The Road to Oxiana

by Robert Byron

  The “minaret” of the night before proved to be a solid square shaft eighty to a hundred feet high, and twenty broad, built of coarse Sasanian masonry and having no entrance or trace of one. The sides gave evidence of an ascending ramp, which must have engaged the shaft in a four-sided spiral. I remember now that Herzfeld in his Reisebericht suggests that the ramp was enclosed in its turn, the whole thus forming a tower with an interior ascent of which only the core remains. Dieulafoy, more picturesque, believes the column served as a fire-altar and pictures the priests filing up its ramp in full view of the populace below, as though it were an Aztec teocalli. But neither theory explains what purpose, other than megalomania, can have prompted the erection of 40,000 cubic feet of solid stone in this form. Even the pyramids were slightly hollow.

  The tower has no name, but is said to mark the site of a stone fallen from heaven. All round it, within a radius of half a mile, the ground shows the contours of Ardeshir’s capital. Many of the foundations, or of the walls that fell on them, seem to be only a foot or two below the earth, and there is one platform still above it. This is built of rectangular blocks, neatly cut and fitted in the Achemenian way, and very different from the higgledy-piggledy masonry of the tower, where stones of any shape are embedded in a sea of mortar. I should like to dig here; it must be the richest site in Persia still untouched. Sasanian fragments are seldom beautiful. But they document an obscure passage of history at the junction of the ancient and modern worlds.

  The others mounted their horses and I the ass, which beat the Governor’s stallion by a nose at every corner, flapping its ears and hopping its ditches as if it could outpace any horse living. We stopped at a garden on the way back, to recline beneath a grove of old orange trees, and drink curds with nutmeg. Outside the town, three ragged children salaamed the Governor from the back of a camel. Reining back the stallion on his hindlegs, as though the scene were another Field of the Cloth of Gold, he gave them in return the polite formulas: “Peace to you. Your Excellencies’ health is good by the grace of God?” It was a great joke, we all laughed, and so did the children. But it was also a true benevolence, that warmed my heart towards Haji Seyid Mansur Abtahi Shirazi, the Governor of Firuzabad.

  Ibrahimabad (c. 4400 ft.), February 23rd.—That charming man had intended to come with me to the gorge, but was engaged, today being Friday, in entertaining the Municipality to a picnic in the garden of Nasrabad. He had not believed I would leave so soon, and had expected me at the picnic too. Indeed he was almost offended by my going. But I could assure him, with truth for once, that his grief was nothing to mine.

  Today has been the perfect day, the one day which, even if there is no other like it, makes the whole journey from England worth while.

  The start was unpropitious. Last night, as my horse from Ismailabad was being shod in the bazaar, it broke its halter and fled. The escort promised me one of theirs instead, but were late in getting up, thinking they now had the advantage of me. Outside the town, we found the missing horse, which delayed us still further. It was nibbling the road with that air of hopeless indecision characteristic of lost horses, vacantly looking up now and then as if in search of some kind person to take it home. Having wasted half an hour trying to effect this kindness, during which our own horses were goaded into a lather while the truant remained as cool, as vacant, and as helplessly innocent as before, we drove the brute into the gorge. One of the escort stayed on guard at our end, so that if it did escape by the other it could only arrive at its native place.

  The Palace of Ardeshir assumed enormous dimensions as we crossed the river and could distinguish the small-ness of two Kashgai tents encamped on a lawn below it. These tents were black and oblong, and were stretched over low stone walls. Dogs, children, lambs, and chickens tottered about the grass, enlarging still further the uncouth skeleton above them. Two women wearing full pleated skirts were pounding corn on a cloth by means of pestles attached to long staves.

  There was not time to measure the palace properly. But I soon saw that Dieulafoy’s elevation was wrong. This is interesting, considering the importance of the building in the history of architecture and the fact that Dieulafoy’s has so far been the only information available to writers on the subject.

  The entrance was originally on the south, through a big barrel-vaulted ivan. Today what appears to be the main façade faces east, looking across the river towards the mouth of the gorge. Behind it, at either end, are two courts, the southern covering about half an acre, the northern rather less. These are divided from one another by a series of three domed chambers, which stretch right across the Palace from side to side one behind the other. Only half the east chamber is still standing, with half its dome above it; so that the line of the façade appears at first sight to be interrupted by an open vestibule thirty feet across and fifty high. But one soon sees that really there is no façade at all—though I use the term for convenience—and that the whole of the east wall, having stood on the brink of the green slope now supporting the Kashgais, has gradually collapsed and taken the front of the first chamber with it.

  The two inner chambers are also about thirty feet square, and their domes, resting directly on simple corner squinches, have the same diameter. The apex of each dome is pierced by a broad hole, round which the outside masonry projects upwards. At present these holes afford the only light there is; if they were originally enclosed, the chambers beneath must have been artificially lit, and each dome must have been surmounted by a sort of rough cupola, thus discovering a precedent for those extraordinary nipples on the Romanesque domes of Perigueux. The dome of the middle chamber is some fifteen feet higher than the other two. Higher still is the elliptical cupola which separates it from the front dome, and which roofs the passage between the middle chamber and the outer ruined one. This passage is divided into two storeys; but a light well in the floor of the upper enables the hole in the cupola to illuminate the lower. A similar passage separates the middle and hinder chambers. This is roofed by a massive barrel-vault and is entirely unlighted.

  Dieulafoy makes all three domes the same height, and omits the cupolas of the passages altogether.

  It would need a long time to make sense from the maze of internal walls and heaps of fallen masonry that occupy the two courts. One can see, however, that a barrel-vaulted room, or succession of rooms, ran beside the dome-chambers on the north. The vault is gone, but two of the transverse walls whose semicircular tops supported it still stand. These walls are pierced at the bottom by shallow archways like those of a bridge, whose curve, being less than that of the vault above, is rendered doubly hideous by a pier at the apex necessary to support the weight of the wall.

  Most of the walls are about five feet thick. The stones are uncut and the mortar fills the gaps. Stucco adorned the three chambers, whose refinements are of two styles. One we call Romanesque: the squinches rest on a dogtooth cornice; doorways with rounded tops are framed in concentric mouldings; and a similar niche in the south court has these mouldings also dog-toothed. The other is bastard Egyptian, copied from Persepolis: arched doorways are surmounted by horizontal canopies which are scalloped, as they spread forwards and outwards, with a radiating feather design. This convention is unattractive enough in its own country and original stone. As a third-hand reminiscence, in cheaper material, it foreshadows the taste of the London County Council in the early XXth century.

  However, only archaeologists see beauty in Sasanian architecture. The interest here is historical. This palace, founded at the beginning of the IIIrd century A.D., is a landmark in the development of building. Its revelation of the squinch, a simple arch across the angle of two walls, coincides with the appearance of the pendentive, a kite-shaped vault supported by an angle pier, in Syria; and from these two inventions derive two primary architectural styles, in the wake of two religions: mediaeval Persian, branching into Mesopotamia, the Levant, and India; and Byzantine-Romanesque, spreading to the confines of northern Europe. Previously,
there was no means of placing a dome on four square walls, or on a building of any shape whose inside area much exceeded that of the dome itself. Henceforth, as squinches and pendentives became enlarged, and as the former were multiplied into zones of stalactites and bats’-wings, a dome became possible to buildings of all shapes and sizes. The Christian expansion of this possibility reached its height in St. Sophia at Constantinople, and began a second life with Brunelleschi’s dome at Florence. The Mohammadan is waiting to be mapped, by anyone who can keep his temper among the jealousies of modern archaeology. But one thing is certain. Without these two principles, of which one has its prototype here, architecture as we know it would be different, and many objects most familiar to the world’s eye, such as St. Peter’s, the Capitol, and the Taj Mahal, would not exist.

  I wish I could go to Sarvistan. It is nearer Shiraz than this, and has another Sasanian palace, in which a row of arches that spring from the wall are supported by round pillars. Here perhaps is the germ of that other great feature of Mohammadan architecture, the arcade. Pillars certainly played their part in Sasanian architecture, as the excavations at Damghan have shown, and in view of the Sasanian aptitude for vaulting, it is probable that they were used in most cases to support arches.

  Fired by this train of revelation, I clambered down from the roof to find the Kashgais had made tea for us. An old tribesman obligingly produced an awl and thread to mend the cross-piece of my saddle-bags. One of the younger men, having said he knew the path up to the Kala-i-Dukhtar, had gone ahead to await us in the gorge. He hailed us from above as we rode by. The climb was easier than it looked, but nasty enough.

  Seen from behind, the castle stands on a promontory, and is thus defended on three sides by precipices that fall almost sheer from its outer walls. The last stage of the climb was up a saddle connecting the promontory with the main cliff. This leads to the back of the building, which faces north, a mighty rampart lacking door or window and curved as though it contained a stadium. Tall thin buttresses support it at close intervals, and are joined at the top by rounded arches.

  Creeping gingerly round the edge of the wall, for there was a high wind, I attained the central chamber.

  The castle is built in three terraces. From the gorge below a gaping black arch can be seen, which gives entrance to a basement on the east side. This I could not reach as the spiral ramp communicating with it was blocked and I had no wish to climb down the outside. There are two such ramps, contained in square turrets which led originally from the bottom of the building, past the east corners of the chamber I stood in, to a third level above.

  In general form this chamber resembles those in the Palace of Ardeshir, being square and supporting a dome on squinches. The stucco is dotted with bullet-holes, but is otherwise extremely well preserved, though it has no ornament. Each wall is pierced by a broad round-topped arch, which, in the case of the south, east, and west walls, is open to the air. That in the north wall has been blocked up, and the masonry stucco’d over. But its outline is plain enough.

  This wall is on that side of the chamber which faces away from the gorge and is enclosed by the curved rampart at the back. And now arose a mystery. Between the chamber and the rampart lies a large area to which there seems to have been no entrance other than the arch now blocked or some hidden passage cut through the rock below. I could see no trace of such a passage from the back. There may be one from the basement. But I think not. For I saw then that others had noticed this mystery too, and had burrowed deep into the wall on either side of the arch in their attempts to penetrate the sealed area. They would hardly have wasted so much effort for no reason. The longer of the tunnels stretched twenty feet into solid masonry and came to a dead end.

  The opposite arch on the south side gives on to a grass platform between high walls, which extend to the brink of the gorge sixty feet away. These walls, as can be seen from the semicircular top of the wall at the inner end, supported a barrel-vault some forty feet in diameter. The other end was always open. Thus the Kala-i-Dukhtar at Firuzabad provides another Sasanian prototype for Persia’s next most important contribution to Mohammadan architecture after the dome on squinches: the ivan or open-fronted hall. This form, more than any other, changed the character of the early mosques. At first it was employed on one side only, to announce the sanctuary and the direction of Mecca. Later it was used to break the monotony of the other sides as well. It grew taller and taller. Its flat screen-like front became a field for all kinds of ornament and writing. It sprouted minarets at the side, arcades and cupolas at the top. Its vagaries have changed the face of every town in Islam, and it was pleasing, I thought, to find myself hanging on to an old nut-tree and eating an orange in the place where the idea began.

  Suddenly the Kashgai guide said: “Do you want to see the hammam?”

  I did want to know what he meant; Turkish baths aren’t generally situated on the tops of desolate mountains. My guards picked up their rifles, and we followed the man down a devious little path along the cliff’s edge. After a few moments the guards ran away, shouting “Nargiz! Nargiz!” Presuming they had seen some animal I continued with the guide, from whom, if from anyone, they were supposed to be guarding me, and who at length lowered himself over the cliff, beckoning me to follow. We found ourselves at the mouth of a tunnel festooned with ferns and emitting a rank smell, as though it were the lair of a beast: a notion which was supported by some heaps of bones and feathers.

  Forty feet up this tunnel brought us to the threshold of a cavern. It was now almost pitch dark. A hot vapour and a sound of bubbling assailed us. Suddenly our feet exchanged the solid rock for a crust of quaking mud.

  “You had better go first”, I said.

  “I think”, said the Kashgai, “that you had better go first.”

  We decided to light a bonfire.

  Even this did not reveal the end of the cavern or the whereabouts of the bubbling. Taking a brand, I was just stepping out on to the mud, when the smoke disturbed a cloud of bats. There was only one exit for them, and I was blocking it. With the breath of their wings on my neck, I fled down the tunnel into daylight, where I stood watching the verminous little creatures suspend themselves among the ferns. They were of the short-eared kind, in size between a sparrow and a thrush, and their small pink faces gazed malevolently down into mine.

  A sound of laughing and two pairs of legs showed the guards had found us. Dropping down on to the ledge, they were carrying, instead of the expected pelt, armfuls of those same big jonquils, twice the size of ours, which I had seen at the Governor’s. This was the meaning of nargiz1—narcissus!

  Looking over the edge to see if there had once been a way up from below, I found traces of an artificial path built out of the side of the cliff. Mortar and stonework were both Sasanian. In those days, therefore, the cavern may have been used as a Turkish bath; it is difficult to see what other reason there could have been for making a path to it. The records of Sasanian royalty are particularly impersonal. But I now begin to imagine it in slippers, so to speak, during week-ends at the Kala-i-Dukhtar, when the rheumatic members of the party took the waters of a morning and the dowagers had face-massage in that mud. After all, if Mile Tabouis can write a life of Nebuchadnezzar which is almost too heavy to lift, I might make two such volumes on Ardeshir out of today’s material.

  When we reached the bottom, I jumped into the river. It was deep enough to swim, not too cold, and most grateful after a hot morning. But the escort thought it fatal, and uprooting several trees, lit a bonfire to bring me to life when I came out. Including the Kashgai, we were now six; but the splendour of Ali Asgar’s travelling arrangements enabled me to lunch them all out of my saddle-bags, reserving a bottle of wine for myself. A pied kingfisher was flitting up and down the river, black and white and rather larger than ours, but unmistakably its cousin, having the same large head, stumpy tail, and lightning flight. On the bank grew one or two mauve leafless irises, or lilies, three inches high.


  There are two Sasanian rock-carvings in the gorge, of which Flandin and Coste give drawings, though no photographs have been published of them. The more interesting depicts a tilt between Ardeshir and his enemy Ardarun V, the last of the Arsacid dynasty, which he displaced. This is near the Firuzabad end; unfortunately I had missed it, and there was no time to go back so far. I did ride back to see the other, which the Kashgai had pointed out from the top of the cliff. This depicts the usual god, Hormuzd, and king, also Ardeshir in this case, grasping a ring; the king wears a balloon on his head, said by some authorities to be a bag for the hair, is followed by several attendants, and assumes an attitude of defence (meant by the artist to be deference) as practised in modern boxing. Small and alone among the huge cliffs, carved on a face of morose purplish rock where river, trees, and kingfisher were the only life, the row of ancient figures was reminder less of the Sasanids’ triumph than of the dark age they triumphed over. Neither they nor the gorge have changed, save that passers-by are not so common and find less convenience; for there used to be a bridge near the relief, and the river is still parted by a fallen pier, built of cut stone, whose mortar has withstood the spate of thirteen centuries. Forcing my horse through the reeds, till its belly touched the water, I looked hurriedly and in vain for the inscription Herzfeld saw here, which records that the bridge was built by Aprsam, Ardeshir’s minister.