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Around the World on a Bicycle V1

T >> Thomas Stevens >> Around the World on a Bicycle V1




It is the special hour of prayer, and in every direction may be observed
men, halting in whatever they may be doing, and kneeling down on some
outer garment taken off for the purpose, repeatedly touch their foreheads
to the ground, bending in the direction of Mecca. Passing beneath the
second musicians' gate, I reach the artillery square just in time to see
a company of army buglers formed in line at one end, and a company of
musketeers at the other. As these more modern trumpeters proceed to toot,
the company of musketeers opposite present arms, and then the music of
the new buglers, and the hoarse, fog-horn-like blasts of the fantastic
tooters on the bala-khanas dies away together in a concerted effort that
would do credit to a troop of wild elephants.

When the noisy trumpeting ceases, the ordinary noises round about seem
like solemn silence in comparison, and above this comparative silence
can be heard the voices of men here and there over the city, calling out
"Al-lah-il-All-ah; Ali Ak-bar." (God is greatest; there is no god but
one God! etc.) with stentorian voices. The men are perched on the roofs
of the mosques, and on noblemen's walls and houses; the Shah has a strong-
voiced muezzin that can be heard above all the others. The sun has just
set; I can see the snowy cone of Mount Demavend, peeping apparently over
the high barrack walls; it has just taken on a distinctive roseate tint,
as it oftentimes does at sunset; the reason whereof becomes at once
apparent upon turning toward the west, for the whole western sky is aglow
with a gorgeous sunset-a sunset that paints the horizon a blood red, and
spreads a warm, rich glow over half the heavens.

The moon will be full to-night, and a far lovelier picture even than the
glorious sunset and the rose-tinted mountain, awaits anyone curious
enough to come out-doors and look. The Persian moonlight seems capable
of surrounding the most commonplace objects with a halo of beauty, and
of blending things that are nothing in themselves, into scenes of such
transcendental loveliness that the mere casual contemplation of them
sends a thrill of pleasure coursing through the system. There is no city
of the same size (180,000) in England or America, but can boast of
buildings infinitely superior to anything in Teheran; what trees there
are in and about the city are nothing compared to what we are used to
having about us; and although the gates with their short minars and their
gaudy facings are certainly unique, they suffer greatly from a close
investigation. Nevertheless, persons happening for the first time in the
vicinity of one of these gates on a calm moonlight night, and perchance
descrying "fair Luna "through one of the arches or between the minars,
will most likely find themselves transfixed with astonishment at the
marvellous beauty of the scene presented. By repairing to the artillery
square, or to the short street between the square and the palace front,
on a moonlight night, one can experience a new sense of nature's loveliness;
the soft, chastening light of the Persian moon converts the gaudy gates,
the dead mud-walls, the spraggling trees, and the background of snowy
mountains nine miles away, into a picture that will photograph itself
on one's memory forever. On the way home I meet one of the lady missionaries -
which reminds me that I ought to mention something about the peculiar
position of a Ferenghi lady in these Mohammedan countries, where it is
considered highly improper for a woman to expose her face in public. The
Persian lady on the streets is enveloped in a shroud-like garment that
transforms her into a shapeless and ungraceful-looking bundle of dark-blue
cotton stuff. This garment covers head and everything except the face;
over the face is worn a white veil of ordinary sheeting, and opposite
the eyes is inserted an oblong peep-hole of open needle-work, resembling
a piece of perforated card-board. Not even a glimpse of the eye is
visible, unless the lady happens to be handsome and coquettishly inclined;
she will then manage to grant you a momentary peep at her face; but a
wise and discreet Persian lady wouldn't let you see her face on the
street - no, not for worlds and worlds!

The European lady with her uncovered face is a conundrum and an object
of intense curiosity, even in Teheran at the present day; and in provincial
cities, the wife of the lone consul or telegraph employee finds it highly
convenient to adopt the native costume, face-covering included, when
venturing abroad. Here, in the capital, the wives and daughters of foreign
ministers, European officers and telegraphists, have made uncovered
female faces tolerably familiar to the natives; but they cannot quite
understand but that there is something highly indecorous about it, and
the more unenlightened Persians doubtless regard them as quite bold and
forward creatures. Armenian women conceal their faces almost as completely
as do the Persian, when they walk abroad; by so doing they avoid unpleasant
criticism, and the rude, inquisitive gaze of the Persian men. Although
the Persian readily recognizes the fact that a Sahib's wife or sister
must be a superior person to an Armenian female, she is as much an object
of interest to him when she appears with her face uncovered on the street,
as his own wives in their highly sensational in-door costumes would be
to some of us. In order to establish herself in the estimation of the
average Persian, as all that a woman ought to be, the European lady would
have to conceal her face and cover her shapely, tight-fitting dress with
an inelegant, loose mantle, whenever she ventured outside her own doors.
With something of a penchant for undertaking things never before
accomplished, I proposed one morning to take a walk around the ramparts
that encompass the Persian capital. The question arose as to the distance.
Ali Akbar, the head fan-ash, said it was six farsakhs (about twenty-four
miles); Meshedi Ab-dul said it was more. From the well-known Persian
characteristic of exaggerating things, we concluded from this that perhaps
it might be fifteen miles; and on this basis Mr. Meyrick, of the Indo-
European Telegraph staff, agreed to bear me company. The ramparts consist
of the earth excavated from a ditch some forty feet wide by twenty deep,
banked up on the inner side of the ditch; and on top of this bank it is
our purpose to encompass the city.

Eight o'clock on the appointed morning finds us on the ramparts at the
Gulaek Gate, on the north side of the city. A cold breeze is blowing off
the snowy mountains to the northeast, and we decide to commence our novel
walk toward the west. Following the zigzag configuration of the ramparts,
we find it at first somewhat rough and stony to the feet; on our right
we look down into the broad ditch, and beyond, over the sloping plain,
our eyes follow the long, even rows of kanaat mounds stretching away to
the rolling foothills; towering skyward in the background, but eight
miles away, are the snowy masses of the Elburz Range. Forty miles away,
at our back, the conical peak of Demavend peeps, white, spectral, and
cold, above a bank of snow-clouds that are piled motionless against its
giant sides, as though walling it completely off from the lower world.
On our left lies the city, a curious conglomeration of dead mud-walls,
flat-roofed houses, and poplar-peopled gardens. A thin haze of smoke
hovers immediately above the streets, through which are visible the
minarets and domes of the mosques, the square, illumined towers of the
Shah's anderoon, the monster skeleton dome of the canvas theatre, beneath
which the Shah gives once a year the royal tazzia (representation of the
tragedy of "Hussein and Hassan"), and the tall chimney of the arsenal,
from which a column of black smoke is issuing. Away in the distance, far
beyond the confines of the city, to the southward, glittering like a
mirror in the morning sun, is seen the dome of the great mosque at
Shahabdullahzeen, said to be roofed with plates of pure gold. As we pass
by we can see inside the walls of the English Legation grounds; a
magnificent garden of shady avenues, asphalt walks, and dark-green banks
of English ivy that trail over the ground and climb half-way up the
trunks of the trees. A square-turreted clock-tower and a building that
resembles some old ancestral manor, imparts to "the finest piece of
property in Teheran" a home-like appearance; the representative of Her
Majesty's Government, separated from the outer world by a twenty-four-foot
brick wall, might well imagine himself within an hour's ride of London.

Beyond the third gate, the character of the soil changes from the stone-
strewn gravel of the northern side, to red stoneless earth, and both
inside and outside the ramparts fields of winter wheat and hardy vegetables
form a refreshing relief from the barren character of the surface
generally. The Ispahan gate, on the southern side, appears the busiest
and most important entrance to the city; by this gate enter the caravans
from Bushire, bringing English goods, from Bagdad, Ispahan, Tezd, and
all the cities of the southern provinces. Numbers of caravans are camped
in the vicinity of the gate, completing their arrangements for entering
the city or departing for some distant commercial centre; many of the
waiting camels arc kneeling beneath their heavy loads and quietly feeding.
They are kneeling in small, compact circles, a dozen camels in a circle
with their heads facing inward. In the centre is placed a pile of chopped
straw; as each camel ducks his head and takes a mouthful, and then
elevates his head again while munching it with great gusto, wearing
meanwhile an expression of intense satisfaction mingled with timidity,
as though he thinks the enjoyment too good to last long, they look as
cosey and fussy as a gathering of Puritanical grand-dames drinking tea
and gossiping over the latest news. Within a mile of the Ispahan gate
are two other gates, and between them is an area devoted entirely to the
brick-making industry. Here among the clay-pits and abandoned kilns we
obtain a momentary glimpse of a jackal, drinking from a ditch. He slinks
off out of sight among the caves and ruins, as though conscious of acting
an ungenerous part in seeking his living in a city already full of gaunt,
half-starved pariahs, who pass their lives in wandering listlessly and
hungrily about for stray morsels of offal. Several of these pariahs have
been so unfortunate as to get down into the rampart ditch; we can see
the places where they have repeatedly made frantic rushes for liberty
up the almost perpendicular escarp, only to fall helplessly back to the
bottom of their roofless dungeon, where they will gradually starve to
death. The natives down in this part of the city greet us with curious
looks; they are wondering at the sight of two Ferenghis promenading the
ramparts, far away from the European quarter; we can hear them making
remarks to that effect, and calling one another's attention. The sun
gets warm, although it is January, as we pass the Doshan Tepe and the
Meshed gates, remarking as we go past that the Shah's summer palace on
the hill to the east compares favorably in whiteness with the snow on
the neighboring mountains. As we again reach the Gulaek gate and descend
from the ramparts at the place we started, the clock in the English
Legation tower strikes twelve.

"How many miles do you call it." asks my companion. "Just about twelve
miles," I reply; "what do you make it?" "That's about it," he agrees;
"twelve miles round, and eleven gates. We have walked or climbed over
the archway of eight of the gates; and at the other three we had to climb
off the ramparts and on again." As far as can be learned, this is the
first time any Ferenghi has walked clear around the ramparts of Teheran.
It is nothing worth boasting about; only a little tramp of a dozen miles,
and there is little of anything new to be seen. All around the outside
is the level plain, verdureless, except an occasional cultivated field,
and the orchards of the tributary villages scattered here and there. In
certain quarters of Teheran one happens across a few remaining families
of guebres, or fire-worshippers; remnant representatives of the ancient
Parsee religion, whose devotees bestowed their strange devotional offerings
upon the fires whose devouring flames they constantly fed, and never
allowed to be extinguished. These people are interesting as having kept
their heads above the overwhelming flood of Mohammedanism that swept
over their country, and clung to their ancient belief through thick and
thin - or, at all events, to have steadfastly refused to embrace any other.
Little evidence of their religion remains in Persia at the present day,
except their "towers of silence" and the ruins of their old fire-temples.
These latter were built chiefly of soft adobe bricks, and after the lapse
of centuries, are nothing more than shapeless reminders of the past. A
few miles southeast of Teheran, in a desolate, unfrequented spot, is the
guebre "tower of silence," where they dispose of their dead. On top of
the tower is a kind of balcony with an open grated floor; on this the
naked corpses are placed until the carrion crows and the vultures pick
the skeleton perfectly clean; the dry bones are then cast into a common
receptacle in the tower. The guebre communities of Persia are too
impecunious or too indifferent to keep up the ever-burning-fires nowadays;
the fires of Zoroaster, which in olden and more prosperous times were
fed with fuel night and day, are now extinguished forever, and the
scattering survivors of this ancient form of worship form a unique item
in the sum total of the population of Persia.

The head-quarters - if they can be said to have any head-quarters - of the
Persian guebres are at Yezd, a city that is but little known to Europeans,
and which is all but isolated from the remainder of the country by the
great central desert. One great result of this geographical isolation
is to be observed to-day, in the fact that the guebres of Yezd held their
own against the unsparing sword of Islam better than they did in more
accessible quarters; consequently they are found in greater numbers there
now than in other Persian cities. Curiously enough, the chief occupation -
one might say the sole occupation - of the guebres throughout Persia, is
taking care of the suburban gardens and premises of wealthy people. For
this purpose I am told guebre families are in such demand, that if they were
sufficiently numerous to go around, there would be scarcely a piece of
valuable garden property in all Persia without a family of guebres in
charge of it. They are said to be far more honest and trustworthy than
the Persians, who, as Shiite Mohammedans, consider themselves the holiest
people on earth; or the Armenians, who hug the flattering unction of
being Christians and not Mohammedans to their souls, and expect all
Christendom to regard them benignly on that account. It is doubtless
owing to this invaluable trait of their character, that the guebres have
naturally drifted to their level of guardians over the private property
of their wealthy neighbors.

The costume of the guebre female consists of Turkish trousers with very
loose, baggy legs, the material of which is usually calico print, and a
mantle of similar material is wrapped about the head and body. Unlike
her Mohammedan neighbor, she 'makes no pretence of concealing her features;
her face is usually a picture of pleasantness and good-nature rather
than strikingly handsome or passively beautiful, as is the face of the
Persian or Armenian belle. The costume of the men differs but little
from the ordinary costume of the lower-class Persians. Like all the
people in these Mohammedan countries, who realize the weakness of their
position as a small body among a fanatical population, the Teheran guebres
have long been accustomed to consider themselves as under the protecting
shadow of the English Legation; whenever they meet a "Sahib" on the
street, they seem to expect a nod of recognition.

Among the people who awaken special interest in Europeans here, may be
mentioned Ayoob Khan, and his little retinue of attendants, who may be
seen on the streets almost any day. Ayoob Khan is in exile here at Teheran
in accordance with some mutual arrangement between the English and Persian
governments. On almost any afternoon, about four o'clock, he may be met
with riding a fine, large chestnut stallion, accompanied by another
Afghan on an iron gray. I have never seen them riding faster than a walk,
and they are almost always accompanied by four foot-runners, also Afghans,
two of whom walk behind their chieftain and two before. These runners
carry stout staves with which to warn off mendicants, and with a view
to making it uncomfortable for any irrepressible Persian rowdy who should
offer any insults. Both Ayoob Khan and his attendants retain their
national costume, the main distinguishing features being a huge turban
with about two feet of the broad band left dangling down behind; besides
this, they wear white cotton pantalettes even in mid-winter. They wear
European shoes and overcoats, as though they had profited by their
intercourse with Anglo-Indians to the extent of at least shoes and coat.
The foot-runners have their legs below the knee bound tightly with strips
of dark felt. Judging from outward appearances, Ayoob Khan wears his
exile lightly, for his rotund countenance looks pleasant always, and I
have never yet met him when he was not chatting gayly with his companion.
Of the interesting scenes and characters to be seen every day on the
streets of Teheran, their name is legion. The peregrinating tchai-venders,
who, with their little cabinet of tea and sugar in one hand, and samovar
with live charcoals in the other, wander about the city picking up stray
customers, for whom they are prepared to make a glass of hot tea at one
minute's notice; the scores of weird-looking mendicants and dervishes
with their highly fantastic costumes, assailing you with " huk, yah huk,"
the barbers shaving the heads of their customers on the public streets -
shaving their pates clean, save little tufts to enable Mohammed to pull
them up to Paradise; and many others the description and enumeration of
which would, of themselves, fill a good-sized volume.

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