After a hot night, we are out early to take advantage of the morning’s coolness. Walking down towards the Zoroastrian Fire Temple, the roads are busy with traffic. A policeman ineffectually tries to direct the flood of cars and scooters at an intersection. Beyond the city, out in the desert, the reddish flanks of a mountain range are already beginning to dissolve into the haze, their shapes becoming indistinct and nebulous.
The Fire Temple of the Zoroastrians is set in a small, walled garden of conifers. Two shuffling caretakers maintain the grounds and show visitors into the temple. Above the doorway, set into a Romanesque porch, is an effigy of Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra, the prophet of the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda. The front room, the only room that non-believers are allowed into, is a small museum containing a painting of Zarathustra and two holy books, one of which contains an English translation of the gathas, the prayers of the Zoroastrians.
But the focus of the museum is a large glass panel through which can be seen the temple’s holy fire burning in a silver urn. This fire is supposed to have been burning continuously since 470 AD. It seems a strange and somehow atavistic thing to worship fire, but still, Zoroastrianism is practiced by a substantial number of people throughout West Asia.
From the fire temple, we walk about in the narrow kūtchés (alleyways) of the town, looking for a place called the Water Reservoir With Six Wind Towers. We eventually find it and it is unremarkable, so we walk back to the centre of town and along past the bazaar to the Masjid-é-Jamé.
The portals of the mosque are richly decorated with tile work and boast two well-proportioned minarets. Inside, there is a courtyard: searingly bright in the mid-morning light. The dome is tiled inside and out with exquisite aquamarine-coloured tiles. The floor of the main room is covered with carpets and we take our sandals off to walk around them.
In a small wooden stand, there is a collection of small clay tablets with Quranic inscriptions on them. These are placed in front of a person when he or she prays and the head is pressed onto them with each prostration. Linda pockets one as a souvenir. I’m sure Allah can spare one small piece of clay.
Out in the courtyard, the mosque’s caretaker beckons us to follow him. He leads us first into a cellar beneath the courtyard, into which once flowed an underground stream, now dried up. The cellar is a little dank, but very cool, and a carpet spread out on a platform is a sign that people sit down here during the heat of the day.
Back above ground, we are led through an intricately carved wooden door into a cloister. The large room sports several dozen arched pillars decorated with dark blue and white bands. The caretaker shows us a carpet into which is woven the Hindu swastika symbol. His explanation is lost on us, but it is an intriguing sight. We are then led back into the room beneath the dome where the wheezing caretaker points out several more swastikas in the tilework of the inner dome. This work apparently is from the Timurid era ( circa late 14th Century to 1502).
Leaving the mosque, we walk up into a narrow lane that leads past the small dome of another mosque, or perhaps an emāzādé [school]. The entrance gate is locked, but even from the street, it makes a nice photograph. The lane leads up into a smaller square surrounded by the mud brick walls of houses. At the centre of the square, there is a complicated wooden structure whose purpose we cannot guess at, but is perhaps a frame for building archways.
On the way back to the center of town I have a haircut and electric shave in a barber shop for 2,000 Rials. We browse briefly in the bazaar, which seems to sell mainly shoes and fabric, then retire to the hotel for the rest of day.
It is now 9.20pm and we are sitting out in the courtyard of the Hotel Aria. The night air is cool and clean. The sky above the brick walls of the hotel is a deep inky black. We are watching a small Daewoo TV set: Wolfgang Petersen’s evocative and claustrophobic film, Das Boot. It is, of course, dubbed rather clumsily into Farsi, but still, the action is relatively easy to follow.
The movie finishes abruptly halfway through the film, with the submarine resting on the seabed and water leaking in. The credits appear. It is amazingly amateurish and unprofessional. Perhaps the second half is on next week.
CurseOfTheTraveller 