Everybody Loves the Assassins (Cont.)

Outside Online

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	High lonesome: a farmer and her mule near Alamut. (Rob Howard)

AND SO THERE WE WERE, the next day, Abbas and Rob and I, packed into a new four-wheel-drive Nissan, barreling north down the road toward the valleys of the Assassins, while cars ahead of us and behind us and on all sides of us emitted whole blizzards of candy wrappers and half-eaten fruit and yogurt cartons and nutshells and sometimes even entire newspapers.

Abbas was in some distress about this. "Always," he said, "I care about the garbage."

There was a lot of it to care about.

Abbas's assistant and our interpreter for the trip, Shahram Yassemi, 33, was staring out into the swirling storm of refuse in a small agony of embarrassment. Shahram is considered "Americanized." He left Iran at 15 and studied at the University of Wisconsin, where he was known as "Sham," "Shroom," and "Shroomer." Later he went to Oregon State University and studied forestry, which he didn't like because "it was all about logging and road building." Eventually he got a master's degree in forest resources at the University of Idaho. Shahram wanted to use his knowledge to put together small-scale sustainable forestry systems in developing countries. He was generally proud of Iran and Iranians and was acutely sensitive about environmental issues.

"So, Shahram," I said, as Reza, our driver, battered his way through flying apricot pits and pistachio shells, "your typical Iranian has a hard time differentiating between a public highway and a public dump site."

"We definitely need some serious public education," Shahram allowed.

"Hey, Duck," I said to Rob. "Shahram thinks maybe they ought to have an anti-litter campaign. Here. In Iran."

Sooner or later, a sultan would ask a stable hand what he thought of a horse, and the answer might be a dagger to the heart. The weapon was always a dagger, and the assassin seldom escaped with his life.

The Duck was dumbfounded. "You're kidding."

"Really. He thinks his fellow countrymen may actually be a bit profligate with their rubbish."

"Profligate!" the Duck said. "Rubbish."

"Hey," Shahram said, "why don't you guys bite me."

Abbas was generally nervous about this kind of exchange. Courtesy was the convention in Iran. But Shahram had fallen in with American and Canadian skiers, with backcountry climbers and the like. In grad school he had spent a couple of winters living in his car (a $300 Toyota) and skiing at resorts like Crested Butte and Jackson Hole. His family hoped he might get a degree in engineering. Some kind of doctorate. Instead he was a grad-school ski bum and had become expert in the American outdoor tradition of giving the other guys a whole bunch of shit.

"So," Abbas said, obviously changing the subject, "looking now seeing Elburz Mountains." We were rising into a series of hot and spare and treeless hills. The grass was sunbaked brown. It was a kind of vertical and merciless Bakersfield, and it just kept going up: 6,000 feet, 7,000, 8,000. We came over the pass in the relative cool of the late afternoon. There was a river far below, the Shahrud, which looked, on my Iranian map, to run about a hundred miles, generally in an east-to-west direction. The land along its banks was a brilliant, nearly iridescent, green.

The valley below was prime Assassin country. The sect had had castles up all the drainages that fed the Shahrud, more than 50 of them in the area that was called the River Bank, or the Rudbar. The River Bank is set square in the middle of the northern Elburz and is protected from the plains to the south and east by mountains rising precipitously from the desert; it is also sheltered from the Caspian Sea, to the north, by a crest of craggy, glaciated summits.

We dropped to the rice paddies along the river. About 600 feet above, I could see the shattered walls of a castle undulating along the contours of the hillside.

Abbas got out and began climbing up a steep rock-strewn slope, and it became clear, on this first negligible jaunt, that Abbas and Shahram could climb circles around the Duck and me. The gravel field got steeper toward the summit, and we passed through stones piled where a gate might once have been. This was the Assassin castle of Lammasar.

The Assassin theology is highly complex, and the most simpleminded of explanations would be to say that it is all about succession. When the Prophet Muhammad died in 632, he left no clear instructions about who was to come after him. Abu Bakr, one of the first of the Prophet's converts, was appointed ruler. A dissident group believed that Ali, the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law, was the obvious choice. He was, in fact, the fourth caliph, or divinely appointed leader. But Ali was assassinated, and Husayn, his son and successor, was killed in the battle of Karbala.

As time progressed, the Islamic orthodoxy accepted the idea that the office of religious leader could be largely an elective one. The Party of Ali, the Shia, clung to the idea of succession through the line of the Prophet. Iranians are mostly Shiites and are sometimes called Twelvers because they believe there have been 12 imams, descendants of Ali, the last of whom is in hiding and is called the Awaited One.

The Assassins split with the Shia in 765, following the death of Ja'far al-Sadiq, the sixth imam after Ali. The group that was to originate the concept of organized political terror supported al-Sadiq's eldest son, Isma'il, as imam. But the great majority of Shiites accepted Musa, Isma'il's younger brother. And that issue—who was to succeed Ja'far al-Sadiq—put the supporters of Isma'il in direct confrontation with Twelver Shiites.

The Ismailis were a reasonably successful sect for about 300 years, rising and falling in prominence. Sometime in the late 11th century, a remarkably able and frightening man named Hasan-i Sabbah reinvigorated the faith and, through stealth, took over the castle of Alamut, in the middle of the River Bank area. It was from this fortress, Alamut, that the Old Man of the Mountain sent out his Assassins.

As I pondered Islamic history on our climb to the castle, the Duck and Shahram exchanged an assortment of sarcasms, as Americans will. "I bet," the Duck said, "you've never even seen your girlfriend's hair."

"No," Shahram said, "but the chadors with the cutaway nipples are fun."

The castle had been built into the ridgetop, but there wasn't much left of it. The walls had once enclosed a space that Freya Stark thought to be about 1,500 feet by 600 feet. What we saw, at the north entrance, were thistles growing in a pile of rubble. There were several stone cisterns, large rectangular holes, one of them at least 25 feet deep, chiseled out of the solid rock: pools to supply the castle in the event of siege.

Marco Polo mangled the truth in his account of the Assassins, but it is a fact that Hasan-i Sabbah was the Assassin master and that he killed some of the most highly placed of his rivals. The initial victim was the vizier Nizam al-Mulk, the Turkish sultan's chief counselor, killed by dagger blows on October 16, 1092.

"It was the first of a long series of such attacks," writes Bernard Lewis in The Assassins, "which, in a calculated war of terror, brought sudden death to sovereigns, princes, generals, governors, and even divines who had condemned the Ismaili doctrines."

The prime tactic was to place an agent, an assassin, in the target's retinue. Sooner or later, a sultan would ask a stable hand what he thought of a horse, and the answer might be a dagger to the heart. The weapon was always a dagger, and the assassin seldom escaped with his life. No potentate was safe. Many felt it necessary to wear chain-mail shirts at all times.

At the lower, southern end of the castle, there were several nearly intact walls, along with a few turrets and towers. The terrain below was steep enough that a rider would have to lead a horse. A soldier on foot would strain toward the wall, stumbling with his weapons. I stared at a broken tower and the crumbling ramparts built into the sinuous bend of the slope and could see, for a moment, the terrible symmetry that was Lammasar. The castle was absolutely impregnable. It could not be taken, ever, by anyone.

The wind had sprung up, and it whistled through the rubble, as if to emphasize the complete devastation on all sides. There was a lesson here, moving with the wind through the rubble. We camped that night near a small lake, and Abbas moved about, picking up litter here and there, but there was almost more trash than grass.

"Always," he said, "I care about the garbage."

"Then how come," I asked, "we're camped in a dump?"

Abbas said, "Is campsite."

"He's giving you shit," Shahram explained.

"I see," Abbas said, but he really didn't get it at all.

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