Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan Volume I Part 12

This caravanserai is only one march from Tihran, and it seemed as if all difficulties were over. Abbas Khan and the sick orderly were sent on early, with a baggage mule loaded with evening dress and other necessities of civilisation; the caravan was to follow at leisure, and M---- and I started at ten, without attendants, expecting to reach Tihran early in the afternoon.

It is six days since that terrible ride of ten hours and a half, and my bones ache as I recall it. I never wish to mount a horse again. It had been a very cold night, and for some time after we started it was doubtful whether snow or rain would gain the day, but after an hour of wet snow it decided on rain, and there was a steady downpour all day.

The Elburz range, which the day before had looked so magnificent when fifty miles off, was blotted out. This was a great disappointment.

An ascent of low, blackish volcanic hills is made by a broad road of gray gravel, which a torrent has at some time frequented. Thorns and thistles grow there, and skeletons of animals abound. Everything is grim and gray. From these hills we descended into the Kavir, a rolling expanse of friable soil, stoneless, strongly impregnated with salt, but only needing sufficient water to wash the salt out of it and to irrigate it to become as prolific as it is now barren.

It is now a sea of mud crossed by a broad road indicated by d.y.k.es, that never-to-be-forgotten mud growing deeper as the day wore on. Hour after hour we plunged through it, sometimes trying the road, and on finding it impa.s.sable scrambling through the ditches and over the d.y.k.es to the plain, which after offering firmer foothold for a time became such a "slough of despond" that we had to scramble back to the road, and so on, hour after hour, meeting nothing but one ghastly caravan of corpses, and wretched a.s.ses falling in the mud.

At mid-day, scrambling up a gravel hill with a little wormwood upon it, and turning my back to the heavy rain, I ate a lunch of dates and ginger, insufficient sustenance for such fatigue. On again!--the rain pouring, the mud deepening, my spine in severe pain. We turned off to a caravanserai, mostly a heap of ruins, the roofs having given way under the weight of the snow, and there I sought some relief from pain by lying down for the short thirty minutes which could be spared in the _seraidar's_ damp room. It was then growing late in the afternoon, all landmarks had disappeared in a brooding mist, there were no habitations, and no human beings of whom to ask the way.

The pain returned severely as soon as I mounted, and increased till it became hardly bearable. Ceaseless mud, ceaseless heavy rain, a plain of mud, no refuge from mud and water, attempts to gallop were made with the risk of the horses falling into holes and even _kanaats_.

M---- rode in front. Not a word was spoken. A gleaming dome, with minarets and wood, appeared below the Shimran hills. Unluckily, where two roads met one looked impa.s.sable and we took the other, which, though it eventually took us to Tihran, was a _detour_ of some miles.

In the evening, when I was hoping that Tihran was at hand, we reached the town of Shah Abdul Azim, built among the ruins of an ancient city, either Rhages or Rhei. The gilded dome is the shrine of Abdul Azim, and is a great place of pilgrimage of the picnic order from Tihran.

The one railroad of Persia runs from the capital to this town. As we floundered in darkness along wide roads planted with trees, there was the incongruity of a railway whistle, and with deep breathing and much glare an engine with some carriages pa.s.sed near the road, taking away with its harsh Western noises that glorious freedom of the desert which outweighs all the hardship even of a winter journey.

It was several miles from thence to the gate of Tihran. It was nearly pitch dark when we got out of Abdul Azim and the rain still fell heavily. In that thick rainy darkness no houses were visible, even if they exist, there were no pa.s.sengers on foot or on horseback, it was a "darkness which might be felt."

There was a causeway which gave foothold below the mud, but it was full of holes and broken culverts, deep in slime, and seemed to have water on each side not particular in keeping within bounds. It was necessary to get on, lest the city gates should be shut, and by lifting and spurring the jaded horses they were induced to trot and canter along that road of pitfalls. I have had many a severe ride in travelling, but never anything equal to that last two hours. The severe pain and want of food made me so faint that I was obliged to hold on to the saddle. I kept my tired horse up, but each flounder I thought would be his last. There was no guidance but an occasional flash from the hoofs of the horse in front, and the word "spur"

ringing through the darkness.

After an hour of riding in this desperate fashion we got into water, and among such dangerous holes that from that point we were obliged to walk our horses, who though they were half dead still feebly responded to bit and spur. We reached the dimly-lighted city gate just as half of it was shut, and found Abbas Khan waiting there. The caravan with the other sick men never reached Tihran till late the next morning.

At the gate we learned that it was two miles farther to the British Legation, and that there was no way for me to get there but on horseback. One lives through a good deal, but I all but succ.u.mbed to the pain and faintness. Inside the gate there was an open sea of liquid mud, across which, for a time, certain lights shed their broken reflections. There was a railway shriek, and then the appearance of a station with shunting operations vaguely seen in a vague glare.

Then a tramway track buried under several inches of slush came down a slope, and crowded tramway cars with great single lamps came down the narrow road on horses too tired to be frightened, and almost too tired to get out of the way. Then came a street of mean houses and meaner shops lighted with kerosene lamps, a region like the slums of a new American city, with _cafes_ and saloons, barbers' shops, and European enormities such as gazogenes and effervescing waters in several windows. Later, there were frequent foot pa.s.sengers preceded by servants carrying huge waxed cambric lanterns of a Chinese shape, then a square with barracks and artillery, a causewayed road dimly lit, then darkness and heavier rain and worse mud, through which the strange spectacle of a carriage and pair incongruously flashed.

By that time even the courage and stamina of an Arab horse could hardly keep mine on his legs, and with a swimming head and dazed brain I could hardly guide him, as I had done from the gate chiefly by the wan gleam of Abbas Khan's pale horse; and expecting to fall off every minute, I responded more and more feebly and dubiously to the question frequently repeated out of the darkness, "Are you surviving?"

Just as endurance was on the point of giving way, we turned from the road through a large gateway into the extensive grounds which surround the British Legation, a large building forming three sides of a quadrangle, with a fine stone staircase leading up to the central door. Every window was lighted, light streamed from the open door, splashed carriages were dashing up and setting down people in evening dress, there were crowds of servants about, and it flashed on my dazed senses that it must be after eight, and that there was a dinner party!

Arriving from the mud of the Kavir and the slush of the streets, after riding ten hours in ceaseless rain on a worn-out horse; caked with mud from head to foot, dripping, exhausted, nearly blind from fatigue, fresh from mud hovels and the congenial barbarism of the desert, and with the rags and travel-stains of a winter journey of forty-six days upon me, light and festivity were overwhelming.

Alighting at a side door, scarcely able to stand, I sat down in a long corridor, and heard from an English steward that "dinner is waiting."

His voice sounded very far off, and the once familiar announcement came like a memory out of the remote past. Presently a gentleman appeared in evening dress, wearing a star, which conveyed to my fast-failing senses that it was Sir H. Drummond Wolff. It was true that there was a large dinner party, and among the guests the Minister with thoughtful kindness had invited all to whom I had letters of introduction. But it was no longer possible to make any effort, and I was taken up to a room in which the comforts of English civilisation at first made no impression upon me, and removing only the mackintosh cloak, weighted with mud, which had served me so well, I lay down on the hearthrug before a great coal fire till four o'clock the next morning.

And "so the tale ended," and the winter journey with its tremendous hardships and unbounded mercies was safely accomplished.[24]

I. L. B.

FOOTNOTES:

[23] The alt.i.tude of Demavend is variously stated.

[24] I remained for three weeks as Sir H. Drummond Wolff's guest at the British Legation, receiving from him that courtesy and considerate kindness which all who have been under his roof delight to recall. I saw much of what is worth seeing in Tihran, including the Shah and several of the Persian statesmen, and left the Legation with every help that could be given for a long and difficult journey into the mountains of Luristan.

NOTES ON TIHRAN[25]

It is a matter of individual taste, but few cities in the East interest me in which national characteristics in architecture, costume, customs, and ways generally are either being obliterated or are undergoing a partial remodelling on Western lines. An Eastern city pure and simple, such as Canton, Niigata, or Baghdad, even with certain drawbacks, forms a harmonious whole gratifying to the eye and to a certain sense of fitness; while Cairo, Tokio, Lah.o.r.e, and I will now add Tihran, produce the effect of a series of concussions.

Tihran--set down on a plain, a scorched desert, the sublimity of which is interfered with by _kanaats_ or underground watercourses with their gravel mounds and ruinous shafts--has few elements of beauty or grandeur in its situation, even though "the triumphant barbarism of the desert" sweeps up to its gates, and the scored and channelled Shimran range, backed by the magnificent peak, or rather cone, of Demavend, runs to the north-east of the city within only ten miles of its walls.

The winter with its snow and slush disappeared abruptly two days after I reached Tihran, and as abruptly came the spring--a too transient enjoyment--and in a few days to brownness and barrenness succeeded a tender mist of green over the trees in the watered gardens, rapidly thickening into dark leaf.a.ge in which the _bulbul_ sang, and nature helped by art spread a carpet of violets and irises over the brown earth. But all of verdure and greenery that there is lies within the city walls. Outside is the unconquerable desert, rolling in endless shades of buff and brown up to the Elburz range, and elsewhere to the far horizon.

Situated in the most depressed part of an uninteresting waste in Lat.

35 40' N. and Long. 51 25' E., and at an alt.i.tude of 3800 feet, the climate is one of extremes, the summer extreme being the most severe.

For some weeks the heat is nearly insupportable, and the Legations, and all of the four hundred Europeans who are not bound to the city by a fate which they execrate, betake themselves to "yailaks," or summer quarters on the slopes of the adjacent mountains.

Entering Tihran in the darkness, it was not till I saw it coming back from Gulahek, the "yailak" of the British Legation, when the mud was drying up and the willows were in their first young green, that I formed any definite idea of its aspect, which is undeniably mean, and presents no evidences of antiquity; indeed, it has no right to present any, for as a capital it only came into existence a century ago, with the first king of the present Kajar dynasty. The walls are said to be eleven miles in circuit, and give the impression of being much too large, so many are the vacant s.p.a.ces within them. They consist chiefly of a broad ditch, and a high sloping rampart without guns. Twelve well-built domed gateways give access to the city. These are decorated with glazed tiles of bright colours and somewhat gaudy patterns and designs, representing genii, lions, and combats of mythical heroes.

Above the wall are seen tree-tops, some tile-covered minarets, the domes of two mosques, and the iron ribs of a roofless theatre in the Shah's garden, in which under a temporary awning the _Tazieh_ or Pa.s.sion Play (elsewhere referred to) is acted once a year in presence of the Shah and several thousand spectators.

Entering by a gateway over which is depicted a scene in the life of Rustem, the Achilles of Persia, or by the Sheikh Abdul Azim gate, where the custom-house is established and through which all caravans of goods must reach Tihran, the magnitude of the untidy vacant s.p.a.ces, and the shabby mud hovels which fringe them, create an unfavourable impression. Then there are the inevitable ruinousness, the alleys with broken gutters in the centre, the pools of slime or the heaps of dust according to the weather, and the general shabbiness of blank walls of sun-dried bricks which give one the impression, I believe an unjust one, of decay and retrogression. I never went through those mean outskirts of Tihran which are within the city walls without being reminded of a man in shabby clothes preposterously too big for him.

The population is variously estimated at from 60,000 to 160,000 souls.

It varies considerably with the presence or absence of the Court. The streets and bazars are usually well filled with people, and I did not see many beggars or evidences of extreme poverty, even in the Jewish quarter. On the whole it impressed me as a bustling place, but the bustle is not picturesque. It is framed in mean surroundings, and there is little variety in costume, and much sober if not sad colouring.

In "old" Tihran the alleys are crooked, dirty, and narrow, and the bazars chiefly frequented by the poor are very mean and untidy; but the better bazars, whether built as some are, round small domed open s.p.a.ces, or in alleys roofed with low brick domes, are decidedly handsome, and are light, wide, clean, and in every way adapted for the purposes of buying and selling. European women, even though unattended, can walk through them quite freely without being mobbed or stared at.

The best bazars are piled with foreign merchandise, to the _apparent_ exclusion of native goods, which, if they are of the better quality, must be searched for in out-of-the-way corners. Indeed, if people want fine carpets, _curios_, rich embroideries, inlaid arms, and Kerman stuffs, they must resort to the itinerant dealers, who gauge the tastes and purchasing powers of every European resident and visitor, and who may be seen at all hours gliding in a sort of surrept.i.tious fashion round the Legation compounds, conveying their beautiful temptations on donkeys' backs.

It is chiefly in the fine lofty saddlery bazar and some small bazars that native manufactures are _en evidence_. All travelling is on horseback, and the Persian, though sober in the colours of his costly clothing, loves crimson and gold in leather and cloth, embroidered housings and headstalls, and gorgeous saddle-covers for his horse. The usual saddle is of plain wood, very high before and behind, and without stuffing. A thick soft _namad_ or piece of felt covers the horse's back, and over this are placed two or more saddle-cloths covered with a very showy and often highly ornamental cover, with ta.s.selled ends, embroidered in gold and silks and occasionally with real gems. The saddle itself is smoothly covered with a soft ornamental cover made to fit it, and the crupper, breastplate, and headstall are frequently of crimson leather embroidered in gold, or st.i.tched ingeniously with turquoise beads.

The mule, whether the pacing saddle-mule worth from 60 to 80, much affected by rich Persians in Tihran, or the humbler beast of burden, is not forgotten by the traders in the great saddlery bazar. Rich _charvadars_ take great pride in the "outfit" of their mules, and do not grudge twenty _tumans_ upon it. Hence are to be seen elaborate headstalls, breastplates, and straps for bells, of showy embroidery, and leather st.i.tched completely over with turquoise beads and cowries--the latter a favourite adornment--while cowried headstalls are also ornamented with rows of woollen ta.s.sels dyed with beautiful vegetable dyes. In this bazar too are found _khurjins_--the great leather or carpet saddle-bags without which it is inconvenient to travel--small leather portmanteaus for strapping behind the saddles of those who travel _chapar_, _i.e._ post,--cylindrical cases over two feet long which are attached in front of the saddle--decorated holsters, the multifarious gear required for the travelling pipe-bearers, the deep leather belts which are worn by _chapar_ riders, the leathern water-bottles which are slung on the saddles, the courier bags, and a number of other articles of necessity or luxury which are regarded as essential by the Persian traveller.

In most of the bazars the shops are packed to the ceiling with foreign goods. It looks as if there were cottons and woollen cloth for the clothing of all Persia. I saw scarcely any rough woollen goods or shoddy. The Persian wears superfine, smooth, costly cloth, chiefly black and fawn, stiff in texture, and with a dull shine upon it. The best comes exclusively from Austria, a slightly inferior quality from Germany, and such cloth fabrics as are worn by Europeans from England and Russia.

The European cottons, which are slowly but surely displacing the heavy durable native goods, either undyed, or dyed at Isfahan with madder, saffron, and indigo, are of colours and patterns suited to native taste, white and canary yellow designs on a red ground predominating, and are both of Russian and English make, and the rivalry which extends from the Indian frontier, through Central Asia, is at fever-heat in the cotton bazars of Tihran. It does not appear that at present either side can claim the advantage.

In a search for writing paper, thread, tapes, and what are known as "small wares," I never saw anything that was not Russian. The cheap things, such as oil lamps, _samovars_, coa.r.s.e coloured prints of the Russian Imperial family in tawdry frames, lacquered tin boxes, fitted work-boxes, gla.s.s teacups, china tea-pots, tawdry lacquered trays, gla.s.s brooches, bead necklaces, looking-gla.s.ses, and a number of other things which are coming into use at least in the south-west and the western portions of the Empire, are almost exclusively Russian, as is natural, for the low price at which they are sold would leave no margin of profit on such imports from a more distant country.

A stroll through the Tihran bazars shows the observer something of the extent and rapidity with which Europe is ruining the artistic taste of Asia. Ma.s.ses of rubbish, atrocious in colouring and hideous in form, the principle of shoddy carried into all articles along with the quintessence of vulgarity which is pretence, goods of nominal utility which will not stand a week's wear, the refuse of European markets--in art Philistinism, in most else "Brummagem," without a quality of beauty or solidity to recommend them--are training the tastes and changing the habits of the people.

One squarish bazar, much resorted to for gla.s.s and hardware and what the Americans call "a.s.sorted notions," is crammed with Austrian gla.s.s, kerosene lamps of all sizes in hundreds, chandeliers, etc. The amount of gla.s.s exhibited there for sale is extraordinary, and not less remarkable is the glut of cheap hardware and worthless _bijouterie_.

It is the Lowther Arcade put down in Tihran.

Kerosene and candles may be called a Russian monopoly, and Russia has completely driven French sugar from the markets. In the foreign town, as it may be called, there are two or three French shops, an American shop for "notions," and a German chemist.

The European quarter is in the northern part of Tihran, and is close to vacant and airy s.p.a.ces. There are the Turkish Emba.s.sy, and the Legations of England, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Belgium, Austria, and America, and a Dutch Consulate-General, each with its Persian _gholams_ who perform escort duty. Their large and shady compounds, brightened by their national flags, and the stir and circ.u.mstance which surround them, are among the features of the city.

The finest of all the Legation enclosures is that of England, which is beautifully wooded and watered. The reception-rooms and hall of the Minister's residence are very handsome, and a Byzantine clock tower gives the building a striking air of distinction. The grounds contain several detached houses, occupied by the secretaries and others.

A very distinct part of the foreign quarter is that occupied by the large and handsome buildings of the American Presbyterian Mission, which consist of a church occupied at stated hours by a congregation of the Reformed Armenian Church, and in which in the afternoons of Sundays Dr. Potter, the senior missionary, reads the English Liturgy and preaches an English sermon for the benefit of the English-speaking residents, very fine boarding-schools for Armenian girls and boys, and the houses of the missionaries--three clerical, one medical, and several ladies, one of whom is an M.D.

Outside this fine enclosure is a Medical Missionary Dispensary, and last year, in a good situation at a considerable distance, a very fine medical missionary hospital was completed. The boys' and girls'

schools are of a very high cla.s.s. To my thinking the pupils are too much Europeanised in dress and habits; but I understand that this is at the desire of the Armenian parents. The missionaries are not allowed to receive Moslem pupils; but besides Armenians they educate Jewish youths, some of whom have become Christians, and a few Guebres or Zoroastrians.