I have been reading Robert Byron's The Road To Oxiana about his 1933 journey through Persia (Iran) and beyond by way of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine/Jerusalem.
One need not look any further than the map on page 18 following the Introduction for the first interesting discovery: that Persia and its northern neighbor Afghanistan both shared a border with "India."
We are reminded that Pakistan, which was /is largely a British creation, and which has been much in the news this week, did not exist until 1947.
Byron's saga, like Patrick Leigh-Fermor's later two-volume story of his own 1933 walk from Holland to Constantinople, A Time Of Gifts and Between The Woods & Water set a very high standard for travel writing. Both men took the genre well outside the borders of tourist guides and deep into the realms of history, culture, literature, and just pure fun.
Why is it that the British produced so many great travellers and travel writers at the same time they were pretty much mucking up the world in so many other ways? Odd.
Upon his arrival in Baghdad with his companion, Byron had this to say about that city:
"...For only one thing is it now justly famous: a kind of boil which takes nine months to heal, and leaves a scar."
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Mount Battenberg |
That still sounds about right, if we just change nine "months" to nine "years," no matter what jubilant news has come out of Pakistan this week.
...Speaking of which, you may have noticed that there was a royal wedding last week, at which one of the many hired-hand experts was one "India" Hicks. She was one of Lady Di's bridesmaids way back when, and is the granddaughter of Lord Louis Mountbatten (ne' Battenberg, a German). He was killed by terrorists in 1979.
Earl Mountbatten was Prince Philip's ( a Greek) uncle, and Prince Charles's ( a Nit) great-uncle/godfather and mentor. As the last Viceroy of India, he was the very one who was instrumental in creating, some might say cursing, the separation of Hindu India from Islamic India, aka Pakistan. Perhaps he felt that changing the name of a country would help in the same way it had helped his own family. Apparently, it didn't.
It makes one wonder if Ms. Hicks, who is herself 521st in line for the throne, had been born a boy, if she would have been called Stan? Well, it makes me wonder anyway, and I suppose I must make a disclosure: it is this same lady who occasionally shares an island with me, and who seldom misses an opportunity to mention its wonders so that every Euro aristo and pseudo-aristo will visit.
As many of you know from my own travel writing, this has caused me to hide my island under the fictitious name Saint James, in order to protect it from the same folks. As my great Saint James-ian friend and island laureate, Dunmore Townes, has written in his poem, The Duchess Of Dunmore Don't:
"...You can lead the royal pains
to a watering hole,
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The Hills of India |
But you don't
have to drink with dem..."
But, I have digressed, and I apologize. But that is how history goes. It has a nasty habit of digressing from expected paths, sometimes for years and years at a time. This allows us, of course, to severely alter our views about what actually happened when history was being made, often, as Robert Byron says, by small accidents, and not by heroic acts.
As time passes, we are able to paint history with a coat of whitewash mixed with various expedient political needs.
An incident that occurred to me this week might be a case in point. I overheard my coffee-cubicle neighbor at Starbuck's exclaiming, predictably enough I suppose, "I guess W doesn't look so stupid now..."
...which brings us full circle to that boil and that scar Byron mentioned.
When all the hoopla, however well-deserved, dies down, I recommend reading The RoadTo Oxiana. It will not erase any scar, celebrate any royals, bring back any lives, or turn back the clocks, but it will bring us closer to something called the truth, which is a very precious commodity these days.
Or any days.
Ed Note: We also recommend reading Patrick Leigh-Fermor's books, many of which have been reprinted in the past few years:
