Mother of All Road Trips (XIV)*:  Red Snake and Towering Cypress

Ride down the valleys northwest of Mashhad (Iran) toward the Caspian basin and you find yourself rapping at the gates of staggering human dramas.   As the road turns south you see traces of that story: ruined ramparts of a great wall, sometimes called the ‘Red Snake’, rivaling in scale the Great Wall of China.  More than a thousand years old, it was thrown up in hopes of fending off the horseback stirrings of central Asia’s nomads who would later create empires of their own.

But much earlier even than that, this continental interior of seas and mountains set in motion prehistoric waves of human migration that swept east toward India and west as far as the shores of the Atlantic and beyond.  These impulses would unite half the world in speaking ‘Indo-European’ languages, all finding a single root here in this very neighborhood.

Such a story, now pieced together by geneticists and linguists, unfolded on landforms equal to that drama. They come into view as the highway swings up from valley depths, climbing onto the ridges of a chain of mountains.  There the scale and grandeur of this scene comes into sharp relief.  At your feet lies a shimmer of the Caspian Sea.  To the east and far north lie the endless steppes that gave us the horse, which, married to the spoked wheel, yielded not only wagons, but, heaven help us, war chariots.  To the west lies a system of rugged mountains – the Elburz, skirting the southern shores of the Caspian, and running beyond into southeastern Europe, the Caucuses.  To the south lie the arid plains of Persia’s interior once known as Parthia.

But while such grand themes belong to chronicles of the past, our little caravan paused on the heights not so much in reverence, but rather, to inspect our battered gear.  We soon realized that the bazaar-fashioned rooftop carrier was urgently in need of repairs.  The welds were giving way under the punishment of rough roads and the weight of our load.  We found a village welding shop and set to putting things right as a crowd gathered.  A man of stern demeanor approached demanding to see travel papers.  As we fumbled in our bags, one of our party had the temerity to question his authority to check documents.  The man led our companion aside under a glare, and there drew back his coat to reveal a holstered sidearm.  This was authority enough to result in eager compliance and a full set of passports.  We were only the latest barbarians to have trespassed through the wall, there to face comeuppance.

This small settlement, we discovered, belonged to the cradle of an ancient monotheistic faith.  It’s founder, Zoroaster, arose out on the steppes east of the Caspian as many as three thousand years ago.  There is reason to believe that the biblical Magi who came to Bethlehem in search of an infant Messiah were star-lovers of this faith.  Today their descendants, long oppressed, are scattered to the winds well beyond central Asia – to India where we knew them as Parsees, and to small enclaves in Europe and America.

One of the most exquisite drives of our entire trek then threaded us through a mountain couloir south of the Caspian toward Tehran.  There, snow-crowned peaks overlooked mountain slopes leading down to streams far below.  In the valley depths, like black sentinels, stood towering cypress trees marking farms and settlements, scenes reminiscent of a Van Gogh landscape.  One such cypress, in the distant south near the imperial city of Persepolis, said to have been planted by Zoroaster himself in his preacherly travels, has stood guard across three millennia and now ranks among the oldest surviving life forms on the planet.

And we, in tinker-toy wheeled conveyance of our own, are but passing – well – barbarians.

*This Traipse series, ‘Mother of All Road Trips’, recounts an overland journey by car including four school-leaver chums in the summer of 1965 traveling from Karachi (Pakistan) to Rotterdam (Netherlands).  The relative peace of that time, however rugged the infrastructure, permitted passage along what followed much of the ancient Silk Road.