A Curious Life for a Lady

by Pat Barr

  Later, after dealing with his patients, Wills used to wander round the bazaars, selecting and eating his lunch as he went – crackle-crisp kebobs garnished with sorrel and ground figs, hot flapjacks, a succulent slab of mutton from the sheep-on-a-spit, a bowl of cucumbers or wild asparagus, and to top it off a bowl of sherbet flavoured with tamarind juice or a bunch of long white juicy grapes called ‘old man’s beard’. Then he’d stroll along to watch the printers stamping the traditional designs of peacocks, lion-hunts, elephants, soldiers and beardless disdainful noblemen on the famous Isfahan curtains, or he’d visit the artists in the Gulshan caravanserai to admire the decoration of an exquisite pill-box, and he’d usually end up at the Maidan (the place) where the haughty, gracious, fiery, superb Persian horses were put through their paces. Wills bought as many of these as he could afford and mentions that in his stable, as in all others, the grooms kept one wild pig because its breath was supposed to be good for the other inmates. These piggy mascots were always called Marjan (Coral); they devotedly trotted behind the horses like pet dogs and the horses often repaid their affection by refusing to gallop too fast, so that little Coral could keep up!

  ‘The fury of Islam’, as Isabella called it, effectively prevented her from enjoying the pleasures and beauties of Isfahan, and she went to the city but once, under escort, to meet some Persian women in their anderun. Life in an anderun was petty, stilted, prurient, catty, cushioned, hopeless and unhealthy. In obedience to the Moslem concept of ‘not opening the eyes of the women too wide’, females received scant education of any kind. Their apartments were silken, gilt, tasselled, thickly carpeted, decorated with alabaster vases, glass lustres, lamp-shades, candelabra; for the Persians adored glassware and, Curzon supposed, ‘would have no hesitation in pronouncing the Crystal Palace to be the maximum opus of the world’s architecture’. Inside these padded cells, the women passed the time in banging tambourines, making bonbons and cucumber jams, gossiping, occasionally tearing each other’s hair out, chalk-whitening their necks, clown-reddening their cheeks, smearing eyes and lashes with black kohl, concocting love-potions to excite the enthusiasm of their lords and watching performances of bawdy plays, on which, Isabella felt, ‘unaccustomed English eyes could not look’. Lacking exercise, eating too many bonbons, the women were invariably puffy-fat and pallid, they tottered rather than walked and wore the most extraordinary indoor costume, which she thought ‘as lacking in delicacy as it is in comfort’. It consisted of a ‘chemise’ of tinselled silk gauze ‘so transparent as to leave nothing to the imagination’, a short velvet wide-open bolero covering the arms, but not the breasts or upper abdomen, and an enormous stiff bouffant mini-skirt with white knee-length socks to match. To the eyes of the nineteenth century westerner this bizarre rig-out, topped by the painted docile face and dyed, plastered hair was hideously ludicrous rather than provocative, though, as Dr Wills says, ‘the effect of a lady sitting down astonishes the beholder and would scandalise the Lord Chamberlain’.

  How lucky and untrammelled Isabella suddenly felt in comparison with these bedizened creatures confined for most of the time in their languid, over-perfumed, stuffy rooms; how glad she was to get back to Julfa and concentrate on preparations for the forthcoming adventure – such as ‘refitting my dear old tent with new ropes’. Herbert Sawyer arrived in April and, she told her friends, he made ‘an immense sensation in this minute community which vegetates in superlative stagnation. His splendid appearance, force of character, wit, brutal frankness, ability and kind-heartedness made a “great breeze” and I hear that his sayings and doings are the one topic’ Quite probably there were one or two missionary maidens in Julfa who, like the Simla ladies, would have gladly taken Isabella’s place and faced the perils of the Bakhtiari country in such manly company, but the dashing eligible widower and the tough ageing widow were, she says, ‘good comrades’ and had reached their compromises. They agreed that Isabella’s caravan was to be almost independent, it would simply camp at night within the ring of Sawyer’s sentries, and that ‘I am to keep my rough ways in dress, etc’. Her four mules carried bedding, stores for forty days (including a quantity of much-vaunted “Edwards’ Desiccated Soup”), ‘presents for the savages’ (it is her joke) and three skin tents. One of these was a small ‘bathroom tent’ which it was difficult to use during daylight because the space between it and the ground was usually knobbed with open-eyed, open-mouthed faces of local urchins. The modern reader may wonder how Isabella with her scrupulous regard for the feminine proprieties, dealt with matters of evacuation and personal hygiene during this and most of the other journeys when men were in constant and close proximity. Surely the question must have occurred to many of her friends and readers; but it is doubtful if any summoned the courage to ask her, and certainly, she never mentioned the subject herself. Anyway, on this excursion she at least had a bathroom tent, and also, most precious and important of all, a portable medicine-chest given her by Messrs Burroughs & Wellcome, containing fifty bottles their special ‘tabloids’, quinine, ointments and some surgical instruments.

  III

  Mrs Bishop and Major Sawyer left Julfa on 30 April, the best time of the year. Willows, hazy-green with spring, lined the river banks, apricot and walnut orchards were in bloom, fields of opium-poppy glowed white and clouds of blue-grey pigeons drifted about the nearby pigeon-towers. These towers, some of them eighty feet high, decorated with arabesques of red and yellow ochre, were colourful, quaint features of a monotonous landscape. Their walls were honeycombed with pigeon cells and their object was to enable the easy collection of pigeon guano for the raising of early melons. In the past, the trade had flourished, but early-melon demand had slackened and most of the towers were in ruins, though the pigeons still liked them and used them as bases for extensive depredations of the surrounding crops.

  Within a few days the caravan shook down nicely and the free ways of the wilds were hers. Each cool dawn began with the shout to ‘Boot and Saddle’ from Sawyer, whom she had dubbed ‘The Sahib’ in recognition of his typically Anglo-Indian mien. Then came the sunrise sounds of animals chewing fodder, the clack of cooking-pots, the shouts of muleteers; later the rhythmical thud of hoofs on gravel slopes, the smells of tamarisk and animal dung, the touch of a cool breeze swirling through the hair of horse and rider, the sudden surprise of beauty, such as rows of red-legged storks fishing along the blue-green of the Seligun Lake. ‘This is a purely wandering life’, Isabella wrote in her first letter from the Bakhtiari country. ‘We never know in the morning where we shall be at night, but if a place looks nice and there is water we decide to camp there. I like it.’

  Real travellers invariably liked it. Even the sophisticated George Curzon, a figure more fitted to the halls of public debate, liked it, for he found that Persia brought out the nomad in him. ‘Perhaps it is that, in the wide landscape, in the plains stretching without break to mountains and mountains succeeded by plains, in the routes that are without roads, in the roads that are without banks or ditches, in the unhampered choice, both of means of progression and of pace, there is a joyous revulsion from the sterile conventionality of life and locomotion at home. Something, too, must be set down to the grateful spirit of self-dependence which legions of domestics have not availed to subdue, and to the love of adventure which not even the nineteenth century can extinguish. Or is it that in the East and amid scenes where life and its environment have not varied for thousands of years, where nomad Abrahams still wander with their flocks, there Rebecca still dips her skin in the well, where savage forays perpetuate the homeless miseries of Job, western man casts off the slough of artificial civilisation and feels he is breathing again with his ancestral stock, the atmosphere that nurtured his kind?’

  If this were so (and Isabella would have concurred with all these reasons), then certainly the Bakhtiari among whom she now found herself offered ample inducement for the casting-off of civilisation’s sloughs, for they were a people much given to Old Testament scenarios,
savage forays and Job-like miseries. Most of them, to use the lifeless phraseology of the geography text-book, were ‘pastoral nomads’ who wintered along the warm plains of Khuzistan and summered among the high cool affluents of the Upper Karun. They usually dwelt in carpeted tents. The carpets ‘served as chairs, tables and beds and the low wall of roughly-heaped stones at the back for trunks and wardrobe, for on it they keep their “things” in immense saddlebags made of handsome rugs. The visible furniture consists of a big copper bowl for food, a small one for milk, a huge copper pot for clarifying butter and a goatskin suspended from three poles, which is jerked by two women seated on the ground, is used for making curds’. In addition to the curds, they ate the produce from a few scant crops and their herds of goats and sheep, supplemented by hares and ibex, acorn bread and the occasional bowl of bustard soup.

  Bakhtiari ideas on boundaries were hazy, but they lived mostly to the west of Isfahan, an area of precipitous mountains and plateaux, foaming gulleys, empty alpine valleys. They retained a sort of quasi-independence under the Shah and owed monetary tribute to Isfahan. But such payment was seldom obtained for, as Curzon suggests, ‘the intrusion of a civil revenue officer among them would be a perilous exercise’. In any case, the Bakhtiari did not really feel part of Persia, for though they spoke a Persian dialect their origins were as vague as their boundaries. ‘They appear never to have developed a folk-lore or produced a book or harboured a historian,’ Curzon comments, and their few traditions ‘are swift to lose themselves in the fabulous’. Those traditions they did possess were vainglorious embroideries of their more violent forays, bitter inter-tribal feuds that had crackled on for centuries and had earned the Bakhtiari a formidable reputation for cruel ferocity; it was proverbial, for instance, that they had been obliged to forego the reading of the Fahtihah or prayer for the dead, because otherwise they would not have had time for any other occupations. Isabella, in quoting this legend, felt it was too harsh, for in her experience the people were so sorely afflicted with all the miseries of Job that they had little stomach for fighting.

  Owing to the possession of the Burroughs & Wellcome medicine-chest, she was assumed to be a hakkim (doctor) and word of her approach spread like blossom on the breeze. Men, women and children crowded round her tent at every halt, bringing their cataracts and glaucoma, their scabies, epilepsies and snake-bites, their dyspepsia and rheumatism (‘wind-in-the-bones’, they called it) for her attention. Dismayed and harassed, seeing up to two hundred patients a day, Isabella found she needed every ounce of that medical training she had received at St Mary’s Hospital three years before. It must have been quite an ordeal – the rows of silent, miserable, accusing people huddled outside her tent, pathetic old women praising Allah as they bore away their doses of medicine in broken egg-shells, flies feeding on the open sores of wailing children, the smell of sick, unwashed bodies, above all their unquestioning faith that she could perform medical miracles. The stone-blind stumbled from afar pleading for eye-lotions, the stone-deaf thrust their ears at her to cure, the harem women with wild handsome nut-brown faces pleaded for love-potions or for malignant draughts to disfigure the favourite wife.

  Except in the latter case, Isabella did all she could without flinching, conscious that she was setting a Christian example. From Julfa a few weeks before she had written to a friend, ‘I have just read “The Greatest Thing in the World” and wish to act out the courtesy and kindness which it enjoins, among the savages, muleteers … I am always seeing more strongly that doing is Christianity and possibly many of us have paid a disproportionate attention to what we believe. It is a striking remark that at the judgement a verdict is given only on what has been done or not done’. Her efforts were, then, a working out of this practical Christian philosophy; they were tokens of gratitude for her intensified, vitalised faith; they were also, undoubtedly, gestures of affection and respect for that kind John Bishop, who would have so heartily approved. Certainly it was in the spirit of true Christian charity that Isabella laboured to help these people, for they constantly repaid her kindnesses by robbing her and the rest of the caravan of everything they could lay dirty hands on – except the medicine-chest, which was never touched!

  Some time in May (they had by now lost track of the exact date) she and Sawyer reached Ardal, the ‘capital’, where the Ilkhani, the Bakhtiari chief, was temporarily housed in a forlorn and crumbling fort. While Sawyer argued with him over the hire of an armed escort for the wilder regions beyond, the thankless task of ‘harem-visiting’ fell to Isabella’s lot. Bakhtiari women were more rowdy, robust and importunate than the pallid Persians, and, crowding round her in dozens, they besieged Mirza Yusuf with questions: ‘How old was this foreign woman?’, ‘Why didn’t she dye her hair?’, ‘Did she whiten her teeth?’, ‘Why didn’t her eyebrows meet in the middle?’, ‘Did she know a cure for wrinkles/jealousy/simple ugliness?’, ‘How many wives had Sawyer at home?’, ‘Did he want a Bakhtiari girl?’ ‘Did foreigners get indigestion because they ate too much celery in sour milk?’ ‘Would the lovely foreign lady give them some of her pretty buttons, or scarves, or bangles?’ It always ended the same way – the women offered a few gluey sweetmeats, then gradually relapsed into sullen envious silence, broken by wails of self-pity at the dull inactive degradation of their lives.

  As soon as she decently could, Isabella literally tore herself away, feeling sad, helpless, angry at their plight, As she left the native settlements the noises of the makeshift, nomadic life brayed after her – whine of women, squawk of babies and fowls, snort, bleat, bawl of tethered animals, yelp of dogs and boys, bang of tambourine, screech of pipe, clatter of guns and basins, bellows of men demanding food and quarrelling. ‘Savage life does not bear a near view,’ she decided after two months among the people. ‘Its total lack of privacy, its rough brutality, its dirt, its undisguised greed, its unconcealed jealousies and hatred, its falsehood and its pure selfishness and treachery are all painful on a close inspection.’

  Nevertheless, it was clear to her that such people must be treated with that extra kindness and forbearance due to those who were innocently ignorant of the Christian virtues. By the time they reached Ardal, it was equally clear that Major Sawyer did not share these views. This tension is only suggested in the book, but in two letters that survive it seems that the relationship between the two became very fractious over the question of ‘dealing with the natives’. Sawyer’s approach was blatantly and unashamedly imperialistic. ‘Tell him if he doesn’t bring wood I’ll go with my men and tear down every roof and door-post in the place,’ was the message that poor Mirza Yusuf was told to convey to a headman who had refused them fuel. ‘And then tell him to go the devil,’ Sawyer added for good measure. When they reached Ardal, Sawyer’s choler effortlessly expanded to include the Ilkhani, his sons and all the minor khans within shouting range. ‘Imagine the toil I have here,’ Isabella suggests to her friends – who, worthy maiden ladies in distant Edinburgh, probably couldn’t begin to imagine any such thing – ‘when the Sahib ought to be most friendly and polite to the great feudal chief whose guest he is, and yet is most desperately insolent in manner. As yesterday, when the two sons of the Ilkhani called at the durbar tent, and he coolly went out at once, saying to me, “Now do the best you can with them!” After which he stood outside the tent within earshot, cleaning his sextant and making a snort of ridicule and saying sarcastic things in a whisper about my feeble efforts, which Mirza heard and kept giggling in his interpretation…. His behaviour is a frightful political mistake and a mistake in every way,’ she concludes. Plainly, Sawyer had cast her in the thankless role of mediator between himself and the unruly tribal chiefs, relying on her popularity as a hakkim and her conciliatory, friendly behaviour to gain the sympathy and co-operation that he couldn’t be bothered to win on his own behalf. She did it, but it was impudence on his part to expect it. After all, it was his mission, and his was all the credit when they returned home, the mission safely accomplished.


  Nor was this the only role that Isabella had thrust upon her. Unfortunately, Sawyer’s only reliable surveyor caught an eye-infection that incapacitated him for weeks – and she was the only possible substitute. ‘The Sahib has just told me that I am to help him with the observations and in a few minutes I shall have to take the chronograph record of the sun crossing the meridian, twenty-four observations for the latitude and then there will be the stars for the longitude. Alas, alas!’ wailed Isabella, but secretly revelling in this exercise, for she always enjoyed the collection of records and measurements that, she hoped, might contribute a mite to the sum of human knowledge. ‘And now,’ she continues breathlessly, a page or so later, ‘the Sahib has just told me that he’ll want me from 9.30 till eleven tonight to work on the stars. It is terribly hard work, my hands gets shaky and icy cold and I get some very sharp words. A single mistake of sight and the base from which the survey starts would be vitiated and all the elaborate astronomical calculations will be upset.’ One night apparently the words ‘You’d turn a saint into a devil’ were thundered at her, ‘amidst much else – and all because I asked for the repetition of three figures to make sure that I had heard them rightly.’ It is one of the most amusing and engaging pictures of Isabella’s later years to imagine her standing late at night on the great gritty empty plains of Persia, very small, tired, cold, and trying, with desperate and child-like conscientiousness to hold the sextant, chronograph or whatever quite steady while Sawyer barked at her out of the darkness about her really rather minor inadequacies!

  At such times, the Major was at his worst; at other times they rubbed along well together, she, at least, relaxed by the freedoms and ‘utter sartorial licence of camp life’. ‘I am so much better as usual since I came into camp and have not to do “company”’, she explains. In the absence of company, clothes were simply ‘a sort of loose grey ulster’ and Bakhtiari rag shoes; food was gobbled greedily off a tray; light was a candle on a saucer; sleep was a soft oblivion as she rolled in a sheepskin among the saddlery in a dim corner of the tent. During the midday halts, which grew longer as the heat increased, Sawyer, in old flannel shirt and breeches, would come to lie outside her tent with his handsome head in its shadow and she would read Ben Hur aloud for their mutual entertainment, and sermons on Sundays for their mutual enlightenment.