In the valley of Assassins - Alamut
by Branko Soban
The youngest Tahir opened wide his eyes. He was looking at of the fortress, partially hewn out of a giant rock, that has risen in front of him. As if driving the fortress into a corner, Shah Rud split in two streams at this point. The castle was like a small settlement and climbed like a staircase from the low front into the high background. At its four corners stood four towers, with the farther two rising high over the front two. The fortress, together with the river, appeared like a wedge, rammed in between the two sheer, inaccessible mountain sides. Like a mighty barrier it was shutting off the exit from the canyon. That was Alamut, the most commanding among the fifty-odd fortresses of the Rudbar region. Deilem kings built it and it was said to be impregnable.
Vladimir Bartol, Alamut
The first time I read Vladimir Bartol’s Alamut in 1984, when the houses Obzorja in Maribor and Lipa in Koper published this masterpiece, that Slovenia and the world have now been rediscovering, sixty years after its birth. In the years after its first print the critics were not favourably disposed towards it. This of course pained Bartol. But in spite of the hurt he cared more for readers than for critics. Several times he spoke about the “readers’ vote”, that would sooner or later assure the novel its deserved place in the Slovenian literature. And as in other cases his writer’s intuition has not let him down. The “vote” has certainly been taking place: lately Alamut has been turning into a best-seller of a size, that’s been seldom experienced in Slovenian literature.
I happened upon Alamut again and again later, when travelling through the Near East as the reporter for Delo. One of the nicest surprises in connection with Slovenia I can definitely credit to Tidjani Hadad, Tunisian member of parliament and the then chief editor of the weekly Tunisia News. When we met for an interview in Tunis, he decided for starters to try out my knowledge of the literature of the place, where I am coming from. “Maybe you have heard about Vladimir Bartol?” he unexpectedly asked, looking at me from askance, while we sipped our teas in some Arab tea shop.
The shock of course was complete. Back home Bartol has been a butt of jokes for years, even for the greatest of our literary greats, who kept pushing him away onto the garbage heap of the history; and now here in Tunisia, where for years after our declaration of independence nobody had a clue about a place called Slovenia, a cultured Tunisian is able to quote with unbridled enthusiasm complete sentences from this book. “I’ve read Alamut in French translation. When doing my masters in Paris. Actually in one single sweep. And when I put it down, I said to myself, what I will say to you now: never ever before has a non-islamic hand written such a magnificent book about the world of Islam!” Our meeting went on for much longer than the agreed-upon half hour. Namely right after this introductory exchange Mister Tadjid got on the telephone and cancelled next two dates.
Friendly contacts, created there in Tunis a decade ago around the Alamut theme, have survived until today. And together with them the challenge of Alamut has survived as well, some kind of a quiet invitation to visit the fortress, which, for long impregnable, obliterated centuries ago, whiles away in its solitude in the distant mountains of Iran.
I struck a deal for the ride to Alamut with Mohamed Ali Porali, a kind Iranian of my age. He offered me his old, but pretty tough Peugeot, produced in one Iran’s own factories. Having three daughters back home, who were all three looking forward to be given away (and in Iran a wedding can cost you a fortune), he was glad to have a chance for an extra penny. Which is also why it was not too difficult for me to reach a deal.
We started on a Friday, the Lord’s day. Because it was still early, the streets of Teheran, otherwise hopelessly chock full of cars the whole week, up to the wee night hours, were uncannily silent and empty. As if overnight we turned up in some other, completely different Teheran. We could thus quite easily get out of the city and descend onto the wide highway going to Qazwin, the old and famous crossroad of caravans going to Caucasus, Caspian region and Mesopotamia, still one of the bigger and more important towns in the state.
Mohamed is an interesting talking partner. On the road he confesses to me, he used to be a commanding officer in the artillery before his retirement. First under shah and then under Khomeini. When the war with Iraq started, the gunners were first to get to the front: “It was bloody. Many of my soldiers do not live anymore. But they were good soldiers. We had superb Swiss anti-aircraft guns from Oerlikon. They have no match on this world. Iraqi MiGs were falling from the sky like flies. But we still feared every day for our lives. Thought of our dearest all the time. A war is something horrible. I don’t wish it upon anybody,” he was telling me during the ride,” Not even upon Iraqis. What the Americans are doing with them, is simply ghastly. And insulting to the Iraqi nation. We Iranians would never allow that something of this sort happens to us…” He lifted both his hands to stress the point and then hastily grabbed the steering wheel again. After a hundred miles, just ahead of Qazwin, we left the highway. In the direction of the mountains, accompanying us on the right all the way from Teheran on. The street sign says clearly – Alamut. The highway to Tabriz and to Turkey has already ended. The real ride is starting now. The road namely is narrow and, after leaving he plain behind, it starts to wind higher, toward the naked mountains, that are 10.000 feet and more high, with peaks whitened by the first November snowfall.
Even if the country is brown and dry as some bleak desert because of the incoming winter and prolonged droughts, the ride into the mountains does not bore me. There’s not much traffic. Now and then a truck passes, a heavy Mercedes, its strong motor the right thing for these ridges and ranges. The road is climbing steeply and every new turn opens up new, dramatic views. The real splendour, however, waits for us at the top of the Chala pass, where – in spite of a warm Iranian autumn – it’s pretty darn cold due to the altitude. Deep below us, like on the palm of my hand, I can see the scenic valley of Assassins, chiselled out between two magnificent mountain ranges, that one could barely cross in times, before the present-day roads have been built.
On the other side of the high mountains there’s the Caspian sea and on the south behind us the Alborza range descends into the Qazwin plain, a part of the Iranian high plain, which I have crossed with Mohamed. From the pass the road drops wildly into the valley, that’s been well known to more or less the whole of Europe during times of crusades and later too. Because of the mysterious Isma’ili sect, its Nizari branch and its leader, Hassan Ibn Sabbah, and because of the blind faith of his fedais, the fear and terror of many a court in those times, because they were ever ready to die for their master. Isma’ilis, due to stories, told by crusaders, stuck with the name of Assassins, built a number of castles and fortresses on the highs along this valley, with the mighty Alamut as the centre of their state.
During Hassan Ibn Sabbah’s lifetime (in Iran they just call him Hassan Sabbah) nobody was able to take this fortress. Alamut fell well over two centuries after his death, in November 1256 to be exact, when Mongols finally broke the Isma’ili resistance and completely demolished the castle. The Mongol khan Mangu delegated this gory task to his brother Hulagu. The last lord of the Alamut castle Rukn al-Din Khur Shah, 27th Nizari imam, who after the death of his father Ala al-Din Muhammad III ruled just for one year, surrendered to Mongols. But a day or two later Hulagu cut off his head with his own very hands and ordered every single Nizari to be killed, wherever they may be found in Persia. It was a massacre of a size, that those times probably have not seen. The few Isma’ilis, who have evaded Mongol swords, went underground and did not reappear until the 15th century, when they started again to spread their religion through Persia.
After a short hour of a slow and cautious ride along wild abysses we ended with Mohamed on the valley floor, among the rice fields of the picturesque village of Rajaye Dasht, with a bridge across muddy Rasmiyan, a tributary of Shah Rud (royal river), that’s born out of waters of Talikhan and Alamut, as the villagers tell us. At the village entrance a huge, rusty table with a detailed map of the valley and a warm “Welcome to Alamut” greets us. But the street sign close by visibly worsens mood of Mohamed, pretty much tired already from driving through all these mountains. It states namely in clear big letters, that there’s additional 40 long and winding miles to the Alamut fortress. This means another hour and a half drive, because the narrow road keeps climbing and descending, and on top of that you never know what waits for you around the next corner. Could be a herd of sheep, but it could be a broken down truck as well, which is even more dangerous.
Through the colourful and fertile valley, full of wheat and rice fields and orchards – there’s cherry trees too – we winded our way first into the Alamut village. At the gas station, however, the only one we’ve seen for some time, they let us know, the village has nothing to do with the fortress of the same name. The castle is another fifteen miles up the main road, and then you have to turn left and drive up the hill. With the old Peugeot, that in spite of heavy trials has not tired yet, we conquer these distance as well.
You can notice even from far away the giant dark brown rock that like some enormous spur looms steeply over the village and the whole valley. This is Bartol’s Alamut, the eagles’ nest, which the author has never seen with his own eyes. To reach the famous fortress it took us altogether more than five hours. A trifle compared to two day’s ride on mule’s back, that the famous globe trotter Freya Stark needed from Qazwin to get here. She described her travels through Persia in a magnificent itinerary “In the valley of Assassins”, that’s been reprinted innumerable times since. A copy of the first edition is a collectible today, with a rather steep price tag.
At the foot of Alamut it’s unexpectedly lively. Even on Friday, which in any Islamic country is a day of rest, a group of young men has been loading steel tubes on their backs to trudge them up the mountain. Each one of them carries one, and the mules carry two. The trail, hewed into the northern side of the huge rock, is well traced. First innumerable steps, then, below the top, a safe and well cared for footpath. Still the climb is punishing even without the load. The boys are visibly breathless and, after doing the trail a few times, even the mules are starting to buck, so the drovers are now and then letting them feel the stick.
They are dragging this hardware to the top of Alamut because the state has decided to renovate the fortress. They need it for scaffolds, which for the time being are actually disfiguring the mountain. But fortunately they have yet to reach the very top, so the restless spirit of Hassan Ibn Sabbah can still enjoy, until the spring, when they will resume the works, the undisturbed view of his realm, of the valley below. The Gazorkhan villagers namely still believe, the spirit of the former Lord of Alamut inhabits the mountain.
They buried him at the foot of the fortress. For two centuries following his death Isma’ilis from all over the world kept visiting his grave, until the Mongols on taking Alamut destroyed his last place of rest, so today nobody knows anymore, where his bones have be strewn. The master has been deprived of the eternal peace, the dead are entitled to, so his soul has been keeping watch at the top of Alamut, waiting for a chance to revenge, as a toothless old woman in the village below told me.
The craving to revenge was the red thread leading through the restless life of Hassan Ibn Sabbah. Starting in his youth in Nishapur, where he learnt his alphabet with Omar Khayyam, the famous poet and astronomer, and with Nizam al-Mulk, who later became the Seljuk vizier. As Edward Fitzgerald writes in the introduction to his translation of Khayyam’s verses, when taking leave of each other, the young men promised each other, the first one to succeed were to help the other two as best as he could. And truly. Nizam al-Mulk, who became the great vizier, took care of his friends, securing a regular stipend for the poet Khayyam, and an important court position for Hassan. But due to his knowledge and agility Hassan soon turned into a dangerous competitor for his school friend, so Nizam shamed him in front of sultan.
Hassan swore to revenge himself for this humiliation. He went to Egypt, where he got introduced into the secrets of the Isma’ili religion. He returned then to Persia and established a sect, that turned into the dread and terror of Seljuks and (indirectly) of other courts, near and far, as well. And the first victim of his fedais was the vizier Nizam al-Mulk himself, for breaking his pledge and in his ambition cheating his own school friend.
There’s not much to see right now at the top of Alamut. Of the mammoth fortress only few walls have remained, which archaeologists have covered carefully with straw and clay to protect them from destroying influence of the winter. The winter is a little shorter compared to the winter in Europe but because of the altitude (over 6000 feet) snow is plentiful, staying a long time into the spring .”It’s the approaching winter, that forces us to hurry up. We have to dig through the whole top of Alamut. Because of the exact ground plan of the fortress, which the state would like to renovate completely based on old maps. But when this is supposed to happen, nobody knows. Alamut will namely require inordinate amount of funds,” tells me Ruhollah Mirsai, the chief of the expedition, who’s at the top of the fort every day.
The view from the top, from where Bartol’s Jussuf threw himself into the abyss, is truly fantastic. At the edge of this precipice this great engineer of human souls, the lord over lives and deaths, Hassan Ibn Sabbah himself, often stood himself, pondering the destiny of the human race. “The man is strangest being in this world … He would like to soar like an eagle, but has no wings. He would like to have the power of a lion, but has no claws. How terribly imperfect you made him, o lord! And as a punishment you gave him the reason and the power to comprehend his own impotence…”
Deep below us, like on the palm of your hand, spreads out the village of Gazorkhan. Maybe that’s where the paradise gardens were hidden, that Hassan used to drug and prepare his faithful for their murderous missions. It’s these heavens that demonstrate Hassan’s creative resolve, to shape the world according to the divine image. To enter stealthily into the Allah’s workshop itself and, because he’s old and tired, take over his job. Involve him in the art contest of forming the clay again. And then – create a new man!
When driving back with Mohamed to Teheran, I’m thinking how cruel actually the literary crowd was towards Bartol. Let’s say Josip Vidmar in his Faces:” As a writer he was questionable… As an artist he never could really convince…Bartol said several times literature is his wife. It appears to me, however, this consort was indeed too much for him…” Or Ferdo Kozak in his letter to Miško Kranjec, published twenty years after Alamut: ”I still have to say, to me Alamut is a document of a special kind. For me it’s a peripheral literature, written by a person, who has no ear for the most essential, although simple issues of man and of his inner life… What’s precious in a man, it’s not some lumped-together morality – I know that. But it is anchored in things, that enrich the life, renewing and recreating it. The author of Alamut had a blind spot for that…”
One can of course understand the novel in all kinds of ways, but the stormy history of Bartol’s times as well as modern times has proven, that at its core Alamut is also a kind of a living metaphor for terrible dictators of times between the two wars, when the book was being written. On one side Hassan Ibn Sabbah and his fedais, Shah Malik and vizier Nizam al-Mulk, on the other side Mussolini, Hitler and today maybe Bush, who declared a real war on Islam. Very much like when the whole world united against the mysterious Isma’ilis.
The author himself wrote about it: ”I kept steeling the ‘fluid’ from dictators and suddenly I felt like a dancer on the rope, that hangs between the past and the present, between the present and the future. And I have not even noticed the moment, when the time, understood as the present, past and future, has dissolved for me, letting me experience things-to-be with the same intensity as the ‘now’ or events that happened yesterday or long time ago…”
And while driving down the picturesque valley back to Teheran and discussing our ascent of Alamut with Mohamed, I am thinking: were it not for Vladimir Bartol, who in 1938 wrote Alamut, Umberto Eco would for sure pounce on the subject half a century later. Hassan Ibn Sabbah was namely one of the most mysterious leaders of his times. He was an astronomer, philosopher and a dreamer. And on Alamut he built himself a library of a size, unmatched in those times. Maybe even more prominent than the one, Eco was discovering in the Name of the Rose.
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Alamut by Vladimir Bartol - ISBN: 0-9720287-3-0
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