I have now done my best to describe in detail almost the whole of the Yezdi’s surroundings, the furniture of his room, the pattern of his house, the streets of his town, and the vast deserts by which he is isolated from the world. When he gets up in the morning, he finds himself in a room practically containing nothing but a carpet, the walls and ceiling an expanse of white gypsum, and the taqchas provided with solitary objects upon which his eye can rest in turn without the slightest diversion to anything else. There is no confusion, but at the same time there is no arrangement. In such a room, with such furniture, the necessity for arrangement never occurs to him. He goes out into his court-yard; certainly there are flower-beds, but they are not cut like English flower-beds in the middle of necessarily existing growth and greenery. The shape of the beds and the nature of their contents has not been chosen with the slightest view to their artistic surroundings; they are simply artificial constructions in a waste of pavement which itself conceals the desert which stands to the Persian in the place of the natural world. Inside the beds each plant grows its own life, by itself, untouched by its neighbour, and the eye unconsciously fixes itself upon it as on an isolated unit. The Yezdi leaves his house and passes through an absolutely dry and scentless atmosphere along streets which present variety only in the matter of form. He goes for a journey across the desert plains; to the right there is only one object to be seen, a range of distant mountains, with a slight variety of jags along the top; to the left there is a similar range. Every now and again he comes across a shrub which attracts his eye by its hermit existence. Behind him is the solitary city; every six miles, while he is in the neighbourhood of the town, there is an equally solitary village, or perhaps a water-cistern with a domed roof; for league after league he can see in front of him his solitary manzil, where he intends to stay the night. Even when he goes to the villages this sparseness of life and circumstance is scarcely modified. Can you be surprised if this hourly contemplation of isolated units produces a mind which it is impossible for the tangle-reared European ever to fully understand? Can you be surprised if an intellect is produced accustomed to almost unbelievable concentration upon single and solitary ideas, but almost unreachable by minds that are accustomed to complicated trains of thought, to careful evasions of contradictions, and to systematic arrangements of their intellectual knowledge?
Diagram illustrating the use of the qan’at. Notice that all the cultivation about the hills is irrigated from the snow torrent. Yezd is irrigated by qan’at water, brought in some cases from a point 30 miles distant, for the qan’ats do not go straight to the centre of the plain but make for a low part of the plain from wherever water is found. The 300 ft. well in Yezd is useless for irrigation, there being no lower point than Yezd.
DEHBALA.
A hill village on one of the snow torrents.
CHAPTER II
Isolation and insularity—The town the geographical and political unit—Extension of citizenship to strangers—Bigotry—Oppression and persecution of Parsis[2]—Improvement in their position—Position of Jews—Fanaticism largely non-religious—Position of European colony.