Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/115

 number of persons for whom they have engaged to pray. They mark their foreheads with saffron, and have a great veneration for a red cow. They wear very little cloathing, and those who are of the most distinguished piety, put one of their arms upon their head, or some other part of the body, in a fixed position, and keep it unalterably in that attitude. A little way from the temple is a low clift of a rock, in which there is a horizontal gap, 2 feet from the ground, near 6 long and about 3 feet broad, out of which issues a constant flame, of the colour and nature I have [p. 382] already described : when the wind blows, it rises sometimes 8 feet high, but much lower in still weather : they do not perceive that the flame makes any im- pression on the rock. This also the Indians worship, and say it cannot be resisted but it will rise in some other place. About 20 yards on the back of this clift is a well cut in a rock 12 or 14 fathom deep, with exceeding good water.' ^

The descriptive portion of this account, as already stated, is correct, being based upon information received from accurate observers. It is plain from the description itself that, if actual Gabrs (i.e. Zoroastrians, or Parsis) were among the number of the worshipers at the shrine, they must have kept in the back- ground, crowded out by Hindus, because the typical features which Hanway mentions are distinctly Indian, not Zoroastrian. The allusion to the tilaJc mark on the forehead, the veneration paid to the red cow, the diet of herbs and fruits, the scantiness of clothing, and the Yogi posture of the urdhva-hdhu ascetics, with withered arms, are all Brahmanical.

Further external evidence of the same character may be gained from the testimony of succeeding travelers. Thus, S. G. Gmelin (1771) describes the various Yogi practices of the devotees, especially of one ascetic who had held his arm up for seven years, until it became stiffened — a species of self-casti- gation that is only Hindu and was never sanctioned by Zoroas- trianism.2 Similarly, Jacob Reineggs, who made several jour- neys in the Caucasus before 1796, in describing the ' Ateschjah,'

1 Hanway, Caspian Sea, 1. 381- Beise auf dem Caspischen Meere, 1. 382 = 3 ed. 1. 261-265. 178-179, n., Stuttgart, 1834, as I have

2 The reference to S. G. Gmelin, not been able to obtain Gmelin's own Eeise, 3. 46, is taken from Eichwald, work.

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