Silk Road Ghost Stories

The caravanserai at Zein-o-din is round, and the old drivers say that is so the devil has no corner to hide in. Leila had come for the photographs. She had not come for the devil. It stood alone on the plain south of Yazd, a ring of honey-coloured brick in a desert the colour of a lion, with low towers at its edge and a single arched gate. Four hundred years ago the shah’s engineers had built it a day’s march from the next, and the next, so that the caravans carrying silk and indigo and saffron could sleep behind walls. Now it took paying guests. There was Wi-Fi in the courtyard, if you stood by the pool. She arrived in the late afternoon with two cameras and a tripod, and a commission from a magazine in Berlin that wanted the desert to look the way desert never quite does: empty, golden, unhaunted. The manager, a soft-spoken man called Mr…