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British Mensa Travel Special Interest Group |
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Mad
dogs... The unforgettable music of Bukhara is not that of tambour and Uzbek balalaika which accompanies the glittering folk-dances over supper in a restored caravanserai, while the evening sun clambers up the russet brick and blue-tiled arches. It is rather the raw, natural threnody of the desert itself. Whatever small stirring in the dust one far-off scurrying beetle or wild creature's hoof kicks up into the still air is carried on little eddies of thermal across an uninterrupted barrenness of two thousand miles. Unhindered in its passage over those scrub-littered dunes where now and then a solitary arch stands up as the only relic of inn or brigand-fort or customs post, that breeze unites with a companion breeze, and those with two others, those fused breezes with other breezes, until like gathering clansmen they have together become a force that comes howling out of the wilderness against this frontier of civilization. Using the proverbial furnace imagery to categorise the Bukharan midday sun is a little like calling the floor of the Atlantic damp. Bukhara in August is hot the way the tip of the cone at the mouth of a bunsen burner is hot. Touch this city and you can only scream: a serious, flesh-blistering health hazard. Seven in the evening at Urgench, the main airport for Khiva, and the temperature is a hundred and ten in the shade. The skyscrapers of Soviet Bukhara are the first thing higher than a sapling that the winds of the Kyzyl Kum encounter in their nomad prowling from the remote north: its many windowed towers become the pipes of a giant organ. Sitting in my room curtained against the searing heat, I heard again that army of servile chambermaids, legacy of Soviet regimentation, endlessly hoovering the corridors throughout the stifling afternoon. In reality, no one moved outside the room. No staff, no international oil-men or straying diplomats: certainly very few spies these days. Even the hotel foyer was deserted: if there was any receptionist technically on duty there, he was certainly sleeping. It would have been an Emir's cruelty to rouse him with the telephone. The moaning and wailing vacuum-cleaners were only the incessant wind, ever-present voice of the steppes of Central Asia. It takes mad dogs and Englishmen to disturb that pattern of inhuman emptiness that makes of the afternoon streets of Bukhara an enamelled map; and any dogs there were in the oasis city, mad or vestigially domesticated, were keeping to the shadow. It was not so much that I borrowed Dave's woman for the excursion to the Ark in the still-smouldering late afternoon, after the manner of a Good Housekeeping short story. He was out on some separate mad-dog foray of his own, and she had briefly succumbed to the climate and the diet. Jean borrowed me, for my vestiges of fifth-form Russian; sufficient of it, at any rate, to establish a bargain, as we believed, with the one taxi-driver still conscious. In this land, “Ark” has a very different meaning from Genesis’ benevolent refuge against floods and fatal communal guilt. It is more like Exodus’ Ark of the Covenant (ever-present reminder of guilt) in its dangerous and disturbing potency, fenced round with protective protocol against risk of injury, the ancient equivalent of health and safety regulations. The Ark at the heart of Bukhara was the palace and seat of government of the Emirs, and every bit as much a high mud-built fortress as those mountain castles of Rajasthan or the Moroccan Atlas kingdoms. The Emir, at any rate the one encountered by the luckless Stoddart and his kind on both sides of the 19th century Great Game, was as nasty a sample of despotic caprice as any folk tale of baba-yagas has ever presented. Having agreed with the driver (as far as could confidently be judged) to await us outside in some tree-shaded patch, Jean and I braved the cobbled expanse of the Registan, that arena of staring open space that not so long since was evidently grassed, in front of the citadel's twin-turreted gate. This is where English explorers were obliged to dig their own graves prior to deposit in them. Missing now (looted by the Soviets, seemingly) are the giant scimitar and the flail that once hung above the mouth of the entrance tunnel, as frank a symbol of doubtful hospitality as has ever been offered to new arrivals. Above the gate is an elegant little pavilion convenient for the observance of the Changing of the Heads. The ramp could equally have accommodated horses, carriages or elephants; and, to those who observe that the elephant is not native to Central Asia, one can only point out the fine blue specimens cavorting across the ancient Sogdian frescoes in the dust heaps of Old Samarkand. The Ark, a mud-brick monster whose foundation goes back to pre-Islamic times and whose first independent occupant was the Zoroastrian Queen Khatum (the stone roots of whose fire-temple underlie the city's oldest mosque), was once subject to regular collapse and reconstruction. From this tiresome cycle it allegedly achieved release only when remodelled, on astrological advice, to a ground plan matching Ursa Major. The Mark XIX or whichever Ark that now confronted us was largely 16th century. It was restored following the Uzbek expulsion of the Mongol Timurids (under whom most of the city once held to be Asia's most illustrious repository of learning and the seat of its most famous library had been reduced to desolation), but once again, supposedly, gutted by Frunze's Red Army column in 1920. I was in for a reunion less traumatic than these encounters. Brought up from early childhood on the Shah Nameh (in translation!), on the tales of Rustum and a Persian court that actually owe as much to the Turkic Ghaznavids as British King Arthur does to French romancers, I was as familiar with the brothers Gew and Gudarz, with Isfendiyar and the great hero's noble mount Rakush and, of course, the immortal meeting between the champion and his son Sohrab, as with Agravaine and Pelinore and any other of Arthur's Round Table. Running then, after all these years, into "luckless Sayavush", as mythic founder of the city, supposedly buried under the Ark's side-entrance, had that same shock as the first sight of Mykinae, Troy or Dunsinane, the moment when one steps inside a universal legend. The enormity of that encounter with ghosts is always one of travel's most potent experiences, somewhat akin to coming across the Pope in Sainsbury's, as well as a jolting, personal leap back in time. To be instantly transported inside an immortal tale has the eerie quality of hallucination to it. It turns the giant fiction into fact. There used to be a clock alongside the flail and scimitar. A certain Giovanni Orlandi, kidnapped and imported by Turkoman slave-traders, is said to have been (family members apart) the very last of all Nasrullah's dispensees, having purchased himself an extension of time by constructing for the gadget-mad Emir a telescope and the region's only mechanical, Arabic-numeral timepiece. Nasrullah, having inadvertently and irreparably dropped the telescope from a minaret, unfairly cancelled the hold and put Orlandi back on the active list. Declining to convert to Islam - though one suspects that, as with Atahualpa, the profession of faith might have amended no more than the method of his dying - he was duly decapitated. At the end of the gate tunnel, flanked by sheds that once functioned as police holding-cells, we emerged into a little avenue that climbed to the court mosque, fronted by delicate timber columns with intricate stalactite capitals. Here a bystander, of what degree of officialdom was impossible to determine, attached himself to our trudging ascent, in the hope of baksheesh. This was a forlorn hope, as this self-appointed guide commanded no perceptible English larger than "Hello", and offered for commentary on the delights which his demonstrating hand extended to us only an engaging smile. As for fifth-form Russian, it didn't seem to feature any of the relevant vocabulary. As I recall, the first lesson in Bondarchuk's primer had concentrated on the pilot of an aeroplane, a hero sporting a medal where a flying helmet might have been more pertinent. But this was no great handicap in the little citadel museum, whose sparse labels were bilingual, neither of them English, but exhibits reasonably self-explanatory, as much European, or would-be European, as Asiatic. The surgical instruments would not have been out of place in the old operating theatre of St. Thomas's; and there was a fairly modest gilt and red-plush throne, a hundred generations removed from either the carpets of Nasrullah's nomadic ancestry or those sofa-sized silver or lacquer plinths wholly unrelated to the human anatomy which have exalted despots in India, China and Sri Lanka. The commentary and the presence faded simultaneously as we toiled onward and upward to the Emir's audience hall, now open to the sky. In its day, the platform of the divan had been surfaced with carpet - like the yurt-platform in front of the divan at Khiva, a reminder of these rulers' origins in the Eastern steppes. Evidently it was on such a carpet that he was hoisted to be installed Khan, whatever affectation of European plush and gilt he may have preferred for daily business. In front of the Tuscan-orange columns of the divan, crouching on the flagstones of the sunken court as lost as a dehydrated frog in an empty swimming-pool, sat another of those hunched, Urartian-type lions, all head and haunch, with none of the real beast's lithe hunter's proportions and shaggy camouflage. Had he had life in him, he would surely have lost it, for turning his shoulder on the throne: the hall's principal entrance is masked by a hefty, adobe screen (once marble?) to allow courtiers, on exiting, to present their backs to the royal presence then - and not before. It was a court that did not go in for the shaking of hands, which allowed the monarch's duty in the matter of receiving of emissaries to be more easily delegated than a modern Queen's. His officials included one whose specific office was to deliver the requisite Aleykum assalam in reply to formal salutations, on the fatigable ruler's behalf. Finally unshadowed, in both senses, we stepped out on to the burning setts of the sloping upper courtyard, the principal open space inside the Ark, which curiously accommodated the stables. The yard was used for swabbing down the horses on their return from military or processional duty, an occupation that in other cultures is usually reserved to premises more remote from the ceremonial centre of things. The advantage of doing it here, as perceived by despots, was the minor one that the run-off was directly precipitated into the cellars beneath, in which, in addition to the treasury and the Emirate's mint, the state's considerable collection of prisoners was housed. Humiliating, certainly: less than tormenting, perhaps? But then Nasrullah and his generation had plenty of other methods for that, among which decapitation, dehydration, disocculation and emasculation were among the more predictable, if less insensitive. The ambience of all that, as ever, we found relieved by a second museum devoted to taxidermic scraps from the Emir's non-human pursuits, and by the inevitable souvenir kiosk, offering what would undoubtedly have been fascinating turn-of-the-century accounts of the local scene, had I only had Russian less modern than aeronauts, or any Uzbek. Our driver had not fled his post as at first we thought; he had simply relocated, as the sun moved round. We interrupted his sleep for long enough to get us back to the hotel and once again thanked Soviet megalomania and Soviet ruthlessness for getting this tower of air-conditioned blessing erected where the fires of Asia never intended such an oasis to stand. First published in VISA 83 (Feb 2009) |