Yazd is a city of mud brick at the edge of the great central desert, and its water has always come from far away. The qanat is an ingenious solution: a gently sloping underground channel, dug by hand from a mountain foot into the dry plain, carrying water for kilometres without a pump, with a line of vertical shafts to give access and air. The Hasan Abad-e Moshir qanat, near Mehriz, is one of the eleven qanats that UNESCO listed in 2016, and it is a remarkable piece of hydraulic engineering, still in use after centuries. Some of the mother wells at the source are dozens of metres deep.
The work of the qanat builders, the muqanni, was dangerous and highly skilled. They dug with a pick and a lamp, and measured the slope by eye, and a good qanat could run for more than thirty kilometres. The water allowed villages, gardens and whole cities to exist in a place that would otherwise be empty. In Iran there are tens of thousands of them, some of them more than two thousand years old, and the people of Mehriz still divide the water by a system of hours and shares.
Mehriz sits among pistachio and pomegranate orchards, with the red and ochre hills of the Shirkuh range to the south-west, a mass of high peaks above Yazd. The air is dry, the light very clear, and in summer the heat is severe, with little shade. In spring, the almond and apricot trees blossom, and the gardens are green against the desert.
Riding here is a very different experience. Roads run straight across the plain, with long views of mountains, and when they climb into the hills they twist in tight bends. Traffic is light on the minor roads, and heavy near Yazd. Check the rules for foreign visitors and for motorcycles before you go. Mehriz has fuel and shops, and Yazd, thirty-five kilometres away, has everything. The best seasons are spring and autumn.