In the 1920s the land he was destined to rule nudged the southern border of the newly established Soviet Union for more than a thousand miles, skirting the shoreline of the Caspian Sea, plentiful in sturgeon, whose fine caviar graced tables around the world. The spongy storm clouds that sailed down from southern Russia were squeezed dry trying to clear the mountainous rock face of the Alborz Mountains range, ensuring that Persia's northern coast remained perpetually drenched while the kingdom's interior was almost always parched. "Water is the chief concern of the Persian peasant," an American traveler wrote in the early twentieth century. "Wherever he can find the flow of a mountain stream or build a crude canal from a well or spring, a small portion of the desert becomes a paradise and he prospers. Certain of these regions are said to be among the most fertile in the world, producing in abundance not only the finest of wheat and barley, but grapes, peaches, nectarines, pomegranates, figs and melons which are unsurpassed among the fruits of the Temperate Zone."
The sweeping view from the top of the Alborz ridge was of a "magnificent plateau which seems to stretch to eternity," a visitor to Persia once said. Eighteen thousand feet below, clinging to its mountainous hemline, Tehran basked in the sun like a smug cat whose muddy brick tail extended to the edge of the great salt desert. To the east, beyond Yazd with its lyrical skyline of wind chimneys, travelers entered "the great lifeless desert, shaped like a huge hour-glass, 900 miles in length, from the foothills of the Alborz range, in the north, almost to the Indian Ocean, in the south, and ranging in width from 300 to 100 miles." The sprawling Dasht-e Kavit desert held tight its mysteries and miracles. Mighty dust storms roared through like locomotives. Locals in Sistan Province dreaded the annual Wind of One-Hundred-Twenty Days, when broiling gales lashed the region from June to September, and locals still spoke of the time a shepherd and his flock of sheep were dug out alive after a week buried under a sand drift. "Some sections in their utter bleakness resembled landscapes on the moon," was how one American described Dasht-e Kavir in 1950. "At wide intervals walled adobe villages, with green fields and slender poplar trees, or an upthrust of jagged, rocky hills broke the monotony. . . .A haze wrapped the horizon in mystery. Eastward, seemingly limitless, stretched the great salt desert, shimmering in the heat. To the west, gaunt rock hills, pastel-shaped, made a grotesque skyline. A caravan of camels plodded by carrion birds glided above a burro's carcass."
The main centers of urban life hovered at the desert edge, each a reflection of Persia's dazzling cultural and ethnic diversity. The capital, Tehran, had always been a rough town. Laid waste by the Afghans in 1723, Tehran was a mere cluster of three thousand mud and brick hovels when the Qajar Dynasty appointed it the new Imperial seat. This made strategic sense---the village occupied the gateway to the heights of the Alborz, which overlooked the plateau---but Tehran lacked the elegant artistry and sophistication of the former capital, Isfahan, and most visitors regarded the locals as uncouth and too focused on turning a profit. About seventy-five miles to Tehran's south sat Qom, where the ayatollahs, the country's religious leaders, resided and where important religious schools known as the hawza were located. The second major center of clerical power was Mashad, to the northeast, nestled against the border with Afghanistan. Each year pilgrims trekked to Mashad to pay their respects at the stupendous Holy Shrine of Imam Reza, resting place of the Prophet Mohammad's eighth disciple. Isfahan, always elegant, dominated the central provinces, and tourists from around the world admired the Shah Abbas Mosque, one of the finest examples of Isla mic architecture in the world, which opened out onto the splendid Naghsh-e Jahan Square, where Persian monarchs watched polo matches from a high pavilion, and also the picturesque "Bridge of Thirty-Three Arches," which spanned the Zayande River. Dominating the southwest was the city of Shiraz, "an oasis situated on a high plateau ringed by barren hills. It is a city of gardens and has never been known as a center of trade and industry. Its fame is due to its poets, its gardens, its wine, and its almost mythical position in the Iranian mind." Persia's greatest poets, Hafez and Saadi, wrote of the Shirazi love of songbirds, sweet wine and scent of rose.
The southern provinces were Iran's economic lifeline. In the breadbasket province of Khuzestan, which straddled the Iraqi border, the port city of Abadan boasted the world's largest oil refinery. Running along the southern coastline were the Zagros Mountains, rocky sentinels overlooking the Persian Gulf, where mighty tankers crept through the Strait of Hormuz, only twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest tip, on their way to market. In the sixties the Shah poured more than $1 billion into Persian Gulf oil facilities and at a stroke trebled Iran's oil production and established the foundations for the country's spectacular economic takeoff. The Persian Gulf was Iran's "jugular vein," and he brushed aside foreign critics who accused him of harboring territorial ambitions. When an American journalist asked the Shah whether "Iran's entry into the Persian Gulf would affect the country's relations with the Arabs and Israelis," he offered a stiff retort: "We are in the Persian Gulf. What we are demanding is what has always belonged to our country throughout history."
The Shah's people embodied the contradictions of life along the highway of history. They retained a distinct identity that set them apart from their neighbors and reflected their unique passage through space and time. Life on the high plateau was a constant game of survival, with ever-changing rules. Persians had endured centuries of foreign occupation by absorbing the ways of their overlords to the point where the Greeks, Arabs, and Mongols mirrored them back in return. They were Persians first but also Arabs, Baluchis, Armenians, Kurds, and Turks. More than 90 percent were Muslim, but they shared the land with Jewish, Christian, Bahai, and Zoroastrian minorities. Renowned for their hospitality, artistry, and individualism, the Persians were also inveterate grumblers, too easily slighted and with a capacity to exaggerate and embellish. For a people who prided themselves on their knowledge of science, philosophy, and literature, Persians saw their world as one shaped by elaborate conspiracies that allowed them to shift the blame for their own mistakes and misfortunes onto the shoulders of others. These ultimate survivors were adept at showing different faces to outsiders but also to their own rulers, whom they had a habit of raising up and turning out with bewildering speed---an old saying had it that the people did not often turn, but when they did, it was usually fatal. Persians thrived in adversity only to slacken in good times, so that even when their borders stoved in under relentless pressure from the Russians, Turks, and British in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Persian art, culture, and literature flourished under the Safavid and Qajar Dynasties.
Western visitors regarded the Persians as a brilliant and inscrutable people. The American journalist Frances Fitzgerald traveled to Iran in 1974 and wrote a penetrating account of life under the second Pahlavi king. "Iran is a country of walls and mirrors," she wrote. "Walls surround the villages as they surround every house in Tehran, dividing the public and private lives, creating distances where they do not exist. Behind walls that are mud-brown and anonymous, the rich conceal their fountains and gardens from the desert. . . the great families of Iran have covered the insides of their houses with murals and faceted mirrors so that each room is a visual maze of light and reflections of the real and painted figures. Turn the thought around and the mirrors are a complete defense system, turning away the truth. In Iran, nothing is exactly what it seems. A foreigner finds uncertainty behind arrogance, sadness behind euphoria. But ambiguity may be the only principle of nature in Iran."
