“How many miles do you call it.” asks my companion.  “Just about twelve miles,” I reply; “what do you make it?” “That’s about it,” he agrees; “twelve miles round, and eleven gates.  We have walked or climbed over the archway of eight of the gates; and at the other three we had to climb off the ramparts and on again.”  As far as can be learned, this is the first time any Ferenghi has walked clear around the ramparts of Teheran.  It is nothing worth boasting about; only a little tramp of a dozen miles, and there is little of anything new to be seen.  All around the outside is the level plain, verdureless, except an occasional cultivated field, and the orchards of the tributary villages scattered here and there.  In certain quarters of Teheran one happens across a few remaining families of guebres, or fire-worshippers; remnant representatives of the ancient Parsee religion, whose devotees bestowed their strange devotional offerings upon the fires whose devouring flames they constantly fed, and never allowed to be extinguished.  These people are interesting as having kept their heads above the overwhelming flood of Mohammedanism that swept over their country, and clung to their ancient belief through thick and thin — or, at all events, to have steadfastly refused to embrace any other.  Little evidence of their religion remains in Persia at the present day, except their “towers of silence” and the ruins of their old fire-temples.  These latter were built chiefly of soft adobe bricks, and after the lapse of centuries, are nothing more than shapeless reminders of the past.  A few miles southeast of Teheran, in a desolate, unfrequented spot, is the guebre “tower of silence,” where they dispose of their dead.  On top of the tower is a kind of balcony with an open grated floor; on this the naked corpses are placed until the carrion crows and the vultures pick the skeleton perfectly clean; the dry bones are then cast into a common receptacle in the tower.  The guebre communities of Persia are too impecunious or too indifferent to keep up the ever-burning-fires nowadays; the fires of Zoroaster, which in olden and more prosperous times were fed with fuel night and day, are now extinguished forever, and the scattering survivors of this ancient form of worship form a unique item in the sum total of the population of Persia.

The head-quarters — if they can be said to have any head-quarters — of the Persian guebres are at Yezd, a city that is but little known to Europeans, and which is all but isolated from the remainder of the country by the great central desert.  One great result of this geographical isolation is to be observed to-day, in the fact that the guebres of Yezd held their own against the unsparing sword of Islam better than they did in more accessible quarters; consequently they are found in greater numbers there now than in other Persian cities.  Curiously enough, the chief occupation — one might say the sole occupation — of the guebres throughout Persia,