Full Tilt by Dervla Murphy Read Free Book Online Page A

I’ve earned a few months of perfect weather!)
    Soon after lunch I abandoned the road for over ten miles and cycled along a dried-up river-bed where the baked mud was firm and smooth and the boulders en route seemed a mere triviality as compared with the excruciating, sharp-edged gravel on a road with an inexorably corrugated surface. When I found the river-bed veering too much to the south I reluctantly left it and walked over a mile or so of desert back to the road. The last thirty miles were through another magnificent mountain range with a very stiff climb up to this village. I passed the scene of a ghastly smash-up reported a few days ago in theEnglish-language Teheran paper. A truck and bus were in a head-on collision on a V-bend – both went into a ravine and fifty-one were killed. Something similar happens almost every day somewhere in Persia and the drivers are always blamed. Watching Persian buses on mountain roads makes me feel quite ill; when I see the dust-cloud that heralds one I dismount and remove myself to a safe distance. During ten days in Teheran I witnessed seven bad traffic accidents, four of them involving the deaths of nine people.
    This is a tiny village of some twenty domed mud huts, a tea-house and the barracks. There should be a level road tomorrow as the map shows no passes – but probably we’ll have a worse surface each day.
SHAHRUD, 2 APRIL
    How right can you be! We only covered sixty-six miles today (5.45 a.m.–6.50 p.m.) and I had to walk over twenty-five of them, not because of hills, but because no one with any regard for their cycle would ride it over this sort of infernal track. I haven’t seen one private car or one lorry since leaving Teheran, though many buses pass, packed with people and overloaded on the roofs with rolls of carpet, bicycles, crates of hens, lambs and kids (alive and kicking – literally!) and diverse bundles containing God knows what. These buses unload for lunch (between 12 and 3) at village eating-houses, which have streams running beside them and a few green trees shading the carpet-covered ‘tables’ on which everyone sits cross-legged eating their bread and chives and hard-boiled eggs and minced-meat balls and mast (the Persian yoghourt). Before the meal all babies present have their napkins changed and these are washed in the stream (as are the chives and everybody’s teeth after eating) and spread out to dry before the resumption of the journey. Today I joined one of these parties (obviously a pilgrimage returning from Meshed) and though I was addressed as ‘Monsieur’ the mere fact that I was from a Christian country provoked hostility. I didn’t dare use the camera, though I would have valued a few shots of those fanatical-looking chaps in filthy rags and tatters. Many of them were adolescents, so it’s going to take H.I.M. a long, long time to tame thislot. The children were terrified of me and wouldn’t come for the sweets I offered and the whole atmosphere was so unpleasant that I removed myself sooner than I would have otherwise and took my siesta in the safety of the desert a few miles away.
    A phenomenon that intrigues me is the number of Catholic religious oleographs in all these eating-houses and tea-houses – Christ as a baby in the manger or working in the carpenter’s shop, the Immaculate Heart of Mary picture, highly coloured, Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, Our Lady of Good Counsel, cheap prints of the Raphael Madonna, and St Joseph. These are in addition, of course, to the Shah, the Empress and baby Prince in various stages of growth, not to mention luscious semi-nude females advertising Pepsi-Cola and aspirin. But how all these Christian pictures got here baffles me; granted the Muslims are devoted to Christ as a Prophet and to Our Lady, but I wouldn’t have thought their devotion would go so far.
    When I arrived on the outskirts of this town a car overtook me and the driver (manager of a local sugar factory and reader of the