Free A Writer's World by Jan Morris

from behind.
    Life in Persia is largely governed by a sense of humour, and depends for its continuity upon a series of non sequiturs, so that affairs there progress bumpily but soothingly, like an opiate with grit in it. It has long been so, for through centuries of despotism the Persian has erected around himself an indefinable screen of humour, slipperiness and oddity, a smoke-screen or camouflage, a false trail, a tear gas, behind which he can dive when trouble approaches him, to the bewildered chagrin of his tormentors. All this old tang and quiddity of Persia is best sniffed or experienced in the bazaars of Isfahan. Of all the splendid bazaars of the Middle East I enjoy these most. They are winding and rambling and mysterious, lit by shafts of sunshine streaming through the roof, full of fabrics and carpets and jewellery and vegetables, with exotic turbaned figures wandering through them, and a constant pushing and tumbling and shouting and bargaining; the whole conducted in a series of vaulted corridors of faintly ecclesiastical character. Women get short shrift in this Islamic mart, and are pushed out of the way with donkeys or sworn at mercilessly, and sometimes the vivid gusto of the place evolves into the macabre or the eerie.
    I was once walking through the bazaars when a young man fell off his bicycle; a package wrapped in newspaper, fastened to the carrier rack, came undone, and there rolled on to the pavement the complete head of a horned sheep, its eyes glassy, a thin trickle of blood oozing from its neck. Obscurely disturbing, too, is the antique camel mill which works in a kind of dungeon near the entrance to the bazaars. You enter it down a flight of worn steps, and find yourself standing in a windowless subterranean cavern. In the middle of this awful place two aged camels, their eyes padded, lope round and round a grinding mill in the half-light, with a smell of dung, hair, straw and burning wood, and the flicker of a flame from a distant corner where three old camel-men in rags are cooking themselves a meal.
    In such a place you can clearly hear the beat of the Persian heart – old, shuttered, wily, erratic. There is an edgy feeling to the crowds that shuffle and barge through these draughty arcades, and in the Persian’s eye, though he has a gaudy streak of the buffoon to his make-up, there is always a look of deep and calculating introspection. You never feel remote from the desert in Isfahan; you are never divorced from Islam; there are many reminders that the city stands on the brink of wild, unworldly territories, inhabited by roaming bands of tribesmen and coloured by many a lingeringtaboo and superstition. This is the home of the Zoroastrians and the great Persian mystics, and the nurturing-place of the fragile Persian poets of antiquity. To this day, up more than one winding and rickety staircase in the bazaars, amid the dust and the sweet smoke of the hubble-bubbles, you will find the miniaturists still at work, squatting cross-legged on their benches with their pupils around them.
    Isfahan is both bitter and perfumed: and if you are ever lulled into sentimentality by the charm of it all, there will soon come swaggering by some figure of glorious insouciance in turban, cloak, fur hat, sheepskin boots, cummerbund, limpid gown or tight-belted jerkin, the very personification of the perennial Persia. His astringent image haunts the scene, and breathes a spiced breath upon most of its activities.
    Tehran, the Shah’s capital, was in those days hardly less rich in piquancy. If I illustrate the trait with a comic anecdote, it is not because the trait itself was comic, but because Persian characteristics were so often served up soufflé style – their flavour fluffed about in humour, but none the less strong and subtle beneath.
    It is said of the great Reza Shah that he was once making an inspection tour down his new trans-Iranian railway when a preceding locomotive was derailed and capsized beside