Qanat Irrigation & Adventure
Qanāts (قناة) go by many names - kareez, kārīz, kahan, khettara, galería, falaj, kahn, orfoggara/fughara (to name a few) - and can be found in various forms all over the world. They’re particularly useful, however, in arid regions with more fertile ones nearby…preferably at a higher elevation. Essentially, qanāts tap into desert water tables and use gravity to draw it out to useful places.
Though it may seem a pretty straight-forward (not to mention linear) design for an underground expedition, qanāts are anything but. A few tantalizing features:
- Qanāts typically travel from fertile hills into lower, desert settings, and on into either farmland or cities, or both. They unite disparate environments that rely on that connection, which creates interesting possibilities for travel and power dynamics.
- Qanāts are particularly stable, resilient underground structures that are resistant to natural disaster, and even their water flow fluctuates very little between wet and dry years. True, military forces in the recent past have been responsible for destroying several ancient qanāt systems, but set the date back just a couple of hundred years and the forces of such destruction are nonexistent.
- Qanāts are sometimes divided into smaller distribution networks, often called kārīz, which include reservoirs for storage. In other words, they aren’t just straight up- or downhill lines.
- There are vertical shafts at regular intervals, meaning multiple points of entry and exit in some cases.
- They can be huge, with some recorded at over 40 miles long, and vertical shafts over 900 feet deep. It surrounds one with a nice, claustrophobic atmosphere just to imagine it.
- There are unexpected structural and mechanical features, including walkways, platforms leading up the vertical shafts, tunnels reinforced by clay-fired hoops, kinetic-energy absorbing waterfalls and even mill wheels. Indiana Jones almost needs another movie to handle all of that.
- Badgir: The qanāts can be utilized in conjunction with towers that harness air pressure and wind power to cool a house, and even keep ice frozen. These towers, or badgirs, normally extend from houses like chimneys-in-reverse. In other words, qanāt networks run under entire cities.
- Qanāts deal in matters of force: gravity, water current, air pressure and even harnessed kinetic energy.
- Qanāts have been throughout history privately owned or community-owned, or some ratio of the two. Just in case you need a built-in conflict to color your adventure.
All-in-all, some exciting prospects for incorporating a qanāt into your design plans. In my imagination, mine is already a labyrinthine clockwork of death-traps and stunning, phosphorescent-lit reservoir rooms.
Special thanks to The Heritage Institute for their extensive Zoroastrian research.
(Source: Wikipedia)
