At first my body seemed light to me, and swung easily into the spaces I planned for it. I was a little surprised. When I tested the soft-looking scarp, kicking or wrenching at it before each step, nothing crumbled. My trainers felt out invisible knobs and dents. Slowly, clambering from side to side, I was winching myself into space. Then stones began to skitter down below me, and echoed on the rocks. A sharp wind was blowing over the higher cliffs. Little by little, I became afraid. I had not really thought the ascent possible.
Halfway up, my nerve failed me. I stopped, spread-eagled against the rock-face. A few drops of rain fell. Above me the crevice–thirty feet of it–rose sheer. Beneath me was a drop to solid stone. I could see the autumn valley descending past the oasis of Shams Kilaya to hills like grey dust. I waited for my breathing to still. I noticed the hands clenching the rock close against my face: they were lean and broken-skinned, not hands that should be doing this. Then I looked up and glimpsed the ceiling of the cave-chamber I could not reach. It was sooted by Mongol fires.
With helpless excitement I began to crawl upwards again. It became too late to turn back. Years ago, young, I would have hurried in fear and perhaps fallen. Now I waited, with pained slowness, to secure a handhold here, a foothold there. I could hear my own heart. For the last ten feet the sides of the cleft were so close that I braced my body inside it. Once I felt my toes slipping; then they held. I was afraid to look down. A broken arch appeared in the opening above. The scarp beside me had been cemented smooth.
Only when I heaved myself on to the level floor, heady with triumph, did I look down at the sixty-foot drop to stone, shaking with the thought of my descent. I was in a huge broken chamber. Outside, but close by, the hewn stone of a tower bulged from the plaster.
Now I can barely read what I wrote there. In my notebook half the sentences tremble indecipherably. But I think they say this:
I do not know where I am. In stables, maybe, or a guardhouse. An arch spans the cleft where a bastion once stood. Whatever passageway it connected has fallen in. A room has broken open above it. I am treading lightly, for fear of falling. All the ceilings are charred.
Somewhere I remember smoothing my hands over a long, mortared cistern. Beyond, I grope down a rough-hewn corridor fifty yards into the mountain, until it opens on a high vault. I have no torch, and cannot go farther. I sit down exhausted in the opening above the valley, gazing at the traces of stucco flaking round its threshold. I feel light and strange. The soot-stains are still vivid there. I think of Rukn-ad-din and his family hurrying down these passageways to some lost stairway, going to their surrender and to death. I steady my nerves for my own descent. Birds flitter and squeak in the fissures, and an invisible sun is shining out of storm-clouds over other mountains.
‘Britain! Football! Manchester United!’ Three youths expend their English on me before crying: ‘You Iraq! Why in Iraq?’ Not a soul I have met, between eastern China and western Iran, has applauded the invasion of Iraq. ‘Oil!’
Our minibus rattles over a factory-blackened plain, where apartment blocks of naked iron and brick jut out of scrubland. Its seats are banked with sacks of nuts and apples from the markets of Qazvin, and the passengers have been rearranged so that nobody unrelated is sitting next to a woman. ‘Football very good! Iraq no!’ After an hour the flotsam of industry drifts away, but nothing gives you to expect what is coming. Then, across the level wastes, from a pool of orchards, the dome of Sultaniya lifts out of solitude.
I clamber from the bus into its shadow. Only a dwarfed village surrounds it, the alleys scoured by a howling wind. For a minute I shelter in its lee, then I walk free and gaze up through flying dust with a shock of elation. This is the resting-place of the Mongol sultan Oljeitu, built seven hundred years ago within living memory of Genghis Khan: one of the supreme monuments of Asia.
A giant octagon of lion-coloured brick rises for sixty feet, before it shadows into a gallery of triple arches grouped round each façade. Above them, like broken eyelashes, the remains of glazed tiles cling–azure starred with steel blue. From the topmost terrace, circled by turrets which were once minarets, the dome hangs in brilliant turquoise–a spiked crown 170 feet above the ground.
Here at Sultaniya, Oljeitu established the Ilkhanid capital after his great-grandfather Hulagu founded the dynasty from Balkh to Anatolia. A great city burgeoned overnight, filled by royal command with mosques and palaces, merchants and craftsmen, under a skyline–if early travellers are to be believed–forested in globular domes and even a ziggurat. An astonished peace had settled over the Silk Road. The Mongols’ havoc had died away, and from the Great Khanate of a conquered China their dynasties ruled unbroken to the Mediterranean. From the mid-thirteenth century, for close on a hundred years, trade flowed along routes overseen by forts and the posting-stations of imperial couriers. It was said that a virgin bearing a gold dish could walk unmolested from China to Turkey. Under this Pax Mongolica, the popes and kings of Europe sent monks as emissaries eastward, seeking alliance with the Mongols against the Arabs, and hunting for the elusive Christian realm of Prester John. A Turkic Nestorian monk from China turned up in the Vatican and the court of Philippe le Bel in Paris, and the Polo brothers travelled to the capital of Kublai Khan with a gift of oil from the Holy Sepulchre.
The markets of Sultaniya, meanwhile, were hung with newly freed luxuries. The raw and woven silks of China penetrated overland again, with lacquer and musk. Genoese and Venetians set up shop. At this time, too, the knowledge of gunpowder passed from China to Europe, with silk-weaving machinery and the mechanical clock. Arabian horses and Turkish falcons appeared, and the textiles of Flanders and Italy, and the great days of the Tang returned with Indian spices and stones come up from the Persian Gulf, rubies and lapis lazuli, ivory and rhinoceros horn.
I wandered this vanished city under a flailing wind. The traces of its walls and towers ringed the dust in greenish stone, restored, and beyond Oljeitu’s tomb the ruffled ground was covered with blue shards. On the very day he died, it was said, fourteen thousand families abandoned Sultaniya, for it straddled no major crossroad, but was raised by the sultan’s fiat on the summer pastures of his fathers, which were temperate and rich in game. Every autumn the court forsook it for lower camping-grounds. They were still pastoralists at heart. Even Oljeitu’s mausoleum was orientated south, in the old Mongol way, not south-west toward Mecca, and his favourite holy man (I found his grave nearby) was a filthy shaman who went naked in a necklace of bells and bones and a felt hat sprouting cows’ horns.
All through Ilkhanid times the Mongols’ tents were more gorgeous than cities. Silk came into its own. There were silk tents raised on gold-plated and gold-nailed pillars; tents that became throne-rooms and ministries, tents that two hundred men could barely erect in twenty days. Silk lined the wagons of the Mongol princes, and was routinely demanded in tribute. A gold-woven fabric named nasij was especially prized, and skilled weavers were moved into the Mongol heartland from Samarkand and Herat to create it. Genghis Khan himself had marvelled at his silk-clad women, glittering ‘like a red-hot fire’, and Marco Polo described the whole court of Kublai Khan assembling in identical coloured silks, according to the feast-day.
As for their sepulchres, the Ilkhanids eventually broke with the Mongol custom of secret burial, and each vied with his forebears to be lavishly entombed. Their haunting model was the Seljuk tomb of Sultan Sanjar at Merv. Yet the mausoleum of Oljeitu, as I entered, shed down a more complex richness. Even thicketed in scaffolding, its diffused light disclosed a vast, still space. The double tier of bays that encircled it, shaping the octagon, were carried within framing arches reaching to fifty feet, where stalactite ceilings were still stuck with faience fragments in turquoise and ultramarine. Under the gallery I circled painted ceilings which glowed in garnet and bronze, like a Persian carpet set in motion overhead. And within the arches of the sanctuary, climbing all their soffits and spandrels, there ebbed and flowed a broken river of mosaic tiles
, polychrome plaster and bands of gilded script, dissolving at last to the slow curve of the dome into infinity.
A mysterious uncertainty in the tomb’s decor–a tracery of stucco had been plastered over the first, beautiful tilework–perhaps reflects the wavering of Oljeitu’s time or heart. He was born a Nestorian Christian (and baptised Nicholas after the current pope); he flirted with Buddhism, then adopted Sunni Islam. But in 1310, a sudden convert to Shiism, he decided to transport the corpses of Ali and Hussein to his half-built mausoleum, before reverting to Sunnism and resuming the tomb for himself. Often the Shia faience and Sunni plaster have survived side by side. Sometimes both have vanished. And high above the gallery, obscured in scaffolding and gurgling with pigeons, a band of tiles still twins the names of Ali and the Prophet.
It was on the railway platform in Zanjan that I realised people were no longer speaking Persian. A Turkish dialect was in the air (it had started at Qazvin). I was crossing another unmarked frontier. Here, where the plains start to rumple into tablelands, the ethnic Persians thin away before Turkic Azeris, who number quarter of Iran’s people, and far to the north-west the mountain corridors of the Caucasus, and Turkey itself, exert their faint, unseen presence.
Something odd was happening to my own language too. It came out lisping and misshapen. For several hours my mouth had been filling with pain, and now I was seized by nausea. In the train’s mirror I saw a swollen, discoloured face. Its two halves might belong to different people, one cheek so inflated that its eye was closing. Beneath a wobbling tooth, the gum was inflamed by a livid abscess. I wondered with misgiving what dentist might work in the old Mongol town of Maragheh ahead of me, and regretted leaving behind the delicate hands of Persia.
My third-class sleeper had none of the communal festivity of carriages in China or Central Asia. Its six-bunk cabins were closed by sliding doors in clouded glass. They were noiseless and private. Dosed with aspirin, I lay awake on an upper bunk, while the rain-soaked wind clanked in the ventilator by my head, and we moved into darkness. A policeman had warned me as I boarded: ‘Keep your things close: if anyone offers you to eat or drink, refuse it.’ Now, faint from sickness, with the vulnerability of the lone traveller, I wedged my rucksack behind my back and curled under the railway’s flowery sheets, and tried to sleep.
The other passengers seemed far away. Below me two soldiers sprawled in battledress; beneath them an old woman lay asleep in her hijab, a scarf lashed around her face, while her husband sat awake, telling his prayer-beads with tiny cries. Sometimes we drifted past small stations where nobody stirred, or stopped in emptiness; and platform signs lit the dark incongruously with English–‘Prayer Room’, ‘Ablutions Place Women’–while the rain thickened into the night.
I stared out unsleeping. Once I saw a fox. And once we stopped a long time beside a station awning, where a youth and a girl were seated on broken chairs, oblivious of us. His head and body were turned to her with fierce, beseeching eyes, his shoulders hunched almost to his ears, while she–beautiful in profile–sometimes granted him a smile, then tied her headscarf more decorously and looked elsewhere. Then he would say something pleasing, and her smile would return and her feet in their trainers tapped nervously under her chador, on and on, until our train slid away.
Laughter floated up from the berth opposite me, where a pale-faced man had followed my gaze. He was young, but his round head was balding, with fine, close-shaven features. His English came lucid, tinged by something like American. ‘In two years they’ll be kissing!’
I said: ‘How do they find any privacy?’
‘Maybe they’ll go back to one of their parents’ houses. Young people do that.’ He spoke as if he were no longer young. ‘But here in the provinces it can be terrible if you’re caught.’
Outside our window I glimpsed low hills, blacker than the sky, sensed the train climbing. Its lights nosed far ahead over scrubland and gravel sidings. The man’s face came into focus opposite me. He had frank, hard eyes. I asked: ‘How do you speak English?’
‘I was in Canada by the age of sixteen. I was there four years.’
‘Your father…?’
‘No, I was alone.’
The strangeness of this hung in the air a moment, with the snoring of the soldiers. Then he said: ‘I escaped before being called up for the Iran–Iraq war.’ He waited, as if testing the silence. Perhaps it was the intimacy of darkness which eased these confidences, I thought, or our suspension above the sleeping others. He said: ‘My parents were divorced. He had another woman, and I didn’t get on with her. I wanted to get out. I didn’t want to fight that war. I thought it senseless. So I left.’
‘How?’
‘Over the mountains. Into Turkey. There was a whole gang of us. The Kurds ran an escape network, and smuggled us over. We were shot at as we went, and twice we were nearly caught by Turkish police. The Kurds mocked up a passport for me–we all laughed at it–before my father paid for a Canadian one to reach me. There was a racket going on using passports sold by Western drug addicts. Mine had belonged to Gordon——, I remember. I was sixteen and he was thirty-four, but at the Greek border they never bothered even to open it. And at Montreal airport I flushed it down the lavatory and claimed refugee status.’
I felt an uneasy wonder. Had he not done this, he might be lying beneath the flower-fetid soil of the Martyrs’ cemetery, with tens of thousands of other teenagers. Instead he had worked as a waiter in a fast-food restaurant in Montreal, and studied English. He had changed his name from Vahid to David. ‘Canada was good,’ he said. ‘But I was sorry for the family I’d left behind. By the time I was twenty, the war was over, and I felt homesick. I decided to return. Because I’d been a minor when I escaped, I wasn’t jailed. I was just fined. But now I’m sorry I ever left Canada. I want to go back.’
‘I don’t blame you.’ But I wondered if he had left it too late to return.
He said: ‘That was a futile war, you know. They’ve never told us how many died. And they’re still bringing back the bodies. You see the billboards everywhere, of the faces of the martyrs. Half the streets are named after them–big streets for big martyrs, little streets for little ones.’ His laughter disappeared into the silence. I wondered if he felt himself a deserter, after all, compelled to belittle those who had stayed behind.
He shifted nervously. ‘Now we’ve had enough blood. There’ve been too many dead. The people are exhausted. They don’t want any more. So we wait. We wait for these old mullahs to die out. It may take ten years. Their holy city, Qum, is a kind of mullah factory, churning them out. And they’re in league with the rich bazaaris–they have a common interest in keeping the country backward. But in the end it’s got to change. We’re a softer people than the Arabs, you know, more open to things. It’s an irony.’ He was whispering now. ‘We need a secular government. Everyone I know wants that. We want access to the world.’
‘Can you wait ten years?’
‘No. I’ll go back to Canada.’
For a while we were silent under the slurr of the rain and the grinding wheels. We were climbing more steeply now, into Azeri country: the land of his people. Turkic tribes had drifted south into Iran over many centuries, as the nomads had into China, and founded dynasties. The great Safavid dynasty was Turkic; so was the whole nineteenth-century Qajar house; and the Azeris still wielded power in government and commerce greater than their numbers. Persian-speakers ridiculed them. ‘They tell donkey jokes about us,’ Vahid said, and reckoned it jealousy.
By now my sedated toothache had stilled to a sullen throb, and I was fading in and out of sleep. Vahid too had turned his face to the cabin wall, but he went on talking in a pained monotone. ‘Of course I love my country…but not to live in, just to dream of…We live a lie here, we even have two economies…Western stuff gets smuggled across the Gulf from Dubai…nobody can police those waters…Satellite dishes everywhere, receiving foreign channels, and drugs galore…They say we have two million addicts amo
ng the poor…’
Blurred by painkillers, I had the illusion now that the voice belonged to no one in particular, floating in the night like the disembodied lament of all his country.
‘…Tehran’s grown terrible…The whole city’s polluted, petrol’s so cheap…yet we have to send it abroad to be refined…My women friends walk about like sheets in the day…but indoors they dress in miniskirts and drink imported vodka and their parties make such a racket they get stopped by the police…then my girlfriend has to go home before the night’s over because of her parents…’
Somewhere out in the rainswept night we had passed the town of Mianeh and the fifteenth-century bridge over the gorge of the Qizil Uzun nearby. The murmur of his voice merged with the murmur of the train-wheels. ‘I think the Mongol invasion changed my people…So much devastation. Every city. We were a happier people before…’
Much later, it seemed, I emerged from sleep again, and heard him say: ‘That war against Iraq…I pretend I disagree with it, even now. But I remember one of my teachers at school was killed fighting there…They just said he was dead. It made me tremble…The truth is I didn’t have the guts to fight…’
Light dawned over another land. The dusty plains had gone. Vahid too, at some time in the night, had gone. Through eyes swollen half shut I gazed out at the hard plateaux of the Turkic world, rolling their brown grass into a changeless sky. I leant outside to cool my inflamed face. Through the hills in front, our multicoloured carriages moved like a harlequin snake, obscenely bright.
Half an hour later I stumbled out on to the platform at Maragheh, and into the first hotel I saw. On its lobby wall the trio of ruling clerics had shrunk to two, the hardline Khamenei surviving alone while the dead Khomeini loured behind him like an angry ghost. In these poor rooms–along with the Koran, the prayer-mat and the sacred stone–a lonely touch of the past surfaced: a hung carpet, perhaps, or some faded plasterwork.
Shadow of the Silk Road Page 34
