When Taraz and Megan came back from Israel, they gave me a little white box. Within, were two small rocks, the large one from Mt Carmel in Haifa, and a small one from the prison city of Akka, where Baha'u'llah was exiled after he left Adrianople, Turkey. Both are a speckled tan, with some white and grey stratifications. The smaller of the two could be a fragment from an old stone wall in Akka. The larger looks like a praline candy with a molten center.
They also brought back a small shell and some fine sand from the beach at Tel Aviv; when I opened the small plastic bag and felt the sand, it was still slightly damp, and cool. Later, I realized that I could have breathed the air within this bag, that of the Mediterranean!
Hearing their stories about Akka, Bahji, and Haifa, and especially seeing some of their photos, made me wish that I could have seen these locations when Baha'u'llah was there. (Flickr photo by Raz).The images we see in present-day journeys - the transportation, luxury hotels, the clothing - is vastly different from how things were then. I tried imagining a walled fortress, a citadel, the ancient caravanseri for travelers, (pictured here). I hungered for older images of Persia and Turkey, the ancient hills and cave dwellings.With that in mind, I made a trip to our local library, and to my good fortune, I acquired a guide who offered me her services with a simple question, "Are you finding what you are looking for? Oh, she had no idea, the journey the two of us would take! Fortunately, this is her specialty, this digging for treasure, and she didn't bat an eye. "Jenny" is one of the oldest librarians I've ever seen - stooped, round shouldered, and with a gait that one would see on a war veteran. She had to pause to accommodate injuries, age, and breath.
"Well, I'm looking for images of Persia, Turkey and the Holy Land, before the turn of the century. " I said. Then, I thought, I'd better be more specific..... "before 1900".
She calculated for a moment, considered that probably the camera had been invented by then, and proceeded to show me a goodly number of books that I've already read. "The Culture of Islam" by Lawrence Rosen; "A Traveller on Horseback in Eastern Turkey and Iran" by Christina Dodwell; "Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran" by Jason Elliot; "Persian Pilgrimages: Journeys Across Iran" by Afshin Molavi; and "The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics In Iran" by Roy Mottahedeh. As she pulled them all out, one by one, I had to inform her that most of them were too recent for what I was looking for.
So, this devoted Librarian logged onto her computer. She researched our topic, and with only ten minutes of repairs and paper-tugging to the printer, we got another itinerary, and traveled over to another part of the library. By this time, she was in the lead, resolute. When she answered my questions, she'd take a half-breath every couple of words, like she was climbing uphill. She adjusted her bifocals and squinted at book titles on the list. "Ah, YES! There's 'Ten Thousand Miles In Persia' by Major Percy Molesworth Sykes! 1867 - 1945. That's SIR Percy Molesworth Sykes."
But, his book was not on the shelf. She jotted down a reserve for me, and then another. It appeared that most of the books on her list were not on the shelves. They'd been pulled and were in storage - in the basement.
Now, at this point I was truly feeling sorry for my guide. But, no matter. She made a phone-call from the special services desk, and within ten minutes, a book was at hand. Abraham Valentine William Jackson's "Persia Past and Present: A Book of Travel and Research. 1862 - 1937".
I was looking at a book that was over a hundred years old! His credentials: "Professor of Indo-Iranian Languages, and sometime adjunct professor of the English language and Literature at Columbia University." He began his travels in 1903, and his book contains exactly the kind of illustrations and photographs that I'd been looking for. He is a delightful writer, using the antiquated courtesies of an older linguistic style that is part of a bygone age. I perused the list of over 200 illustrations and a map, looked up and thanked her.
She was delighted, grabbed her little yellow post-it pad and pen, and without further adiew, she was off. I browsed the DVD's and brought home "Daughter of Keltoum" by Mehdi Charef, a story about an Algerian woman on a quest to find her mother in the Atlas Mountains. Wonderful! I had my treasures for the weekend.
