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

On leaving Ardal we passed very shortly into a region little traversed by Europeans, embracing remarkable gorges and singularly abrupt turns in ravines, through which the Karun, here a deep and powerful stream, finds its way. A deep descent over grassy hills to a rude village in a valley and a steep ascent took us to the four booths, which are the summer quarters of our former escort, Rustem Khan, who received us with courteous hospitality, and regaled us with fresh cow's milk in a copper basin. He introduced me to twelve women and a number of children, nearly all with sore eyes. There is not a shadow of privacy in these tents, with open fronts and sides. The carpets, which are made by the women, serve as chairs, tables, and beds, and the low wall of roughly-heaped stones at the back for trunks and wardrobe, for on it they keep their "things" in immense saddle-bags made of handsome rugs. The visible furniture consists of a big copper bowl for food, a small one for milk, a huge copper pot for clarifying butter, and a goat-skin suspended from three poles, which is jerked by two women seated on the ground, and is used for churning butter and making curds.

A steep ascent gives a superb view of a confused sea of mountains, and of a precipitous and tremendous gorge, the Tang-i-Ardal, through which the Karun passes, making a singularly abrupt turn after leaving a narrow and apparently inaccessible cañon or rift on the south side of the Ardal valley. A steep zigzag descent of 600 feet in less than three-quarters of a mile brings the path down to the Karun, a deep bottle-green river, now swirling in drifts of foam, now resting momentarily in quiet depths, but always giving an impression of volume and power. Large and small land turtles abound in that fiercely hot gorge of from 1000 to 2000 feet deep. The narrow road crosses the river on a bridge of two arches, and proceeds for some distance at a considerable height on its right bank. There I saw natural wood for the first time since crossing the Zagros mountains in January, and though the oak, ash, and maple are poor and stunted, their slender shade was delicious. Roses, irises, St. John's wort, and other flowers were abundant.

The path ascends past a clear spring, up steep zigzags to a graveyard in which are several stone lions, rudely carved, of natural size, facing Mecca-wards, with pistols, swords, and daggers carved in relief on their sides, marking the graves of fighting men. On this magnificent point above the Karun a few hovels, deserted in summer, surrounded by apricot trees form the village of Duashda Imams, which has a superb view of the extraordinary and sinuous chasm through which the Karun passes for many miles, thundering on its jagged and fretted course between gigantic and nearly perpendicular cliffs of limestone and conglomerate. Near this village the pistachio is abundant, and planes, willows, and a large-leaved clematis vary the foliage.

Leaving the river at this point, a somewhat illegible path leads through "park-like" scenery, fair slopes of grass and flowers sprinkled with oaks singly or in clumps, glades among trees in their first fresh green, and evermore as a background gray mountains slashed with snow.

In the midst of these pretty uplands is the Ilyat encampment of Martaza, with its black tents, donkeys, sheep, goats, and big fierce dogs, which vociferously rushed upon Downie, the retriever, and were themselves rushed upon and gripped by a number of women. The people, having been informed of our intended arrival by Reza Kuli Khan, had arranged a large tent with carpets and cushions, but we pitched the camps eventually on an oak-covered slope, out of the way of the noise, curiosity, and evil odours of Martaza. Water is very scarce there, three wells or pools, fouled by the feet of animals, being the only supply.

I rested on my dhurrie under an oak till the caravan came up. It was a sweet place, but was soon invaded, and for the rest of the day quiet and privacy were out of the question, for presently appeared a fine, florid, buxom dame, loud of speech, followed by a number of women and children, all as dirty as it is possible to be, and all crowded round me and sat down on my carpet. This Khanum Shirin is married to the chief or headman, but being an heiress she "bosses" the tribe. She brought up bolsters and quilts, and begged us to consider themselves, the whole region, and all they had as pishkash (a present from an inferior to a superior), but when she was asked if it included herself, she blushed and covered her face. After two hours of somewhat flagging conversation she led her train back again, but after my tent was pitched she reappeared with a much larger number of women, including two betrothed girls of sixteen and seventeen years old, who are really beautiful.

These maidens were dressed in clean cotton costumes, and white veils of figured silk gauze enveloped them from head to foot. They unveiled in my tent, and looked more like houris than any women I have seen in the East; and their beauty was enhanced by the sweetness and maidenly modesty of their expression. I wished them to be photographed, and they were quite willing, but when I took them outside some men joined the crowd and said it should not be, and that when their betrothed husbands came home they would tell them how bold and bad they had been, and would have them beaten. Although these beauties had been most modest and maidenly in their behaviour, they were sent back with blows, and were told not to come near us again. The Agha entertained the Khanum Shirin for a long time, and the conversation was very animated, but when he set a very fine musical box going for their amusement the lady and the rest of the crowd became quite listless and apathetic, and said they much preferred to talk. When their prolonged visit came to an end the Khanum led her train away, with a bow which really had something of graceful dignity in it.

The next morning her husband, the Mollah-i-Martaza, and his son, mounted on one horse, came with us as guides, and when we halted at their camp the Khanum took the whip out of my hand and whipped the women all round with it, except the offending beauties, who were not to be seen. The mollah is a grave, quiet, and most respectable-looking man, more like a thriving merchant than a nomad chief, though he does carry arms. He is a devout Moslem, and is learned, i. e. he can read the Koran.

In a short time the woodland beauty is exchanged for weedy hills and slopes strewn with boulders. Getting other guides at an Ilyat camp, we ascended Sanginak, a mountain 8200 feet high, from the top of which a good idea of the local topography is gained. The most striking features are the absence of definite peaks and the tremendous gorges and abrupt turns of the Karun, which swallows in its passage all minor streams. Precipitous ranges of great altitude hemmed in by ranges yet loftier, snow-covered or snow-patched, with deep valleys between them, well grassed and often well wooded, great clefts, through which at some seasons streams reach the Karun; mountain meadows spotted with the black tents of Ilyats, and deserted hovels far below, with patches of wheat and barley, make up the landscape.

These hills are covered with celery of immense size. The leaves are dried and stacked for fodder, and the underground stalks, which are very white, are a great article of food, both fresh and steeped for a length of time in sour milk. After resting in some Ilyat tents, where the people were friendly and dirty, we had a most tiresome march over treeless hills covered with herbs, and down a steep descent into the Gurab plain, on which a great wall of rocky mountains of definite and impressive shapes descends in broken spurs. My guide, who had never been certain about the way, led me wrong. No tents were visible, the nomads I met had seen neither tents nor caravan. Two hours went by in toiling round the bases of green hills, and then there was the joyful surprise of coming upon my tent pitched, the kettle boiling, the mules knee-deep in food, close by the Chesmeh-i-Gurab, a copious spring of good water, of which one could safely drink.

This Gurab plain, one of very many lying high up among these Luristan mountains, is green and pretty now – a sea of bulbs and grass, but is brown and dusty from early in June onwards. It is about four miles long by nine or ten broad, and is watered by a clear and wonderfully winding stream, which dwindles to a thread later on. The nomads are already coming up.

The rest was much broken by the critical state of Karim's arm, which was swelled, throbbing, and inflamed all round the wound inflicted by Karun on May 13, and he had high fever. It was a helpless predicament, the symptoms were so like those of gangrene. I thought he would most likely die of the hot marches. It was a very anxious night, as all our methods of healing were exhausted, and the singular improvement which set in and has continued must have been the work of the Great Physician, to whom an appeal for help was earnestly made. The wound is daily syringed with Condy's fluid, the only antiseptic available, and has a drainage tube. To-day I have begun to use eucalyptus oil, with which the man is delighted, possibly because he has heard that it is very expensive, and that I have hardly any left!

Yesterday I had the amusement of shifting the camps to another place, and Hadji was somewhat doubtful of my leadership. On arriving at the beautiful crystal spring which the guide had indicated as the halting-place for Sunday, I found that it issued from under a mound of grass-grown graves, was in the full sun blaze, and at the lowest part of the plain. The guide asserted that it was the only spring, but having seen a dark stain of vegetation high among the hills, I halted the caravan and rode off alone in search of the water I hoped it indicated, disregarding the suppressed but unmistakably sneering laughter of the guide and charvadars. In less than a mile I came upon the dry bed of a rivulet, a little higher up on a scanty, intermittent trickle, higher still on a gurgling streamlet fringed by masses of blue scilla, and still higher on a small circular spring of very cold water, with two flowery plateaux below it just large enough for the camps, in a green quiet corrie, with the mountains close behind. Hadji laughed, and the guide insisted that the spring was not always there. A delightful place it is in which to spend Sunday quietly, with its musical ripple of water, its sky-blue carpet of scilla, its beds of white and purple irises, its slopes ablaze with the Fritillaria imperialis, and its sweet, calm view of the green Gurab plain and the silver windings of the Dinarud.

Above the spring is the precipitous hill of Tur, with the remains of a rude fort on its shattered rocky summit. Two similar ruins are visible from Tur, one on a rocky ledge of an offshoot of the Kuh-i-Gerra, on the other side of the Dinarud valley, the other on the crest of a noble headland of the Sanganaki range, which is visible throughout the whole region. The local legend concerning them is that long before the days of the Parthian kings, and when bows and arrows were the only weapons known, iron being undiscovered, there was in the neighbourhood of Gurab a king called Faruk Padishah, who had three sons, Salmon, Tur, and Iraj. It does not appear to be usual among the Bakhtiaris for sons to "get on" together after their father's death, and the three youths quarrelled and built these three impregnable forts – Killa Tur, the one I examined, Killa Iraj, and Killa Salmon.

The beautiful valley was evidently too narrow for their ambition, and leaving their uncomfortable fastnesses they went northwards, and founded three empires, Salmon to the Golden Horn, where he founded Stamboul, Tur to Turkistan, and Iraj became the founder of the Iranian Empire.

Killa Tur is a stone building mostly below the surface of the hill-top, of rough hewn stone cemented with lime mortar of the hardness of concrete. The inner space of the fort is not more than eighty square yards. The walls are from three to six feet thick.

Chigakhor, May 31.– The last twelve days have been spent in marching through a country which has not been traversed by Europeans, only crossed along the main track. On leaving the pleasant camp of Tur we descended to the Gurab plain, purple in patches with a showy species of garlic, skirted the base of the Tur spur, and rode for some miles along the left bank of the Dinarud, which, after watering the plain of Gurab, sparkles and rushes down a grassy valley bright with roses and lilies, and well wooded with oak, elm, and hawthorn. This river, gaining continually in volume, makes a turbulent descent to the Karun a few miles from the point where we left it. This was the finest day's march of the journey. The mountain forms were grander and more definite, the vegetation richer, the scenery more varied, and a kindlier atmosphere pervaded it. In the midst of a wood of fine walnut trees, ash, and hawthorn, laced together by the tendrils of vines, a copious stream tumbles over rocks fringed with maiden-hair, and sparkles through grass purple with orchises. This is the only time that I have seen the one or the other in Persia, and it was like an unexpected meeting with dear friends.

Crossing the Dinarud on a twig bridge, fording a turbulent affluent, which bursts full fledged from the mountain side, and ascending for some hours through grassy glades wooded with oak and elm, we camped for two days on the alpine meadow of Arjul, scantily watered but now very green. Oak woods come down upon it, the vines are magnificent, and there is some cultivation of wheat, which is sown by the nomads before their departure in the late autumn, and is reaped during their summer sojourn. There are no tents there at present, yet from camps near and far, on horseback and on foot, people came for eye-lotions, and remained at night to have them dropped into their eyes.

The next morning I was awakened at dawn by Mirza's voice calling to me, "Madam, Hadji wants you to come down and sew up a mule that's been gored by a wild boar." Awfully gored it was. A piece of skin about ten inches square was hanging down between its forelegs, and a broad wound the depth of my hand and fully a foot long extended right into its chest, with a great piece taken out. I did what I could, but the animal had to be left behind to be cured by the Mollah-i-Martaza, who left us there. Another misfortune to Hadji was the loss of the fiery leader of the caravan, Cock o' the Walk, but late at night he was brought into camp at Dupulan quite crestfallen, having gone back to the rich pastures which surround the Chesmeh-i-Gurab. The muleteer who went in search of him was attacked by some Lurs and stripped of his clothing, but on some men coming up who said his master was under the protection of the Ilkhani, his clothes and horse were returned to him.

The parallel ranges with deep valleys between them, which are such a feature of this country, are seen in perfection near Arjul. Some of the torrents of this mountain region are already dry, but their broad stony beds, full of monstrous boulders, arrest the fury with which at times they seek the Karun. One of these, the Imamzada, passes through the most precipitous and narrow gorge which it is possible to travel, even with unloaded mules. The narrow path is chiefly rude rock ladders, threading a gorge or chasm on a gigantic scale, with a compressed body of water thundering below, concealed mainly by gnarled and contorted trees, which find root-hold in every rift. Where the chasm widens for a space before narrowing to a throat we forded it, and through glades and wooded uplands reached Arjul, descending and crossing the torrent by the same ford on the march to Dupulan the next day.

Owing to the loss of two baggage animals and the necessary re-adjustment of the loads, I was late in starting from Arjul, and the heat as we descended to the lower levels was very great, the atmosphere being misty as well as sultry. Passing upwards, through glades wooded with oaks, the path emerges on high gravelly uplands above the tremendous gorge of the Karun, the manifold windings of which it follows at a great height. From the first sight of this river in the Ardal valley to its emergence at Dupulan, just below these heights, it has come down with abrupt elbow-like turns and singular sinuosities – a full, rapid, powerful glass-green volume of water, through a ravine or gorge or chasm from 1000 to 2000 feet in depth, now narrowing, now widening, but always the feature of the landscape. It would be natural to use the usual phrase, and write of the Karun having "carved" this passage for itself, but I am more and more convinced that this is not the case, but that its waters found their way into channels already riven by some of those mighty operations of nature which have made of this country a region of walls and clefts.

A long, very steep gravelly descent leads from these high lands down to the Karun, and to one of the routes – little used, however – from Isfahan to Shuster. It is reported as being closed by snow four months of the year. The scenery changed its aspect here, and for walls and parapets of splintered rock there are rounded gravelly hills and stretching uplands.

The three groups of most wretched mud hovels which form the village of Dupulan ("Two Bridge Place") are on an eminence on the left bank of the Karun, which emerges from its long imprisonment in a gorge in the mountains by a narrow passage between two lofty walls of rock so smooth and regular in their slope and so perfect a gateway as to suggest art rather than nature. This river, the volume of which is rapidly augmenting on its downward course, is here compressed into a width of about twenty yards.

At this point a stone bridge, built by Hussein Kuli Khan, of one large pointed arch with a smaller one for the flood, and a rough roadway corresponding to the arch in the steepness of its pitch, spans the stream, which passes onwards gently and smoothly, its waters a deep cool green. Below Dupulan the Karun, which in that direction has been explored by several travellers, turns to the south-west, and after a considerable bend enters the levels above Shuster by a north-westerly course. Near the bridge the Karun is joined by the Sabzu, a very vigorous torrent from the Ardal plain, which is crossed by a twig bridge, safer than it looks.

The camps were pitched in apricot orchards in the Sabzu ravine, near some elægnus trees, which are now bearing their sweet gray and yellow blossoms, which will be succeeded by auburn tresses of a woolly but very pleasant fruit. Dupulan has an altitude of only 4950 feet, and in its course from the Kuh-i-Rang to this point the Karun has descended about 4000 feet. Though there was a breeze, and both ends of my tent and the kanats were open, the mercury was at 86° inside, and at 5 a. m. at 72° outside (on May 21). There were no supplies, and even milk was unattainable.

The road we followed ascends the Dupulan Pass, which it crosses at a height of 6380 feet. The path is very bad, hardly to be called a path. The valley which it ascends is packed with large and small boulders, with round water-worn stones among them, and such track as there is makes sharp zigzags over and among these rocks. Screw was very unwilling to face the difficulties, which took two hours to surmount. The ascent was hampered by coming upon a tribe of Ilyats on the move, who at times blocked up the pass with their innumerable sheep and goats and their herds of cattle. Once entangled in this migration, it was only possible to move on a few feet at a time. It straggled along for more than a mile, – loaded cows and bullocks, innumerable sheep, goats, lambs, and kids; big dogs; asses loaded with black tents and short tent-poles on the loads; weakly sheep tied on donkeys' backs, and weakly lambs carried in shepherds' bosoms; handsome mares, each with her foal, running loose or ridden by women with babies seated on the tops of loaded saddle-bags made of gay rugs; tribesmen on foot with long guns slung behind their shoulders, and big two-edged knives in their girdles; sheep bleating, dogs barking, mares neighing, men shouting and occasionally firing off their guns, the whole ravine choked up with the ascending tribal movement.

Half-way up the ascent there is a most striking view of mountain ranges cleft by the great chasm of the Karun. The descent is into the eastern part of the Ardal valley, over arid treeless hillsides partially ploughed, to the village of Dehnau, not yet deserted for the summer. Fattiallah Khan expected us, and rooms were prepared for me in the women's house, which I excused myself from occupying by saying that I cannot sleep under a roof. I managed also to escape partaking of a huge garlicky dinner which was being cooked for me.

The Khan's house or fort, built like all else of mud, has a somewhat imposing gateway, over which are the men's apartments. The roof is decorated with a number of ibex horns. Within is a rude courtyard with an uneven surface, on which servants and negro slaves were skinning sheep, winnowing wheat, clarifying butter, carding wool, cooking, and making cheese. The women's apartments are round the courtyard, and include the usual feature of these houses, an atrium, or room without a front, and a darkish room within. The floor of the atrium was covered with brown felts, and there was a mattress for me to sit upon. The ruling spirit of the haram is the Khan's mother, a comely matron of enormous size, who occasionally slapped her son's four young and comely wives when they were too "forward." She wore a short jacket, balloon-like trousers of violet silk, and a black coronet, to which was attached a black chadar which completely enveloped her.

The wives wore figured white chadars, print trousers, and strings of coins. Children much afflicted with cutaneous maladies crawled on the floor. Heaps of servants, negro slaves, old hags, and young girls crowded behind and around, all talking at once and at the top of their voices, and at the open front the village people constantly assembled, to be driven away at intervals by a man with a stick. A bowl of cow's milk and some barley bread were given to me, and though a remarkably dirty negress kept the flies away by flapping the milk bowl with a dirty sleeve, I was very grateful for the meal, for I was really suffering from the heat and fatigue.

A visit to a haram is not productive of mutual elevation. The women seem exceedingly frivolous, and are almost exclusively interested in the adornment of their persons, the dress and ailments of their children, and in the frightful jealousies and intrigues inseparable from the system of polygamy, and which are fostered by the servants and discarded wives. The servile deference paid by the other women to the reigning favourite before her face, and the merciless persistency of the attempts made behind her back to oust her from her position, and the requests made on the one hand for charms or potions to win or bring back the love of a husband, and on the other for something which shall make the favourite hateful to him, are evidences of the misery of heart which underlies the outward frivolity.

The tone of Fattiallah Khan's haram was not higher than usual. The ladies took off my hat, untwisted my hair, felt my hands, and shrieked when they found that my gloves came off; laughed immoderately at my Bakhtiari shoes, which, it seems, are only worn by men; put their rings on my fingers, put my hat on their own heads, asked if I could give them better hair dyes than their own, and cosmetics to make their skins fair; paid the usual compliments, told me to regard everything as pishkash, asked for medicines and charms, and regretted that I would not sleep in their house, because, as they said, they "never went anywhere or saw anything."

They have no occupation, except occasionally a little embroidery. They amuse themselves, they said, by watching the servants at work, and by having girls to dance before them. They find the winter, though spent in a warm climate, very long and wearisome, and after dark employ female professional story-tellers to entertain them with love stories. At night the elder lady sent three times for a charm which should give her daughter the love of her husband. She is married to another Khan, and I recalled her as the forlorn-looking girl without any jewels who excited my sympathies in his house.