The next day I watched a man struggle with his goat in the place where taxi rides

could be negotiated. Hawa fixed us up with a driver who said he would take us to the
church of the Subbi, the Mandaeans. I became suspicious, for the Mandaeans do not
have churches. It was a sad sight, a small, white painted Roman Catholic chapel, but
boarded-up and abandoned. Try again.
At first, I did not think that the silversmith, Shaker Feyzi, was a Mandaean, for he
had no beard. His little shop was not much more than a cavity in a wall. A group of
black-clad women carried handfuls of heavy silver ankle bangles to Mr. Feyzi. They
haggled, he bought, and later I purchased a bracelet from him. He was about fifty and
very friendly, and we conversed and met his family. Mr. Feyzi stressed that he was an
Iranian, and the requisite picture of the Shah and his family, Shah Reza Mohammad,
the last of the Pahlavis, hung on the wall. He is my Shah, said Mr. Feyzi, inviting no
further inquiries on that point. We had already learned that any business that did not
sport such a picture would be closed. We had also learned to approach anything resembling
a political question with extreme care. The Savak, the Shahs secret police, could
be anywhere.
Come back in four months, at Panja, said Mr. Feyzi, then we go in the river.
He was referring to the intercalary feast at New Years, when many Mandaeans are
baptized. Now, only two families were left in Abadan, he told us, but there were many
more earlier. Where had he learned English? From English-speaking soldiers during
the Second World War, and later from Americans in the oil trade, who came to buy
silver from him.
In neighboring Khorramshahr, the old Muhammerah, we met another, older smith,
a goldsmith who gave his name as Aran. Other goldsmiths advised us to go to Ahwaz,
the capital of the province. Soon we moved swiftly through the flat desert, leaving behind
the junklike sailboats that seemed to float in the shimmering air above the waterway,
the Shatt al-Arab. Patches of blooming roses and rows of tall date palms flew by,
while the human-sized dust devils, the miniature dust storms, whirled like dancers in
the distance. A mythological landscape.
In a large, prosperous-looking goldsmith shop in Ahwaz, we were first greeted with
reasonable suspicion because we used the inside term, Mandaean, not Subbi. This showed
that we knew something; the question was what? and why? I explained, via Hawa, and
they soon relaxed and showed us a Mandaean calendar, and we admired the jewelry. We
should visit their priest, they suggested. Could we do that? Sure, why not?
We entered the enclosed courtyard of the house of Sheikh Abdullah Khaffagi, the
head of Mandaeans of Iran. I spotted cows tethered off to one side. A strikingly beautiful
woman, veil-less, with high cheekbones, blue eyes, and dark blonde hair, came
across the courtyard and smiled at us. Enchanted by her, Hawa paid her a compliment,
laughed and clapped her hands. We were led up the stairs by a young man, one of the
priests grandsons, as I recall. He warned us not to touch the old man, who must remain
pure. Glasses of Coca-Cola were brought, and we sat down to wait in the upstairs
room. Sheikh Abdullah appeared in the doorway, with a slight smile and twinkling
keen blue eyes. He was about ninety-five, bent over approximately the same number of
degrees, white bearded, clad entirely in white, with white cloth slippers (no animal hide
must touch him). Living separately from his family, he cooked his own food. Now we
smiled and bowed, but we did not stretch out our hands to him.
The sheikh sat down on a cushion on the floor, his covered knees almost up to his
ears. We conversed for an hour, he showed us letters from European scholars (in Mandaic)
and told us that he had met Lady Drower many times and had visited Professor Rudolf
Macuch in Tehran.1 I let him know that I had met Lady Drower once, a few years earlier,
when she was ninety-one, less than a year before she passed away.
The priest fetched several Mandaean books and scrolls to show us, all in their individual
white cloth bags. He also gave me a paper copy of the imprint on the Mandaean
skandola, the ritual iron ring with an iron chain. This is used to seal newborn babies on

their navels, and it also seals graves. Sheikh Abdullah showed us his ring and explained
that the four animals depicted on the sealthe lion, the wasp, the scorpion, and the
encircling snakewere the elements of life.
Then he began to tug at something under his cushion. We helped him pull out a
large cloth bag, like the others, but this one was heavy as a rock. It was an archetypal
book, The Book of John, made entirely of lead, inscribed with stylus on lead pages bound
together like a regular book. No wonder it was heavy. Its edges were frayed and worn.
We leafed through it reverently. C. G. Jung might have fantasized about a tome like
this. There is probably not its like in the world. Sheikh Abdullah told us that the book
was 2,053 years old and written by John the Baptist himself. There and then, it seemed
a likely view.
Cosmological and mythological topics came up. What will happen to us at the end
of the world? we asked. There we satHawa, a secular Iranian with a Sufi father; Mark,
an American Jew; me, a Norwegian apostate Lutheranall somehow representing traditional
neighbors and enemies of the Mandaeans. Perhaps it had been frivolous to ask.
Sheikh Abdullah avoided answering us directly, saying he did not know. But, showing
better diplomacy and taste than we did, he might just as well have been being polite. In
any case, the Mandaeans will go to the Lightworld, the heavenly world. Paradise lies
beyond the gate at the North Pole, ours is just one of 365 universes, and the earth is flat
and stands still. And it will soon end. Such were the sheikhs words.
We thanked him, took farewell, and, with heads reeling, descended the stairs to the
world still there.