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Mullah's Words. The Mohammedanism of Ghazan's youth is no help either: in Meshed, Persia's ancient holy city, he is haunted by his old mullah's advice merely to submit to fate. Ghazan cannot settle for that answer. Entangled in a garish tapestry of animal symbol's—a snow leopard, a caged parrot, a bold hawk—Ghazan finally decides that he must fight: "I thought I had to take a decision only about my future. Later I saw that it involved the whole tribe and Persia . . . Now I see that even more is at stake . . . sun, moon and stars, clouds . . . we move with them."
Despite a stolen army tank, which he sends into battle as incongruously as the city profiteers display their refrigerators, Ghazan and all his tribe meet inevitable doom. Thus Author Cronin's dastan. The book contains some murky writing and a lot of nostalgia for the primitive past in a country which, after all, must live in the present—even if the present occasionally looks wrong or foolish. At times, Author Cronin indulges in preposterous dialogue, as when Ghazan's young sweetheart mutters how she loves strawberry ice cream (replies Ghazan: "With snow from the summit and the top of goat's milk we shall make you a superb ice-cream") and purrs about her Persian kitten: "He has angry miaows and impatient miaows and hungry miaows. And some miaows that no one has ever been able to understand."
In its day Persia has faced up to Egyptians, ancient Greeks, Macedonians, Turks, Russians, Britons; some readers will resent the latterday, dastanly invasions by Cronin's strawberry-flavored romanticism. But the events described rise above the book; it is an arresting episode of a people caught on one of those mountain crags of history where neither retreat nor advance but only death is possible.