy with the country crossed, no such intimacy as
that which comes from following a road in all its miles, stopping now
as a patch of flowers by the wayside hails the attention, stopping
again to eat and drink under the shadow of a rock, sitting on the
ground and watching the vultures wheel or the insects run, startling a
hare from its form, becoming for a moment identified with a spot remote
and unfrequented, which has a life of its own, and which in all
probability one will never see again.


III

Next morning the lakes and shadows of moonlight had gone, but lakes and
shadows of sunlight, more brilliant and no less deep, had taken their
place.  The women were busy spinning in the courtyard.  Skeins of
scarlet and yellow wool hung in the arches; and with scarlet
handkerchiefs tied round their heads the women squatted on the step,
the spindles twirling beneath their practised hands.  I photographed
them, and they besieged me, asking to see the result, but I had to
explain that they must wait at least three weeks before the post-cart
would bring the pictures.  They seemed disappointed, and none too
confident that the promised photographs would ever arrive; but whether
it was me, or, with better reason, the post-cart that they mistrusted,
I do not know.

We wandered out, along the twisting lanes of the village between the
high brown walls, and coming round a corner found ourselves suddenly on
the plain.  From here the village looked more like a walled city than
ever, with its gate cut darkly in the wall, and several little towers
like barbicans, and the absence of windows or other openings, giving
the impression of a fortified place.  All was brown and blue; brown
plain, brown village, blue sky, and in the distance blue hills faintly
streaked with snow.  But it was not deserted, for under the wall walked
a file of young women, six or eight of them, a few yards apart, each
with a distaff in her hand, up and down a long trail of wool between
wooden pegs on the ground; and each as she went added the strand from
her distaff to the trail, holding it down with a forked stick, in and
out amongst the pegs, like a sort of cat's-cradle.  What the object of
this occupation was, I cannot conceive, since the wool on the distaffs
was not ravelled, and, having unwound it thus and laid it out upon the
ground, I cannot see what there remained for them to do but to wind it
all up again.  However, that was their concern, and in the meantime
they provided a very pleasant and surprising sight; and a sight also
very satisfying, in its suggestion of placid, primitive labour, which
seemed to fall naturally into its place among the occupations of the
men, with their rude ploughs and pastoral idle days.  A great repose it
afforded to the mind, this simple community, growing a little wheat,
breeding lambs and kids enough for flesh and skins, weaving the cloth
for their own covering; so self-sufficient, and so far removed from the
vile ambitions of industry.  It was like a return to a fresher world,
there under the wall of Dilijan in the early morning; a world which,
plus the existence of a doctor and a dispensary, might fairly have been
called ideal.  And since I was determined to go through Persia with an
eye to outward appearances only, ignoring the physical disease and
political corruption which were not my province and which I could do
nothing to alleviate, to my fancy it was ideal, though that might be a
shallow way of looking at it.

[Illustration: DILIJAN: WOMEN SPINNING.]

The road from Dilijan lay across a plain thick with asphodel, which
ceased as abruptly as it had begun, as is the patchy fashion of all
plant life in Persia.  Conditions do not seem to alter, to explain this
capriciousness on the part of the flowers, but there it is: either they
grow or they do not grow, and there is an end of it.  Mulleins, too,
which habitually favour a damp soil, had sprinkled themselves over this
arid plain, but they had chosen badly, for poor starved dusty things
they were, looking as though they would shrivel long before the moment
came for them to throw up their yellow spires.  We were on the high
table-lands, at a height of perhaps six thousand feet, so that the
hills which ran parallel to our course, bordering the plain, kept the
snow on their jagged summits, inconsiderable though their rise appeared
to be.  This, we agreed, as we bundled along over the endless, bumpy
road, was the type of landscape which above all gave the effect of
Central Asia.  To be so high that, although the sun was powerful, the
region of snow seemed but so very little higher; to breathe air of that
incomparable purity; to have the sensation of being on the roof; to
detect, beyond the range of near hills, a farther, bluer range;--so
must Tibet look, and so Pamir.  We had, too, those vast high solitudes
to ourselves, mile after mile, plain after plain,--for we crossed many
low cols, scarcely to be called passes, which always opened out again a
view of plain as extensive as the one we had just conquered.  A
heart-breaking country, indeed, to ride across, when each view ahead
meant a day's journey for a horse.  Yet it must not be thought that the
journey was monotonous, for sometimes we would come on a little oasis
of green,--the brilliant green of young wheat, and straight poplar
trees just broken into leaf above a stream,--with a handful of mud
houses, and sometimes an abrupt change led us into a gorge as dire and
dark as the inferno, but always the view opened again, on to plateau
and mountains, and the long straight road leading for twenty, thirty
miles ahead.

[Illustration: ON THE ROAD TO ISFAHAN.]

And although the plains were desert land, they were as good as watered
by large and frequent (though always distant) lakes, with reedy edges,
and the snowy reflections of mountain tops mirrored in their shimmering
surface.  Indeed, in some places the mountains rose as islands out of
the lake, as fantastic as the strange landscapes of Leonardo, and as
rocky, and of as deep a blue.  Sometimes the lake appeared straight
ahead, lying across the road, and cutting off the base of the solid
hills, so that they floated unsubstantially; and even dwindled in size,
till they finally went out, like a blown candle--but reappeared again,
growing from little shapeless puffs in the heart of the mirage to their
own rocky form, still detached, still ethereal, but joining up with
their fellows as we advanced towards them, till once more a coherent
range barred the plain.  Sometimes the lake lay to the left hand or the
right, either at the foot of the hills, when it spread wide and placid,
reflecting peaks and sky with disconcerting conviction, or cutting off
the base of the hills, as a sea-coast skirting the edge of a fabulous,
pinnacled country, where rose tier upon tier of blue jagged crests,
resting (as it seemed) upon nothing, in an extravagance of lovely
unreality.  It created, to the eye, a world of myth where substance and
illusion floated together in romantic marriage; all the more romantic
for the knowledge that it would never again be exactly repeated, never
exactly the same distortion, the same association of mist and light,
concealment and revelation.  A brief world, of changing shapes, hinting
at ravines and caverns, pools and lagoons running up into the hills,
all magical, all inhabited by nymphs and monsters, chimeras, wyverns,
and fabulous Circean beings; a world of grottoes and blue profundities,
of reflections doubly deceptive, since neither the mirror nor the image
was really there; a world which we, and we alone, might see,
perpetually shifting, changing, and recreated.  There is a picture in
Venice, by Bellini I think, in which Venus sitting in a boat is drawn
or at any rate accompanied by cherubim swimming in the green waters
round her feet, while behind her rises a blue landscape of just such a
world, all in an unearthly daylight which shall not be called
submarine, but rather the light of watery caves; such a world, such a
light, we saw, all close at hand though we could never hope to reach
it, could never wander into its enchanting fastnesses or gaze into
those false and limpid mirrors which might have given back, like the
looking-glass in the fairy story, the reflection of distant events or
the face of the beloved; for surely there must exist in some desert
country of the world a legend that he who looks into the waters of a
mirage will behold there an image hidden to all other eyes?  These
waterless, watered plains seem a very breeding-ground for superstition.
Other manifestations we saw, such as the dust-demons which, at a little
distance, rose like djinns in a column and swirled away, not obeying
the direction of the wind as we conceived it to be, but hurrying off in
opposite ways, as though following their own wishes, independent of the
more explicable wishes of nature.

[Illustration: ON THE ROAD TO ISFAHAN.]

We found no shade anywhere that day, so we ate our luncheon in a ruined
caravanserai, the broken arches framing the peaks of snow and the blue
sky, then packed ourselves in again, and after about two hours of
travelling, accompanied now by swarms of butterflies, whose little
shadows danced along in the dust beside us, passed over a little col,
and saw before us, on the farther edge of the new plain, two blue domes
swelling over a wash of green.  The road became very soft and sandy;
that last bit of the journey seemed the longest bit of all.  At last we
came to melon fields, and fields of opium poppies, and began to pass
peasants either labouring in the fields or driving their donkeys
towards the town, and before we knew it we were between walls, and then
in a crowded street, and at the end of the street lay the Meidan of
Isfahan.


IV

It is very rash to go to Isfahan.  It is wiser to keep the cities of
beautiful name for mental pilgrimage only; "not in Bokhara nor in
Samarcand nor in Balkh..." says the Persian poet, who, like Milton and
Marlowe and not a few other poets, evidently had a weakness for the
romantic names.  But really it is quite safe to go to Isfahan; for it
lies at the foot of its hills in the heart of Persia, as true to its
name now as it was in the times of Hajji Baba, whose adventures should
be carried in the pocket.  All the protagonists of Morier's story
jostle in the streets: the scribe, the beggar, the seller of water, the
woman in the white veil, the merchant riding on his horse with his
apprentice mounted behind him.  In the Meidan a dervish was sitting on
the ground telling a story to the crowd; they sat round him in a circle
with lips parted and eyes popping nearly out of their heads as the holy
man worked himself up into a state of frenzy over the exploits of his
hero (for Persian stories are usually heroic, and Firdusi's epic of the
Kings their favourite recital).  With his long beard, high hat, and
orange nails, and fierce little eyes flashing out of his hairy face, he
seemed indeed wild and inspired, as though he had been spinning his
tale for the last five hundred years and was only now working up to the
climax.  It was evening; the Meidan was sparsely populated; only a few
idlers strolled, men in long robes, hems raising a little swirl of
dust; they paced, as students might pace a cloister, hands clasped
behind their backs, heads bent, gravely conversing.  At one end of the
vast Meidan rose the blue gateway and turquoise dome of the mosque; at
the other end gaped the entrance to the dark bazaars: religion and
cupidity facing one another.  Fanaticism, barter, dusk and the
story-teller, all gathered together, in this eastern city.  The
graceful little Ali Carpi, midway, was like a flower in the dusk.  I
could not believe that I was in Isfahan; it seemed too improbable to be
true.  "Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban..."  There were the stone
goal-posts, near the vaulted entrance to the bazaars; for the Meidan
was once a polo-ground.  There was the dervish, still churning up the
turmoil of his story; a horseman had drawn rein, and sat in the saddle,
listening; he carried a long upright lance, stuck into his stirrup.
Some one had lit a brazier, which produced strange effects of shadow
amongst the crowd, and threw a fitful light on to the face of the
dervish.  The guttural language spurted as though in ecstasy from his
lips.  He jerked his hands in wild gesticulation.  But all around, in
the twilight that encircled that focus of glow and frenzy, the Meidan
lay like a lake of peace, long, narrow, level; and within the entrance
to the bazaars a single lantern burned, showing the way into that
obscure and unfathomable warren.

[Illustration: ISFAHAN: ENTRANCE TO THE BAZAARS.]


V

I climbed next day to the roof of the Ali Carpi, and looked enviously
across the roofs of the city towards the south, where the road went up
the hill to Shiraz and Persepolis.  I had no time to go to Shiraz and
Persepolis that April, but it was a pleasure deferred, not a pleasure
foregone; simply something to be put off till next year, so I gazed
enviously but without bitterness, and then turned to gaze towards the
jagged Bakhtiari hills, which I should cross next year also, on foot
with a little convoy of mules to carry my tent and luggage.  All this
gave me an agreeable sense of anticipation; it was agreeable also to
feel that I should be in Isfahan once more, for it is very poignant to
say to oneself, "I shall never see this place again".  There must,
however, I thought, be something a little wrong with some one who
attached, instinctively, so much importance to place; it betrayed a
spiritual superficiality, too material an attitude; I had thought to
gain emancipation by tearing myself up from my roots, and here I was
already netted in the love of Persia.  Worse than that,--for love of
Persia was after all an understandable and reasonable thing,--worse
than that, I had caught myself suffering real little pangs all along
the way; even crossing India, when I saw a road, wanted to travel down
it, and had to remember that that road with its turns and stretches
would be gone from me for ever in a flash.  These brief but frequent
fallings-in-love gave me cause for serious anxiety; such vibrations of
response ought, I felt, to be reserved for one's contact with human
beings, nor should nature have a greater power than human nature to
excite and to stir the soul.  That disposition might make a good
traveller but surely it made also a bad, an inadequate, friend?  The
external world had too much importance for me; my appreciation was
altogether too painfully vivid; but as I meditated, looking over the
roofs of Isfahan, I knew that there was no help for it: those hills,
that Shiraz road, squeezed my heart as in a muscular hand.  I was a
victim, and could escape from myself no more than any other slave of
temperament.  Only, it was a form of temperament for which I could
expect very little sympathy or understanding; an absurdity, an
exaggeration.  Better to keep it private,--but in a book consecrated to
my weakness, that would present some little difficulty.

[Illustration: ISFAHAN: THE MEIDAN.]

Ali Carpi trembled under my feet; at first I thought that an earthquake
was about to level Isfahan in one magnificent cloud of dust, but soon
realised that the trembling was due merely to the insecurity of the
frail old building.  So I remained where I was.  I could look down into
the tank of the Hall of Forty Columns--the Chel Setun--fringed with
umbrella pines and ending squarely at the foot of the little palace.  I
could look down into the Meidan, where the tiny figures strolled, or a
carriage like a toy crossed the square followed by a swirl of dust.  I
could look almost into the courtyard of the mosque--that sanctuary
forbidden to the unbeliever.  To look down upon a city from a roof high
above its roofs is to gain a new aspect; everything appears at an odd
angle, and freakish framings make little complete pictures like the
vignettes in medival paintings; thus between the blue domes I got a
group of brown houses, with the profile of the hills behind; or through
the ogives of a window I got one rounded bubble of blue dome, like a
huge mappemonde, the continents and seas represented by the stains
where the tiles had fallen off.  There was plenty to amuse an idler on
the roof, and to descend from those airy solitudes to the earth below
was like coming down into a world of which one had taken wily
advantage, gained a surreptitious and almost dishonourable acquaintance.


VI

Perched up on their scaffolding in a dark whitewashed barn of the
bazaars, the carpet-makers threaded their spindles, sitting with
dangling legs twenty feet above ground before the stretched warp and
woof of the carpet.  They sat in a row, as swallows on a telegraph
wire, ten or twelve of them, weaving with the quick hands of practice.
Little boys in round cashmere caps, young men in blue linen, they
presented a row of backs, and of crossed feet swinging in long,
pointed, white canvas shoes, and as they wove they chattered, pulling
at the coloured wools, knocking the stitches down into place, leaning
forward, reaching for another skein.  As the eyes grew accustomed to
the darkness, the rich texture of the carpet emerged in blues and reds;
like a half-lived life, stretched on its frame, the pattern of the
lower half was clear, but the upper half still rose naked, the brown
strings waiting for the daily inch of the design.  Shafts of sunlight
speared the room, shooting down from holes in the roof, and quivering
in circles on the floor.  In a corner stood a great wooden framework, a
rude primitive contrivance of stays, rollers, and pulleys, laced with
twine; squatting in front of this, three women, veritable Parcae, spun
the wool on to distaffs.  The heavy woollen skeins hung like clusters
of fruit; as red as pomegranates, as blue as grapes, as yellow as
lemons; they jumped and bobbed with the spinning; the roughened fingers
ran up and down the drawn-out strands, robbing them of their beard,
before the quick twist spun them up into the conical ball on the
distaff.  The women looked up with a grin: here was something that they
could do better than the superior foreigner.  All their lives (I
supposed) they had known, day in, day out, this rasp of the wool
between their fingers, until, for them, it became the one physical
sensation intimately known; the one habitual thing that would trudge
through their half-dreams between sleeping and waking.  But they were
unaware that I supposed this; nor, being aware, would they have cared
or understood, any more than the Egyptian potters, for life is rough
and practical, and there is no time for those finer shades that delight
the idle.  An unchanged, traditional industry; that rude barn enshrined
all the quality of the ancient crafts, in essence the same as the
carpenter's shop, the forge, the wine-press; full of the clumsy
laborious processes of such immemorial trades, but rich in a spirit
denied to the apter methods of convenience.  The art of carpet-making
is not dead in Persia.  Not only does it thrive in Isfahan, but in the
tents of the nomad tribes the women weave, according to the traditional
pattern of their province; they weave for their own use, and for the
markets, keeping the hereditary skill alive, on the hillside and by the
fires.  How many people, in England, look intelligently at the rug they
trample?  How many people, who peer into a picture or examine a chair,
will bring an equal fastidiousness to bear upon a carpet?  Yet a carpet
is a work of art with a special chance of appealing to even the most
general taste; it is no otiose ornament, but a necessity, and
furthermore, by its symmetry of design it panders to the human
predilection for a repeated pattern.  It can share either the flat
quality of fresco, or the deep opulence of texture.  For all that, it
is neglected save by a few, and even by those few it is liable to be
maltreated and hung upon a wall, which is not the proper place for a
carpet.

[Illustration: ISFAHAN: CARPET-MAKERS.]

I grew angry as I watched the weavers and thought of these things, and
angrier still remembering the degenerate taste of the Persians
themselves, who, for all the fine tradition behind them, will treat a
carpet as though it were a picture, not only by hanging it on the wall,
but by causing actual pictures to be reproduced, as fights between
archers, or cherubs floating in an orange grove, or young women pouring
libations for their lovers.  These productions they esteem, and display
with pride, taking the Oriental's delight in ingenuity.  I remembered
how in Constantinople, before the war, when everything flowed by that
channel from out of Asia on its way to the European markets, it had
been possible to spend a whole afternoon in a shop, lounging, while one
rug more beautiful than the last was unrolled, dusky, faded, the
treasures of sixteenth-century Isfahan.  Now, although nothing new has
taken the place of the old--yet the possibilities of pattern are
infinite--and although by instinct the weavers in the tents and
villages keep to the safe tradition, the Europeans neglect the ancient
art, and the richer Persians corrupt the modern product so far as they
are able.  The workers alone have not gone wrong.  Craftsmen do not go
wrong.  That which is made by the hand, built up in an intimate
relationship between creation and maker, lives by a life of its own so
long as it is not interfered with by pretentious meddlers.  I came out,
indignant, into the sun.

[Illustration: ISFAHAN: THE MADRASSEH.]


VII

But by far the most lovely thing I saw in Isfahan, one of those things
whose loveliness endures as a melody in the mind, was the Madrasseh,
meaning school; but if a school at all, then a school for pensiveness,
for contemplation, for spiritual withdrawal; a school in which to learn
to be alone.  A cloister, not in the architectural sense of the word,
but in the psychological; a place of retreat and harmony, open to all,
but where each one might go in a privilege of privacy, to sit or to
pace, or to gaze into the water, to arrive or to depart, unnoticed,
unquestioned, in that independence which few communities understand or
are willing to accord.  One is allowed to be lonely there; but in more
civilised communities no one is allowed to be lonely; the refinement of
loneliness is not understood.  Was it the mere visual beauty of the
place? or the atmosphere, the very air, soaked in spiritual experience,
that produced this profound impression?  Certainly the visual beauty
was very great, and, aware that I was all too apt to be led astray by
such outward seductions, I examined my impressions severely: still,
after all the paring away, remained such convictions as I had known
only in monasteries and cloisters, places where men had chosen a
secluded (perhaps a cowardly) life; a sense that each man had, indeed,
a private existence, moments in which it was necessary that he should
be apart, for a little, from his fellows.  The Madrasseh of Isfahan
differed in this from the monastery, that it was the refuge of men
ordinarily engaged in worldly affairs; merchants, traders, scholars,
pilgrims, came here alike, for an hour, for a day; no conventions were
binding; those who chose to be alone, might be alone, walking apart;
those who chose might drift into a little group, talking of current
politics; those who would pray, might pray; but all were respected, in
the indulgence of their several needs.  As to the outward beauty of
this place: a long range of buildings, tiled in blue, enclosed a
rectangular space; a long pool, with steps going down into the water,
reflected the buildings; lilac and irises, in sheets of purple, seemed
but a deeper echo of the colours of the tiles; a golden light of sunset
struck the white trunks of the plane trees, flushing them until they
turned to living flesh; and among the lilacs, the irises, and the
planes strolled the tall, robed figures, or sat by the water's edge,
idly stirring the water with the point of a stick, so that the
reflections quivered to a cloud of amethyst and blue, then steadied
again to mirror in glassy stillness the blue walls, the spreading
leaves, the evening sky.




CHAPTER VII

KUM


I

At evening we came again to Kum, that sacred place, this time driving
into the town, and being swallowed up almost immediately under the dark
arch of the bazaars.  We were tired, after a run of nearly two hundred
miles, and had yet to find a lodging; we drove to a house we knew of,
and beat on the door, but although a dog barked inside, no one came to
open.  The usual crowd collected--little boys scribbled with their
fingers in the dust that whitened the car--beggars whined and stretched
out their hands--the black veiled women stood and stared and
whispered--then our servant asked, would we honour the house where he
was born?  But how to find the house? for he had forgotten the way.
Volunteers surged forward, perched themselves heaven knows how on the
luggage, crouching on the splashboards, hanging on like monkeys,
holding on with one hand and wildly waving the other; so we moved off
again, and plunged into the bazaar, cleaving our way very slowly
through that busy hour of dusk, when the whole population comes out to
buy and talk, and the donkeys are driven in from the country with their
loads of camel-thorn, and everybody shouts,--and shouted all the more,
at the unusual sight of a motor in that place.  It was dark, only a few
little shop-lamps burnt, making tiny shrines of light at intervals down
the street; I switched on my headlights, and their beam rushed down the
bazaar, a fierce and concentrated illumination, leaving the donkeys to
jostle in the shadows with their great loads, and only a soft bump to
tell us that we had hit a pack as we squeezed our way through.  Our
volunteers guided us well, down alleys and round corners; our servant
meanwhile in a great state of delight, balancing himself on the step at
an acrobatic angle, beating off the children with sound whacks of an
umbrella.  I was not sorry to emerge from the bazaars, before we had
run over anybody, into the open street, and to see again the sky over
our heads and to be rid of that jostling, shouting, hailing crowd.  The
street was so narrow that the car could just pass between the mud
walls, lurching from rut to rut, the steering wheel half twisted out of
my hands.  A score of boys straggled after us, holding on to the car
and shouting.  Then we came to a cross-street, and drew up at the
corner house; the news of our arrival had travelled quicker than we
had; the door was already open, our host was greeting us--a tall,
black-bearded man of incomparable dignity--and eager hands were
loosening the cords that secured our luggage.

After noise, silence; after movement, stillness.  A little house round
a courtyard; the rectangular tank reflecting the pale sky; a bush of
oleander; a room, carpeted, but bare of furniture.  Are these things
worth chronicling?  Probably not.  But of such arrivals and such
transitory hours,--of such glances through a door once opened and then
forever shut,--journeys in Persia are made.  I remember the chicken
they cooked for us, in the juice of pomegranates and walnuts, and the
huge dish of golden rice.  I remember the sensation of stretching tired
limbs on a pile of rugs.  I remember asking our host if he could play
the _tar_ (for many Persians chant the poets, striking a few chords on
the strings of their native instrument), and his producing instead a
discordant gramophone with half a dozen scratchy records, which out of
politeness we were compelled to play.  I remember night falling on the
little court, and sleep falling on our eyelids.


II

Then in the morning the house basked in a soft, hot brilliance; a woman
knelt to wash her rags in the tank; pigeons cooed on the roof; a baby
toddled out; a dog flopped down in the shade and slept.  From the
street outside came the cry of some passing pedlar, but the house was
shut away from the street, not even a window pierced the brown wall; it
was all turned inwards, on to the little court, private and
self-contained, where the black-bearded Seyed ruled amongst his women.
So it had always been in that little household, so it would continue to
be through the long hot summer, when the oleander would wilt and the
vine ripen its grapes on the rough supports.  So it was in hundreds of
little houses all over Persia, waking in the morning; and at Dilijan, I
knew, the women would be walking up and down, below the wall, with
their twirling spindles and their long trail of wool.

Our host came out and greeted us, very tall and dark and grave, wearing
his long grey coat as though it were a robe, his beard combed, his
nails beautifully stained with fresh henna.  He sat smoking under the
vine while we broke our fast.  Our meal was laid on a little ledge
outside the sleeping-room: cushions of emerald-green velvet, and a
bunch of brilliant, single, yellow roses.  A bowl of curdled cream.
Jam in green glass jars.  The brown native bread, as crisp as a
biscuit.  Water in a ewer of flower-like shape.  Children came and
peeped at us--small wonder, for we were the first foreigners to cross
that threshold--and the women peeped too, holding their veils closely,
and tittering; but Seyed, keeping watch under the vine, waved them away
with a lordly gesture.  Then he rose and came towards us, and invited
us to follow him.

These impressions of Kum are simply like miniatures in my mind; Persian
miniatures, bright, small, and sharp; intimate, enamelled.  I see the
arcaded background, the many figures, the ground starred with little
flowers, all with the fine quality of those early paintings.  Each one
seems complete, as though it were already in a frame, true to itself
within its own limitations, true to a general tradition also, without
date, but finely classical.  Seyed led us through the streets; he
walked with an air of authority; we had no idea where he was taking us,
nor should we have been capable of finding our way back.  Through the
labyrinth, between the mud walls; and already I was thinking of his
house and the courtyard as of a picture seen in a book, an illumination
in a missal, whose pages I had now closed, when he stopped at a door,
and signed to us to enter.

Seyed had opened the book again at another illuminated page.  There in
the centre of the court stood the tree from which the yellow roses had
been picked; a bush taller than a man, smothered in the wide, single,
yellow rose that, more like a butterfly than a flower, settled upon the
green.  It was the magic bush of the Arabian Nights; I looked about for
the Singing Fountain and the Talking Bird; a goldfish darted in the
tank.  Seyed stood there smiling.  I realised that he was lit by some
extraordinary pride; that he was showing us something that held a
romantic, secret place in his life, something apart from the homeliness
of his dwelling-house, a separate thing.  But he made no comment, and
we stood, not knowing what to say.  Time hung suspended; we knew that
something was about to happen, though we could not tell what; a bee
blundered across the sun-warmed space; a rose broke, and the yellow
petals fluttered to the ground.  Then in the arches of the house,
raised to the level of our eyes, appeared a young woman in a blue robe
flecked with stars; she held a child in her arms.  Only for an instant
she appeared, framed in the arch, looking out with inquiring, expectant
eyes; then as she caught sight of the strangers she gave a cry and
vanished, and the court returned to its warm empty silence and the sole
sentinel of the yellow rose.  We looked at Seyed.  He was still
smiling, as a showman who for a second has drawn aside a curtain and
let it fall again.  Very gravely he ushered us back into the street,
the door closed behind him, no remark was passed on what we had seen,
we strolled towards the bazaars, talking of Russian traders on the
Caspian.


III

Now that was not the last of Seyed, for, as though he deliberately
intended us to learn the third aspect of his life, he led us to his
shop in the bazaar.  Up till then, we had not known what his profession
was: we now discovered him to be a tobacconist.  So completely did he
reveal his life to us, with so beautiful a gravity did he disclose, in
turn, the three miniatures of his existence, so authoritatively did he
conduct the whole affair, that one might have suspected him of being a
conscious artist.  But that, of course, was out of the question.  We
sat in his shop, smoking and drinking tea, while the traffic of the
bazaar streamed by and our merchant set forth his views on
Russo-Persian relations.  He was still perfectly calm and dignified,
and that little interlude in the court of his secret house might never
have taken place, for all the reference he made to it.  He sat behind
his counter, his long fingers with their orange nails idly fidgeting
over the brass weights and scales, trim though noble in his appearance,
a man who controlled his life.  The shop was stacked from floor to
ceiling with brightly coloured paper packets of cigarettes; now and
then a passer-by would stop, and Seyed would rise and take down a
packet, or weigh out an ounce of tobacco into a twist of paper, all
with leisurely movements; and the coins he received in payment he
allowed to drip from his fingers into the till as though they were of
no more account to him than drops of water.  It was curious to see the
bazaar in this way from the opposite angle, from inside, looking out
from the shop instead of looking into it.  Seyed's son came, a tall
dark young man, very like his father; he kept his own shop, a little
way up the street.  Seyed looked at him with pride.  He could read; he
read out a letter to his father, which Seyed had been unable to
decipher.  What, I wondered, was the relationship between the son and
the woman in the second house?  Did he even know of her existence?  Did
he know of it all too well?  And a whole tangle of relationships
presented itself to me; what communication, for instance, existed
between the rather furtive, squalid women who had been sent about the
business of drawing water for us, of cooking our dinner, and the
blue-robed woman who had so briefly appeared behind the yellow rose,
the spoilt woman, the cherished woman?  Were they rivals? or mistress
and servants? or, deliberately, strangers to one another?  These were
things which I could never know, however much they interested me;
secrets which I must leave--I who drove away into a more varied
life--to the sacred village and the Persian merchant.




CHAPTER VIII

THE CORONATION OF REZA KHAN


I

As we re-entered Teheran the sentry at the gate stopped us with the
mechanical inquiry, "Az koja miayand?" "From what place do you
come?"--and on receiving our reply "Az Isfahan," allowed us to proceed
into the town.  We found an air of excitement hanging about the
streets; in the public square some tall masts, very crooked, had been
set up, covered with red bunting; flags were out; festoons of electric
light bulbs swooped along the faade of the municipal building.  Wild,
romantic horsemen paraded the streets in little bunches.  Triumphal
arches were in process of erection.  Wire silhouettes of Hercules
strangling the lion, of Castor and Pollux, of aeroplanes and motor
cars, gave promise of the Persians' favourite form of display:
fireworks.  There was no doubt about it: they had at last realised the
approach of the coronation, and were bestirring themselves in a sudden,
last-moment panic.

[Illustration: THE VALIAHD.]

With characteristic lack of foresight they had left everything to the
last, and now seemed aggrieved that because the month was Ramazan the
workmen were half-hearted and languid.  To hear the ministers of the
court complain, you might have thought that Ramazan had come upon them
unawares.  Like people preparing for amateur theatricals, they were,
however, sustained by the conviction that it would be all right on the
day, and in the meantime they were as pleased as children with the
ingenuity of their devices and with the opportunity afforded them for
the exercise of their inventiveness in every form of decoration.
Everything was collected together and placed on trestle-tables at
intervals along the street: clocks, vases, tea-pots, photographs, china
ornaments--especially clocks, for which, like most Orientals, they have
a great fondness, so that the streets of Teheran tinkled all day with
the strikings of discrepant hours.  Then there must be illuminations;
and, apart from the official lanterns and fireworks, every little
household brought out its oil-lamps, its night-light glasses, and its
candlesticks, and added them to the clocks and china.  Before very
long, the whole of Teheran looked like an immense jumble-sale.  Then,
to this absurdity, was added a really effective decoration: carpets
were hung against the walls of the houses, carpets closely touching, so
that the mean buildings disappeared behind the arabesques of Kirman and
the blood-red velvets of Bokhara.  The city ceased to be a city of
brick and plaster, and became a city of texture, like a great and
sumptuous tent open to the sky.

Meanwhile the tribesmen continued to pour into the city.  We were not
accustomed to these wild and picturesque figures; but, hung with
shields and stuck with weapons, mounted on rough ponies, they sauntered
down the Lalzar with a lofty disregard of the attention they
attracted.  Baluchis with embossed bucklers, Turcomans with great fur
busbies and tunics of rose-red silk, Bakhtiaris with high white felt
hats, black jackets, and white sleeves, Kurds with turbans of fringed
silk; Kashgais, Lurs, Berbers, men from Sistan--these representatives
of the (more or less) subject tribes composed the bodyguard of the new
Shah.  What with the tribes and the carpets, Teheran was losing its
shoddy would-be European appearance and putting on, at last, a
character more reminiscent of the pen of Marco Polo.

[Illustration: STREET DECORATION.]

Down at the palace a series of works had been undertaken: the
throne-room was to be repainted, the garden paved; such breaches in the
walls as revealed the presence of rubbish-heaps were to be filled up;
the so-called museum was to be rearranged and weeded out.  These ideas
were European, and novel.  The Persians themselves cared not at all
whether the paint in the throne-room betrayed patches of damp, or
whether the china for the state banquets matched, and said so quite
frankly.  "You see," said one of them, "it is only recently that we
have even begun to sit on chairs."  Their anxiety to impress the
Europeans was endearing; there was no point, however humble, on which
they would not consult their English friends.  They would arrive with
little patterns of brocade and velvet; they would ask us to come down
and approve the colour of the throne-room.  "You see," they said, "we
do not know."  They ordered vast quantities of glass and china from
English firms; it would not arrive in time for the coronation, they had
left it too late, but no matter.  They must have red cloth for the
palace servants like the red liveries worn by the servants at the
English legation.  They must have a copy of the proceedings at
Westminster Abbey for the coronation of His Majesty George V.  The copy
was procured, but, stiff with ceremonial, heavy with regalia, created
some consternation; one of the ministers who prided himself on his
English came to ask me privately what a Rougedragon Poursuivant was,
evidently under the impression that it was some kind of animal.  In the
amusement of the outward show of the coronation, one was apt to lose
sight of the wider implications of the new regime.

To us in Teheran, Reza Khan Pahlavi, as sovereign designate, was a
mysterious figure; he never showed himself except at the public salaam;
never honoured any foreign mission with his presence; only
occasionally, and to the dismay of the municipal authorities, he would
drive through unexpected parts of the city in his Rolls-Royce, after
which he would send for the officials concerned, and abuse them for the
bad condition of the roads.  "You spend all the money on beautifying
the public garden," he would say, shaking his fist angrily at the
garden in question, which, in the middle of the dusty square, displayed
a few yellow wall-flowers and a patch of forget-me-not behind the
protection of some strands of barbed wire.  He knew, of course, quite
well that that was not where the money went to, and the officials knew
that he knew; but the financial system of Persia is not to be altered
in a day.  The dictator would retire again to his private house, the
officials would heave a sigh of relief, and things would go on as
before.  In appearance Reza was an alarming man, six foot three in
height, with a sullen manner, a huge nose, grizzled hair and a brutal
jowl; he looked, in fact, what he was, a Cossack trooper; but there was
no denying that he had a kingly presence.  Looking back, it seemed that
he had risen in an amazingly short time from obscurity to his present
position; the army was his creation and stood solid behind him; with
Tamburlaine he might say,

          I am strongly mov'd,
  That if I should desire the Persian crown,
  I could attain it with a wondrous ease:
  And would not all our soldiers soon consent
  If we should aim at such a dignity?

nor had he any rival in the lax limp nation he had mastered.  For the
ruler of Persia, however, half the problem lies precisely in the
character of that nation; easy to dominate, because energy meets with
no opposition, they are, once dominated, impossible to use; there is no
material to build with; like all weak, soft people, they break and
discourage the spirit sooner than a more difficult, vigorous race;
there may be nothing to fight against, but equally there is nothing
that will fight in alliance with the leader.  This character leads
naturally to the innumerable abuses and corruptions from which Persia
suffers; the absence of justice, the sale of offices, the corruption,
bribery, peculation, and general dishonesty that appals the beholder,
not only from a moral point of view, but also from exasperation with
the stupidity and elaboration of such a system.  This internal rot, no
less than the political pressure from England and Russia, must
complicate the position of any energetic ruler; it is the most urgent
thing, the thing which must be cleaned out before any other problem is
dealt with, such problems as transport, under-population, irrigation,
the condition of the peasant, the cultivation of the land.

Reza, it was said, had not desired the Persian crown, and would have
preferred a republic to a kingdom, but that the priesthood insisted
upon his acceptance of the throne.  Not a man who cared for the outward
pomps, he continued to live in his own house, and transferred himself
to the palace only when he gave audience, or for some analogous
purpose.  The palace in question presented the most ludicrous contrasts
of squalor and magnificence.  The first courtyard, which from one end
was dominated by the famous marble throne, was enclosed by a range of
buildings resembling a gardener's bothy.  Holes in the wall betrayed
rubbish-heaps where the chickens scratched; the soldiers' ragged
washing hung on lines stretched between the trees.  A second court gave
access to the garden, and to the faade of the palace; this faade was
tiled, but, of course, half the tiles had fallen out, a broken-down
iron railing wandered aimlessly across the terrace, the tanks were full
of dead leaves, the paths muddy, half the windows smashed.  A mean
staircase led to the upper rooms, every step encumbered by candelabra
and statues in the German taste of the mid-nineteenth century.  At the
top of this staircase was an enormous room, known as the museum, its
walls lined with glass cases contained an extraordinary assortment of
objects, from Sassanian pottery down to the toothbrushes of Nasr-ed-Din
Shah.  This was the room--though with its vast area of tiled floor, and
its columns, and the great height of its vaulted ceiling, it seemed
more like a small cathedral than a mere room--which was to be used for
the coronation ceremony, and which was then given up to workmen;
scaffolding, ladders, filled it; pots of paint stood about; the
officials were in despair; never, never, they said, would the place be
cleared by April the twenty-fifth; and then, as though the spectacle
were too distressing to contemplate any longer, they suggested a visit
to the treasury.


II

Through the garden we went, picking our way over the half-laid bricks,
while the pigeons cooed and the soft spring air wandered in the young
green of the plane trees, in an immemorial way, as though no change of
dynasty brooded over Persia; through the garden and into the palace
again, by a low doorway and a dark narrow passage, stooping lest we
should knock our heads; up a flight of steps, reaching finally a small
room with barred windows.  Knowing too well by now the shabby condition
of everything in this ramshackle country, I was not very much excited
at the prospect of seeing the treasury of imperial Iran, nor did the
lackadaisical air of the frock-coated ministers help to raise my
anticipations.  They stood round, drinking little cups of tea, smiling
in a gentle, secret, self-satisfied way, while servants ran busily,
spreading green baize over the table, and bringing from the recesses of
an inner room leather cases and linen bags carelessly tied with string.
I was watching all this preparation with a rather perfunctory interest,
my thoughts elsewhere, when suddenly, and as with a physical start, my
eyes and thoughts came together, as gears engaging; I stared, I gasped;
the small room vanished; I was Sinbad in the Valley of Gems, Aladdin in
the Cave.  The linen bags vomited emeralds and pearls; the green baize
vanished, the table became a sea of precious stones.  The leather cases
opened, displaying jewelled scimitars, daggers encrusted with rubies,
buckles carved from a single emerald; ropes of enormous pearls.  Then
from the inner room came the file of servants again, carrying uniforms
sewn with diamonds; a cap with a tall aigrette, secured by a diamond
larger than the Koh-i-Nur; two crowns like great hieratic tiaras,
barbaric diadems, composed of pearls of the finest orient.  The
ministers laughed at our amazement and incredulity.  There seemed no
end to the treasure thus casually produced.  Now at last I could
believe the story of Nasr-ed-Din and his visit to the Kurds and Lurs; I
could readily have believed that he had dressed, not only himself, but
the whole of his court in just such a coruscating tabard.  We plunged
our hands up to the wrist in the heaps of uncut emeralds, and let the
pearls run through our fingers.  We forgot the Persia of to-day; we
were swept back to Akbar and all the spoils of India.


III

The pessimism of the ministers was not justified, for on the morning of
April the twenty-fifth we woke to a Teheran spruce and furbished beyond
recognition.  What was Reza Khan, that sulky man, feeling, on this
morning of his day of supreme consummation?  For my own part--since
one's own part is the only part one ever truly knows--I felt quite
emotionally anxious that everything should go off well; I took a
personal interest in that throne-room which I had so often visited at
the unofficial hour of ten in the morning, to criticise the shades of
its peach-coloured distempered walls, to condemn the more outrageous of
the Svres vases so dear to the heart of the Minister of the Court;
that room which I was now about to see under its most pompous aspect,
packed with dignitaries, resplendent with banners; I felt towards it
much as the bride's confidential friend who right up to the hour of the
ceremony has seen the bride in brogues and jersey--untidy, agitated,
intimate--and now must defer, ironically, to the brocade and
orange-blossom.  The little heaps of dust and plaster would finally
have been swept away, the carpets spread, the Peacock Throne relieved
of its dust-sheets.  The palace servants would no longer be in their
stained blue tunics, but in the new scarlet liveries no one had yet
admired.  The new crown, which I had seen in the making, in sections,
would be there, resplendent on a cushion.  The days of being behind the
scenes were over; this was the morning of the public performance.

By two-thirty we were in our places, looking down, from a raised dais,
on the crowd of uniforms and frock-coats that swayed gently up and down
the room.  A clear space had been left down the centre, right up to the
steps of the throne, that superb and barbarous divan of enamel and
precious stones, tassels of rough emeralds hanging down from the arms,
rubies encrusted in the back that like the spreading tail of the Indian
bird rayed out before the great recess of looking-glass at the end of
the room.  Near the steps of the throne, to one side, shuffled and
squatted and pressed a crowd of mullahs; dirty, bearded old men in long
robes and huge turbans; like a baleful chorus in a Greek play, they
pressed forward, encroaching on the cleared space, till every now and
then an aide-de-camp would be compelled to go across, and with the
utmost deference whisper a request for a slight withdrawal.  Black
looks were obliquely cast upon the mullahs, black looks of dread and
hatred as, arrogant and churlish, they conceded a yard, gathered their
robes about them, and crouched back upon their haunches.  The ceremony
was timed to begin at three, but half-past three still brought no sign
of the opening of the doors.  Owing to the presence of the mullahs, no
music might be played, so it was in silence that we waited, a warm
silence broken only by the whispering and rustling of the crowd.
Beyond the gold lace of the diplomatic uniforms, and the light blue of
the Persian officers, a smear of richer colour stained the ranks lining
the open path: an Armenian priest in purple velvet, a Turcoman in his
rose-red coat, and, a pace in front, at intervals, stood young
standard-bearers, sheathed in chain-armour, like Crusaders mingled with
the Asiatics.  Expectancy and imminence brooded over the crowded hall,
heightened by the silence; even the whispers about the delay were now
hushed; at last there came a stir; the doors were opened, and the
figure of a little boy appeared.  Quite alone, dressed in uniform, he
marched down the length of the room, saluting, and took his place on
the lowest step of the throne, His Imperial Highness Shahpur Mohammed
Reza, Crown Prince of Persia.

[Illustration: THE CORONATION OF REZA KHAN.]

Now what can be more absurd than a coronation?  It argues a veneration
for kings, which no reasonable person can feel, of that primitive order
which carries one back to the historical plays of Shakespeare, with
their magnificent and fallacious pageantry, seductive as a child's game
of make-believe; to lines of poetry in which the weight and poignancy
of the line depend upon some royal word with its onerous associations.
"Else a great prince in prison lies"; and why should a great prince not
lie in prison, if he deserves it, as well as a simple malefactor? or
the head that wears a crown not lie as uneasy as another head that
boasts not even the possession of a hat?  Yet in spite of all the bad
thinking, and in spite of knowing it to be bad, there is that in us
which revels in ceremonial, and makes us crane to see the enthronement
as though we assisted indeed at some moment of august transfiguration.
Escorted by his generals and his ministers bearing jewels and regalia,
the aigrette in his cap blazing with the diamond known as the Mountain
of Light, wearing a blue cloak heavy with pearls, the Shah advanced
towards the Peacock Throne.  The European women curtsied to the ground;
the men inclined themselves low on his passage; the mullahs shambled
forward in a rapacious, proprietary wave; the little prince,
frightened, possessed himself of a corner of his father's cloak.  Only
the silence seemed strange; one expected a blare of trumpets, a
crashing of chords, and nothing came; only a voice droning an address,
and then the voice of the Shah, reading from a paper.  With his own
hands he removed the cap from his head, with his own hands he raised
and assumed the crown, while two ministers stood by, holding the
dishonoured tiaras of the Kajar dynasty.  Then from outside came a
salvo of guns, making the windows rattle, proclaiming to the crowds in
the streets that Reza Khan was King of Kings and Centre of the Universe.


IV

Everybody crowded out, after the Shah had gone, the ministers beaming
with pleasure as they received the congratulations of their friends on
the successful conduct of the ceremony.  We were all much relieved, in
fact, that no mishap should have come to mar the smoothness of the
proceedings; that no one should have tripped over his robe or dropped a
crown, or a sword, or any of the things which experience of Persia
might have led us to expect.  I thought, myself, that the warmth of the
congratulations was perhaps a little over-emphasised, but the ministers
looked innocently pleased and repeated over and over again, "Oui, en
effet, tout s'est trs bien pass".

[Illustration: TURCOMANS.]

Through the packed streets to the municipal building on the public
square, the crowd parting to let the motors pass.  The crowd seemed
apathetic, a concourse of ignorant people taking very little interest
in the happenings of the day; they stared dumbly, allowing the police
to beat and hustle them as the English motor with the stiff little tin
flag on the bonnet nosed its way amongst them.  A Persian crowd is
divided sharply into sexes; here a wedge of men, and there a wedge of
women herded together, so that as you drive along you get first the
stillness of the silent males, and then, from the black veiled figures,
a sudden, charming twittering, as from a lot of birds or children.
They sat cross-legged on the pavement, rising into standing tiers,
peeping from under their veils; young women with bright eyes, old women
like traditional mothers-in-law, tyrants of the household, and little
girls holding their black snoods about them with an absurd air of
grown-upness in babyhood.  One never got more than a glimpse, but that
glimpse revealed the whole character in a way that the uncovered face
rarely does, whether it was a glimpse of the lively naughty eyes, or of
the sagging, pouchy ill-tempered jowl of the old Megaera.  One had
brushed past them every day on the pavement, in little clusters of two
and three, and caught such glimpses, but never until now seen them
collected in such quantities, as though every little secret household
in Teheran had poured its women out on to the pavement, jabbering,
excited, on a day that would furnish a topic of conversation for a
twelvemonth.  Leila had seen so handsome a young Kurd,--what loins he
had!--how he sat his horse!--but Zia had seen a far handsomer
Englishman,--fair, tall, unlike the Persians,--what response would he
make were she to send him a note?  For the Persian women are very bold
and enterprising under the cover of the veil, and their talk revolves
always round the one single subject.  Meanwhile the banners flew from
the top of the crazy poles, and the wired fireworks in the middle of
the square waited for night, when they would cease to look like
cat's-cradle, and would flare out their brief life in pictures of red
and yellow twirling fire.  From the balconies of the municipal building
we looked down upon the crowd, upon the route of the procession; heads
blossomed at every window; the low grey building at the end of the
square said IMPERIAL BANK OF PERSIA in English lettering; the clocks
ticked on the trestle tables below the triumphal arches.  In the
distance were drawn up the detachments of the tribal bodyguard, sitting
on their horses till the moment came for them to fall into their order
behind the Shah's coach.  On the balconies of the municipal building,
conversation flowed in safe, platitudinous channels: the new crown was
of a very good design, was it not? and made by a Russian jeweller of
Teheran, too!  The Crown Prince was a dear little boy, was he not, with
his miniature sword and his shiny boots?  A horrid little boy really,
said some one else; he has a violent temper and beats his servants with
his fists.  Glasses of lemonade were handed round, straws sticking out
of them; the aspidistras on the parapet were carefully parted by gloved
hands to allow the black muzzles of the kodaks to peep between.
Altogether the crowning of Reza Shah provided an excellent excuse for a
social occasion, both to Leila admiring the loins of the young Kurd and
to Madame X. whispering confidentially to the newly arrived military
attach.

[Illustration: THE CORONATION PROCESSION: KURDS AND BAKHTIARIS.]

Like Cinderella, the Shah came by in a glass coach, six horses drawing
him at a foot's pace, grooms with high-coloured hats like characters
out of the ballet of Prince Igor walking beside the horses.  Behind him
rode his cabinet ministers, looking very ill at ease on horseback in
their cashmere robes of honour; and a sullen prince of the Kajar
dynasty, compelled against his will to give this public support to the
usurper.  Then came the Crown Prince, alone, very small, in another
coach.  Then the bodyguard according to their tribes, riding their
horses like centaurs in full panoply; the swart barbarians of Asia.
"Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles, is it not passing brave to be
a king, and ride in triumph through Persepolis?"  Not much applause
greeted the Shah on his passage, for applause is not in fashion among
the Persians, but a murmur travelled in his wake, and as his coach
turned the corner and disappeared from sight we heard the murmur
spreading up the Lalzar.  When he had reached the gate of the
city--but not until then--the inevitable anti-climax would take place:
he would descend from his coach, remove his crown, there among the
rubbish-heaps and the goats, and would re-embark in a mere motor, to be
driven out to his country place.  This, however, we were not privileged
to see.  We watched the crowd breaking up and swarming over the route
of the procession, before going down ourselves and driving away to our
respective homes.


V

Experience in Isfahan had been set in so different a key; the
Madrasseh, the night at Kum, had imposed themselves by virtue of a
quality so different and so much more elusive than this crude
entertainment; it was--if so remote a parallel may be sought,--like
reading Flecker after Donne, the pictorial poet after the metaphysical,
the one as shallow and beguiling as the other was enriching and
suggestive.  Nevertheless that festive week of the coronation had its
points; it was gay, it was decorative, it was absurd; the day fluttered
with flags, the night dripped with gold; national anthems blared; the
gems of the treasury blazed in the show-cases of the coronation room,
for the admiration of the officials and diplomats who thronged there
evening after evening; the gardens of the palace were illuminated by
coloured lanterns, that reflected in the pools, long lines of light
trembling on the wrinkled surface.  The Shah majestically appeared, and
stood watching the fireworks, a solitary figure in his long military
cloak, under the plane-trees; the rockets rushed hissing upwards, hung
for a second, then burst into a cluster of coloured stars; golden
snakes writhed across the sky; golden showers founted and fell; an
aeroplane of fire revolved its propeller, a motor-car its wheels;
Castor and Pollux wrestled, Hercules overthrew the lion; golden letters
jumped out of the darkness, one by one: V-I-V-E-S-A-M-A-J-E-S-T--
I-M-P--R-I-A-L-E-P-A-H-L-A-V-I.  At that, the Shah, who was standing a
few paces in front of the crowd, shrugged his shoulders slightly, and,
turning on his heel, made his way alone back into the palace.  But for
that single gesture of impatience, he had behaved in public throughout
the week as an effigy, wooden and inscrutable.  At many of the
functions he had not even put in an appearance, but sent his son
instead, who, seated in an immense scarlet tent, guarded by two
soldiers with fixed bayonets, spent his time solemnly eating through
the sweets piled on a table before him.

[Illustration: BALUCHIS.]

Strolling there in the palace garden, where we were now compelled to
spend so many hours, I was reminded of that other Shah, Nasr-ed-Din,
who in the last century used to startle Europe by his arrival in her
capitals, with his Oriental accoutrements and the black moustachios
like a scimitar across his face.  Those were the days in which the
bastinado was still a public spectacle in the streets of Teheran; when
the followers of the Bab were persecuted, and the discussion about the
building of a railway had just entered upon its amaranthine career; the
days when a remarkable couple arrived in Teheran, and were accorded an
audience with the Shah.  The alley-ways of the palace garden were
henceforward haunted for me by the presence of Nasr-ed-Din and the
boyish figure of Jane Dieulafoy.  Her husband wanted to make a study of
Persian antiquities, did he? well, then, Jane would go with him, and
nothing that her friends could say would dissuade her.  The inducements
they put forward to tempt her to remain at home were many but not
various: "Un jour je rangerais dans des armoires des lessives
embaumes, j'inventerais des marmelades et des coulis nouveaux; le
lendemain je dirigerais en souveraine la bataille centre les mouches,
la chasse aux mites, le raccommodage des chaussettes ..." but, she
adds, "je sus rsister  toutes ces tentations."  Jane Dieulafoy indeed
was made of sterner stuff, and in the end it was not so much she who
accompanied her husband as her husband who accompanied her.  She had no
illusions as to the dangers they might encounter on the way, "le moins
qu'il pt nous arriver," she remarks cheerfully, "est d'tre hachs en
menus morceaux," and hung with scapularies, resonant with dangling and
sacred medals, the prayers of their friends still ringing in their
ears, they embarked for Constantinople.

A shrill February wind was blowing as the _Ava_ steamed out of
Marseilles.  But in spite of the cold no stove was lit to warm the
shivering passengers, five in number.  The captain's only reply to
their protests was a threat to set the punkah going, upon which they
turned up the collars of their greatcoats and said no more about it.
When evening came, all lights were extinguished at eight o'clock, and
all matches taken away from the passengers.  The reasons for these
privations then transpired: the whole ship, even the passengers'
private cabins, was loaded with ammunition, despatched by France to
Greece for the liberation of Macedonia from Turkish rule.

Jane, however, forgot her troubles under the blue sky of Greece.  It
went sorely against her conscience to travel from the Piraeus to Athens
" la remorque d'une locomotive".  An incurable romantic, she wanted to
ride.  She could not endure the idea that the smoke of an engine should
soil the olive trees near the city of Pericles.  But once she got up to
the Acropolis she forgot the sacrilege which she had willy-nilly
committed; she scrambled up the Propylea, cursed Lord Elgin,
resuscitated Xerxes on his throne of gold, projected herself into the
soul of the Hellenes.  When she reached Constantinople her enthusiasm
overflowed.  Here were no trains (or at least not visible), no smoke,
no coal, only slim caiques flying like arrows over the glittering
waters.  The Dieulafoys stayed in Constantinople for a fortnight.  They
saw the Sultan, howled with the howling dervishes, gyrated with the
dancing dervishes, ate kebabs and cheese pastry, explored the bazaars,
and were informed that the best road into Persia lay via Tiflis.

Now March is not the ideal month to choose for journeying over the
roads of this difficult country.  As I have already said, and say again
in print, since we, living there, said it in speech a dozen times a
week: if the weather is mild, the snows melt; if it is severe, they do
not, so the traveller has to take his choice between floods or
snowdrifts.  After innumerable adventures the Dieulafoys finally
reached Kasvin, and a mere hundred miles lay between them and the
capital.  They had already been three months on the way, they had
covered over six hundred kilometres of bad roads, their coach had
overturned several times, they had been compelled to spend stormy
nights in the open, they had run the gauntlet of Kurdish brigands.
Jane was not afraid of brigands, but inclined rather to the belief that
they were afraid of her.  "Je me considre avec orgueil.  Se peut-il
qu'un gamin de ma taille pouvante les Kurdes, ces farouches nomades?"
All these adventures successfully surmounted, the 9th of May saw them
at Kasvin, but here a real misfortune overtook them: Monsieur Dieulafoy
fell ill.  Jane was indomitable.  She procured a waggon, but where were
the horses?  Jane scoured Kasvin for horses, and found them at three
o'clock in the morning.  The suffering Marcel was laid in the waggon on
a mattress; they rumbled out of the town, but before they had gone five
miles the wheels sank in mud; they were stuck.  Jane herself seized the
reins and thrashed the team.  Peasants came to the rescue with oxen.
Somehow or other they made their way along the execrable road and by
nightfall were no more than twenty miles from the capital.  Here the
toll-keeper refused to allow them to continue.  But Jane had seen the
snowy cone of Demavend like a white beacon ahead, and over-rode all his
objections.  By ten o'clock that night, with Marcel delirious in the
waggon, they pulled into Teheran.

Here for three weeks Jane remained at the invalid's bedside, never once
going beyond the gate of the hotel garden, which for a creature of her
energetic and inquiring disposition at least gives proof of a very
considerable devotion.  Early in June, frail, tottering, but
convalescent, Marcel was led out to have an audience of the Shah.
Under the charge of the French doctor, the Dieulafoys awaited his
Majesty in the garden of the palace, having first rammed their hats
firmly on their heads, lest they should inadvertently remove them in
the imperial presence (was this Jane's habitual gesture of
salutation?), "ce qui serait de la dernire grossiret".  Presently
Nasr-ed-Din, followed by his servants, was seen approaching between the
trees; an interpreter walked beside him, reading aloud from a French
newspaper; the Shah wore a black fez, a cashmere robe, white drill
trousers, pumps, white socks, and white cotton gloves on his small
hands.  Jane was impressed by his distinguished appearance, his hooked
nose, his white teeth, black hair, and moustachios.  The party bowed
deeply, and the doctor begged leave to present Monsieur and Madame
Dieulafoy.

"What," said the Shah, "is that boy a woman?"  On being assured that it
was so, he addressed Jane in French.  Why, he enquired, was she not
dressed in the long skirts and garments of European ladies?  Jane
replied that she found man's dress more convenient, and that a European
woman travelling in Mohammedan countries was too much exposed to an
inconvenient curiosity.  "True," said the Shah, "but do you suppose
that if a Persian woman in her veil appeared on the Paris boulevards,
she would not immediately become the centre of a large crowd?  Can you
paint?" he asked abruptly.  Jane said no, she could not.  "That's a
pity," said the Shah; "I should have liked a portrait of myself on
horseback.  Do you know Grvy? do you know Gambetta? how is Grvy?" he
said to Marcel.  "How old are you?" he asked, without waiting for
answers.  Marcel said he was thirty-seven.  "You look a great deal
older," said the Shah.  "Don't forget to tell Monsieur Grvy I am his
good friend," and the audience was over.

Then the Dieulafoys must take the road again, with Marcel recovered;
that Isfahan road, and the farther road which I did not know: the road
to Shiraz, Persepolis, Pars, Susa.  Before them lay experiences both
pleasant and unpleasant; the midsummer sun to be faced over stretches
of shadeless plain; the feverish swamps of the Karoun River.  Cold,
flood, and mud they had overcome between Tabriz and Teheran; now they
must endure the worst heats of summer, scorching or malarial.  "I would
not," said Jane, "wish my enemy such pleasures.  That he should follow
the English telegraph line from Teheran to Shiraz I would allow; but
may his evil star never lead him into Pars, into Kouistan, or to the
cursed banks of the Karoun."

Between Teheran and Shiraz, indeed, the journey went smoothly forward;
we get glimpses of Jane, on her passage through Persian villages,
playing "La Fille de Madame Angot" on the harmonium to local governors
(but she played it too fast for their taste, and had to play it again,
half time); explaining to Persian ladies that Queen Victoria has no
beard, and only one husband; falling asleep on her horse from weariness
at the end of the day.  But when they plunged again into Persia (after
an excursion into Iraq), into the wild provinces, bound for Susa, it is
a different story.  Jane fell so ill with fever that fragile objects
were no longer to be entrusted to her shaking hands.  Yet she would not
turn back.  Day after day she rode, strapped to her horse lest she
should fall; and though sometimes she thought her strength would give
out before the caravan reached its destination, her enthusiasm always
revives as tomb or ruin comes into sight; she is always ready to draw
the ground-plan for Marcel; always ready to listen to the songs of the
itinerant musician they have carried along with them on the way.  Her
health might fail, but her spirit never.  Even on the boat, bound at
last for France after a long year's journey, shattered by fever, no
sooner has her strength recovered enough to let her walk from one end
of the deck to the other without undue exhaustion, than she seizes her
pen again and reviews the entire history of Persia.  Jane returned to
France a celebrated woman.  But she had paid the price.  The pleasure
of relating her adventures cost her two hundred grains of quinine; and
though she was willing to overlook the chemist's bill, she bore a long
grudge for her broken health and her failing eyesight.

But it was not so much of Jane on her travels that I thought, as of
Jane in the Teheran of the early 'eighties, and of the great pity that
she could not paint Nasr-ed-Din on horseback, for her diary would
certainly have chronicled their conversations as their acquaintance
progressed, with Jane standing peremptory behind her easel and the Shah
reining in his mount, two people both accustomed to say what they
meant, both no doubt giving as good as they got, beneath the plane
trees of the garden, in the sun and shadows of a Persian June.  Time, I
found, passed very pleasantly for me in the elaboration of these scenes
which had never taken place; it was a pleasanter occupation than
listening to the platitudes of the acquaintances with whom I paced the
walks, in the uncertain swaying of the coloured lights.  Then suddenly
I heard the words of my companion of the moment chime in with my secret
game: "Yes," the voice was saying reminiscently, "I remember that as a
child in Paris I was once allowed to be present at an evening party.
My father, holding me by the hand, told me to look at the person who
had just come into the room.  I looked, and saw a little grizzled old
gentleman, in a smoking-jacket, with the Legion of Honour in his
buttonhole.  'That,' said my father, 'is Madame Dieulafoy.'"




CHAPTER IX

RUSSIA


I

The countryside had also decked itself for the coronation; all along
the roads, where the judas trees had now shed their magenta and clothed
themselves in leaf instead, the jasmine and wild roses were in full
flower.  In the gardens, poor stunted tea-roses that in England would
have been torn up by a derisive hand and flung on the bonfire, had for
some weeks past been putting forth their blooms; but it is for the
exuberance of the native wildling that one must wait before one
understands the reputation of Persian roses.  Huge bushes, compact, not
straggling like the English dog-rose, spattered with flame-coloured
blossom; the ground carpeted with fallen petals--this is the first
impression, then a closer scrutiny reveals the lovely shape of the
separate flower, the pure, early shape of the briar-rose, of a pristine
simplicity which our whorled hybrids, superlative though they be, can
never excel; and, allied to that early, naked design, a colour such as
all our cross-fertilisation fails to produce: the interior of the petal
red, but lined with gold, the two together giving a glow of orange, a
burning bush.  Side by side with these grew the yellow rose, which to
me was always the rose of Kum, and the low, shrubby jasmine, and plumes
of acacia that scented the air; the brief spring was once more making
the most of its allotted season.  I could not believe but that the
earth was ready to break into other sudden, concealed riches, for I had
learnt by now to take nothing on trust, and to ignore the
disparagements of other people, for very quickly I had discovered that
those who found 'nothing to see' were those who did not know how to
look; but although equipped with this pharisaical humour, I might no
longer indulge it, for the time had come for me to return to England.

Already the promise of summer hung over Persia; the planes were heavy
in leaf, and the trickle of water became more persistent, as the
gardeners (with one trouser leg rolled up to the thigh, a fashion I
could never wholly explain) released the pent-up streams and allowed
them to pour over the thirsty beds, or padded bare-footed about the
garden, splashing water to lay the dust in the early morning.  We no
longer courted the sun, but darkened the house all day with reed
blinds, raising them only in the evening when the snows of Demavend
turned red, and the dusk came quickly, and the little owls began to
hoot, and the frogs hopped on the garden path, and the breeze rose and
sighed in the planes.  The imminence of departure oppressed me; I was
beginning to say, "This time next week..." and to suffer when I heard
people making plans for a date, not very far distant, when I should no
longer be there; heartlessly they made their plans, the people for whom
life flowed continuous, while I sat by and listened, under sentence of
death; then the days began to rush, and the day came which was still an
ordinary day for other people, but for me was a day so different.  An
early start, so like, so unlike, the start for Isfahan; the motor at
the door; luggage being carried out; the curtained windows of other
houses, whose inhabitants still slept, would sleep for three hours
longer, by which time I should be sixty miles away; the early morning
life just stirring, the white pony going his rounds with the
water-casks; a freshness over everything; the dogs wanting to come;
being refused; the servants wishing me a good journey, and bringing me
little presents; the fat cook coming out in his white shoes with a
basket of little cakes.  My room empty upstairs, but my books still on
the shelves; my handwriting, reversed, still on the blotting-paper;
good-bye, good-bye; for Heaven's sake let us get this over.  The guard
at the gate saluting, then the streets, the Kasvin gate, the Kasvin
road; what a difference, between arrival and departure! _then_,
everything had been new, I had looked with curiosity, Demavend himself
had had to be pointed out to me and named, I had not known what to
expect next round the turn of the road; now, everything was a landmark
to be left behind, every place had a meaning and an association; there
was the shop where we had bought the pots, there was the place of
meeting for the paper-chase, there was the track that led up to
Var-dar-Var, where we had first found the wild almond in flower, and
had marked off an unknown shrub with a ring of stones.  Still the
donkeys trailed along the road, though camels were few, for they had
gone up to Gilan for the spring grazing; and every one I met going
towards Teheran I envied, and every one I overtook going towards Kasvin
I pitied for being in the same plight as I.

After Kasvin the road was unfamiliar, and the character of the
landscape changed with surprising abruptness.  We were no longer on the
roof; the high, arid plateaus were gone; the vegetation became lush and
green, the climate changed from the clear air of four thousand feet to
the mild, steamy atmosphere of sub-tropical sea-level.  We had dropped
from over four thousand feet in a few hours, down a precipitous road
into the valley of the White River.  The scenery was fine, in its way;
groves of trees descended the steep slopes to the banks of the river,
and between the trees could be seen green meadows, as green as
Devonshire, with cows peacefully grazing, or--an odd effect--camels
grazing in this Devonshire landscape, as who should come upon a herd of
camels in the meadows above the Dart; the valley of the White River had
its beauty, but it was not Persia as I understood it, and I resolved
that I would never bring any one into Persia for the first time by that
road, but would subject them to the rigours of the plains and passes of
Kermanshah and Hamadan.  Evening fell; we seemed to have been
travelling interminably; the continual hairpin corners made driving
very tiring; we met strings of hooded waggons, whose miserable teams
could scarcely drag them up the hill; men were shouting, and tugging at
the bridles, and thrashing the stumbling horses; we got past them all
somehow, and drew up in a village by the river where a notice-board
proclaimed the Hotel Fantasia.

[Illustration: GILAN: ON THE ROAD TO RESHT.]

It was well named, for a crazier building I never saw; an outside
staircase, with two steps missing, led up to a wooden balcony, and here
we pitched our camp-beds and slept as well as the fleas would allow us.
There had been no fleas at Dilijan or at Kum; the rooms there had been
bare and clean; it was typical of the difference between that happy and
this miserable journey.  There, we had gone to sleep conscious of the
free space all around us; here, we were in a narrow valley with the
river roaring in a brown flood fifty yards away, and no sense of Asia.
Next day the road ran on into fertile Gilan, chestnut woods appeared,
olives, and fields of rice; the country was flat, the young rice of a
brilliant green indescribable, to those who have not seen it; even the
peasants walked with a different gait, because from childhood they must
pick their way, carrying baskets slung from either end of a long pole
across their shoulders, along the narrow ridges dividing rice-swamp
from rice-swamp, a characteristic celebrated in the local poetry; out
of the flooded fields rose little Chinese-looking shelters built on
piles, in which the peasants keep watch at night for wild pig; the
houses were no longer of mud, but of brick, tiled or thatched like
cottages in Hampshire; where was my Persia gone? and I imagined how
this road would seem, coming the other way, into Persia instead of out;
how after following the valley along its course, and climbing up, up,
instead of going down, down, the traveller would suddenly find himself
on the table-land heights, with the grandeur suddenly revealed to him.
But we came to Resht, a brown-red town that had nothing in common with
the sun-dried villages I knew, and, remorselessly carried onward, next
day I realised that I was on the Caspian, and that the fading mountains
on the horizon were the last I should see of Persia.

Then little by little every link that still bound me to Persia began to
drop away; I lost the direction of Teheran, my watch no longer
registered Teheran time, my Persian cigarettes gave out and were
replaced by Russian ones.  By such small things did I realise my
severance.  Then a fog came down, hiding the line of the Elburz, and
the little steamer hooted her mournful way across the sea, and morning
dawned upon the coast of Russia.


II

I had been prepared to enter into an atmosphere of gloom and fear; all
my sensibility was on the alert to receive such an impression; but I
cannot say that in Baku I experienced anything of the sort.  Perhaps
the Russians of the south are by temperament gayer than the people of
the north, for certainly the citizens of Baku have seen their share of
trouble, both in their own town and in the neighbouring Caucasian
provinces--twenty-five people, so I was told, had been shot in Baku
itself on the previous day,--yet one heard singing in the streets,
people laughed and looked merry, wore bright colours, made love on the
benches in the public garden.  Lack of trains compelled me to spend two
days at Baku; the hotel was good, the food excellent, the caviare of
course fresh and abundant, the hotel servants civil and obliging.  I
had expected to be crowded off the pavement into the street; not a bit
of it.  I was almost disappointed.  Was this Bolshevik Russia?  There
was nothing to show me what country I was in except the notices written
in Russian, the belted blouses of the men, and the padded blue
cab-drivers sitting behind their yoked horses.  After Persia, the first
thing which struck one was the general air of prosperity; it was
extraordinary to see houses of stone, paved streets, electric trams,
and the great well-fed horses with their rounded rumps; though perhaps
coming the other way, from Europe, it would not have been so
remarkable.  The first hint I had of anything different was at Baku
station; arrived there, with our tickets and papers all in order, we
(that is to say, myself and some Persian friends whom I had fortunately
met) were informed that no places could be reserved in advance.  The
train came from Tiflis; was always crowded; we had very little chance
of finding room.  There would be another train in four days' time....
It was lucky that my acquaintances knew Russian, or I might be at Baku
to this day.  The Persian Consulate-General was called by telephone;
some official or other promised that the impossible should be done;
meanwhile we were put with our luggage into what had once been the
Imperial waiting-room, and which was now decorated with enlarged
photographs of Chicherin and Litvinoff, and with a bust of Lenin draped
in scarlet and black.  In this waiting-room (which, although stripped
of its magnificence so far as possible, still betrayed its Imperial
origin in the luxury of its separate entrance and its adjoining
lavatories) some miscellaneous persons beside ourselves were herded:
some peasant women with bundles, and a shabby little man who sat
huddled on a divan, and who, we were warned, had been put there to
listen to our conversation.  For the first time we dropped our voices
and guarded our words--an unpleasant sensation, but one destined to
become familiar.  Presently the train steamed into the station; we
began to agitate; a railway official came in and said with a wink that
a carriage was being 'cleaned out' for us; this, it appeared, was a
euphemistic way of saying that its occupants were being turned out and
left to shift for themselves for our benefit--again, not my idea of
Bolshevik Russia.

Most people have the idea that travelling in Russia is to-day almost
out of the question; they know vaguely that the classes are no longer
called 'first' and 'second', but 'soft' and 'hard'; this frightens
them, and they do not stop to reflect that it comes to exactly the same
thing.  Let me assure them that Russian trains are quite as comfortable
as European trains; in fact, rather more comfortable, for they go very
slowly and run on a wider gauge.  For a few roubles you can hire
pillows, blankets, and sheets, perfectly clean and supplied to you in a
sealed sack.  You are also given a towel, but no water to wash with.
To compensate for the absence of water, the trains are usually run on
wood, which does away with the peculiar grime of coal-driven railways.
There is really nothing to complain of.  But for some
reason--connected, I suspect, with the question of commissions on the
sale of tickets--if you go to a travelling agency in London and ask for
a ticket to Teheran via Moscow, you will be met with a pitying smile
and the word "Impossible".

There is nothing further to be said in favour of the journey from Baku
to Moscow, for it is exceedingly monotonous; the names of the Caucasus,
the Sea of Azov, Rostov-on-Don seemed full of suggestion, but it very
quickly evaporated: the Caucasus was reduced to a few foothills, the
Sea of Azov looked much like any other sea, and of Rostov one sees only
the railway station, unrelieved even by the presence of a Don Cossack.
After Rostov the steppe begins, and 'le long ennui de la plaine'; very
different from the Persian plains, it rolls away to the horizon in
green billows, not arid enough to be impressive, not luxuriant enough
to be beautiful, dotted with poor Cossack villages, populated by drab
peasants.  A sad country.  Then we passed through the Ukraine, which
depressed me in spite of its rich black soil, for I remembered how
before the war I had stayed there in the magnificent hospitality of
Polish friends, riding, dancing, laughing; living at a fantastic rate
in that fantastic oasis of extravagance and feudalism, ten thousand
horses on the estate, eighty English hunters, and a pack of English
hounds; a park full of dromedaries; another park, walled in, full of
wild animals kept for sport; Tokay of 1750, handed round by a giant;
cigarettes handed round by dwarfs in eighteenth-century liveries; and
where was all that now?  Gone, as it deserved to go; the house razed to
the ground till it was lower than the wretched hovels of the peasants,
the estate parcelled out, cut in half by the new Polish frontier, the
owner dead, with his brains blown out, and his last penny gambled away
in Paris.  I had not realised that we should pass so near.


III

On the third day we arrived at Moscow.  I scarcely know how to write of
Moscow; I have only that to say which others have said before, others
who have had a longer and more privileged experience than I, and who
even so have not succeeded in finding any definition.  I was in Moscow
a very short time, I spoke with very few Russians; yet I felt that if I
were condemned to live there for long I should go mad.  Why, exactly, I
felt this, I cannot say; I do not think it was suggestion, or I should
surely have felt the same at Baku; besides, by the time I arrived in
Moscow, I was inclined to pooh-pooh the accounts I had heard of the
"depressing atmosphere of Russia".  It is a fixed idea, I had said to
myself in Baku, this depressing atmosphere; people feel it because they
think they ought to feel it, but there is no evidence of it anywhere.
What made it the more alarming was that no actual evidence of it
existed in Moscow either; but when you enter a room in which two people
have just been having an emotional scene, you are aware of the
atmosphere at once, even though they control themselves in your
presence; so it was with Moscow.  Nothing visible happened, yet the air
was charged; and tiny indications corroborated.  People glanced over
their shoulders at dinner to see whether the servants were listening;
conversation became freer when the servants had left the room;
dinner-parties were given indeed, but every guest arrived rather as
though he had just escaped a lion in the street.  But I was convinced
not so much by these things, in private houses, nor by the furtive
confidences poured out to a complete stranger by fellow-guests--tales
of false money slipped into pockets, and arrests made on that formal
charge--as by my own intuition and the aspect of the town.  I know that
intuition is a poor argument; I know that it is presumptuous to touch
even the fringe of the Russian problem without cognizance, economical,
political, historical, of all the facts; but what of Kinglake's
traveller, who tells of all objects, not as he knows (or does not know)
them to be, but as they seem to him?  For all I know, it may be true
that a great spirit of elation informs the Russian people; all I can
say is, that if Moscow is an elated city, then let me live elsewhere.
I got the impression of a population furtively slinking along the
walls; a people cowering away; a nation whose aspirations had been
trimmed to a dead level, as a hedge.  There was beggary, the depth to
which one might sink; but no height, beyond that dead level, to which
one might rise.  And yet, again, I do not know.  Possibly the judgement
is warped from the start because one instinctively applies the ordinary
standards of Western Europe to this country which has discarded the
dominant Western conception--that of Wealth as the be-all and end-all
of existence--without yet achieving the peace and freedom in which the
new ideals may develop.  That is to say, the general aspect of poverty
in Moscow--the fact that no one dresses better than his neighbour--may
have much, too much, to do with our hasty conclusions.  We are too well
accustomed to associate material prosperity with spiritual happiness.
So, also, we are too impatient, we who have grown up in a country where
change, although it seems quick to us, is a mere tortoise compared with
such volcanic overthrows; we are too impatient, too intolerant of
disorder, even temporary, to allow for the difficult and painful stage
of transition; we like settled things, established things; we will not
realise that the personal freedom which we demand as our right, and
whose mildest infringement we resent, cannot exist as yet under a young
system, dangerous, precarious, grappling on to its existence.
Communism is fighting for its life, it is unscrupulous, brutal,
criminal; it forces us to say that the Russians have but exchanged one
tyranny for another; but, however much we may blame it for its methods,
we cannot say that it is, in its aims, immoral.  Taking a God's-eye
view, what possible redemption can we suggest for the world but an
escape from materialism?  And that is what Soviet Russia would enforce.
It may be an impossible ideal.  To enforce it leads to barbarism,
persecution, misery, cant, and to the questionable practice of
underhand interference with other countries; but all this does not
alter the idea which lies, sound, at the root of the matter.  The
practical difficulties may prove too great, the mercenary, predatory
instincts of human nature too strong; for, in common with that other
great idea, a league of nations, Communism has human nature as an
opponent.  To overcome this, the Soviet would say in
self-justification, human nature must be crushed, coerced; it must be
altered, willy-nilly; it must be reborn.  Small wonder that a people
undergoing the process of such coercion should slink along the walls of
the capital as malefactors dreading the descent of the hand of justice.
Conform and live; dissent, and die.


IV

That was a curious journey home, its beginning in personal
heart-sickness, its middle in intense, impersonal interest, its end in
sheer farce.  For, when the train reached the Polish frontier, at dawn,
after a night spent in the 'hard' class with three Russians,
strangers,--a night during which I revised my ideas of Russian
travelling,--and when every one in the train was sighing with relief,
and saying "Thank goodness, we arrive in civilised Europe again," we
were met with quite other news.  Revolution in Poland; Warsaw in the
hands of the rebels; the telegraph wires cut; the line blown up; no
trains able to proceed to Warsaw.  The dismayed passengers crowded
round the phlegmatic officials in the customs shed.  No, they could
tell us nothing more; the train would go on as far as it could, perhaps
to within twenty, perhaps fifteen miles of Warsaw; there we should be
turned out and left to our own devices; people were being shot down in
the streets of Warsaw; how many? perhaps three hundred, perhaps three
thousand; who could tell?  No news was coming through.  Would they
advise us to go on or not?  They shrugged, they could not advise; if we
liked to risk it ... I was not afraid of being shot, but I _was_ afraid
of being indefinitely delayed.  A mixed company of Germans, Russians,
and Austrians, who were afraid of the same thing, finally sorted
themselves out from the babbling crowd of passengers, and drifted into
a little group apart, as people will, whose interests and opinions are
the same, in even the tiniest and most newly born of communities.  I
found myself with eight or nine middle-aged, bullet-headed men, who
looked, roughly speaking, like commercial travellers; and one blonde,
very blonde, young woman, an Austrian, travelling in the company of one
of the men, in what capacity it was not hard to determine.  A
time-table was produced from somewhere; assuming that it still held
good for the unaffected parts of Poland, we calculated that we should
be able to reach the German frontier that night.  The Germans had but
one idea in their heads, and that was to sleep that night in their own
country.  Considering the rumours that were current--the whole of
Poland under military rule within twenty-four hours, railways and
bridges destroyed, communication with the rest of Europe interrupted--I
could scarcely blame them; indeed, I shared their determination.  My
difficulty was that I had no money.  I had my ticket through from
Moscow to London, and only enough cash to pay for my food on the way:
how was I to buy new tickets, however 'hard' I might be prepared to
travel?  A fellow-passenger came to my rescue.  He was a shabby little
man, dressed in a ready-made suit, his hair _en brosse_, but he
produced from his pocket-book wads of American notes, which he pressed
into my hand.  For once the orange labels on my luggage had served a
useful purpose.  There they hung, in the restaurant of the Polish
station, crumpled, defaced, but still saying: PERSIA.  Alas, Persia was
very far away; I had now been travelling for twelve days; it seemed
sufficiently absurd that I should have come out of Asia only to run
into a revolution in Europe.  Still, I was amused rather than annoyed;
amused to find myself in the company of these unknown units, all linked
together, suddenly, by a common predicament, familiarly talking
together, although the whole background of our lives remained an
unknown quantity.  Herr Mller, Herr Rosendorf; I picked up their names
little by little.

The train took us as far as Bialystok; there we were left uncertain on
the platform; some one suggested a motor, some one else an aeroplane;
but the problem was solved for us by the arrival of a small, local
train, which would at any rate put us a little farther on our way.  In
this we proceeded at a very leisurely pace all day, crawling round the
back of Poland, seeing no sign of revolution except a few troops
standing about at country stations, and a few sentries posted near
bridges and signal-boxes.  It was warm, and the corn was growing; the
farms and homesteads looked prosperous, not unlike English farms; it
was pleasant to come back to spring, after Russia where the spring had
not yet broken, and to see rural Poland thus unexpectedly, instead of
keeping to the beaten track.  It was a rolling landscape, with clumps
of dark firs on the sky-line, well-kept roads, gates painted a clean
white; after Persia and Russia, I felt that I was really back in
Europe.  At eight o'clock, after this peaceful and uneventful journey,
we arrived at a small frontier town--Grajevo.  Out on the platform
again, and into another customs shed, only to learn that the train
would go no farther.  And what about the trains next day?  Oh, the
trains next day, said the Poles, there probably wouldn't be any trains
next day.  My Germans were in consternation.  Sleep on Polish soil they
would not.  Were there any motors?  Yes, there was one motor in
Grajevo, but it was broken down.  But there was an engine in the
siding; could we not have that?  Well, said the Poles very dubiously,
we might perhaps have that, but not until one o'clock in the morning,
not until all was quiet and everybody gone to bed.  After some
consultation we closed with this offer.  It remained only for us to put
away the hours between eight and one.

There is not much to do in a Polish village.  We wandered out into the
street, the Germans now a hilarious band, arm-in-arm, singing student
songs, since they saw some prospect of escape; but it was obvious that
we could not walk up and down for half the night, even so mild a night,
under the stars, in the dark street.  I wondered what my friends in
England would say if they could miraculously see me, instead of
thinking of me comfortably asleep in a _wagon-lit_, rushing across
Europe?  For Polish revolutions mean very little to us when we read the
headlines in the morning paper, but when you run into them they lead
you, as I was finding, into unusual situations.

  Nach Frankreich zogen zwei Grenadier',
    Die waren in Russland gefangen,

sang the Austrian blonde in a rich contralto, and laid her golden head
on the shoulder of her companion.  Everybody was very good-humoured and
merry.  Then some one espied a caf, with a light showing, and we burst
noisily in there, and were established round a table in a little room,
a cottage piano in one corner, and on the walls coloured lithographs of
Millais' Angelus and of a Russian sledge being pursued by wolves.  In
the next room, some Polish officers, sitting drinking at little tables,
eyed us curiously, as well they might.  Herr Rosendorf called for wine;
he called for vodka; both were brought, and bacon and eggs, and the
table laid in a twinkling.  The vodka dwindled in the bottle; the party
became uproarious.  German, Russian, and English were spoken
indifferently, and even a few words of Japanese by somebody just
returning from Japan.  Everybody shouted little bits of information
about themselves.  My opposite number leaned across the table and
announced to me, in a stentorian voice, "I have travelled Singer's
sewing machines one hundred thousand miles over Manchuria".  "Say
something in Persian," they demanded, and I repeated a verse from
Hafiz.  These middle-aged, bullet-headed gentlemen became as children;
they even beat on the table with spoons.  Then one of the Polish
officers, unable to bear his isolation any longer, came in and started
playing the "Blue Danube" on the piano.  The Austrian blonde sprang up
and began to dance.  The men quarrelled in an arch, skittish way as to
who should dance with her, pushing each other about, and digging one
another in the ribs: chairs were overturned; somebody made a speech;
post-cards were bought, and passed round for everybody's signature.  By
this time they were all very drunk indeed.  The Austrian blonde shook
off her partner, returned to her place, laid her head on her arms and
began to cry.  Her companion sat stroking her hair, a pleased smile on
his face.  She nestled, kittenish, into his arms and went to sleep.

She woke up, however, at the first movement towards departure, pulled
out a little mirror, attended to her face, combed her short golden
hair, and, pouting, allowed herself to be escorted into the street.
There, at the station, was our engine, with a tender attached, puffing
red clouds into the night; we climbed aboard amongst many jokes and
much hilarity, suppressed by the railway officials, who kept glancing
anxiously and guiltily round.  As we steamed off, down the dark line,
nothing could restrain the party; they sang "Deutschland ber Alles";
remembered my presence; stopped; said they hoped England did not mind:
so England was compelled to join in.  Thus we came into Germany.


V

I forget the name of the German village; I know only that I had three
hours' sleep in a clean little room with an iron bedstead and a blue
tin basin, and that we were all in a train again by six the next
morning.  That day passed in a haze: Knigsberg; a long wait there,
drinking coffee out of thick cups and looking at photographs in the
German papers of the scenes in Warsaw; then another train; the Polish
Corridor; East Prussia; Berlin.  Farewell to my companions, who were to
scatter to their destinations.  The efficiency of Berlin; the quick,
good taxi, striped black and white like a bandbox; the lighted streets;
the polished asphalt; the Kaiserhof.  I was travel-stained and tired;
the servants at the Kaiserhof looked at me with polite suspicion; I
revenged myself on them by sending for the head waiter, ordering the
best dinner and the most expensive wine, and by distributing enormous
tips out of my wad of American notes.  As I had not had a proper meal
since leaving Moscow, I took a good deal of trouble over the ordering
of that dinner.  I was afraid I might have to spend the night in
Berlin, but I discovered a train that left for Flushing at ten; next
morning found me in Holland.  The customs-house officer at the Dutch
frontier made me an offer of marriage.  Then everything began to rush.
Was I on the sea? very rough, too; beautiful, green, white-crested
waves; was I at Folkestone? with English voices talking round me? was
that Yew Tree Cottage and the path across the fields?  Were those the
two pistons at Orpington, still going up and down, and still a little
wrong?  Was I standing on the platform at Victoria, I who had stood on
so many platforms?  The orange labels dangled in the glare of the
electric lamps.  PERSIA, they said; PERSIA.




THE END






[End of Passenger to Teheran, by V. Sackville-West]
