The descent to the valley was hair-raising. It was as if the entire range on which we’d been perched was a giant breaking wave, and having ascended the gentle backslope, we next had to negotiate down the much steeper face. We made camp that night at its base and then for five days traversed untracked and seared reaches of red, hardened earth. This country Ismail believed to be inhabited by heretics capable of eating, or at least sitting in, fire. He mentioned with some concern that he didn’t think they were Moslem at all.
On the sixth day we encountered, just as Polo’s account recorded, a stepped and crooked valley rising to our left. The path of its dried riverbed the Italian called the Track of Thieves. As it narrowed, its walls radiated heat. We could feel our elevation. In the winter, Ismail speculated, a bitter wind must scour out this funnel. Aziz responded from ahead that winters in his village were so cold that even the wolves stayed home.
Eventually we reached the willows and sanjid trees of the Badasht oasis, smaller than Polo described it, and had our bread and raisins by a stream while white-and-black magpies stalked to and fro before us. On either side the cliffs were so high we were untouched by the sun. When Ismail smeared his cheese on his lips as a kind of balm, I found myself longing for the minor relief of some mealtime companionship that didn’t involve spitting or mashing food with one’s fingers.
We were joined in the late afternoon by a shepherd with crossed eyes and his two sons. They afforded us the standard greeting, polite without effusion, and for a time we sat in a circle in silence that in the East is good manners. Upon seeing the whiteness of my arms they pulled up their own sleeves in order to demonstrate the contrast. Finally the shepherd informed Ismail that they had never seen a European woman. Or man. They seemed pleased with us for having been brave enough to come among them.
They laid out their meal before them and shared what they had with great hospitality. This meant less for them, and when I partook at their insistence, the father looked off downstream with a comfortable kind of sadness and the smaller boy’s eyes followed every mouthful I took.
While the boys filled the family goatskin with water and Aziz gathered straw for the mules, the shepherd asked Ismail to explain my presence, glancing over every so often to see if my appearance corroborated the outlandish story he was receiving. He told us that Alamut was the name not of the fortress but of the valley itself. He said that people often came in search of the fortress but when pressed on that point clarified that to his knowledge only two men had done so in the last seven years. Later, as we made our arrangements for sleep, the boys exclaimed over a wandering tortoise. And then we retired to the tremolo of water running nearby, the sweetest of sounds in the night.
A priest counseling Philip VI of France against the hazards of an exploratory campaign in the East wrote of the Assassins that they were thirsty for human blood, contemptuous of life and salvation, and could, like the devil, encloak themselves in radiance. If encountered they were to be cursed, then fled. They had turned taqiyya, the Shia tradition of concealment in the face of persecution, back against the Sunni in the most lethal of configurations. When not disguised they were said to have worn white gowns with red headcloths, the colors of innocence and blood. This and more came from Von Hammer-Purgstall’s history of the sect in the London School of Oriental Studies, and when I wrote Vera excitedly of my find, she wrote back, “Wolves in sheep’s clothing: of course it would excite you.”
Ismail warned that we should travel as much by night in this region as we could manage, for safety’s sake, and the shepherd when taking his leave of us seemed to agree. The path above the oasis after a short stretch led us through a long defile of dark stone the shepherd had called the Black Narrows and in which he had warned us not to linger. When that ended we found our track clinging to a cliff that fell away below us a thousand feet. Each slip by our mules occasioned a curse from Ismail, tired and furious at being forced to navigate such a passage. So narrow that our outside feet hung out over the abyss, it continued for miles with no widening that might allow us to take our ease, and after nightfall the darkness grew so total that even my mule’s ears were lost to sight. I entrusted the edge, step by step, wholly to him.
Mid-morning the next day, round a particularly terrifying corner, the track finally opened out onto an ancient road and the ruins of an old bridge over a cataract plunging away into the valley below: the Alamut stream, I was certain, whose spring provided water for the fortress. From anywhere but this spot, the great ridge and headland of rock seemed to close off with a wall any upward access. We still had a thousand feet to climb, along that thin thread of water which near the top dispersed its spray to the wind, but even so we knew how close we were. After an uncomfortable cliff-side night’s rest, a morning’s ascent brought us in searing sunlight onto the knife-edge of a ridge. And before us, like the prow of a great ship, was what had to be the western redoubt of the Rock of the Assassins.
Around its northern flank appeared a path tilted on a frighteningly steep gradient through white limestone that powdered like salt beneath the mules’ hooves. The scree was sufficiently treacherous that Ismail and I ascended as much with our hands as our feet, Aziz behind us leading the mules. At the summit we scrambled over a low outer wall made of a few loose stones and into a cold wind, sweat-soaked as we were. The height was such that we could plainly see the roundness of the Earth. On the northwestern side a granite pillar adjoining an even higher cliff face formed a natural citadel and revealed itself as the site of the spring, the conduits of which were still visible as grooves running south to rectangular cisterns dug into the solid rock.
The site had long since been pumiced clean by the wind, although traces of the outer walls emerged here and there, as well as half the central keep, still upright and brandishing an iron loophole at its highest point. On all sides the natural walls fell away sheer. From the southern end we looked down two thousand feet of stone. To the east, in huge stone slabs, were round holes four inches deep and eight in diameter that may have held the doorposts for giant gates. Out of one hole I fished a piece of blue-glaze pottery pictured in von Hammer-Purgstall’s history, and sank to my knees with a cry. “It is Polo’s fortress!” I shrieked to Aziz, who smiled back in terror at my agitation.
I was streaming sweat despite the cold. I retrieved the map from my saddlebag and took some bearings with numbed fingers. To the east we could see the great semicircle of a mountain range covered with snow, and through its passes northward a hint, in the haze, of the Caspian jungle and the sea. We were so high that by late afternoon the sunlight had lost its force and our bones seemed to absorb the mountains’ frigidity. Ismail, alarmed, wrapped my bedroll about my shoulders, where it flailed and thrashed. I sank to a sitting position while I wept, and the wind felt as I did about the map, buffeting it to pieces.
The next morning I woke to clouds from the Caspian Sea pouring like a wave over the distant watershed to the northeast. They sailed toward us and melted away in the sun’s heat before reaching our valley. I had lost the energy to raise my arms and pitched from dehydration to floods of perspiration, and knew immediately that it must be malaria. Ismail examined me and diagnosed that as well as dysentery, two diseases he assured me he was well used to seeing. He prescribed a soup of rice, milk, and almonds that would scrub me out like soap. I reminded him that we had none of those ingredients and he answered that we would make use of them once we did. I instructed him to fetch the quinine from my saddlebag and gave myself a double dose. How far were we from the nearest motor road, or doctor? It was all another world.