Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana ( picador edition, 1981)
On holiday I like to read something which contrasts to where I am. So I read of Indian’s in Canada in Brian Moore’s Black Robe when I was in Moscow and Joyce’s The Dubliners when I was in South Island, New Zealand. Thus I took this book to re-read when I went to what I expected to be a very wet Ireland. I remember feeling what a sad book this was as one could never recapture the world that Byron’s visited but, since then, the lands of Lebanon, Iraq, Persia and Afghanistan have been subjected to even more misery and destruction. Afghanistan has now had to endure the CIA-sponsored campaign against the Russian-backed government, the era of the Taliban and now the US led invasion. It is odd to read of the Great Game being played out in the 1930s and realise that Afghanistan still allows conflict by proxy to take place.
Byron sets out to journey from Palestine to the Oxus partly to explore the origins of Islamic architecture. For much of the way, he is accompanied by Christopher Sykes of the Yorkshire gentry family based at Sledmere. Byron’s reactions to Palestine where the Jewish immigration is in full spate and Arab resentments are brewing is so interesting with our hindsight. He obviously admires Jewish industry and achievements but not all their methods. He has fewer illusions over the Arabs than his compatriots in the British foreign service. His descriptions of the various Christian denominations fighting over the holy sites still seem to ring true.
On the Shah’s regime in Persia, his observations are now seen in their longer context. The dictatorial monarch was keen on westernisation but it resulted in fear so Byron has to give him the code name “Marjoribanks’ in his diaries to cover himself. In one place a Potemkin-style false town was erected to satisfy the visiting Shah that progress had been made. Since then one remembers the last Shah’s celebrations of the Imperial rule of Iran at Persepolis which it’s ostentatious extravagance.
In contrast, Byron liked Afghanistan. “Here at last is asia without an inferiority complex” . He believes that the Persians cut off their noses to spite their faces!! Herat would be better known than Samarkand if it had had fifty years of rail access. He describes the former’s wonderful monuments; do they still exist? An eye-opener is the importance of Gohar Shad Begum, the wife of Shah Rukh, and responsible for some of the architectural wonders. It is good to hear of a woman making a mark in such a male dominated society. Byron can see the good and bad in Christian missionaries. Some bring medicine to ravaged beings, others have “behinds stuck out as if their spines were too righteous to bend”. One humane Archdeacon only made one convert in thirty years and she asked for a mullah on her death bed.
There are triumphs of lyrical writing. A Governor and his son are lost in the sight and smell of spring. The green of Afghanistan is not like the harsh deep green of Bengal or the sad cool green of Ireland or the salad green of the Mediterranean or even the heavy, full blown green of the English summer beeches. “This was the pure essence of green, indissoluble, the colour of life itself”. Later he writes movingly of a landscape bleached of all colour by the heat and sun. And he revels all the way in flowers, irises, and the roses which stir Kabul dwellers ion the same way as blossom does the Japanese. We hear of a bunch of guards apparently running away from some wild beasts but actually rushing to gather armfuls of jonquils.
Above all Byron describes lands, cities and monuments of such beauty which we cannot see again from the pre-war Jerusalem to the cities of Persia and to the Buddhas of Bamian, deliberately blown up by the Taliban. He writes of Nejef in Iraq now the target of suicide bombers. He tells of the glass coffin suspended for a thousand years at Gumbad-i-Kabus and the greatest building in the world there. Is it still there? Until very recently the coins of Alexander the Great were still being used as every day currency until the men from the museums made the people aware of their value.
Sykes and Byron survive snakes, scorpions, malarial swamps, landslide after landslide, illness, the suspicion of being spies and the activities of unhelpful officials. But they also meet genuine kindness and wonderful drivers.
One slight criticism; the book has an introduction by Bruce Chatwin but it would have benefited from a proper editor and a wealth of foot notes explaining who persons were and what had changed since Byron's time but I suppose that if the 1981 edition had included this, it would now be out of date. And I also wondered how they really did manage for money.
In the end they never did reach the Oxus and towards the end of the book we find out why. The Afghans kept the Russians away from their southern areas to placate the British, and the British from the North so as not to upset the Russians. Byron reads home like Odysseus, the dogs welcome him and he dedicates his journal to his mother. Chatwin does not go too far in calling this book a masterpiece.
On holiday I like to read something which contrasts to where I am. So I read of Indian’s in Canada in Brian Moore’s Black Robe when I was in Moscow and Joyce’s The Dubliners when I was in South Island, New Zealand. Thus I took this book to re-read when I went to what I expected to be a very wet Ireland. I remember feeling what a sad book this was as one could never recapture the world that Byron’s visited but, since then, the lands of Lebanon, Iraq, Persia and Afghanistan have been subjected to even more misery and destruction. Afghanistan has now had to endure the CIA-sponsored campaign against the Russian-backed government, the era of the Taliban and now the US led invasion. It is odd to read of the Great Game being played out in the 1930s and realise that Afghanistan still allows conflict by proxy to take place.
Byron sets out to journey from Palestine to the Oxus partly to explore the origins of Islamic architecture. For much of the way, he is accompanied by Christopher Sykes of the Yorkshire gentry family based at Sledmere. Byron’s reactions to Palestine where the Jewish immigration is in full spate and Arab resentments are brewing is so interesting with our hindsight. He obviously admires Jewish industry and achievements but not all their methods. He has fewer illusions over the Arabs than his compatriots in the British foreign service. His descriptions of the various Christian denominations fighting over the holy sites still seem to ring true.
On the Shah’s regime in Persia, his observations are now seen in their longer context. The dictatorial monarch was keen on westernisation but it resulted in fear so Byron has to give him the code name “Marjoribanks’ in his diaries to cover himself. In one place a Potemkin-style false town was erected to satisfy the visiting Shah that progress had been made. Since then one remembers the last Shah’s celebrations of the Imperial rule of Iran at Persepolis which it’s ostentatious extravagance.
In contrast, Byron liked Afghanistan. “Here at last is asia without an inferiority complex” . He believes that the Persians cut off their noses to spite their faces!! Herat would be better known than Samarkand if it had had fifty years of rail access. He describes the former’s wonderful monuments; do they still exist? An eye-opener is the importance of Gohar Shad Begum, the wife of Shah Rukh, and responsible for some of the architectural wonders. It is good to hear of a woman making a mark in such a male dominated society. Byron can see the good and bad in Christian missionaries. Some bring medicine to ravaged beings, others have “behinds stuck out as if their spines were too righteous to bend”. One humane Archdeacon only made one convert in thirty years and she asked for a mullah on her death bed.
There are triumphs of lyrical writing. A Governor and his son are lost in the sight and smell of spring. The green of Afghanistan is not like the harsh deep green of Bengal or the sad cool green of Ireland or the salad green of the Mediterranean or even the heavy, full blown green of the English summer beeches. “This was the pure essence of green, indissoluble, the colour of life itself”. Later he writes movingly of a landscape bleached of all colour by the heat and sun. And he revels all the way in flowers, irises, and the roses which stir Kabul dwellers ion the same way as blossom does the Japanese. We hear of a bunch of guards apparently running away from some wild beasts but actually rushing to gather armfuls of jonquils.
Above all Byron describes lands, cities and monuments of such beauty which we cannot see again from the pre-war Jerusalem to the cities of Persia and to the Buddhas of Bamian, deliberately blown up by the Taliban. He writes of Nejef in Iraq now the target of suicide bombers. He tells of the glass coffin suspended for a thousand years at Gumbad-i-Kabus and the greatest building in the world there. Is it still there? Until very recently the coins of Alexander the Great were still being used as every day currency until the men from the museums made the people aware of their value.
Sykes and Byron survive snakes, scorpions, malarial swamps, landslide after landslide, illness, the suspicion of being spies and the activities of unhelpful officials. But they also meet genuine kindness and wonderful drivers.
One slight criticism; the book has an introduction by Bruce Chatwin but it would have benefited from a proper editor and a wealth of foot notes explaining who persons were and what had changed since Byron's time but I suppose that if the 1981 edition had included this, it would now be out of date. And I also wondered how they really did manage for money.
In the end they never did reach the Oxus and towards the end of the book we find out why. The Afghans kept the Russians away from their southern areas to placate the British, and the British from the North so as not to upset the Russians. Byron reads home like Odysseus, the dogs welcome him and he dedicates his journal to his mother. Chatwin does not go too far in calling this book a masterpiece.
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