loads were mixed up, and the servants and _charvadars_ were
quarrelling, and I did not get my dinner till ten; but things are all
right now, and have been since the following morning, when I assumed
the reins of government and saw the mules loaded myself, an efficient
interpreter making my necessary self-assertion intelligible.
Though the spring has set in, most of the country between this and
Tihran looks a complete desert. In February it was a muddy waste--it
is now a dusty waste, on which sheep, goats, and camels pick up a gray
herbage, which without search is not obvious to the human eye, and
consists mostly of wormwood and other bitter and aromatic plants. Off
the road a few tulips and dwarf irises coming up out of the dry ground
show the change of season.
I came for some distance on one day by a road which caravans avoid
because of robbers. It crosses a reddish desert with a few salt
streams and much saline efflorescence, a blasted region without a
dwelling or patch of cultivation. Yet a four-mile gallop across one
part of it was most inspiriting. As the two Arabs, excited by the
pace, covering great spaces of ground with each powerful stride,
dashed over the level gravel I thought, "They'll have fleet steeds
that follow"; but no steed or rider or bird or beast was visible
through all that hungry land. We passed also close to a salt lake on
the Kavir, seen in the distance on the former journey, near which are
now pitched a quantity of Ilyat tents, all black. The wealth of these
nomads is in camels, sheep, and goats. Though the camps, five in
number, were small, they had over 200 camels among them.
Where four weeks ago there was deep mud there is now the glittering
semblance of unsullied snow, and the likeness of frost crystals fills
the holes. _Miles_ of camels loaded with cotton march with stately
stride in single file, the noble mountain camel, with heavy black fur
on neck, shoulder, fore-arm, and haunch, and kindly gentle eyes,
looking, as he is, the king of baggage animals, not degraded by
servitude, though he may carry 800 lbs.
Some of the sights of the road were painful. For instance, just as I
passed a caravan of the dead bound for Kum a mule collided with
another and fell, and the loosely-put-together boxes on its back gave
way and corpses fell out in an advanced stage of decomposition. A
camel just dead lay in a gully. On a ledge of rock above it seven
gorged vultures (not the bald-headed) sat in a row. They had already
feasted on him to repletion. I passed several dead camels, and one
with a pleading pathetic face giving up the ghost on the road.
Yesterday I rode in here from the magnificent caravanserai of
Shashgird, sixteen miles in three hours before lunch, and straight
through the crowded bazars to the telegraph office unmolested, an
Afghan camel-driver's coat, with the wool outside, having proved so
good a disguise that the _gholam_ who was sent to meet me returned to
his master saying that he had not seen a lady, but that a foreign
soldier and _sahib_ had come into Kum.
When my visit was over and I had received from Mr. Lyne the route to
Isfahan, and such full information about rooms, water, and supplies as
will enable me to give my own orders, and escape from the tyranny of
the _charvadars_, having sent the horses to the caravanserai I
disguised myself as a Persian woman of the middle class in the dress
which Mrs. Lyne wears in the city, a thick white _crepe_ veil with
open stitch in front of the eyes, a black sheet covering me from head
to foot, the ends hanging from the neck by long loops, and held with
the left hand just below the eyes, and so, though I failed to imitate
the totter and shuffle of a Persian lady's walk, I passed unnoticed
through the long and crowded streets of this fanatical city, attended
only by a _gholam_, and at the door of my own room was prevented from
entering by the servants till my voice revealed my identity.
Twice to-day I have passed safely through the city in the same
disguise, and have even lingered in front of shops without being
detected. Mr. and Mrs. Lyne have made the two days here very pleasant,
by introducing me to Persians in whose houses I have seen various
phases of Persian life. On reaching one house, where Mrs. Lyne arrived
an hour later, I was a little surprised to be received by the host in
uniform, speaking excellent French, but without a lady with him.
He had been very kind to Hadji, who, he says, is rich and has three
wives. The poor fellow's lungs have been affected for two years, and
the affection was for the time aggravated by the terrible journey. He
talked a good deal about Persian social customs, especially polygamy.
He explained that he has only one wife, but that this is because he
has been fortunate. He said that he regards polygamy as the most
fruitful source of domestic unhappiness, but that so long as
marriages are made for men by their mothers and sisters, a large sum
being paid to the bride's father, a marriage is really buying "a pig
in a poke," and constantly when the bride comes home she is ugly or
bad-tempered or unpleasing and cannot manage the house. "This," he
said, "makes men polygamists who would not otherwise be so.
"Then a man takes another wife, and perhaps this is repeated, and then
he tries again, and so on, and the house becomes full of turmoil.
There are always quarrels in a polygamous household," he said, "and
the children dispute about the property after the father's death." Had
he not been fortunate, and had not his wife been capable of managing
the house, he said that he must have taken another wife, "for," he
added, "no man can bear a badly-managed house."
I thought of the number of men in England who have to bear it without
the Moslem resource.
A lady of "position" must never go out except on Fridays to the
mosque, or with her husband's permission and scrupulously veiled and
guarded, to visit her female friends. Girl-children begin to wear the
_chadar_ between two and three years old, and are as secluded as their
mothers, nor must any man but father or brother see their faces. Some
marry at twelve years old.
"La vie des femmes dans la Perse est tres triste," he said. The
absence of anything like education for girls, except in Tihran, and
the want of any reading-book but the Koran for boys and girls, he
regards as a calamity. He may be a pessimist by nature: he certainly
has no hope for the future of Persia, and contemplates a Russian
occupation as a certainty in the next twenty years.
After a long conversation I asked for the pleasure, not of seeing his
wife, but the "mother of his children," and was rewarded by the sight
of a gentle and lovely woman of twenty-one or twenty-two, graceful in
every movement but her walk, exquisitely refined-looking, with a most
becoming timidity of expression, mingled with gentle courtesy to a
stranger. She was followed by three very pretty little girls. The
husband and wife are of very good family, and the lady has an
unmistakably well-bred look.
Though I knew what to expect in the costume of a woman of the upper
classes, I was astonished, and should have been scandalised even had
women only been present. The costume of ladies has undergone a great
change in the last ninety years, and the extreme of the fashion is as
lacking in delicacy as it is in comfort. However, much travelling
compels one to realise that the modesty of the women of one country
must not be judged of by the rules of another, and a lady costumed as
I shall attempt to describe would avert her eyes in horror by no means
feigned from an English lady in a Court or evening-dress of to-day.
The under garment, very much _en evidence_, is a short chemise of
tinselled silk gauze, or gold-embroidered muslin so transparent as to
leave nothing to the imagination. This lady wore a skirt of flowered
silver brocade, enormously full, ten or twelve yards wide, made to
stand nearly straight out by some frills or skirts of very stiffly
starched cotton underneath, the whole, not even on a waistband round
the waist, but drawn by strings, and suspended over the hips, the
skirts coming down to within a few inches of the knee, leaving the
white rounded limbs uncovered. The effect of this exaggerated
_bouffante_ skirt is most singular. White socks are worn. Over the
transparent _pirah[=a]n_, or chemise, she wore a short velvet jacket
beautifully embroidered in gold, with its fronts about ten inches
apart, so as to show the flowered chemise. Her eyebrows were
artificially curved and lengthened till they appeared to meet above
her nose, her eyelashes were marked round with _kohl_, and a band of
blue-black paint curving downwards above the nose crossed her
forehead, but was all but concealed by a small white square of silk
_crepe_, on the head and brow and fastened under the chin by a brooch.
Had she been in another house she would have worn a large square of
gold-embroidered silk, with the points in front and behind, and
fastened under the chin. Under the _crepe_ square there was a small
skull-cap of gold-embroidered velvet, matching her little zouave
jacket, with an aigrette of gems at the side. Her arms were covered
with bracelets, and a number of valuable necklaces set off the beauty
of her dazzlingly white neck.
Persian ladies paint, or rather smear, but her young pure complexion
needed no such aids. Her front hair, cut to the level of her mouth,
hung down rather straight, and the remainder, which was long, was
plaited into many small glossy plaits. Contrary to custom, it was
undyed, and retained its jet-black colour. Most Persian ladies turn it
blue-black with indigo, or auburn with _henna_, and with the latter
the finger-nails and palms of the hands are always stained.
Her jewellery was all of solid gold; hollow gold and silver ornaments
being only worn by the poor. She wore a chain with four scent caskets
attached to it exhaling attar of roses and other choice perfumes.
She was a graceful and attractive creature in spite of her costume.
She waited on her husband and on me, that is, she poured out the tea
and moved about the room for hot water and _bonbons_ with the feeble,
tottering gait of a woman quite unaccustomed to exercise, and to whom
the windy wastes outside the city walls and a breezy gallop are quite
unknown. The little girls were dressed in the style of adults, and
wore tinselled gauze _chad[=a]rs_ or _chargats_.
After seeing a good deal of home life during some months in Persia, I
have come to the conclusion that there is no child life. Swaddled till
they can walk, and then dressed as little men and women, with the
adult tyrannies of etiquette binding upon them, and in the case of
girls condemned from infancy to the seclusion of the _andarun_, there
is not a trace of the spontaneity and nonsense which we reckon as
among the joys of childhood, or of such a complete and beautiful child
life as children enjoy in Japan. There does not appear to be any child
talk. The Persian child from infancy is altogether interested in the
topics of adults; and as the conversation of both sexes is said by
those who know them best to be without reticence or modesty, the
purity which is one of the greatest charms of childhood is absolutely
unknown. Parental love is very strong in Persia, and in later days the
devotion of the mother to the boy is amply returned by the grown-up
son, who regards her comfort as his charge, and her wishes as law,
even into old age.
When tea was over the host retired with the remark that the ladies
would prefer to amuse themselves alone, and then a Princess and
another lady arrived attended by several servants. This Princess came
in the black silk sheet with a suggestion of gold about its border
which is the street disguise of women of the richer classes, and she
wore huge bag-like violet trousers, into which her voluminous skirts
were tucked.
She emerged from these wrappings a "harmony" in rose colour--a comely
but over-painted young woman in rose and silver brocade skirts, a rose
velvet jacket embroidered in silver, a transparent white muslin
_pirah[=a]n_ with silver stars upon it, and a _chargat_ of white
muslin embroidered in rose silk.
She and the hostess sat on a rug in front of a fire, and servants now
and then handed them _kalians_. The three little girls and the guest's
little girl were in the background. The doors were then fastened and a
number of servants came in and entertained their mistresses. Two sang
and accompanied themselves on a sort of tambourine. Tea was handed
round at intervals. There was dancing, and finally two or three women
acted some little scenes from a popular Persian play. By these
amusements, I am told, the women of the upper classes get rid of time
when they visit each other; and they spend much of their lives in
afternoon visiting, taking care to be back before sunset. After a long
time the gentle hostess, reading in my face that I was not enjoying
the performances, on which indeed unaccustomed English eyes could not
look, brought them to a close, and showed me some of her beautiful
dresses and embroidered fabrics.
Putting on my disguise and attended by a servant I walked a third time
unrecognised and unmolested through the crowded bazars, through the
gate and across the bridge, when a boy looked quite into my shroud,
which I was not perhaps clutching so tightly as in the crowd, and
exclaiming several times _Kafir_, ran back into the city. I did not
run, but got back to the "hotel" as fast as possible.
It is very noisy, and my room being on the ground floor, and having
three doors, there is little peace either by day or night. Thirteen
days from the _No Ruz_ or New Year, which was March 21, are kept as a
feast before the severe fast of the Ramazan, and this city of pilgrims
is crowded, and all people put on new clothes, the boys being chiefly
dressed in green.
To-morrow I begin my journey over new ground.
I. L. B.
LETTER XI
KASHAN, _March 26_.
I have seen the last of Kum and hotels and made roads for many months.
So much the better! I had to ride the whole length of the bazars and
the city, a mile and a half, but the camel-driver's coat served again
as a disguise, and I heard no remarks except from two boys. Indeed I
am delighted to find that the "foreign soldier" who rides in front of
me attracts so much curiosity that I pass in his wake unnoticed.
The ruinous condition of Kum is fearful. Once outside the houses and
bazars which surround the shrine of Fatima, the town is mostly rubbish
and litter, with forlorn, miserable houses created out of the rubbish,
grouped near festering pools; broken causeways infamously paved, full
of holes, heaps of potsherds, bones obtruding themselves, nothing to
please and everything to disgust the eye and sadden the spirit,
religious intolerance, a diminished population, and desolation.
The pottery bazar, abounding in blue glazed ware of graceful shapes,
and a number of shrines of saints, are the only objects of interest.
The domes of the latter were once covered with blue tiles, but these
have nearly all peeled off, leaving the universal mud--a mud so
self-asserting everywhere that Persia may be called the "Great Mud
Land." The cherry and apricot trees are in full bloom, but as yet
there is little greenery round Kum, and the area of cultivation is
very limited.
I am now on the road which, with the exception of that from Tihran to
Resht, is best known to travellers,[30] but I cannot help sketching it
briefly, though the interests are few considering the distance
travelled, 280 miles from Tihran to Isfahan. I now see Persia for the
first time; for traversing a country buried in snow is not seeing it.
It would be premature to express the opinion that the less one sees of
it the more one is likely to admire it.
I have been _en route_ for a week under the best possible
circumstances--the nights always cool, the days never too warm, the
accommodation tolerable, the caravan in excellent working order, no
annoyances, and no grievances. The soldier who attends me arranges
everything for my comfort, and is always bright and kind. I have no
ambition to "beat the record," but long gallops on a fine Arab horse
turn marches of from twenty-two to thirty miles into delightful
morning rides of from three and a half to four and a half hours, with
long pleasant afternoons following them, and sound sleep at night.
These are my halcyon days of Persian travelling; and yet I cannot
write that Persia is beautiful.
It is early spring, and tulips and irises rise not out of a carpet of
green but, to use the descriptive phrase of Isaiah, "as a root out of
a dry ground," the wormwood is dressed in its gray-green, the buds of
the wild dwarf-almond show their tender pink, the starry blossom of
the narcissus gleams in moist places, the sky is exquisitely blue, and
shining cloud-masses fleck the brown hillsides with violet shadows.
Where there is irrigation carpets of young wheat cover the ground; but
these, like the villages, occur only at long intervals, for the road
passes mainly through a country destitute of water, or rather of
arrangements for storing it.
As to natural trees there are none, and even the bushes are few and
unlovely, chiefly camel thorn and a rigid and thorny tamarisk. Beyond
Kum there is no made road. A track worn by the caravans of ages
exists,--sometimes parallel ruts for a width of half a mile, sometimes
not two yards wide, and now and then lapsing into illegibility. There
are large and small caravanserais of an inferior class along the
route, and _chapar khanas_ at intervals. Water is often bad and
sometimes brackish. It is usually supplied from small brick
_abambars_, or covered reservoirs. Milk is hard to obtain, often
impossible; at some places fowls can be bought for eightpence each,
and "flap jacks" everywhere.
Except the snowy cone of Demavend, with purple ranges curtaining his
feet, no special object of admiration exists; the plains are reddish,
yellowish, barren, gravelly, or splotched with salt; the ranges of
hills, which are never far off (for Persia is a land of mountains),
are either shapeless and gravelly, or rocky, rugged, and splintered,
their hue reddish and purplish, their sides scored by the spring rush
of wasted torrents, their aspect one of complete desolation, yet not
without a certain beauty at this season--rose-flushed in the early
morning, passing through shades of cobalt and indigo through the day,
and dying away at sunset in translucent amethyst against a sky of
ruddy gold.
But, take away the atmospheric colouring--which the advancing heat
will abolish--and the plain English of the route is this, that in
every direction, far as the eye can reach, the country is a salt waste
or a gravelly waste, with a few limited oases of cultivation on the
plains and in the folds of the hills, always treeless, except round a
few of the villages, where there are small groves of poplars and
willows. The villages are clusters of mud hovels, scarcely
distinguishable from the wastes, and many of them are ruined and
deserted, oppressive exactions or a failure of water being common
reasons for a migration. These dismal ruins are shapeless heaps of
mud, the square towers of the square walls alone retaining any
semblance of form.
Long lines of choked _kanaats_, denoted by their crumbling shafts,
attest the industrious irrigation of a former day. Tracks wind wearily
among shrunken villages, or cross ridges of mud or gravel to take
their unlovely way over arid stony plains. Unwatered tracts of land,
once cultivated, as the _kanaats_ show, but now deserts of sand and
stones, send up gyrating clouds of gritty dust.
Such is Persia between its two capitals; and yet I repeat that in cool
weather, and on a good horse, the journey is a very pleasant one. Most
European men ride _chapar_, that is, post; but from what I see of the
_chapar_ horses, I would not do it for the sake of doubling the
distance travelled in the day, and therefore cannot describe either
its pleasures or tortures from experience.
On certain roads, as from Tihran to Shiraz, there are post stations
(_chapar khana_) with horses and men at distances of from twenty to
twenty-five miles, with a charge of one _kran_ (eightpence) per
_farsakh_ (four miles) for each horse engaged, an order having been
previously obtained from a government official. Besides your own horse
you have to take one for the _shasgird chapar_, or post-boy, who has
to take the horses back, and one for the servant. The two latter carry
the very limited kit, which includes a long cotton bag, which, being
filled with chopped straw at night, forms the traveller's bed. The
custom is to ride through all the hours of daylight whenever horses
are to be got, doing from sixty to ninety miles a day, always
inspired by the hope of "cutting the record," even by half an hour,
and winning undying fame.
The horses, which are kept going at a canter so long as they can be
thrashed into one, are small and active, and do wonders; but from the
strain put upon them, bad feeding, sore backs, and general
dilapidation and exhaustion, are constantly tumbling down. Several
times I have seen wretched animals brought into the yards, apparently
"dead beat," and after getting some chopped straw and a little barley
thrashed into a canter again for twenty-five miles more, because the
traveller could not get a remount. They often fall down dead under
their riders, urged by the heavy _chapar_ whip to the last.
Riding _chapar_, journeying in a _taktrawan_ or litter, or in a
_kajaweh_, or riding caravan pace, by which only about thirty miles a
day can be covered, are the only modes of travelling in Persia, though
I think that with capable assistance a carriage might make the journey
from Tihran as far as Kashan.
I lodge in the _chapar khanas_ whenever I can. They consist of mud
walls fourteen feet high, enclosing yards deep in manure, with
stabling for the _chapar_ horses on two sides, and recesses in their
inner walls for mangers. The entrance is an arched gateway. There are
usually two dark rooms at the sides, which the servants occupy and
cook in, and over the gateway is the _balakhana_, an abortive tower,
attained by a steep and crumbling stair, in which I encamp. The one
room has usually two doors, half-fitting and non-shutting, and perhaps
a window space or two, and the ashes of the last traveller's fire.
Such a breezy rest just suits me, and when my camp furniture has been
arranged and I am enjoying my "afternoon tea," I feel "monarch of all
I survey," even of the boundless desert, over which the cloud shadows
chase each other till it purples in the light of the sinking sun. If
there is the desert desolation there is also the desert freedom.
The first halt was delicious after the crowds and fanaticism of Kum. A
broad plain with irrigated patches and a ruinous village was passed;
then came the desert, an expanse of camel-brown gravel thickly strewn
with stones, with a range of low serrated brown hills, with curious
stratification, on the east. A few caravans of camels, and the _haram_
of the Governor of Yezd in closely-covered _kajawehs_, alone broke the
monotony. Before I thought we were half-way we reached the _abambars_,
the small brown caravanserai, and the _chapar khana_ of Passangh[=a]m,
having ridden in three hours a distance on which I have often expended
eight.
Cool and breezy it was in my room, and cooler and breezier on the flat
mud roof; and the lifting of some clouds in the far distance to the
north, beyond the great sweep of the brown desert, revealed the mighty
Elburz range, white with new-fallen snow. At Sinsin the next evening
it was gloriously cold. There had been another heavy snowfall, and in
the evening the Elburz range, over a hundred miles away, rose in
unsullied whiteness like a glittering wall, and above it the colossal
cone of Demavend, rose-flushed.
The routine of the day is simple and easy. I get the caravan off at
eight, lie on the floor for an hour, gallop and walk for about half
the march, rest for an hour in some place, where Mahboud, the soldier,
always contrives to bring me a glass of tea, and then gallop and walk
to the halting-place, where I rest for another hour till the caravan
comes in. I now know exactly what to pay, and by giving small presents
get on very easily.