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convincing.
    Behzad said, “You wouldn’t be able to follow me. I don’t know what to do, either. I don’t go to mosques.”
    But we could go into the courtyard, and to do that we didn’t have to take off our shoes. The courtyard was wide and very bright. At one side was a clock tower, with an austere modern clock that had no numerals. On the other side was the entrance to the shrine. It was high and recessed and it glittered as with silver, like a silver cave, like a silver-vaulted dome cut down the middle. But what looked like silver was only glass, thousands of pieces catching light at different angles. And here at last were the pilgrims, sunburnt peasants, whole families, who had come from far. They camped in the open cells along the courtyard wall (each cell the burial place of a famous or royal person), and they were of various racial types: an older Persia, a confusion of tribal and transcontinental movements.
    One Mongoloid group was Turkoman, Behzad said. I hardly knew the word. In the 1824 English novel
Hajji Baba
(which I had bought at the hotel in a pirated offset of the Oxford World’s Classics edition), there were Turkoman bandits. I had once, in a London sale room, seen a seventeenth-century Indian drawing of a yoked Turkoman prisoner, his hands shackled to a block of wood at the back of his neck. So the Turkomans were men of Central Asia who were once feared. How they fitted into Persian history I didn’t know; and their past of war andbanditry seemed far from these depressed campers at the shrine. Small, sunburnt, ragged, they were like debris at the edge of a civilization that had itself for a long time been on the edge of the world.
    Near the mosque was the two-storey yellow brick building where Khomeini had taught and lectured. It was neutral, nondescript; and nothing was going on there now. Behzad and I walked in the bazaar. For most of the stall-keepers it was siesta time. In one bread stall, stacked high with flat perforated rounds of sweet bread, the man was stretched out on a shelf or counter on the side wall and seemed to be using part of his stock as a pillow. Behzad bought a paper. It was very hot; there was little to see; Qom’s life remained hidden. We began to look for shade, for a place to sit and wait.
    We came upon a small hotel. It was cramped inside, but newly furnished. The two men seated behind the desk pretended not to see us, and we sat in the little front lounge; nobody else was there. After some minutes one of the men from the desk came and told us to leave. The hotel was closed for Ramadan; that was why, he added disarmingly, he and his friend hadn’t stood up when we came in.
    We went out again into the light and dust, past the souvenir shops again, with the brown cakes and the tablets of Arabian clay; and were permitted to sit in the empty café opposite the
KHOMEINI IS OUR LEADER
slogan. It was a big place, roughly designed and furnished, but the pillars were clad with marble.
    There was nothing to drink—a bottled “cola” drink seemed only full of chemical danger—and the place was warm with the raw smell of cooking mutton. But the shade was refreshing; and the relaxed exhaustion that presently came to me, while Behzad read his Persian paper, helped the minutes by.
    At the table in the far corner, near the serving counter, there was a family group, as I thought: father, two boys, and a little girl in a long black dress and veil. So small, I thought, and already veiled. But she was active; she talked all the time and was encouraged by the others, who seemed to find everything she said funny. From time to time the man smiled at me, as though inviting me to admire. Shrieking at one stage, the girl ran up the steps to the upper gallery, shrieked some more up there, encouraging fresh laughter downstairs. She came down again, showed the others what she had brought down. She turned—and for the first time we could see her face—and she came to Behzad and me.
    She wasn’t