One of the guys then asked if Sabine was my wife, and on hearing that she wasn’t said, “She has very beautiful eyes.” It was interesting that the guys all seemed too shy, or perhaps just mindful of Iranian social protocol, to address her directly. The same guy said, “I like her. Please tell her.”
I did, even though Sabine had heard for herself, to which Sabine replied jokingly that she was probably old enough to be his mother. He then asked me to ask Sabine if she had a sister.
After the reaction to Khomeini from the shopkeeper, I was curious to ask them what they thought of their government and of the late Ayatollah. There was no dispute like the JLo and Christina debate; they all unanimously stated their hatred. Sabine seemed surprised at this and asked if their parents had similar views. They nodded and one guy said, “My father fucking hates him!” Without further prompting he then said, “I like Mr. George Bush very much.” When we offered contrary opinions he replied, “Yes, George Bush is a bad man, but he is not as bad as Khomeini.” We laughed.
When we bade them good night, they all wanted to shake hands although they wouldn’t shake Sabine’s. We walked Sabine back to her hotel and arranged for her to call on us tomorrow morning, where we would then charter a car or get a minibus to the castle. On our way back, Ricardo and I stopped off at a milkshake shop where I had the best “milk banana” I’ve ever tasted. I finished the first and it was so good I had another. I don’t know what the guy put in it, but it might have been crack it was so addictive. As soon as we got back to the hotel, we hit the sack.
Getting any sleep was another matter, though, as it was swelteringly hot and our room was full of mosquitoes. There was no screen on the window, but it was so hot we had little choice but to leave it wide open. The little bastards feasted on us for hours before it became too much, and at two in the morning, Ricardo turned to me and asked, “Jamie, are you awake?”
I was, and he didn’t need to tell me what he was thinking. We jumped out of bed, turned on the light, shut the window, and set about a rampage of killing that made the Indian ketchup flick seem tame. One by one, we asserted our revenge. Halfway through the cull, I glanced across at Ricardo standing like me in nothing but his underpants, with a look of sheer intensity on his face. He looked as if on a life or death military operation. We both started to laugh. By the time we’d finished, there were probably some fifty bloody splat marks on the walls. The last few were the hardest to get, but when finally over, it was a tremendous relief and sleep was not far off.
CHAPTER EIGHT
By eight o’clock, Ricardo, Sabine, and I were chartering a taxi. The drive to the Castle of the Assassins was spectacular, taking us along meandering gravel roads through absolutely breathtaking mountain scenery.
The view from the car may have been great, but the car itself wasn’t. It was in a terrible condition and felt very unstable, rocking from side to side like a skateboard with loose trucks. The driver pulled over at an isolated little roadside store to give the car a breather and its brakes a rest, which were smoking, and I mean that literally. I got out and took a photo of the billowing white fumes wafting up from the front wheel arches. It wasn’t a reassuring sight considering the steep, curvy nature of the road and its many nasty vertical drops. We all popped into the roadside shop whilst waiting for the car to recover. Five minutes later and we were back on the road. The condition of the taxi was no reason for the driver not to put his foot down, though, and it was full speed all the way to the village of Alamut. Here the driver indicated that we should get out.
“What the hell’s going on?” I thought. We still had thirteen miles to the castle, but the devious driver tried to make out that we’d only paid to get to this village, and if we wanted to go all the way to the castle then we’d have to come up with more money, to the tune of IR60,000. That was what we’d paid thus far and had traveled many times the distance from here to the castle. I told him that if he didn’t stick to the normal deal, he’d get nothing (we hadn’t paid him yet) and we’d hitch or catch another cab. Another annoying stand off set in with all of us determined not to give in first.
After about ten minutes of sitting around in the roasting sun, Ricardo and Sabine reluctantly agreed to give him a further IR10,000 to take us all the way there. He was very lucky to get this, as by now I was keen to tell him to take a long walk off a short pier. Our crafty driver dropped us in another village and pointed us in the direction of the castle, which he assured us was walkable from here. We took his word for it but were apprehensive since it would have been easy for him to stitch us up in revenge for the contretemps earlier.
We walked into the village past several mud-brick houses and inquired with an old woman who was beating an intricately designed Persian rug as to the whereabouts of the castle. She spoke no English but a young man nearby helped us out. Worryingly, he also informed us that the next bus back to Qazvin left not in the afternoon, as we’d assumed, but tomorrow morning. This was a problem as we were in the middle of nowhere in rural Iran and had no chance of finding a taxi out here.
Whoops.
I was convinced we could hitchhike back, but Ricardo and Sabine weren’t too keen on the hitching option. We decided not to worry about it until we’d located the castle we’d come all this way to see.
It was a steep walk to the castle. We’d not hiked for more than a minute when a four-wheel-drive pickup truck came by and offered us a lift. This was what I loved about Iran: one minute you could be peeved with some crafty taxi driver for trying to rip you off, and the next some generous stranger was going out of his way to help you out. And go out of his way he did—not only did he give us a lift to the path just below the castle, but he also gave us some fresh figs and a frozen water bottle full of ice. The figs were fresh, not dried—green on the outside and fleshy red on the inside and unlike any I’d tried.
We thanked him, and cooled off for a minute by a clear stream before starting the steep trek to the top. It was a beautiful but tiring walk past a towering sand-colored rock face up to a little plateau. Here the track changed direction, hugging the rock face to our right, which led onto a series of steps winding up the cliff. The plateau was a great place to take a breather and take in the view. On our left were mountains of surprisingly varied colored rocks. There were shades of pink, yellow, green, and even purple, making them look like a vast pastels picture. Farther on from this was a little valley almost entirely enclosed by dramatic crusty layered rocks jutting up from the ground as if thrown skyward by some enormous force. Down in the valley was a flat piece of lush grassy ground almost in a perfect circle surrounded on its outside by proud, elegant, upright standing poplar trees, which were slowly swaying in the breeze. And in the distance, framing the whole picture, were the towering Alborz Mountains reaching to the huge endless blue sky above.
It was a great sight and one that only got better the farther up we went. When we reached the top, the castle came into view. The castle was called Alamut, which was one of several local fortresses known collectively as the Dezha-ye Hashishiyun or Castles of the Assassins. These once strongly fortified bases had been the hideouts for followers of a peculiar religious cult based, somewhat loosely, around the teachings of Ismailism.
The cult was founded in the eleventh century by a complete nutter by the name of Hasan Sabah, who recruited followers from as far afield as Khorasan province in eastern Iran and parts of Syria. His group were widely feared and for good reason, as they weren’t adverse to a bit of beastly barbarity—their specialty being the murder of religious and political leaders. It’s purported the assassins’ crafty leaders would lure their followers into the castle’s beautiful gardens where irresistible maidens would tend to their every need and get them hopelessly stoned out of their minds on hashish. Nothing wrong with that, but on the downside they would then be sent out to commit murder under the belief that their leader, Hasan Sabah, had the magical power to protect them from harm’s way and that he could whisk them off to paradise.
Interestingly, the word “assassin” is derived from the word for the followers of the sect, the Hashishiyun. Alamut Castle is the only fortress of the Assassins that is easily accessible; the others, about twenty-three of them, require the likes of a guide and donkeys to get to. Alamut had been constructed in AD 860 but was captured in 1090 by the Assassins, who subsequently resided there until 1256 when it was captured by the Mongols, who consigned the Assassins to history.
The cult’s existence was first brought to the attention of Europe by returning Crusaders, but the Assassins were made famous by English writer Dame Freya Stark’s classic twentiethcentury travel book
