The Birmingham age-herald., 1921-08-24

WV as.-espssIal5-rhs ' skies iss
 above Baku are once more illuminated by the eternal fires of the worlds most famous oil region.
 Near the spot where zoroastrian or
 Farsi priests guarded the sacred
 flames which burned for more than a score of centuries, IS modern wells are now ablaze, according to press dispatches. What this great natural waste means is brought out in the
 following bulletin from the Wash ington, D. C., headquarters of the National Geographic society.
 "If American relief work is inau- gurated in south Russia. and if ar engagements can be made with the new governments of the Caucasus, the race between charity and starva- ton may be run largely with Baku oil,' says the bulletin. Already the white nights of north Russia are be- ginning to wane, and the ice which coats the Neva early in the fall will I soon be creeping down the queen of Russian rivers anu stopping trans portation on the one life line of commerce upon which large scale re- lief work on the lower yolga can de- pend.
 The iron rails of Russia have dis integrated with neglect and traffic. The great Russian waterway will be open for at least two months more. And the fuel long used in the VoIga steamers and tugs is petroleum and it's by-products. principally masut, trick residue from the reineries. Fuel and food are intimately connected in any plan of Russian relief on the 1 lower Volga and the wastage of pe- troleum in Babu is matter of deep concern.
 Before the time of the Saracens, Baku was noted for it's natural gas and sacred fires. At Surakhani, where, from the days of zoroaster to 1879. the colorless flames of naphtha | gas were never extinguished, tenn pie of the fire worshippers, built in the time of Marco Polo and restored in the time of Shakespeare, can still be seen, although the lighting of naphtha gas is no longer allowed here or on the waters of the Caspian at Bibi Eybat. Fire worshippers on pill leyv vtyrnvv "a oera "A oI- ft. IDx, preceding the American revolution had the tradition that the fires of Surakhani had begun to burn soon after the flood and that they would the world.
 When, in eSS A. D., the Arab hosts appeared in Persia and fire worship pers became Moslems under the sword of the prophet. large numbers of zoroastrians fled to India Their great Tombs of Silence on the slopes of Malabar hill, in Bombay, where loathsome vultures await their grue- some opportunity as consumers of corpses, stand as present day re- minders Of political and religious forces which removed the Parsis from their ancestral homes and placed them in control of modern finance at the gateway to India.
 "The modern city of Baku Is a combination of the new and the old, of the east and west. Since the es-. tablishment of the Azerbaijan repub- lie and the selection of Baku as it's capital, some changes have been made But in general Baku is what | it was before the war
 ! "In. the spring of 1918 there was sharp fighting between the Christians and the Tatars for control of the tregion. At this time large part Iof the Tatar section was destroyed by shell fire from the Caspian. The romantic Kis-Kale or Virgin Tower, which the Tatars used as an obser- vation post, still bears the marks of shell fire which, however, failed to l do seriouns damage to Byzantine walls. The ancient walls of the old Tatar citadel bear pock-mark lines which join the apertures in the bat dement's and which show where Rus- sian and Armenian machine guns sprayed the ramparts and drove the Tatar fighters from their best points of vantage. Then came the British,
 with small force from Enzeli. But they soon withdrew, leaving badly mixed problem to find it's own soiu-
 tion.
 "The Baku oil fields: in 1917, in the
 midst of war and revolution. pro-5 duced nearly 5o,ooo. ooo barrels of pii.' But during the winter of lsl7tlS' labor troubles and the closing oflthe
 5<o-mile piEe me to Batum, Oh the: Black sea. rsdSeed me output. Po- litical and secia unrssf have demor- lalisedthf olt industry which in Baku.