Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/580

534 are unventilated, and receive light only from the doorways. In the great karwan-serais of lower Mesopotamia there is another feature which I have not seen elsewhere in the Orient. It consists of great quadrangular platforms of solid masonry in the open court. They are about four feet high, and serve as a place on which to deposit for the night the packs of the animals. Hitching-rings are sunk into the vertical walls of these platforms. These features may be seen in the illustration on page 529, of which the photograph was taken when the building was practically empty.

Nor is religion neglected in the construction of the karwan-serai. In the picture referred to one may see the kublah which gives the direction of Mecca and is used for the call to prayer. It is located at one end of the court platforms, being slightly elevated above them. In the illustration (a photograph of Mahaweel Khan between Baghdad and Babylon) we notice another common characteristic of the karwan-serai, namely, the isolated chamber on the roof immediately over the great portal entrance. This is the chamber set aside for the lodgment of persons of distinction, and especially for the ladies of a harem. Stairways immediately inside the portal lead to this chamber of honor and to the roof over the arcades and the stables concealed behind them. During the heated period travellers are glad to sleep on the roof, unless their stuff is so valuable that it is the part of wisdom to stay with it. The thermometer registers 117° Fahr., which makes a house intolerable both by day and by night. By day people live in cellars; by night on the roofs of their houses—an inheritance from the Babylonians, and a reminiscence from the hanging gardens of Babylon.

The karwan-serai is in charge of one or more keepers (khanjees), who are usually obliging and eager to make the foreigner as comfortable as may be. The modern hotel is built in the hope of making money thereby, but unlike it the karwan-serai owes its existence to religious, charitable, or semieleemosynary motives; but as it undertakes to furnish its guests with nothing but safety, shelter, and water, travellers must needs bring everything else with them, even charcoal for cooking their food. Though no charges are made, the khanjees expect and usually receive a backsheesh proportionate to the services rendered. They are not there "for their health," but precisely because of the expected backsheesh.

Shortly after dark the great doors of the entrance-portal are closed and secured by powerful chains: it is then that the karwan-serai has become for the nonce a fortress, behind whose massive, windowless walls the traveller may sleep in security from invasion from without. But within, an army of creeping things is astir and girded for war throughout the livelong night.

We are informed by Xenophon that Cyrus was the first to build caravansaries at the relay-stations along the royal postal-roads. Many of the places mentioned in the Peutinger Table, in the Antonine and Jerusalem Itineraries, were certainly mere karwan-serais, whose only inhabitants were the men employed by government to look after the welfare of the relays of horses, while possible travellers had to take pot-luck, then as now. These stationes have all disappeared, and so must all karwan-serais fall into decay with the lapse of years, no matter how well built originally. For, being charitable institutions, they have no revenues from travellers, and in most cases no endowment fund was provided by their pious founders for maintenance or repairs. Repairs, therefore, are never made: Kismet holds full sway here as in everything else Oriental. But fortunately the karwan-serais, having been honestly and massively built, may be used for centuries without repairs, and indeed they continue to be used for other centuries after they have actually fallen into a ruinous condition.

This fact is evidenced by the magnificent ruins of Sultan Khan (Royal Khan), pictured on page 535, which is still used in spite of the fact that for one or two centuries (since the trade-route changed) it has been a ruin crumbling to its approaching fall. The Arabic inscription on the magnificent portal states that the khan was built by order of Alau-ed-din, the eleventh and last of the Seljuk sultans of Iconium. It reads: "The exalted