Stay in Garmrud
happy as they could. Not only was I their first European
visitor for years, but I belonged, as it were, particularly to
'Aziz, and therefore to his village. His mother was on the
house-roof to welcome us: his pretty wife stood behind her
with the last baby tied into the shawl on her back as is the
Alamut fashion; his sisters and cousins and aunts came
greeting us one by one.
The house was at the lower end of the village with the
Alamut torrent in front of it and the cliff at the back. It
was a prosperous clean little place, with a tiny walled
garden full of lettuce and beans, two good rooms and a
few dark places below for stabling and stores. And the
inner room was well furnished with rugs woven by the
young wife, and bedding, and the baby's cradle, and various
treasures pushed into niches in the white-washed wall.
Here Ismail set up my bed while the women squatted on
the roof (in Garmrud every front door gives on to some-
body's roof) and picked over the rice for the pilau, and gave
the news, and 'Aziz showed his friends, who soon came
dropping in in twos and threes, what he had brought from
Qazvin in his saddle-bags for his shop across the stream.
The chief treasure was a print of the Shah, and an oleograph
of a Victorian lady in a bustle, which the young wife looked
at with interest, bending over it in her black trousers and
frilled kilt and bright waistcoat, her twisted red kerchief
tied at a rakish angle at the very top of her head.
She was furious with 'Aziz for staying away so long. She
had to spend all her time in the shop. It was not fitting, she
said—and should be his business. And what was he doing
all this time in Qazvin? It was not a woman's place to sit
in the shop. It was not that she cared particularly whether
he were here or no. She knew that whenever a friend said
" Stay " he stayed, and forgot about his wife. He could
[22.9]