TRAVELS IN THE EAST
CHAPTER THREE
By the middle of December, Freya was settled in a room in the village of Brummana in the Lebanon which, ‘sung by Flecker, lay like a brown lizard on its ridge’. From the first days of departure, her spirits had risen, and they kept rising; it was all better, much better than she had hoped. Purposeful, self-contained, a woman alone spending little, she must have seemed strange to local people who were used to greater pomp and assertiveness among the few Europeans who had come this way. The bolder children crowded around her whenever she walked down the street while the men stared and the women followed her movements from behind shuttered windows. Everywhere, at all times, she was on show. Her response was simple. She acted calmly, with precision, and always pleasantly; she stopped to talk and ask questions, a parasol held over her head, in sensible suit and hat, or sat for hours sketching or just looking.
Freya was soon hard at work on her Arabic and setting a routine for daily life in the Middle East that was to remain a pattern for all her travels. She walked a good deal, making expeditions with a guide, having prepared herself well beforehand. She spent much time paying calls, sitting listening and practising Arabic; and she wrote letters, instructing her main correspondents to keep them, so that they would act as diary.
She had, as she herself recognised, one useful accomplishment: a true appreciation of leisure and the importance of not hurrying, but leaving time to listen and be accepted. It came, she felt, from early illnesses, and from the Victorian rules of her childhood, when dressing for dinner was customary and with it the ‘casting away as it were of the day’s business’ so that she now felt herself most like the Arab nomad, ‘who receives his world as it comes from Allah, and is not concerned to alter it more than he need’. She was soon completely charmed, the landscape and the people perfectly suited to her intense curiosity and strong sense of the romantic. ‘I have been trying’, she wrote, ‘to think why it is all so fascinating, and have come to the conclusion that it is the feeling of a life not merely primitive – we have that in Italy – but genuinely wild … a feeling of the genuine original roughness of life.’ To an English friend, she added: ‘The East is getting a firm grip. What it is I don’t know: not beauty, nor poetry, none of the usual things …’
There was better to come. In April, having moved from Brummana to Damascus, she looked at a map, picked out what seemed a lonely ruin, far from villages, and found a guide. To Penelope Ker, sister of W. P. Ker, she recorded her delight in what she had seen: ‘Yesterday was a wonderful day: for I discovered the Desert! … Camels appeared on our left hand: first a few here and there, then more and more, till the whole herd came browsing along, five hundred or more … Their huge legs rose up all around me like columns … I stood in a kind of ecstasy among them … I never imagined that my first sight of the desert would come as such a shock of beauty and enslave me right away.’
Freya was neither the first nor the most remarkable of the desert travellers, and indeed mountains, not deserts, were her true landscape; but in her excitement and recognition there was something of the exhilaration of Charles Doughty, or of any of that band of her distinguished countrymen who were drawn, as she now was, by the infinite mystery of deserts and their clean, clear air. The pleasure was to make its way into all she wrote; as a reviewer soon noted, Freya had joined ‘the odd handful who remained not to teach, not to evangelise, not even, broadly speaking, to change, elevate, govern or save but to understand, to interpret; to share the life of the desert’.
After seven months, having spent the £200 she had saved up, she left for Europe, ‘with a feeling, dim but insistent, that the whole of my future must be rearranged’. What she needed now was a plan, perhaps a subject to research that would return her to the East. Books of travel or history had not really occurred to her, for she did not yet see herself as a writer. A future among the missionaries was also dismissed, since she had discovered that she hated philanthropy and that her sense of curiosity made her a better student than a teacher. If she regretted anything, it was the slowness with which she was forming her own life, which came, she concluded, not from ‘timidity, for I was morally brave by nature, and physically by will’ but from too strong a regard for affection and a reluctance to waste any that came her way. On a visit to London she spent her days in the British Museum, reading. The Jebel Druze was abandoned when she learnt that some fifty travellers had written about it already. ‘I wonder’, she noted gloomily, ‘if there is anything left not written about? The only thing that is not overdone is thinking.’
In 1927, the Prime Minister of Iraq, Ja’far Pasha, having been approached by mutual friends, had invited Freya to visit Baghdad. Since then he had been appointed to London as ambassador, but her hopes of a visit remained, not least because she at last had a subject in mind: a history of the fortresses of the Assassins and their castles between Aleppo and the Persian border.
The Baghdad that Freya came to in the autumn of 1929 had been ruled over by King Faisal since 1921, when Iraq had been granted a monarchy by the British, but it was still firmly in British hands, run by British advisers and policed by British forces. The route out from Europe was by fast ship to Bombay, then by a slower one up the Persian Gulf to the port of Basra. For the last stage there was a train. Southern Mesopotamia, as the area had been known, lay between the rivers Tigris and the Euphrates; it was bare, barren and stony, prey to violent sandstorms. As the train neared Baghdad those watching from the windows could see great mounds of bare earth, all that remained of Babylon. (Other travellers preferred to come more of the way overland, boarding the Nairn brothers’ articulated coach in Damascus, and drinking their whisky and soda through a straw as they bumped across the desert.)
The city itself had been little prepared for the grandeur of monarchy. In 1921 there had been no palaces or large buildings, only three bridges, made of boats, and only one street, unpaved and unpassable in rain. When Freya arrived, planning to spend some months preparing for an expedition into Persia, many of the brick houses were still unstable, lighting and sanitation were extremely primitive and a small fleet of horse-drawn carriages continued to be the main form of public transport. In the south of the country there were large numbers of Indians; in the north, many spoke only Turkish; in the north-east were the Kurds and the Yezidis, the ‘devil-worshippers’. Nearly a third of the inhabitants of Baghdad were Jews. In the summer, the heat was intense, rarely falling below 110 degrees in the shade; there were dust storms, severely trying to temper and nerves.
This was just the sort of place, with its mixed and exotic history and the desert stretching for miles beyond, that most appealed to Freya. What was more, it had a British past, a state of affairs she usually welcomed, with her firm approval of much of the legacy of Empire. There had been Englishmen in Baghdad for generations; a Residency had been established there in 1783 by the East India Company, after which had come a succession of well-intentioned representatives, like the scholarly Claudius James Rich, archaeologist of Babylon, and Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, who found the key to the cuneiform language by comparing the old Persian Elamite and the Babylonian inscriptions dedicated to Darius on the rock of Behistun, and who kept as pets a leopard, a lion cub and a mongoose. In 1929, when Freya arrived, Gertrude Bell, ‘Um el-Muimin’, mother of the faithful, Oriental Secretary and Director of Antiquities, and translator of Hafiz, had been dead just two years.
To the English community, centred round the handsome colonial High Commission overlooking the river, with its fine flowering verbena and wrought-iron gates and balconies, Freya was a disconcerting arrival. She was thirty-six, small, somewhat dumpy, very precise and sometimes steely in manner and determinedly eccentric. She wore Arab dress for dinner parties and a bandeau swathed across one side of her face, where the scalp had been torn away. While they clustered at the Club, she sought lodgings with a shoemaker’s family, from financial necessity, since she had a very ordinary liking for comfort. She furni
shed her room with a camp-bed, and bought four ornamental candlesticks in the bazaar; she was lent curtains and a sofa. From here she made sorties, by rowing boat across the Tigris, to soirées where she observed the local life, as well as the British in Baghdad.
She had not expected, she wrote home, to find them so ‘hen-like’ nor so full of ‘froth and foam’, though it was the men, and not their wives, who were the more disapproving of her. What had been necessary independence in Europe was seen as wilful provocation in a city where rules of behaviour were laid down in the clubhouse and the barracks. When she proposed to spend a night at the camp of a Bedouin sheik in the desert they were appalled and told her that one could not be friends with both natives and the British. She went just the same, after writing to the civil servant who had reprimanded her that ‘a dog is allowed one bite before being suppressed; and I really haven’t yet had my bite’. Under a heavy black veil, she visited the Kadhimaim mosque, so holy that no Christian was allowed inside and knowing that her visit was calculated to enrage all who learnt of it. She journeyed, on her own, north to Mosul, or with the Bedouin, into the desert. She attached herself to a harem for a few days near Damascus, where she came to feel ashamed of her unveiled condition, and soon objected to its ‘deadly boredom’ and gossip that reminded her forcefully of Dronero.
What she was doing, all this time, was beginning to develop her own style of observing and reporting. It was lively, detailed, revealing and often very personal, and it had not been much used among travellers of her kind before. To her mother, main recipient in these early years of the letters that were to be the backbone of future books, she described a visit to the Queen. ‘It was after dinner because of Ramadan, and I wore my Asolo dress. We went up by a policed entry through miles of what might have been hospital corridors with very inferior coir matting spread along, and, instead of the Nubian slaves, little girls in high heels and knitted jumpers and an apron tied over them, who took our coats off. Then we went into a big room, rather bare walls, and crimson furniture – quite dignified in its bareness, and the little figure of the Queen, with an ermine wrap and gilt shoes, standing up very straight, and with a charming smile, in front of her crimson throne … A white fluffy cat sat under the throne and the white ermine. The Queen’s face was ugly and charming – a huge mouth and henna’d hair which she has bobbed, but the only things noticeable are the vivid eyes so brimming with life that it seems a miracle she could say nothing.’
Privately, to friends in England, Freya was a little scornful of Gertrude Bell, whose ghost she complained resided over the city and who seemed to her overrated, for she had travelled with three baggage mules, two tents and three servants, had never had enough adventures, or stayed anywhere long enough to get to the heart of things.
In her notebook, elaborating on a philosophy for herself that she had touched on before and would return to constantly all her life, she wrote: ‘So far as my personal object in life goes, I should wish to attain two things: first the confidence of more time, not to be confused within the narrow limits of one life: secondly, the sense of death as a new and wonderful adventure. If these two can attain a real sense of certainty, my own inner life will have succeeded – and I hope to succeed. It will mean the absolute liberation from fear, which is a form of slavery … To risk one’s life seems to me the only way in which one can attain to a real (as distinct from a merely theoretic) sense of immortality unless one happens to be among lucky people in whom faith is born perfect.’
Some of the bravado she kept up in public was genuine: Freya felt considerable and understandable contempt for the unthinking orthodoxy, cliquishness and racial superiority she encountered among many of the British families in Baghdad. (Through the columns of the Baghdad Times, she was later to poke fun at the rules governing the behaviour of those she referred to as the ‘Ladies of Iraq’.) But some of it was show. In private, Freya was often low, hesitant and increasingly unhappy about her appearance and her solitariness. As she wrote to her mother, ‘I am so very depressed this evening – feeling so old, and as if my whole life were wasted and it were now too late to do anything with it … and as if what I do do were not worth doing: no one seems to think it is, but just wonder at me and are sorry for me if they are nice, and disapprove if they are not. To be just middle-aged with no particular charm or beauty and no position is a dreary business … no one any longer makes love to me except when they are drunk.’ Letters, her correspondence with friends in England, had become important to her; when post failed to come, she fretted.
To make things harder, Freya seems at this point to have fallen in love. Among the new friends she was making in Baghdad – and despite those who carped, there were now people, most of them men, who had come to admire her energy, her individuality and her considerable charm and who were to remain lifelong and devoted friends – was the man who had replaced Gertrude Bell as political adviser, Captain Vyvyan Holt, an exceptional Arabist, traveller and lover of the desert. It was not until 1942, summing up her life in a long unpublished letter to Sir Sydney Cockerell during a pause from the war on Cyprus, that she described to anyone what had happened. The incident, she wrote, had been a ‘strange, unwanted falling in love, unprovoked and unexpected, inspired by the most conventional, unsuitable person who, for his part, hovered on the edge, but never fell in, and yet held me with no active effort of his own so that for seven years I never felt quite free … I regret walking so long down a one-way lane with only a blank wall at the end … The poverty of his affection saved me, and I kept my own way, but it was only with stress and trouble.’
It was through Holt, however, that Freya first began to learn Persian, and it was on his prompting that came the first true journey.
The Assassins were a Persian sect, a branch of the Shi’a Moslems, exploited by an unscrupulous Persian family who introduced them to rituals of initiation. Their first grandmaster was Hassan-i-Sabbah, who joined the sect in 1071, used murder and drugs as political tools, and became known to the West through the chronicles of the Crusaders. With some followers, Hasan seized a number of Syrian strongholds and ruled over them as a semi-independent fief. His central fortress was at Alamut, in the unpassable mountain ridges of the Caspian, where he urged his men to practise the liberal arts while governing by assassination. In 1256 the Mongol armies came east; one by one they took the Assassin castles. (This, at least, was the contemporary thinking on the Assassins: a view since discredited by scholars.)
The idea that had come to Freya, sitting in the British Museum in London, was to travel across the area, fix the position of the fortresses, ‘disentangle the absolute wrongness’ of the map, and ‘make for Alamut and Tehran across the jungle country – a lovely blank on the map so far’. Between April 1930 and October 1931 she made two main journeys into Persia, the first being interrupted by a characteristic piece of buccaneering on her part. At a Baghdad dinner party, someone had told her of a Lur boy who professed to have seen twenty cases of ornaments, daggers, coins and idols hidden in a cave in the limestone hills of Kabir Kuh in Luristan. Hoping for a glimpse of the treasure of Nihavend, Freya set up a short, and in the event highly confused, side trip through unmapped country, ending with a couple of hours when she shook off her attentive police escort and scrambled, fruitlessly, about the hills in search of the promised cave. It came to nothing, but it was just the sort of outing she most enjoyed.
To practise Persian, Freya installed herself in the Hôtel de France in Hamadan, and took lessons from a young man dressed like a clown, with a henna’d beard, frock coat and peaked cap. Every few days, she made short trips into the mountains. After the desert and the dusty plains of Iraq, Persia was enchantingly lush, a ‘wonderful, wild, waste country … tumbled seas of mountains, with pale green valleys, very shallow, and blue and red ridges’. She always travelled alone, and always, as the first European woman in these parts a figure of intense curiosity and speculation, by bus or by horse, and often on foot, with a guide, climbing sometimes very
high in search of clues to the lost Assassins. In one valley a man told her of an ancient garden, 11,000 feet up, hidden by snow for several months each year. ‘I got so excited I felt my fingers trembling.’
In 1931 came the real expedition. One August morning, with almost no money, having spent most of what she had on emerald beads, she set out from Hamadan. ‘This is a great moment, when you see, however distant, the goal of your wandering … It matters not how many ranges, rivers or parching dusty ways may lie between you: it is yours now forever.’ As she journeyed, Freya gave names to the mountain ranges and villages she passed through. She was gone about four weeks. She found a missing castle, covering the slanting top of a hill, surrounded by cliffs, with a secret passage constructed down to the river, some 800 feet below. She reached it in her stockings, her shoes proving too slippery, and was gratified to hear a later expedition describe her route as ‘unscaleable’.
Malaria, dengue fever, chronic dysentery, heart strain, measles – ill health shadowed every adventure. ‘It is now fourteen years that I have never once done anything without the feeling of fatigue, and I have only started on one of my expeditions without wondering if I was strong enough to face it’, was how she once rebuked her seventy-six-year-old mother, who was complaining about the disadvantages of age. High in the mountains, far from assistance, with the red pinnacles of the Alamut gorge in sight, she collapsed with dysentery. Then came malaria. Her watch stopped; she knew neither date nor time. For a week she thought she would die; but a diet of white of egg and sour milk, the kindness of the family with whom she lodged, and above all her own indomitable disposition, pulled her through. She recorded the episode, the contemplation of death, the fear, the loneliness, dispassionately, sounding very human, but without complaint. It was her father’s death, in Canada, that she had news of when she reached the diplomatic enclosure in Tehran.
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