rd, and their quarters
laid waste and destroyed for ever.

This series of vicissitudes and misfortunes accounts for the small
number of the survivors, their precarious life, their difficulties in
the exercise of their religion, and the dispersion of their sacred
books. In the time of Ibn Haukhal each village had its temple,
its priests, and its sacred book. According to Mr. Dosabhai Framji
Karaka, in 1858 there were thirty-five Fire Temples in Yezd and its
environs. At present there are four in Yezd itself, eighteen in the
neighbouring village, and one at Kirman. As for the sacred books there
are only those that are to be found in India. Westergaard, who visited
Persia in 1843, writing to his friend the late Dr. Wilson of Bombay,
to inform him of his disappointment, says, [52] "I have stopped in
Yezd for eleven days, and although I have mixed in their gatherings,
I have seen but sixteen or seventeen books in all; two or three copies
of the Vendidad Sade and of the Izeschne, which they call Yasna, and
six or seven copies of the Khorda-Avesta. I have only been able to
obtain two and a portion of a third, a part of the Bundahish and of
another Pehlvi book. That is all that I have succeeded in obtaining,
in spite of all my efforts to get more--for instance, the fragments
of the Izeschne with a Pehlvi or Pazend translation, of which there
is only one copy in Europe, that at Copenhagen."

The same traveller, speaking of the Zoroastrians who at present reside
in Kirman, expresses himself in these terms: "The Guebres there are
more maltreated than their brethren in Yezd. They have only two copies
of the Vendidad and of the Yasna and a rather large number of the
Khorda-Avesta, with which, however, they will not part. Here nobody
reads Pehlvi. They complain bitterly of Aga Mahomed Khan having given
up the city to plunder, of the destruction of most of their sacred
books, and of the massacre of the faithful."

One of the harshest conditions of the conquest of Persia had been at
all times a tax called "Jazia." The Mahomedans are the only persons
exempted from this tax, all the other infidel inhabitants of the
kingdom, Armenians, Jews, and Zoroastrians, being subject to it. The
Armenians of Tauris and of the villages of Persia situated near the
frontier have been relieved of this tax by the care of the Russian
Government. It is difficult to arrive at an estimate of the tax paid
by the Armenians and the Jews, but this is certain--