Five Years in a Persian Town

by Napier Malcolm

As soon as these streams reach ground that it is possible to level into terraces, they are used for irrigation, and become the stalks of minute mazra’s. Then come long hill villages with orchard trees and walnuts; and lastly, if there is any water left at the real mountain base, there will be a round irrigated patch of rather larger extent on the edge of the plain.

In the middle of the plains water may be found about sixty yards beneath the surface, a depth from which it may be drawn through wells for drinking purposes, but not in large quantities for irrigation. Consequently, if the snow torrents were the only source of water supply, the centres of the Persian plains would be uninhabitable; for in districts like that of Yezd the rainfall is so trifling that nine or ten not over large falls of rain or snow in the twelve months constitute a wet year. But water that is found at sixty, or even a hundred, yards down at the base of the hills is by no means useless. From this point to the centre of the plain there is a considerable, though very gradual declivity. So when the original shaft has been sunk, and water has been found, perhaps at three hundred feet below the surface, a long line of similar shafts are sunk towards the centre of the desert, at distances varying from twenty to forty yards, the line sometimes stretching for more than thirty miles, until a point of desert has been reached that lies as deep down as the original water-level. Then all the shafts are connected at the bottom by burrows, just big enough to afford passage to a man; the water is let in, and appears in an open ditch in the centre of the desert. Of course conveyance of water by these qan’āts as they are called, which are often thirty or forty miles long, is by no means inexpensive, so as a rule the water is used immediately it can be brought to the surface. Consequently we find all through the barren Persian plains two strange phenomena: little cultivations, fed by artificial channels, standing all by themselves, leagues away from anywhere, in the middle of a desolate and waterless expanse; and large towns such as Yezd, situated far away from any natural water supply, in the barest spot to be found in all the desert, the central hollow where the drifting sands have collected and covered over even the faintest vestige of vegetable life.

HUJJATABAD, THE FIRST STAGE FROM YEZD.

Sandy desert, with qan’at pits in foreground.

The typical Persian plain is very long, appearing to be comparatively narrow, and certainly flat beyond conception. The plains through which one approaches Yezd from Kashan or Kirman are probably on the average about sixty miles broad. But the huge barren mountains, lying in long jagged ranges to the right and left, show with such plainness of detail from every point, that the traveller unused to the clear atmosphere of the East can hardly credit the full size and distance. Mountains, plains, foreground, and far perspective, everything, in the Yezd district at any rate, is one neutral tint of brown, except for the snow lying on the rocks of the mountain-top, the long flakes of salt scattered here and there about the plain, or the continual moving mirage. Even at sunrise and sunset, when the sky and distant hills put on a colouring of glorious brilliancy, there is an utter absence of those soft tones in the foreground which can only be given by sunlight in a humid atmosphere.

Near Yezd there rise into sight brown villages, excrescences of the same material as that on which they stand, isolated separate objects with sharp definite bounds. The scanty, hedgeless crops that surround them, usually arranged in oblong patches like small allotments, seldom show until the traveller is quite near; the few trees are wretchedly poor in size and colour, and the walls and buildings are simply mud, of which three parts are in ruins.

After a few of these villages we come to Yezd itself, equally isolated from everything, and in other respects very much the same as the villages. However, as we approach the town by most of the main roads, there are no fields and no trees at all. Also there are sticking out from the town a lot of high square air-shafts, looking like short factory chimneys. Yezd, like the villages, is brown, but there are a few patches of white. There are one or two very faintly tiled minarets and a newer-looking green dome; but these things are not sufficiently striking to modify the general brown effect.

Now we are among the bāghs.[1] A bāgh is an enclosure, generally oblong, consisting of mud walls twelve feet high, surrounding a planted area. Very often a bagh contains nothing but fields of farm crops. The better class baghs, belonging to the richer Persians, have in the centre a kind of summer dwelling-house with plenty of porticos, built on a very open-air pattern. Such baghs are well stocked with fruit trees and rose bushes; there may also be a few small elms, or short poplars, or perhaps some cypresses. There are not many flowers. Here, too, most of the area is given up to farm crops. Everything is laid out after the plan of a Dutch garden, but without the turf and thick foliage, and also without the extreme trimness that we connect with such places. In the better gardens there is always a small gutter of running water, and generally an artificial tank with a stone border. This is the part of the bagh most highly prized by the natives. In Persia a small artificial channel with a stream of water about two feet across seems to give that air of distinction to a house which we expect from a well-kept lawn with good flower-beds. From the road nothing can be seen of all this greenery except the tops of the highest trees. In Yezd indeed only the baghs that lie some way out up the course of the qan’ats show as much as this. Just round the town nothing is to be seen but the bare walls and the gateways of the gardens. The gateways have some brickwork about them, and are sometimes partially whitened. They stand back from the road. The tops of the mud walls are generally in bad repair, and here and there we come across a jagged hole that has been made as a short cut into the garden by the gardener. In such cases the pieces of mud and sun-dried bricks, when they have been taken out, lie in the street. Where the surface of the thoroughfare has not been taken up for bricks, which by the way are left to bake in the sun in the middle of the road, it is generally used for drying manure that has been kneaded with a modicum of earth. The dyers also use the street for hanging up their cloths to dry, and also for arranging their skeins of silk, which they twist round wooden pegs stuck into the wall about forty yards apart. The road surface is a little irregular, and occasionally it is made more interesting by a shaft leading into a qan’at. As we approach the houses proper the road narrows, for it is only the natural lane between enclosures, and the house enclosures, which from the outside are exactly similar to the baghs, lie closer together.