Five Years in a Persian Town

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Napier Malcolm. Five Years in a Persian Town

Five Years in a Persian Town

Table of Contents

PREFACE

FIVE YEARS IN A PERSIAN TOWN

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CONCLUSION

FOOTNOTES

GLOSSARY

INDEX

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Napier Malcolm

Published by Good Press, 2019

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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. 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. 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.

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