by Pat Barr
After leaving Ardal they climbed to the steep watery uplands north of the Upper Karun, along with straggling processions seeking summer pastures. ‘Loaded cows and bullocks, innumerable sheep, goats, lambs and kids,’ trailed past, ‘big dogs, weakly sheep tied on donkeys’ backs and weakly lambs carried in shepherds’ bosoms; handsome mares each with her foal running loose or ridden by women with babies seated on the tops of loaded saddle-bags made of gay rugs; tribesmen with foot-long guns slung behind their shoulders and big two-edged knives in their girdles’. In these wild regions every man was a walking arsenal, the authority of the Ilkhani was uncertain, and at every halt the camp boiled with rumours – that the Ilkhani was going to murder his nephew and there would be tribal war, that some of the khans were going to murder the Ilkhani, with similar consequences, that the Ilkhani and/or his nephew was going to cut the throats of the rich, intrusive foreigners. One day, a group of tribesmen armed with clubbed sticks surrounded Sawyer, who coolly fired his revolver in the air and passed the incident off as a joke; on another occasion Mirza actually overheard some of the men making plans to kill them all. No wonder that Sawyer was secretly concerned when Isabella trotted away alone to collect alpine plants or view a particularly dramatic mountain pass. ‘I was undressing that night,’ she tells her friends, after one such expedition, ‘when some beast kept poking round my tent, now here, now there – violently. I whistled and called Mirza, upon which it seemed to raise itself up as if it would break down the curtains of the tent. I was really frightened and with my alpine stock struck the creature a violent blow, as I thought on its nose, thinking it was a bear, when a human yell answered, followed by “You hit awfully hard!” – It was the Sahib who I hadn’t seen since the day before, come to see if I had got back safely.’
Because of the disturbed state of the country, muleteers absconded, armed escorts from the chiefs did not arrive, the survey schedule fell further behind and Sawyer got ‘furiouser and furiouser’. ‘I don’t believe there would be one difficulty here but for his awful temper and complete contempt of thought and manner for coloured people,’ Isabella wrote. After venting his spleen on all the coloureds within sight, he turned on her ‘with such a causeless ebullition of rage that I decided we must part company and that I must tell him so’. Such was the force of the Major’s personality, however, that it took her three tries before she eventually screwed up courage to do this. Sawyer ‘took her head off’ at first, and launched into a catalogue of her shortcomings, among which that of her voice figured prominently. ‘It had begun to irritate him the day we left Karachi, he told me, and at times nearly maddens him!’ But in fact she was well-nigh invaluable to him just then, in spite of her voice, and she was enjoying herself after her original fashion. So he promised to curb his temper and be less rude to the natives, and she agreed to stay.
But those joys she did experience during the last six weeks of their journey together seldom leap from the pages of her published narrative. As they scrambled west across the mountain ranges, she provides a quantity of geographical information, her interest in the subject sharpened by her enforced participation in the survey-work, and this is occasionally brightened by vivid descriptions of the scant human activity around. Clearly, it was a hot, tedious journey undertaken at considerable risk, for the threat of violence – reckless, causeless, almost innocently savage – throbbed ceaselessly in the rarefied air. On two occasions their caravan was fired upon by tribesmen outlined in traditional fashion on the hill-crests; and once they found themselves in the middle of a tribal fracas. ‘Bang, bang. The firing is now close and frequent,’ Isabella records, ‘and the dropping shots are varied by straggling volleys.’ As she trained her field-glasses on the combatants, who were scuffing up and down the hillsides shooting and yelling, she thought what stupid dreary warfare this was. For such a torn and untamed land, the only real remedy would be her favourite one – the benevolent overlordship of British rule. ‘Why don’t the English come and give us peace?’ the Bakhtiari apparently asked her on many occasions. But she realised that had the British, the Persians or anyone else come to tame these predatory nomads, most of them would have fought to the joyous death to preserve their savage freedom and any alliance they made would founder on the treacherous sands of greed and deceit.
Though Isabella is at pains to point out the Bakhtiari virtues – their love of children, occasional merriment, familial loyalty – they sound the most dangerous and unpleasant people she ever travelled among, and she was most fortunate to emerge from their territory without being ‘left to stand in her skin’, their graphic way of describing the state of those they had plundered. But she did, and on 9 August reached Burujerd, where Sawyer’s mission ended. Isabella’s letters to her friends end earlier, so there is little hint of how the two seasoned travellers parted. Anna Stoddart, who always thought the conventional view was the nicest, says ‘they bade each other goodbye as comrades who had gone through difficulty, danger and privation together’. Probably they did, but certainly Sawyer was glad to hear the last of that over-careful ageing voice of Isabella’s, and she expresses relief ‘that no call to boot and saddle’ would break the sleep of future dawns.
IV
To substitute for the unpredictable stimulating companionship of the handsome Major, Isabella bought ‘Boy’, a powerful compact stallion, ‘with a big ugly head and flopping ears’ and a proud, uncut tail ‘carried in fiery fashion’. He was unsuspicious, affectionate and engaging, but a real coward and would turn tail and bolt at the whiff of a camel. Like all Persian horses, he wore a surprising quantity of clothes, even in summer: ‘a parhan or shirt of fine wool crossed over the chest, then a similar garment of thicker material and at night a namad, ‘a piece of felt half an inch thick, so long that it wraps the animal from head to tail and so deep as to cover his body down to the knees’. During the first day out on the journey west from Burujerd, Boy came walking into her tent and ‘made it very apparent that he wanted me to divide a melon with him’. Grapes were his next penchant – he would eat up to ten pounds a day ‘for dessert’ – then cucumbers, pears and biscuits. When she sat outside, he was tied to her chair and rubbed his nose against her face for the occasional pat; when she walked, he followed like a dog and watched with interest when she picked flowers, and when she rode him frolicked happily, sure-footed and beautiful.
It was harvest-time, and at the oasis town of Sahmine, two marches from Burujerd. ‘All the open spaces were threshing-floors’. Heaps of wheat were ‘tossed into the air on a fork, the straw is carried for a short distance and the grain, falling to the ground, is removed and placed in great clay jars in the living-rooms of the houses. All the villages are now surrounded with mounds of kah (broken straw) which will be stored before snow comes. The dustiness of the winnowing process is indescribable. I was nearly smothered with it in Sahmine, and on windy days each village is enveloped in a yellow dust storm.’
When there was no wind, however, the last fierce heats of summer hung in thick, almost tangible wedges over the plains, and Isabella who had born the sharp cold of the uplands with equanimity came down with fever. On one such day, when the air stormed with sand-flies, and the steel-white sun almost scorched the hair from her head, she could no longer bear to ride, and lay down in a roadside ditch to rest. The following vignette amusingly suggests how she surmounted sudden difficulties – with resource, determination, asperity and not a little luck. She was aroused by ‘Mirza’s voice saying in cheerful tones, “Madam your horse is gone!” “Gone,” I exclaimed, “I told you always to tether him.” “I trusted him,” he replied sententiously. “Never trust any one or any horse, and least of all yourself,” I replied unadvisedly. I sent him back with his horse to look for Boy, telling him when he saw him to dismount and go towards him with the nose-bag, and that though he would approach it and throw up his heels and trot away at first, he would eventually come near enough to be caught. After half an hour he came back without him…. He said he saw Boy, rode
near him twice, did not dismount, held out to him not the nose-bag with barley but my “courier bag”, and that Boy then cantered out of sight! For the moment I shared Aziz Khan’s contempt for the “desk-bred” man.
‘Mirza is so good that one cannot be angry with him, but it was very annoying to hear him preach about “fate” and “destiny” while he was allowing his horse to grind my one pair of smoked spectacles into bits under his hoofs. I only told him that it would be time to fall back on fate and destiny when, under any given circumstances, such as these, he had exhausted all the resources of forethought and intelligence. My plight was a sore one, for by that time I was really ill, and had lost, as well as my horse and saddle, my food, quinine, writing materials and needlework. I got on the top of the baggage and rode for five hours, twice falling off from exhaustion.’ At length they reached a village, where she went to bed in her tent, promising a large reward for anyone who found Boy. ‘The next morning a gentle thump, a low snuffle and a theft of some grapes by my bedside announced that Boy was found.’ And the contents of the holsters, which were missing, were later returned to her also.
Her fever continued, and when she reached the city of Hamadan she stayed three weeks to recuperate. At Hamadan, in her circumstances, anyone with less of an insatiable appetite for comfortless and perpetual motion would surely have called it a day, packed up and gone home the easy way by Baghdad and Cairo. The fever had left her debilitated, all her stores had again been stolen, another winter lurked behind the mountains. But such a temptation, if indeed it was one, gained no ground with her. When she looked at the map, the obvious way home seemed to be a north-westerly overland journey of a thousand miles through west Persia, parts of Kurdistan and Armenia to Trebizond on the Black Sea. It was not a route with much popular appeal and local muleteers offered various excuses for refusing to take it – it was too late in the season, they would all be robbed, they didn’t know the way. But at last she made a contract for mules, men and supplies with ‘a well-dressed Turk’ who proved as untrustworthy as he looked, and left Hamadan in mid-September.
Her ‘marches’ averaged eighteen miles a day, and by the sixth of them there were so many Kurds about and so little Persian was spoken that, though officially still in Persia, she felt she had reached romantic Kurdistan. Kurdistan, ‘a name in very common use upon the title-page of travellers’ books,’ wrote Lord Curzon, turning his mocking gaze in Mrs Bishop’s direction, ‘is no more than a convenient geographical expression for the entire country estimated at over 50,000 square miles that is inhabited by Kurds. This region has no natural or political boundaries; it includes both Turkish and Persian territory and it contains many other elements, Turkish, Persian, Chaldean and Armenian in the population as well’. The various elements squabbled among themselves as usual, and the Kurds, bigoted, fiery, ruthless people, had, Curzon adds, ‘proved a thorn in the side of every ruling power’ that had ever established sovereignty in western Asia. He utterly disapproved of their predatory activities and their ‘sullen swagger’ so ‘usually associated with picturesque ruffianism’. But Isabella, who always had a sneaking admiration for the ruffian type, was prepared to like the Kurds very much, though she learned so many unpleasant things about them that she later had to revise her opinion.
The men were wild-looking, gay, festooned with swords, long knives, guns, with garlands of bullets round their waists, and quite free from the distasteful ‘Persian cringe’. The women were ‘unveiled, bold-faced and handsome in the Meg Merrilees style’ and it was refreshing to see ‘their firm elastic walk after the tottering gait of the shrouded formless bundles which pass for Persian women’. They were hospitable and invited her into their houses, gloomy labyrinths of clean low-roofed clay-floored rooms. They enthroned her on piles of quilts, offered Russian tea, warned her of the fearsome perils of the road ahead, chatted about their crops and animals of which they seemed to have an abundance. Other travellers comment on the pressures of Kurdish hospitality, and one recalled that, as a gesture of friendship, a chief would ‘select a particularly greasy lump of lamb’s fat from the stew and stuff it well down into the guest’s mouth with his dirty fingers, on which one is supposed to choke out, “The Lord be praised, it is excellent”.’ Isabella contrived to avoid this amiable custom, but the men did thrust upon her the traditional, hectic escort when she left each village – a ‘throw on the road’, as it was called. They charged around her, wheeling their steeds in ever-narrowing circles and ‘sometimes tearing up and down steep hills, firing over the left shoulders and right flanks of their horses, lunging at each other with much-curved scimitars, and singing inharmonious songs’.
This was all thrillingly interesting and Isabella felt happy again. The air had a spirited edge that restored her health, the nearest European was miles away, galloping on Boy was a daily delight. On these western plains no rain had fallen for months and the prevailing colours were cobalt, ochre and buff-brown. The distant mountains provided the cobalt, dissolving into a washy-blue horizon; ochre were the nearby houses and the stacks of fodder on the roofs, and buff-brown the near foothills, the dried straw-beds, the mud walls of ruinous forts, the hides of ploughing oxen, the dusty fat-tailed sheep. She came upon a Seyyid one day, a Moslem holy man with a commanding physique and the frigid pride of the ascetic, who preached with such fervour about the virtues of ‘Houssein’ that his hearers beat their breasts and howled with conviction; she came upon strings of carts with huge creaking wheels drawn by four buffalo and a boy who sat on the back of one crooning a perpetual melody – if he stopped, so did the beasts.
And then, really too soon, she came upon the plain of Urmi, the ‘Paradise of Persia’ where the waters began and so the grass was green, the orchards fruit-laden, the fields golden. Looking down upon the region on a bright autumn day she watched the activity of this suddenly fertile land: ‘Here the wine-press is at work, there girls are laying clusters of grapes on terraces prepared for the purpose, to dry for raisins; women are gathering cotton and castor-oil seeds, little boys are taking buffaloes to bathe, men are driving and loading buffalo-carts, herding mares, ploughing and trenching, and in the innumerable villages the storehouses are being filled; the herbs and chillies are hanging from the roofs to dry, the women are making large cakes of animal fuel … and are building it into great conical stacks, the crones are spinning in the sun, and the swaddled infants bound in their cradles are lying in the fields and vineyards while their mothers are at work’.
Rich, tranquil Urmi marked the end of the most interesting parts of this journey – or at least, the end of Isabella’s most interesting accounts of it. From there, she ascended the lonely mountains of Kurdistan, where settlements of Syrian and Armenian Christians were being murdered, robbed and persecuted by bands of armed Kurdish brigands. She visited the Patriarch of the dispossessed Syrian church in his mountain retreat at Kochanes and journeyed towards the Black Sea via Van and Erzerum. She was horrified to discover that, throughout the whole area, the Syrian and Armenian peasants were cruelly impoverished and oppressed by both Kurds and local officials. She became furiously indignant at the situation, and it was an indignation that spurred her into action on behalf of these mild, defenceless people when she reached England.
On the last day of October, a day away from the relative security of Van, she wrote: ‘As I have no lodging but a dark stable, I am utilising the late afternoon, sitting by the village threshing floor, on which a mixed rabble of animals is treading corn. Some buffaloes are lying in moist places looking amiable and foolish. Boy is tied to my chair. The village women knit and stare. Two of the men, armed with match-lock guns, keep a look-out for the Kurds. A crystal stream tumbles through the village, over ledges of white quartz. Below, the valley opens and discloses ranges bathed in ineffable blue. The mountain sides are aflame with autumn tints, and down their steep paths oxen are bringing the tawny gold of the late harvest on rude sledges …’
It is an attractive, typical last picture of Isabella�
�s great middle-eastern safari, as she sat writing by the side of a threshing-floor, with peasants and animals about her, beloved Boy tethered to her chair, and the sounds and sights of wild nature brilliant and close. The best of it was over by then, although she took more than another month to reach Trebizond in easy stages. Communications were most effective in those days, once on the well-beaten tracks. She left Trebizond on 13 December by steamer, went to Constantinople, was in Paris on Christmas Day, in London at six a.m. on Boxing Day, where she breakfasted with her publishers, Mr and Mrs Murray, travelled to Edinburgh that night and there came to temporary rest at the home of Professor and Mrs Grainger Stewart in Charlotte Square.
CHAPTER IX
Korea
MRS ISABELLA BISHOP faced the New Year – her sixtieth. On New Year’s Day she made a pilgrimage to Tobermory. It was an inappropriate time to choose, with the Hogmanay whisky flowing and the Hogmanay pipes skirling, and no one probably having much in mind, just then, pious little Miss Henrietta Bird who died there eleven years before. Isabella stayed just two days and returned miserably to Edinburgh. There were aching voids in familiar places where the well-beloved faces had been; it was much more painful than when she was abroad, distanced from these poignant emptinesses. She told Ella Blackie, ‘It is most desolate to return after two years and have no home to go to and no familiar things about me.’ Nevertheless, she was temperamentally incapable of making a home for herself, as she already knew, even though she went through the motions of inspecting various Edinburgh houses – only to reject them all. ‘It is so so difficult to decide on anything like settling,’ she concluded.
