A steamship from Nobel’s fleet is placed at our disposal for an excursion to the oil wells in Balakhany. It was not the first and only time that the ships of the great firm carried visitors out there; it is undertaken with alacrity year in and year out and is nothing special. A good many of the Scandinavians were kind enough to come along and explain everything to us.
It was a quiet, moonlit evening. After half an hour’s ride outside Baku, the water is seen to boil in black swirls. The swirls change, move, and merge with other swirls; the incessant movement makes you think of the northern lights. A handful of cotton waste is kindled and tossed down into the swirls, and at once the sea in that spot is ablaze. The sea burns. The black swirls are natural gas. Then we have to ride back and forth in the flames, letting the propeller wipe the fire out.
We arrive and step ashore. The ground is damp and fatty with oil, the sand feels like soap when you walk on it, and there is a sharp smell of petroleum and kerosene that gives us foreigners a headache. The petroleum area is divided into basins, lakes, surrounded by sand banks. But it’s not much use trying to block out the oil, which seeps into the banks, making them fatty and damp along with the rest.
Crude oil was known by the ancient Jews and Greeks, and out here, on the Apsheron peninsula, it has been used by the population for fuel and lighting for a very long time. But only during the last thirty years have they been making kerosene from it. Not to mention the “13 varieties in vials,” which are still more recent products. Now a city of derricks extends as far as the eye can see, the world’s most unpleasant and incredible city of black, greasy, crudely built derricks. Inside, there is a roar of machinery day and night; the workers shout to one another to drown out the noise, and the derricks shake from the huge drills that are sunk into the ground. The workers are Persians and Tatars.
We go inside one of the derricks. My hat bumps against a beam and looks ruined for life, it’s that greasy and black; but they assure me that in the Baku factories it won’t take a minute to get the oil out again by chemical means. The noise is terrible. Swarthy Tatars and yellow Persians stand each at their machines, minding their work. Here the crude oil is drawn up; a contrivance goes down into the ground and returns after fifty seconds with 1,200 pounds of oil, then goes down again, is away for fifty seconds and returns with another 1,200 pounds of oil—around the clock, all the time. But the hole has cost money; it’s five hundred meters deep. They used a year to drill it and it cost 60,000 rubles.
We go to another derrick, where they are drilling. The hole is still dry, the drill is working night and day in sand and stone, in rock. This hole is a capricious hole, it’s known for its viciousness throughout the city of derricks. The place was discovered last year, when it showed clear signs of oil like all places around here, and drilling was started. Fifty meters down, almost no distance at all, that is, the oil suddenly shoots up in a mighty fountain, killing people as it gushes forth and shattering the derrick. The fountain is without order and moderation, it’s wild, forcing up oil in such excessive amounts that it creates lakes around itself and floods the earth. They make dams and throw up banks, but the dams are too narrow and fresh banks have to be thrown up outside the initial ones—the fountain spewed oil to the tune of one and a half million rubles in twenty-four hours. For two days and nights. Then it stopped. And no earthly power has managed to make it yield another liter of oil since. It corked the hole. It has probably found a rock in the earth’s entrails down there and hurled it before the opening. Since then they have drilled and drilled without interruption, but to no avail; they have now got down as far as 650 meters, all in vain. And they are still drilling; some day, I suppose, they will get through the rock. The yellow Persians and the swarthy Tatars stand there with their hearts in their mouths; if this madcap begins to lash out like the last time, Allah will squeeze them all through the derrick’s roof and tear them to pieces in a second. But then Allah would have ordained it that way. La illaha il Allah.
The noise of machinery wasn’t originally part of this place; America has desecrated it and brought its roar into the sanctuary. For here is the seat of the “eternal fire” of antiquity. There is no place hereabouts where one can escape America: the drilling method, the lamps, even the distillate gasoline—it’s all America. The Maccabees burned “the thick water” only for the purification of the temple. And when we have become tired of the noise and half blinded by the natural gas and prepare to leave the place, we go back in a Robert Fulton kind of boat.
Tomorrow we shall visit Surakhany. Thank goodness, it’s said to have a Parsee temple.
•
We supposedly received quite many of our religious ideas from the Iranian peoples. The old Israelites did by no means remain uninfluenced spiritually by the neighboring peoples; they got something from Egypt during the time they lived there, something from Assyria, Babylon, Persia. Thus, the writings of the Old Testament mention the activities of evil spirits, demoniacal possessions that were unknown among the Israelites; but among the Persians there were evil spirits in great numbers. Then, according to the inscriptions, the Mesopotamians received these ideas from the Persians and brought them westward to the people of Assyria, and at the time of Christ there was, at least in Judea, a flourishing lore about spirits and demons. And so it became part of Christianity. Whereupon it spread to many peoples and lighted many witches’ pyres. Whereupon it even got to Finnmark, burning up many women who were so possessed that they stayed on the surface of the water “like a float.”
And here we stand on the spot from which Christianity received its poetic notion of the “eternal fire.” There was a fire in the earth that required no fuel, it burned all by itself and never went out; such a fire was sacred. The ancients were very poor scientists; they didn’t know that petroleum stems from the prehistoric vegetable kingdom, like coal. They didn’t even know that science afterward abandoned this theory and adopted another: that petroleum is due to animal matter in the earth—frankly speaking, fish. The ancients were very stupid scientifically. They only got to know this thick water and set fire to it, making it burn, burn eternally. They connected it with Mithra, the sun, which also burned eternally and was God’s image. And the water became sacred to them; they worshiped it and made pilgrimages to it. And when someone even erected a temple over this source of fire, their gratitude was very great.
But then the good Iranians gave birth to the great religious innovator called Zardusht, Zarathustra. He thought his people was worshiping strange gods—which all founders of religions think about their people—and so he taught that they shouldn’t have so many gods anymore. He decided that there should be one good god, to be called Ormuzd, and one evil god to be called Ahriman. That sufficed. But in the course of time he needed one more god, and he would be above all the others and be called Mithra. And Mithra became truly great in Iran.
It was the same Mithra they worshiped here, before the eternal fire at Baku.
And Zarathustra continued to lay the foundations of his religion and succeeded quite well. Besides the three gods, of which Mithra was the highest, there were, he taught, three kinds of good supernatural beings, angels, who were higher than man. Then there were three kinds of evil supernatural beings, demons or devils. In short, Zarathustra taught Christianity many good things.
And everything was just fine.
But then it turned out that the Iranians couldn’t make do only with gods; they also had to have a goddess. Où est la femme? they said. And so they installed a woman as their goddess, and her name was Anaitis. But once they had begun to change and improve on Zarathustra’s teaching, they picked up gods galore, even from Babylon, even from Greece, and the people again fell into idolatry and polytheism. The Iranian kings despised Zarathustra’s teaching; since it was not foreign, what was there to make a song and dance about? The kings favored Hellenism, while the people themselves found a gap in their religion, called attention to the gap and grumbled about it. Zarathustra had never managed to explain the origin of good and evil, and the relationship between the good and the evil god. The Iranians said: If both good and evil have their source in Ormuzd, that is, in the same fundamental being, then they lose their character as complete opposites—figure out that little conundrum, they said; we call it a gap. You see, the Iranians were unaware of our knowledge on this question: we take care of a trifle like that with a serpent and an apple.
After this, the reputation of Zarathustra’s teaching greatly declined, and when the Mohammedan caliphs took over the country, it was almost completely eradicated. But a few faithfuls emigrated to India with the teaching intact and have lived there to this very day under the name Parsees, while others remained in Persia, a few thousand, the so-called Ghebers, fire worshipers. Of the latter, there also lived a few at the fire temple near Baku until quite recently.
Here Parsees from India and Ghebers from Persia came to pray. To these pious ones, Mithra was the same as before, the god of all, eternal as the sun and the eternal fire. No people had a more sacred place. Those upstart Mohammedans had only Medina to go to, and in Medina there was only a grave; but here was a living fire, a kind of sun inside the earth, God. Already from afar, at the first sight of the white temple, the pilgrims threw themselves on the ground in trepidation, and they approached the temple humbly, with repeated prostrations. These people had become poor and miserable, the upstarts had made themselves masters of their nation and pushed them into a remote corner of their country; but in their hearts they were mightily comforted by the thought that it was they, and no one else, whose belief in God was right and true. The Mohammedan caliphs and shahs of Persia pursued them unsparingly when they were on their way to their white temple, but their faith was so great that they preferred to put on the unclean garb of the upstarts and travel in disguise rather than give up their perilous journey to Baku.
And when they came to the temple, there were small cells and other rooms all about this blessed house where they could stay. And in every cell there burned a low petroleum flame, a small sun that never went out. And here Ghebers and Parsees lay on their faces, leaving the world behind.
But then America, with its roar, invaded the place. On their arrival one year, the pilgrims discovered that a petroleum factory had been constructed near the sanctuary. All the little suns in the cells had been extinguished; every stream of gas led to the factory.
Then, little by little, the Ghebers and the Parsees abandoned the shrine. The upstarts from the Orient had fought with them, but it was the upstarts from the West who vanquished them. Defeated, they withdrew to their remote corner of the country. Their Baku shrine is now a mere legend. But the living fire will be sacred to them until the last of these faithfuls is dead. For they are fire worshipers.