In The Imperial Shadow

THE h M1RZA MAHMOUD KHAN SAGHAPHI PAGE TO THE SHAH C TY, NEW YORK 1928 CWRKMIT, 193ft BY BQimiTOAY, JJOtAN A COMPANY, W COPYRIGHT, t 7, 1028 BY AA PUBMfiHINn COMPANY ALL W01HT6 RBI1RVKU, PRINTBP IN THR UNITKP TATSS AT THS COWNTRy UW lRI, GARDEN Cm, N, V, CONTENTS PART I CHAPTER PAGE I. The Birth of a Persian Boy 3 II. AVisit to My Holy Uncle 17 III. My Cousins and I Distribute Alms to the Poor 26 IV. lakh Takes Me to School 34 V. Making Ready for the New Year 54 VI New Years Eve Arrives 70 VII. Two Eunuchs from the Shafts Palace Call to Wish My Mother a Happy New Year 79 VIE AVisit to the Harem 84 X. My Second Visit to Her Majesty, the Queen 101 PART II I, Leaf nin About My Ancestors 121 II I Visit My Fa tksr College 142 IE Ti Imperial Prison 150 IV. A Gtimps of the Shah and a Visit to the Summer Palace 158 V. Looking the Tiger in the Eyes 172 VI Preparations for the Imperial Orlou 179 VII Akbar, the Knight Errant 19 VIII Attars Horn 201 vi CONTENTS PART III CHAPTER PAGE I. I Set Out for the Land of the White Monster 215 II. We Mo-urn for the Great Martyr 227 III. The Passing of the Impend Ordou 239 IV. A Night in the Mountains 246 V. Crossing the Famous Mountain Corridor 258 VI. The Imperial Camp 265 VII. Determining a Chess Champion 281 VIII. Hunting in the Jungles of Mazenderan 286 II. Riding with the Shah 300 X. Opium Smokers 309 XI. AShamSeyyed 317 JII. We Come to the End of the Summer 333 PART IV I. On the Road Again 343 II. Farther Along the Road 356 III. The Jinnees Pursue Me 364 IV. A Strange Walk 371 V. Yaghout, the Executioner Prince of WrM 377 VI. The ff Unseen Hand Strikes 388 PART I THE BIRTH OF A PERSIAN BOY IT WAS the 7th of March, the month in which the Queen of Springis reborn. The peaceful, easy-going Persians were chanting in Arabic the last words of their morning prayer before getting ready to go to their work. The prayer over, each man embraced his wife and children and, stand ing in the centre of the large court of his house or the smaller one of his hovel turned his face toward the sky and filled his lungs with a deep draft of the fresh, exhilarating air, laden with the perfume of early violets. The dawn of a new day was enough to make him happy. For the rest, he trusted in the bounty of the Almighty Khoda with the un alterable trust that his faith inspired. The faith of Islam taught by the Prophet, upon whose soul be the benediction of God The first to start his prayer and the last to finish was Mash-hadi Eshagh, a tenant of my fathers. In the summer Eshagh made mud bricks with a wooden mould and left them on the ground to dry in the sun. During the fall and winter he was a man of all work. He sold anything for which there was a demand-baked potatoes to pedes trians in the streets or aromatic Kerbs to the housewives. He worked also during the night, especially in the winter, when the snow was heavy and the air biting. Then he sold tripe. For the past few weeks he had been selling boiled beet-roots in the early morning. Notwithstanding his meagre revenue he had managed during long years of hard work to turn the courtyard of his 4 IN THE IMPERIAL SHADOW little mud-and-straw-covered brick house into a lovely small garden as beautiful as the large gardens and parks of the neighbouring houses. He was a lover of flowers, as most Persians are, and a philosopher and moralist as well. On that particular morning he was looking with interest at thenarcissi and hyacinths growing in pots on the window-sills Let us see our sabze, he said to himself and walked to his little bedroom window to look with affectionate eyes at slender blades of wheat growing in a large earthen platter, A handful of these grains had been carefully spread two weeks before by the hands of his wife. She had chosen a sunlit spot and anxiously hoped for a full, bushy growth before the 21st of March, the Persian New Years Day when the platter was to serve as a decoration for her eve ning table...