Wednesday, 25 April

The sun was already sinking as we hurried for the first time into town to buy cushions and carpets in the bazaar. (It goes without saying that the rooms of Hajji Abbas's house had nothing but four walls.)

We go around the town as if in an underground labyrinth. The covered alleyways, strewn with refuse and rotting matter, twist and intersect in a baffling fantasy. In places, they become so narrow that, if you meet a horseman, or even a small donkey, you have to flatten yourself against the wall to avoid being touched. Men dressed in dark robes and wearing tall astrakhan hats stare at you without any ill-will. The women glide by, moving aside like silent ghosts, all of them covered from head to toe by a black veil, the face covered by a white mask with two round holes for the eyes. The little girls, not yet veiled, but heavily made-up and their hair reddened with henna, are nearly all adorable with their fine beauty and smiles, even the poorest who go bare-foot and in tatters, in their charming rags. In these long, depressing walls, built of grey brick and grey earth, there are no openings for windows. There is nothing but doors, and even then, there is a second wall built behind to hide them and to provide a permanent screen. Some of the doors are framed with precious old tilework, depicting sprays of irises and branches of roses, whose colouring, brightened by the contrast with all the greyness around, bursts forth with a freshness in the midst of so much decay and ruin. Ah, the women draped in black, entering by these doors! They skirt the old bare wall and disappear into the hidden house.

My tunnel-shaped street is the way along which the Bushire caravans come into the town. There is a small Jewish bazaar selling mainly vegetables and seeds. However, in order to get to the real Shiraz bazaar, a huge place full of surprises, you have to take quite a long route through the labyrinth. It begins with dark narrow winding streets, where, in front of a thousand little stalls, you have to avoid potholes and sewage. Then come vast straight regular avenues, vaulted with domes in endless succession; there, for the first time, you can say this is indeed a large town, entered as if through the sewers, and seeing nothing. Along these avenues, merchants of the same trade come together, for this is the oriental custom.