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 Reugious Architecturb. 253 their country, and obliged to use circumspection and humble demeanour in order to be allowed a comer somewhere ; the aiesk- gah has had to make itself smaller, and descend to within little of the ground level — ^withdraw itself within a strictly closed court to escape from the gaze and intrusion of the non-Parsee ; all the same it has not suffered its fire to be extinguished. The mar- vellous longevity, the persistence of a belief whose rites are now precisely what they were in the days of the Dejoces, the Cyaxares, the Cyruses, and Dariuses, has in it something that appeals to the imagination and stirs it to unconscious respect. This has been vividly expressed in a page we reproduce as an appropriate con- clusion to our study.* " My researches," writes Flandin, " in the hypogeta of Persepolis were disturbed by an incident that deserves being told. As I was ascending the path that led to the ruins, I perceived two figures whose dress, even at that distance, looked diflferent from that of the Persians ; they were two little old men, hale and keen«eyed witlial. ... To my questions they answered that they were traders from Yezd, on their home return from a journey in the north of Persia. They went on to say that, like the bulk of the inhabitants of Yezd, they were Guebres (fire-wor- shippers), as Jemshid, the great king that had built the palaces of Persepolis had been. They could not, they said, go by those noble ruins without visiting them even as pilgrims. Having thus spoken, they began to collect small pieces of wood and dry grass, with which they made a pyre on the edge of the escarp of the rock where we stood. They set fire to it, mumbling prayers in a tongue I had not yet heard in those countries. It must have been Zend, the language of Zoroaster and the Avesla, an idiom which is scarcely to be distinguished from that whose characters are incised on the walls of Persepolis. As the Guebres were praying before their fire, I raised my eyes to the upper sculpture on the facade of the funereal vault in front of which we stood. The scene figured above was identical with the scene enacted before me. Mazdaism, then, had still adepts, adherents whose faith had been preserved through many centuries despite the persecutions of the followers of Mohammed and Ali. The two Guebres were gone, but the tiny pyre still burnt. I felt under the sway of a truly religious im{)ression, as I found myself alone beside those embers that had been pra ed to, and had received the ' Flandin, Relation^ torn. ii. p. 203.