As the sun sank the distant hills became rose-flushed, and then one by one the flush died off into the paleness of death, and in the gathering blue-grayness, in desolation without sublimity, in ghastliness, impressive but only by force of ghastliness, and in benumbing cold, we rode into this village, and into a yard encumbered with mighty piles of snow, on one side of which I have a wretched room, though the best, with two doors, which do not shut, but when they are closed make it quite dark—a deep, damp, cobwebby, dusty, musty lair like a miserable eastern cowshed.
I was really half-frozen and quite benumbed, and though I had plenty of blankets and furs, had a long and severe chill, and another to-day. M—— also has had bad chills, and the Afghan orderly is ill, and moaning with pain in the next room. Hadji has fallen into a state of chronic invalidism, and is shaking with chills, his teeth chattering, and he is calling on Allah whenever I am within hearing.
The chilly dampness and the rise in temperature again may have something to do with the ailments, but I think that we Europeans are suffering from the want of nourishing food. Meat has not been attainable for some days, the fowls are dry and skinny, and milk is very scarce and poor. I cannot eat the sour wafers which pass for bread, and as Hadji cannot boil rice or make flour porridge, I often start in the morning having only had a cup of tea. I lunch in the saddle on dates, the milk in the holsters having been frozen lately; then is the time for finding the value of a double peppermint lozenge!
Snow fell heavily last night, and as the track has not been broken, and the charvadars dared not face it, we are detained in this miserable place, four other caravans sharing our fate. The pros and cons about starting were many, and Abbas Khan was sent on horseback to reconnoitre, but he came back like Noah's dove, reporting that it was a trackless waste of snow outside. It is a day of rest, but as the door has to be open on the snow to let in light, my hands are benumbed with the damp cold. Still, a bowl of Edwards' desiccated soup—the best of all travelling soups—has been very reviving, and though I have had a severe chill again, I do not mean to succumb. I do not dwell on the hardships, but they are awful. The soldiers and servants all have bad coughs, and dwindle daily. The little orderly is so ill to-day that we could not have gone on even had the track been broken.
Saruk, Feb. 12.—Unladen asses, followed by unladen mules, were driven along to break the track this morning, and as two caravans started before us, it was tolerable, though very deep. The solitude and desolation were awful. At first the snow was somewhat thawed, but soon it became immensely deep, and we had to plunge through hollows from which the beasts extricated themselves with great difficulty and occasionally had to be unloaded and reloaded.
As I mentioned in writing of an earlier march, it is difficult and even dangerous to pass caravans when the only road is a deep rut a foot wide, and we had most tedious experience of it to-day, when some of our men, weakened by illness, were not so patient as usual. Abbas Khan and the orderly could hardly sit on their horses, and Hadji rolled off his mule at intervals. As the charvadars who give way have their beasts floundering in the deep snow and losing their loads, both attempt to keep the road, the result of which is a violent collision. The two animals which "collide" usually go down, and some of the others come on the top of them, and to-day at one time there were eight, struggling heels uppermost in the deep snow, all to be reloaded.
This led to a serious mêlée. The rival charvadar, aggravated by Hadji, struck him on the head, and down he went into the snow, with his mule apparently on the top of him, and his load at some distance. The same charvadar seized the halters of several of our mules, and drove them into the snow, where they all came to grief. Our charvadar, whose blue eyes, auburn hair and beard, and exceeding beauty, always bring to mind a sacred picture, became furious at this, and there was a fierce fight among the men (M—— being ahead) and much bad language, such epithets as "son of a dog" and "sons of burnt fathers" being freely bandied about. The fray at last died out, leaving as its result only the loss of an hour, some broken surcingles, and some bleeding faces. Even Hadji rose from his "gory bed" not much worse, though he had been hit hard.
There was no more quarrelling though we passed several caravans, but even when the men were reasonable and good nature prevailed some of the mules on both sides fell in the snow and had to be reloaded. When the matter is not settled as this was by violence, a good deal of shouting and roaring culminates in an understanding that one caravan shall draw off into a place where the snow is shallowest, and stand still till the other has gone past; but to-day scarcely a shallow place could be found. I always give place to asses, rather to avoid a painful spectacle than from humanity. One step off the track and down they go, and they never get up without being unloaded.
When we left Dizabad the mist was thick, and as it cleared it froze in crystallised buttons, which covered the surface of the snow, but lifting only partially it revealed snowy summits, sun-lit above heavy white clouds; then when we reached a broad plateau, the highest plain of the journey, 7800 feet in altitude, gray mists drifted very near us, and opening in rifts divulged blackness, darkness, and tempest, and ragged peaks exposed to the fury of a snowstorm. Snow fell in showers on the plain, and it was an anxious time, for had the storm which seemed impending burst on that wild, awful, shelterless expanse, with tired animals, and every landmark obliterated, some of us must have perished. I have done a great deal of snow travelling, and know how soon every trace of even the widest and deepest path is effaced by drift, much more the narrow rut by which we were crossing this most exposed plateau. There was not a village in sight the whole march, no birds, no animals. There was not a sound but the venomous hiss of snow-laden squalls. It was "the dead of winter."
My admirable mule was ill of cold from having my small saddle on him instead of his great stuffed pack-saddle, the charvadar said, and he gave me instead a horse that I could not ride. Such a gait I never felt; less than half a mile was unbearable. I felt as if my eyes would be shaken out of their sockets! The bit was changed, but in vain. I was obliged to get off, and M—— kindly put my saddle on a powerful Kirmanshah Arab. I soon found that my intense fatigue on this journey had been caused by riding mules, which have no elasticity of movement. I rode twenty miles to-day with ease, and could have ridden twenty more, and had several canters on the few places where the snow was well trodden.
I was off the track trying to get past a caravan and overtake the others, when down came the horse and I in a drift fully ten feet deep. Somehow I was not quite detached from the saddle, and in the scrimmage got into it again, and a few desperate plunges brought us out, with the horse's breastplate broken.
When we reached the great plateau above this village, a great blank sheet of snow, surrounded by mountains, now buried in white mists, now revealed, with snow flurries drifting wildly round their ghastly heads, I found that the Arab, the same horse which was so ill at Nanej, was "dead beat," and as it only looked a mile to the village I got off, and walked in the deep snow along the rungs of the "mule ladders," which are so fatiguing for horses. But the distance was fully three miles, with a stream to wade through, half a mile of deep wet soil to plunge through, and the thawed mud of a large village to splash through; and as I dared not mount again for fear of catching cold, I trailed forlornly into Saruk, following the men who were riding.
Can it be said that they rode? They sat feebly on animals, swaddled in felts and furs, the pagri concealing each face with the exception of one eye in a blue goggle; rolling from side to side, clutching at ropes and halters, moaning "Ya Allah!"—a deplorable cavalcade.
Saruk has some poplars, and is surrounded by a ruinous mud wall. It is a village of 150 houses, and is famous for very fine velvety carpets, of small patterns, in vivid vegetable dyes. At an altitude of 7500 feet, it has a severe climate, and only grows wheat and barley, sown in April and reaped in September. All this mountainous region that we are toiling through is blank on the maps, and may be a dead level so far as anything there is represented, though even its passes are in several cases over 7000 feet high.
Saruk, Feb. 13.—The circumstances generally are unfavourable, and we are again detained. The Afghan orderly, who is also interpreter, is very ill, and though he is very plucky it is impossible for him to move; the cook seems "all to pieces," and is overcome by cough and lassitude; Abbas Khan is ill, and his face has lost its comicality; and in the same room Hadji lies, groaning and moaning that he will not live through the night. Even M—-'s herculean strength is not what it was. I have chills, but in spite of them and the fatigue am really much better than when I left Baghdad, so that though I exercise the privilege of grumbling at the hardships, I ought not to complain of them, though they are enough to break down the strongest men. I really like the journey, except when I am completely knocked up, or the smoke is exceptionally blinding.
The snow in this yard is lying in masses twelve feet high, rising out of slush I do not know how many feet deep. It looks as if we had seen the last of the winter. The mercury is at 32° now. It is very damp and cold sitting in a room with one side open to the snow, and the mud floor all slush from the drip from the roof. The fuel is wet, and though a man has attempted four times to light a fire, he has only succeeded in making an overpowering smoke, which prefers hanging heavily over the floor and me to making its exit through the hole in the roof provided for it. The door must be kept open to let in light, and it also lets in fowls and many cats. My dhurrie has been trampled into the slush, and a deadly cold strikes up through it. Last night a man (for Hadji was hors de combat) brought in some live embers, and heaped some gum tragacanth thorns and animal fuel upon them; there was no chimney, and the hole in the roof was stopped by a clod. The result was unbearable. I covered my head with blankets, but it was still blinding and stifling, and I had to extinguish the fire with water and bear the cold, which then was about 20°. Later, there was a tempest of snow and rain, with a sudden thaw, and water dripped with an irksome sound on my well-protected bed, no light would burn, and I had the mortification of knowing that the same drip was spoiling writing paper and stores which had been left open to dry! But a traveller rarely lies awake, and to-day by keeping my feet on a box, and living in a mackintosh, I am out of both drip and mud. Such a room as I am now in is the ordinary room of a Persian homestead. It is a cell of mud, not brick, either sun or kiln dried. Its sides are cracked and let in air. Its roof is mud, under which is some brushwood lying over the rafters. It has no light holes, but as the door has shrunk considerably from the door posts, it is not absolutely dark. It may be about twelve feet square. Every part of it is blackened by years of smoke. The best of it is that it is raised two feet from the ground to admit of a fowl-house below, and opens on a rough platform which runs in front of all the dwelling-rooms. With the misfitting door and cracked sides it is much like a sieve.
I have waited to describe a Persian peasant's house till I had seen more of them. The yard is an almost unvarying feature, whether a small enclosure with a low wall and a gateway closed at night by a screen of reeds, or a great farmyard like this, with an arched entrance and dwelling-rooms for two or three generations along one or more of the sides.
The house walls are built of mud, not sun-dried brick, and are only one story high. The soil near villages is mostly mud, and by leading water to a given spot, a pit of mortar for building material is at once made. This being dug up, and worked to a proper consistency by the feet of men, is then made into a wall, piece after piece being laid on by hand, till it reaches a height of four feet and a thickness of three—the imperative tradition of the Persian builder. This is allowed a few days for hardening, when another layer of similar height but somewhat narrower is laid upon it, takchahs or recesses a foot deep or more being worked into the thickness of the wall, and the process is repeated till the desired height is attained. When the wall is thoroughly dry it is plastered inside and outside with a mixture of mud and chopped straw, and if this plastering is repeated at intervals, the style of construction is very durable.
The oven or tāndūr is placed in the floor of one room, at least, and answers for cooking and heating. A peasant's house has no windows, and the roof does not project beyond the wall.
All roofs are flat. Rude rafters of poplar are laid across the walls about two feet apart. In a ketchuda's or a wealthier peasant's house, above these are laid in rows peeled poplar rods, two inches apart, then a rush mat, and then the resinous thorns of the tragacanth bush, which are not liable to decay; but in the poorer houses the owner contents himself with a coarse reed mat or a layer of brushwood above the rafters. On this is spread a well-trodden-down layer of mud, then eight or ten inches of dry earth, and the whole is thickly plastered with mixed straw and mud. A slight slope at the back with a long wooden spout carries off the water. Such a roof is impervious to rain except in very severe storms if kept in order, that is, if it be plastered once a year, and well rolled after rain. Few people are so poor as not to have a neatly-made stone roller on their roofs. If this is lacking, the roof must be well tramped after rain by bare feet, and in all cases the snow must be shovelled off.
These roofs, among the peasantry, have no parapets. They are the paradise of dogs, and in hot weather the people take up their beds and sleep there, partly for coolness and partly because the night breeze gives freedom from mosquitos. In simple country life, though the premises of the peasants for the sake of security are contiguous, there are seldom even balustrades to the roofs, though in summer most domestic operations are carried on there. Fifty years ago Persian law sanctioned the stoning without trial or mercy of any one caught in the act of gazing into the premises of another, unless the gazer were the king.
Upon the courtyard stables, barns, and store-rooms open, but so far I notice that the granary is in the house, and that the six-feet-high clay receptacles for grain are in the living-room.
Looking from above upon a plain, the poplars which surround villages where there is a sufficiency of water attract the eye. At this season they are nothing but a brown patch on the snow. The villages themselves are of light brown mud, and are surrounded usually by square walls with towers at the corners, and all have a great gate. Within the houses or hovels the families are huddled irregularly, with all their appurtenances, and in winter the flocks and herds are in subterranean pens beneath. In summer the animals go forth at sunrise and return at sunset. The walls, which give most of the villages a fortified aspect, used to afford the villagers a degree of protection against the predatory Turkomans, and now give security to the flocks against Lur and other robbers.
Every village has its ketchuda or headman, who is answerable for the taxes, the safety of travellers, and other matters.
Siashan, Feb. 16.—The men being a little better, we left Saruk at nine on the 14th, I on a bright little Baghdadi horse, in such good case that he frequently threw up his heels in happy playfulness. The temperature had fallen considerably, there had been a fresh snowfall, and the day was very bright. The Arab horses are suffering badly in their eyes from the glare of the snow.
If I had not had such a lively little horse I should have found the march a tedious one, for we were six hours in doing eleven and a half miles on a level! The head charvadar had gone on early to make some arrangements, and the others loaded the animals so badly that Hadji and the cook rolled off their mules into the deep semi-frozen slush from the packs turning just outside the gates. We had three mules with us with worn-out tackle, and the loads rolled over many times, the riders, who were too weak to help themselves, getting bad falls. As each load, owing to the broken tackle, took fifteen minutes to put on again, and the men could do little, a great deal of hard, exasperating work fell on M——. After one bad fall in a snowdrift myself, I rode on alone with one mule with a valuable burden. This, turning for the fourth time, was soon under his body, and he began to kick violently, quite dismaying me by the bang of his hoofs against cases containing scientific instruments. It was a droll comedy in the snow. I wanted to get hold of his halter, but every time I went near him he whisked round and flung up his heels, till I managed to cut the ragged surcingle and set him free, when I caught him in deep snow, in which my horse was very unwilling to risk himself.
Soon after leaving Saruk, which, as I mentioned before, is famous for very fine carpets, we descended gently upon the great plain of Feraghan, perhaps the largest carpet-producing district of Persia. These carpets are very fine and their patterns are unique, bringing a very high price. This plain has an altitude of about 7000 feet, is 45 miles in length by from 8 to 15 in breadth, is officially stated to have 650 villages upon it, all agricultural and carpet producing, and is considerably irrigated by streams, which eventually lose themselves in a salt lake at its eastern extremity. It is surrounded by hills, with mountain ranges behind them, and must be, both as to productiveness and population, one of the most flourishing districts in Persia.
We were to have marched to Kashgird, but on reaching the hamlet of Ahang Garang I found that Abbas Khan had taken quarters there, saying that Kashgird was in ruins.
Hadji, who had allowed himself to roll off several times, was moaning and weeping on the floor of my room, groaning out, with many cries of Ya Allah, "Let me stay here till I'm better; I don't want any wages; I shall be killed, oh, killed! Oh, my family! I shall never see Bushire any more!" Though there was much reason to think he was shamming, I did the little that he calls his "work," and left him to smoke his opium pipe and sleep by the fire in peace.
I was threatened with snow-blindness in one eye; in fact I saw nothing with it, and had to keep it covered up. One of the charvadars lay moaning outside my room, poor fellow, taking chlorodyne every half-hour, and another had got a bad foot from frost-bite. They have been terribly exposed, and the soft snow at a higher temperature has been worse for them than the dry powdery snow at a low temperature, as it soaks their socks, shoes, and leggings, and then freezes. Making Liebig's beef tea warms one, and they like it even from a Christian hand. The Afghan orderly bore up bravely, but was very weak. Indeed the prospect of getting these men to Tihran is darkening daily.
My room, though open to the snow at one end, was comfortable. The oven had been lighted twelve hours before, and it was delightful to hang one's feet into the warm hole. There were holes for light in the roof, and cold though it was, so long as daylight lasted these were never free from veiled faces looking down.
In order to become thoroughly warm it was necessary to walk long and briskly on the roof, and this brought all the villagers below it to stare the stare of vacuity rather than of curiosity. A snow scene is always beautiful at sunset, and this was exceptionally so, as the long indigo shadows on the plain threw into greater definiteness the gleaming, glittering hills, at one time dazzling in the sunshine, at another flushed in the sunset. The plain of Feraghan as seen from the roof was one smooth expanse of pure deep snow, broken only by brown splashes, where mud villages were emphasised by brown poplars, the unbroken, unsullied snow, two feet deep on the level and any number in the drifts, looking like a picture of the Arctic Ocean, magnificent in its solitude, one difficult track, a foot wide, the solitary link with the larger world which then seemed so very far away.
Things went better yesterday on the whole, though the mercury fell to zero in the night, and I was awakened several times by the cold of my open room, and when a number of people came at daylight for medicines my fingers were so benumbed that I could scarcely measure them. What a splendid field for a medical missionary loving his profession this plain with its 650 villages would be, where there are curable diseases by the hundred! Many of the suffering people have told me that they would give lodging and the best of their food to any English doctor who would travel among them.
The loads were well balanced yesterday, and Hadji only pulled his over once and only rolled off once, when Abbas Khan exclaimed, "He's not a man; why did Allah make such a creature?" We got off at nine, the roofs being crowded to see us start. Fuel is very scarce at Ahang Garang. For the cooking and "parlour" fire, the charge was forty-five krans, or about twenty-eight shillings! Probably this included a large modakel. For a room from two to four krans is expected.
Through M——'s kindness I now have a good horse to ride, and the difference in fatigue is incredible. We embarked again on the vast plain of snow. It was a grim day, and most ghastly and desolate this end of the plain looked, where the waters having done their fertilising work are lost in a salt lake, the absolutely white hills round the plain being emphasised by the blue neutral tint of the sky. For the first ten miles there was little more than a breeze, for the last ten a pitiless, ruthless, riotous north-easterly gale, blowing up the snow in hissing drifts, as it swept across the plain with a desolate screech.
The coverings with which we were swaddled were soon penetrated. The cold seemed to enter the bones, and to strike the head and face like a red-hot hammer, stunning as it struck, the tears wrung from the eyes were frozen, at times even the eyelids were frozen together. The frozen snow hit one hard. Hands and feet were by turns benumbed and in anguish, terrific blasts loaded with hard lumps of snow came down from the hills, snow was drifting from all the white ranges above us; on the more exposed part of the track the gusts burst with such violence as to force some of the mules off it to flounder in the deep snow; my Arab was struck so mercilessly on his sore swollen eyes that at times I could scarcely, with my own useless hands, induce him to face the swirls of frozen snow. Swifter and more resistless were the ice-laden squalls, more and more obliterated became the track, till after a fight of over three hours, and the ceaseless crossing of rolling hills and deep hollows, we reached the top of a wind-bared slope 7700 feet in altitude and saw this village, looking from that distance quite imposing, on a hill on the other side of a stream crossed by a brick bridge, with a ruined fort on a height above it. It promised shelter—that was all. Below the village there was an expanse of snow, sloping up to pure white hills outlined against an indigo depth of ominous-looking clouds.
While M—— went up a hill for some scientific work, I followed the orderly, who could scarcely sit on his horse from pain and weakness, into the most wretchedly ruinous, deserted-looking village I have yet seen, epitomising the disenchantment which a near view of an Eastern city brings, and up a steep alley to a ruinous yard heaped with snow-covered ruins, on one side of which were some ruinous rooms, their backs opening on a precipice above the river, and on the north-east wind. I tumbled off my horse, Abbas Khan, the least sick of the men, with benumbed hands breaking my fall. The severe cold had stiffened all my joints. We could scarcely speak; the bones of my face were in intense pain, and I felt as if the cold were congealing my heart.
With Abbas Khan's help I chose the rooms, the worst we have ever had. The one I took for myself has an open-work door facing the wind, and it is impossible to have a fire, for the draught blows sticks, ashes, and embers over the room. The others are worse. It is an awful night, blowing and snowing; all the men but two are hors de combat. The poor orderly, using an Afghan phrase, said, "The wind has played the demon with me." He has a fearful cough, and hæmorrhage from the lungs or throat. The cook is threatened with pleurisy. It may truly be called "Hospital Sunday." The day has been chiefly spent in making mustard poultices, which M—— is constantly crossing the yard in three feet of snow to put on, and protectors for the chests and backs, preparing beef tea, making up medicines, etc.
Surely things must have reached their worst. Out of seven men only one servant, and he an Indian lad with a fearful squint and eyes so badly inflamed that he can hardly see where he puts things down, is able to do anything. Two of the charvadars are lying ill in the stable. Mustard plasters, Dover's powders, salicylate of soda, emetics, poultices, clinical thermometers, chlorodyne, and beef tea have been in requisition all day. The cook, the Afghan orderly, and Hadji seem really ill. At eight this morning groans at my door took me out, and one of the muleteers was lying there in severe pain, with the hard fine snow beating on him. Later I heard fresh moaning on my threshold, and found Hadji fallen there with my breakfast. I got him in and he fell again, upsetting the tea, and while I attended to him the big dogs ate up the chapatties! He had a good deal of fever, and severe rheumatism, and on looking at his eyes I saw that he was nearly blind. He lost his blue glasses some days ago. I sent him to bed in the "kitchen" for the whole day, where he lay groaning in comfort by the fire with his opium pipe and his tea. He thinks he will not survive the night, and has just given me his dying directions!
Afterwards M—— came for the thermometer and chlorodyne, and remarked that my room was "unfit for a beast." The truth is I share it with several very big dogs. It did look grotesquely miserable last night—black, fireless, wet, dirty, with all my things lying on the dirty floor, having been tumbled about by these dogs in their search for my last box of Brand's meat lozenges, which they got out of a strong, tightly-tied-up bag, which they tore into strips. On going for my fur cloak to-day, these three dogs, who, I believe, would take on civilisation more quickly than their masters, were all found rolled up under it, and lying on my bed.
The mercury in the "parlour" with a large fire cannot be raised above 36°. In my room to-night the wet floor is frozen hard and the mercury is 20°. This is nothing after 12° and 16° below zero, but the furious east wind and a singular dampness in the air make it very severe. Yesterday, before the sky clouded over, there was a most remarkable ring or halo of prismatic colours round the sun, ominous of the storm which has followed.
This place standing high without shelter is fearfully exposed; there is no milk and no comfort of any kind for the sick men. We have decided to wrap them up and move them to Kûm, where there is a Persian doctor with a European education; but it is a great risk, though the lesser of two. I have just finished four protectors for the back and chest, three-quarters of a yard long by sixteen inches wide, buttoning on the shoulders, of a very soft felt namad nearly half an inch thick—a precaution much to be commended.
I think that Hadji, though in great pain, poor fellow, is partly shamming. He professed this evening to have violent fever, and the thermometer shows that he has none. Even the few things which I thought he had done for me, such as making chapatties, I find have been done by others. It is a pity for himself as well as for me that he should be so incorrigibly lazy.
Taj Khatan, Feb. 18.—Yesterday we had a severe march, and owing first to the depth of the snow, and then to the depth of the mud, we were seven hours in doing twenty-one miles. The wind was still intensely cold—bitter indeed. There are few remarks to be made about a country buried in snow. The early miles were across the fag end of the dazzling plain of Feraghan, which instead of being covered with villages is an uninhabited desert with a salt lake. Then the road winds among mountains of an altitude of 8000 and 9000 feet and more, its highest point being 8350 feet, where we began a descent which will land us at Tihran at a level under 4000 feet. Snowy mountains and snowy plains were behind—bare brown earth was to come all too soon.
Winding wearily round low hills, meeting caravans of camels to which we had to give way, and of asses floundering in the snow, we came in the evening to a broad slope with villages, poplars, walnuts, and irrigated lands, then to the large and picturesquely situated village of Givr on a steep bank above a rapid stream, and just at dusk to the important village of Jairud, also on high ground above the same river, and surrounded by gardens and an extraordinary number of fruit trees. The altitude is 6900 feet.[21] I had a balakhana, very cold, and was fairly benumbed for some time after the long cold march.
A great many people applied for medicine, and some of the maladies, specially when they affect children, make one sick at heart. Hadji is affecting to be stone deaf, so he no longer interprets for sick people, which creates an additional difficulty. We left this morning at ten, descended 2000 feet, and suddenly left the snow behind. Vast, gray, and grim the snow-covered mountains looked as they receded into indigo gloom, with snow clouds drifting round their ghastly heads and across the dazzling snow plains in which we had been floundering for thirty days. It is strange to see mother earth once more—rocky, or rather stony hills, mud hills, mud plains, mud slopes, a brown world, with a snow world above. Two pink hills rise above the brown plain, and some toothed peaks, but the rest of the view is simply hills and slopes of mud and gravel, bearing thorns, and the relics of last year's thistles and wormwood. The atmospheric colouring is, however, very fine.
This is a large village with beehive roofs in, and of, mud. A quagmire surrounds it and is in the centre of it, and the crumbling houses are thrown promiscuously down upon it. It is nearly the roughest place I have seen, and the worst accommodation, though Abbas Khan says it is the best house in the village. My room has an oven in the floor, neatly lined with clay, and as I write the women are making bread by a very simple process. The oven is well heated by the live embers of animal fuel. They work the flour and water dough, to which a piece of leaven from the last baking has been added, into a flat round cake, about eighteen inches in diameter and half an inch thick, place it quickly on a very dirty cushion, and clap it against the concave interior of the oven, withdrawing the cushion. In one minute it is baked and removed.
A sloping hole in the floor leads to the fowl-house. The skin of a newly-killed sheep hangs up. A pack saddle and gear take up one corner, my bed another, and the owner's miscellaneous property fills up the rest of the blackened, cracked mud hovel, thick with the sooty cobwebs and dust of generations. The door, which can only be shut by means of a wooden bolt outside, is six inches from the ground, so that fowls and cats run in and out with impunity. Behind my bed there is a doorless entrance to a dark den, full of goat's hair, bones, and other stores. In front there is a round hole for letting in light, which I persistently fill up with a blanket which is as persistently withdrawn. There is no privacy, for though the people are glad to let their rooms, they only partially vacate them, and are in and out all the time. Outside there is mud a foot deep, then a steep slope, and a disgusting green pool, and the drinking water is nauseous and brackish. The village people here and everywhere seem of a very harmless sort.
Kûm, Ash Wednesday, 1890.—It was really very difficult to get away from Taj Khatan. The charvadar came on here, leaving only two men to load twelve mules. M—— practically had to load them himself, and to reload them when the tackle broke and the loads turned. Hadji and the cook were quite incapable, the Afghan orderly, who seemed like a dying man, was left behind; in fact there were no servants and no interpreters, and the groom was so ill he could hardly sit on a horse.
The march of twenty-five miles took fully eight hours, but on the Arab horse, and with an occasional gallop, I got through quite comfortably, and have nothing to complain of. The road lies through a country of mud hills, brown usually, drab sometimes, streaked with deep madder red, and occasionally pale green clay—stones, thistles, and thorns their only crop. [I passed over much of this country in the spring, and though there were a few flowers, chiefly bulbs, and the thorns were clothed with a scanty leafage, and the thistles and artemisia were green-gray instead of buff, the general aspect of the region was the same.] There was not a village on the route, only two or three heaps of deserted ruins and two or three ruinous mud imamzadas, no cultivation, streams, or springs, the scanty pools brackish, here and there the glittering whiteness of saline efflorescence, not a tree or even bush, nothing living except a few goats, picking up, who knows how, a scanty living,—a blighted, blasted region, a land without a raison d'être.
Then came low mud ranges, somewhat glorified by atmosphere, higher hills on the left, ghastly with snow which was even then falling, glimpses far away to the northward of snowy mountains among heavy masses of sunlit clouds, an ascent, a gap in the mud hills, some low peaks of white, green, and red clay, a great plain partly green with springing wheat, and in the centre, in the glow of sunset, the golden dome and graceful minarets of the shrine of Fatima, the sister of Reza, groups of trees, and the mud houses, mud walls, and many domes and minarets of the sacred city of Kûm.
Descending, we trotted for some miles through irrigated wheat, passed a walled garden or two, rode along the bank of the Abi Khonsar or Abi Kûm, which we had followed down from Givr, admired the gleaming domes and tiled minarets of the religious buildings on its bank, and the nine-arched brick bridge which spans it, and reached a sort of hotel outside the gates, a superior caravanserai with good, though terribly draughty guest-rooms upstairs, furnished with beds, chairs, and tables, suited for the upper class of pilgrims who resort to this famous shrine.
To have arrived here in good health, and well able for the remaining journey of nearly a hundred miles, is nothing else than a triumph of race, of good feeding through successive generations, of fog-born physique, nurtured on damp east winds!
There is an air of civilisation about this place. The rooms have windows with glass panes and doors which shut, a fountain in front, beyond that a garden, and then the river, and the golden shrine of Fatima and its exquisite minarets. My door opens on a stone-flagged roof with a fine view of the city and hills—an excellent place for taking exercise. So strong is Mohammedan fanaticism here that much as I should like to see the city, it would be a very great risk to walk through it except in disguise.
M—— borrowed a taktrawan from the telegraph clerk and sent it back with two horses to Taj Khatan for the orderly, who was left there very ill yesterday morning, under Abbas Khan's charge, the Khan feeling so ill that he lay down inside it instead of riding. Hadji gave up work altogether, so I unpacked and pitched my bed, glad to be warmed by exercise. Near 8 p.m. Abbas Khan burst into the "parlour" saying that the taktrawan horses were stuck in the mud. He evidently desired to avoid the march back, but two mules have been sent to replace the horses, and two more are to go to-morrow. The orderly was so ill that I expect his corpse rather than himself.
This morning Hadji, looking fearful, told me that he should die to-day, and he and the cook are now in bed in opposite corners of a room below, with a good fire, feverish and moaning. It is really a singular disaster, and shows what the severity of the journey has been. The Persian doctor, with a European medical education, on whom our hopes were built, when asked to come and see these poor men, readily promised to do so; but the Princess, the Shah's daughter, whose physician he is, absolutely refuses permission, on the ground that we have come through a region in which there is supposed to be cholera!
I. L. B.
LETTER VII
Kûm, Feb. 21.
At five yesterday afternoon Abbas Khan rode in saying that the taktrawan, with the orderly much better, was only three miles off. This was good news; a mattress was put down for him next the fire and all preparations for his comfort were made. Snow showers had been falling much of the day, there was a pitiless east wind, and as darkness came on snow fell persistently. Two hours passed, but no taktrawan arrived. At 7.30 Abbas Khan was ordered to go in search of it with a good lantern; 8, 9, 10 o'clock came without any news. At 10.30, the man whose corpse I had feared to see came in much exhausted, having crawled for two miles through the mire and snow. The sowar, who pretended to start with the lantern, never went farther than the coffee-room at the gate, where he had spent an unconscientious but cheery evening!
In the pitch darkness the taktrawan and mules had fallen off the road into a gap, the taktrawan was smashed, and a good white mule, one of the "light division," was killed, her back being broken. This was not the only disaster. Hadji had lain down on the borrowed mattress and it had taken fire from the live ashes of his pipe and was burned, and he was a little scorched.
The telegraphist was to have started for Isfahan the next morning with his wife and child in the litter, in order to vacate the house for the new official and his family, and their baggage had actually started, but now they are detained till this taktrawan can be repaired. In the meantime another official has arrived with his goods and a large family, a most uncomfortable situation for both parties, but they bear it with the utmost cheerfulness and good nature.
Last night I made Hadji drink a mug of hot milk with two tablespoonfuls of brandy in it, and it worked wonders. This morning, instead of a nearly blind man groping his way about with difficulty, I beheld a man with nothing the matter but a small speck on one eye. It must have been snow-blindness. He looks quite "spry." It is not only the alcohol which has cured him, but that we are parting by mutual consent; and feeling sorry for the man, I have given him more than his wages, and his full demand for his journey back to Bushire, with additional warm clothing. M—— has also given him a handsome present.
I fear he has deceived me, and that the stone deafness, feebleness, idiocy, and the shaking, palsied gait of a man of ninety—all but the snow-blindness—have been assumed in order to get his return journey paid, when he found that the opportunities for making money were not what he expected. It is better to be deceived twenty times than to be hard on these poor fellows once, but he has been exasperating, and I feel somewhat aggrieved at having worked so hard to help a man who was "malingering." The last seen of him was an active, erect man walking at a good pace by the side of his mule, at least forty years thrown off. [He did not then leave Kûm, but being seized with pleurisy was treated with great kindness by Mr. Lyne the electrician, and afterwards by the Amin-es-Sultan (the Prime Minister), who was visiting Kûm, and who, thinking to oblige me, brought him up to Tihran in his train!] Those who had known him for years gave a very bad account of him, but said that if he liked he could be a good servant. It is the first time that I have been unfortunate in my travelling servant.
The English telegraph line, and a post-office, open once a week, are the tokens of civilisation in Kûm. A telegraphic invitation from the British Minister in Tihran, congratulatory telegrams on our safety from Tihran, Bushire, and India, and an opportunity for posting letters, make one feel once more in the world. The weather is grim, bitterly cold, with a strong north-east wind, raw and damp, but while snow is whitening the hills only rain and sleet fall here. The sun has not shone since we came, but the strong cold air is invigorating like our own climate.
Taking advantage of it being Friday, the Mohammedan day of rest, when most of the shops are closed and the bazars are deserted, we rode through a portion of them preceded by the wild figure of Abbas Khan, and took tea at the telegraph office, where they were most kind and pleasant regarding the accident which had put them to so much inconvenience.
Kûm is on the beaten track, and has a made road to Tihran. Almost every book of travels in Persia has something to say upon it, but except that it is the second city in Persia in point of sanctity, and that it thrives as much by the bodies of the dead which are brought in thousands for burial as by the tens of thousands of pilgrims who annually visit the shrine of Fatima, and that it is renowned for fanaticism, there is not much to say about it.
Situated in a great plain, the gleam of its golden dome and its slender minarets is seen from afar, and the deep green of its orchards, and the bright green of the irrigated and cultivated lands which surround it, are a splash of welcome fertility on the great brown waste. Singular toothy peaks of striated marl of brilliant colouring—red, blue, green, orange, and salt peaks very white—give a curious brilliancy to its environment, but this salt, which might be a source of wealth to the city, is not worked, only an ass-load or two at a time being brought in to supply the necessities of the market.
The shrine of Fatima, the sister of Reza the eighth Imam, who sleeps at Meshed, is better to Kûm than salt mines or aught else. Moslems, though they regard women with unspeakable contempt, agree to reverence Fatima as a very holy and almost worshipful person, and her dust renders Kûm a holy place, attracting tens of thousands of pilgrims every year, although, unlike pilgrimages to Meshed and Kerbela, Kûm confers no lifelong designation on those by whom it exists. Its estimated population is 10,000 souls, and at times this number is nearly doubled. Pilgrimage consists in a visit to the tomb of Fatima, paying a fee, and in some cases adding a votive offering. Vows of abstinence from some special sin are frequently made at the shrine and are carefully registered.
The dead, however, who are annually brought in thousands to be buried in the sacred soil which surrounds the shrine, are the great source of the wealth of Kûm. These corpses travel, as to Kerbela, on mules, four being lashed on one animal occasionally, some fresh, some decomposing, others only bags of exhumed bones. The graves occupy an enormous area, of which the shrine is the centre. The kings of the Kajar dynasty, members of royal families, and 450 saints are actually buried within the precincts of the shrine. The price of interments varies with the proximity to the dust of Fatima from six krans to one hundred tumans. The population may be said to be a population of undertakers. Death meets one everywhere. The Ab-i-Khonsar, which supplies the drinking water, percolates through "dead men's bones and all uncleanness." Vestments for the dead are found in the bazars. Biers full and empty traverse the streets in numbers. Stone-cutting for gravestones is a most lucrative business. The charvadars of Kûm prosper on caravans of the dead. There is a legion of gravediggers. Kûm is a gruesome city, a vast charnel-house, yet its golden dome and minarets brighten the place of death.
The dome of Fatima is covered with sheets of copper plated with gold an eighth of an inch in thickness, and the ornament at the top of the dome, which is of pure gold, is said to weigh 140 lbs. The slender minarets which front this imamzada are covered with a mosaic of highly-glazed tiles of exquisite tints, in which an azure blue, a canary yellow, and an iridescent green predominate, and over all there is a sheen of a golden hue. The shrine is inaccessible to Christians. I asked a Persian doctor if I might look in for one moment at the threshold of the outer court, and he replied in French, "Are you then weary of life?"[22]
My Indian servant, an educated man on whose faithful though meagre descriptions I can rely, visited the shrine and describes the dome as enriched with arabesques in mosaic and as hung with ex votos, consisting chiefly of strips of silk and cotton. The tomb itself, he says, is covered with a wooden ark, with certain sacred sentences cut upon it, and this is covered by a large brown shawl. Round this ark, which is under the dome, Kerman, Kashmir, and Indian shawls are laid down as carpets. This open space is surrounded with steel railings inlaid with gold after the fashion of the niello work of Japan, and the whole is enclosed with a solid silver fence, the rails of which are "as thick as two thumbs, and as high as a tall man's head." This imamzada itself is regarded as of great antiquity.
Two Persian kings, who reigned in the latter part of the seventeenth century, are buried near the beautiful minarets, which are supposed to be of the same date. There are many mosques and minarets in Kûm, besides a quantity of conical imamzadas, the cones of which have formerly been covered with glazed blue tiles of a turquoise tint, some of which still remain. It was taken by the Afghans in 1772, and though partially rebuilt is very ruinous. It has a mud wall, disintegrating from neglect, surrounded occasionally by a ditch, and at other times by foul and stagnant ponds. The ruinousness of Kûm can scarcely be exaggerated.
The bazars are large and very busy, and are considerably more picturesque than those of Kirmanshah. The town lives by pilgrims and corpses, and the wares displayed to attract the former are more attractive than usual. There are nearly 450 shops, of which forty-three sell Manchester goods almost exclusively. Coarse china, and pottery often of graceful shapes with a sky-blue glaze, and water-coolers are among the industries of this city, which also makes shoes, and tans leather with pomegranate bark.
The Ab-i-Khonsar is now full and rapid, but is a mere thread in summer. The nine-arched bridge, with its infamously paved roadway eighteen feet wide, is an interesting object from all points of view, for while its central arch has a span of forty-five feet, the others have only spans of twenty. The gateway beyond the bridge is tawdrily ornamented with blue and green glazed tiles. After seeing several of the cities of Persia, I am quite inclined to give Kûm the palm for interest and beauty of aspect, when seen from any distant point of view.
That it is a "holy" city, and that a pilgrimage to its shrine is supposed to atone for sin, are its great interests. Its population is composed in large proportion of mollahs and Seyyids, or descendants of Mohammed, and as a whole is devoted to the reigning Shiah creed. It has a theological college of much repute, established by Fath' Ali Shah, which now has 100 students. The women are said to be very devout, and crowd the mosques on Friday evenings, when their devotions are led by an imam. The men are fanatically religious, though the fanaticism is somewhat modified. No wine may be sold in Kûm, and no Jew or Armenian is allowed to keep a shop.
Kûm, being a trading city, manufactures a certain amount of public opinion in its business circles, which differs not very considerably from that which prevails at Kirmanshah. The traders accept it as a foregone conclusion that Russia will occupy Persia as far as Isfahan on the death of the present Shah, and regard such a destiny as "fate." If only their religion is not interfered with, it matters little, they say, whether they pay their taxes to the Shah or the Czar. To judge from their speech, Islam is everything to them, and their country very little, and the strong bond of the faith which rules life and thought from the Pillars of Hercules to the Chinese frontier far outweighs the paltry considerations of patriotism. But my impression is that all Orientals prefer the tyrannies and exactions, and the swiftness of injustice or justice of men of their own creed and race to good government on the part of unintelligible aliens, and that though Persians seem pretty comfortable in the prospect of a double occupation of Persia, its actual accomplishment might strike out a flash of patriotism.
Probably this ruinous, thinly-peopled country, with little water and less fuel, and only two roads which deserve the name, has possibilities of resurrection under greatly changed circumstances. Of the two occupations which are regarded as certain, I think that most men, at least in Central and Southern Persia, would prefer an English occupation, but every one says, "England talks and does not act," and that "Russia will pour 100,000 troops into Persia while England is talking in London."
I. L. B.
LETTER VIII
Caravanserai of Aliabad, Feb. 23.
Twelve hours and a half of hard riding have brought us here in two days. No doctor could be obtained in Kûm, and it was necessary to bring the sick men on as quickly as possible for medical treatment. It was bitterly cold on the last day, though the altitude is only 3400 feet, and it was a tiresome day, for I had not only to look over and repack, but to clean the cooking utensils and other things, which had not been touched apparently since we left Baghdad!
This is a tedious part of the journey, a "beaten track" with few features of interest, the great highway from Isfahan to Tihran, a road of dreary width; where it is a made road running usually perfectly straight, with a bank and a ditch on each side. The thaw is now complete, and travelling consists of an attempt to get on by the road till it becomes an abyss which threatens to prove bottomless, then there is a plunge and a struggle to the top of the bank, or over the bank to the trodden waste, but any move can be only temporary, the all-powerful mire regulates the march. The snow is nothing to the mud. Frequently carcasses of camels, mules, and asses, which have lain down to die under their loads, were passed, then caravans with most of the beasts entangled in the miry clay, unable to rise till they were unloaded by men up to their knees in the quagmire, and, worst of all, mules loaded with the dead, so loosely tied up in planks that in some cases when the mule flounders and falls, the miserable relics of humanity tumble out upon the swamp; and these scenes of falling, struggling, and even perishing animals are repeated continually along the level parts of this scarcely passable highroad.
Our loads, owing to bad tackle, were always coming off, the groom's mule fell badly, the packs came off another, and half an hour was spent in catching the animal, then I was thrown from my horse into soft mud.
Cultivation ceases a short distance from Kûm, giving place to a brown waste, with patches of saline efflorescence upon it, on which high hills covered partially with snow send down low spurs of brown mud. The water nearly everywhere is brackish, and only just drinkable. After crossing a rapid muddy river, nearly dry in summer, by a much decayed bridge of seven or eight low arches, we reached terra firma, and a long gradual ascent and a series of gallops brought us to the large caravanserai of Shashgird, an immense place with imposing pretensions which are fully realised within. In the outer court camels were lying in rows. A fine tiled archway leads to an immense quadrangle, with a fine stone abambar or covered receptacle for water in the middle. All round the quadrangle are arched recesses or mangers, each with a room at the back, to the number of eighty. At two of the corners there are enclosed courtyards with fountains, several superior rooms with beds (much to be avoided), chairs, mirrors, and tables fairly clean—somewhat dreary luxury, but fortunately at this season free from vermin. That caravanserai can accommodate 1000 men in rooms, and 1500 mules.
To-day's long march, which, however, has had more road suitable for galloping, has been over wild, weird, desolate, God-forsaken country, interesting from its desolation and its great wastes, forming part of the Kavir or Great Salt Desert of Persia, absolutely solitary, with scarcely a hamlet—miles of the great highway of Persia without a living creature, no house, no bush, nothing. Later, there were some vultures feasting on a dead camel, and a mule-load of two bodies down in the mud.
Some miles from Shashgird, far from the road, there is a large salt lake over which some stationary mists were brooding. Beyond this an ascent among snow clouds along some trenched land where a few vines and saplings have been planted leads to a caravanserai built for the accommodation of state officials on their journeys, where in falling snow we vindicated our origin in the triumphant West by taking lunch on a windy verandah outside rather than in the forlorn dampness of the inside, and brought a look of surprise even over the impassive face of the seraidar.
When we left the snow was falling in large wet flakes, and the snow clouds were drifting wildly among the peaks of a range which we skirted for a few miles and then crossed at a considerable height among wonderful volcanic formations, mounds of scoriæ, and outcrops of volcanic rock, hills of all shapes fantastically tumbled about, chiefly black, looking as if their fires had only just died out, streaked and splotched with brilliant ash—orange, carmine, and green—a remarkable volcanic scene, backed by higher hills looking ghastly in the snow.
After passing over an absolutely solitary region of camel-brown plains and slopes at a gallop, M—— a little in front always, and Abbas Khan, the wildest figure imaginable, always half a length behind, the thud of the thundering hoofs mingling with the screech of the cutting north wind which, coming over the snowy Elburz range, benumbed every joint, on the slope of a black volcanic hill we came upon the lofty towers and gaudy tiled front of this great caravanserai, imposing at a distance in the solitude and snow clouds, but shabby on a nearer view, and tending to disintegrate from the presence of saltpetre in the bricks and mortar.
There are successions of terraces and tanks of water with ducks and geese upon them, and buildings round the topmost terrace intended to be imposing. The seraidar is expecting the Amin-es-Sultan (the Prime Minister) and his train, who will occupy rather a fine though tawdry "suite of apartments"; but though they were at our service, I prefer the comparative cosiness of a small, dark, damp room, though with a very smoky chimney, as I find to my cost.
British Legation, Tihran, Feb. 26.—The night was very cold, and the reveille specially unwelcome in the morning. The people were more than usually vague about the length of the march, some giving the distance at twenty-five miles, and others making it as high as thirty-eight. As we did a good deal of galloping and yet took more than seven hours, I suppose it may be about twenty-eight. Fortunately we could desert the caravan, as the caravanserais are furnished and supply tea and bread. The baggage mules took ten hours for the march.
The day was dry and sunny, and the scenery, if such a tract of hideousness can be called scenery, was at its best. Its one charm lies in the solitude and freedom of a vast unpeopled waste.
The "made road" degenerates for the most part into a track "made" truly, but rather by the passage of thousands of animals during a long course of ages than by men's hands. This track winds among low ranges of sand and mud hills, through the "Pass of the Angel of Death," crosses salt and muddy streams, gravelly stretches, and quagmires of mud and tenacious clay, passing through a country on the whole inconceivably hideous, unfinished, frothy, and saturated with salt—the great brown desert which extends from Tihran to Quetta in Beloochistan, a distance of 2000 miles.
On a sunny slope we met the Prime Minister with a considerable train of horsemen. He stopped and spoke with extreme courtesy, through an interpreter, for, unlike most Persians of the higher class, he does not speak French. He said we had been for some time expected at Tihran, and that great fears were entertained for our safety, which we had heard at Kûm. He is a pleasant-looking man with a rather European expression, not more than thirty-two or thirty-three, and in spite of intrigues and detractors has managed to keep his hazardous position for some years. His mother was lately buried at Kûm, and he was going thither on pilgrimage. After the usual compliments he bowed his farewells, and the gay procession with its brilliant trappings and prancing horses flashed by. The social standing of a Persian is evidenced by the size of his retinue, and the first of the Shah's subjects must have been attended by fully forty well-mounted men, besides a number of servants who were riding with his baggage animals.
Shortly after passing him a turn among the hills brought the revelation through snow clouds of the magnificent snow-covered chain of the Elburz mountains, with the huge cone of Demavend, their monarch, 18,600 feet[23] in height, towering high above them, gleaming sunlit above the lower cloud-masses. Swampy water-courses, a fordable river crossed by a broad bridge of five arches, more low hills, more rolling desert, then a plain of mud irrigated for cultivation, difficult ground for the horses, the ruins of a deserted village important enough to have possessed two imamzadas, and then we reached the Husseinabad, which has very good guest-rooms, with mirrors on the walls.
This caravanserai is only one march from Tihran, and it seemed as if all difficulties were over. Abbas Khan and the sick orderly were sent on early, with a baggage mule loaded with evening dress and other necessities of civilisation; the caravan was to follow at leisure, and M—— and I started at ten, without attendants, expecting to reach Tihran early in the afternoon.
It is six days since that terrible ride of ten hours and a half, and my bones ache as I recall it. I never wish to mount a horse again. It had been a very cold night, and for some time after we started it was doubtful whether snow or rain would gain the day, but after an hour of wet snow it decided on rain, and there was a steady downpour all day. The Elburz range, which the day before had looked so magnificent when fifty miles off, was blotted out. This was a great disappointment.
An ascent of low, blackish volcanic hills is made by a broad road of gray gravel, which a torrent has at some time frequented. Thorns and thistles grow there, and skeletons of animals abound. Everything is grim and gray. From these hills we descended into the Kavir, a rolling expanse of friable soil, stoneless, strongly impregnated with salt, but only needing sufficient water to wash the salt out of it and to irrigate it to become as prolific as it is now barren.
It is now a sea of mud crossed by a broad road indicated by dykes, that never-to-be-forgotten mud growing deeper as the day wore on. Hour after hour we plunged through it, sometimes trying the road, and on finding it impassable scrambling through the ditches and over the dykes to the plain, which after offering firmer foothold for a time became such a "slough of despond" that we had to scramble back to the road, and so on, hour after hour, meeting nothing but one ghastly caravan of corpses, and wretched asses falling in the mud.
At mid-day, scrambling up a gravel hill with a little wormwood upon it, and turning my back to the heavy rain, I ate a lunch of dates and ginger, insufficient sustenance for such fatigue. On again!—the rain pouring, the mud deepening, my spine in severe pain. We turned off to a caravanserai, mostly a heap of ruins, the roofs having given way under the weight of the snow, and there I sought some relief from pain by lying down for the short thirty minutes which could be spared in the seraidar's damp room. It was then growing late in the afternoon, all landmarks had disappeared in a brooding mist, there were no habitations, and no human beings of whom to ask the way.
The pain returned severely as soon as I mounted, and increased till it became hardly bearable. Ceaseless mud, ceaseless heavy rain, a plain of mud, no refuge from mud and water, attempts to gallop were made with the risk of the horses falling into holes and even kanaats. M—— rode in front. Not a word was spoken. A gleaming dome, with minarets and wood, appeared below the Shimran hills. Unluckily, where two roads met one looked impassable and we took the other, which, though it eventually took us to Tihran, was a détour of some miles.
In the evening, when I was hoping that Tihran was at hand, we reached the town of Shah Abdul Azim, built among the ruins of an ancient city, either Rhages or Rhei. The gilded dome is the shrine of Abdul Azim, and is a great place of pilgrimage of the picnic order from Tihran. The one railroad of Persia runs from the capital to this town. As we floundered in darkness along wide roads planted with trees, there was the incongruity of a railway whistle, and with deep breathing and much glare an engine with some carriages passed near the road, taking away with its harsh Western noises that glorious freedom of the desert which outweighs all the hardship even of a winter journey.
It was several miles from thence to the gate of Tihran. It was nearly pitch dark when we got out of Abdul Azim and the rain still fell heavily. In that thick rainy darkness no houses were visible, even if they exist, there were no passengers on foot or on horseback, it was a "darkness which might be felt."
There was a causeway which gave foothold below the mud, but it was full of holes and broken culverts, deep in slime, and seemed to have water on each side not particular in keeping within bounds. It was necessary to get on, lest the city gates should be shut, and by lifting and spurring the jaded horses they were induced to trot and canter along that road of pitfalls. I have had many a severe ride in travelling, but never anything equal to that last two hours. The severe pain and want of food made me so faint that I was obliged to hold on to the saddle. I kept my tired horse up, but each flounder I thought would be his last. There was no guidance but an occasional flash from the hoofs of the horse in front, and the word "spur" ringing through the darkness.
After an hour of riding in this desperate fashion we got into water, and among such dangerous holes that from that point we were obliged to walk our horses, who though they were half dead still feebly responded to bit and spur. We reached the dimly-lighted city gate just as half of it was shut, and found Abbas Khan waiting there. The caravan with the other sick men never reached Tihran till late the next morning.
At the gate we learned that it was two miles farther to the British Legation, and that there was no way for me to get there but on horseback. One lives through a good deal, but I all but succumbed to the pain and faintness. Inside the gate there was an open sea of liquid mud, across which, for a time, certain lights shed their broken reflections. There was a railway shriek, and then the appearance of a station with shunting operations vaguely seen in a vague glare.
Then a tramway track buried under several inches of slush came down a slope, and crowded tramway cars with great single lamps came down the narrow road on horses too tired to be frightened, and almost too tired to get out of the way. Then came a street of mean houses and meaner shops lighted with kerosene lamps, a region like the slums of a new American city, with cafés and saloons, barbers' shops, and European enormities such as gazogenes and effervescing waters in several windows. Later, there were frequent foot passengers preceded by servants carrying huge waxed cambric lanterns of a Chinese shape, then a square with barracks and artillery, a causewayed road dimly lit, then darkness and heavier rain and worse mud, through which the strange spectacle of a carriage and pair incongruously flashed.
By that time even the courage and stamina of an Arab horse could hardly keep mine on his legs, and with a swimming head and dazed brain I could hardly guide him, as I had done from the gate chiefly by the wan gleam of Abbas Khan's pale horse; and expecting to fall off every minute, I responded more and more feebly and dubiously to the question frequently repeated out of the darkness, "Are you surviving?"
Just as endurance was on the point of giving way, we turned from the road through a large gateway into the extensive grounds which surround the British Legation, a large building forming three sides of a quadrangle, with a fine stone staircase leading up to the central door. Every window was lighted, light streamed from the open door, splashed carriages were dashing up and setting down people in evening dress, there were crowds of servants about, and it flashed on my dazed senses that it must be after eight, and that there was a dinner party!
Arriving from the mud of the Kavir and the slush of the streets, after riding ten hours in ceaseless rain on a worn-out horse; caked with mud from head to foot, dripping, exhausted, nearly blind from fatigue, fresh from mud hovels and the congenial barbarism of the desert, and with the rags and travel-stains of a winter journey of forty-six days upon me, light and festivity were overwhelming.
Alighting at a side door, scarcely able to stand, I sat down in a long corridor, and heard from an English steward that "dinner is waiting." His voice sounded very far off, and the once familiar announcement came like a memory out of the remote past. Presently a gentleman appeared in evening dress, wearing a star, which conveyed to my fast-failing senses that it was Sir H. Drummond Wolff. It was true that there was a large dinner party, and among the guests the Minister with thoughtful kindness had invited all to whom I had letters of introduction. But it was no longer possible to make any effort, and I was taken up to a room in which the comforts of English civilisation at first made no impression upon me, and removing only the mackintosh cloak, weighted with mud, which had served me so well, I lay down on the hearthrug before a great coal fire till four o'clock the next morning. And "so the tale ended," and the winter journey with its tremendous hardships and unbounded mercies was safely accomplished.[24]
I. L. B.
NOTES ON TIHRAN[25]
It is a matter of individual taste, but few cities in the East interest me in which national characteristics in architecture, costume, customs, and ways generally are either being obliterated or are undergoing a partial remodelling on Western lines. An Eastern city pure and simple, such as Canton, Niigata, or Baghdad, even with certain drawbacks, forms a harmonious whole gratifying to the eye and to a certain sense of fitness; while Cairo, Tokio, Lahore, and I will now add Tihran, produce the effect of a series of concussions.
Tihran—set down on a plain, a scorched desert, the sublimity of which is interfered with by kanaats or underground watercourses with their gravel mounds and ruinous shafts—has few elements of beauty or grandeur in its situation, even though "the triumphant barbarism of the desert" sweeps up to its gates, and the scored and channelled Shimran range, backed by the magnificent peak, or rather cone, of Demavend, runs to the north-east of the city within only ten miles of its walls.
The winter with its snow and slush disappeared abruptly two days after I reached Tihran, and as abruptly came the spring—a too transient enjoyment—and in a few days to brownness and barrenness succeeded a tender mist of green over the trees in the watered gardens, rapidly thickening into dark leafage in which the bulbul sang, and nature helped by art spread a carpet of violets and irises over the brown earth. But all of verdure and greenery that there is lies within the city walls. Outside is the unconquerable desert, rolling in endless shades of buff and brown up to the Elburz range, and elsewhere to the far horizon.
Situated in the most depressed part of an uninteresting waste in Lat. 35° 40′ N. and Long. 51° 25′ E., and at an altitude of 3800 feet, the climate is one of extremes, the summer extreme being the most severe. For some weeks the heat is nearly insupportable, and the Legations, and all of the four hundred Europeans who are not bound to the city by a fate which they execrate, betake themselves to "yailaks," or summer quarters on the slopes of the adjacent mountains.
Entering Tihran in the darkness, it was not till I saw it coming back from Gulahek, the "yailak" of the British Legation, when the mud was drying up and the willows were in their first young green, that I formed any definite idea of its aspect, which is undeniably mean, and presents no evidences of antiquity; indeed, it has no right to present any, for as a capital it only came into existence a century ago, with the first king of the present Kajar dynasty. The walls are said to be eleven miles in circuit, and give the impression of being much too large, so many are the vacant spaces within them. They consist chiefly of a broad ditch, and a high sloping rampart without guns. Twelve well-built domed gateways give access to the city. These are decorated with glazed tiles of bright colours and somewhat gaudy patterns and designs, representing genii, lions, and combats of mythical heroes.