False Summits

by John Parle (Ireland)

I didn't expect to find Iran

Getting late now, but no rush. I was enjoying the crunch of the darkening earth under my boots, coming down in a saunter from the hill above Garmeh. Each footfall brought me a little closer to the leaning palms of the oasis, and out of that green-dark island came the cool breath of plants and a rising chorus of insects. A dog barked in salute from somewhere behind the zig-zag palm fronds, irrigation channels, and mud-brick walls at the edge of town. Almost home. Pomegranates had fallen in clumps along the path, so I made one final stop, to stoop and hold one in my hand. It felt heavy with sugar and water; relief after a day heaving over sun-blasted crags, the factor fifty running into my eyes. I slipped it into my pocket. My legs carried on while I turned inward, and I was flicking through the pictures in my head when I heard the ocarina. I’d looked down on the oasis from a jagged rock chair, just when the muezzin called out across the landscape. At my back there was nothing at all, only the thousand-mile stare of the desert. One more false summit. From Tehran to Kashan, on to Isfahan, I’d started in the haze of a modern megalopolis and visited bustling bazaars and caravanserais on the way to soaring domes and minarets. From there I traced the curve of a question mark along the map, by winding alleys and windcatchers in Yazd, then far out into the desert, to this little green gem at Garmeh. Very faint at first, like one friend rousing another from a dream, the melody came on the air. The cricket song was loud now and all around me, but for the musician it was like a canvas to a painter. She took slow, even steps up a scale, then down again. She lingered on the lowest note, then let herself drop back into the warm lake of sound. When the music resurfaced, I had already decided to follow it. It ushered me off the path home, down a dark stretch hugged by trees. Where the track held hands with a canal, the atmosphere dipped and cooled, and where they parted it drew new heat from the earth. The crickets kept me company through the pauses, until each time the musician returned to cast me a few more breadcrumbs. The moon lent enough light to follow them round bends, up ramps, over potholes. Each melody was complete in itself, so with each rest I wondered whether another would come. Each time it did, until then, it didn’t. Only the crickets now. I kept my bearing and walked on. The trees began to thin, the crickets receded, and I approached the courtyard of a teahouse at the edge of town. All awash there in the amber of a sleepy fire, perched upon a log stool, was a woman wearing a viridian headscarf. Beside her she had set down a small earthenware oval, the ocarina. Dorna spoke a little English. Over tea and a halved pomegranate, we built a conversation of comfortable silences, quick questions and easy answers. We were the same age and quite alike, I thought, though I was a boy from Tipperary and she a girl from Tehran. Her manners were as mild as her music, but her eyes were sharp and keen. I asked her if she travelled, and she said she’d lived for a month on Hormuz, spearing crabs for dinner and sleeping under stars on the beach. Via giant sandcastles in Kerman and a rainbow mosque in Shiraz, I reached the Persian Gulf. I was ferried first to Qeshm, then on to Dorna’s Hormuz. It’s an island where the rocks are red, struck through with chalk and sulphur. The sand is as pink as a pomegranate. I sweated more than I thought was possible each time I halted the bike and the engine went quiet, all forty-four degrees attacking at once. Getting late now, but no rush. I was coming down in a saunter from the Portuguese castle, long bested and buried in pink powder. I was peering from one peak to the last, and to the next.