Full Tilt (7 page)

It was dark, though with a bright moon from 6. p.m., and I would have enjoyed the ride through the cool evening but for being badly scared by five men (plus a rifle) in a car who kept stopping and trying to persuade me to go with them to Sang Bast. Maybe they meant well but twelve miles from anywhere after dark I didn’t relish their attentions and they disappeared with what looked like guilty haste when two gendarmes on horseback came patrolling up the road. I’m now safely back with my friends in the barracks here, who are all very worried about my arm (which at this stage looks a lot worse than it feels) and have just given me a soothing cream to apply – what they use for ‘Marchers’ Feet’. I notice it’s Swiss-made.

This morning my flat length of breakfast bread (called
none
) was covered with snail-tracks – much to my astonishment, as I wouldn’t have thought snails to be a feature of such a dry country. This seemed slightly off-putting at first but then I reminded myself that some people are
outré
enough to eat snails and as there can’t be much chemical difference between a snail and a snail-track I went on from there. It was rather disillusioning to discover that a gendarme – it couldn’t have been anyone else – stole sixty American cigarettes out of my saddle-bag last evening, but I suppose this is
not really astonishing in a country where the C-in-C of the Army is at present on trial at the Teheran High Court, for large-scale corruption. Anyway it was entirely my own fault: I know by now that American cigarettes are much coveted here (if you had smoked Persian ones you’d realise why!) and I should have kept them in my knapsack. On the whole, apart from a few incidents, I’ve found the gendarmerie a very decent, kind and reliable lot of boys; they are the Shah’s special interest and he does all he can to keep up the standard of the corps.

We left Sang Bast at 5.15 a.m. and had covered just over forty-five miles when, at 11 a.m., the inevitable happened and the back wheel came off; fortunately we were going very slowly up an incline at the time, so I wasn’t injured myself. Investigating the situation I discovered that the thread of the relevant screw had been ruined, which seemed a natural enough consequence to it having been hammered into place. At this point I was twenty-five miles from the last town and twenty miles from the next and Roz couldn’t be wheeled so I ate my lunch and went to sleep till such time as something might come to rescue me. (Since leaving Ireland I’ve acquired the habit of sleeping whenever I want to, which is very convenient.)

Only two trucks had passed all morning, taking petrol to Herat from the oil refinery at Meshed, and it was nearly 2 p.m. before the next one woke me as it came rattling along the execrable road. The driver was a barefooted Afghan with a flowing turban and as you can’t put a bicycle on top of an oil-tanker he nonchalantly roped Roz to the engine; the fact that she completely obscured his view of the road was quite irrelevant since Asian drivers never look where they’re going. As I was getting into the cab he noticed my sunburn and was appalled. Before I could try to explain that if not touched it didn’t hurt he had coated my arm with Premium Pure Motor Oil, applied on a filthy piece of cotton wool out of his own First Aid box. He was so gentle that the treatment didn’t pain me in the least but it remains to be seen whether Premium Pure Motor Oil on raw sunburn is a cure or the beginning of a lingering, fatal illness!

The cab of this truck had no doors and no windscreen glass and no
seats but an upturned box for the driver; it seemed to be entirely home-made and the petrol engine stank so strongly that, despite all the fresh air, I was feeling violently ill in less than half an hour. Only the fact that we had three breakdowns in less than a hundred miles saved me: I was able to get out then and recover. The driver told me that there was no bicycle shop before the frontier town of Tieabad so here I am a day ahead of schedule; actually the road was so bad for the last sixty miles that even if Roz hadn’t succumbed I would probably have given up the unequal struggle and hitched a ride over that stretch for both our sakes: the only alternative would have been to walk every yard of the way.

The first thirty miles today was through quite prosperous country with an unusual number of cattle and many acres of wheat, well up. The people, who are supposed to be even more unreliable than those of Azerbaijan, were very nice to me at both the villages where I stopped for tea and water. A minority of them are Mongolians, which is quite thrilling – a proof I’m nearing Central Asia! One point that intrigued me was that there do not appear to be any half-breeds: one sees either pure Aryan features or pure Mongolian, so there must be no intermarrying, which seems odd, as they’re all Muslims.

I had a second lunch at 2.30 with the driver at a tiny village
eating-house
. The mutton soup was delicious (if you like your soup
twenty-five
per cent grease with lumps of fat floating in it, as I do) and was followed by perfectly cooked and beautifully flavoured mutton stew with beans, bread, raw onion and Pepsi-Cola (Persia’s national drink!). I find the style of building evolved to suit mud very attractive; there are no corners or angles; everything is rounded and arched and curved. I’ve now got used to the Eastern way of sitting silently doing nothing whatever for an indefinite period. These people don’t indulge in conversation as a pastime: they have occasional fierce arguments about some particular point and the rest is silence. I found it very pleasant today, just sitting cross-legged on my carpet (a posture which is no longer agonising as my joints are in training) looking out through the arched doorway at the blue sky and the few green trees growing beside the stream and the pale gold landscape and the
donkey-traffic 
– little boys galloping by, old men walking their steeds sedately, and young men leading donkeys which were almost hidden under enormous leather pannier-bags filled with earth for some new building. The stream (which is also the local fridge) was flowing eloquently over boxes of bottles of Pepsi and the water was bubbling companionably in the men’s hookahs all around me. I couldn’t help wondering what all these millions of people think about during all these countless hours spent silently sitting – they have so few mental stimulants that it’s difficult to believe they think at all. My Afghan driver was much more alert than the average Persian; he’s an awfully nice bloke, giving a good first impression of the ‘savages’ of Afghanistan.

On arriving here I took Roz to the cycle shop and after infinite trouble found a screw to fit, seized it by force from the proprietor and personally did the job with my own screwdriver. In future, if anything goes wrong I, myself, am coping – or dying in the attempt.

I seem to have lost the thread of my narrative somewhere – I was going to say that after thirty miles the rest of today’s journey was through sand desert, with only a few tiny villages. This town is a pleasant little place, where I am staying at the hotel, having been through the Customs and got an exit stamp on my passport, so that I’m all set for Afghanistan first thing in the morning. Not one word was said about the expired visa, which shows what you can get away with if you try – thirty-two days on a fifteen-day visa!

I’m quite sorry to be leaving Persia. Beneath all the physical dirt and moral corruption there is an elegance and dignity about life here which you can’t appreciate at first, while suffering under the impact of the more obvious and disagreeable national characteristics. The
graciousness
with which peasants greet each other and the effortless art with which a few beautiful rags and pieces of silver are made to furnish and decorate a whole house – in these and many other details Persia can still teach the West. I suppose it’s all a question of seeing one of the oldest and richest civilisations in the world long past its zenith. But I’ve decided that the Persians, though it’s impossible for me to
like
them as I do the Turks, are more to be pitied than censured. Hundreds
of years of in-breeding and malnutrition have undermined the race and it is only when you approach them from that angle and treat them with the necessary patience that you can come to terms with them.

I’ve gone completely native myself and now wash face, hands, teeth and clothes in the
jube
, though I remember being shocked five weeks ago at the sight of the Persians doing just that. However, I’ve now realised that the dreadful colour of the water is partly due to soil erosion, one of the chief national problems; there’s no such thing as a clear stream here. But I do draw the line at drinking the
jube
water!

At the moment I’m sitting in the hotel courtyard, writing by the light of a full moon, beside a nimble, sparkling fountain, with richly scented shrubs all around me and the mountains of Afghanistan jagged against a royal blue sky on the eastern horizon. The air feels like silk as a little breeze moves among the birch trees that enclose two sides of the courtyard. The town’s electricity supply has broken down and the tall pillars of the verandah look very lovely by moonlight.

Actually I shouldn’t be here – on arrival the proprietor told me that no women are allowed outside the Women’s Quarter. I meekly went off to same but it consisted of a tiny room with six beds and just enough space to walk between them. One bed was mine; the other five were occupied by women who possessed a minimum of two infants apiece – all being fed and changed at the time of my appearance. Both window and door were tightly sealed and the stink was appalling, so I got hold of an Indian, also staying here, and used him as interpreter to tell the proprietor that (
a
) The Shah condemned the segregation of women, (
b
) The Government was trying to encourage tourism and (
c
) I was prepared to respect religious conventions within reason but was
not
prepared to lock myself up for hours in a room like that when I could be sitting in a courtyard like this. The proprietor said, ‘Very well, if you don’t mind being stared at’, to which I irritably replied that I’d been getting stared at by every man I met for thirty-two days and that if they had nothing better to do I didn’t really mind.

We left Tieabad at 6 a.m. with nineteen miles to go to the Afghan Customs, though the actual frontier is only ten miles away. The road ran through more sand desert, and lots of sand had been blown over it, which was an advantage in a way on such a rough surface. We crossed the frontier at 7.45 a.m. and whoever said the weather in Afghanistan would be ideal for cycling was wrong because even at this hour it was almost too hot. Those 150 miles I came south yesterday have made an extraordinary difference to the temperature. However, last winter remains so vivid in my mind that I am still grateful for too much sun.

The only indication of the Persian-Afghan frontier is a seven-foot stone pillar, conspicuous from far across the desert, which lucidly announces ‘Afghanistan’. Here I stopped to photograph Roz. Three miles further on a long branch served as Customs barrier and beside it lay a very young soldier in a very ragged uniform, sound asleep with one hand on his rifle. I quietly raised the barrier for myself and continued towards the Customs and Passport Office two hundred yards ahead.

There, no one took the slightest notice of either my kit or my passport, no uniformed officials appeared and no series of dingy, uncomfortable offices had to be visited. Instead, I was ushered into a cool, dim, carpeted room and entertained by three men who, though ignorant of any European language, made me feel welcome and at home. They all wore baggy cotton trousers and loose, cleverly embroidered shirts hanging below the knees and turbans piled high above broad, smooth brows. As we sat cross-legged, performing the ritual of tea-drinking, I felt myself being happily weaned from the twentieth century by their reposefulness.

I was two hours at the Customs and might have been sitting there yet if another petrol truck hadn’t arrived en route from Meshed. The driver wanted to take me to Herat but after yesterday’s experience I know that the one thing more deleterious than being fried on a cycle in a desert is being rattled through a desert by truck. However, I asked the driver to take two petrol cans of water and leave them fifteen and
thirty miles away on the roadside, as I couldn’t possibly carry enough water on Roz to replace the gallons of sweat lost.

The village near the Customs – Islam Qu’ala – which I had expected to look like an East Persian village, didn’t look like anything but an Afghan village: every house was a miniature fortress, with special apertures for firing at your neighbour when there’s a feud on. At a little distance from the houses was an encampment of black goat-hair tents similar to one I had passed on the outskirts of Meshed, with a few camels lying chewing the cud beside it; it would have been good for a photo but I decided I’d like to get the ‘feel’ of the country before drawing unnecessary attention to the fact that I was about to cross forty miles of uninhabited desert.

We arrived here at 6.30 p.m. after a most gruelling struggle; I thought nothing could be worse than Persian roads but of course Afghan roads are much, much worse. Poor Roz – how long will she survive?

Ghurion is off the ‘main’ road so I decided to spend the night in a little tea-house at the junction, which is run by a delightful old man. I’m still working on the principle that the fewer people who know I’m around the better. (Despite myself all the fuss about the dangers of Afghanistan is having its effect on my nerves: probably a few days among the Afghans will soothe me down.)

The tea here comes by the tea-pot, instead of by the glass as in Turkey and Persia. You get about a pint of it and a little china bowl half filled with sugar into which you pour the tea and by the time you’ve had four bowlfuls the sugar is all gone. Having seen nothing of Afghanistan but a Customs House, a desert and a tea-house, there’s no more to report till I get to Herat tomorrow morning.