Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan, Volume 1 (of 2)

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.