A Curious Life for a Lady

by Pat Barr

  II

  Tehran, capital of Persia since about 1785, was a half-westernised, half-oriental city dumped on a stony plain that burned in summer and froze in winter. Spring, which arrived two days after Isabella, conjured violets, willows and irises for its irrigated gardens and, for its people, the first little cucumbers sent up from the south wrapped in rose-leaves. Its walls, eleven miles in circuit, marked spring’s boundaries, for the desert that lapped against them was practically changeless. Its gates, Curzon said, consist ‘of lofty archways adorned with pinnacles and towers and present from a distance a showy appearance which has caused to some incoming travellers paroxysms of delight’ but which, on closer inspection, proved to be ‘gaudy and tasteless erections of crumbling glazed tile’.

  Inside the city walls, its bazaars were crammed with foreign goods – cottons from Berlin, Austrian chandeliers, China tea, Dutch candles, brass bowls from Lucknow and, from the two imperial rivals, Russia and Britain, bevies of rose-rimmed teapots and ornate picture-frames, mounds of brash magenta cloth and cheap tin trays, galaxies of glass trinkets, tasselled oil-lamps and flashy beads. ‘A stroll through Tehran’s bazaars shows the observer something of the extent and rapidity with which Europe is ruining the artistic taste of Asia’, Isabella remarked. The city’s womenfolk, creeping in nearby alleys, were shapeless blue-black bundles, on the way, perhaps, to the public baths, where they could cast aside their shrouds and gossip with friends as they languidly awaited the weekly beauty treatment: a stain of henna to keep the soles of the feet, the fingernails and palms a nice reddish-brown, and a paste of indigo leaves to keep the hair blue-black. The men of the city by contrast, bustled and flaunted, drank lots of thick coffee in cafés and arak (surreptitiously), smoked their gurgling water-pipes with ceremonious gusto (often smoked opium also), called each other son-of-a-burnt-father and/or of-a-dog with exceeding frequency, bullied, cheated, laughed a lot, and for recreation hunted beyond the walls in the sudden spring, with falcons to catch pheasants and with greyhounds to catch gazelles.

  One of the capital’s keenest sportsmen was The Asylum of the Universe, the King of Kings, the Shah-in-Shah Nasr-ed-Din himself, who, Curzon tells us, ‘may frequently be encountered riding out of the city to one of his numerous shooting boxes in the mountains, attended by a large camp-following and solaced by a selection from his extensive seraglio’. Nasr-ed-Din, he continued, possessed other qualities which, like his love of the hunt, were characteristic of his lineage: ‘a genius for paternity, a fair intelligence, handsome features and remorseless economy’. The Shah’s economy was practised mainly on his subjects, for his Palace, which Isabella visited in company with Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, was a dream of oriental splendour. Sweeping staircases of creamy alabaster curved into halls of blue and white marbled stucco that were furnished with tables of beaten gold, and numbered among these magnificent anterooms was one of the greatest multi-millionaire shows on earth: rows of glass cases ‘full of pearls, rubies, diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, flashing forth their many-coloured light – treasures not arranged, but piled like tea or rice’.

  The immense Pleasure Gardens outside enshrined the familiar masculine Paradise – sparkling fountains, nightingales, roses, with women’s apartments (anderun) adjoining. The latter sported, according to Curzon, ‘a subterranean bathroom in the centre which has a circular pool lined with blue tiles, whilst at the extremity of the chamber is an inclined plane of polished marble, down which, it is understood, that the shiftless naiads used to slide into the arms of their royal adorer and were by him pitched into the pool – a feat of no common exertion, considering that is at some distance’. Probably Sir Henry did not show Isabella this slippery slope, but he did present her to the Shah, the royal pitcher, who appeared informally while they were there. The King of Kings pushed up his big horn spectacles and focused upon her eyes ‘about which there is something very peculiar’; he asked a few brusque questions and walked away – a rather ‘rough-looking man’, she decided, ‘with neither eastern nor western polish’ about him and having in his broad hands enough wealth to alleviate much of the misery and poverty she had seen in his domains, had he felt so inclined. Such a royal inclination was improbable. ‘The Shah’, pronounced Curzon, ‘is about as likely to undertake a genuinely great public work as he is to turn Protestant.’

  In extenuation however, Curzon adds that the Shah often intended to remedy certain abuses, but his good intentions were frustrated and defeated by a traditional system of venal corruption allied to ‘a great dearth of administrative energy’. In Curzon’s view, ‘Half the money voted with his consent never reaches its destination, but sticks to every intervening pocket with which professional ingenuity can bring it into even transient contact; half the schemes authorised by him are never brought any nearer to realisation, the minister or functionary in charge trusting to the oblivious caprices of the sovereign to overlook his dereliction of duty.’ Other western observers, including Isabella, bear out these strictures. The ‘oriental squeeze’ operated with rare finesse in Persia, where it was called modakel. Modakel worked at all levels, but increased in geometrical progression according to the status of the parties concerned. Thus a muleteer might pay nine krans for a load of hay, and charge his master ten krans for it; but a chief of police might buy his appointment for a thousand krans and extort from the local citizenry twice as much within six months. The marketing of official positions in this fashion did nothing to encourage a sense of security, because, once in office, a man spent much of his time and money protecting it from other aspirants – as the Persian proverb put it, ‘While the jay eats the grasshopper, the hawk waits for the jay.’ In these precarious circumstances it was an official’s usual policy to collect as many ‘grasshoppers’ as possible before the hawk swooped, that is, to ‘squeeze’ everything procurable by means of bribery, crippling taxation and general skulduggery from his every subordinate down to the lowliest peasant, who, Isabella says, ‘is the ultimate sponge, to be sucked dry by all above him’.

  With all this going on there was indeed, as Curzon remarked, a dearth of enthusiasm and resourcefulness for the furthering of new, expensive schemes of westernisation, but in 1890 fresh efforts were begin made in this direction by the clever, optimistic British Minister, Sir Henry Drummond Wolff. Sir Henry believed that the best way to strengthen ‘sick man’ Persia was to encourage the British to invest in the building of its roads and railways. The Russians, however, had similar ideas, and the whole question of when Persia should get its modern communications depended more on international economic and military strategy than on the needs or wishes of the people themselves. Even the Shah had no final say, for he was pulled in different directions by the vociferous claims of the two big powers as they busily staked out their ‘spheres of influence’ – Russians in the north, British in the south. And, during her three-week stay at the Legation, Isabella noted that within the foreign community ‘the relations of England and Russia with each other and with the Shah afford a topic of ceaseless interest’. Her interest in such topics was waning, however, and she soon planned escape.

  Isabella does not refer to Major Sawyer at this point, but during the journey from Baghdad she learned to suffer his ‘crotchetiness’ and found him to be resourceful, game and reliable under stress. Sawyer, for his part, must have had secret misgivings about the wisdom of encumbering himself with a small, delicate-looking widow nearing sixty, but her performance had been a remarkable one and she presumably passed his every test. They agreed to meet later in Isfahan, a long way south, and from there to explore together the savage and empty country of the Bakhtiari tribes that was the object of Sawyer’s survey mission.

  For the new stage of her journey, Isabella hired as interpreter and attendant a cheerful young Brahmin called Mirza Yusuf. Tehran milled with these mirzas – secretary-scribes – and many of them danced perpetual if unproductive attendance on the various Ministers of State, playing rhubarb-and-custard bit parts in the Alice-in-Wonder
land world of Persia’s mobile administration. Curzon describes the rituals with some amazement: ‘A Ministry in Persia consists of the minister and some scribes (mirzas) without any determinate place of office or any of the apparatus that appears indispensable to Europeans. A bureau is set up at whatever spot the minister happens to be, whether in his house, or in an ante-room or a court of the Royal Palace or perchance in … a coffee house. His swarm of scribes buzzes after the chief on all his marches, each bearing with him in his pocket the necessary writing apparatus and documents. Accordingly an office can be rigged up any or everywhere in a trice. In the pockets of such a mirza are often to be found the documents of a series of years past consisting of little scraps of paper which he has come to regard as private, and in no sense official property.’ Perhaps Mirza Yusuf’s pockets were full; anyway, he was, Isabella says, ‘willing to do anything to get to England’.

  So a few days later she, Mirza Yusuf and a Persian cook with a ‘grotesquely hang-dog look’ started on the breezy easy journey to Isfahan. The plains were ‘reddish, yellowish, barren, gravelly or splotched with salt’, their flatness occasionally broken by grisly hunks of decay – choked irrigation tunnels, a ruined, untenanted hovel, the corpse of a camel festooned with replete vultures. Rutted tracks ground into the gritty land by the beasts of a million ambling caravans marked this ancient way; but the sky above was newly streaked with the wires of the Indo-European Telegraph Company that hummed importantly with up to a thousand messages a day – coded lengthy dispatches from the India Office in Whitehall to the Viceroy in India and equally lengthy summaries of Indian news from Calcutta for the columns of tomorrow’s Times. The new verbose pompous mumbo-jumbo of the British Empire vibrated meaninglessly above; below, the ancient, equally verbose, pompous and meaningless mumbo-jumbo of the dervishes still held sway; the contrast was absolute.

  There were always dervishes shuffling along between Tehran and Isfahan, telling fortunes and stories, stealing, praying, cursing, selling talismans (dried sheep’s eyes to ward off snakebite, lucky blue beads to sew on horses’ tails), sleeping against the telegraph poles in the desert. These were the wandering lamas of Persia, less consequential in the main than their Tibetan confrères, but equally idle, dirty and given to weird musical and terpsichorean exhibitions designed to demonstrate their familiarity with the prevailing godhead. Like the lamas, some were truly devout; many, according to one long-term western resident, ‘had no religion save that of doing no work’. So they scrounged, demanding shelter and alms by fixing their victims with a glittering eye, brandishing a bowl and hiccuping out with alarming ferocity the sound ‘Huk – yac, huk’. One of the dervishes on the Isfahan road must have intimidated Isabella a little for she reluctantly allowed him a night’s lodging, though he was not a congenial guest: ‘He carries a large carved almsholder; and the panther skin on his shoulders, the knotted club and his lean, hungry, fanatical face give him a dangerous look. All I have seen on this march have worn long matted bushy hair, often covering their shoulders, an axe in the girdle, and peculiar turbans decorated with phrases from the Koran.’ She was fortunate to shake him off the next day, for dervishes frequently moved in upon the wealthy for weeks, even months on end. If their demands for alms were ignored, they simply squatted in the courtyards, yelled ‘huk, huk’ for hours, blew their wailing buffalo-horns all night, poured a stream of imprecations on their ‘hosts’ and even planted seeds of barley in the garden, thereby signifying their intention of staying until the crop ripened, or they were bought off. They were seldom forcibly ejected, for a vague odour of sanctity clung to them along with less fragrant smells, and most people were a little afraid of their licentious, bizarre theatricality.

  The day after her encounter with the dervish, Isabella reached Isfahan, the former capital of Persia that until the mid eighteenth century had been a magnificent eastern city, and since, according to Curzon, had bewailed its lost splendours ‘in perpetual sack-cloth and ashes’. Such sorrow and deprivation begat envy and malice; the Isfahanis were notorious for their niggardliness, their conceit and their religious intolerance. Neither Jews, Armenians nor other Christians dared to live in the city itself for fear of persecution, and as Isabella passed through its streets she she was jeered and spat upon by howling men. It was a relief to cross the River Zainderud into the suburb of Julfa where all the religious minorities lived in uneasy proximity and thus where Dr Bruce, Curzon’s Crusader, had established a large Church Missionary Society mission, in which she stayed. Naturally, she regarded Brace’s endeavours much more warmly than did Curzon, and praised its ‘solid and suitable’ teaching of Armenian girls, its orphanage and medical centre.

  Isabella did however express reservations about the wisdom of sending untried young Englishwomen to such a post, and cited the case of ‘Miss V …’ who had recently arrived at the Julfa mission and died there within a few months, ‘her life sacrificed to over-study of a difficult language and neglect of fresh air and exercise’. Cut off from all family ties, the idealistic newcomer, ‘dreaming of a circle in all respects consecrated, finds herself among frictions, strong difference as to methods of working, not always gently expressed … Is it wonderful’, Isabella asks, ‘that supposed slights, tiffs, criticisms which would be utterly brushed away if a good walk in the open air or a good gallop were possible, should be brooded over till they attain a magnitude which embitters and depresses life?’ She constantly advocated the therapeutic value of a ‘good gallop’ and felt that, though the actual dangers of missionary life were often exaggerated, the insidious long-term effects of isolation, confinement and sickness due to unfamiliar food, climate or conformity to native custom were not sufficiently taken into account by mission boards. Delicate, sheltered, dedicated, unskilled, sometimes faint-hearted and highly-strung young women were given a great send-off into the heathen wilderness where, quite often, feeling neglected and futile, they simply wilted and died.

  Mrs Bishop’s enlargement on this particular theme at this point in her journey was not fortuitous; she undoubtedly had in mind her own cousin, ‘Mary Bird of Persia’ as she was later called, who arrived to work at the Julfa mission about a year after Isabella was there. Mary was then thirty-two, and had led ‘a sheltered home-life’ up to that time, according to a memoir about her; she was delicate in health, small in stature and had no professional training. But she must have possessed some of Isabella’s fearlessness, pertinacity and practical zeal, for she did not succumb in the least. She taught herself how to extract teeth, sew up ears torn in harem fights, cauterise boils, and she insisted on ministering to the poor in Isfahan itself, in defiance of the bigoted hostility that assailed her. To some missionaries these were courageous acts, performed in defiance of the sort of overwhelming odds against which crusading Christians are intended to wrestle; but the lay view was different. ‘Miss Bird’s recklessness is a constant source of anxiety to the English officials who are naturally desirous that, as a British subject, no harm should befall her,’ wrote a member of the Julfa telegraph staff. ‘It is a question calling for serious consideration whether proselytising missionaries in such a country as Persia do not defeat rather than promote the cause of Christianity by exciting or intensifying antipathy to European ideas. They certainly tend to endanger the safety of all European residents there.’ Many of the secular foreigners subscribed to this opinion, and the mission was equally unpopular ‘with the Armenian hierarchy who look upon its agents as poachers on their own preserves’, Curzon comments. The hierarchs had a point in so far as the only converts made by the mission in its twenty years of operation were Armenians who had discarded their own brand of Christianity for the Anglican variety. Moslem children were forbidden to attend its school and the legal penalty for Moslem apostasy was still death.

  Dr C. J. Wills of the Persian telegraph service, like his colleagues, has some harsh things to say about this religious imbroglio. In his view, ‘The Isfahani looks upon the Julfa Armenian as a race apart and merely a pander
er to his vices and a maker of intoxicant liquors; and the hangdog Armenian with his sham Turk or European dress and the bottle of arak in his pocket staggers in secure insolence, confident in the moral protection given him by the presence of the English whom he robs, respecting neither his priest whom he despises, nor the missionaries whom he dislikes at heart (though they educate his children gratuitously) and whom his priest openly reviles.’ Wills spoke from first-hand experience for he once lived in the Armenian quarter along the street of the liquor-makers and Persians often knocked on his door by mistake calling for crude arak – ‘fixed bayonets’ as it was known.

  As a secular male doctor, Wills was one of the few foreigners who could move freely about Isfahan, which Isabella hardly saw. Crossing the Julfa bridge early in the summer mornings, he would pause to watch the calico rinsers at work. They were up to their knees in the shallow river, thwacking the long strips of calico against mill-stones, and from the half-dyed fabric clouds of multi-coloured spray sprang up against the sunshine. After rinsing, the strips were stretched on the gravel banks – rich purple and coppery brown they were, turkey-red, saffron and larkspur blue. Each rinser had his own mill-stone, his brushwood hovel on the shore, his donkey, guard-dog and a boy to keep the material damp by dashing sheets of water over it. The rinsers roared a tuneless song, the boys shouted, the donkeys brayed, the dogs barked, the water splashed and the coloured calico slapped rhythmically against the stones. It was one of those bright timeless scenes that had gone on for centuries along the banks of the Zainderud and warmed the spirits of all who saw it.