Page 60 - 1930 October - To Dragma

OCTOBER, 1930 59

as we approached the gate which guards the city, and where the police
inspection takes place, he told me to sink down in my seat, pull my
hat over my eyes, and pretend to be asleep. I did, and we got through
the lines. I asked him afterwards how he had done it. He explained,
half apologetically, that he had told the guard that I was his Russian
wife! This was the same driver who, just before we left Teheran, had
put out of the outside front seat a Yezd merchant who had placed
himself there in order to avoid having to straddle the gear levers which
the middle seat involved, the driver using the argument that I should have
that seat, since I was a lady, and the levers would be difficult for my
skirts. He failed to note that the Yezd merchant wore a voluminous
coat that trailed to the ground, while my skirts were of the regulation
modern knee-length! When the man from Yezd undertook to point out
that fact, he was promptly transferred to another car! The whole Per-
sian trip was full of just such amusing incidents. I f only there were time
to tell more of them.)

At Isfahan, I had wonderful days of browsing and bicycling—in the
labyrinths of the old covered markets, in the Maidan (the vast public
square and parade ground where formerly the Shahs watched polo games
and where criminals were shot to pieces tied to the mouths of cannons),
along the famous Chehar Bagh (the city's main streets), and in the re-
mains of the ancient royal palace and gardens. I went often also to Julfa,
an Armenian Christian settlement across the river from Isfahan dating
from 1604, with an interesting history. ( " I f you can deal with an
Armenian," the Persians say, "you can deal with the devil himself!")
I was in Isfahan for the great Mohammedan I d , or the Feast of the Sacri-
fice, and at Isfahan, also, had an extraordinary piece of luck just as I
was getting ready to leave, being invited by a friend to drive in his car
to Shiraz, with visits on the way to the Tomb of Darius and the ruins
of Persepolis! The regular passenger cars about which I had been
inquiring allowed no time for stopovers at the ancient monuments. Pri-
vate cars were almost prohibitively expensive. M y hostess in Isfahan had
hved there for eight years before she had had a chance to see the famous
mins—and yet here, on the very day on which I had planned to try
(apologies for the Japanese clerk who accidentally tore, and himself re-
cut, this stencil, saying nothing about it until the finished page told
the tale. Apologies, too, for the poor quality of the whole job, which
certainly didn't measure up to promise, but also didn't seem worth re-
d o i u g . L.S.) to get to them somehow, came the invitation to do free
o f cost the very thing I was longing to do!

The story of that trip, with our scramble across the fields to those

wonderful carved rock walls that hold the tomb of Darius—jumping irri-

gation ditches, wading through streams and trudging through ploughed

e'as and nettle patches—is a long and amusing one, but we certainly

2°0nn a *r e w a r c f ° r o u r struggles in the beautiful and gigantic

, 00-year-old sculptures and tombs cut into the solid perpendicular

ace of the cliffs which we reached at the end of our tramp. There were

ur tombs in all, around the entrances of which enormous Greek crosses