by Jill Worrall
By the time we return to the central axis of the garden, the fountains in the main pool have been turned on and jets of water are arching over the central pool. The air is moist and small rainbows flicker in the morning sunlight that filters greenly through the palms. We are in an emerald oasis within an oasis.
As our journey across the edge of the Dasht-e Lut follows another of Persia’s silk routes we come across caravanserais in various states of repair at frequent intervals. One such is the Kalmard caravanserai that, in a place almost devoid of man-made structures and dominated by barren, ragged mountains, can be seen for kilometres in either direction.
It looks typically abandoned as we push open the magnificent weather-beaten double doors that still swing inwards on their original wooden pivots. The creak of the gates is loud in the silence, but as they stop moving we can hear running footsteps somewhere ahead.
We step out of the gloom of the entrance tunnel into the courtyard and a movement to one side make us turn to see a slightly built woman in a long skirt and headscarf. She has her arm protectively around a small boy clad in a grubby red jacket several sizes too big for him and ripped black track pants that come halfway up his calves.
Reza slowly walks over to her and begins to talk, translating for me as he goes.
An Afghan refugee, she is alone as her husband has gone away to work, leaving her and her son in the abandoned building. Before leaving he’d built a wall across the front of one of the niches to make a dark, one-roomed alcove to house his family. A few skinny goats live in one of the larger corner rooms. Washing hangs across another niche.
‘She speaks the most perfect Persian,’ Reza marvels. ‘Afghans are known to speak some of the purest Farsi.’
The small boy follows us as we explore the other rooms of what was once a five-star travellers’ inn. Each of the niches has four wooden coat hooks – something we’ve not seen anywhere else. Then we come across a rarity in a caravanserai – an inside toilet facility.
When we climb the stairs to the roof we almost step into the teacups belonging to a group of three men, one of whom is wielding a clipboard, another a tape measure and the third, and youngest, a thermos.
Once we’ve all got over our surprise the most senior of them explains they are a survey party from the Cultural Heritage and Tourism Organisation, which has plans to restore the caravanserai.
‘What will happen to the Afghan woman and her child?’ I ask.
He tells us that eventually she’ll have to move. I look over the parapet at the rubbly desert and the striated mountains. The road stretches far into the distance in both directions, disappearing into a shimmering mirage. Where was there to go?
It is a heavily fortified caravanserai – pairs of arrow slits are set into the parapet, between them a vertical chute that we guess could be used either by archers or to pour hot liquids down on attackers.
We are peering over the parapet at the view when Reza suddenly asks for my camera. Pointing it down the road we’ve just come from he zooms out the telephoto lens.
‘Can you see that black smudge in the middle of the road far away? Look through here and see what it is,’ he instructs.
Using the telephoto lens as I would a pair of binoculars, I look in the direction he is pointing and see an old man with a wispy beard, wearing a kilted gown and walking with the aid of a tall stick coming steadily down the road towards us. We’d passed that way only 30 minutes ago and certainly hadn’t seen him – where had he materialised from?
By the time we come down the stairs the traveller is coming through the caravanserai doors. Seen close up, his face is wrinkled and burnt by the sun and his belongings are in a swag tied over one shoulder. Reza, ever curious and encouraged by me, asks where he came from and where he is going. He doesn’t answer, instead shuffles over to a niche and sits down. He accepts a mug of water from the woman, but will not speak. We have to leave with that particular mystery unsolved.
Still following the caravan route we continue south through a landscape where salt has been sucked to the surface on such a scale that it looks as if it has just finished snowing. Another impressive caravanserai with round towers at each corner looms up beside us. The only way in is through a collapsed section of the wall; more perils lurk inside because this building seems to have an underground level, the roof of which has subsided in places.
We are picking our way carefully among the mounds of building material and rubble in one of the upper rooms when I almost trip over a donkey. It is very dead, but perfectly mummified in the arid atmosphere and still tied to one of the original camel tether rails set into the wall.
‘The poor thing – someone must have forgotten about it and it’s died of starvation,’ I say, backing hastily away.
‘No, no,’ Reza assures me. ‘I’m sure it died of natural causes but the owner for some reason hasn’t shifted it.’
It is a good try on his part, but I don’t believe him.
Behind the caravanserai is the ruined entrance to a water reservoir and the remains of an adobe fortress built around a small rock outcrop. Saltbush, with its ghostly silver-grey crabbed branches, clings to life among the sand and gravels.
A sapphire-blue sky hangs like a dome over us. All is utterly silent; remote, almost frighteningly vast and devastatingly beautiful in its starkness.
I want to stay longer, but Reza B is honking his horn – he’s already seen enough caravanserai to last a lifetime and decides it is time we were moving. But it is he who stops the van a few kilometres down the road to admire a herd of wild camels, including babies, grazing nearby.
‘Look, these are camels,’ he says slowly in Farsi. Reza leaps in with his favourite ‘substitution drill’.
‘I have two apples, I have two camels. Jill has two camels, Ahmad has two camels...’
Outside the language laboratory the mountains close in – jagged, slashed with fault lines, their feet hidden by a deluge of scree.
It looks like a road to nowhere. But for hundreds of years travellers, their camels and precious cargoes followed this route – it would have been a frightening, arduous journey, no matter what the season. And little wonder that the caravanserai along the way were so well protected – this would have been prime bandit territory.
When we stop at the next caravanserai, however, it is more akin to a barnyard than a link with the past. In the courtyard are two grumpy camels tied to old tyres and the side ivans have been blocked up with more tyres to create pens for a couple of donkeys and a small flock of sheep. When we climb up to the roof and look down through a collapsed dome a herd of goats gazes nervously back up at us.
Somehow, the amateur renovations, shoddy additional brick walls and manure everywhere make this a much more forlorn sight than even the most lonely ruined caravanserai. To make matters worse, someone has authorised the building of a mosque right beside the walls, and this looms above us in a less than elegant way. Its walls are covered with badly applied tiles that make it look more like a rather large public toilet with a dome of stained concrete plonked on top.
‘Reza,’ I ask, trying to be diplomatic. ‘How can a country that once produced the mosques of Isfahan produce something like this?’
Reza stares at the building gloomily.
‘I know, bloody modern shoddy building. I am ashamed.’
Once again we’ve spent too long digging up the past in the caravanserai because the sun is starting to set as we arrive at Kharanagh, an abandoned hillside village the foundations of which date back to pre-Islamic times about 1400 years ago.
Until 40 years ago this had been a small but thriving agricultural town and Reza and I leave Reza B contemplating his watch to wander into one of the arched tunnels that runs through the village. It’s fascinating to note that the roofs of the houses or small shops form the floor of the level above; when it was still inhabited Kharanagh must have had a wonderfully organic, communal feeling about it. We climb up several levels, stumble on the old village bakery
with its gaping wall ovens and end up on a terrace beside a small minaret that is catching the late sun.
Soot still clings to the walls and chimney places in some of the houses and graffiti has been etched into the smoky bricks. There is a mix of Farsi and English – initials inside hearts seem common to both. From an archway suspended over a sheer drop is a view down to terraced fields of green. It’s the first sign of agriculture we’ve seen all day. In the distance an aqueduct crosses a small river and beyond that, set into the banks, is a series of caves created by local farmers as shelters for their sheep.
As we return to the van the roar of an engine breaks the silence and an elderly man riding an old Russian motorbike appears, the petrol tank of his machine draped with dozens of freshly dug carrots and a shovel balanced across the handle bars. He stops beside a small channel of fast-moving water running past the outer walls of the village, piles the carrots on the shovel and rinses them off in the water. Then he signals us to come over and holds out a bunch of the vegetables invitingly. The Rezas dutifully refuse them three times as custom dictates, and then take a few.
When we rejoin the main Tabas-Yazd highway shortly after, we find ourselves swallowed up in a line of heavy, labouring trucks. There is little chance to overtake because the stream is just as constant in the other direction; this is the main highway leading to Pakistan and Afghanistan and still follows one of the ancient caravan routes.
The sun has almost sunk below the rim of mountains when Reza B turns the van off the highway and bumps us over the sand to Zeynodin, one of only four or five round caravanserai in the whole country, and unusually it has been lovingly converted into a boutique hotel. A small door set into the massive wooden gateway opens and the hotel manager steps out to greet us, leading us into a circular vestibule draped with local carpets.
Twelve arched ivans face the inner courtyard in the centre of which is a platform that would have once been used for unloading camels. Some of the archways lead to simple bedrooms with high brick walls and carpets on the floor.
The dining room is also off the courtyard. The piece de résistance here is one of the most ornate samovars I’ve seen in Iran. But before I can inspect it more closely Reza glances at the sky and hurries me up the stairs in the vestibule to the roof.
The sun is setting over the desert. The mountains that rim the small basin in which we are situated are difficult to see in the darkness and a single star hangs suspended over our heads. The road is still bumper-to-bumper with trucks. The air rings with the hum and whine of engines and their lights form an almost unbroken chain of white and red in both directions just as the road itself forms ´ a continuum with the trading routes of old.
An icy wind sweeps off the mountains making us retreat into the small teahouse that has been created in a niche off the dining room. The floor is covered in a thick layer of hand-knotted carpets in tones of rich red and deep blues. The brick walls, now cleaned of their soot, are bathed in golden light from intricate brass fittings. A tray of tea and a qalyan are placed in front of a sea of cushions and bolsters set against the curved wall ready for us.
We sit and inhale – orange-flavoured tobacco and the ghosts of past travellers. Their spirits, after withstanding centuries of snow, biting cold, blistering heat, bandits and exhaustion, are all around us.
5
POMEGRANATES IN THE DESERT
Yazd to Kerman
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you
Don’t go back to sleep
You must ask for what you really want
Don’t go back to sleep
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
Where the two worlds touch
The door is round and open
Don’t go back to sleep.
Jelaluddin Balkhi (Rumi), 13th century Persian poet
I wake in the night conscious that here in the room in which I am sleeping hundreds of people have slept before me: men, women, traders and holy men, wise men and simple souls, men of honour and miscreants.
If I’d been resting here 300 years ago, would I have been thinking very different thoughts? Or in the shivering hours before dawn do we all ponder the same questions, the same thoughts of love and the future and, most importantly for me at this moment, that off-putting need to stagger outside in the freezing air to the loo across the courtyard...
Reza and I had agreed to meet in the courtyard before sunrise at which point we planned to climb up to the roof so we could watch dawn over the desert and the caravanserai. But when I open the creaking door of my room there is no one in sight. The only eyes watching me are those of the desiccated fox skull that the renovators had found under a flagstone nearby and affixed to the wall above my door.
The cold is biting and, although I am determined not to miss the sunrise, I am not going to suffer alone. I cross the courtyard to the Rezas’ door and bang on it. A sleep-heavy voice assures me he is coming.
A minute or two later he emerges, looking less than alert, and we climb the high steps to the roof. The low parapet affords no protection from a pre-dawn wind that flows down from the mountains. Every time I take off a glove to use my camera my hand goes numb.
But when the glowing orange sun edges above the mountains in the east, I stop moaning about the cold and my lack of sleep and watch the colours of morning wash over the adobe walls of the stable that stands just outside the caravanserai door.
The shadows intensify across the sensuous curves of the ancient building’s rounded corners. The monochrome of the desert comes alive and the piercing lights of the omnipresent trucks are dulled.
After breakfast Akbar, the moustached manager, unlocks the stable doors to reveal three baby camels warming up in the early morning sun against the far wall.
‘We think tourists will expect to see camels here. They cost five hundred US dollars each so I hope we are right,’ he says. A small smoky grey donkey is keeping them company.
Reza B talks to the handful of other staff who all want to know where in Iran he comes from.
‘I come from Azerbaijan,’ he begins.
‘What is that like?’
‘Well, he answers, ‘there is western and eastern Azerbaijan. In my western Azerbaijan the nights are full of stars.’
Although we are staying in Yazd that night we drive straight through the city and out to the small village of Taft.
Yazd, and some of the surrounding villages, such as Taft, is one of the last remaining strongholds of the Zoroastrian religion that is thought to have only about 200,000 adherents worldwide. Most of them are in Iran but there is also a community in India, specifically in Mumbai, where they are known as Parsees.
Before the advent of Islam, Zoroastrianism was effectively the national religion of Persia – and despite the country’s modern-day status as an Islamic republic, the religion is firmly embedded in the nation’s consciousness and woven into its sense of identity. Zoroastrianism dates back to about 550BC when it is believed that its founder, Zoroaster (also known as Zarathushtra and Zarathustra) was born. No one is exactly sure where this took place but it may have been in northeastern Afghanistan perhaps or modern-day Turkmenistan. Regarded as one of the world’s oldest monotheistic religions, its adherents believe in a saviour born of a virgin and that the world will end with a battle between good and evil and a final judgement.
Zoroastrians are mistakenly called fire-worshippers. They certainly do venerate fire, but only as a symbol of God the creator’s wisdom and energy. Good thoughts, good deeds and good words are the key ingredients of their faith, along with a belief in free will. Traditionally Zoroastrians do not believe in conversion. You have to be born a Zoroastrian – each faith will lead one to God.
The village of Taft is also known for its pomegranates and on its outskirts, in the centre of a traffic roundabout, is a massive metal sculpture of a fruit basket piled high with gilt and ruby-red pomegranates.
We stop at the entrance to an unsealed alleyway bounded b
y high earth walls in the heart of Taft, and Reza and I set off down the path leaving Reza B to enjoy a snooze in the van. Apart from looping electricity and telephone lines it’s a timeless scene. We stop frequently to peer through the cracks of the wooden gates set into the walls – last year’s leaves and a few mummified fruits hanging in the suspended animation of late winter cling to orchards of apples, apricot and pomegranates.
We reach a T-junction and see in the wall in front of us a small niche black with soot that has a trail of candle grease snaking down to the ground.
‘In the evenings someone comes out and lights a candle – it’s a sign of the Zoroastrian faith, but also a way to light the darkness through the streets,’ Reza explains.
We turn right and follow the lane until Reza stops outside a tall set of metal gates inside of which is the village fire temple, the focus of Zoroastrian worship and where communal prayers and other ceremonies are held. He gently pushes the gate open and we step into a tiny courtyard where two or three trees stand among the long grass and the thorny branches of a few rose bushes edge the path.
A simple rectangular building stands in front of us featuring a steep set of steps leading up to a plain metal door. A woman, bent double and with her back to us as she sweeps the concrete with a twig broom, is on the steps. Hearing our voices, she turns round and carefully makes her way down the stairs toward us.
Wearing a long green skirt and an orange and red scarf that comes down almost to her waist – quite different from those of all the other women I’ve met so far – she’s tiny, only coming up to Reza’s chest.
Encircled as her wrinkled but delicately flushed face is with her scarf, she looks just like a carefully preserved apple wrapped in colourful tissue paper. She smiles sweetly at Reza and launches into a rapid conversation in Farsi that I can’t follow.