Full Tilt (6 page)

There was an amusing interlude today when an American engineer going back by jeep to his work in Afghanistan pulled up to investigate me and the following conversation took place:

American: ‘What the hell are you doing on this goddam road?’

Me: (having taken an instant dislike to him) ‘Cycling.’

American: ‘I can see that – but what the hell for?’

Me: ‘For fun.’

American: ‘Are you a nut-case or what? Gimme that bike and I’ll
stick it on behind and you get in here and we’ll get out of this goddam frying-pan as fast as we can. This track isn’t fit for a camel!’

Me: ‘When you’re on a cycle instead of in a jeep it doesn’t feel like a frying-pan. Moreover, if you look around you you’ll notice that the landscape compensates for the admittedly deplorable state of the road. In fact I
enjoy
cycling through this sort of country – but thank you for the kind offer. Goodbye.’

As I rode on he passed me and yelled: ‘You
are
a goddam nut-case!’

I regard this sort of life, with just Roz and me and the sky and the earth, as sheer bliss. My one worry at the moment is Roz’s complete disintegration. So far the rear-lamp, the rear mudguard and half the front mudguard have fallen off; the straps tying saddle-bag to saddle have both broken; the left pannier-bag holder has come apart and the right pedal has loosened. Everything is being held together by a system of rope and wire more complicated than you’d believe possible, but fortunately none of these disabilities is serious. The trouble will start when wheels or frame crack up. It’s astonishing that I haven’t had a puncture since leaving Teheran – a tribute to the extreme care with which I’m cycling. But obviously my claim that cycling is the best way to
see
a country just isn’t valid in this region. I daren’t take my eyes off the road for one second and my ‘seeing’ is confined to the walking intervals and to the frequent stops I make just to look around me.

This village is the most primitive place I’ve hit so far, with not even a gendarmerie barracks. It’s a collection of the usual mud huts, very roughly constructed, and in the tea-house everything is of mud – the ‘counter’, the seats all around the walls and the steps leading up to an attic where men are smoking opium. I went up there to investigate sleeping accommodation and found five braves all in a trance with their pipes – that’s what comes of having no gendarmerie in a place! (My right arm is so stiff tonight that I can’t bend it and the pain is
intense
– but better that than frost-bite.) The three men now drinking tea here seem to be neutral towards me: they show no friendliness, but no apparent hostility either. I feel it’s just as well I arrived late: the fewer people who know about my presence the better. I’ll sleep on one
of the long mud seats with Roz tied to me and my knapsack under my head with its straps round my neck – though it’s not clear how me being strangled by my own straps will help the situation if someone tries to rob me!

I survived last night without incident but despite tiredness slept badly as the sunburn agony woke me every time I moved. We set out at 5.30 a.m. and the whole of today’s eighty-five-mile ride was through the Great Salt Desert with flat sand on either side to the horizon and only one town (Salzevar) en route. This seemed an interesting place but was full of Mullahs and turbaned youths who stoned me and cut my sunburned arm five minutes after I’d arrived, so I departed hastily before a riot started. Salzevar is in the heart of the Mullah-dominated country, where the police are afraid of the clergy and simply don’t appear if there’s trouble, so discretion was most emphatically the better part of valour. I’m now safe with the gendarmerie in a little village, sitting up in my bunk and feeling rotten. My right arm is half the size again of my left and tomorrow all the blisters will burst. I can’t think why it’s swelled so much; that didn’t happen in Spain, where I also had very bad sunburn. Anyway, it’s entirely my own fault.

The road was slightly improved today, except where so much sand had blown over it that one couldn’t cycle without skidding. I feel quite feverish this evening; possibly it’s slight heat-stroke though I didn’t feel over-heated to any great degree.

I woke up feeling much better, though my arm has not burst yet. We only did fifty-five miles today as this is Omar Khayyám’s town and I’ve stopped here to pay homage. Besides, I think I’ve been pushing myself too hard, so an easy day was not a bad idea.

On leaving Bagh-Jar I had a twelve-mile walk through the mountains on a ghastly road but surrounded by tremendously exciting scenery. Then we suffered more desert until reaching here.

I find the Persian fauna very un-exotic. Bird life round the villages consists of crows, magpies, willy-wagtails, swallows and sparrows. The only unfamiliar birds are little crested chaps rather like thrushes and an occasional fierce, enormous hawk; I’ve also heard a few nightjars. Animal life is almost nil, though today I saw four roebuck crossing the road. Insect life consists to date of houseflies (very few) and black beetles as in Ireland.

This is a very lovely town; I notice that the towns of Persia tend to be much more attractive than the cities, especially now when the gardens are so beautiful with their smooth lawns, pale green cascades of weeping willow and brilliant beds of carnations, roses, pansies and geraniums. The main streets are always wide and the sun-soaked mud walls look golden under the violet blue of the Persian sky. Almost all the traffic consists of pony-phaeton taxis and innumerable laden donkeys and bicycles. The inevitable
jube
(a channel of water flowing between footpath and road) runs everywhere but on the whole the streets are quite clean and I’ve come to the conclusion that Persian water is safe if you make it clear you want to
drink
it, not wash with it. Anyway I’ve been drinking it uninhibitedly with no ill effects.

We arrived here at 3.15 p.m. and I was immediately captured by a twenty-year-old boy who secured me as his guest for the night against terrific competition from his class-mates; the local students have to pay fifty
reals
for a thirty minutes’ English lesson, so an English-speaking guest for the night is considered precious. Three days ago Khayyám’s new tomb was opened to the public by the Shah (pity I missed that) and a bevy of youths, laden with dictionaries, grammars and simplified versions of
Jane Eyre
, took me there this afternoon, all bombarding me en route with their particular problems of pronunciation, sentence construction and spelling. The keenness of Persian youths to learn English is positively fanatical but their opportunities remain very limited as few competent teachers are available outside Teheran.

The new tomb represents modern architecture at its grotesque worst; I almost wept to see it over the body of such a man as Omar Khayyám. I also saw the old tomb which is very simple, dignified and appropriate. Why tens of thousands of reals had to be spent on this new contraption
when the country is swarming with undernourished children I do not know.

The family with whom I’m staying consists of the mother (aged thirty-five), three sons aged twenty, eighteen and twelve, and four girls aged sixteen, fourteen, nine and six. The father works as a draper’s assistant in Teheran and the household is obviously very poor. This being Friday (the Muslim Sunday) twelve relatives were rounded up to come and meet me at supper time, but even though the men were close relatives the mother and daughters, including the six-year-old, veiled themselves the moment the visitors appeared. Islam is so rigid around here that
no
man, except father, husband and sons, is allowed to glimpse a woman’s face; no wonder the boys can’t take their eyes off my poor mug – at least it’s a change from mother and sisters!

I ate with the women and was relieved to get lentils instead of rice. We also had a savoury omelette and salad – which I declined, having seen it washed in the
jube
and been warned by everyone to avoid
jube
-washed
salad at all costs. There were no chairs or tables or beds in the house and no cutlery – you use the flat pieces of bread to dig your share out of the communal dish.
Mast
with sugar was served as dessert and I found the whole meal very appetising.

Everyone is most concerned about my arm, which certainly looks alarming, though it feels better tonight.

After the meal grandmother and mother took turns smoking the hookah, while one girl played on a timbrel and the rest danced – the traditional Friday evening pastime. I’ve got to appreciate Arabic music to the point where I have my favourite tunes and I could watch Persian dancing for hours; it’s marvellously graceful, particularly in the use of arms and hands. The six-year-old gave a magnificent performance and a two-year-old already had the general idea!

There was quite a change in the landscape today, though none in the road surface. We covered seventy-two miles, some of them between wonderful mountains, and most through what, for this
area, is fertile land – i.e. a village, surrounded by little irrigated fields, every twenty miles or so, and in between huge flocks of sheep and goats grazing on some invisible herbage. There are hundreds of tiny lambs and kids with the flocks now and they look absolutely adorable; the lambs have thick fleeces and enormous floppy ears like spaniels, and the kids are very dainty and frisky. I stopped to have lunch with a fierce-looking but actually very amiable shepherd and admired his flocks while eating: we solemnly exchanged bread and salt so are friends forever, according to local custom.

As if Persia wanted to show me what it could do in the way of fauna I saw seven more deer today and one big dog fox of a horrid
yellow-grey
colour. I also met a tortoise, two scorpions, a hamster and an eagle and along much of the way I was accompanied by lark-song, which made me feel quite homesick.

This village is at the junction of the Teheran–Meshed–Afghanistan road, so I’ll be returning to it tomorrow evening after a detour to see the sights of Meshed and to collect my mail. The local gendarmerie are exceptionally nice and sufficiently sophisticated to diagnose my sex so a flea-bag has been put on the office floor for me.

There was a strong east wind against us today – very wearing combined with the atrocious surface. It got quite cloudy too – there might be a nice bit of rain tomorrow, but that’s not likely, though last week they did have their first inch for four years in South Persia.

One of the things that most intrigues Persians about me is the fact that I have no brothers and sisters: obviously only children are quite unknown here and they have the greatest sympathy for me. They’re certainly a very family-minded people: brothers and sisters show tremendous mutual affection and in times of family trouble do all they can to help each other.

This was the first evening my expired visa was spotted, as a Lieutenant is in charge here; usually there’s only an NCO as illiterate as his men. But the Lieutenant is a nice young man who winked and took twenty American cigarettes and said I could be fined over £50 for having American cigarettes in Persia.

We arrived outside the British Council office in Meshed at 7.50 a.m. – ten long minutes to wait for mail! It was a perfect metalled road for the twenty-five miles and I met with no hostility from the locals, who were friendlier than in many other places; but I had to avoid going to the shrine area alone, though I would have given a lot to explore it. Meshed is by far the nicest of the four Persian cities I’ve seen and it
did
rain this morning so all along the fine wide
boulevards
, which are lined with birches as big as our oaks, the new green leaves were freshly sparkling. A car was kindly laid on to take me round the city yet it was most frustrating just to glimpse the out-
of-bounds
beauties of the mosques and shrine and museum and library. That quarter was teeming with Mullahs; I saw three in green turbans, which means they are descended from the Prophet. An American girl who took herself off there two days ago against advice was badly hurt by stones when trying to get colour-shots of the domes and minarets.

One is told the most blood-curdling tales at each stop. Here the
pièce de résistance
is about three Americans who, when motoring from Meshed to the Afghan frontier, stopped for a picnic and were all shot dead by bandits, who then escaped into Afghanistan but were hunted, by the Afghan police, back into Persia, where they were captured by the Army and publicly hanged in the main square of Teheran. Mr Jones of the British Council said there’s no question of me going to Kabul via Mazar-i-Sharif as that area has lots of Communist-inspired trouble. The Russians are really trying hard at the moment to take over the whole of Afghanistan and there’s a terrific tug-of-war going on between them and the Americans.

I left the British Council at 2.45 p.m. after lunch with the Joneses. (Very nice – both lunch and Joneses – and the British Council premises, which used to be the Consulate quarters when Britain had a Consul in Meshed, are really magnificent, with gardens and grounds that seem like Paradise when one comes to them from the desert.) I had decided that Roz would have to go to hospital before
tackling Afghanistan so I took her to the city’s biggest cycle shop where a few jobs which should have taken half an hour took two and a half hours so that we didn’t get out of Meshed till 5.30 p.m. This sounds incredible but everyone who has lived here knows it’s true: Persians will
not
use a screwdriver – instead they
hammer
every screw into place, and all other repairs and readjustments are done with corresponding brutality. You can’t imagine what I suffered, sitting on a stool beside the patient, chain-smoking and drinking my emergency supply of Courvoisier through sheer nerves, while they attacked that unfortunate, long-suffering cycle with hammer and chisel. Eventually we left, having abandoned the back mudguard. I am now anticipating the worst, as no machine could survive an assault like that without dire repercussions.