[Illustration: Diagram illustrating the use of the qan’at. Notice that all the cultivation about the hills is irrigated from the snow torrent. Yezd is irrigated by qan’at water, brought in some cases from a point 30 miles distant, for the qan’ats do not go straight to the centre of the plain but make for a low part of the plain from wherever water is found. The 300 ft. well in Yezd is useless for irrigation, there being no lower point than Yezd.] [Illustration: DEHBALA. A hill village on one of the snow torrents.] CHAPTER II Isolation and insularity—The town the geographical and political unit—Extension of citizenship to strangers—Bigotry—Oppression and persecution of Parsis[2]—Improvement in their position—Position of Jews—Fanaticism largely non-religious—Position of European colony. The population of Yezd can only be guessed at, but probably that of the town proper is between thirty and forty thousand, and that of the town and surrounding villages between fifty and sixty thousand. This little community is insular beyond the insularity of islands. Within two hundred miles there are three sizable cities, Shīrāz, Kirmān, and Isfahān, of which Isfahan is slightly the nearest. When you send a letter to Isfahan from Yezd, if your friend writes by return of post you may get back your answer in a month; although a runner, taking the slightly shorter road by the mountains, could go and return within the week. Travelling in the ordinary way the journey takes eight days there, and eight back. It is a great pity that within the last two years they have got rid of the native telegraph line. During my journey up six years ago this contrivance was a source of never-failing interest and surprise to me. First of all there were the poles. They were rough sticks, exactly like what a washerwoman in England uses for propping up her clothes-line: I suppose, taking the good line with the bad, there was on the average about one insulator to every three poles; this is without counting the insulators which were hung midway between the poles, apparently by way of ornament. The wire itself was at different levels: in a good many places it lay on the ground, but at others it crossed the road about the level of a horseman’s chin. One day in Yezd one of the European residents wanted to send a telegram, and sent to the telegraph office to ask when the line would be up. They sent back a very polite message to say that the trouble was not that the line was down; it was always down: the difficulty was that a camel had stepped upon it.