It was Robert Byron who announced that he wished to travel east to seek coloured architecture. But he was also following a path established by both Vita Sackville-West and Gertrude Bell before him. Few commentators have had the intellectual self-confidence of those of interwar Britain. They still saw it their duty to inform as well as comment, thus the occasionally pedagogic tone. None of them wrote with any apparent fear of contradiction.
‘An endlessly beautiful parable’
GERTRUDE BELL
Persian Pictures (1894 and 1928)
Gertrude Bell (1868–1926) had the facility through family wealth and connections to travel freely, but she was also a talented linguist and student of Arab culture. She became more than an adventurer in Asia Minor and Arabia when the First World War drew her into becoming a political adviser, administrator and informant, particularly to Winston Churchill, alongside T. E. Lawrence. She took a leading role in the formation of Iraq. Her death, aged fifty-seven, in July 1926, remains something of a mystery. The book was originally published as Safar Nameh, Persian Pictures: A Book of Travel in 1894 and was republished in 1928, two years after Bell’s death, as Persian Pictures. Much of it is adapted from the letters sent during her visit to her uncle Sir Frank Lascelles, who was British Ambassador to Tehran.
The East is full of secrets – no one understands their value better than the oriental; and because she is full of secrets she is full of entrancing surprises. Many fine things there are upon the surface; brilliance of colour, splendour of light, solemn loneliness, clamorous activity; these are only the patterns upon the curtain which floats for ever before the recesses of Eastern life: its essential charm is of more subtle quality. As it listeth, it comes and goes; it flashes upon you through the open doorway of some blank, windowless house you pass in the street, from under the lifted veil of the beggar woman who lays her hand on your bridle, from the dark, contemptuous eyes of a child; then the East sweeps aside her curtains, flashes a facet of her jewels into your dazzled eyes, and disappears again with a mocking little laugh at your bewilderment; then for a moment it seems to you that you are looking her in the face, but while you are wondering whether she be angel or devil, she is gone.
She will not stay – she prefers the unexpected; she will keep her secrets and her tantalising charm with them, and when you think you have caught at last some of her illusive grace, she will send you back to shrouded figures and blank house-fronts.
You must be content to wait, and perhaps some day, when you find her walking in her gardens in the cool of the evening, she will take a whim to stop and speak to you and you will go away fascinated by her courteous words and her exquisite hospitality.
For it is in her gardens that she is most herself – they share her charm, they are as unexpected as she. Conceive on every side such a landscape as the dead world will exhibit when it whirls naked and deserted through the starry interspace – a grey and featureless plain, over which the dust-clouds rise and fall, build themselves into mighty columns, and sink back again among the stones at the bidding of hot and fitful winds; prickly low-growing plants for all vegetation, leafless, with a foliage of thorns; white patches of salt, on which the sunlight glitters; a fringe of barren mountains on the horizon … Yet in this desolation lurks the mocking beauty of the East. A little water and the desert breaks into flower, bowers of cool shade spring up in the midst of dust and glare, radiant stretches of soft colour gleam in that grey expanse. Your heart leaps as you pass through the gateway in the mud wall; so sharp is the contrast, that you may stand with one foot in an arid wilderness and the other in a shadowy, flowery paradise. Under the broad thick leaves of the plane-trees tiny streams murmur, fountains splash with a sweet fresh sound, white-rose bushes drop their fragrant petals into tanks, lying deep and still like patches of concentrated shadow. The indescribable charm of a Persian garden is keenly present to the Persians themselves – the ‘strip of herbage strown, which just divides the desert from the sown,’ an endlessly beautiful parable. Their poets sing the praise of gardens in exquisite verses, and call their books by their names. I fear the Muses have wandered more often in Sa’di’s Garden of Roses than in the somewhat pretentious pleasure-ground which our Elizabethan writer prepared for them.
‘So stands Persepolis’
VITA SACKVILLE-WEST
Twelve Days in Persia (1927)
Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) was a novelist, poet and garden designer, famed for the gardens of her Sissinghurst home. She came from an aristocratic and secure background and was married to the writer, politician and broadcaster Harold Nicholson for nearly fifty years. Meanwhile, she had many affairs, the more celebrated of which were with her talented and sometimes colourful friends, including her first love Rosamund Grosvenor, Violet Trefusis, and Virginia Woolf, for whose novel Orlando she was the muse. Here Vita Sackville-West passes judgement with authority on the creative achievements of three different civilisations in a few paragraphs. Husband Harold Nicolson and other companions hardly merit a mention.
The pastoral tribes have streamed by, simple survivals from a lost world; the steam-hammers have thudded round the site of what was once the Temple of Fire; now it is time to see what becomes of empires as arrogant as the British and, on so oracular a note, to end.
Persepolis is particularly suitable for such a purpose – to stand midway between the Bakhtiari country and the outposts of England as typified by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. It is suitable because, although it was once the capital of the Persian Empire, its ruins now lie among surroundings as primitive as the plain of Malamir. The gaunt columns remain, thrusting up at the sky, but of the site of the city of Istakhr there is nothing but the nibbled grass. Persepolis gains in splendour from its isolation. Not another building stands anywhere near it; not a hut, not a guard-house, not a shepherd’s shelter; only the vast green plain, encircled by mountains and the open sky and the hawks that wheel and hover between the columns. As a ship launching out on an expanse of sea, the great terrace drives forward on to the plain, breasting it, the columns rising like naked spars into the clear blue of the sky. At first sight it may seem smaller than one had expected to find it, but that is due to the immensity of the plain and to the mass of the hill against which it is pushed up. The terrace, in fact, juts squarely out, backing against the hill as though for defence; but the effect is less of a seeking for defence than of an imperial launching of defiance, a looking-out across the plain, a raised domination above the level ground: the throne of kings overhanging the dwellings of the people. But the dwellings of the people which once spread over the plain have disappeared, and nothing of the royal capital remains but the ruins that were once the citadel of Xerxes and Darius; the dwellings of the people, no doubt, were made of wattle and sun-dried bricks, ephemeral material, whereas the kings glorified themselves in stone. A thousand years, I suppose, will level the disparity between them. The propylaea of Xerxes, the palace of Darius, will have enjoyed a few thousand more years of survival than sun-baked bazaars which sheltered the potter and the barber.
So stands Persepolis, looking out over the deserted plain. The space, the sky, the hawks, the raised-up eminence of the terrace, the quality of the Persian light, all give to the great terrace a sort of springing airiness, a sort of treble, to which the massive structure of bastion and archways plays a corrective bass. It is only when you draw near that you realise how massive that structure really is. It has all the weight of the Egyptian temples; square, monolithic. The terrace itself is supported on enormous blocks, its angles casting square shadows; a double stairway climbs it, a stairway that at its landing-place is superbly dominated by huge winged bulls. Now you are in the midst of the ruins: the columns soar, supporting no roof; square doorways open, leading into no halls. (But see, within the jamb of one doorway is carved a king wrestling with a lion, and within another a king stepping forward under the shade of a parasol; these were the kings that ruled, but here, following the easy rise of steps, comes a procession of captive kings.) A little further, and you are in the Hall of the Hundred Columns, a wilderness of tumbled ruins, but ruins which in their broken detail testify to the richness of the order that once was here: fallen capitals; fragments of carving small enough to go into a pocket, but whorled with the curls of an Assyrian beard; wars and dynasties roll their forgotten drums, as the fragment is balanced for a moment in the palm of the hand. Over this roofless desolation hangs the sun, cutting black square shadows, striking a carving into sharper relief; and silence reigns, but for the dry-leaf scurry of a lizard over the stones. This hall was roofed with cedar, says Quintus Curtius; and now the discovered ashes of carbonised cedar corroborate the account of the historians: this hall of Darius flamed indeed beneath the vengeance of Alexander. Little did it avail Darius that he should have caused the Avesta to be written in letters of gold and silver on twelve thousand tanned ox-hides.
The hand of man has never desecrated these ruins, no excavator’s pick has ever rung upon these stones; tumbled and desolate they lie today, as they lay after the might of Alexander had pushed them over. The heat of the Persian summers has passed over them and bleached them; they have flushed in the light of many sunrises and bared themselves to the silver of many moons; the wild flowers have sown themselves in the crevices and the lizards scurry over the pavements; but it is a dead world, as befits the sepulchre of an imperial race.
Ruined cities. Ranging away from Persepolis, I remember other wrecks of pride, splendour, and majesty: the ziggurat of Ur against the sunset, the undulating mounds that were Babylon, the gay broken colonnades of Palmyra. Golden, graceful, airy, debased, Palmyra rises like a flower from the desert in an oasis of palms and apricots. At the apex of a flattened and irregular triangle between Damascus and Baghdad, Palmyra lies on the old caravan route, and the strings of camels still slouch beneath the triumphal arches of Zenobia and Odenathus. But the Street of the Hundred Columns is now nothing but a transparent screen of pillars, framing the desert, and in the precincts of the Temple of Baal clusters an Arab village, the squalid houses incongruously put together with the stones of the once magnificent centre of a pagan faith. What is Palmyra now? Where is the glory of Solomon who built Tadmor in the wilderness? A few tourists motor out from Beirut, and the desert traffic of camel caravans passes through on its leisurely way. The Arab children squabble in the gutters. There is a French poste de police. There is a derelict building, originally designed as an hotel. But now that even the Trans-Desert Mail no longer takes Palmyra in its rush – as it did when the Druses terrorised the southern route – it seems likely that Palmyra will return to the isolation to which it is geographically destined, and that the flush of its prosperity under the Roman Empire will resemble the flush of flowers over the desert in spring – with this difference, that spring for Palmyra is not recurrent. It happened once, and will not happen again; a miracle the more exquisite for its singleness and fugacity.
You come upon Palmyra unexpectedly, if you approach it from the Damascus side, going through a gorge crowned by Turkish forts, and coming out on to a full view of the desert with these surprising ruins standing in the white, pale sand. Lovely in colour, as golden as honey, the vistas of columns and arches give Palmyra a lacy quality; it is a series of frames, and nothing so much enhances the beauty of landscape as to be framed in a fragment of architecture. But on looking closer this architecture presents a puzzle: it is Roman, surely? but there is something not quite Roman about it; there are mistakes that the Roman builders would not have made. Indeed, the Romans did not build it, no; Arabs built it, dazzled by what they had seen or heard of the Roman models. Most people criticise Palmyra on this account. Certainly it is neither as pure nor as majestic as Baalbec. It lacks the grand solidity of Roman building, and the Roman sense of proportion is notably absent. But I like Palmyra. It is very feminine; it is gay, whimsical, and a little meretricious. It seems to have drunk the desert sun, and to have granted free passage to all the desert winds with a wanton insouciance. Palmyra is a Bedouin girl laughing because she is dressed up as a Roman lady.
And there, lastly, under the snows of Lebanon lie the mighty ruins of Heliopolis. The Temple of Bacchus retains its shape, but of the Temple of Jupiter only six columns survive out of the original fifty-four. Baalbec had its worthy enemies: Genghiz, Timur, and Saladin; besides the earthquakes which have crashed pediment and capital to the ground. There lie the blocks of masonry, here gapes a vault; here is a column, propping itself against the wall of the Temple. It is a wilderness of masonry; havoc such as might have been wrought in a sudden onslaught by the anger of the very god to whom the greatest temple was dedicated, that Jupiter who at Baalbec was called Baal, not the hirsute Jove of the Romans, but a beardless god, covered with scales, and holding in one hand a scourge, and in the other, lightning and ears of corn. Baalbec has gone the way of those cities of antiquity on whose ruin no later city has arisen. True, a little town has grown up beside it, so that it enjoys neither the superb isolation of Persepolis nor the native sprinkling of Palmyra, but the little town is insignificant, and it is really the wreck of Heliopolis which dominates the lovely valley between Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon.
There is another difference between Baalbec and those two other cities. The plain of Persepolis is green indeed with the short grass, and at Palmyra the fruit trees of the oasis foam with blossom in the spring, but there is no sign of cultivation anywhere. Round Baalbec the fertile land is carefully tilled; the permanence of agriculture, that detailed, laborious, and persistent craft, is nowhere more strongly emphasised than here, where it pursues its quiet way undisturbed by the presence of a crumbled civilisation. It seems not irrelevant to wonder whether in the course of centuries the Anglo-Persian oil-fields may not revert to the solitudes of the Bakhtiari hills, while London, Paris, and New York lie with the wild flowers blowing over their stones, and fields of corn bend to the breeze for the bread of the population in some distant capital whose name we do not yet know.
‘The hours fled, the decanter flowed, the telegraphist was carried out, I fell into a torpor …’
ROBERT BYRON
The Road to Oxiana (1937)
Robert Byron (1905–41) affected a casual diary style of writing; this disguised his very careful crafting and re-crafting of the book over the three years following his return from his travels. The Road to Oxiana (Oxiana referring to the region along Afghanistan’s northern border) is studiedly episodic and loose in its structure. Its easy-going diary format is a careful invention to engage the reader; the reader is intended to participate in the randomness of the journey.
Byron was not connected in any way with the poet, though he would allow it to be assumed that he was. He made the journey that was The Road to Oxiana with Christopher Sykes, who would write a biography of Byron after his death in 1941, when his ship was torpedoed in the North Atlantic.
It starts in Venice and ends in Peshawar, the first town in what is now Pakistan on the east side of the Khyber Pass. The narrative is divided mainly between their travels in Persia and Afghanistan. In the first of these three passages, the two are in the Golestan Province in the northeast of Persia. In the second they have reached Afghanistan and are visiting the northern hub of the country, Mazar-i-Sharif, then the seat of provincial government and centre of commerce. In the last they have reached what were then the most celebrated monuments in the country, the Bhuddas of Bamiyan. These are statues of the Bhudda, thirty-five and fifty-five meters high, that were carved out of the mountainside in the sixth century CE.
Gumbad-i-Kabus (200 ft), 24 April
After following the Bandar Shah road a little way back, we turned to the right down a track between wattle fences. High reeds obscured the view. Suddenly, as a ship leaves an estuary, we came out on to the steppe: a dazzling open sea of green. I never saw that colour before. In other greens, of emerald, jade, or malachite, the harsh deep green of the Bengal jungle, the sad cool green of Ireland, the salad green of Mediterranean vineyards, the heavy full-blown green of English summer beeches, some element of blue or yellow predominates over the others. This was the pure essence of green, indissoluble, the colour of life itself. The sun was warm, the larks were singing up above. Behind us rose the misty Alpine blue of the wooded Elburz. In front, tyre glowing verdure stretched out to the rim of the earth.
Bearings, landmarks, disappeared, as they would from a skiff in mid-Atlantic. We seemed to be always below the surrounding level, caught in the trough of a green swell. Sitting down, we might see for twenty feet: standing up, for twenty miles and even then, twenty miles away, the curve of the earth was as green as the bank that touched the wheels, so that it was hard to tell which was which. Our only chart was by things whose scale we knew: groups of white-topped kibitkas, dotted like mushrooms on a lawn – though even in their case it needed an effort of reason to believe they were not mushrooms; and droves of cattle, mares with their foals, black and brown sheep, kine and camels – though the camels were deceptive in the opposite sense, seeming so tall that it needed another effort to believe they were not antediluvian monsters. As the huts and animals varied in size, we could plot their distances: half a mile, a mile, five miles. But it was not this that conveyed the size of the steppe so much as the multiplicity of these nomadic encampments, cropping up wherever the eye rested, yet invariably separate by a mile or two from their neighbours. There were hundreds of them, and the sight, therefore, seemed to embrace hundreds of miles.
As plans of cities are inset on maps of countries, another chart on a larger scale lay right beneath our wheels. Here the green resolved, not into ordinary grass, but into wild corn, barley, and oats, which accounted for that vivid fire, as of a life within the green. And among these myriad bearded alleys lived a population of flowers, buttercups and poppies, pale purple irises and dark purple campanulas, and countless others, exhibiting all the colours, forms, and wonders that a child finds in its first garden. Then a puff of air would come, bending the corn to a silver ripple, while the flowers leaned with it; or a cloud shadow, and all grow dark, as if for a moment’s sleep; though a few feet off there would be no ripple and no darkness; so that this whole inner world of the steppe was mapped on a system of infinite minute recessions, having just those gradations of distance that the outer lacked.
Our spirits had risen when we left the plateau. Now they effervesced. We shouted for joy, stopping the car lest the minutes that were robbing us of the unrepeatable first vision should go faster. Even the larks in this paradise had lost their ordinary aloofness. One almost hit my hat in its inquisitiveness.
…
Mazar-i-Sheriff, 1 June
Yesterday morning Christopher called at the Mudir-i-Kharija’s office to ask permission to visit the Russian Consulate. His excuse was that we needed some visas, of which there is in fact no hope, though it is tantalising to think that Bokhara is only fifteen hours from Termez by train. However, he had no chance of using this excuse, since even the Mudir-i-Kharija’s deputy is asleep to us now. He therefore went by himself, breasted his way through a post of Afghan soldiers who presented their bayonets at him, and at length reached M. Bouriachenko, a small intellectual man who was sitting under a tree reading.
‘You want visas for Samarcand?’ said M. Bouriachenko. ‘Of course you do. I will telegraph to Moscow at once to say that two Oxford professors of Islamic culture’ – (God forgive us, we both left Oxford without degrees) – ‘have arrived here and are waiting for permission to cross the Amu Darya. No, there is nothing to see at Termez. The place you ought to go to is Anau. Professor Simionov has just written a book on the Timurid monuments there. I wish I could give you the visas at once, but I’m afraid it will take a week or so to get a reply. Anyhow you are here for a bit, that’s the main thing. We must have a party. Will you come?’
‘When?’ asked Christopher, forgetting to say thank you in his surprise.
‘When? I don’t know when. What does it matter? This evening? Would that suit you?’
‘Perfectly. What time?’
‘What time? Seven, is that all right? Or six? Or five to four? We can start now if you like.’
It was half-past eleven, and a blazing hot morning. Christopher said perhaps the evening would be nicer.
At half-past six we tiptoed out of the hotel so that the Muntazim should not hear us, reached the gate of the Consulate, where the guard brandished their weapons as before, and found ourselves in a series of courtyards shaded by trees; in the front yard stood a number of lorries and cars, including a red Vauxhall. M. Bouriachenko received us in a cool room free from icons of Lenin and Marx, and lit by a private electric light plant. I said, I supposed by his name that he must come from Ukraine. ‘Yes, from Kiev, and my wife from Riazin.’ She walked in, a young woman plainly dressed in dark purple, whose good-natured face was framed in hair drawn flat from a parting in the middle. Others followed her: an enormous wallowing man, slightly scented, from whose pitted face came the voice of a dove; his wife, a blonde with red lips whose golden hair was brushed straight back from her forehead; Master Bouriachenko, aged five and the spit of Chaliapin; a boy and girl belonging to the second couple; the doctor, a tubby little fellow with a black moustache and butcher’s lick; another lady discreetly painted, whose fair hair was ruffled into a crest; the fat fair man I saw in the telegraph office, who said he had been a radio officer at Canterbury during the War; two natty young fellows just arrived from Kabul, who had taken a fortnight over the journey owing to the rains: and last of all a girl of fourteen, daughter of the painted lady, whose movements were beautiful to watch and who is destined to become a ballet dancer.
Judged by Russian standards, which differ from ours, the food was not really profuse; indeed how could it be? though they had bought, at considerable expense we discovered afterwards, the last sardines in the town. But it had that air of profusion which Russians always create about them, and as new guests kept wandering in, and new tables were brought, and new chairs, and the children hopped up on people’s laps, the dishes kept pace and were still as full as ever of the sardines from India, paprika from Russia, fresh meat with onion salad, and bread. A decanter of yellow vodka, in which fruit was swimming, was endlessly replenished. The Russians, who gulped it off in cups, complained furiously of our slow sipping. But that was only at first.
The two young men from Kabul had been bringing a number of new English records that had been ordered from Peshawar; but they had all been spoilt in the wreck of their lorry by the storm at Haibak, and the loss was a tragic disappointment to this isolated community; though to hear them apologise for it, one might have thought the records had been ordered for us instead of them. As it was, tangos and jazz alternated with Shehérezade, Boris Godunov, and Eugene Onyegin. We danced, we sang, we sat down to eat, we danced again. Conversation was in Persian, and what made it odder, when talking to one’s own kind, was the inevitable accompaniment of Persian gesture, the bowing of the head and fluttering of the eyelids, the hand on the heart, and the general assumption of self-deprecation. M. Bouriachenko and the man with the dove’s voice addressed us as ‘Sahib’. Perhaps they thought this sounded more equalitarian than the Persian Excellencies and Highnesses we used to them.
The hours fled, the decanter flowed, the telegraphist was carried out, I fell into a torpor, the Russians began to unload their emotions, and when I woke up I found Christopher gasping for breath under the souls of the whole community. It was two o’clock and time to go home. The hotel was only a few hundred yards away. But M. Bouriachenko, calling for the ‘Consulski Vauxhall’, insisted on driving us to it. This was an act of real friendship. For whether our walk was unsteady or not, it would have been unwise to run a risk of the Afghans observing it, a fact we appreciated when a sentry thrust his rifle into the window of the car.
This morning was painful beyond the usual run of next-mornings. We called at the Consulate after tea, bearing not flowers, but some boxes of cigars, and found them all sitting out in a sort of games court equipped with swings and parallel bars and a high net over which any number of people divided into two sides, can fist a soft football. A game was started for us, the party being increased now by three or four other men, proletarian savages, who are employed as chauffeurs and mechanics. The telegraphist looked older.
M. Bouriachenko told us that the only other Russians in this part of the country were four locust-fighters living in and about Khanabad. The locusts are a new plague here. They arrived from Morocco a few years ago, breed on the north slopes of the Hindu Kush, and thence descend on Russian Turkestan, where they menace the cotton crops.
Since there is a road from here to Khanabad, and another from there to Kabul which avoids the Haibak gorge, we have decided not to ride after all. This detour will take us 150 miles further east, to the edge of Badakshan, and the excuse for making it afforded by the blockage at Haibak is too good to miss. Christopher regrets the horse journey, but I think the detour will be more interesting.
The pleasure he takes in reducing the famed Bhuddas of Bamian to cultural rubble is part of what Jonathan Raban refers to as Byron’s ‘calculated affront’ to the conventional bias of taste towards the classical.
Shibar (c. 9000 ft, 24 miles from Bamian), 9 June
I should not like to stay long at Bamian. Its art is unfresh. When Huan Tsang came here, the Buddhas were gilded to resemble bronze, and 5000 monks swarmed in the labyrinths beside them. That was in 632; Mohammad died the same year, and the Arabs reached Bamian before the end of the century. But it was not until 150 years later that the monks were finally extirpated. One can imagine how the Arabs felt about them and their idols in this blood-red valley. Nadir Shah must have felt the same 1,000 years later when he broke the legs of the larger Buddha.
That Buddha is 174 feet high, and the smaller 115; they stand a quarter of a mile apart. The larger bears traces of a plaster veneer, which was painted red, presumably as a groundwork for the gilt. Neither has any artistic value. But one could bear that; it is their negation of sense, the lack of any pride in their monstrous flaccid bulk, that sickens. Even their material is unbeautiful, for the cliff is made, not of stone, but of compressed gravel. A lot of monastic navvies were given picks and told to copy some frightful semi-Hellenistic image from India or China. The result has not even the dignity of labour.
The canopies of the niches which contain the two figures are plastered and painted. In the smaller hangs a triumph scene, red, yellow, and blue, in which Hackin, Herzfeld, and others have distinguished a Sasanian influence; but the clue to this idea comes from Masson, who saw a Pahlevi inscription here a hundred years ago. The paintings round the larger head are better preserved, and can be examined at close quarters by standing on the head itself. On either side of the niche, below the curve of the vault, hang five medallions about ten feet in diameter which contain Boddhisatvas. These figures are surrounded by horseshoe auras of white, yellow, and blue and their hair is tinged with red. Between each medallion grows a triple-branched lotus; at least we supposed it to be that, though in other surroundings it might be taken for an ecclesiastical bracket upholding three glass globes. The next zone above is occupied by a pavement in squares out of perspective, and the zone above that by a wainscot of Pompeian curtains finished with a border of peacocks’ feathers. On top of this come two more rows of Boddhisatvas, seated against auras and thrones alternately, the thrones being decked with jewelled carpets. Between these stand large cups on stems, resembling Saxon fonts and sprouting cherubs. The topmost zone overhead is missing. The colours are the ordinary fresco colours, slate-grey, gamboge, a rusty chocolate-red, a dull grape-tint, and a bright harebell blue.
The subjects suggest that Persian, Indian, Chinese, and Hellenistic ideas all met at Bamian in the fifth and sixth centuries. It is interesting to have a record of this meeting. But the fruit of it is not pleasant. The only exception is the lower row of Boddhisatvas, which Hackin says are older than the rest. They achieve that air of repose, graceful, but empty, which is the best one can expect of Buddhist iconography.