“This chamber appears to be ... a temporary living-room for travellers. It ... communicates with the cells above the haunches of the arch by an opening 4 ft. 6 in. high. The inner room is probably intended to afford sleeping accommodation. The living-room is approached by a staircase in the thickness of the wall leading up from the top of the pier. The Persian name for an upper chamber of this kind is ‘bala-khana,’ literally ‘a house up above.’”[116] Perhaps the finest bridge in Persia is the far-famed Ali Verdi Khan at Isfahan. Ali Verdi Khan was the general of Shah Abbas, and his bridge, if not the greatest in the world, has no rival that excels it in stateliness. As Lord Curzon has said, it alone is worth a visit to Isfahan to see. I know it in photographs only, and in written descriptions, but I feel its beauty and magnificence. In many respects it resembles the Pul-i-Khaju (p. 213), but it is a great deal longer, and no pavilions rise above its tiers of arches. To my mind the pavilions of the Pul-i-Khaju have an architectural value that cannot be rated at too high a level. So I miss their grace in the Ali Verdi Khan, though this noble structure ought not to be criticised--except in an ashamed whisper. [Illustration: THE BRIDGE OF ALI VERDI KHAN OVER THE ZENDEH RUD AT ISFAHAN, PERSIA] There is a gateway at the north end, so we must place the Ali Verdi Khan among the minor defensive bridges. A paved ramp or causeway leads from a great avenue to the gateway; and then a visitor has 388 yards to walk before he reaches the far end. The main road is paved, and its width is thirty feet. Upon each side is a gallery, or covered arcade, two and a half feet wide, which is pierced through the outer wall of the bridge from one end to the other; it communicates with the main road by frequent arches, it opens by similar arches--over ninety in number--on to the river view, and here and there it expands into large chambers, as we see in Brangwyn’s pen-drawing. The chambers used to be decorated with “not too proper paintings,” done in the time of Abbas II. At both entrances the Ali Verdi Khan is flanked by round towers, and staircases in the towers go up to a fine platform which in earlier times was a favourite promenade; but now it is disfigured by telegraph poles, the modern spirit everywhere having an unrivalled vulgarity.[117] “Similar staircases, cut in the basements of the towers, and also at regular intervals in the main piers, conduct from the road level to a lower storey, where, but little elevated above the bed of the river, a vaulted passage runs along the entire length of the bridge, through arches pierced in the central piers, crossing the channel of the river by huge stepping-stones planted in its bed. Colonel Johnson gives the dimensions of these transverse arches as ten feet span and nine feet high; and of the main arches (thirty-three in