It’s not the best shot in the world. But I had to have it. My father, Ahmad and I are hurling down the highway towards Meshed and the Holy Grail of all travelers in Persia: the tiled magnificence of the Gohar Shad, trying to make it there before dark. The day before was spent crossing the barren, lifeless Dasht-i-Kavir.

The great range of mountains in the photo is the Kuh-i-Nishapur. I was dying to go up into the hills and see the famed turquoise mines. Turquoise—the color of the Turks—that arresting faience adorning mosques and minarets from the Pillars of Hercules to the Straits of Malacca. Green may be the color of Islam but turquoise left an indelible, obsessive stain on me. The stain of blue in the harsh Central Asian heat and sun. Amidst the orchards of Samarkand and the opaque olive pools of Bukhar-i-Sharif and the summit of Persian architectural expression: the Sheikh Lutfollah mosque of Isfahan.

The mines, worked since antiquity, finally petered out in the late 19th century. Perhaps the turquoise mined here found its way onto the ring fingers of Chinese princesses and Roman potentates? Who is to say it is not so? In the grand sweep of time anything is possible. And it was a day pregnant with the possible.

More after the jump.

Behind me was the Parthian Steppe. Just writing the words gives me chills, chills that conjure up images of those mail clad cataphracts who captured the emperor Valerian, or the wily archers who massacred a full legion of Romans and a consul—Marcus Licinius Crassus—at Carrhae in Mesopotamia, thus, dealing out fatal blow to the Triumvirate back in Rome.

“Parthian country,” I mumbled to myself as we raced across the red grass steppe. The dirt more crimson than the cereal laden grasses littering the steppe. I shook my head in the wind and heat and thought, “it is still a wild, feral land."

A few miles East of us, set in a crease in the foothills of the Kuh-i-Nishapur, were the remains of the city itself. Jewel of Khorasan, home to Omar Khayyam and Farid al-din Attar, avatars of the great 10th-11th century blossoming of Persian science and mysticism. And then came the deluge: a new nation of wild horsemen stormed out of the Central Asian heartland, fresh from the conquest of Kwarizm, those Mongols, and Nishapur was obliterated, never to rise again.

We stopped and walked through the sun baked ruins: a wasteland. It is said that the Mongols left a mountain of skulls near a half wasted city gate as a warning: do not return.

But the ghosts did not heed the Mongols, for like a whisper, just above the breeze, I could hear them, a keening lament for a civilization lost.