Maiden Voyages (23 page)

Besides having a manor, we have a demesne as well, a fair demesne of lavender tufts that grow thick over the hills; and their odourous blossoms, drying in the sun, mingle their fresh, salt perfume with the heavier odour of the pines. Our only labour is to gather these blossoms; but so regal is our idleness that we have much ado to accomplish it.

Going to and fro, we have made the acquaintance of certain neighbouring princes and princesses whose kingdoms lie round about. There are, in the first place, two little girls, whom we meet every day seeking pasture for their goat. As the goat supplies the milk and butter for the family, it is most necessary that she should have good grass; and that, on this arid coast, is not easy to find in September. When they have found a green spot, they carefully tether her, and with many parting injunctions to her not to run away, and to eat all she can, and be a good little goat, they leave her. Then there is the old man who lives in a thatch on the hillside, from whom we buy figs; and the woman who goes about with scales and basket, selling lobsters. At the hotel there is an old Parisian who has exiled himself from the gaieties of the capital, and is living out the remainder of a misspent life in the solitudes of his native south. His eyes fairly devour anyone who comes from Paris, and he beams when a bicyclist or two pump into Lavandou to solace his loneliness. For several days he has been the only guest at the hotel besides ourselves, and he eats his lobster and sips his benedictine in sadness.

The other day we left our manor long enough to make a royal progress to Cavalaire, a village six miles down the coast. The road is a wild one: on one side the steep hillside, on the other the sea. If we had not tested the kindliness of these southerners before, we might have been rather intimidated by the loneliness of the road. We met nothing more terrible
than a sailor boy sitting on the stone coping of a bridge, trying to tie up a badly bruised foot in a piece of cloth torn from the sash about his waist. He had been put ashore that morning off a freight boat because his foot disabled him, and was limping along to St. Praid, twenty-five miles down the coast, where his people lived. He did not ask for charity, nor vouchsafe his story until he was questioned. We gave him some money, and a pin to keep the cloth on his foot, and as we were returning late in the afternoon, we met him limping on his way. We met also a few fishermen, and several women walking beside little carts drawn by a donkey no bigger than a sheep, and every woman was knitting busily as she walked, stopping only long enough to greet us. The village of Cavalaire consists of a station house and a little tavern by the roadside. The station agent lay asleep on a bench beside his door, and his old mother and wife were knitting beside him. The place is not a little like certain lonely way stations in Wyoming and Colorado. Before we reached our own village that night the moon was already throwing her tracks of troubled light across the sea.

But always we come back to the principality of pines and decide there is nothing else quite so good. As I said before, there is nothing but a little cardboard house of stucco, and a plateau of brown pine needles, and green fir trees, the scent of dried lavender always in the air, and the sea reaching like a wide blue road into the sky. But what a thing it is to lie there all day in the fine breeze, with the pine needles dropping on one, only to return to the hotel at night so hungry that the dinner, however homely, is a fête, and the menu finer reading than the best poetry in the world! Yet we are to leave all this for the glare and blaze of Nice and Monte Carlo; which is proof enough that one cannot become really acclimated to happiness.

(1892–1962)

from
PASSENGER TO TEHERAN

Ever since I have been in Persia I have been looking for a garden and have not yet found one. Yet Persian gardens enjoy a great reputation. Hafiz and Sa-adi sang frequently, even wearisomely, of roses. Yet there is no word for rose in the Persian language; the best they can manage is “red flower.” It looks as though a misconception had arisen somewhere. Indeed I think the misconception is ours, sprung from that national characteristic by which the English exact that everything should be the same, even in Central Asia, as it is in England, and grumble when it is not. “Garden?” we say; and think of lawns and herbaceous borders, which is manifestly absurd. There is no turf in this parched country; and as for herbaceous borders, they postulate a lush shapeliness unimaginable to the Persian mind. Here, everything is dry and untidy,
crumbling and decayed; a dusty poverty, exposed for eight months of the year to a cruel sun. For all that, there are gardens in Persia.

But they are gardens of trees, not of flowers; green wildernesses. Imagine that you have ridden in summer for four days across a plain; that you have then come to a barrier of snow-mountains and ridden up the pass; that from the top of the pass you have seen a second plain, with a second barrier of mountains in the distance, a hundred miles away; that you know that beyond these mountains lies yet another plain, and another, and another; and that for days, even weeks, you must ride, with no shade, and the sun overhead, and nothing but the bleached bones of dead animals strewing the track. Then when you come to trees and running water, you will call it a garden. It will not be flowers and their garishness that your eyes crave for, but a green cavern full of shadow, and pools where goldfish dart, and the sound of little streams. That is the meaning of a garden in Persia, a country where the long slow caravan is an everyday fact, and not a romantic name.

Such gardens there are; many of them abandoned, and these one may share with the cricket and the tortoise undisturbed through the hours of the long afternoon. In such a one I write. It lies on a southward slope, at the foot of the snowy Elburz, looking over the plain. It is a tangle of briars and grey sage, and here and there a judas tree in full flower stains the whiteness of the tall planes with its incredible magenta. A cloud of pink, down in a dip, betrays the peach trees in blossom. Water flows everywhere, either in little wild runnels, or guided into a straight channel paved with blue tiles, which pours down the slope into a broken fountain between four cypresses. There, too, is the little pavilion, ruined, like everything else; the tiles of the façade have fallen out and lie smashed upon the terrace; people have built, but, seemingly, never repaired; they have built, and gone away, leaving nature to turn their handiwork into this melancholy beauty. Nor is it so sad as it might be, for in this spacious, ancient country it is not of man that one thinks; he has made no impression on the soil, even his villages of brown mud remain invisible until one comes close up to them, and, once ruined, might have been ruined for five or five hundred years, indifferently; no, one thinks only of the haven that this tangled enclosure affords,
after the great spaces. One is no longer that small insect creeping across the pitiless distances.

There is something satisfying in this contrast between the garden and the enormous geographical simplicity that lies beyond. The mud walls that surround the garden are crumbling, and through the breaches appears the great brown plain, crossed by the three pale roads: to the east, the road to Meshed and Samarcand; to the west, the road to Bagdad; to the south, the road to Isfahan. The eye may travel, or, alternately, return to dwell upon the little grape-hyacinth growing close at hand. These Asian plains are of exceeding beauty, but their company is severe, and the mind turns gratefully for a change to something of more manageable size. The garden is a place of spiritual reprieve, as well as a place of shadows. The plains are lonely, the garden is inhabited; not by men, but by birds and beasts and lowly flowers; by hoopoes, crying “Who? Who?” among the branches; by lizards rustling like dry leaves; by the tiny sea-green iris. A garden in England seems an unnecessary luxury, where the whole countryside is so circumscribed, easy and secure; but here, one begins to understand why the garden drew such notes from Sa-adi and from Hafiz. As a breeze at evening after a hot day, as a well in the desert, so is the garden to the Persian.

The sense of property, too, is blessedly absent; I suppose that this garden has an owner somewhere, but I do not know who he is, nor can any one tell me. No one will come up and say that I am trespassing; I may have the garden to myself; I may share it with a beggar; I may see a shepherd drive in his brown and black flock, and, sitting down to watch them browse, sing a snatch of the song that all Persians sing at the turn of the year, for the first three weeks of spring. All are equally free to come and enjoy. Indeed there is nothing to steal, except the blossom from the peach trees, and no damage to do that has not already been done by time and nature. The same is true of the whole country. There are no evidences of law anywhere, no sign-posts or milestones to show the way; the caravanserais stand open for any one to go in and rest his beasts; you may travel along any of those three roads for hundreds of miles in any direction, without meeting any one or anything to control you; even the rule of the road is nominal, and you pass by as best you can. If you prefer to leave the track and take to the open, then
you are free to do so. One remembers—sometimes with irritation, sometimes with longing, according to the fortunes of the journey—the close organisation of European countries.

The shadows lengthen, and the intense light of sunset begins to spread over the plain. The brown earth darkens to the rich velvet of burnt umber. The light creeps like a tide up the foothills, staining the red rock to the colour of porphyry. High up, above the range of the Elburz, towers the white cone of Demavend, white no longer now, but glowing like a coal; that white loneliness, for ten minutes of every day, suddenly comes to life. It is time to leave the garden, where the little owls are beginning to hoot, answering one another, and to go down into the plain, where the blue smoke of the evening fires is already rising, and a single star hangs prophetic in the west.

(1868–1969)

from
MY JOURNEY TO LHASA

We ought to have left the
dokpas’
camp in the middle of the night to cross the pass at noon. But we were tired, and the warmth that we felt, lying next to a big fire, kept us sleeping longer than we had planned. I shrank also from the idea of starting without eating and drinking hot tea, for on the higher level we would find no fuel. What would happen? What would the road be like? We could not guess. Was the pass even practicable? People had only told us that it might be. Yongden, of
course, felt reluctant to go so far to fetch water, inasmuch as the few places where the stream flowed freely in daytime might be covered with ice after dark. Anyhow, he went, and we drank our tea. But the day broke before we had left the place.