waist, leaping round a green-robed mollah, who was reciting the woes of
the Imam as he moved forward in the midst of his disordered crew. The
boys jumped and leapt round him, beating their breasts--there was no
trace of sorrow on their faces. They might have been performing some
savage dance as they came onwards, a compact mass of bobbing heads
and naked shoulders--a dance in which they themselves took no kind
of interest, but in which they recognised that it was the duty of a
Persian boy to take his part. They were followed by men bearing the
standards of the village--long poles surmounted by trophies of beads
and coloured silks, streamers and curious ornaments; and in the rear
came another reciter and another body of men, beating their breasts,
from which the garments were torn back, striking their foreheads and
repeating the name of the Imam in a monotonous chorus, interspersed
with cries and groans.
But it was in the evening that the real ceremony took place. The
bazaar in the centre of the village was roofed over with canvas and
draped with cheap carpets and gaudy cotton hangings; a low platform
was erected at one end, and the little shops were converted into
what looked very like the boxes of a theatre. They were hung with
bright-coloured stuffs and furnished with chairs, on which the
notabilities sat and witnessed the performance, drinking sherbet and
smoking kalyans the while. We arrived at about nine o’clock and found
the proceedings in full swing. The tent was crowded with peasants, some
standing, some sitting on the raised edge of a fountain in the centre.
Round this fountain grew a mass of oleander-trees, their delicate
leaves and exquisite pink flowers standing out against the coarse
blue cotton of the men’s clothing, and clustering round the wrinkled,
toil-worn peasant faces. On the platform was a mollah, long-robed and
white-turbaned, who was reading exhortations and descriptions of the
martyrdom with a drawling, chanting intonation. At his feet the ground
was covered with women, their black cloaks tucked neatly round them,
sitting with shrouded heads and with the long strip of white linen veil
hanging over their faces and down into their laps. They looked for all
the world like shapeless black and white parcels set in rows across the
floor. The mollah read on, detailing the sufferings of the Imam: ‘He
thirsted, he was an hungered!’ the women rocked themselves to and fro
in an agony of grief, the men beat their bare breasts, tears streamed
over their cheeks, and from time to time they took up the mollah’s
words in weary, mournful chorus, or broke into his story with a
murmured wail, which gathered strength and volume until it had reached
the furthest corners of the tent: ‘Hussein! Hussein! Hussein!’
It was intensely hot. Cheap European lamps flared and smoked against
the canvas walls, casting an uncertain light upon the pink oleander
flowers, the black-robed women, and the upturned faces of the men,
streaming with sweat and tears, and all stricken and furrowed with
cruel poverty and hunger--their sufferings would have made a longer
catalogue than those of the Imam. The mollah tore his turban from his
head and cast it upon the ground, and still he chanted on, and the
people took up the throbbing cry: ‘Hussein! Hussein! Hussein!’
Presently a dervish shouldered his way through the throng. A scanty
garment was knotted round his loins, his ragged hair hung over his
shoulders, and about his head was bound a brilliant scarf, whose
stripes of scarlet and yellow fell down his naked back. He had come
from far; he held a long staff in his hands, and the dust of the
wilderness was on the shoes which he laid by the edge of the platform.
He stood there, reciting, praying, exhorting--a wild figure, with eyes
in which flashed the madness of religious fanaticism, straining forward
with passionate gestures through the smoky light which shone on his
brilliant headgear and on his glistening face, distorted by suffering
and excitement. When he had finished speaking he stepped off the
platform, picked up his shoes and staff, and hurried out into the night
to bear his eloquence to other villages....
There is nothing more difficult to measure than the value of visible
emotion. To the Englishman tears are a serious matter; they denote only
the deepest and the most ungovernable feelings, they are reserved for
great occasions. Commonplace sensations are, in his opinion, scarcely
worth bringing on to the surface. The facile expression of emotion
in a foreigner is surprising to him--he can scarcely understand the
gestures of a nation so little removed from him as the French, and he
is apt to be led astray by what seems to him the visible sign of great
excitement, but which to them is only a natural emphasis of speech.
In the East these difficulties are ten times greater. The gesture
itself has often a totally different significance; the Turk nods his
head when he says ‘No,’ and shakes it when he wishes to imply assent;
and even when this is not the case, the feeling which underlies it is
probably quite incomprehensible--quite apart from the range of Western
emotion--and its depth and duration are ruled by laws of which we
have no knowledge. The first thing which strikes us in the Oriental
is his dignified and impassive tranquillity. When we suddenly come
upon the other side of him, and find him giving way, for no apparent
reason, to uncontrolled excitement, we are ready to believe that
only the most violent feelings could have moved him so far from his
habitual calm. So it was that evening. At first it seemed to us that
we were looking upon people plunged into the blackest depths of grief,
but presently it dawned upon us that we were grossly exaggerating
the value of their tears and groans. The Oriental spectators in the
boxes were scarcely moved by an emotion which they were supposed to
be sharing; they sat listening with calm faces, partook of a regular
meal of sweetmeats, ices, and sherbets, and handed round kalyans with
polite phrases and affable smiles. Our Persian servants were equally
unmoved; they conformed so far to the general attitude as to tap their
well-clad chests with inattentive fingers, but they kept the corners of
their eyes fixed upon us, and no religious frenzy prevented them from
supplying our every want. And on the edges of the crowd below us the
people were paying no heed to what was going forward; we watched men
whose faces were all wet with tears, whose breasts were red and sore
with blows, stepping aside and entering into brisk conversation with
their neighbours, sharing an amicable cup of tea, or bargaining for a
handful of salted nuts, as though the very name of Hussein were unknown
to them. Seeing this, we were tempted to swing back to the opposite
extreme, and to conclude that this show of grief was a mere formality,
signifying nothing--a view which was probably as erroneous as the other.
But whatever it meant, it meant something which we could not
understand, and the whole ceremony excited in our minds feelings not
far removed from disgust and weariness. It was forced, it was sordid,
and it was ugly. The hangings of the tent looked suspiciously as though
they had come from a Manchester loom, and if they had, they did not
redound to the credit of Manchester taste; the lamps smelt abominably
of oil, the stifling air was loaded with dust, and the grating chant
of the mollahs was as tedious as the noise of machinery. How long it
all lasted I do not know; we were glad enough to escape from it after
about an hour, and as we walked home through the cool village street,
we shook a sense of chaotic confusion from our minds, and heard with
satisfaction the hoarse sounds fading gradually away into the night
air....
After such fashion the Shiahs mourn the death of the Imam Hussein, the
Rose in the Garden of Glory; and whether he and his descendants are
indeed the only rightful successors of the Prophet is a question which
will never be definitely settled until the coming of the twelfth and
last Imam, who, they say, has already lived on earth, and who will come
again and resume the authority which his deputy, the Shah, holds in his
name. ‘When you see black ensigns’--so tradition reports Mohammed’s
words--‘black ensigns coming out of Khorasan, then go forth and join
them, for the Imam of God will be with those standards, whose name is
El Mahdi. He will fill the world with equity and justice.’
_THE SHADOW OF DEATH_
SLOWLY, slowly through the early summer the cholera crept nearer.
Out of the far East came rumours of death ... the cholera was raging
In Samarkand ... it had crossed the Persian frontier ... it is in
Meshed! said the telegrams. A perfunctory quarantine was established
between Tehran and the infected district, and the streams of pilgrims
that flock ceaselessly to Meshed were forbidden to enter the holy city.
Then came the daily bulletins of death, the number of the victims
increasing with terrible rapidity. Meshed was almost deserted, for
all whom the plague had spared had fled to the mountains, and when a
week or two later its violence began to abate, flashed the ominous
news: ‘It is spreading among the villages to the westward.’ From day
to day it drew ever closer, leaping the quarantine bulwark, hurrying
over a strip of desert, showing its sudden face in a distant village,
sweeping northwards, and causing sanguine men to shake their heads and
murmur: ‘Tehran will be spared; it never comes to Tehran’--in a moment
seizing upon the road to the Caspian, and ringing the city round like a
cunning strategist. Then men held their breath and waited, and almost
wished that the suspense were over and the ineluctable day were come.
Yet with the cholera knocking at their doors they made no preparations
for defence, they organized no hospitals, they planned no system of
relief; cartloads of over-ripe fruit were still permitted to be brought
daily into the town, and the air was still poisoned by the refuse which
was left to rot in the streets. It was the month of Muharram; every
evening the people fell into mad transports of religious excitement,
crowding together in the Shah’s theatre to witness the holy plays and
to mourn with tears the death of Hussein. Perhaps a deeper fervour was
thrown into the long prayers and a greater intensity into the wailing
lamentations, for at the door the grim shadow was standing, and which
of the mourners could answer for it that not on his own shoulder the
clutching hand would fall as he passed out into the night? The cloud
of dust that hung for ever over the desert and the city assumed a more
baleful aspect; it hung now like an omen of the deeper cloud which was
settling down upon Tehran. And still above it the sun shone pitilessly,
and under the whole blue heaven there was no refuge from the hand of
God. So the days passed, and the people drank bad water and gorged
themselves on rotten fruit, and on a sudden the blow fell--the cholera
was in Tehran.
Woe to them that were with child in those days and to them that were
sick! One blind impulse seized alike upon rich and poor--flight!
flight! All who possessed a field or two in the outlying villages,
and all who could shelter themselves under a thin canvas roof in the
desert, gathered together their scanty possessions, and, with the
bare necessaries of life in their hands, crowded out of the northern
gateways. The roads leading to the mountains were blocked by a stream
of fugitives, like an endless procession of Holy Families flying before
a wrath more terrible than that of Herod: the women mounted on donkeys
and holding their babes in front of them wrapped in the folds of their
cloaks, the men hurrying on foot by their side. For the vengeance of
the Lord is swift; in the East he is still the great and terrible God
of the Old Testament; his hand falls upon the just and upon the unjust,
and punishes folly as severely as it punishes crime. In vain the desert
was dotted over with the little white tents of the fugitives, in vain
they sought refuge in the cool mountain villages. Wherever they went
they bore the plague in the midst of them; they dropped dead by the
roadside, they died in the sand of the wilderness, they spread the
fatal infection among the country people.
Oriental fatalism, which sounds fine enough in theory, breaks down
woefully in practice. It is mainly based upon the helplessness of a
people to whom it has never occurred to take hold of life with vigorous
hands. A wise philosophy bids men bear the inevitable evil without
complaint, but we of the West are not content until we have discovered
how far the coil is inevitable, and how far it may be modified by
forethought and by a more complete knowledge of its antecedents. It
may be that we turn the channel of immediate fate but little, but
with every effort we help forward the future safety of the world. But
fatalism can seldom be carried through to its logical conclusions--the
attitude of mind which prevented the Persians from laying in medical
stores did not save them a fortnight later from headlong flight.
The most degrading of human passions is the fear of death. It tears
away the restraints and the conventions which alone make social life
possible to man; it reveals the brute in him which underlies them all.
In the desperate hand-to-hand struggle for life there is no element
of nobility. He who is engaged upon it throws aside honour, he throws
aside self-respect, he throws aside all that would make victory worth
having--he asks for nothing but bare life. The impalpable danger into
whose arms he may at any moment be precipitating himself unawares tells
more upon his nerves and upon his imagination than a meeting with the
most redoubtable enemy in the open; his courage breaks under the strain.
Such fear laid hold of the people of Tehran.
The Persian doctors, whose duty it was to distribute medicines among
the sufferers, shut up their stores, and were among the first to leave
the stricken city; masters turned their servants into the streets and
the open fields, if they showed symptoms of the disease, and left them
to die for want of timely help; women and little children were cast out
of the andaruns; the living scarcely dared to bury the bodies of the
dead.
One little group of Europeans preserved a bold front in the midst of
the universal terror. The American missionaries left their homes in
the villages and went down into the town to give what help they could
to the sick, and to hearten with the sight of their own courage those
whom the cholera had not yet touched. They visited the poorer quarters,
they distributed medicines, they started a tiny hospital, in which
they nursed those whom they found lying in the streets, giving them,
if they recovered, clean and disinfected clothes, and if they died a
decent burial. They tried to teach a people who received both their
help and their wisdom at the point of the sword, the elementary laws
of commonsense, to prevent them from eating masses of fruit, and to
put a stop to a fertile cause of fresh infection by persuading them to
burn the clothes of the dead instead of selling them for a few pence
to the first comer. Sometimes we would meet one of these men riding up
from the town in the cool of the evening, when ceaseless labour and
much watching had rendered it imperative that he should take at least
one night’s rest. His face had grown thin and white with the terrible
strain of the work, and in his eyes was the expression which the sight
of helpless suffering puts into the eyes of a brave man.
‘One morning,’ related the doctor months afterwards, ‘as I was going
out early to make my rounds, I found a woman lying on the doorstep.
She was half naked, and she had been dead some hours, for her body
was quite cold. A child crept round her, moaning for food, and on
her breast was a little living baby fast asleep.... It was the most
terrible thing I ever saw in my life,’ he added after a moment. The
missionaries were aided by one or two European volunteers and native
pupils from their own schools, who stood shoulder to shoulder with
them, and helped them to bear the heat and burden of the day. Their
courage and their splendid endurance will remain graven on the minds
of those who knew of it long after shameful memories of cowardice have
been forgotten.
For it was not only the Persians who were terror-stricken; among the
Europeans also there were instances of cowardice. There were men who,
in spite of former protestations of indifference, turned sick and white
with fear when the moment of trial came; there were those who fled
hastily, leaving their servants and their companions to die in their
deserted gardens; and there were those who took to their beds and who
even went to the length of giving up the ghost, victims to no other
malady than sheer terror. The English doctor had his hands full both
in the town and in the country; by many a sick bed he brought comfort
where his skill could not avail to save, and courage to many who were
battling manfully with the disease.
Religious fervour grew apace under the influence of fear. Men to
whom travel and intercourse with foreigners had given a semblance of
Western civilization, exchanged their acquired garb for a pilgrim’s
cloak, and set forth on the long journey to Mecca. The air was full of
rumours. It was whispered that the mollahs were working upon native
fanaticism, and pointing to the presence of Europeans as a primary
cause of evil which must be straightway removed. To-day an incredible
number of deaths were reported to have taken place in Tehran during the
last twenty-four hours, to-morrow the news would run from lip to lip
that the Shah himself had succumbed. At the time when the cholera broke
out in Tehran, his Majesty was making his summer journey through the
country. He at once despatched an order to the effect that the disease
was on no account to be permitted to come near his camp, but it was not
within his conception of the duties of kingship to take precautions
for the safety of any dweller in his realms but himself. He appeared
to be considerably alarmed by the approach of an enemy who is no
respecter of persons. He dismissed the greater part of his followers,
and, making a few nights’ halt in a palace in the neighbourhood of his
capital, he hurried on into the mountains. Even in those nights forty
or fifty people died in his camp, but he was kept in ignorance of this
untoward occurrence. Fortunate indeed were those ladies of his andarun
who accompanied him on his travels, or who had enough influence to
succeed in having themselves transported to one of the numerous country
palaces; the others were obliged to continue in the town, no one having
time to spare them any attention, and it was not till the fury of the
cholera was spent that the poor women were allowed to move into a less
dangerous neighbourhood.
Even under the shadow of death there were incidents which were not
lacking in a certain grim humour. Such, for example, was the tale of
the half-mad and more than half-naked negro who lived in the desert
beyond our doors, and who was accustomed to come whining to us for alms
when we rode out. He must have possessed a sardonic sense of comedy,
and the adventures of the Hunchback cannot have been unfamiliar to
him. He had a wife lurking in the village, though we were unconscious
of her existence till he came in tears to inform us of her decease,
begging that he might be given money wherewith to pay for her burial.
A charitable person provided him with the necessary sum, with which
(having never, in all probability, seen so much silver in his dirty
palm) he incontinently decamped. But before he left he took the
precaution of setting up the dead body of his wife against the palings
of our garden, thereby forcing the European dogs to bear twice over
the expenses of her funeral. Persian beggars and cripples have more
lives than they have limbs. Many good men died in Tehran, but when we
returned there at the end of the season we found precisely the same
group of maimed and ragged loiterers hanging about our doors.
The cholera was not of very long duration. A slight fall of rain
reduced the daily number of deaths by several hundreds; before six
weeks were past the people were returning to the streets they had
quitted in precipitate haste; a fortnight later the surrounding
villages also were free of sickness, and had resumed their accustomed
aspect, except for an air of emptiness in the tiny bazaars, from
which in some cases a third of the population had been reft, and
a corresponding number of fresh graves in the burial-grounds. But
another disease follows on the heels of cholera: typhoid fever is the
inevitable result of an absolute disregard of all sanitary laws. The
system of burial among the Persians is beyond expression evil. They
think nothing of washing the bodies of the dead in a stream which
subsequently runs through the length of the village, thereby poisoning
water which is to be used for numberless household purposes, and in
their selection of the graveyard they will not hesitate to choose
the ground lying immediately above a kanat which is carrying water
to many gardens and drinking-fountains. Even when they are buried,
the bodies are not allowed to rest in peace. The richer families hold
it a point of honour to lay the bones of their relations in some
holy place--Kerbela, where Hussein was slain, or the sacred shrine
of Meshed. They therefore commit them only temporarily to the earth,
laying them in shallow graves, and covering them with an arched roof
of brickwork, which practice accounts for the horrible smell round the
graveyards after an outbreak of cholera. A few months later, and long
before time has killed the germs of disease, these bodies are taken up,
wrapped in sackcloth, and carried, slung across the backs of mules, to
their distant resting-place, sowing not improbably the seeds of a fresh
outbreak as they go. The wonder is, not that the cholera should prove
fatal to so many, but that so large a proportion of the population
should survive in a land where Ignorance is for ever preparing a smooth
highway for the feet of Death.
_DWELLERS IN TENTS_
EVERY man, says a philosopher, is a wanderer at heart. Alas! I fear
the axiom would be truer if he had confined himself to stating that
every man loves to fancy himself a wanderer, for when it comes to the
point there is not one in a thousand who can throw off the ties of
civilized existence--the ties and the comforts of habits which have
become easy to him by long use, of the life whose security is ample
compensation for its monotony. Yet there are moments when the cabined
spirit longs for liberty. A man stands a-tiptoe on the verge of the
unknown world which lures him with its vague promises; the peaceful
years behind lose all their value in his dazzled eyes; like him, ‘qui
n’a pas du ciel que ce qui brille par le trou du volet,’ he pines to
stand in the great free sunlight, the great wide world which is all too
narrow for his adventurous energy. For one brief moment he shakes off
the traditions of a lifetime, swept away by the mighty current which
silently, darkly, goes watering the roots of his race. He, too, is a
wanderer like his remote forefathers; his heart beats time with the
hearts long stilled that dwelt in their bosoms, who came sweeping out
of the mysterious East, pressing ever resistlessly onward till the grim
waste of Atlantic waters bade them stay. He remembers the look of the
boundless plain stretching before him, the nights when the dome of the
sky was his ceiling, when he was awakened by the cold kisses of the
wind that flies before the dawn. He cries for space to fling out his
fighting arm; he burns to measure himself unfettered with the forces of
God.