Aerial photo of Chehel-Sotun, Isfahan: The British art historian Robert Byron saw [Chehel-Sotun] brought to life during the 1933 trip that led to his classic travel memoir, The Road to Oxiana. At a reception to honor the Shah's birthday, he said, the building became the stately pleasure dome that had been intended. "Spread with carpets, lit with pyramids of lamps, and filled with several hundred people, the veranda looked enormous; its wooden pillars and painted canopy towered away into the night; the glass niche at the back, glittering through its gold filigree, seemed infinitely distant." There was dancing in the long vaulted room beneath the frescoes, and then fireworks outside, pouring streams of gold into the black water of the reflecting pool. Even Byron, an eccentric and often acerbic man, was enchanted. Not everyone, he wrote, could say he had danced in the Chehel-Sotun. (p. 96) "All is calm": Persian garden main index From The
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