The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron

Author:Robert Byron
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 1992-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

PART V

PART V

Shahi (c. 300 ft.), April 22nd.—The first evening of our long-planned journey.

Lady Hoare and Joseph got up early to breakfast with us under the wistaria. The winter aspect of the Legation compound, resembling a Victorian asylum, was now almost hidden by blossom and young leaves. And as we drove away, I remembered with infinite gratitude the kindness I had found in those ugly little houses, and among the English community in general. Such kindness is easy to forget and impossible to repay: it needs a rich man to offer the same degree of hospitality in England as two clean sheets and a bath represent after a journey in Persia. Worse than that, he who writes is apt to repay it with injury, in the form of political indiscretion, which makes life for the residents more difficult than it is already. But this, I must admit, leaves me impenitent, regrettable as it is from the personal point of view. To asperse a sunset in these days is a political indiscretion; and equally so, to praise it, if there happens to be a cement-factory in the foreground that ought to be praised instead. Somebody must trespass on the taboos of modern nationalism, in the interests of human reason. Business can’t. Diplomacy won’t. It has to be people like us.

Once more the Khorasan road, poignant with memories! In spite of the spring, it was snowing at the pass which leads over the edge of the plateau down to the Caspian coast. Under the white blizzard occurred an extraordinary transition. In five minutes we had escaped from a world of stone and mud and sand and everlasting drought which had endured since Damascus, into one of wood and leaves and moisture, where the hills were clothed with bushes, the bushes grew into trees, and the trees, as the snow stopped, gathered into a glowing forest of bare trunks whose leafy vaults shut out the sky. The oppression of the plateau was suddenly remitted. It was only now I knew what a penalty had been levied on the spirit by the bare wind-swept deserts, the threatening mountains and the tumbledown villages. The relief was actually physical. Our bodies seemed to undergo a change of gravity, a return to normal buoyancy.

These feelings were interrupted by a piercing whistle and a puff of white smoke. In the bottom of the valley Marjoribanks’s new railway was creeping up towards the plateau. There, after surmounting the second step of the Elburz at Firuzkuh by a tunnel in the form of a triple spiral, it should arrive at Teheran in three years’ time. It can never pay. The taxation imposed by the first two hundred miles of it is already depriving the peasants of their only luxuries, tea and sugar. But its purpose is a question of psychology rather than economics. For the modern Persian it is the symbol of national self-respect; it provides at last a fresh diet for that unconquerable vanity which has subsisted during two thousand years on the exploits of Darius.

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