Free The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron

muslin. The furniture consisted of two brass bedsteads appointed with satin bolsters, and a ring of stiff settees, upholstered in white, before each of which stood a small white-covered table bearing dishes of melon, grapes, and sweets. In the middle of the floor, which was covered with two layers of carpets, stood three tall oil lamps, unshaded. A grey-bearded steward in a buff frock-coat, whom our host addressed as “aga”, attended us.
    Our letter of introduction had said we wished to visit Sultaniya. If we returned this way, said our host, he would take us in his car. A trouble? He visited Sultaniya every day, for business or sport. In fact he had a house there, in which he could entertain us. In my innocence I believed these courtesies. But Christopher knew better. After an enormous meal, which we ate with our hands, the steward led us back to our bare cubicle in the Grand Hotel—Town Hall.
    I am sitting in the street outside it; for the morning sun is the only available warmth. A pompous old fellow in check tweeds, who looks like Lloyd George, has justcome up and announced himself as the Reis-i-Shosa. This means Captain of the Chaussées, in other words District Road Superintendent. He accompanied the English to Baku, where the reward of his help was a Bolshevik prison.
    Tabriz
(4500
ft
.),
October 15th
.—In Zinjan at last we picked up a lorry. As Christopher was taking a photograph of me sitting in the back, a policeman stepped up and said photographing was forbidden. The driver was an Assyrian from near Lake Urmiya, and by his side sat an Assyrian schoolmistress, who was returning from a missionary conference in Teheran. She regaled us with slices of quince. They were much interested in my acquaintance with Mar Shimun, and advised me to say nothing about it in Tabriz, since there was a persecution of Christians at the moment, and Mrs. Cochran’s Women’s Club in Urmiya had been shut by the police. At the thought of this, they sang
Lead
,
Kindly Light
in unison, the schoolmistress informing me that she had taught the driver this to prevent his singing the usual drivers’ songs. I said I should have preferred the drivers’ songs. She added that she had also persuaded him to remove the blue beads from his radiator-cap; they were a superstition of “these Moslems”. When I told her they were a superstition generally practised by Christians of the Orthodox Church, she was dumbfounded. She admitted then that superstitions sometimes worked: there was a devil named Mehmet, for instance, with a human wife, through whom he had prophesied the War in her father-in-law’s parlour. She called herself a bible-worker, and wanted to know if most people in England smoked or did not smoke. Why doctors did not forbid smoking and drinking, instead of doing so themselves, she could not understand.
    I began to sympathise with the Persian authorities.Missionaries do noble work. But once they make converts, or find indigenous Christians, their usefulness is not so great.
    Christopher, at this stage, was reading in the back of the lorry, where his companions were a Teherani, an Isfahani, two muleteers, and the driver’s assistant.
    Teherani
: What’s this book?
    Christopher
: A book of history.
    Teherani
: What history?
    Christopher
: The history of Rum and the countries near it, such as Persia, Egypt, Turkey, and Frankistan.
    Assistant
(
opening the book
): Ya Ali! What characters!
    Teherani
: Can you read it?
    Christopher
: Of course. It’s my language.
    Teherani
: Read it to us.
    Christopher
: But you cannot understand the language.
    Isfahani
: No matter. Read a little.
    Muleteers
: Go on! Go on!
    Christopher
: “It may occasion some surprise that the Roman pontiff should erect, in the heart of France, the tribunal from whence he hurled his anathemas against the king; but our surprise will vanish so soon as we form a just estimate of a king of France in the eleventh