RUSSIA'S UNKNOWN "BURMA ROAD":

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 123, 31 October 1941, Page 6

RUSSIA'S UNKNOWN "BURMA ROAD":

By Baby Car Through The Wild Mountains Of Trak And fran

\ (Specially written for" The Listener" by

MARJORIE

RICHARDS

ITH the Finns sitting on the Murmansk Railway, ice already beginning to coat the White Sea approaches to Archangel, and some hundreds of the six thousand miles of TransSiberian line within range of Japanese guns, Russia’s supply line (we think) is hanging on a thread-the single railway track that perilously twists and tunnels over two eight thousand foot ranges and across Iran’s sun-smitten and snowflecked plateau from the Persian Gulf down again to the Caspian’s tropical fringe. That two other supply routes run through Iran very few people indeed know. One is in her far east-a passable desert, rather than a road, that climbs and undulates hundreds of arid Beluchi miles till at Meshed it meets Russian lorries trundling- the Golden road to Samarkand and the Turcoman and Turksib (Turkistan-Siberian) railways. The other is in the far west-the shortest possible link between British and Russian territory, a mere three hundred or so miles from Irak to the TransCaucasus. But it runs through mountains standing on end like bristles on a brush. And it was so recently made that only four years ago my husband and I on our way home overland to New Zealand could not for sure discover until our baby Ford reached Mosul whether such a route was actually open to us. : Single-Handed Feat The Irak part of this road, the new part, the part that is actually a road, is locally «called the Rowanduz (Row-an-dooze) from the more spectacular of the two stupendous gorges through which it scales the mountains, But I have seen it written The Hamilton Road, after A. M. Hamilton, the New Zealand engineer who built it. "Singlehanded" is almost the word to use. For Mr. Hamilton, on an assignment that might have daunted the P.W.D.’s trained army of- expert workmen and modern mechanical equipment, was the sole European on the job, and all the skill that his motley gangs of Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians, Armenians, Turks, Persians, Georgians and what-not had 5

in handling-and mending-what tools they had they learned from him as they went along. For five years, in the blazing heat of summer and icy blasts of winter, with Arabs killing Kurds and Kurds killing Arabs all round, and with the mountain peoples naturally bitter against this truck-carrying, troop-carry-ing spear of intervention thrust into their semi-independence and spare-time trade of robbery and their recreation of feud, he was surveyor, leader, father, mechanic, and, at times politician; supervising operations; controlling, paying, feeding, his men; finding supplies; reconnoitring the gloomy depths for possible lines of passage; mending breakages; designing his bridges as he went. And somehow too he found occasional leisure for such diversions as penetrating the hidden intricacies of the Blood Feud of Rowanduz and the career of Hamada Chin, the Spilik Pass brigand. going hunting (and finding!) the Treasure Vault of the Ancient Kings in the tops of the mountains, and taking firstrate photographs; which, photos and tales, you will find in his fascinat-ingly-written Road Through Kurdistan. New Road: Ancient Route I have called the Rowanduz a new road. So it was, as a road, for our New Zealand-bound baby, was the first private car ever through. (We doubt if many have followed since.) But as the general direction of treks from the Plains of Shinar to the Persian Plateau, and vice versa, it is prehistoric. Each spring the Irak Kurds have left their womenfolk to hoe and weave, and have climbed by devious goat-tracks edging the scarps of the canyons to the upland meadows of Iran. Arbela, its point of departure, was already ancient, when in decisive battle there Greek Alexander wrenched the Empire of the East from Persian Darius, In Genesis it is named as one of the four cities of Assur, the kingdom that was before even Babylon (Continued, on next page) \

ALONG THE ROUTE TO TRANS-CAUCASIA

(Continued from previous page) and Assyria. It was Saladin’s capital. And to-day, as Erbil, it is a pillar of fire by night and a shade by day to the surrounding plain. For the modern, or, more strictly, the contemporary town-the oldest continuously-inhabited settlement in the world-stands on a flat-topped, man-made mountain composed of the dust of its own centuries. Bye-pagsing it, we scaled three successive ranges of Scottish hills. The few folk we passed among their twisting streams, stunted oats and moss-covered rocks chillingly reminded us in their yellow-skinned, narrow-eyed approximation to Mongolian types of the Mosul consul’s admonitary tales of feuds and hold-ups. But as we faced the terrific climb of the ill-famed Spilik itself, all our attention and fear passed to Junior’s erupting radiator. But he made the grade. Morning light showed dead across the end of the valley over the Pass a mountain range like a ragged wall. However, from nearer a cleft appeared out of which rushed a torrent between deepgreen pool and deep-green pool. Looking up through that jagged V, eroded mile beyond mile into the rock, we knew where the scores of cubic miles of Mesopotamia that have been built out into the Persian Gulf even in historic times have come from. On to Tabriz It was at the gorge’s far end, where in a saddle of the hills it opens out into a radiation of lesser canyons, that mud-walled, mud-built Rowanduz itself appeared on the skyline immediately overhead. The only: town of Iraki Kurdistan, it crowds the whole top of a long narrow tongue of land projecting between the gorges into space,«The Berserini Gorge beyond was more openrather like the very upper Buller in some ways. But even here, before Hamilton’s gangs blasted undercuts through

various headlands, caravans had always to detour at the cost of two thousand feet of extra climb. Then up, up, up, among the snowy tops we panted until, balanced on the crest, there was our front bumper in Iran and our packs be; hind in Irak! Thereafter, winding downwards along hillsides and the salt shores of Lake Urmia’s inland sea: (all open and dead and deserted as the moon) it was as many miles as we had climbed to reach Tabzir (Ta-breeze). Thence there is rail, a mere hundred miles or so, to the Caucasus. Gentlemen of the Road Now why has there been in our news no reference whatever, that I have seen, to this important supply route? I suspect that the Mosul consul’s warning to us hint the answer. We had camped at the Rowanduz gorge mouth to wash ourselves and our clothes in that marvellous green water, when suddenly a man appeared from nowhere, and begged us to come on for safety to the Police Post at Gali Ali Beg. There we found, celebrating the Iraki king’s birthday at a sort of coffee house, a dozen men, of

perfect physique and most intelligent appearance. They wore bright padded coats over open-necked shirts, and in-tricately-wound wide waistbands above loose baggy white trousers and bare feet: and each carried a long rifle, and, tucked into his cummerbund, a long notched knife. "Much more useful than a gun-it doesn’t echo," one informed us, We were invited to their village. It was the first time in my life I had been on a horse. And up the beast scrambled along a mere goat track straggling across the face of that ragged rock wall between the white-flecked blue sky above and the sheer depth below. Miles of nose-to-tail climbing brought us upon a mud village built something like a honeycomb. Scaling a rickety ladder of branches to where the chief had set a camelhair tent for our reception on his mud-on-branchez roof, we sat round on piles of rugs and coloured quilts, all beautifully clean. A boy poured water over our outstretched hands-on to the floor. We drank glasses of black tea from a silver urn; accepted a bowl all round of curdled goat’s milk; and ate, scooping with pancakes of Kurdish. vegetable-and-wheat bread for spoons, each man for himself from the. common heap of oil-cooked rice stuck with dismembered chickens. Is This the Answer? I must’have seemed a strange "lady" to these Kurdish tribesmen and their Biblically-clad women. "Such knee-boots are wasted on a female" commented one. "Too small for real work; a bad bargain for her husband whatever he paid,"» rumbled another. But their pleasure to talk to us was real and their courtesy perfect. If our friends of that day were not precisely to blame, it was certainly folk much like them who fired on the lorry that passed us at Gali Ali Beg, wounded its driver, and ran it off the road. The passing traveller has been for too many centuries the Kurds’ lawful fun and pocket money for even bombed villages to persuade them otherwise all at once. So. perhaps the cabled rumour that they now hold. the late Iranian army’s stock of small-arms is why we hear nothing of the Rowanduz Road.