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

Marriages are early among these people. They are arranged by the parents of both bride and bridegroom. The betrothal feast is a great formality. The "settlements" having been made by the bridegroom's father and mother, they distribute sweetmeats among the members of the bride's family, and some respectable men who are present tie a handkerchief round the head of the bride, and kiss the hands of her parents as a sign of the betrothal. The engagement must be fulfilled by the bride's parents under pain of severe penalties, from which the bridegroom's parents are usually exempt. But, should he prove faithless, he is a marked man. It appears that "breach of promise of marriage" is very rare. The betrothal may take place at the tenderest age, but the marriage is usually delayed till the bride is twelve years old, or even older, and the bridegroom is from fifteen to eighteen.

The "settlements" made at the betrothal are paid at the time of marriage, and consist of a sum of money or cattle, mares, or sheep, according to the circumstances of the bridegroom's parents. It is essential among all classes that a number of costumes be presented to the bride. After the marriage is over her parents bestow a suit of clothes on her husband, but these are usually of an inferior, or, as my interpreter calls them, of a "trivial" description.

A Bakhtiari marriage is a very noisy performance. For three days or more, in fact as long as the festivities can be afforded, the relations and friends of both parties are assembled at the tents of the bride's parents, feasting and dancing (men and women on this occasion dancing together), performing feats of horsemanship, and shooting at a mark. The noise at this time is ceaseless. Drums, tom-toms, reeds, whistles, and a sort of bagpipe are all in requisition, and songs of love and war are chanted. At this time also is danced the national dance, the chapi, of which on no other occasion (except a burial) can a stranger procure a sight for love or money. It is said to resemble the arnaoutika of the modern Greeks; any number of men can join in it. The dancers form in a close row, holding each other by their kamarbands, and swinging along sidewise. They mark the time by alternately stamping the heel of the right and left foot. The dancers are led by a man who dances apart, waving a handkerchief rhythmically above his head, and either singing a war song or playing on a reed pipe. After the marriage feast the bride follows her husband to his father's tent, where she becomes subject to her mother-in-law.

The messenger, after looking round to see that there were no bystanders, very mysteriously produced from his girdle a black, flattish oval stone of very close texture, weighing about a pound, almost polished by long handling. He told me that it was believed that this stone, if kept in one family for fifty years and steadily worn by father and son, would then not only turn to gold, but have the power of transmuting any metal laid beside it for five years, and he wanted to know what the wisdom of the Feringhis knew about it.

I went up to my camp above the village and tried to rest there, but the buzz of a crowd outside and the ceaseless lifting of curtains and kanats made this quite impossible. When I opened the tent I found the crowd seated in a semicircle five rows deep, waiting for medicines, chiefly eye-lotion, quinine, and cough mixtures. These daily assemblages of "patients" are most fatiguing. The satisfaction is that some "lame dogs" are "helped over stiles," and that some prejudice against Christians is removed.

After this Fattiallah Khan, with a number of retainers, paid a formal visit to the Agha, who kindly sent for me, as I do not receive any but lady visitors in my tent. The Khan is a very good-looking and well-dressed man of twenty-eight, very amusing, and ready to be amused. He was very anxious to be doctored, but looked the opposite of a sick man. He and Isfandyar Khan were in arms against the Ilkhani two years ago, and a few men were shot. He looked as if he were very sorry not to have killed him.

The Bakhtiaris have an enormous conceit of themselves and their country. It comes out in all ways and on all occasions, and their war stories and songs abound in legends of singular prowess, one Bakhtiari killing twenty Persians, and the like. They represent the power of the Shah over them as merely nominal, a convenient fiction for the time being, although it is apparent that Persia, which for years has been aiming at the extinction of the authority of the principal chiefs, has had at least a partial success.

At such interviews a private conversation is impossible. The manners are those of a feudal régime. Heaps of retainers crowd round, and even join in the conversation. A servant brought the Khan a handsome kalian to smoke three times. He also took tea. A great quantity of opium for exportation is grown about Dehnau, and the Khan said that the cultivation of it is always increasing.

From Dehnau the path I took leads over gravelly treeless hills, through many treeless gulches, to the top of a great gorge, through which the Sabzu passes as an impetuous torrent. The descent to a very primitive bridge is long and difficult, a succession of rocky zigzags. Picturesqueness is not a usual attribute of mud villages, but the view from every point of Chiraz, the village on the lofty cliffs on the other side of the stream, is strikingly so. They are irregularly covered with houses, partly built on them and partly excavated out of them, and behind is a cool mass of greenery, apricot orchards, magnificent walnut and mulberry trees, great standard hawthorns loaded with masses of blossom, wheat coming into ear, and clumps and banks of canary-yellow roses measuring three inches across their petals. Groups of women, in whose attire Turkey red predominated, were on the house roofs. Wild flowers abounded, and the sides of the craggy path by which I descended were crowded with leguminous and umbelliferous plants, with the white and pink dianthus, and with the thorny tussocks of the gum tragacanth, largely used for kindling, now in full bloom.

As I dragged my unwilling horse down the steep descent, his bridle was taken out of my hands, and I was welcomed by the brother of Fattiallah Khan, who, with a number of village men escorted me over the twig bridge, and up to an exquisite halting-place under a large mulberry tree, where the next two hours were spent in receiving visitors. It is evident that these fine orchards must have been the pleasure-ground of some powerful ruler, and the immense yellow roses are such as grow in one or two places in Kashmir, where they are attributed to Jehangir.

The track from Chiraz for many miles follows up the right bank of the Sabzu at a great height, descends occasionally into deep gulches, crosses the spurs of mountains whose rifts give root-hold to contorted "pencil cedars," and winds among small ash trees and hawthorns, or among rich grass and young wheat, which is grown to a considerable extent on the irrigated slopes above the river. It is a great surprise to find so much land under cultivation, and so much labour spent on irrigation channels. Some of these canals are several miles in length, and the water always runs in them swiftly, and the right way, although the "savages" who make them have no levels or any tools but spades.

Mountains, much scored and cañoned by streams, very grand in form, and with much snow still upon them, rise to a great height above the ranges which form the Sabzu valley. From Chaharta, an uninteresting camping-ground by the river, I proceeded by an elevated and rather illegible track in a easterly direction to the meeting of two streams, forded the Sabzu, and camped for two days on the green slope of Sabz Kuh, at a height of 8100 feet, close to a vigorous spring whose waters form many streamlets, fringed by an abundance of pink primulas, purple and white orchises, white tulips, and small fragrant blue irises.

Lahdaraz is in the very heart of mountain ranges, and as the Ilyats have not yet come up so high, there were no crowds round my tent for medicine, but one sick woman was carried thither eleven miles on the back of her husband, who seemed tenderly solicitous about her.

On Monday I spent most of the day 1000 feet higher, in most magnificent scenery on an imposing scale of grandeur. The guide took us from the camp through herbage, snow, and alpine flowers, up a valley with fine mountains on either side, terminating on the brink of a gigantic precipice, a cloven ledge between the Kuh-i-Kaller and a stupendous cliff or headland, Sultan Ibrahim, over 12,000 feet, which descends in shelving masses to an abyss of tremendous depth, where water thunders in a narrow rift. The Sabz Kuh, or "green mountain" range, famous for the pasturage of its higher slopes, terminates in Sultan Ibrahim, and unites at its eastern end with the Kuh-i-Kaller, a range somewhat higher. On the east side of this huge chasm rises another range of peaks, with green shelves, dark rifts, and red precipices, behind which rise another, and yet another, whose blue, snow-patched summits blended with the pure cool blue of the sky. In the far distance, in a blue veil, lies the green-tinted plain of Khana Mirza, set as an emerald in this savage scenery, with two ranges beyond, and above them the great mountain mass of the Riji, whose snowy peaks were painted faintly on a faint blue heaven.

That misty valley, irrigated and cultivated, with 100 villages of the Janiki tribe upon it, is the only fair spot in the savage landscape. Elsewhere only a few wild flowers and a gnarled juniper here and there relieve the fierce, blazing verdurelessness of these stupendous precipices. Never, not even among the Himalayas, have I seen anything so superlatively grand, though I have always imagined that such scenes must exist somewhere on the earth. A pair of wild sheep on a ledge, a serpent or two, and an eagle soaring sunwards represented animate nature, otherwise the tremendous heights above, the awful depths below, the snowy mountains, and the valley with its smile, were given over to solitude and silence, except for the dull roar of the torrent hurrying down to vivify the Khana Mirza plain.

After leaving Lahdaraz the path followed the course of the Sabzu through grass and barley for a few miles. Then there is an abrupt and disagreeable change to yellow mud slopes and high mud mountains deeply fissured, the scanty herbage already eaten down by Ilyat flocks – a desolate land, without springs, streams, or even Ilyat tents. Then comes a precipice at an altitude of 7500 feet, through a cleft in which, the Tang-i-Wastagun, the road passes, and descends to the plain of Gandaman as something little better than a sheep track on a steep hillside above a stream. The heat was fierce. A pair of stout gardening gloves does not preserve the hands from blistering. Spectacles with wire gauze sides have to be abandoned as they threaten to roast the eyes. In this latitude, 32°, the heat of the sun at noon is tremendous. At the precipice top I crept into a hole at the base of a rock, for "the shadow of a great rock in a weary land," till the caravan staggered up. It was difficult to brave the sun's direct rays. He looked like a ball of magnesium light, white and scintillating, in the unclouded sky.

On crossing the Tang-i-Wastagun we left behind the Bakhtiari country proper for a time, and re-entered the Chahar Mahals, with their mixed village population of Persians and Armenians. The descent from the Tang-i-Wastagun is upon a ruined Armenian village with a large graveyard. The tombstones are of great size, ten feet long by three feet broad and three feet high, sarcophagus-shaped, and on each stone are an Armenian epitaph and a finely-engraved cross. The plain of Gandaman or Wastagun is a very large one, over 7000 feet in altitude, and is surrounded mainly by high mountains still snow-patched, but to the north by low rocky hills. Much of it is irrigated and under cultivation, and grows heavy crops of wheat and barley. The pasturage is fine and abundant, and the people breed cattle and horses. The uncultivated slopes are now covered with red tulips and a purple allium, and even the dry gravel added largely to the daily increasing botanical collection.

The camps were pitched on green turf near three springs, a quiet place, but there was little rest. We were hardly settled before there was a severe fight among the horses, my sour-tempered Screw being the aggressor. This was hardly quieted when there was a sharp "scrimmage" between the charvadars and the Agha's three young savages, in which one of them, Ali Jan, was badly beaten, and came to me to have a bleeding face and head dressed. After that the people began to come in from the villages for eye-washes and medicines. They have no bottles, nor have I, and the better-off bring great copper jugs and basins for an ounce or two of lotion! A very poor old woman much afflicted with ophthalmia said she had three sisters all blind, that she had nothing for lotion, nothing in the world but a copper cooking pot, and she cried piteously. I had nothing to give her, and eventually she returned with an egg-shell, with the top neatly chipped off. It is the custom to raise the hands to heaven and invoke blessings on the Hakīm's head, but I never received so many as from this poor creature.

The ride to the village of Gandaman, where we halted for two days, was an agreeable one. After being shut up among mountains and precipices, space and level ground to gallop over are an agreeable change, and in the early morning the heat was not excessive. The great plain was a truly pastoral scene. Wild-looking shepherds with long guns led great brown flocks to the hills; innumerable yokes of black oxen, ploughing with the usual iron-shod, pointed wooden share, turned over the rich black soil, making straight furrows, and crossing them diagonally; mares in herds fed with their foals; and shepherds busily separated the sheep from the goats.

Close to the filthy walled Armenian village of Kunak there is a conical hill with a large fort, in ruinous condition, upon it, and not far off are the remains of an Armenian village, enclosed by a square wall with a round tower at each corner. This must have been until recently a place of some local importance, as it is approached by a paved causeway, and had an aqueduct, now ruinous, carried over the river on three arches. Not only the plain but the hill-slopes up to a great height are cultivated, and though the latter have the precariousness of rain-lands, the crops already in ear promise well.

Crossing a spur which descends upon the north side of the plain, we reached Gandaman, a good-looking walled Moslem village of 196 houses, much planted, chiefly with willows, and rejoicing in eight springs, close together, the overflow of which makes quite a piece of water. It has an imamzada on an eminence and is fairly prosperous, for besides pastoral wealth it weaves and exports carpets, and dyes cotton and woollen yarn with madder and other vegetable dyes. The mountain view to the south-west is very fine.

I was in my tent early, but there was little rest, for crowds of people with bad eyes and woful maladies besieged it until the evening. At noon a gay procession crossed the green camping-ground, four mares caparisoned in red trappings, each carrying two women in bright dresses, but shrouded in pure white sheets bound round their heads with silver chains. The ketchuda of the Armenian village of Libasgun, two miles off, accompanied them, and said that they came to invite me to their village, for they are Christians. Then they all made the sign of the Cross, which is welcome in this land as a bond of brotherhood.

Cleanly, comely, large-eyed, bright-cheeked, and wholesome they looked, in their pure white chadars, gay red dresses, and embroidered under-vests. They had massive silver girdles, weighing several pounds, worn there only by married women, red coronets, heavy tiaras of silver, huge necklaces of coins, and large filigree silver drops attached down the edges of their too open vests. Their heavy hair was plaited, but not fastened up. Each wore a stiff diamond-shaped piece of white cotton over her mouth and the tip of her nose. They said it was their custom to wear it, and they would not remove it even to eat English biscuits! They managed to drink tea by veiling their faces with their chadars and passing the cup underneath, but they turned their faces quite away as they did it. They had come for the day, and had brought large hanks of wool to wind, but the headman had the tact to take them away after arranging for me to return the visit in the evening.

He seemed an intelligent man. Libasgun, with its 120 houses, is, according to his account, a prosperous village, paying its tax of 300 tumans (£100) a year to the Amin-ud-Daulat, and making a present only to the Ilkhani. It has 2000 sheep and goats, besides mares and cattle. It has an oil mill, and exports oil to Isfahan. The women weave carpets, and embroider beautifully on coarse cotton woven by themselves, and dyed indigo blue and madder red by their Gandaman neighbours. This man is proud of being a Christian. Among the Armenians Christianity is as much a national characteristic as pride of race and strict monogamy. He remarked that there are no sore eyes in Libasgun, and attributed it to the greater cleanliness of the people and to the cross signed in holy oil upon their brows in baptism!

I rode to this village in the late afternoon, and was received with much distinction in the balakhana of the ketchuda's house, where I was handed to the seat of honour, a bolster at the head of the handsomely-carpeted room. It soon filled with buxom women in red, with jackets displaying their figures, or want of figures, down to their waists. From the red velvet coronets on their heads hung two graduated rows of silver coins, and their muslin chadars were attached to their hair with large silver pins and chains. Magnificent necklaces of gold coins were also worn.

Forty women sat on the floor in rows against the wall. Each had rosy cheeks, big black eyes, and a diamond-shaped white cloth over her mouth. The uniformity was shocking. They stared, not at me, but at nothing. They looked listless and soulless, only fit to be what they are – the servants of their husbands. When they had asked me my age, and why I do not dye my hair, the conversation flagged, for I could not get any information from them even on the simplest topics. Hotter and hotter grew the room, more stolid the vacancy of the eyes, more grotesque the rows of white diamonds over the mouths, when the happy thought occurred to me to ask to see the embroidered aprons, which every girl receives from her mother on her marriage. Two mountains of flesh obligingly rolled out of the room, and rolled in again bringing some beautiful specimens of needlework. This is really what is known as "Russian embroidery," cross stitch in artistic colours on coarse red or blue cotton. The stomachers are most beautifully worked. The aprons cover the whole of the front and the sides of the dress. The mothers begin to embroider them when their daughters are ten. The diamond-shaped cloth is put on by girls at eight or nine. The women would not remove it for a moment even to oblige a guest. The perpetual wearing of it is one of their religious customs, only prevailing, however, in some localities. They say that when our Lord was born His mother in token of reverence took a cloth and covered her mouth, hence their habit.

When the ketchuda arrived he found the heat of the room unbearable and proposed an adjournment to the lower roof, which was speedily swept, watered, and carpeted.

An elaborate banquet had been prepared in the hope that the Agha would pay them a visit, and they were much mortified at his non-appearance. The great copper basins containing the food were heaped together in the middle of the carpets, and the guests, fifty in number, sat down, the men on one side, and the women on the other, the wives of the ketchuda and his brothers serving. There were several samovars with tea, but only three cups. A long bolster was the place of honour, and I occupied it alone till the village priests arrived, – reverend men with long beards, high black head-dresses, and full black cassocks with flowing sleeves. All the guests rose, and remained standing till they had been ceremoniously conducted to seats. I found them very agreeable and cultured men, acquainted with the varying "streams of tendency" in the Church of England, and very anxious to claim our Church as a sister of their own. This banquet was rather a gay scene, and on a higher roof fully one hundred women and children dressed in bright red stood watching the proceedings below.

I proposed to see the church, and with the priests, most of the guests, and a considerable following of the onlookers, walked to it through filthy alleys. This ancient building, in a dirty and malodorous yard, differs externally from the mud houses which surround it only in having two bells on a beam. The interior consists of four domed vaults, and requires artificial light. A vault with a raised floor contains the altar and a badly-painted altar-piece representing the B. V.; a rail separates the men, who stand in front, from the women, who stand behind. A Liturgy and an illuminated medieval copy of the Gospels, of which they are very proud, are their only treasures. They have no needlework, and the altar cloth is only a piece of printed cotton. Nothing could well look poorer than this small, dark, vacant building, with a few tallow candles without candlesticks giving a smoky light.

They have two daily services lasting from one to two hours each, and Mass on Sunday is protracted to seven hours! The priests said that all the men, except two who watch the flocks, and nearly all the women are at both services on Sunday, and that many of the men and most of the women are at both daily services, one of which, as is usual, begins before daylight. There is no school. The fathers teach their boys to read and write, and the mothers instruct their girls in needlework.

After visits to the priests' houses, a number of villagers on horseback escorted me back to Gandaman. The heat of those two days was very great for May, the mercury marking 83° in the shade at 10 a. m. One hundred and thirteen people came for medicines, and in their eagerness they swarmed round both ends of the tent, blocking out all air. The ailments were much more varied and serious than among the Bakhtiaris.

The last march was a hot and tedious one of eighteen miles, along an uninteresting open valley, much ploughed, bounded by sloping herbage-covered hills, surmounted by parapets of perpendicular rock. After passing the large Moslem village of Baldiji, we re-entered the Bakhtiari country, ascended to the Bakhtiari village of Dastgird, descended to the plain of Chigakhor, skirted its southern margin, and on its western side, on two spurs of the great Kuh-i-Kaller range, with a ravine between them, the camps were pitched. In two days most of the tents were blown down, and were moved into two ravines with a hill between them, on which the Sahib on his arrival pitched his camp.

My ravine has a spring, with exactly space for my tent beside it, and a platform higher up with just room enough for the servants. A strong stream, rudely brawling, issuing from the spring, disturbs sleep. There is no possibility of changing one's position by even a six-feet stroll, so rough and steep is the ground. Mirza bringing my meals from the cooking tent has a stick to steady himself. At first there was nothing to see but scorched mountains opposite, and the green plain on which the ravine opens, but the Hakīm's tent was soon discovered, and I have had 278 "patients"! Before I am up in the morning they are sitting in rows one behind another on the steep ground, their horses and asses grazing near them, and all day they come. One of the chiefs of the Janiki tribe came with several saddle and baggage horses and even a tent, to ask me to go with him to the great plain of Khana Mirza, three days' march from here, to cure his wife's eyes, and was grieved to the heart when I told him they were beyond my skill. He stayed while a great number of sick people got eye-lotions and medicines, and then asked me why I gave these medicines and took so much trouble. I replied that our Master and Lord not only commanded us to do good to all men as we have opportunity, but Himself healed the sick. "You call Him Master and Lord," he said; "He was a great Prophet. Send a Hakīm to us in His likeness."