habit of sleeping whenever I want to, which is very convenient.)
Only two trucks had passed all morning, taking petrol to Herat from the oil refinery at Meshed, and it was nearly 2 p.m. before the next one woke me as it came rattling along the execrable road. The driver was a barefooted Afghan with a flowing turban and as you can’t put a bicycle on top of an oil-tanker he nonchalantly roped Roz to the engine; the fact that she completely obscured his view of the road was quite irrelevant since Asian drivers never look where they’re going. As I was getting into the cab he noticed my sunburn and was appalled. Before I could try to explain that if not touched it didn’t hurt he had coated my arm with Premium Pure Motor Oil, applied on a filthy piece of cotton wool out of his own First Aid box. He was so gentle that the treatment didn’t pain me in the least but it remains to be seen whether Premium Pure Motor Oil on raw sunburn is a cure or the beginning of a lingering, fatal illness!
The cab of this truck had no doors and no windscreen glass and noseats but an upturned box for the driver; it seemed to be entirely home-made and the petrol engine stank so strongly that, despite all the fresh air, I was feeling violently ill in less than half an hour. Only the fact that we had three breakdowns in less than a hundred miles saved me: I was able to get out then and recover. The driver told me that there was no bicycle shop before the frontier town of Tieabad so here I am a day ahead of schedule; actually the road was so bad for the last sixty miles that even if Roz hadn’t succumbed I would probably have given up the unequal struggle and hitched a ride over that stretch for both our sakes: the only alternative would have been to walk every yard of the way.
The first thirty miles today was through quite prosperous country with an unusual number of cattle and many acres of wheat, well up. The people, who are supposed to be even more unreliable than those of Azerbaijan, were very nice to me at both the villages where I stopped for tea and water. A minority of them are Mongolians, which is quite thrilling – a proof I’m nearing Central Asia! One point that intrigued me was that there do not appear to be any half-breeds: one sees either pure Aryan features or pure Mongolian, so there must be no intermarrying, which seems odd, as they’re all Muslims.
I had a second lunch at 2.30 with the driver at a tiny village eating-house . The mutton soup was delicious (if you like your soup twenty-five per cent grease with lumps of fat floating in it, as I do) and was followed by perfectly cooked and beautifully flavoured mutton stew with beans, bread, raw onion and Pepsi-Cola (Persia’s national drink!). I find the style of building evolved to suit mud very attractive; there are no corners or angles; everything is rounded and arched and curved. I’ve now got used to the Eastern way of sitting silently doing nothing whatever for an indefinite period. These people don’t indulge in conversation as a pastime: they have occasional fierce arguments about some particular point and the rest is silence. I found it very pleasant today, just sitting cross-legged on my carpet (a posture which is no longer agonising as my joints are in training) looking out through the arched doorway at the blue sky and the few green trees growing beside the stream and the pale gold landscape and the donkey-traffic – little boys galloping by, old men walking their steeds sedately, and young men leading donkeys which were almost hidden under enormous leather pannier-bags filled with earth for some new building. The stream (which is also the local fridge) was flowing eloquently over boxes of bottles of Pepsi and the water was bubbling companionably in the men’s hookahs all around me. I couldn’t help wondering what all these millions of people think about during all these countless hours spent silently sitting – they have so few mental stimulants that
Only two trucks had passed all morning, taking petrol to Herat from the oil refinery at Meshed, and it was nearly 2 p.m. before the next one woke me as it came rattling along the execrable road. The driver was a barefooted Afghan with a flowing turban and as you can’t put a bicycle on top of an oil-tanker he nonchalantly roped Roz to the engine; the fact that she completely obscured his view of the road was quite irrelevant since Asian drivers never look where they’re going. As I was getting into the cab he noticed my sunburn and was appalled. Before I could try to explain that if not touched it didn’t hurt he had coated my arm with Premium Pure Motor Oil, applied on a filthy piece of cotton wool out of his own First Aid box. He was so gentle that the treatment didn’t pain me in the least but it remains to be seen whether Premium Pure Motor Oil on raw sunburn is a cure or the beginning of a lingering, fatal illness!
The cab of this truck had no doors and no windscreen glass and noseats but an upturned box for the driver; it seemed to be entirely home-made and the petrol engine stank so strongly that, despite all the fresh air, I was feeling violently ill in less than half an hour. Only the fact that we had three breakdowns in less than a hundred miles saved me: I was able to get out then and recover. The driver told me that there was no bicycle shop before the frontier town of Tieabad so here I am a day ahead of schedule; actually the road was so bad for the last sixty miles that even if Roz hadn’t succumbed I would probably have given up the unequal struggle and hitched a ride over that stretch for both our sakes: the only alternative would have been to walk every yard of the way.
The first thirty miles today was through quite prosperous country with an unusual number of cattle and many acres of wheat, well up. The people, who are supposed to be even more unreliable than those of Azerbaijan, were very nice to me at both the villages where I stopped for tea and water. A minority of them are Mongolians, which is quite thrilling – a proof I’m nearing Central Asia! One point that intrigued me was that there do not appear to be any half-breeds: one sees either pure Aryan features or pure Mongolian, so there must be no intermarrying, which seems odd, as they’re all Muslims.
I had a second lunch at 2.30 with the driver at a tiny village eating-house . The mutton soup was delicious (if you like your soup twenty-five per cent grease with lumps of fat floating in it, as I do) and was followed by perfectly cooked and beautifully flavoured mutton stew with beans, bread, raw onion and Pepsi-Cola (Persia’s national drink!). I find the style of building evolved to suit mud very attractive; there are no corners or angles; everything is rounded and arched and curved. I’ve now got used to the Eastern way of sitting silently doing nothing whatever for an indefinite period. These people don’t indulge in conversation as a pastime: they have occasional fierce arguments about some particular point and the rest is silence. I found it very pleasant today, just sitting cross-legged on my carpet (a posture which is no longer agonising as my joints are in training) looking out through the arched doorway at the blue sky and the few green trees growing beside the stream and the pale gold landscape and the donkey-traffic – little boys galloping by, old men walking their steeds sedately, and young men leading donkeys which were almost hidden under enormous leather pannier-bags filled with earth for some new building. The stream (which is also the local fridge) was flowing eloquently over boxes of bottles of Pepsi and the water was bubbling companionably in the men’s hookahs all around me. I couldn’t help wondering what all these millions of people think about during all these countless hours spent silently sitting – they have so few mental stimulants that
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