In Xanadu (22 page)

The conversation in the bookshop left us in a gloomy mood. We wandered back to the hotel through pavements full of women in
chador
and khaki-clad Revolutionary Guards. On the street corners men were selling cassettes of the Ayatollah's sermons. Revolutionary tricolours fluttered half-heartedly in the breeze. On the way, we stopped in at the Azerbaijan Museum to see the famous gallery of Sassanian sculpture, but the display had been cleared away. The museum authorities had replaced it with a room full of line upon line of spectacles and false teeth. They belonged, so we were told, to the fallen 'Martyrs of the Revolution'.

The first time I awoke that night, the room was quiet, it was neither too hot nor too cold, and I could not understand what had woken me. Then, rolling over, I noticed the bump in the bed. It was not a wrinkled sheet. Nor did it seem to be the mattress. I felt under the bed. It was not a broken spring. I got out, turned on the lamp and lifted up the mattress. There lay an empty bottle of Glenfiddich whisky. I slung it away and went back to sleep.

The second time, I knew exactly what it was that had woken me. I sat bolt upright, muttered 'shit!' and streaked out of the room, up the corridor to the lavatory at the far end. I only just made it in time. It must have been the dubious chelo-kebab I had eaten the night before, or perhaps the cloudy water in the restaurant at Maku. When Laura awoke the following morning (predictably quite untouched by my bacillus) I was able to announce that I had 'been' seven times in as many hours. The news seemed to restore her spirits somewhat.

You mustn't eat anything this morning,' she said. This afternoon you may have a small bowl of yoghurt. The bacteria in it will help fight whatever is in your stomach. On no account take any antibiotics. They will only weaken your resistance in the future and we can't have the expedition delayed any more than it is already.'

Laura spent the morning exploring while I trotted up and down the corridor. Languishing in bed I felt empty and weak and ill and sorry for myself. I wondered if I had a temperature. Perhaps I had dysentery. Perhaps I had caught one of those worms that you hear about in medical jokes. Some could grow thirty feet long; others made you go blind. To try and take my mind off my stomach I opened
The Travels,
but only found that Polo had suffered the same fate as I: 'The water causes violent and excessive purging,' he writes, 'nigh ten times a day.'

I turned to Robert Byron.
The Road To Oxiana
had done more than anything to lure me to Persia in the first place, and was always favourite reading in moments of depression. Tabriz, I saw, was the scene of one of Byron's funniest playlets (the Ghiboon! Ghiboon! muleteers), but the town of his description bore little resemblance to that I could see from my window. The 'plush-coloured mountains approached by lemon-coloured foothills' were now obscured by the decaying skyscrapers, windows boarded up with black eye-patches. The 'bronze statue of Marjoribanks in a cloak' must have come down with the Revolution, and disappeared along with the 'drinkable white wine and disgusting beer'. At least there was no sign of the athletic fleas which had disabled his companion. Christopher Sykes.

Laura returned at lunchtime. She marched over to my bed, felt the temperature of my brow and declared me cured.

'What you need,' she said, 'is some exercise. While you've been asleep, I have been doing some research. I went back to our Armenian friends and checked Polo's notes on Tabriz. The "charming gardens" have all gone, and according to Tadios the Armenians have given up weaving and handicrafts in favour of ectronics and computers. But silk weaving still goes on in a village called Osku on the outskirts of town. Why don't you go off and discover it?' 'I'm not up to it.'

"You most certainly are. A little diarrhoea never did anyone any harm. Here, I've bought you some kaolin and morphine to keep you corked up.'

'Are you not coming too?'

'No. I thought I might stay behind and read. But make sure you are back by six. I've got tickets for the evening coach to Zanjan.'

On the bus to Osku. feeling like death and bunged up with enough kaolin and morphine to constipate the entire Iranian army, I cursed my weakness. Why did I always take the line of least resistance? But it was too late now. I arrived in Osku with an effective Persian vocabulary of one word. I got out of the bus and said it.

'Abricham;

Around me were scenes of mid-afternoon torpor. Old men lay sprawled about in the shade of a tree. Some sipped tea through sugar lumps held in theirteeth. It was very hot. A few of the old men looked up, but no one answered me. I took a glass of tea from a ragged
chai-khana
boy, and slumped down against the bark. Now was no time for battling against language problems.

An hour later the sun had sunk a little lower and I tried again.

'Abricham,'
I said.

The old man next to me shrugged his shoulders.

'Abricham;
I said again.

This time, for some reason, it worked.

'Abricham?'
said the Persian.

'Abricham;
I replied.

The old man muttered to his neighbour and a Chinese whisper passed around the tree. One of the younger old men on the far side of the trunk was deputed to guide me. The man got up, sh
oo
k the dust from his flat cap, and led on through a maze of mud walls. I followed. After a few minutes we arrived at a small wicket gate set low in the wall. The old man knocked, waited, then knocked again. There was the sound of footsteps and the gate opened. A tall man in his late thirties came out. The old man rattled away in guttural dialect, pointed at me, shrugged his shoulders then grunted. The tall man smiled and extended his hand.

'How do you do?' he said. 'My name is Salim. I am the village schoolmaster. This old man says that you are a crazy foreigner who keeps repeating the same word over and over again. What do you want?'

'I'm looking forthe silk farm. The word I kept repeating was
Ahricham.'

'Abricham?

'Abricham.
Farsi for silk.'

'Oh
I
see.
I
am sorry. You see most people around Tabriz speak Turkish. No one here understands
a
word of Farsi.'

Salim took me to the silk farm. It was another backyard affair, although by necessity a silk loom was
a
more complicated machine than the simple carpet loom we had seen outside Sivas. It lay in
a
small semi-subterranean mud-brick hut, attached to
a
courtyard house in a distant part of the maze. The silk was already wound onto seven weighted spindle whorls
w
hich Salim said came from a village nearby. The silk was spun out across the full five-foot width of the loom frame into a sheet of separate threads. At the far end a single man sat on a bench. He operated the entire machine. Two pedals alternately lifted and lowered two frames of tightly strung cross-threads. A chain shot
a
shuttlecock in between, across the width of the loom, carrying a line of silk alternately under and over the spread of silk threads. A comb then pulled the woven material towards the operator where it wound itself around a wooden roll.

The machine was completely unmotorized and apparently homemade. Its existence near Tabriz, where Polo talks of the weaving of'many kinds of beautiful and valuable stuffs of silk and gold, again proves Polo's accuracy in all matters mercantile, although since the time of Yule that has never really been in doubt. I was shown the finished dyed silks and to the inexpert eye they looked exceptionally fine.

I was on the verge of haggling for a piece but, looking at my watch, I saw the time and rushed back to the square to catch the next bus back into town. It was never wise to anger Laura unnecessarily.

Sleep was impossible in the evening coach. We bumped along minor roads, stopping every half-hour
at
chai-khana.
A sermon gabbled on the tannoy. We arrived at Zanjan thoroughly exhausted, well after midnight. Two hoteliers refused to take us; a third showed us
to
a windowless cubbyhole covered in graffiti. He said he had been
to
Aberdeen ten years before, and he smelt as if he had not washed since. To be fair to him there did not seem to be any provision for so doing in the hotel.

The next morning we rose early and caught a minibus filled with angry old women. Our destination was Sultaniya, now a deserted, crumbling spread of ruins, but once the capital of Mongol Persia. From it was ruled an empire which spread from the Oxus to the Euphrates.

When Polo passed through Persia on his outward journey the town had not yet been built and its site was still occupied by the cornfields of the Qongqur-Oleng, the brown meadows. But by 1324, when Polo died, the town had a population of well over a million. Sultaniya was built to the command of Ilkhan Uljetu, the great-great-great-grandson of Ghengis Khan, a Claudius-figure known to his family as 'the Muleteer' and distinguished in history books by his wide-ranging interest in religion. Born a Nestorian Christian and baptized Nicholas, he became in turn a Shamanist, a Buddhist and a Shi'ite Muslim, before finally converting to the Sunni faith. Having professed every available religion, he died of a digestive disorder in
1316.

Sultaniya was his great love. Much of his childhood had been spent hunting in its rich pastures, and in 1305 work began on what he intended to be the largest and most magnificent city in the world. Walls were built. 30,000 paces in circumference, and within, a network of streets rose up as if by magic. Nobles and officials were encouraged to build palaces for themselves and houses for their peasants. The vizier, the historian Rashid ad-Din, built a whole suburb which he modestly named Rashiddya after himself. It contained twenty-four caravanserai, a magnificent mosque, two minarets, a college, a hospital, fifteen hundred shops, over 'thirty thousand fascinating houses, salubrious baths, pleasant gardens, factories for paper and cloth-weaving, a dye mill and a mint'. Craftsmen and merchants were forcibly moved to the town, and each profession was assigned its own street. An idea was mooted to make Sultaniya a centre of pilgrimage. Uljetu began to build an enormous mausoleum in the centre of the town, intended for the bodies of the two most important saints of the Shi'ite world, Hussein and Ali. Only his conversion to Sunni Islam stalled the plan, which would have turned Sultaniya into a Shi'ite Mecca. The mausoleum became his own tomb.