SELECTIONS FROM PASSENGER TO TEHERAN (1926)

Passenger to Teheran and Twelve Days are both the colorful renderings, full of humor and lively anecdote, of some of Vita’s more exotic travels in Persia and Russia. From the wise suggestions about what to take along, to the accounts of what a traveler in relatively harsh conditions must endure, to the tales of Gertrude Bell’s insisting on her choosing a Saluki dog to the vagaries of mail deliveries, to the marvels of mountainscapes and teeming cities, she never loses her sense of amusement.

Vita traveled widely and often most glamorously, amid and over the mountains of Samarkand and of Persia, rode on many a mule and walked in much mud, writing of her extraordinary experiences whenever she had a moment. She had chosen Salukis with kings, traveled with the famous, endured what travelers endure, and written it all up as a proud and often lonely venture. Her poems about Persia grasp something of her feeling for the country.

In November of 1925, Harold Nicolson was posted to the British Legation in Teheran as His Majesty’s counselor. Vita, preferring to stay in their Sussex home at Long Barn, visited him twice, in 1926 from January to the middle of May, and then in 1927, to walk with him over the Bakhtiari Mountains. During this period, Harold was writing his most successful book, Some People.

For the first trip, Dorothy Wellesley went with her as far as India—they went up the Nile to Luxor and in India went to Agra and New Delhi, after which Vita went up the Persian Gulf by boat, then by rail to Baghdad, staying a few days with Gertrude Bell (Vita omits from Passenger to Teheran any mention of Dorothy Wellesley being on the trip and gives scarcely any notice to India, which she disliked.) She then continued the journey in a caravan of cars over the mountains of Persia and to Teheran, meeting Harold at Kermanshah, to his excitement and her utter composure.

She greatly liked Persia, and, as Nigel Nicolson tells us in his introduction to the 1990 edition of Passenger to Teheran, “Persia had not welcomed since Curzon a more observant and appreciative British visitor than Vita.”1 She, Harold, and Raymond Mortimer—another Bloomsbury figure and Harold’s intimate friend—went together to Isfahan. Eventually she and Harold parted and she wended her way home through Russia and Poland, in the most difficult of circumstances, all of which she took as an adventure.

Vita was a courageous and not in any way the shrinking violet feminine traveler. She was forerunner, mulerider, and wanderer: Over deserts and wide spaces, into mountains and adventures of all sorts, in cities and royal receptions, she remained as intrepid as any of the more celebrated explorers. One of her more useful talents along these lines was flexibility, what we might call the art of making-do. She retains, fortunately, a sense of humor about the expected and unexpected details of traveling, of the British Legation, and of a diplomat’s life. If every fortnight the bag of correspondence left Teheran for Bagdad, the delays were similarly noticeable: It took a letter from Vita to Virginia Woolf about six weeks to arrive. And in the other direction, there were delays no less noticeable: Having sent themselves three cases of wine from London in October, still in May—though they had once been glimpsed—they had not arrived, and there was silence on the topic. “Beyond looking with interest at every camel I meet lurching along the street, and trying to read the address upside down on the crate he bears, I accept this silence with philosophy and drink the amber-coloured wine of Shiraz instead,” Vita wrote.2

When Virginia Woolf received the letters Vita sent her from Persia, she was not altogether complimentary, writing in her diary of 1926: “She is not clever: but abundant and fruitful, truthful too. She taps so many sources of life: repose and variety.” But then upon receiving the typescript of Passenger to Teheran, which the Hogarth Press was to publish in 1926, she exclaimed to Vita how good it was and admitted: “I didn’t know the extent of your subtleties … not the sly, brooding, thinking, evading Vita. The whole book is full of nooks and crannies.”3

PASSENGER TO TEHERAN

CHAPTER II

TO EGYPT

I

One January morning, then, I set out; not on a very adventurous journey, perhaps, but on one that should take me to an unexploited country whose very name, printed on my luggage labels, seemed to distil a faint, far aroma in the chill air of Victoria Station: P E R S I A. It was quite unnecessary for me to have had those labels printed. They did not help the railway authorities or the porters in the least. But I enjoyed seeing my fellow-passengers squint at the address, fellow-passengers whose destination was Mürren or Cannes, and if I put my bag in the rack myself I always managed to let the label dangle, a little orange flag of ostentation. How subtle is the relationship between the traveller and his luggage! He knows, as no one else knows, its idiosyncrasies, its contents; he may have for it a feeling of tenderness or a great loathing; but, for better or worse, he is bound to it; its loss is his despair; to recover it he will forego railway tickets and steamship berths; it is still with him even when he has locked himself away in the drab bedroom of a strange hotel. There is the friendly box, which contains his immediate requisites, and which is opened and shut a dozen times a day; there are the boxes which will not shut, and which therefore he takes care never to open, however badly he may need an object lurking in their depths; to unpack them altogether is unthinkable, as bad as trying to put the djinn back into the bottle. There are the miscellaneous bits—a hold-all with rugs and coats; and always some small nuisance which he wishes he had not brought; had, known, indeed, before starting that he would regret it, but brought it all the same. With what a distinction, too, are invested those of his possessions which have been chosen to accompany him; he knows that he has left behind him an untidy room, with open drawers and ransacked cupboards, the floor strewn with bits of tissue paper and string; a room abandoned for somebody else to tidy up, while he sits smug in his carriage, having got away and escaped; and with him go, stowed away in the dark rectangular jumble of pigskin, fibre, or alligator, those patient, faithful, indispensables which will see the light again in bewilderingly changed surroundings, but which for him will emerge always with the association of his own dressing-table, his own washstand, and all the close familiarity of home. They have shared his ordinary life; now they are sharing his truancy; when he and they get home again, they will look at one another with the glance of complicity.

There is a great art in knowing what to take. The box which is to be opened and shut a dozen times a day must be an expanding box, and to start with it must be packed at its minimum, not its maximum, capacity. This is the first rule, and all temptations to break it by last-minute cramming must be resisted. A cushion or a pillow is a bulky bother, but well worth it for comfort; an air-cushion is less of a bother, but also less of a comfort. A Jaeger sleeping-bag (which goes in the hold-all) makes the whole difference to life on a long and varied journey; but it ought to be lined with a second bag made out of a sheet, or else it tickles. I had neglected this precaution. Thermos bottles are overrated; they either break or leak or both; and there are few places where you cannot get tea. Other essentials are a knife and a corkscrew, and a hat which will not blow off. An implement for picking stones out of horses’ hooves is not necessary. Quinine for hot countries, iodine, aspirin, chlorodyne, sticking-plaster. I would say: avoid all registered luggage, but there are few who will follow this sound advice. I did not follow it myself. I had a green cabin trunk, which I grew to hate, and left behind in Persia. I had, however, the excuse that I must provide against a variety of climates; I expected to be now boiled, now frozen; must have a fur cap and a sun-helmet, a fur coat and silk garments. My belongings had looked very incongruous when they lay scattered about my room.

Equipped, then, and as self-contained as the snail, the English traveller makes the most of the two hours between London and Dover. He looks out over the fields which, on the other side of the Channel, will widen out into the hedgeless sweeps of Northern France. For my part I know that line all too well; it takes me through my own fields, past my own station, and a curious mixture stirs in me; there is a dragging at the heart, and then to correct it I think deliberately how often I have seen this very train hurtle through the station, and have had a different dragging at the heart as “Continental Boat Express” whisked past me—a wish to be off, an envy of those people sitting at the Pullman windows; but no, that was not a dragging at the heart, but at the spirit; it is home which drags the heart; it is the spirit which is beckoned by the unknown. The heart wants to stay in the familiar safety; the spirit, pricking, wants to explore, to leap off the cliffs. All the landmarks flash past me: there are the two factory pistons which go up and down, near Orpington, plunging up and down alternately, but never quite together; that is to say, one of them is not quite risen before the other has begun to fall; ever since I was a child those pistons have distressed me, because I could not get them to work in unison, side by side as they are. I know that I shall remember them, travelling across Asia; and that on my return I shall see them again, still going up and down, and still a little wrong. Then comes my own station, and Yew Tree Cottage, and the path across the fields. But would I, if I could, get out of the train and run home by that path across the fields? There is the orange label dangling: P E R S I A. In half an hour I should be home; and my spaniel, sitting on my glove, would run out astonished; but meanwhile the train has rushed me into less poignant country; I am carried beyond that little patch of acres, beyond the woods where the orchis grows. I wonder whether the things in my luggage have felt a similar pull? responded, as the needle of the compass to the north?

Everything begins to recede: home, friends; a pleasant feeling of superiority mops up, like a sponge, the trailing melancholy of departure. An effort of will; and in a twinkling I have thought myself over into the other mood, the dangerous mood, the mood of going-out. How exhilarating it is, to be thus self-contained; to depend for happiness on no material comfort; to be rid of such sentimentality as attaches to the dear familiar; to be open, vulnerable, receptive!

II

Earlier memories of Cairo were scarcely agreeable; very young, very shy, and very awkward, I had been made to stay with Kitchener. I had not wanted to stay with him; I had protested loudly; my relations, who thought they knew better, said that some day I should be glad to have gone. I was not then, and am not yet, glad; for the recollection survives with horror, a sort of scar on the mind. I had arrived at the Residency suffering from a sunstroke and complete loss of voice—not an ideal condition in which to confront that formidable soldier. Craving only for bed and a dark room, I had gone down to dinner. Six or eight speechless, intimidated officers sat round the table; Kitchener’s bleary eye roamed over them; my own hoarse whisper alone punctuated the silence. Egyptian art came up as a topic. “I can’t,” growled Kitchener, “think much of a people who drew cats the same for four thousand years.” I could think of nothing more to say, even had I been physically capable of saying it. Worse followed; for as we sat on the terrace after dinner, looking across the garden towards the Nile, a quick, happy patter came across the bare floor and in trotted an alert yellow mongrel. “Good gracious, what’s that? a dog?” cried Kitchener, glaring at his A.D.C. The sanctity of the Residency was outraged; a dozen swords were ready to leap from their scabbards. I could not sit by and see murder done; I had to own that the dog was mine.

Next day, however, my host took me to the Zoo, as pleased as a child with the baby elephant which had been taught to salute him with its trunk. The ice was broken.

This time, after the lapse of years, I was irresponsibly in Egypt again; no dog to conceal, no servants, no Kitchener, no sunstroke. I went to Luxor. I had nine days’ grace between ship and ship. Blankets of magenta bougainvillaea hung over the white walls of Luxor; four creamy Nubian camels knelt beside the Nile. I remembered how on that previous occasion in Luxor I had lain in a cool dark room, sick with headache, but thankful to have escaped and to have my sunstroke at last to myself. Instead of going to the Valley of the Kings I had lain watching the bars of sunlight between the slats of the Venetian blinds, and hearing, with the peculiar vividness that only the concentrated egoism of illness brings, the drops of water falling on the tiled floor outside, as the servant splashed it from a bucket; a pleasant way of spending the days—and even the pain seemed to add something, to mark off that week from ordinary life—I was not resentful, only a little wistful at having to come as far as Luxor in order to do it. Now all was changed, and full of energy I took the dazzling, naked road that leads to the Valley of the Kings. How far away now appeared the English fields—yet the two pistons were still going unevenly up and down; small and very brightly green they appeared, as though seen down the wrong end of a telescope, when I thought suddenly of them in the midst of the Theban hills. But above all they presented themselves to me as extremely populous, full of small busy life, rabbits at evening coming out from the spinneys, hares sitting on their haunches among the clods of ploughed lands, field-mice, stoats, slinking through the leaves, and birds innumerable hopping in branches; a multitudinous population of tiny things, with plenty of rich corn and undergrowth to shelter them; very soft, green, and cushioned Kent appeared to me, as I paused in the white dust of that lifeless landscape. A hoopoe? a lizard? a snake? no, there was nothing; only the tumbled boulders and the glare of the sun. This silence and lifelessness frightened me. The rocks closed in on the road, threatening. There is a keen excitement in not knowing what one is going to see next; the mind, strung up, reaches forward for an image to expect, and finds nothing; it is like picking up a jug of water which you believe to be full, and finding it empty. I had formed no image of the burial-ground of the Pharaohs. Indeed, it seemed incredible that within a few moments I should behold it with my eyes, and know for the rest of my life thereafter exactly what it looked like. Then it would seem equally incredible that I should not always have known. These small but stinging reflections kept me lingering; I was loth to part with my ignorance; I reproached myself with having wasted so many years in not speculating on this royal sepulchre. Never again would that delight be within my reach; for the pleasures of the imagination I was about to exchange the dreary fact of knowledge. Already I had seen the road, and, even were I magically to be whisked back to Luxor, or, like Habakkuk, picked up by the hair of the head and through the vehemency of an angelic spirit set down to give my luncheon to some one a thousand leagues distant, still I should have seen the road and might form some idea, on a solid basis, of what was likely to be revealed round the corner. It was no good turning round and going back, out of this wilderness to the narrow green reaches of the Nile: I went forward.

IV

The moon happened to be at the full while I was at Luxor, so I went out to Karnak one night after dinner, to the quick trot of two little horses. This was a thing that many people had done many times before; but to me it was egotistically invested with a special excitement; for among the ambitions that smouldered vaguely at the back of my mind, one was to see Karnak by moonlight, another was to row about Karnak in a boat; and now the first ambition was to be fulfilled. At first the horses trotted softly along the sandy track, between the trees, the clicking of their hooves forming a busy, brisk little rhythm; then the landscape began to resolve itself into its characteristic properties: an obelisk appeared, then the square portico of a lesser temple on the left, then a broken avenue of squat shapes, toad-like among the shadows, then finally the mass of Karnak itself in an open space suddenly spreading out beyond the narrow road and the trees. A strange plain country, Egypt! so true to type, so expected, platitudinous—yet so grandly transcending all these things, making sophistication appear so trivial, putting to shame all pedantry with that perennial simplicity recognised by sophisticated and primitive minds alike. There is no escape. Fastidiousness must split the hair down to its narrowest filament; but, tired, returns again to the simplest forms for an ultimate satisfaction. We come back, always, to those odd, false, true relationships, which stir our emotions in response to our finer, not our more educated, judgement: such relationships as that of a pagan temple under the moon—though why the moon should have any bearing on the temple we do not know, except that both are old, so old that both have become unreal to us; unreal, and charged with a significance we are quite at a loss reasonably to interpret, only we know obscurely that it is there; obscurely, unscientifically, and in ignorance; perhaps mistakenly, but anyway with an inward, intuitive certainty; the conjunction stirs us as an aesthetic harmony stirs us: and who shall explain such mysteries as conjunction and rhythm, intuitively felt, but not by our present crude terminology to be defined? Who shall explain, either, the bearing of visual experience upon physical experience? That which we apprehend through the eyes can surely have no bearing on that which we experience through the spirit? But all these words are so vague: “spiritually,” “emotionally,” “intellectually,” what does all that really mean? We fumble, knowing that somewhere round the corner lies the last, satisfying co-ordination. Meanwhile, certain queer comings together, such as are made by rhythm, or by pattern, or by lights and shadows, do produce a natural harmony: a harmony suggesting that the part does probably fit, somewhere, into the whole.

Leaning against Karnak, I thought: what was a work of art if not the deliberate attempt to produce, artificially, such a harmony, which in nature emerges only by accident, and with the help of such adventitious advantages as Karnak itself now enjoyed, as, the moon casting shadows, and familiar constellations wryly tilted overhead. So, architecture was not and could never be a pure art, depending as it must on natural, accidental things. But there was no denying that architecture and nature made an astounding pair of allies. I had often puzzled over the architect’s platitude, that the aesthetic value of a building was independent of its site, as a picture was independent of its frame, and now understood it less than ever. This Karnak, that rose out of rock and sand, with its columns like gigantic palm-trees and its capitals like spreading lotus, gave the violent lie to such a theory. It sprawled like a magnificent monster on Egypt, enhanced by all that Egypt could give. An obelisk, rising out of the desert, gained something surely by its spiky contrast with the broad rolling waste; I floundered ignorantly, arrogantly but still apologetically, among problems I did not understand. It seemed to me that, since I had embarked on this journey, I had shed everything but the primitive pleasures of sensation. I knew myself, theoretically, to be a reasonably educated person, ready to produce theories on several subjects; yet when I called on theory now, it behaved like an ill-trained dog that will not come to the whistle, snuffing rather at new, delicious scents in the hedgerow, flushing a bird, jumping after it into the air, and landing on all fours again with a mouthful of tail-feathers. Like Kinglake’s traveller, I was fit only to report of objects, not as I knew them to be, but as they seemed to me—and to read into them, I might add, a great many attributes they could not really possess.

Walking into Karnak was like walking into one of Piranesi’s Prisons, solidified suddenly into stone, and grown to natural, nay, to heroic size. Piled on fantastic ruin, obelisks pricked the sky; the colossal aisle soared, its base plunged in the deepest shadow, its head lifted to the moon; shafts of light struck the columns, lay in silver druggets across the floor. The black, enormous temple was shot through and through by those broad beams of light. Beyond the aisle, a vast space littered with fallen masonry lay open to the sky. Cavernous openings, porticos, colonnades, blocks of masonry; obelisks, statues of Pharaohs, some upright, some prone; and beyond them, beyond this magnificent desolation, shrilled the thin piping of the frogs. At every point of the compass, turn which way one might, this temple, this etching by a mad genius, offered some new aspect, now beautiful, now terrible; some massing of shadow, some lofty soaring into light. It crushed the mind, since it was not the human mind that had conceived it as it now appeared, but such inhuman factors as time upon earth; and, in the sky, the mechanism of astronomy which brought the moon once more to that path overhead. But, out of the awful shadows, came suddenly a human voice, insistent, clamant for recognition. “I am a twin,” it said.

I turned, and beheld a figure in noble draperies standing beside me in a patch of light. It was my dragoman, a young Bedouin of proud and handsome appearance. He was in a state of extraordinary excitement, as though he could not contain his news, but must, under compulsion, communicate it to somebody. “I am two months older than my brother,” he said, his eyes burning with pride. “My mother kept my brother two months longer than she kept me. My father gave me two nurses,” he said, expressively, rounding his hands over his breast, “two nurses, for pleasure that I came so soon. My father never looks at my brother, he looks only at me. When my father dies, I shall be the headman of our village. I get three crops a year.” He broke off, and bounded nimbly up a sort of Giant’s Causeway of fallen stone; paused there, tall in his flowing robes against the sky. “Listen!” he cried, and rapped on a prostrate monolith. It gave out a note like twanged steel. He laughed with delight, as though this performance on the part of the quarried granite were one with his own excitement and his simple vanity.

CHAPTER III

TO IRAQ

I

Our return from Luxor to Cairo must have looked like a triumphal progress through the night, seen from the desert by any stray Bedouin, for the dining-car caught fire and trailed after us like the tall of a comet down the line. The train was stopped once, certainly, and some half-hearted efforts were made to put the fire out, but these being unavailing, we started off again and hoped for the best. My handsome dragoman was terribly frightened; he forgot about being a twin, he forgot about his prowess as a hunter, and insisted that the carriage would soon “be lying down on her side.” Besides, he added, robbers were in the habit of putting boulders across the line, to stop the train and plunder such passengers as might survive the accident. Our particular engine-driver was a devil, it appeared, and would charge any obstacle rather than run the risk of being thought in league with the robbers. I had seen the engine-driver, a little black man with a red handkerchief knotted round his head; he had come along from his engine to watch while the railway men tried to extinguish the dining-car, most contemptuous, with a cigarette dangling from his lips; the flames lit up his dark greasy face, and he had replied scornfully to any anxious enquiries. Finally I persuaded Nasr to go back to his own compartment, which he did, remarking that he would rather break in a rogue camel than go in a train again. As nothing happened, however, and as we arrived safely in Cairo next morning, he forgot his fears and implored me to take him on to Persia. He had seen France, England, Spain, and Italy; he had told his father he would not marry until he had seen all the world; would I not, therefore, take him to Asia that he might the more speedily settle down with a wife? He looked crestfallen when I said it was impossible, but soon brightened again. If I would not do that, would I at least send him a packet of post cards (coloured) of Shakespeare’s house at Stratford? This I was able to promise, and he ran along beside the train as it moved out of Cairo station, explaining that he had left eighteen pence with the postcard shop at Stratford, but that they had never sent the post cards … but here we reached the end of the platform, and the last I saw of him was the flutter of his white robe as he stood waving and looking after the train which might have carried him on the way to the coveted places.

He was a great dandy, and I missed him. His luggage had been a mystery to me, for he apparently carried a roll of blanket only, yet every day in Luxor he had produced new, voluminous clothes, green, purple, and white, and scarves embroidered with gold thread, and leather shoes in purple and yellow. I wished I had his receipt. My own baggage by now had increased considerably, and my supply of orange labels was giving out; I had acquired a gramophone, an icebox, and a large canvas bag which took the overflow of my books. The gramophone and the ice-box I had accepted in Cairo to save them from being thrown into the Nile; as they had already travelled with forty-seven other pieces of luggage over Tibet on the backs of yaks, I thought it a pity they should not continue their career.

With this paraphernalia I arrived at Port Said; learnt that the ship was late; slept in an hotel on the quay-side; and woke in the morning to find the liner moored under my windows.

VI

Fever sharpens the wits and improves the perceptions; loneliness performs the same good office. I had no one to talk to, except the captain, a jovial Scotchman who accepted his fate with the usual philosophy of such men. Yes, he said, it could be quite warm enough in the Gulf, certainly; and yes, the monsoons did give you a bit of a dusting. “But it’s surprising,” he added, “what a hammering a ship will take from the sea and come up smiling.” A seafaring life begets, not a lyrical, but a matter-of-fact point of view; there is, mentally, a family likeness among sailors, and this captain reminded me of another one who, on returning a borrowed copy of Typhoon, remarked only, “Seems to have been a bit of dirty weather knocking about.” The captain, however, had to go back to his bridge and I was left to my own devices. There was not much to look at: Baluchistan was very faint, more like a long, low, pink cloud than solid land, nor had we any prospect of future sights, for the captain told me that we should pass through the narrow Gulf of Oman during the night. Ships seem to take a pleasure in passing during the dark hours any object which might be of interest to their passengers. So my hand flew over the paper, covering sheet after sheet, and a school of porpoises followed the ship, turning over and over because they are still looking for Solomon’s ring, which he dropped off his finger in the Persian Gulf. Presently back came the captain, and pointed to the coast. “Persia,” he said laconically.

VII

The next two days were rough and cold; no land was in sight; we might have been in the North Sea instead of the Persian Gulf. The fever returned with fury. But I was so elated that I did not care: I had begun a book, and I had seen Persia. Since I might not behold the pearls of Bahrain, I took refuge in the pearls of Proust, heavy on the white throat of the duchesse de Guermantes; I dived into my canvas bag and brought out those shabby volumes which had won me such black looks when they lay scattered round me on the deck of the P. & O.; for although parson and colonel’s lady had enough French and enough Biblical knowledge to understand the titles, I doubt whether they had ever heard of Proust; anyway, I fished them out again now, and lost myself in that brilliant world, so real in its unreality. To read of Proust’s parties in the Persian Gulf is an experience I can recommend, as a paradox which may please the most fastidious taste. Indeed, I came to believe that every book should be read in the most incongruous surroundings possible, for then it imposes its own unity in a way that startles the reader when he has to emerge again into his own world; thus, when I passed from a ball at the Hotel de Guermantes into the little dining-saloon of S.S. Varela, Proust’s world was still truer than the ship and I was puzzled to know, really, where I was.

Then we came to Mohammerah, and, with other ships, waited outside the bar till we could begin to go up the Shat-el-Arab. It was then twilight; the ships’ lights came out one by one over a wide expanse of water; the smooth sky was streaked with red and orange behind the groves of palms; again it seemed miraculous that the ship should have made her landfall, but less miraculous this time, at the head of a narrow sea, than after the opal wastes of the Indian Ocean. So we waited for a little at the gateway to Iraq, with the engines stilled, in a peace like the peace of a lagoon. Slowly we moved up the river; it was dark by now, and the waterway was narrow: a low coast, thick with groves of date palms, through which we glided all night; from time to time I got up and looked through the porthole, but saw nothing beyond the thick, tall trees, that made an opaque wall along the banks, but whose fronded tops waved gently against a clear sky.

VIII

From Basrah to Bagdad the train runs straight over the desert; yellow, hideous, and as flat as the sea, the desert comes right up to the railway line, and stretches away to the circular horizon, unbroken save by a little scrub, a few leprous patches of salt, or the skeleton of a camel. Once, the monotony is interrupted by a mound: this is Ur of the Chaldees. Otherwise there is nothing. At one station a notice-board says: Change for Babylon. But one does not see Babylon from the train. So I was glad enough to reach Bagdad at seven in the morning, to hear the shouts with which all movement is conducted in the East, and to see the goats picking their way with pastoral simplicity between the railway trucks. I had had quite enough by then of fending for myself, and wished only to forget about the Persian Gulf and Basrah as quickly as possible; Bagdad to me meant no Arabian Nights, but the much greater and more comforting romance of friends.

This was lucky, for any one who goes to Bagdad in search of romance will be disappointed. The Tigris rushes its yellow flood through the city, and the houses which line its banks share the inevitable picturesqueness of all houses lining a waterway; the round coracles, which cross the river laden with bales and donkeys, swirling in the flood, looking impossibly unseaworthy, have a peculiar character of their own; but for the rest Bagdad is a dusty jumble of mean buildings connected by atrocious streets, quagmires of mud in rainy weather, and in dry weather a series of pits and holes over which an English farmer might well hesitate to drive a waggon. In Bagdad, however, drivers are not so particular. Ford cars, battered, bent, with broken wind-screens and no trace of paint, bump hooting down the street, while camels, donkeys, and Arabs get out of the way, as best they can: any road, in the East, is a road for a motor. I confess that I was startled by the roads of Bagdad, especially after we had turned out of the main street and drove between high, blank walls along a track still studded with the stumps of palm trees recently felled; the mud was not dry here and we skidded and slithered, hitting a tree-stump and getting straightened on our course again, racketing along, tilting occasionally at an angle which defied all the laws of balance, and which in England would certainly have overturned the more conventionally minded motor.

Then: a door in the blank wall, a jerky stop, a creaking of hinges, a broadly smiling servant, a rush of dogs, a vista of garden path edged with carnations in pots, a little verandah and a little low house at the end of the path, an English voice—Gertrude Bell.

I had known her first in Constantinople, where she had arrived straight out of the desert, with all the evening dresses and cutlery and napery that she insisted on taking with her on her wanderings; and then in England; but here she was in her right place, in Iraq, in her own house, with her office in the city, and her white pony in a corner of the garden, and her Arab servants, and her English books, and her Babylonian shards on the mantelpiece, and her long thin nose, and her irrepressible vitality. I felt all my loneliness and despair lifted from me in a second. Had it been very hot in the Gulf? got fever, had I? but quinine would put that right; and a sprained ankle—too bad!—and would I like breakfast first, or a bath? and I would like to see her museum, wouldn’t I? did I know she was Director of Antiquities in Iraq? wasn’t that a joke? and would I like to come to tea with the King? and yes, there were lots of letters for me. I limped after her as she led me down the path, talking all the time, now in English to me, now in Arabic to the eager servants. She had the gift of making every one feel suddenly eager; of making you feel that life was full and rich and exciting. I found myself laughing for the first time in ten days. The garden was small, but cool and friendly; her spaniel wagged not only his tail but his whole little body; the pony looked over the loose-box door and whinnied gently; a tame partridge hopped about the verandah; some native babies who were playing in a corner stopped playing to stare and grin. A tall, grey saluki came out of the house, beating his tall against the posts of the verandah; “I want one like that,” I said, “to take up into Persia.” I did want one, but I had reckoned without Gertrude’s promptness. She rushed to the telephone, and as I poured cream over my porridge I heard her explaining—a friend of hers had arrived—must have a saluki at once—was leaving for Persia next day—a selection of salukis must be sent round that morning. Then she was back in her chair, pouring out information: the state of Iraq, the excavations at Ur, the need for a decent museum, what new books had come out? what was happening in England? The doctors had told her she ought not to go through another summer in Bagdad, but what should she do in England, eating out her heart for Iraq? Next year, perhaps … but I couldn’t say she looked ill, could I? I could, and did. She laughed and brushed that aside. Then, jumping up—for all her movements were quick and impatient—if I had finished my breakfast wouldn’t I like my bath? and she must go to her office, but would be back for luncheon. Oh yes, and there were people to luncheon; and so, still talking, still laughing, she pinned on a hat without looking in the glass, and took her departure.

I had my bath—her house was extremely simple, and the bath just a tin saucer on the floor—and then the salukis began to arrive. They slouched in, led on strings by Arabs in white woolen robes, sheepishly smiling. Left in command, I was somewhat taken aback, so I had them all tied up to the posts of the verandah till Gertrude should return, an army of desert dogs, yellow, white, grey, elegant, but black with fleas and lumpy with ticks. I dared not go near them, but they curled up contentedly and went to sleep in the shade, and the partridge prinked round them on her dainty pink legs, investigating. At one o’clock Gertrude returned, just as my spirits were beginning to flag again, laughed heartily at this collection of dogs which her telephone message (miraculously, as it seemed to me) had called into being, shouted to the servants, ordered a bath to be prepared for the dog I should choose, unpinned her hat, set down some pansies on her luncheon table, closed the shutters, and gave me a rapid biography of her guests.

She was a wonderful hostess, and I felt that her personality held together and made a centre for all those exiled Englishmen whose other common bond was their service for Iraq. They all seemed to be informed by the same spirit of constructive enthusiasm; but I could not help feeling that their mission there would have been more in the nature of drudgery than of zeal, but for the radiant ardour of Gertrude Bell. Whatever subject she touched, she lit up; such vitality was irresistible. We laid plans, alas, for when I should return to Bagdad in the autumn: we would go to Babylon, we would go to Ctesiphon, she would have got her new museum by then. When she went back to England, if, indeed, she was compelled to go, she would write another book.… So we sat talking, as friends talk who have not seen one another for a long time, until the shadows lengthened and she said it was time to go and see the King.

The King’s house lay just outside the town; a wretched building in a sad state of disrepair, the paving-stones of the terrace forced up by weeds, the plaster flaking off the walls and discoloured by large patches of damp. The King himself was a tall, dark, slim, handsome man, looking as though he were the prey to a romantic, an almost Byronic, melancholy; he spoke rather bad French, addressing himself in Arabic to Gertrude when his vocabulary failed him. They discussed what linoleum he should have in the kitchen of his new country house. Then tea was brought in, and a sort of pyramid of fanciful cakes, which delighted Feisal, and they discussed at great length the merits of his new cook. Gertrude seemed to be conversant with every detail of his housekeeping as well as with every detail of the government of his kingdom, and to bring as much interest to bear upon the one as upon the other.

His melancholy vanished as she twitted and chaffed him, and I watched them both—the Arab prince and the Englishwoman who were trying to build up a new Mesopotamia between them. “You see,” she had said to me, “we feel here that we are trying to do something worth while, something creative and constructive”; and in spite of her deference to his royalty, in spite of the “Sidi” that now and then she slipped into her conversation, there could be very little doubt as to which of the two was the real genius of Iraq. As we drove back into Bagdad she spoke of his loneliness; “He likes me to ring up and ask to go to tea,” she said. I could readily believe it.

Her house had the peculiar property of making one feel that one was a familiar inhabitant; at the end of a day I felt already that I was part of it, like the spaniel, the pony, and the partridge (the partridge, indeed, slept in my bedroom that night, on the top of the cupboard); I suppose her life was so vivid, so vital, in every detail, that its unity could not fail to make an immediate, finished impression on the mind. But I was only a bird of passage. Next evening I left for Persia, the moon hanging full over Bagdad, and my heart warmed with the anticipation of a return to that friendly little house which now I shall never see again. The finally selected saluki sat beside me; she must be called Zurcha, said Gertrude, meaning “yellow one”; in every street café a gramophone brayed, through the fog of smoke rising from the hubble-bubbles of the Arabs. These smoky, lighted interiors slid past me as my cab bumped towards the station; but I, clinging on to my bouncing luggage, had no leisure for their tinsel or their discord. What were Arabs to me or I to them, as we thus briefly crossed one another? they in their robes, noble and squalid, of impenetrable life; and I a traveller, making for the station? They had all the desert behind them, and I all Asia before me, Bagdad just a point of focus, a last shout of civilisation, lit by that keen spirit, that active life; and lying for me now—as though I looked down upon it from a height—between Arabia and Asia, midway between a silence and a silence.

CHAPTER V

ROUND TEHERAN

I

This country through which I have been hurled for four days has become stationary at last; instead of rushing past me, it has slowed down and finally stopped; the hills stand still, they allow me to observe them; I no longer catch but a passing glimpse of them in a certain light, but may watch their changes during any hour of the day; I may walk over them and see their stones lying quiet, may become acquainted with the small life of their insects and lichens; I am no longer a traveller, but an inhabitant. I have my own house, dogs, and servants; my luggage has at last been unpacked. The ice-box is in the kitchen, the gramophone on the table, and my books are on the shelves. It is spring; long avenues of judas trees have come into flower along the roads, the valleys are full of peach-blossom, the snow is beginning to melt on the Elburz. The air, at this altitude of nearly four thousand feet, is as pure as the note of a violin. There is everywhere a sense of openness and of being at a great height; that sense of grime and overpopulation, never wholly absent in European countries, is wholly absent here; it is like being lifted up and set above the world on a great, wide roof—the plateau of Iran.

Teheran itself, except for the bazaars, lacks charm; it is a squalid city of bad roads, rubbish-heaps, and pariah dogs; crazy little victorias with wretched horses; a few pretentious buildings, and mean houses on the verge of collapse. But the moment you get outside the city everywhere changes. For one thing, the city remains definitely contained within its mud rampart, there are no straggling suburbs, the town is the town and the country is the country, sharply divided. For another thing, the city is so low that at a little distance it is scarcely visible; it appears as a large patch of greenery, threaded with blue smoke. I call it a city, but it is more like an enormous village. The legend here is, that a certain speculator went to the Shah and said, “King of Kings, if I build you a rampart round your city, will you give me all the land within the rampart that is not yet built over?” and the Shah, thinking the man a fool, agreed. But the man was not a fool, and he built the rampart in so wide a circle that the city has not yet grown out to its walls.

*   *   *

… Such strange things happen in these forgotten regions of the world. As a consequence, all questions of transport furnish an endless topic of conversation. Whether so-and-so will arrive, or some one else be able to leave; whether he is to be expected on the Wednesday or the Thursday; whether the post will come tonight or not until tomorrow morning, or, indeed, be delayed for a week—all these speculations form an integral part of life. Are the floods over the Kasvin road? Has the bridge been swept away again between here and Kum? Then some one comes into the town with news of the road, and the information is passed round by word of mouth to all whom it may concern; and, more or less, and for one reason or another, it concerns everybody. So you get the curious spectacle of silk-hatted gentlemen and upholstered ladies engaged in the discussion of these truly mediaeval difficulties. “He is stuck in the mud in the desert,” you hear; “they sent out an aeroplane for him, but that has stuck too.” The modern and the mediaeval jostle in the same phrase. It is all taken quite as a matter of course.

So we are at the mercy of snow and flood, and also at the mercy of limp Oriental methods; three cases of wine, despatched from England in October, have not reached Teheran in May. True, they were heard of two months ago, about two hundred miles up the road, but where are they now? Nobody knows. No doubt the camels came on a patch of green, and have been turned out to graze. All that we know for certain is that they were once “seen passing through Hamadan”; the rest is silence. Beyond looking with interest at every camel I meet lurching along the street, and trying to read the address upside down on the crate he bears, I accept this silence with philosophy and drink the amber-coloured wine of Shiraz instead. The post at least arrives with fortnightly regularity, corded on to the splashboards of a muddy motor, an Indian soldier on the box; the headlights stream suddenly down the road, lighting the white trunks of the plane trees, and then there is a scramble to sort the letters as some one empties the bags out on to the table, and every one carries off his budget greedily and jealously, much as a squirrel carries off a nut to his drey. It is almost as hard, in Persia, to believe in the existence of England, as it is, in England, to believe in the existence of Persia; and to piece together, from various letters, what has really been happening to our friends, is like playing a game, or fitting a puzzle: very neat and fascinating, but hard to conceive of as related to any real life. And yet it has its value, for it cuts a new facet on the gem of friendship; to keep in touch with our friends by means of letters only, shows them to us under a new aspect; they are detached, divorced from the apparatus of personality; appearance, voice, gestures are no longer there to mislead and confuse; what we get is an essence, incomplete certainly, and fragmentary, but pure so far as it goes. Then letters become really an enchanting game; we are compelled to contribute all the resources of our imagination; then we find little scraps put away in our memory, little puzzling scraps, that now fall into place, and we enjoy a triumph that at so remote a distance we should yet have made so illuminating a discovery. We shall go back to our friends treading on firmer ground; not, as might be expected, with a gulf between their life and ours.

But this is the exile’s pleasure, and it is not to be hoped that those friends in England, with their full life, should have the time to idle over us as we do over them. Yet this, too, may be turned into a satisfaction, for it puts us into the superior position of having found out a number of things while remaining ourselves undiscovered. Sitting on a rock, with the yellow tulips blowing all about me, and a little herd of gazelle moving down in the plain, I dwell with a new intensity on my friends. I know quite well that they are not thinking of me. But they have become my prey, and they are not there to correct or to contradict. It might well be a little alarming for them, this solitary dissection; much more alarming than gregarious gossip, which is bad enough, and makes most people nervous; but fortunately they know nothing about it, so I have the laugh over them. I hold them here, quite tiny, but bright and sharp, in the merciless space of Persia. All old habits of mind have left me, so that it is possible to approach the old ideas with a new eye. The heart is renewed, and winds have blown away the cobwebs.

I had, however, strolled as far as the gate, with no intention of speaking of any of these things, but the amplitude and leisure of the place lead me into discursiveness; there is no hurry, and very little to do except sit and stare. I do not think it a waste of time to absorb in idleness the austere splendour of this place; also I am aware that its colour stains me through and through. Crudely speaking, the plain is brown, the mountains blue or white, the foothills tawny or purple; but what are those words? Plain and hills are capable of a hundred shades that with the changing light slip over the face of the land and melt into a subtlety no words can reproduce. The light here is a living thing, as varied as the human temperament and as hard to capture; now lowering, now gay, now sensuous, now tender; but whatever the mood may be, it is superimposed on a basis always grand, always austere, never sentimental. The bones and architecture of the country are there, whatever light and colour may sweep across them; a soft thing passing over a hard thing, which is as it should be. The quality of the light suits this country of great distances. Hills a hundred miles away are clearly scored with the clefts of their valleys, so that their remoteness is unbelievable; Demavend himself, seventy miles distant, looks as though he overhung the town, and might at any moment revive, to annihilate it, his dead volcanic fires. The shapes and promontories of the hills grow familiar: the spur which juts out into the plain near Karedj, the claret-coloured spine of Rhey, the great white backbone at the Elburz, beyond which lie the sub-tropical provinces of the Caspian. They stand with the hardness of an old country; one does not feel that here once swayed the sea, not so very long ago, geologically speaking; on the contrary, this plateau is among the ancient places of the earth, and something of that extreme antiquity has passed into its features, into the jagged profile of its rocks, worn by the weather for untold centuries until it could wear them no more—until it had reduced them to the first shape, and whittled them down to a primal design beneath which it was powerless to delve. Age has left only the bones.

Some complain that it is bleak; surely the rich and changing light removes such a reproach. The light, and the space, and the colour that sweeps in waves, like a blush over a proud and sensitive face. Besides, those who say that it is bleak have not looked, or, looking, have not seen. It is, rather, full of life; but that life is tiny, delicate, and shy, escaping the broader glance. Close and constant observation is necessary, for the population changes from week to week, almost from day to day; a shower of rain will bring out a crop of miniature anemones, a day of hot sun will shrivel them; the tortoises will wake with the warmth; the wasteland stirs. It is necessary to look towards the distance, and then into the few square yards immediately beneath the foot; to be at one and the same time long-sighted and near-sighted.

CHAPTER IX

RUSSIA

I

The countryside had also decked itself for the coronation; all along the roads, where the judas trees had now shed their magenta and clothed themselves in leaf instead, the jasmine and wild roses were in full flower. In the gardens, poor stunted tea-roses that in England would have been torn up by a derisive hand and flung on the bonfire, had for some weeks past been putting forth their blooms; but it is for the exuberance of the native wildling that one must wait before one understands the reputation of Persian roses. Huge bushes, compact, not straggling like the English dog-rose, spattered with flame-coloured blossom; the ground carpeted with fallen petals—this is the first impression, then a closer scrutiny reveals the lovely shape of the separate flower, the pure, early shape of the briar-rose, of a pristine simplicity which our whorled hybrids, superlative though they be, can never excel; and, allied to that early, naked design, a colour such as all our cross-fertilisation fails to produce: the interior of the petal red, but lined with gold, the two together giving a glow of orange, a burning bush. Side by side with these grew the yellow rose, which to me was always the rose of Kum, and the low, shrubby jasmine, and plumes of acacia that scented the air; the brief spring was once more making the most of its allotted season. I could not believe but that the earth was ready to break into other sudden, concealed riches, for I had learnt by now to take nothing on trust, and to ignore the disparagements of other people, for very quickly I had discovered that those who found “nothing to see” were those who did not know how to look; but although equipped with this pharisaical humour, I might no longer indulge it, for the time had come for me to return to England.

Already the promise of summer hung over Persia; the planes were heavy in leaf, and the trickle of water became more persistent, as the gardeners (with one trouser leg rolled up to the thigh, a fashion I could never wholly explain) released the pent-up streams and allowed them to pour over the thirsty beds, or padded bare-footed about the garden, splashing water to lay the dust in the early morning. We no longer courted the sun, but darkened the house all day with reed blinds, raising them only in the evening when the snows of Demavend turned red, and the dusk came quickly, and the little owls began to hoot, and the frogs hopped on the garden path, and the breeze rose and sighed in the planes. The imminence of departure oppressed me; I was beginning to say, “This time next week…” and to suffer when I heard people making plans for a date, not very far distant, when I should no longer be there; heartlessly they made their plans, the people for whom life flowed continuous, while I sat by and listened, under sentence of death; then the days began to rush, and the day came which was still an ordinary day for other people, but for me was a day so different. An early start, so like, so unlike, the start for Isfahan; the motor at the door; luggage being carried out; the curtained windows of other houses, whose inhabitants still slept, would sleep for three hours longer, by which time I should be sixty miles away; the early morning life just stirring, the white pony going his rounds with the water-casks; a freshness over everything; the dogs wanting to come; being refused; the servants wishing me a good journey, and bringing me little presents; the fat cook coming out in his white shoes with a basket of little cakes. My room empty upstairs, but my books still on the shelves; my handwriting, reversed, still on the blotting-paper; good-bye, good-bye; for Heaven’s sake let us get this over. The guard at the gate saluting, then the streets, the Kasvin gate, the Kasvin road; what a difference, between arrival and departure! then, everything had been new, I had looked with curiosity, Demavend himself had had to be pointed out to me and named, I had not known what to expect next round the turn of the road; now, everything was a landmark to be left behind, every place had a meaning and an association; there was the shop where we had bought the pots, there was the place of meeting for the paper-chase, there was the track that led up to Var-dar-Var, where we had first found the wild almond in flower, and had marked off an unknown shrub with a ring of stones. Still the donkeys trailed along the road, though camels were few, for they had gone up to Gilan for the spring grazing; and every one I met going towards Teheran I envied; and every one I overtook going towards Kasvin I pitied for being in the same plight as I.

After Kasvin the road was unfamiliar, and the character of the landscape changed with surprising abruptness. We were no longer on the roof; the high, arid plateaus were gone; the vegetation became lush and green, the climate changed from the clear air of four thousand feet to the mild, steamy atmosphere of sub-tropical sea-level. We had dropped from over four thousand feet in a few hours, down a precipitous road into the valley of the White River. The scenery was fine, in its way; groves of trees descended the steep slopes to the banks of the river, and between the trees could be seen green meadows, as green as Devonshire, with cows peacefully grazing or—an odd effect—camels grazing in this Devonshire landscape, as who should come upon a herd of camels in the meadows above the Dart; the valley of the White River had its beauty, but it was not Persia as I understood it, and I resolved that I would never bring any one into Persia for the first time by that road, but would subject them to the rigours of the plains and passes of Kermanshah and Hamadan. Evening fell; we seemed to have been travelling interminably; the continual hairpin corners made driving very tiring; we met strings of hooded waggons, whose miserable teams could scarcely drag them up the hill; men were shouting, and tugging at the bridles, and thrashing the stumbling horses; we got past them all somehow, and drew up in a village by the river where a notice-board proclaimed the Hotel Fantasia.

It was well named, for a crazier building I never saw; an outside staircase, with two steps missing, led up to a wooden balcony, and here we pitched our camp-beds and slept as well as the fleas would allow us. There had been no fleas at Dililjan or at Kum; the rooms there had been bare and clean; it was typical of the difference between that happy and this miserable journey. There, we had gone to sleep conscious of the free space all around us; here, we were in a narrow valley with the river roaring in a brown flood fifty yards away, and no sense of Asia.…