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Jamshid got to his feet. A hole had been ripped in the carpet. Three other white-headed birds sat without moving in the farthest poplar tree. Jamshid took the rope and started forward again. When he looked back the birds were gone.
    He leaned on the rope. The sun was hot. The corpse was starting to smell. He took the rope by its very end and walked faster, hoping to outpace the smell, but it seemed to lie in the air he was walking into. It was a putrid, sweetish odor. It was a flaw in nature, he thought, that a person should turn so abruptly into this smell.
    In the afternoon, as he was passing some rocks, a man stepped out and came toward him. Jamshid wanted to ask the way. Apparently smelling the body, the man fell back.
    â€œWait,” Jamshid said. “It’s only my poor father I’m taking to burial. Don’t be afraid, he had no disease.”
    But the man ran far among the rocks. Standing on a high rock so he could be seen, he called back, “Don’t you know that if a man alone carries a corpse, the devil seizes him and stains him even to the ends of his nails, and he is unclean forever? Moslem dog! Be gone!”
    Puzzled and shaken, Jamshid kept walking. He supposed it would be weeks before he could reach Shiraz. Even if he managed to keep off the birds, the flesh would have rotted. How was he to pass through villages while giving off this odor which no one could fail to recognize? It was a hopeless journey. If he was going to have to get rid of the corpse anyway, then the sooner the better. Maybe he should just chuck it where he was. Let the birds have it now, he thought, rather than later.
    While he was wondering what he should do he came to a tower on a hillside overlooking the desert. He scrambled up the stone exterior to see if he could see any pursuers. As he came to the rim he paused and sniffed. Ali’s very odor met him there. For it was a dokhmeh, a tower on which the Zoroastrians expose their dead to be eaten by vultures. Doubtless the man who had accused him by the rock was a Zoroastrian. On the circular roof werestrewn a hundred or more human remains, most of them skeletons draped in bleached, torn clothing. A few were still bloody. They lay face up, the knees opened as if to first offer their genitals, source of most of their troubles. Jamshid wandered among them. He came to the bone-pit, a vast hole down the center of the tower, into which had been swept thousands of immaculate skulls and bones.
    He had felt horror at first, but he grew accustomed to these open graves in about the time it takes eyes to grow accustomed to a change of light. This seemed the regular way to move, this picking his way through old, slightly stylized scraps of men and women—of children, too, he noted, stepping over some tiny bones.
    He thought of what the old darvish had said about Zoroastrian customs. That to bury a dead man in the earth would befoul earth. That to drop him in the sea would befoul water. That to burn him would befoul fire. That to let him decompose would befoul air. It was for the birds, creatures who were essentially corrupt, and also, therefore, slightly sacred, to transmute dead flesh into the sky. Are the dead really foul? Jamshid wondered. It was true Ali was stinking. But it seemed to him now that if he had loved Ali it was not entirely for the shine of his spirit, it was also for the glittering darkness of his flesh and bones. Once the light was gone, was the remnant suddenly worthless and foul? Only his own nose, after all, was offended. God did not care about bad smells, nor did Hassan the camel. Nor did the sand and the sky. He decided, cost what it may, he would bear the corpse as far toward Shiraz as he could. In time, if he were faithful enough, his own nose might learn not to notice it. He went to the edge of the tower and put a leg over to descend. As he glanced down he failed to see Hassan.
    Now he saw him, galloping across the desert in the sunlight, several birds