Orient Express (11 page)

—But do you really own this voiture Ford?—Virtually. It's as good as mine.

Outside the wind howled and shrieked about the house. You couldn't see the courtyard for dust. Dust seeped into the room through every crevice. There was a half an inch coating of fine white dust on my pillow. The ramshackle building of the Hôtel de France shook and rattled as if it were coming down about our ears. At last the din grew so terrific that I couldn't hear the suave voice of the Russian engineer who said he owned a Ford.

There was a ripping crash and a shriek from somewhere in the hotel. The Russian engineer ran out and came back in a jiffy with his wife in his arms. Her hair hung snakily over her face and she was chirruping excitedly in Russian. The end of the roof over their room had blown off. It was a tin roof and waved in the wind with a sound like stage thunder. Surely the whole house would be down before night. I lay in the bed with the sheet over my nose to keep out the dust, and the sheet over my ears to keep out the noise, feeling very long and cold and weak and tired, and slid effortlessly into sleep like a trunk going down a chute.

4.
Baha'i

The three American women were Baha'i Missionaries, one from New York, one from Chicago and the youngest one perhaps from some small town in the Dakotas. They all had the same eyes, spread, unblinking, with dilated pupils. We sat in a long dark room furnished in European Persian style, looking at each other constrainedly. The eldest women spoke of the persecutions of the followers of Baha'ullah in Persia, since the time of El Bab, the precursor, martyred in Tabriz: how they were not allowed to be buried, and how they could not meet, and how many of them held their faith in secret. She was old with tired grey hair puffed over her forehead and grey unfirm lips and a face full of small tired wrinkles. The Presbyterian missionaries who lived in the big mission at the other end of town would not speak to them because they were not Christians. They do not know that the service of our lord El Baha'ullah includes the service of Christ who was also a great prophet and the emanation of God.

Another of the women was a doctor. Her face was firm and thin and she was neatly dressed. She spoke of the sufferings of the women, of their flabby ignorance, their wilted lives in the candied gloom of the anderun, the sickness among them and the difficulty with which they had children.

The youngest one had come recently to Teheran. Her talk was full of miracles. She had come up from the coast in winter. They had told her it was death to attempt such a thing. Death has no power on the servant of everlasting light. She had crossed alone a great snowy pass that even the Kourds didn't dare pass in winter; when she came to a ford the swollen river would shrink within its banks; bandits had killed all the other travellers on the road but her; at every step she had felt the hand of God bearing her up, keeping her mule from stumbling, turning away the designs of wicked men.

It was dark when I left them. Outside, a procession was passing, first a few men dressed as Arabs on horses, then travellers on camels gaudily caparisoned, then men with heavy many-branched lamps of brass, then, behind a steel standard like a great flexed sword, weighted down at the tip by a brass tassel, flashing in the lamplight, penitents in fours beating their breasts in unison, tall dark men with bloodshot eyes, beating their breasts in unison to the agonized breathless cry Hosein, Hassan.

That was the thumping beat I had heard in the distance, that had made me restless sitting in the house listening to the missionaries talk of Baha'i gentleness and tolerance and fraternal love. From my room at the hotel where I sat reading an old and phony French translation of Euripides I could hear it still, sometimes from one direction, sometimes from another, shuddering through the dustladen air of the autumn night, the beating of the breasts of the mourners who followed the caravan of Hosein.

5.
Hosein

Hosein, the son of Fatima and Ali, grandson of the Prophet, left Medina for Kufa, city of the first doctors of Islam, where his father, Ali, Lord of all the World, had been stabbed to death. Yezid was khalif in Syria and was plotting to poison Hosein as he had poisoned his lazy brother Hassan. The people of Kufa had invited him, the only surviving grandson of Mahomet, to be their khalif. On the first day of Moharram the small party of the imaum Hosein was met by Harro, who had been sent from Kufa by the khalif's officers to announce that Yezid was master of the city and that Hosein's adherent Muslim had been killed. Hosein was travelling with a few slaves and his sister and his wives and children. One of his wives was a Persian, daughter of the last Sassanid King. Harro, shameful of his errand, went back to Kufa to beg that the imaum be allowed to return to Medina. Hosein's party travelled on slowly by night, for the weather was excessively hot. Hosein said: Men travel by night and the destinies travel towards them. This I know to be a message of death.

Arab-fashion they continued parleying back and forth until, the ninth, Hosein's caravan encamped at Kerbela, a little hillock beside the Euphrates. The army of Amr ben Saar surrounded them, under orders from Yezid to kill the men and bring the women to Damascus. At the last moment Harro and his men came into the camp to die with the holy ones. That night they corded their tents together and made a ditch full of fagots around them so that they could be attacked only from the front. Hosein bitterly regretted that he had brought the children and the women. They had no water.

In the morning Amr ben Saad attacked. Hosein's party was hopelessly outnumbered. At midday, tired from fighting, Hosein sat down for a moment beside his tent and took his baby son Abdullah into his lap. An arrow killed the child. Their thirst became unbearable. Ali Afgar and Ali Asgar, Hosein's two half-grown boys, tried to make a dash to the river to bring back water. They were killed. At last Hosein himself went down to the river. For a while the men of the khalif did not dare attack him, but as he was stooping to drink an arrow struck him in the mouth. Then the khalif's men rushed him from all sides. Thirty spears went through him and Amr rode his cavalry back and forth over the body until it was mashed into the mud of the river-bank. The head was sent to Damascus.

And on the last day Allah, about to hurl all mankind into hell, unmoved by the supplications of Mahomet and Isa ben Miriam and Moses and the two hundred and seventy thousand prophets, will remember the sufferings of Hosein, his agony of mind and the wailing of his women and the death of his sons and his thirst in the tents at Kerbela, and his eyes will fill with tears and whoever has wept for Hosein, whoever has bled for Hosein, whoever has suffered pain for Hosein will be saved, and will enter the gardens, the well-watered gardens where the houris eternally virgin wait under the trees eternally green.

In Teheran the tenth of Moharram dawns in terror and dismay. All night the streets have been turbulent with torches and chanting and the hollow sound of bare breasts beaten in unison. In the early halflight the streets are full of watercarriers offering cups of water to passersby in memory of the terrible thirst they suffered in the tents at Kerbela. Now Hosein is receiving the first charge of the horsemen of Amr, the first flight of arrows.

In a big square in the bazaars the crowd is densest. On a roof chairs have been set for the diplomatic corps, Europeans in frock coats and uniforms, in white flannels and Palm Beach suits as if for a garden party, ladies in pastel-colored dresses, all guarded by a small contingent of Riza Khan's gendarmes. In every direction out of the covered alleys of the bazaars muffled drums and the gruff breathless shout Hassan, Hosein, Hassan, Hosein.

Officers of the cossacks and gendarmerie walking very slowly are passing with bowed heads, followed by led horses. Occasionally you can see tears running down a tobacco-colored cheek. Harness clinks, standards glisten in the sun, the hand of Fatima, the crescent with the mare's tail, green banners and orange banners, penitents in black tunics beating their bare breasts fill the square with a strange gruff hollow sound of pain. Then behind the device of huge steel blades weighted down at the tip by brass ornaments come men stripped to loincloths with skewers and daggers stuck into their flesh, spiked ornaments hung from their bare shoulders, men seemingly spitted by lances and arrows, sweating and dusty in the sun. Then after them, two long lines of men and boys in white shrouds belted with chains, each with his left hand holding the belt of the man ahead and with his right hand beating himself on his bare shaven head with the flat of a sword. The line moves forward slowly, swaying, groaning, beating in time. The blood runs down faces and necks and clots with dust on the white shrouds. There's a smell of blood and agonized sweat. From everywhere comes the gruff continual choking cry, Hosein, Hassan, Hassan, Hosein. The sun directly overhead flashes on the swords, on the swaying blades of the standards, festers in the blackening blood. Hassan, Hosein. Whoever weeps for Hosein, whoever bleeds for Hosein, whoever dies for Hosein.…

VIII. ON THE PILGRIM ROAD

I Darius King of Kings begins the inscription on the great rock carvings at Bisitun. In the dimming afternoon light we could barely see the huge outlines of the figures. The great mountain rises to a peak at either end, each cut off sheer, making, the Kourds say, the silhouette of a house with a broken ridgepole. On the higher cliff, ochre-stained and rusty with lichen, you can make out the gigantic figures of bearded men. Archæologists hung in baskets from the top of the cliff can still read the bragging cuneiform inscription: I Darius King of Kings …

This road, from Hamadan that may have been Ecbatana to Kermanshah and the pass of Taqi Garra that is a vast stair leading down into Iraq, is one of those roads where have marched all the great parades of history. The rocks are worn and grooved by the shuffling of the feet of countless generations of men and animals. Everywhere people have scribbled on the rocks. A curious awe of history hangs over these valleys and cliffs, these stony riverbeds. In the echoing gorges the shouts of the Elamites and the soldiers of the Great King seem still to rumble in the distance among the cursing of the Tommies and hoofbeats of Russian cavalry.

In these last years History has revisited these regions in the shape of three devastating armies. The Turks and the Russians fought back and forth here all through the war. In 1918 the British pushed through here in their campaign for oil, building, or rather rebuilding the road as they went. The result is that there is hardly a khan or a village standing, that the desert, heir of the great parades of history, has nibbled away all the arable land, that in a day's run in a broken-down Ford you can't find a thing to eat except a bowl of sour milk, if you're lucky, in the tent of a migrating family of Kourds.

The road is full of pilgrims from Persia and all the Shiah world, for this is the good time for travelling; the rivers are dry, and there is no snow yet in the passes and it is beginning to be cool in the lowlands of Iraq. I can't imagine how they eat, particularly the merry and dust-stained families you see going it on foot, because the Armenian and I, for all our jingling of silver, count ourselves lucky if we scrape up one meal a day. These pilgrims are on their way to the Holy Cities of Iraq, Kazimain and Samarra and Nedjef and Kerbela, burial places of imaums, men who cast no shadows, whose souls are God's body. Rich people on horses and mules, women jolting in camel-litters, poor people on donkeys or on foot, caravans of small white coffins of the dead being taken for reburial in sacred earth. All day we pass them, splashing them where the road is muddy, giving them dust to eat, the Ford hopping and choking along like a dog on three legs, for the Armenian who drives talks English and wears a thinly disguised English officer's uniform and he feels as his the triumph of the Cross and the Allies over the turban and the Hun.

One night in the caravanserai of a ruined town I don't remember the name of, we had a little cell of which we had blocked the door with the car. The Armenian had left me there to guard the stuff and had gone off to scare up some food. I squatted on the low roof, ducking my head to keep from knocking down any of the fragile glittering glass balls the stars that hung down from the intense blueglass ceiling of the sky. The courtyard was full of little fires round which sat motionless figures of pilgrims; their talk was so low you could hear the munching of the mules and horses in the stalls. Occasionally a camel growled. In my face came a smell of dry sticks burning and from the kahwe under the gate a drowsiness of opium. Everything was spun of glass or ice; you hardly dared breathe in the intense fragility of the moment.

East and west and north and south were intense and bodiless presences like the being you used to imagine behind the windowcurtains when you were a kid. The four directions were torturing points spitting you through like the swords of Our Lady of Pain. Why is going east so different from going west; why is southward happy and northward miserable?

There was a whiff of singed meat in the air and the Armenian appeared below me with some skewers of kebab in his hand, a fold of bread and a white melon under his arm. We ate and fell fast asleep in our tracks.

Next morning the courtyard was empty. The pilgrims had all slipped away before light. We swallowed some tea and were off. This was the day we were going to drop four thousand feet over the great pass that leads into the Messpot. I felt itchy and depressed. Names of the cities I hadn't seen hummed like gnats round my ears: Kaboul, Herat, Khorasan, Isfahan, Shiraz. Baghdad would never make up for them. Besides it had a German sound, smacked of articles in the
Nation
on the Near East Question, of the Winter Garden. Oh, those pink Arabian nights.

And the ladies of the harem

Knew exactly how to wear 'em

In Oriental Baghdad long ago
.

After all, what was the use of going to a place that had established itself so definitely in Berlin and New York? Baghdad was in the locked-up plans of the German general staff, in Jake and Lee Shubert's storehouse, in the vaults of the Anglo-Persian. Why go messing round after it on the banks of the Tigris? After all, between the rivers they still showed strangers the wreck of the Garden of Eden and the actual figtree from which Adam and Eve pulled the leaves out of which they fashioned decency, morality and vice. That was something to look forward to.