The Yezd district—Desert—Water supply—Villages—The town of Yezd—Gardens—Streets—Houses—Furniture—Cleanliness—Undurability of buildings—Built for heat—Hill villages—Effect of surroundings on intellect and character.

In the very centre of central Persia there is a town called Yezd, which in some ways may be uninteresting, but ought for a student of Persia to have the greatest interest, for it possesses all the regular attributes of a Persian town to an exaggerated degree. These Persian towns can be better understood after some consideration of the country in which they lie. Some one, I think, has said that Persia consists of two parts, the salt desert, and the desert which is not salt; and though this is not true of all parts of Persia, with regard to most of the interior of Persia it is as[2] nearly true as a reasonable man can expect an aphorism to be. In the vast district where Yezd lies you find an archipelago, with sand for sea, and towns and villages for islands. If you want to know how big that desert area is, I can only tell you that we went to Yezd, which lies in the very centre of Persia, from the southern shore of the Caspian, which is the northern boundary of the country, and with the exception of a belt of land at the extreme north about thirty miles broad, and a patch round Teheran about twenty miles across, we literally passed through nothing but desert.

But desert in Persia is of many kinds: even the salt desert is not all the same. There are places where the ground is absolutely bare, except for the thick crusts of salt that lie like snowdrifts streaking the surface in every direction. There are also places equally salt where the proximity of a certain amount of useless water produces a larger quantity of plant life than in most parts of the ordinary desert. The ordinary desert is good soil, and wherever water can be brought to it, it is extremely fertile. Generally it has a hard but rather gravelly surface. Sometimes it is flecked with dry brownish shrubs about the size of[3] bedding-out plants, sometimes it is quite bare. There is in parts a good deal of scattered growth, but two plants never touch one another. In the more favourable places shrubs may be found at an average of not more than two yards apart, but, with one exception, I have never seen in the desert plains of central Persia a place away from the hills with sufficient natural growth to modify the colour of the distance.

Then there is the sandy desert. Here also, if the sand is scraped away and water brought, the soil is good, but in appearance the sandy desert is the most desolate of all. Absolutely nothing grows on it. It is like the worst kind of salt desert, without the relief of the white patches. Yezd lies in a big stretch of sandy desert. Sometimes the sand may be broken by a large piece of gravelly plain, but such places are generally as bare as the sands themselves, and form no real break in the dull monotony.

Of course there are oases; but what is called an oasis is not really very different in character from the desert that surrounds it. It is the same desert artificially cultivated. In the plains the water is brought from a distance, and when it is applied the ground consents to nourish exactly those seeds[4] that have been sown. There are hardly any weeds, no turf, no tangle, no hedges, and no waste green. Every blade in the artificial wheat-field is an isolated unit, that may be pulled up without disturbing its neighbour. Even in the fresher-looking gardens, enclosed and concealed by high mud walls, there is the same meagre, bedded-out appearance on every side. In spite of the possibility of three artificial harvests in the year, one sees at a glance that the very roots will inevitably be annihilated when the water is cut off, and of course this happens pretty frequently. There are no wild trees at all, and those that are reared are very small, and scanty in leafage. Such oases as these go by different names, according to the quantity of water. Those that can support a fairly large population are towns, those that can support a smaller one are villages, those that can only support one or two households are called cultivations, or mazra’s. But, however big or however small, they are no interruption to the continuity of the desert.

In the hills and round their bases there is a trifle more plant life, but there is no strong contrast to the barrenness below. Only high up in the creases of the mountain sides, right above the[5] cultivations and villages, there are the narrowest strips of turf on either side of the snow torrents. Here one may find small ferns nestling under the boulders, and quantities of soft flowers, or an occasional wild barberry bush. Away from the actual bed of the mountain streams one is again in desert of a kind, though here, too, the scattered dry shrubs will be found alternating with more succulent varieties of plants, and the landscape is by no means entirely bare.

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[6] 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[7] 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[8] 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.

[9]

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.[10] 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.[11] 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.

Occasionally, as we near the centre of the town, we come across open squares with a small mosque on the one side. The wall of the mosque is dirty white, and there is a little black lettering over the doorway, but very little tile or brick. In the middle there may be a dilapidated octagon with a flat top, about five feet high and six across, built of mud covered with tiles rather the worse for wear. Round such squares there are generally arched recesses, filled in at the bottom, so as to make a ledge three feet from the ground. The bazaars are just the old narrow lanes, covered by a succession of mud domes forming a continuous but untidy roof. The goods are displayed on tiers of mud ledges, and there is a mud room behind. Quantities of the wares are mud. Firepans, barrels for grain, several kinds of toys, bread receptacles, and some other household implements are simply clay, moulded into a rough form, and dried in the sun. Water-bottles, various kinds of pitchers, children’s money-boxes,[12] and hookah-bowls are baked with fire, but without the slightest glaze. The baker’s ovens are made of mud, down to the very doors. Many of the Yezdis even eat mud, and develop an unwholesome muddy complexion.

The cleverness of the Yezdi in manipulating mud is beyond belief. Sometimes you may see men in the streets making barrels for storing grain. First of all a smooth round slab of mud about an inch and a half thick, is moulded on the ground. Then another piece of mud is kneaded into a long sausage, and placed in a hoop upon the edge of the slab. Sausage after sausage is added hoopwise, one on the top of the other, until a height of about four feet has been reached. Each hoop, as it is laid in position, is worked with the hand into smooth connection with the hoop below, and when the barrel is completed there is not the least vestige of a join. The whole is done without wheel or machinery of any kind. A mud lid is added which is soldered on with mud when the barrel is filled.

I have hardly yet succeeded in giving any adequate impression of the untidiness of the streets. The central courtyard of the house is generally a fair-sized garden. For reasons connected[13] with the water supply the inhabitants of the houses are continually altering the level of these places, and large quantities of earth are emptied into the street or carried out of it every day as occasion may arise. All along the sides of the streets there are shallow holes for rubbish heaps; here and there there are cesspools; and yet with all this the streets are so well scavenged by dogs and children that, except in the Jewish quarter, the thoroughfare is comparatively clean, while, thanks to the powerful sun and the absolute absence of moisture in the atmosphere, almost the only obtrusive smells from one end of the town to the other are those that hang round the public baths and the places used by the dyers.

Let us now enter one of the doorways that leads into a better class house. We find ourselves first of all in a round or octagonal porch, covered by a small dome, which is generally pierced in the centre to admit light. From this porch we go through a passage into one of the court-yards. In a good house there are two, or even three court-yards. The whole family live in the better compound, and the men receive their visitors in the smaller one. Though this rule is not without exception, the better class women in Yezd do[14] not seem to have much to complain of in the matter of housing.

In the court-yard there will be found an open tank and some flower-beds; the rest is generally paved. The flower-beds are below the level of the pavement, and are irrigated from the tank. Watering-pots are used for watering the pavement only. Sometimes the whole garden is sunk to the level of the cellar floor, so as to get nearer to the qan’at. The house itself consists of two sets of buildings, chiefly one story, with perhaps one or two upstairs rooms. The upper rooms, however, do not really form a separate story, but are built over the lowest of the ground-floor rooms, so as to bring the roof more or less to one level. The roofs are generally paved with flat bricks of the shape of tiles, and are surrounded by a low mud wall, so as to form a more or less secluded and cool place, where the family may sleep in summer. Perhaps a dome may partially project above the level of the rest of the roof. Also there is the inevitable bād-gīr, or square air-shaft, running down to the back of the big summer portico, or tālār, and furnished at the top with long slits on all four sides to catch any air that may be moving. This talar is the principal room on the summer side, which faces[15] north. It is often built in the form of a cross with very stumpy arms, or rather of an oblong with the corners so taken off as to render it slightly cruciform. The long side of the oblong faces the court-yard, and has no wall at all, but there is a curtain of tent-cloth that moves up and down on pulleys. To the right and left of this sun-blind are short walled-off passages, which are used as entrances. Corresponding to the projecting front part between the passages there is at the back a recess under the bad-gir, completing the cruciform design. The roof is arched into a high dome. The whole talar is raised three feet above the level of the garden, so as to give room for a two-foot upright grating, which is the window of the cellar room underneath. For five months in the year these are the only habitable rooms in a Persian house; and they are both furnished as living-rooms. The rooms on either side of the talar are so like the winter rooms that it is unnecessary to describe them separately.

The whole structure of the place is quite different from that of an English building. Except for enclosing a rough garden the Persian builder hardly ever makes a blank wall. Sometimes the walls of the compound, generally the[16] walls of stables and outhouses, but always the sides of rooms, passages, and porticos consist of a series of arches more or less carefully moulded. In the house, unless they are intended for doors, windows, or cupboards, these arched recesses are filled in to a height of three feet; so that round every Persian room there is a series of ledges, called tāqchas, about the size of a small mantelpiece, generally a span deep, but sometimes very much deeper, and running in instead of running out. If the height of the room will allow it, there is a line of straight moulding above these arches, and above that a second row, usually much shorter than the lower ones. Above that comes a second series of lines of straight moulding, shelving into the arch of the roof, for the ceilings are always constructed on the arch principle, although they are sometimes flattened on the top when it is intended to build an upper room. These arches are built of brick and mud only, without any wood or wooden foundation; and indeed no wood is used in a Yezd house at all, except for doors and windows.

You will find three styles of wall in Persian houses. Sometimes the rough mud is coated over with a smoother surface, either clay and chopped[17] straw, or clay and sand, and the brown colour is left unchanged. In fairly good houses this style is often thought good enough for the summer portico. Very often the angles of the mouldings are pointed with white gypsum, and when ornamental designs in the same fashion are added, the effect is exceedingly pretty. But generally the living rooms in a Persian house are entirely whitened with gypsum, and a moulded design, about an eighth of an inch thick, is made in the centre of the ceiling. These complicated and accurate geometrical designs are produced by the natives with no better tools than a chisel and a bit of string. The formation of the arches and straight mouldings without instruments is equally wonderful, but though the appearance is geometrical two arches never exactly correspond with one another if one comes to measure. Still the construction of a Persian room, perhaps with a large dome, without any better materials than clay, gypsum, and a small modicum of baked brick, without any scaffolding or wooden basis, and with the help of none but the very simplest tools, is a thing that may be accounted one of the most extraordinary marvels of the East.

[18]

As in the summer, so in the winter side, the best room is generally in the centre. The better rooms are almost invariably approached from the side and not from the front, being separated from one another by passages that run to the whole depth of the buildings. This enables the entire frontage of the room to be given up to windows. Generally some of the rooms have a large cupboard room at the back, which is frequently used for sleeping in. As the floor of the house is three feet above the level of the compound, the passages between the rooms are furnished with steps, but they have no doors. Consequently, to shift one’s quarters in such a house necessitates going into the open air. The smaller rooms are generally approached from the front, and in this case they sometimes have an aivān, or mud verandah. The winter rooms always take up the north end of the compound, but are often built along the east or west side as well.

Rooms are generally named by the number of their windows, which is usually three or five. A good five-windowed room will have a frontage of five arches filled in with French windows. The semi-circular fanlight consists of pieces of coloured glass fixed together in a wooden lattice.[19] The lattice at a distance resembles fret-work, but is really elaborately pieced together. Some of the older windows contain exceedingly fine work, but even when it is well done it is not very durable, and nowadays they can only do very rough work. Some of the work that is forty or fifty years old is marvellous, but could not be done at the present time for love or money. The French window itself consists of two doors which are supposed to meet in the middle. There are no hinges, but each door has a wooden foot which turns in a mud socket. The arrangement of the coloured glasses which forms the panes is extremely artistic. The same sort of wooden lattice is used, but the pattern is rather larger than the pattern of the fanlight. As may be supposed, it is extremely difficult to keep these windows clean, for the panes, besides being very minute, are simply caught into grooves in the wood; and, as the work is done without any great accuracy, they very seldom fit. The doors are made after the same design as the windows, but they have wooden panels. They are often surmounted by a glazed fanlight. The wood of the doors and windows is covered with a yellowish-brown paint, and warps very badly, as it is used in an unseasoned[20] state. Our cat could generally get in through a bolted door.

Of course there is no form of door fastening which can be used from both sides, and in this way as in others a Persian house is distinctly inconvenient. Still the style of building when fresh is very pretty. These masses of French windows with their coloured panes artistically arranged, the lines of white arches all along the sides, and the high-arched ceiling with its curious mouldings give the room an ecclesiastical appearance. At the back of the room there is not infrequently a corresponding line of door-windows, leading to one of those cupboard-rooms which I have before mentioned. This arrangement increases the regularity of the general design.

Before passing on to describe the furniture I must mention that there is one other totally different style of window, which lifts up in a sash, without pulleys, and is supported when open by metal stays. Also it is very common to find wooden lattices unglazed. Paper or calico is pasted over these in the winter.

There are one or two other forms of ornamentation that are not uncommon. Perhaps a line of painting, quaint but distinctly artistic,[21] may run round the room just below the taqchas, giving the effect of a dado. Sometimes the roof is much more elaborately moulded, and is spangled with little bits of looking-glass; when this is not overdone the effect is pleasing. It is not uncommon to find very poor looking-glasses, about twelve by six inches, let into the walls. There are in almost every room rings attached to staples, which are intended to support the baby’s hammock. Fireplaces are a European importation, but they are generally to be found in at least one room of the better class houses. They are almost always narrow, and comparatively high, so as to conform to the arch design, and they are made in the wall without any metal. The metal fittings of the room, such as hammock-rings, staples, and door and window latches, are made of whitened iron curiously engraved; and nails of the same material with very large heads, from one inch to three or four inches across, are used freely by the Persians for ornamenting woodwork.

The movable furniture of a Persian room is very simple. Curtains are not used very freely, and those that are used are rather scanty. Generally they are hung up by the corners[22] without any string. In the men’s apartments they are used more for doors than for windows. The favourite pattern is a very crude green or red with a large lozenge in the middle, like the design on a watered silk.

The only really valuable things in a Persian room are the carpets. In some cases these are laid right up to the walls, and a piece of drugget something less than a yard wide is also laid along the walls, usually on three sides of the room. In other cases there is a border of very thick clumsy felts arranged round the carpet which occupies the centre of the floor. The felts are self-coloured, with a small amount of stamped pattern. They have not got cut edges, but are made in one piece, consequently the shape is very inaccurate. They cost nearly as much as good carpets, and are often protected with druggets in the same way. In the place of honour, furthest from the door, is a mattress stuffed with cotton, covered with some sort of chintz or cretonne, and furnished with one or two very large round bolsters. In the winter there is also occasionally a kursī in evidence, but they are less common in Yezd than in other Persian towns. The kursi is a rough stool, about as high as a milking-stool, and[23] about eighteen inches square, completely covered with cotton quilts and rugs, which trail on the ground on every side. Beneath this an iron brazier of lighted charcoal is placed, and the family tuck their legs underneath the wraps, and squat round the kursi on the floor. This, however, is not generally kept in the room except in the coldest weeks. During the remaining seasons the brazier is often brought in on a large copper tray, either for heating the room, or for keeping the teapot warm and for opium smoking. All copper and iron utensils in Persia, such as these trays and braziers, are carefully tinned.

Tables in Yezd are made in the roughest fashion, but the legs are nicely turned, the Yezd carpenters being greatly inferior to the turners, who are entirely distinct from them, and who produce very good work with the simplest class of hand-lathe worked with a bow. The carpenter, on the other hand, is incapable of putting up a shelf straight. He never dovetails, and he disguises the inaccuracy of his joints with plentiful deposits of clay.

Many of the Yezdis use little tables about three feet by two, and standing about twelve inches high. These are used only for tea-things. But tea is[24] generally made by an inferior, standing at a tall table in the corner of the room. These tables are rather larger, not less than four feet by two. They stand as high as an English sideboard, and have a rough border of curved or dog-tooth pattern falling down from the slab, so that they very much suggest a rough dressing-table. They are often brought in and out of the rooms as they are wanted. People who wish to be thoroughly European in their manners sometimes have a larger table of the same kind permanently in the room, surrounded by a few bentwood chairs, which are brought up from Bombay, or folding-chairs with cane seats, which I think they bring from Isfahān, and about which the less said the better. Such a table is always covered by a white cloth, the most fashionable variety being a Turkey bath-towel.

These chairs and larger tables are no real part of Persian plenishing, while the tea-tables are being continually carried backwards and forwards, and are not necessary to the equipment of the room. Consequently the room does not present a very filled appearance. The few utensils which it contains, other than those mentioned, are placed upon the taqchas. On one[25] of these taqchas may be seen a pair of lālas. The lala is a spring candlestick with a globe, and is, I believe, made in Europe. The candles are also imported. All lights in Persia have to be carefully protected from the wind, as the house is not a continuous building, but a series of outhouses. On another taqcha will be found a lamp, also of European manufacture. Persian lamps, which are simply saucers of native vegetable oil with a floating wick, are used freely about the house when a strong light is not required, but they have the disadvantage of blackening the gypsum of the walls. With regard to the imported lamps it is a curious thing that, although the lamps used are of the cheapest variety, with stems and reservoirs of blue or white glass, lamps with short stems, which might be brought into the country at an infinitely less cost, do not seem to have come into fashion. On a third taqcha is sure to be found a specimen of the Persian hookah, or qaliān. This is a most elaborate pipe, and is both made and bought in sections. The large bowls, however, when they are made of glass, are, I believe, imported; also some of the china heads.

Sometimes you will find on the taqchas a pair[26] of European vases. In Yezd the pattern is almost always that of the hand rising up from a stand and grasping a tapered vessel. Sometimes also you will find cheap Continental oleographs, generally ladies’ heads. These are bought by the pair, and you will find two copies of the same picture standing side by side. Another European import to which the Yezdis are much attached is a looking-glass. These are of the oblong shape, with varnished or gilt frames. Perhaps also one will see on the taqchas a covered glass vessel with a long spout, containing rose-water.

In the women’s rooms there is occasionally a large wooden trunk for clothes, covered with gold and silver paper, and of a very clumsy design. The taqchas may be covered with plush cloths, and this is sometimes the case in the men’s apartments. The women are also fond of highly ornamented trinket boxes.

SWEET EATING IN A TALAR.

This is the principal part of the summer buildings in a Persian house, and the bottom of the picture is the level of the compound. The room underneath is a living room, and is lighted by the grating under the talar. It is only used in the heat of the day. The door to the cellar staircase is seen on the right of the picture. The passage is the approach to the talar itself.

The three men are sitting in the ordinary Persian way round a tray of sweets. The Yezd sweets are remarkably good and have no coarse flavour. They eat them as we do cakes, but in rather larger quantities. This talar is a small one. The larger ones are generally cruciform in shape. It has no bad-gir (air-shaft) or front curtain.

The better class Yezd houses are exceedingly clean, and so on the whole are the people who live in them. In this Yezd is distinctly superior to some other Persian towns. The houses of the rather poorer classes in Yezd are dirtier, but they would compare favourably with those of[27] a corresponding class in many parts of Europe. The very poor class are crowded together, many families to one house, and live in a condition of filth as great as the dry atmosphere will permit. You must remember that the native never removes his clothes for the night; indeed he only removes his clothes or washes his body when he goes to the public bath. The fee for admission is a mere trifle, but people do not go to the bath unless they have an absolutely clean set of clothes to change into when they have bathed. A few of the poor people take off their clothes on arriving at the bath and wash them, staying in the bath until they are dry enough to put on again. This, however, is exceptional, and generally speaking the difference in the standard of cleanliness accepted by the richer and poorer Yezdis is very large.

Houses that are not very new are always more or less tumble-down. The mud ceilings crack very easily, and the white gypsum flakes off at the slightest touch. The more essential parts of the structure are equally undurable. But you must remember that no Yezdi wants his house to last for ever. When the house is first of all built, a large chamber is made below the[28] surface to receive the drainage, and the size of this is determined by the length of time the owner wishes his house to last, which is generally forty to fifty years. When the chamber is full, the rich occupants move to another house, and the house gradually falls to pieces. To the Yezdi an old house means a bad house, and this idea is so deeply rooted, that even in his bagh he seems to prefer young trees to those which have attained their full size. The idea of a residence which bears the marks of natural growth, and is not simply artificial, has never entered into the Yezdi’s mind; and the absence of this to us familiar idea, has to be reckoned with in dealing with his character. Also it must be remembered that two-thirds of a Persian town, and three-quarters of a Persian village, is from various causes invariably in ruins. I suppose that in an English climate the best-built Yezd dwelling houses would remain standing for about a fortnight. In spite of their palatial design they are really nothing but mud huts, and when you live in them, or rather about them, for you are in the open air as often as you are inside, you learn their imperfections to your cost. Nobody can realise the immense amount of damage that can[29] be done in a town like Yezd by a really wet day. Some while ago we had twenty-four hours of rain, which destroyed, I believe, about a couple of hundred roofs, and, what is worse, caused the older qan’at pits to fall in, blocking the water supply in some parts of the town for three months. Is there any other town in the world where a little extra rain causes a three months’ drought? There is a story in Tehran about a Dutch Ambassador, who was so afraid of the roof falling down that in wet weather he invariably slept under the table. However he was a very tall man, and, when the catastrophe happened, he got his foot crushed.

Still the summer buildings in a Yezd house are really not bad. Generally speaking, the Persian builds well for heat and badly for cold. Yet the short Yezdi winter is a very severe one; and we, who are accustomed to a longer cold season, are astonished to see the philosophic way in which the Yezdi sets himself to endure the cold while it lasts, without taking any particular precautions to defend himself from it. The long window-front is a mass of spaces and cracks. Even when panes are not missing, daylight is frequently to be seen between the glass and the[30] lattice, between the window and its frame, and sometimes between the frame and the wall. This of course is not including the crack between the two doors, which is often half an inch wide. Remember that every door in the house is a front door, leading into the open air, and you will get some idea of the provision made against the winter cold. The fact is that the Persian only understands two kinds of winter requirements, that of the hard living working-man who demands only the simplest shelter against the cold, and that of the man who on cold days can devote himself to keeping warm with a kursi in an inner apartment. A man who wants to do his work comfortably in any sort of weather is entirely beyond his calculation. On the few days when snow falls the merchants’ offices are practically deserted, and no one but the smaller tradesmen and artisans goes to the bazaars.

The house, as I have said, is really built for a protection against heat. When I first went to Yezd I was surprised to find how tremendously the natives were affected by the hot weather. The native is certainly less affected than the European by the direct rays of the sun; but although something in the climate seems to tell on[31] Europeans after two or three years’ residence, I would back a fairly strong Englishman, furnished with a sun-helmet, against the average town Yezdi, to get through a piece of work on a hot day, or to keep up continuous hard work for a season or two. Consequently every Yezdi who can afford it tries to get away from town for at least two months of the year. The hill villages, which the Persians call yailāq, or summer quarters, lie about thirty miles away from the town. Every well-to-do Persian has a house in one or other of these villages, and there is a fashion about them, some being resorts chiefly patronised by the artisans, and some by the big merchants.

As most of the richer Persians have more than one house in the villages, Europeans generally have no great difficulty in hiring a place to stay at. The houses are left during the winter in charge of a villager, who uses the lower rooms only, the upper ones being then uninhabitable from the intense cold. Indeed the cold is so great that we were told that one winter the animals had been dying of thirst, as the water was frozen beyond the possibility of breaking the ice, and they had not fuel enough to melt it. The whole building is much rougher than the town house, though the roofs have to be made[32] more carefully. The villages are very small and isolated, and the winter population is quite trifling. There is in these villages a little arable land, but the people depend chiefly on root-crops, nuts, and dried fruit for their winter stores, and on the produce of the sheep and goats. The animals are tended in summer by the children. The little boys spend most of their time up the walnut trees, throwing down leaves for them to eat, while the little ragged shepherdesses carry a twelve-foot staff for whacking the walnut trees, when they do not climb them in the same way as their brothers.

Those who go to the villages in the summer take with them everything they need in the way of carpets, furniture, and cooking utensils, also all groceries, and even wheat and charcoal; for the commonest things of this kind are often absolutely unprocurable. A rich Persian has stores frequently sent to him from Yezd during his stay. Even in Yezd some necessary store or other is almost always running short, so that something is generally at famine prices. This, of course, is due to the great isolation of the town. But in the villages it is intensified. Sometimes there will be no meat, at another time hardly any bread, and some years ago we found it almost impossible to[33] procure milk, and were told by our Persian friends that they had the same difficulty. This eighteen-hour journey, with all the paraphernalia of the home, is the average Yezdi’s only experience of foreign travel; and for this reason I have thought it necessary to give some account of what he sees and finds.

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[34] 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[35] 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?