“This chamber appears to be ... a temporary living-room for travellers. It ... communicates with the cells above the haunches of the arch by an opening 4 ft. 6 in. high. The inner room is probably intended to afford sleeping accommodation. The living-room is approached by a staircase in the thickness of the wall leading up from the top of the pier. The Persian name for an upper chamber of this kind is ‘bala-khana,’ literally ‘a house up above.’”[116]
Perhaps the finest bridge in Persia is the far-famed Ali Verdi Khan at Isfahan.
Ali Verdi Khan was the general of Shah Abbas, and his bridge, if not the greatest in the world, has no rival that excels it in stateliness. As Lord Curzon has said, it alone is worth a visit to Isfahan to see. I know it in photographs only, and in written descriptions, but I feel its beauty and magnificence. In many respects it resembles the Pul-i-Khaju ([p. 213]), but it is a great deal longer, and no pavilions rise above its tiers of arches. To my mind the pavilions of the Pul-i-Khaju have an architectural value that cannot be rated at too high a level. So I miss their grace in the Ali Verdi Khan, though this noble structure ought not to be criticised—except in an ashamed whisper.
THE BRIDGE OF ALI VERDI KHAN OVER THE ZENDEH RUD AT ISFAHAN, PERSIA
There is a gateway at the north end, so we must place the Ali Verdi Khan among the minor defensive bridges. A paved ramp or causeway leads from a great avenue to the gateway; and then a visitor has 388 yards to walk before he reaches the far end. The main road is paved, and its width is thirty feet. Upon each side is a gallery, or covered arcade, two and a half feet wide, which is pierced through the outer wall of the bridge from one end to the other; it communicates with the main road by frequent arches, it opens by similar arches—over ninety in number—on to the river view, and here and there it expands into large chambers, as we see in Brangwyn’s pen-drawing. The chambers used to be decorated with “not too proper paintings,” done in the time of Abbas II. At both entrances the Ali Verdi Khan is flanked by round towers, and staircases in the towers go up to a fine platform which in earlier times was a favourite promenade; but now it is disfigured by telegraph poles, the modern spirit everywhere having an unrivalled vulgarity.[117] “Similar staircases, cut in the basements of the towers, and also at regular intervals in the main piers, conduct from the road level to a lower storey, where, but little elevated above the bed of the river, a vaulted passage runs along the entire length of the bridge, through arches pierced in the central piers, crossing the channel of the river by huge stepping-stones planted in its bed. Colonel Johnson gives the dimensions of these transverse arches as ten feet span and nine feet high; and of the main arches (thirty-three in number) which they bisect, as twenty feet span and fifteen feet high, separated by piers eleven feet thick. There is thus a triple promenade on this remarkable bridge—the vaulted passage below, the roadway and lateral galleries above, and the open footpath at the top of all. I should add that the upper part of the bridge is of brick, the piers and towers are of stone.”[118]
There is no European structure akin to this, but for a long time Rothenburg on the Tauber has been famous for a two-storeyed bridge; also we know that some modern commercial bridges have an upper road and a lower one, like the High Level Bridge at Newcastle. In every case the idea was suggested by the Roman practice of building aqueducts in tiers.
IV
And now let us give all our attention to the more military bridges. Brangwyn has studied them with the utmost care and interest; there are but few variations of the war-bridge that his art has not yet represented. Let us see, then, what his research has found.