نسخة مذيلة من "بلاد فارس والشأن الفارسي" بقلم جورج كرزون، مع أوراق مدرجة [و‎‎٤‎٨‎٨] (١٨١٤/٩٨٦)

19
FROM TEHERAN TO ISFAHAN
village of Murchakhar, near to which, on November 13. 1729 Nadir
Shah inflicted a decisive defeat on the Afghans, who were soon ex
pelled root and branch from the country. Here also in 1785 died
Ali Murad Khan, who enjoyed a brief reign of four years in the
anarchy that succeeded the death of Kerim Khan Zend. A short
rise leads past the large Mader-i-Shah caravanserai, built of brick
upon a foundation of blueish stone by the mother of Shah Abbas,
to the crest of a low ri( % e tlia t separates the plains of Murchakhar
and Isfahan. Thence over the fiat we speed in the direction of the
Sefavi capital, already indicated by faint blue smoke-wreaths and
by the converging lines of innumerable Imnats. Behind it the
panorama is closed by mountains of striking and irregular outline. 1
As we approach the city the most conspicuous objects in the
landscape are a number of large circular towers with smaller turrets
Pigeon- projecting from their summits, sometimes sixty to seventy
towers feet in total lieiglltj planted in the midgt of enclosures
and gardens, and suggesting to the untutored eye the fortalices of
a feudal baronage. The real explanation is deplorably material
and deficient in the slenderest element of romance. They are
pigeon-towers, erected for the preservation of the dung and for the
breeding of those birds, who spend the day afield and return at
night to these comfortable quarters. The photograph which I
present of a section of the interior will show that the towers con
tain an infinite number of cells 2 and a well in the middle for col
lecting the manure, which is spread upon the melon-beds in the
surrounding fields. 3 They are opened and cleaned once a year,
but I should imagine that the damage inflicted on the grain crops
by the depredations of the birds would all but counterbalance the
profit accruing from the distribution of their guano. In Char
din’s time there were reckoned to be 3,000 of these pigeon-towers
1 From Kashan to Isfahan, an alternative, but more circuitous, route runs to
the east via Natanz. It was followed and described by several of the seventeenth
century travellers, e.g. John Struys (1672), Travels, cap. xxx., and C. Le Brun
(1703), Travels, cap. xxxvii. Compare A. H. Schindler (1879), Zeit. d. Gesell.f.
Erd. z. Berlin, vol. xiv. pp. 307-66.
2 Dr. Wills mentions a single tower as containing 7,000 cells, and giving
accommodation, therefore, to 14,000 pigeons. Since Isfahan, however, ceased to be
a capital, melons do not fetch so high a price; and, accordingly, the majority of
the towers have fallen into ruin.
3 Dr. Fryer {Travels into Persia, 1676, letter v.) is responsible for the state
ment that the pigeons’ dung was used ‘ to supply the Magazines with Salt-Petre
for making gunpowder,’ a use which is, I confess, novel to me.