A Traveller's Life (16 page)

‘For the first few moments I was bewildered; the heavy, dense, sulphurous vapour that filled the place, and almost suffocated me – the wild shrill cries of the slaves pealing through the reverberating domes of the bathing-halls, enough to awaken the very marble with which they were lined – the subdued laughter and whispered conversations of their mistresses, murmuring along in an undercurrent of sound – the sight of nearly three hundred women, only partially dressed, and that in fine linen so perfectly saturated with vapour that it revealed the whole outline of the figure – the busy slaves passing and re-passing, naked from the waist upwards, and with their arms folded upon their bosoms, balancing on their heads piles of fringed or embroidered napkins – groups of lovely girls, laughing, chattering, and refreshing themselves with sweetmeats, sherbet and lemonade – parties of playful children, apparently quite indifferent to the dense atmosphere which made me struggle for breath – and, to crown all, the sudden bursting forth of a chorus of voices into one of the wildest and shrillest of Turkish melodies, that was caught up and flung back by the echoes of the vast hall …'

In the men's
hammam
, visited by Allom, there were fewer bathers and apart from the slapping of flesh, the cracking of joints as the
tellahs
, the bathing attendants, seized the bathers in an excrutiating lock, and the sounds of running water, the usual brooding silence reigned. Both the attendants and their victims had the foreparts of their heads shaven in the curious fashion of the time, leaving the hair long over the nape of the neck so that if it was only a little longer it could have been plaited into a pigtail. In fact, it was a very old hairstyle. It probably dated back to the thirteenth century when what was then a single, small tribe of
Turks fled westwards before the Mongols of Genghis Khan, who themselves had a curious way with their hair, and the Turks may have adapted it to their own use. At his first meeting with Mongols, three days eastwards of Sudak in the Crimea in May 1253, the Flemish Franciscan, William de Rubruquis (Rubruck), on his way to visit Mangu Khan at Karakorum, noted that the Mongol men shaved a square patch on top of their heads, leaving a tuft to fall over their eyebrows, and longer hair at the back and sides.

The room was illuminated by long, parallel shafts of light admitted by the perforations in the dome which were filled with inverted hemispheres of glass and the steam and the wet floors produced a strange, unearthly radiance. This and the huge, shaven skulls of the
tellahs
gave the impression that what one was looking at was in another world.

This unearthliness which seemed to be a characteristic of Constantinople persisted up the Bosphorus, in the meadows of what are known as the Sweet Waters of Asia, the Göksu, the Sky Stream and the Kücüksu, the Little Stream, which lie outside the village of Anadolu Hisar, the Anatolian Castle on the Asiatic side. There the
arrhubas
, carriages with oval windows drawn by long-horned oxen, had already arrived in the meadows, laden with veiled women. It was Friday evening, the Muslim holiday, and these women were from the Asiatic side. The others, and the meadow was filled with them, would have come out of Europe across the Bosphorus in caïques. They sat around a fountain drinking sherbet, which in this case was made with the dried fruit of raisins, pears, peaches, prunes and so on, while the men sat apart.

One could have a better idea of what the
arrhuba
and its veiled occupants were like by returning once more to the Sweet Waters of Europe. There one could see the Asma Sultana driving through the meadows from her palace at Eyüp in her state
arrhuba
. It was
a huge and heavy machine, carved with arabesques and springless; but in spite of its size, because of its oval windows which were so large that apart from the roof it was virtually an open carriage, the effect was one of extraordinary lightness, as if it and the carriages which followed with various other women of the Seraglio, were some kind of exotic flying-machines which had just landed and were now being drawn away to Gate Number Seven where their occupants could disembark and go through immigration and customs. In fact it seemed as if it was only the horned oxen which chained the
arrhuba
to the earth.

The hair over the brows of these beasts was dyed with henna, and slender bow-shaped rods attached to their yokes were hung with tassels; sometimes the animals' tails were attached to the ends of these rods so that the tassels trembled even more than they would have done with the normal undulations of the road; and around their necks they wore bright blue beads as amulets to ward off the evil eye.

The Sultana's
arrhuba
, as were the others, was escorted by a grumpy-looking Greek
Arrhubagee
who had the same curiously shaven head as the men in the baths; and the curtains were drawn back, for the journey was nearly over and the Asma Sultana looked out with bold eyes above her white veil and a lock of hair peeped out from below her white coif. It was as if she was daring one to pay her a compliment; but behind her
arrhuba
was one of the black eunuchs who had a sword stuck in his cummerbund, and to do so would have meant instant death.

And I saw the bazaars, the greatest of which was the Kapali Carsisi, the Great Covered Bazaar, the oldest the Sahaflar Carsisi, the Market of Second-Hand Booksellers, which stood on the site of the Chartoprateia, the Book and Paper Market, which flourished when Istanbul was Byzantium.

Because in a bazaar one is normally more interested in the
merchandise offered than in the surroundings, however impressive, as Bartlett and Allom showed them to be, one still wanted to know what the Great Covered Bazaar was really like in the twenty years before the Crimean War, before the Industrial Revolution swamped it with cheap trash and before the Grande Rue de Péra, now Istiklal Caddesi, which bisects the heights of Pera in the European City across the Golden Horn, siphoned off the fashionable shoppers who had previously patronized it in the seventies. To do so it was necessary to continue to consult the popular writings of Miss Julia Pardoe and the Rev. Robert Walsh. Both had, whenever the opportunity presented itself, which was not seldom in Constantinople, a slightly but nonetheless perceptibly risqué approach to whatever their chosen subjects happened to be.

Both saw the Great Bazaar when it was full of the perfumes of attar of roses, essence of lemon, extract of jasmine, as well as more aphrodisiac scents, such as those of the musky secretions of rats' tails and those given off by odoriferous gums, which were much appreciated by the ladies of the harems who smoked them in pastille form, using pipes ornamented with turquoise and brilliants, which were anything up to twelve feet long, putting to their lips the mouthpieces of amber from the Baltic which were reputed to preserve the users from the plague.

In the Eski Bedesten, a fortress-like building in the heart of the Bazaar in which from time immemorial the most valuable merchandise had been offered for sale, and in which merchants wearing huge turbans sat writing with reed pens on yellow, parchment-like paper, they saw drinking cups lipped with precious stones, rosaries in which the beads were jewels, aigrettes of diamonds, and bridles covered with pearls, and gold rings. In the Kürkgüler Carsisi, the Furriers' Market, leopard skin saddle-cloths were on sale.

In the Sandel Bedesten, like its namesake the Eski Bedesten
originally built of wood in the reign of Fateh Mahomet the Conqueror, not long after he took the city in 1453, they saw silks embroidered in thick gold and silver, the work of Armenian women who were even more strictly enclosed in their harems than in the Turkish ones. The silks from Bursa in Asia Minor were so heavy that it seemed impossible to Europeans that they were not mixed with cotton; and there were stuffs from Baghdad and muslins so thin that they were almost impalpable. Rebuilt in stone, as was the Eski Bedesten in 1701, the Sandel Bedesten was a huge, vaulted echoing building of Piranesian proportions and grandeur.

In the Street of the Shawl-Makers the most prized shawls came from Lahore and Tibet; the Street of Mirrors, the Aynacilar Sokak, sold little looking-glasses of gold and silver, or else they were velvet-covered and embellished with pearls from the nearby Street of the Pearl Merchants, the Incicler Sokak; the Street of the Slipper-Makers, the Terlikciler Soklak, was like ‘a bed of tulips', Miss Pardoe wrote, full of gold-embroidered and jewel-sprinkled harem slippers and boots of bright yellow morocco for the Turks, crimson for Armenians, purple for Jews, black for Greeks.

In the darkness of the Armoury Bazaar the walls were lined with pieces of armour for men and horses, shields, helmets, spears, suits of chainmail, Indian bows, Tower muskets, American rifles, scimitars, Albanian pistols, Damascus sabres and so on.

It was the end of an epoch, and Allom and Bartlett, Miss Pardoe and the Rev. Walsh all knew it.

‘Constantinople, having for centuries exhibited the singular and extraordinary spectacle of a Mahommedan town in a Christian region, and stood still while all about it were advancing in the march of improvement, has at length, as suddenly as unexpectedly, been roused from its slumbering stupidity,' the last wrote in 1839. ‘The city and its inhabitants are daily undergoing a change as extraordinary as unhoped for; and the present generation will see
with astonishment that revolution of usages and opinions, during a single life, which has not happened in any other country in revolving centuries. It is thus that the former state of things is hurrying away, and he who visits the capital to witness the singularities that marked it will be disappointed. It is true it possesses beauties which no revolution of opinions, or change of events, can alter. Its seven Romantic hills, its Golden Horn, its lovely Bosphorus, its exuberant vegetation, its robust and comely people, will still exist, as the tapered minaret, the shouting muezzin, the vast cemetery, the gigantic cypress, the snow-white turban, the
beniche
of vivid colours, the feature-covering
yashmak
, the light caïque, the clumsy
arrhubas
, the arched bazaar – all the distinctive peculiarities of a Turkish town – will soon merge into the uniformity of European things and, if the innovations proceed as rapidly as it has hitherto done, leave scarce a trace behind them.'

I had been born a hundred years too late.

In 1954 I left the family business and went to work for Worth Paquin, then a well-known couture house in Grosvenor Street.

While working away for Worth I wrote my first book,
The Last Grain Race
, based on the journal I had kept while serving as an apprentice in the
Moshulu
. By the autumn of 1955 it was finished and, to everyone's surprise, it began to show signs, long before its publication in September 1956, that it might be successful.

Some time in the spring of 1956 my publishers, Secker & Warburg, sent me a questionnaire to fill in for publicity purposes. The last question was, ‘What would you most like to do?' and against it I wrote, ‘Make a journey through unknown territory.' One day David Farrer, a director of the firm, asked me to go and see him. On his desk was the questionnaire. ‘Just read this,' he said, handing it to me. Against my answer to the question ‘What would you most like to do?' he had added in red ink, ‘And so you shall!'

Meanwhile things were not going at all well at Worth Paquin, either for the couture house itself or for Newby. I had a gruesome interview with one of the directors, who said that they were keeping me on for the time being but were making no promises
for the future. Emboldened by the reception my book was having, I told him that I had just had a book accepted for publication and that I was staying on for the time being and was making no promises for the future either. After this, during the lunch hour, I went into the Post Office in Mount Street and sent a cable to Hugh Carless, a friend of mine at the British Embassy, Rio de Janeiro, which read, ‘Can you travel Nuristan June?'

Before being posted to South America Hugh, as a third secretary at the embassy in Kabul, had been able to indulge a passion for travels in the remote interior of Afghanistan. While engaged in one of these arduous journeys he had reconnoitred a twenty-thousand-foot mountain on the borders of Nuristan, otherwise the Country of Light, a region into which no Englishman had penetrated since Sir George Robertson, the British Political Agent in Gilgit, had explored parts of it in 1890–1, at which time it was known as Kafiristan, the Country of the Unbelievers. It was Hugh's ambition actually to get into Nuristan itself, and over the years he had written long letters to me about the country and its people.

It was during a rehearsal for the showing of the 1956 wholesale collection – which was attended by the suit buyer of a famous New York department store who, as it subsequently transpired, was not there to buy anything but to acquire ‘as a pourboire' (as her agent described it) an oversize bottle of ‘Je Reviens', the firm's scent – that I received a reply to my cable from Hugh in Rio: ‘Of course, Hugh.' The story of our subsequent adventures is told in A
Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
.

I was now thirty-seven years old and my hair was beginning to disappear at an alarming rate. On my return to London from the Hindu Kush in the autumn of 1956 I decided to pay a visit to Mr Alexis (Alexis is not his real name) who ran, and still runs, a fashionable barber's shop in Jermyn Street; not in the hope that he would be able to arrest the process but that he might lay out
what hair I still possessed in a way that would conceal the bald bits.

‘Been abroad lately?' said Mr Alexis, as he began to work one of his miracles, affecting not to notice that I was trembling like a leaf.

‘As a matter of fact I've been in Central Asia,' I said. ‘I crossed the Oxus.' What does it matter how I crossed it, I thought; after all, I had crossed it.

‘Ah,' said Mr Alexis, working away. ‘How very interesting. Coming from Kabul, I suppose, or going there? Where did you cross it?'

‘I landed at Termez.' It was true in one sense. I had in fact flown over it, not the same thing at all, in the exploring sense, as crossing it by boat; but I was unnerved by this interrogation by a hairdresser and by the loss of my hair, which felt as if it were becoming non-existent under his ministrations; ‘felt' because he would not let me look in the mirror while the work was in progress. In short, he had me on the run.

‘At Termez. How wide would you say the river was
when you were there
?' The menace in his voice was unmistakable.

‘About half a mile.'

‘You think as little as that? I suppose you crossed on a raft?'

This was the great divide. The moment when I began to lie.

‘Yes, but of course there was quite a lot of other shipping about, paddle-steamers and so on.' I had seen the steamers from the plane.

I was telling
him
. What a fool I was making of myself. Of course, I should have known, with a name like that he was probably born in Russian Asia. Perhaps he had been one of our men in Termez. Somehow I had to put an end to this interrogation.

‘Have
you
been in Termez?' I asked. It was about as profitable as addressing the Sphinx.

‘Very dusty on the Russian bank. Didn't you find it so, sir? And Termez; really, just a single street.'

This was a chance to redeem myself. I took it.

‘But of course on the Afghan side it's thick jungle in places,' I said. ‘And they say' (who, I wondered, had said it, if anyone?) ‘that there are tigers.'

He didn't seem to hear. He was doing something to the place where my double-crown had been when I had one.

‘Used to be tigers,' he said at length. ‘Certainly there
used
to be tigers.' And then, ‘Of course you went to Merv?'

‘No, but I flew over Samarkand.' ‘Over Samarkand', it sounded feeble.

‘Oh, you
flew
?'

‘Yes, in a Russian plane, from Termez to Tashkent, then on to Moscow and from there to Vienna by way of Lvov and Budapest.' That will settle him, I thought.

‘
Most
people fly from Kabul,' he said. ‘I can't understand why
you
joined the plane at Termez.'

When he had finished I had the sort of hair-do that made me look as if I should have been driving a chariot. There was no need to comb it. What there was of it, until I washed it, just stayed put. It was hygienic and a bit cold at first. I liked it but I was not so sure that I was altogether happy at having the head of the Secret Service (Central Asia) as my barber, so after this I let Wanda cut my hair.