CHAPTER XXV

FROM YEZD TO TEHERAN

'They have ridden the low moon out of the sky,

Their hoofs drum up the dawn.'

-KIPLING, The Ballad of East and West, 39.

It was the morning of May 13 when I bade adieu to Yezd and its Zoroastrian community and to my English hosts, and started on the journey northward to Teheran. The distance to be covered was about 375 miles over a trail through plains alternating with deserts which now and then encroach on the track if the hills on either side do not hold them back. Some day the journey will be made in seven hours by an Occidental express-train, but it took me seven days to accomplish the weary march, most of it on the back of animals only less tired than myself.

As I mounted my horse at the door of the Mission and rode out through the gates of Yezd into the desert, I was warned that, if a heavy sand-storm should break, I was to take my bearings by means of the compass and head toward the nearest haven of refuge, as the path might be wholly obliterated by the sand. There was happily no occasion to necessitate this measure, and as the horses were good, I enjoyed 'chaparing' at a brisk gallop for a number of miles.

Safar, all this while, kept up a spirited conversation with the little postilion (shāgird-chāpār), a bright lad who did not allow the horses to lag, but kept whipping them up from time to time with a thin metal chain that served as a whip, so that we reached before long the vicinity of the Gabar dakhmah, which crowned a high sand-dune in the distance. Here

I halted for an instant to take a photograph of our youthful postilion holding in his hand the chain, which he sold me as a memento at a price (thanks to Safar's dealings) far below the figure which my farangi extravagance might have offered him.1

The hamlet of Hojatabad, about twelve miles from Yezd, was the first station for changing horses, and I rested in its spacious caravansarai for about an hour, from one to two in the afternoon. My luncheon consisted of raw eggs (tukhmahā na pukhtah); these formed my staple food when 'on the road' in Persia, because I always found them good and nutritious, and I could save time, when hastening to make long stages of twelve or thirteen hours in the saddle, by not even waiting to have them boiled. For dessert on this occasion I had some sharbat, which was sickishly sweet in taste, but was served in an antique brass saucer engraved with a tracery so artistic in design that I bought the dish as a curio and had Safar wrap up the sticky receptacle and place it in his capacious saddle-bags. Sundown found us in Maibud, which Yakut and other early Oriental geographers, who wrote before the thirteenth century, locate at a distance of 'ten farsakhs from the borders of Yezd and the same distance from Akdah.'2 Like most of the ancient farsakh measurements, these numbers have remained unchanged and are still given as the respective distances to these places when reckoning the pay by farsakhs for post-horses. Even if we do not go back to the Persian and Arabic geographers, we have more or less precise records of the route dating from the time when Marco Polo traversed a part of it

1 At the time of the purchase I thought that this thin metal chain might be the modern representative of the ancient aspahe aštrā, 'horsegoad,' of the Avesta (Vd. 4. 19; 6. 5; 14. 2, etc.), but I have since become convinced that the aspahe aštrā is represented rather by the ordinary

whip with leather thong and wooden handle, one of which I had purchased near the Tomb of Cyrus, and that the chain represents rather the sraošōčarana, as seen also in the chain whips at Modern Merv in Turkistan.

2 Yakut, p. 555; cf. also p. 404.

in the latter part of the thirteenth century.' The Italian friar Odoric of Pordenone rode over it from Kashan to Yezd early in the fourteenth century (about 1325),2 and in the latter part of the fifteenth century (1474) Josafa Barbaro, the Venetian envoy to the court of Usun Cassan, describes Kashan and Kum, two of the most important towns on the line.3

The second day's march, as my diary shows, was a plodding ride of fourteen hours, with two brief breaks before the goal, fifty-six miles distant, was reached. A mid-day halt on this journey was made for an hour at Akdah, or Agdah, which is described by Yakut as 'a town on the borders of the desert of Yezd.' Somewhere in the hills in this vicinity there is said to be a shrine sacred to the memory of Banu-i Fars, or Khatun Banu, the mother, or more probably the daughter, of the last Sasanian monarch Yazdagard, with whose death the line of Zoroastrian rulers in Persia came to an end.5

In this same region, in the Zoroastrian village of Sharafabad, in the district of Ardakan, there is an old mud-walled Tower of Silence (dakhmah), and the story goes that seven charitable sisters built seven different dakhmahs at various points on the plain of Ardakan, and the sites of these structures are indicated by mounds of earth which are still pointed out by the aged Parsis of Sharafabad. There is also a modern Zoroastrian dakhmah between Sharafabad and Mazra-i Kalantari, in Ardakan; it was erected by Manakji Limji Hoshang Hantaria, the

1 See Marco Polo, ed. Yule, 1. 88; cf. also Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles in Persia, p. 155.

2 See Odoric de Pordenone, ed. Cordier, p. 41, Paris, 1891.

3 See Josafa Barbaro, Travels in Persia, 49. 73.

4 Yakut, pp. 404, 555. The older form of the name is generally given as 'Ukdah in the Arab geographies.

The legend of her flight and the cow which kicked over the pail of milk

that was to quench her thirst, and the consequent traditional sacrifice of cows on the spot by Zoroastrians (now discontinued), is recorded by Karaka, History of the Parsis, 1. 85-87; Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles in Persia, p. 156.

6 For this information regarding the dakhmahs I wish again to thank Khodabakhsh Bahram Raïs of Yezd. On the Zoroastrian village of Sharafabad, see Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles in Persia, p. 156, n. 1.