Isabella Bird - Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan, Volume 2 (of 2)

Hassan is now "down with fever" and the opium craving, and one of the charvadars with fever. The cold winds of Gunak were too much for them. All day shots have been heard among the near mountains. The Hajwands, a powerful tribe, and the Abdulwands are fighting about a recent cutting off of a cow's tail, but the actual cause of the feud is deeper, and dates farther back. Aziz Khan wants us to return to Diz Arjanak, fearing that we may become implicated, and the Agha is calling him a coward, and telling him to ride back alone. Bang! Bang! The firing is now close and frequent, and the dropping shots are varied by straggling volleys. With the glasses I can see the tribesmen loading and firing on the crests of the near hills. A great number are engaged. One tribe has put up a stone breastwork at our end of the valley, but the enemy is attacking the other.

3 p. m. – An hour ago Mirab Khan arrived with a number of armed horse and footmen. Before he left he spent, I may say wasted, nearly an hour of my time again on his maladies, and again wrote down the directions for his medicines. Volleys fired very near startled him into departing, and he rode hastily back to Arjanak, fearing, as he said, an attack. Nominally, he armed the guides and the men he left behind, but one of the guns has neither caps nor powder, and another has only three caps. All the animals have been driven in.

4 p. m. – A man with grimy arms bare to the elbow has just run down to the Agha's camp from the conflict. He says that his people, who are greatly inferior to the Hajwands in numbers, thought it was the camp of the Shah's revenue collector, and sent him to ask him to mediate. The Agha expressed his willingness to become a mediator on certain conditions. There is much excitement in camp, all the men who are well crowding round this envoy, who is guilty of saying that fifty men are to attack our camps to-night.

7.30 p. m. – The Agha, with the Sahib and Aziz Khan, three brave men mounted and armed with rifles and revolvers, went to mediate. I went to a knoll in the valley with some of our men, above which on either side were hills occupied by the combatants, and a large number of tribesmen crowned the crest of a hill lying across the ravine higher up. The firing was frequent, but at long range, and I was near enough to see that only one man fell.

Our party rode on till they reached the top of a low ridge, where they dismounted, reconnoitred, and then passed out of sight, being fired on by both parties. The tribesmen kept on firing irregularly from the hill crests, occasionally running down the slopes, firing and running into cover. The Sahib's tufangchi , who is of Cheragh Ali's tribe, asked me, "Is this the way they fight in your country," I asked him if he would not like to be fighting? and he replied, "Yes, if it were my quarrel." The sun was very bright, the sky very blue, and the smoke very white as it drifted over the lonely ravine and burst in clouds from the hill-tops. I saw the combatants distinctly without a glass, and heard their wild war-shouts. What a matter for regret is this useless tribal fighting, with its dreary consequences of wailing women and fatherless children! "Why don't the English come and take us? Why don't the English come and give us peace?" are surely the utterances of a tired race.

After sunset the Agha returned, having so far succeeded in his mission that the headmen have promised to suspend hostilities for to-morrow, but still shots are fired now and then.

Yesterday we marched through narrow defiles and along hillsides to this lake, without seeing a tent, a man, or even a sheep or goat, following a stream which bears several names and receives several torrents which burst, full grown, from powerful springs in the mountain sides – a frequent phenomenon in this country – from its source till its entrance into this lake. Its two sides differ remarkably. On the right bank rise the magnificent ranges which form Shuturun, broken up into precipices, deep ravines, and peaks, all rocky and shapely, and absolutely denuded of soil. The mountains on the left bank are great shapeless masses of bare gravel rising into the high but blunt summit of the Sefid Kuh, with only occasional outcrops of rock; here and there among the crevices of the rocky spurs of Shuturun the Juniperus excelsa plants itself; otherwise, on the sun-scorched gravel only low tamarisk bushes, yellow salvias, a few belated campanulas, and a very lovely blue Trichodesma mollis remain.

On reaching the top of a very long ascent there was a unique surprise, for below, walled in by precipitous mountain sides, lies a lake of wonderful beauty, owing to its indescribable colour. Wild, fierce, and rocky are the high mountains in which this gem is set, and now verdureless, except that in some places where their steep sides enter the water willows and hawthorns find scanty roothold. Where the river enters the lake there is a thicket of small willows, and where it leaves it its bright waters ripple through a wood of cherry, pear, plum, and hawthorn. A broad high bank of gravel lies across a part of its lower end, and all seemed so safe and solitary that I pitched my camp here for Sunday at an unusual distance from the other camps.

"Things are not what they seem." Two armed Hajwands visited the camps, shots were heard at intervals this morning, and in the night some of the watch said they saw a number of men advancing towards us from under the bushes. I heard the sharp crack of our own rifles twice, and the Agha and Sahib calling on every one to be on the alert; the mules were driven in, and a great fire was made, but nothing came of it. To-night Mirab Khan's guides, who have been with us for some days, have gone back, journeying at night and hiding in caves by day for fear of being attacked.

This lovely lake, having no native name, will be known henceforward geographically as Lake Irene. Its waters lie in depths of sapphire blue, with streaks and shallows of green, but what a green! Surely without a rival on earth! Were a pea transparent, vivid, full of points and flashes of interior light, that would be the nearest approach to the colour, which changes never, while through the blazing hours the blue of the great depths in the centre has altered from sapphire to turquoise, and from turquoise to lapis-lazuli, one end and one side being permanently bordered round the margin with liquid emerald. The mountains have changed from rose to blue, from blue to gray, from gray to yellow, and are now flushing into pink. It is a carnival of colour, before the dusty browns and dusty grays which are to come.

Camp Sarawand, July 29. – To-day's march has been a change from the grand scenery of the Bakhtiari mountains to low passes and gravelly spurs, which sink down upon a plain. A blazing hillside; a mountain of gravel among others of similar ugliness, sprinkled with camel thorn and thistles; a steep and long descent to a stream; ripe wheat on some irrigated slopes; above these the hundred hovels of the village of Sarawand clinging one above another to the hillside, their white clay roofs intolerable in the fierce light; more scorched gravel hills breaking off abruptly, and then a blazing plain, in a mist of dust and heat, and low hills on the farther side seen through a brown haze, make up the view from my tent. The plain is Silakhor in Persia proper, and, nolens volens , that heat and dust must shortly be encountered in the hottest month of the year. Meanwhile the mercury is at 105° in the tent.

Outside is a noisy crowd of a mixed race, more Persian than Lur, row behind row. The ketchuda said if I would stand outside and show myself the people would be pacified, but the desired result was not attained, and the crushing and pushing were fearful – not that the people here or elsewhere are ever rude, it is simply that their curiosity is not restrained by those rules which govern ours. The Agha tried to create a diversion by putting a large musical box at a little distance, but they did not care for it. I attempted to give each woman a card of china buttons, which they like for sewing on the caps of their children, but the crush was so overpowering that I was obliged to leave it to Aziz. Then came the sick people with their many woes and wants, and though now at sunset they have all gone, Aziz comes in every few minutes with the laugh of a lost spirit, bringing a fresh copper bowl for eye lotion, quite pleased to think of my annoyance at being constantly dragged up from my writing.