First stop: the carpet town of Tabris. Marco Polo had described the “Assassins” of Mount Alamut, so Bradley looks for traces of the first suicide killers in history. In Tehran, he finds access to the young urban music scene, all underground. In the old mud-built town of Yazd, he looks for the last remaining fire-worshippers. At the shore of the Persian Gulf, he wonders why Marco Polo did not take the sea to reach China but instead traveled the dangerous deserts.