Books: Lost Tribe

THE LAST MIGRATION (343 pp.)—Vincent Cronin—Dutton ($4.50).

A fruitfull countrey, inhabited with pasturing people, which dwell in the Summer season upon mountains, and in Winter they remoove into the valleyes . . . in carravans . . . of people and cattell, carrying all their wives, children and baggage. . .

This Elizabethan description of nomadic Persians (from Hakluyt’s Principal Voyages) would have been accurate in the time of Herodotus (circa 484-425 B.C.) and was still accurate in A.D. 1926, when Persia’s modern-minded Reza Shah Pahlavi began his reign, set about freeing the women of their veils, ordered the men into Western suits and decided that nomadic existence was “a blot on his progressive country.” Harried by the Shah’s troops, the nomadic tribes “settled,” but in 1941, when Reza was forced to abdicate after the Allies moved into Persia, the tribes went back to their ancient way of life. They stuck to it until a few years ago, when British Author Vincent (The Wise Man from the West) Cronin, who visited the Persian interior in hope of taking part in a spring migration of one tribe, found that its nomadic way had finally petered put. The Last Migration, largely based on interviews with tribal leaders, is Cronin’s story of these nomads’ decline and fall.

Idyl’s End. Author Cronin scarcely lives up to Herodotus or Hakluyt, for nowadays history is considered more “creative” if it is presented as fiction. Cronin has recast historic events in a form which the Persians call dastan, i.e., “near-factual history, almost myth.” But the hero of this dastan will be remembered: Ghazan Khan, nomad chief of a tribe that Cronin calls the Falqani and a man hopelessly caught in the paradoxes of progress.

In youth Ghazan was trained by a mullah in the tenets of Mohammedanism, but at 15 he was sent to school in Switzerland; now he tries to give his people the best of both worlds, only to find—like so many other men of good will in the East—that such an attempt can easily lead to tragedy. When Ghazan gets wind of the fact that the Persian army is planning once again to resettle his people, he leads them into the uplands for the summer, and they resume their way of life—shearing their sheep, weaving cloth and dazzling-colored rugs. Ghazan knows that this summer idyl cannot last and that by fall he must lead his tribe back to its winter grazing grounds, to face the 20th century in the shape of the modern Persian army. Then, to fight or not to fight, that is the question to which Ghazan desperately seeks an answer.

Nothing is as it seems. He admires the West and progress. But the West’s emissaries—an international aid mission—are uncomprehending and horrified by his tribe’s backwardness, illiteracy and impractical preoccupation with poetry; civilization’s missionaries depart, leaving behind two artificially inseminated ewes and predicting bigger and better herds, which the Falqani do not want. Throughout his country, Ghazan seems to see only a bizarre blend of ancient Eastern evils and too-hasty Westernization—hunger and corruption, opium smokers in grey flannel suits, profiteering officials who “displayed the refrigerator in their drawing room like a Chinese lacquer cabinet.”

Mullah’s Words. The Mohammedanism of Ghazan’s youth is no help either: in Meshed, Persia’s ancient holy city, he is haunted by his old mullah’s advice merely to submit to fate. Ghazan cannot settle for that answer. Entangled in a garish tapestry of animal symbol’s—a snow leopard, a caged parrot, a bold hawk—Ghazan finally decides that he must fight: “I thought I had to take a decision only about my future. Later I saw that it involved the whole tribe and Persia . . . Now I see that even more is at stake . . . sun, moon and stars, clouds . . . we move with them.”

Despite a stolen army tank, which he sends into battle as incongruously as the city profiteers display their refrigerators, Ghazan and all his tribe meet inevitable doom. Thus Author Cronin’s dastan. The book contains some murky writing and a lot of nostalgia for the primitive past in a country which, after all, must live in the present—even if the present occasionally looks wrong or foolish. At times, Author Cronin indulges in preposterous dialogue, as when Ghazan’s young sweetheart mutters how she loves strawberry ice cream (replies Ghazan: “With snow from the summit and the top of goat’s milk we shall make you a superb ice-cream”) and purrs about her Persian kitten: “He has angry miaows and impatient miaows and hungry miaows. And some miaows that no one has ever been able to understand.”

In its day Persia has faced up to Egyptians, ancient Greeks, Macedonians, Turks, Russians, Britons; some readers will resent the latterday, dastanly invasions by Cronin’s strawberry-flavored romanticism. But the events described rise above the book; it is an arresting episode of a people caught on one of those mountain crags of history where neither retreat nor advance but only death is possible.