by Pat Barr
And that is Isabella ‘doing what she can do well’. If anyone then, now, in the future, is curious about peasant family life in a desert town in the winter – there it is, every thistle and puddle of it. The weather did not improve, she and Sawyer simply decided to plough through it, and their first night on Persian mud was, in its unmitigated comfortlessness, as typical of the country as its peasant home-life. The village caravanserai was abominably dirty and too ruinous to afford shelter from the driving sleet, so they passed into ‘the great lofty mule stable, on both sides of which are recesses or mangers about ten feet by seven and about eight feet high…. There were at least four hundred mules in this place, jangling their great bells, and crowds of muleteers and gendarmes, all wet and splashed over their heads with mud, some unloading, others making fires and feeding their mules, all shouting when they had anything to say, the Babel aggravated by the clatter of the rattles of a hundred curry-combs and the squeals of fighting horses. The floor was deep with the manure of ages and piled with bales and boxes. In the side recesses, which are about the height of a mule’s back, the muleteers camped with their fires and their goods and laid the provender for their beasts in the front … The odour was overpowering and the noise stunning, and when our wet mud-covered baggage animals came in, adding to the din, there was hardly room to move, far less for the roll in which all mules indulge when the loads are taken off; and the crush resulted in a fight and one mule got his fore-feet upon my “manger” and threatened to share it with me. It was an awful place to come to after a six hours’ march in rain and snow, but I slid off my mule into the recess, had it carpeted, put down my chair, hung a blanket up in front and prepared to brave it, when the inhabitants of this room, the one place which has any pretensions to being a room in the village, were bribed by an offer of six krans (about four shillings) to vacate it for me. Its “pretensions” consist in being over a gateway, and in having a door and a square hole looking out on the street; a crumbling stair slippery with mud leads up to it. The roof leaks in every direction, and the slimy floor is full of pools, but it is luxury after the caravanserai stable, and with one waterproof sheet over my bed and another over myself I have fared well, though the door cannot be shut…. In front of this room is a broken ditch full of slimy greenish water, which Hadji took for my tea! We have now reached a considerable altitude and may expect anything. Hadji has just climbed the stair with groans of “Ya Allah” and has wailed out, “Colonel says we go – God help us.”’
The name of Hadji’s god was on his lips at every catastrophe – when the girths broke and the mules’ loads fell in the slush, when he was reprimanded for offering food on a filthy plate, when water froze in the tea-urn, when he was cheated over the price of a hen. The name of Isabella’s god was often in her mind, for this was biblical country. That first gruesome mule stable reminded her of the inn at Bethlehem and she imagined the humiliation and mess of a birth in ‘the crowd and horrors of such a stable’; the Persian raise en scène was peopled with Old-Testament figures – an aged Kurdish patriarch with turban and long grey beard crouched over a fire, dirty shepherds sleeping in slumped heaps on the stable straw, morose, black-robed women ladling grain from clay-fired jars. Chaldeans, Israelites, Nestorians, Zoroastrians had all passed that way, and some of the villagers round about were Davidites, who venerated the nearby tomb of King David and believed in a thousand and one reincarnations of the Godhead, from Moses through to Imam Ali, cousin of Mohammed. The ancient bleak setting stirred Isabella’s imagination and nourished her faith; the bigotry of Islam and its oppressive hold on the people, especially the women, sickened her, and these influences, acting upon her throughout her travels in the Middle East, undoubtedly contributed to her adoption of an increasingly convinced and militant pro-Christian attitude.
For the time being, she needed all her spiritual and physical resources simply to survive. After bitter nights under the leaking roofs of various filthy caravanserais, they were up at icy dawn to tramp across uplifted snow-plains marked only by the hieroglyphs of birds’ feet and the trailing dents of a caravan gone before. The track was a corrugated, one-mule-wide trench running between drifts and fell into the latter of the two categories of Persian ‘road’ that Curzon defined as those ‘upon which some, however slight, labour has at one time been spent, and those to which no labour had ever been devoted at all’. When two caravans met Isabella tells us, ‘the question arises who is to give way?’ The question arose one afternoon when they saw bearing down upon them a string of sixty mules loaded with huge packing-cases. Mule-like ‘they could not and would not give way, and the two caravans came into collision. There were mules struggling and falling, loads overturned, muleteers yelling and roaring, Hadji groaning “God help us!”, my mule, a new one, a big strong animal, unused to a bit, plunging and kicking, in the middle of a “free fight”. I was struck hard on my ankle by a packing-case and nearly knocked off. Still down they came, in apparently endless hordes; my mule plunged her bridle off, and kicked most violently; there were yells all round. My snow spectacles were knocked off and lost, then came another smash, in which I thought a bone was broken. Fearing that I should be laid up with a broken limb for weeks in some horrible caravanserai, and really desperate with the danger and confusion, I called over and over again to Hadji to get off and pull my mule into the snow or I should be killed! He did not stir, but sat dazed on his pack moaning “God help us” till he, the mule and the load were rolled over in the drift. The orderly contrived to get the bridle on my mule, and to back his own in front of me, and as each irrepressible animal rolled down the bank he gave its load a push, which, nicely balanced as these loads are, made it swerve and saved me from further damage. Hadji had rolled off four times previously and the last I saw of him at that time and of the caravan was a man, five mules and their loads buried in the snow. The personal results to me of what is euphemistically called a “difficulty” are my blue glasses gone, a number of bruises, a badly-torn riding skirt, and a bad cut, which bled profusely and then the blood froze.’
They floundered on at about fourteen miles a day. They spent one night in a frigid hovel where even the floor was a glacial sheet, even the plaster on the walls was fringed with icicles; they blundered through a blizzard at three degrees below zero and, on arriving at the inn, Isabella was literally frozen to the saddle and had to be prised off and carried inside. Nearly three weeks out from Baghdad they reached Kermanshah, where, at the home of the British Agent, she and Sawyer, their limbs tingling at the promise of warmth, were conducted ‘into a handsomely-carpeted room with divans beside a blazing fire, a table in the centre covered with apples, oranges and sweetmeats, and the large Jubilee photograph of Queen Victoria hanging over the fireplace’.
The Agent’s sitting room was one of the few comfortable places in Kermanshah, a town with a sorry past of ‘plague, pestilence and famine’, its present population shrunken and oppressed, its dwellings, alleys and warehouses crumbling, its pervading atmosphere, like that of most other provincial centres, one of forlorn and listless decay. Appropriately, as it was the first sizeable Persian town Isabella had seen, Kermanshah was famous for its carpets. This was a lucrative trade (though seldom so for the weavers themselves), because Persian carpets were much in vogue. As Curzon puts it, ‘The upper-class householder in England or America is rare who does not think the acquisition of such an article, whether genuine or spurious, an indispensable testimony both to culture and civilisation.’
Isabella tried to see the carpets in the bazaar, but was rudely hooted and jostled by the Moslem males, even though she had veiled her face in deference to custom. She visited the shops where the weaving was carried on – a beautifully simple process in which the wool was stretched on a primitive loom and pure vegetable dyes were used of deep madder red, pale indigo and soft turquoise on a white ground that would mellow to primrose in a decade. The weavers were women, and, as men were present, they had to hold their thick veils across their faces, which gre
atly impeded their movements. She watched the scene with pitying dismay, seeing, as foreigners usually did in Persia, the drama of its contrasts: the grace and beauty of traditional, creative work; the ugly, barbaric restrictions imposed upon the workers.
A prime reason for the generally dismal state of affairs in Kermanshah, as in other towns, was the nature of local maladministration, of which Isabella had a glimpse during her visit to the District Governor. This functionary, a grotesque, squat figure in long full skirts, a brocade coat and black Astrakhan hat, had a face like an ape, she decided, and a loud fatuous giggle to match. He curtly asked Isabella if the rumour was true that she was going to Tehran to take up the post of doctor in the Shah’s harem, and then offered Russian tea and gez, ‘a mawkish white exudation from a desert plant akin to manna’, another English traveller explains. ‘When mixed with pistachio nuts and sugar it is cloyingly sweet, clamps itself firmly around the inner jaws and renders conversation impossible for a considerable period.’ If Isabella could not talk, she could observe, and she liked little of what she saw – ragamuffin armed soldiers propped against the doorways of the Governor’s citadel, ‘obsequious crowds of native and negro servants’ lounging about the reception-room that was ‘a dismal combination of Persian and European taste’ with its tea-tables covered in tawdry cretonne, its simple lofty walls bedizened with hanging wax grapes à la française.
Justice was dispensed with unwonted zeal by the Governor and his subordinates from this turgid centre, for, as Curzon explains, ‘nothing is so welcome to the Persian Governor as a street row, a blood feud, a murder or a quarrel within his jurisdiction. Down come his officers on the delinquents and from their pockets out come the fines. If litigation ensues, so much the better for the provincial exchequer, since every wheel of the judicial machine will require constant greasing.’ By this system most wealthy offenders escaped unscathed, though poorer, but for the truly impoverished a gruesome assortment of humiliations and tortures was supplied. A woman caught in adultery might have her head shaved and be led through the jeering town tied on an ass: for a man, the commonest punishment was the bastinado, whereby he was slung head downwards from a bar and the soles of his feet were beaten raw with pomegranate-wood switches kept damp and flexible for the purpose. (Those with a little cash might bribe the beaters to whip with less ferocity.) There were one or two other oriental specialities such as, for stealing telegraph posts – fasten delinquent by one ear to a post in the middle of the desert; for the murder of an official – brick murderer up to his neck in a wall, enclosing the head in mortar and leave to set hard …
After the Kermanshah sights, the little group trotted on, faces muffled now in lined face-masks, feet in sheepskin bags. Isabella, Hadji, the cook and two baggage mules formed what Sawyer was pleased to call ‘the light division’ and rode ahead each day into the venomous hiss of a continual gale. It was a demon wind, ‘a steady blighting, searching, merciless blast, no rise or fall, no lull, no hope. Steadily and strongly it swept, at a temperature of 9° across the glittering ascent – swept mountain-sides bare; enveloped us at times in glittering swirls of powdery snow which after biting and stinging careered over the slopes in twisted columns; screeched down gorges and whistled like the demon it was, as it drifted the light frozen snow in layers, in ripples, in waves, a cruel, benumbing, blinding, withering invisibility! The six woollen layers of my mask, my three pairs of gloves, my sheepskin coat, fur cloak, and mackintosh piled on over a swaddling mass of woollen clothing, were as nothing before that awful blast. It was not a question of comfort or discomfort, but of life or death.’ She was not exaggerating, either; the following day they passed the corpses of five muleteers shrivelled by the gale’s fury.
Isabella had never experienced such suffering on a journey. They crossed a 7,000-foot mountain pass, scintillating in frigid sunlight that mocked their distress and froze their masks to cheek and lip; many many times the baggage straps broke and the ill-balanced loads, with servants atop, rolled away into the drifts, and Hadji, calling upon his god, lay spread-eagled and motionless waiting to be picked up, just like, said Isabella, ‘a shot soldier in a war picture’. The cook ‘was all to pieces’; the muleteers suffered fevers and snow-blindness; when she dismounted cramps tortured her every joint, and both she and Sawyer endured agues and frostbite. Isabella survived this on a diet of sour wafers, dried soup, dates and goat’s milk. Every sunset, huddled in a smoke-stifled hovel, she was besieged by peasants begging for medical aid to cure their scrofula, tumours, ophthalmia, smallpox and other divers maladies interpreted to her by Hadji ‘with brutal frankness’; at night, she shared sleeping-space with sundry animals and her blankets froze to her head; each new dawn Hadji cried to Allah and swore he would be dead before dark. Her response to all this was astonishing: ‘I have chills but in spite of them and the fatigue am really much better than when I left Baghdad, so that though I exercise the privilege of grumbling at the hardships, I ought not to complain of them, though they are enough to break down the strongest men. I really like the journey, except when I am completely knocked up, or the smoke is exceptionally blinding.’
In fact, she seems to have been the fittest of the lot, for even Sawyer’s ‘herculean strength is not what it was’. A few days later only one of the seven servants was still on his feet and affairs seemed to have touched rock-bottom. ‘Mustard plasters, Dover’s powders, salicylate of soda, emetics, poultices, clinical thermometers, chlorodyne and beef tea have been in requisition all day. The cook, the Afghan orderly and Hadji seem really ill. At eight this morning groans at my door took me out, and one of the muleteers was lying there in severe pain, with the hard fine snow beating on him. Later I heard fresh moaning on my threshold and found Hadji fallen there with my breakfast. I got him in and he fell again, upsetting the tea, and while I attended to him the big dogs ate up the chapatties! He had a good deal of fever and severe rheumatism and on looking at his eyes I saw that he was nearly blind … He thinks he will not survive the night and has just given me his dying directions!’
Hadji did rise again the next day when the caravan staggered on, but feigned deafness as well as blindness so that he would not have the bother of any more interpreting. When they reached Kum a few days later Isabella decided she had had more than her fill of this whining, incompetent, malingering Arab; she dosed him with brandy and milk, gave him more than his wages, some warm clothing and told him to be off. The result was miraculous: he lost his deafness, blindness, fever and ‘palsied gait’ within the hour, and the last she saw of him was an erect and active man swaggering away beside his mule ‘with at least forty years thrown off’.
The worst of their hardships ended at Kum, from which one of Persia’s main roads stretched across the bleak plains to the capital. The caravanserais along it were like Grand Hotels compared to those in which they had been staying – stained gilt mirrors glared from the mud walls of Isabella’s tawdry ‘suite’ and there was stabling for 1,500 mules. Forty-six days after the departure from Baghdad (during which period, Isabella told a friend, she had lost twenty-two pounds in weight!) she and Sawyer left the rest of the caravan and galloped ahead for Tehran. In the early evening, when they were still floundering through the muddy dark, they heard an incongruous familiar whistle, a roar and a rattle of lights as a train lurched by on Persia’s only five-mile-long railway, ‘taking away with its harsh western noises that glorious freedom of the desert which outweighs all the hardships even of a winter journey’. By this time, Isabella was faint with hunger and exhaustion and her spine was in agony; for the last few miles even the horses tottered with fatigue and she could scarcely hold on to the saddle. ‘“Are you surviving?”’ Sawyer kept inquiring out of the darkness, and her answer was increasingly dubious.
At long last they lurched through a gateway, and there was the British Legation, large, dignified, unruffled before them. ‘Every window was lighted, light streamed from the central 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.’
