Night at Chela
tants sat in rows on the roofs opposite, like the audience in
an amphitheatre. Europeans were seemingly not freqoent
here, but 'Aziz had been right, and the good mountain
hospitality did not fail us, though the people were so poor
that even the bride's clothes hung in rags about her, and her
ornaments and jewels were but lead and glass.
Graves of Achaemenian or Sassanian kings, which provide
beads and talismans for ladies as far east as Hamadan, are
here unknown. The mud houses too were poor: an outer
room; an inner anderun where the women slept among the
year's sacks of grain; an inmost little storeroom, and a porch
roofed with boughs and hardened mud where the rugs were
spread for tea, was the extent of our house and one of the
best in the village. Its furnishings were a few rugs locally
woven, a few copper, tinned or wooden vessels, some
quilts, a jug or two of the lovely Qazvin shape, and the
samovar and little glasses for tea.
We sat over these while the pilau was cooking, and
watched die oil wicks go out one by one in the Chala
houses while our host and his sons in their dark-blue rags
and old frieze coats talked to us with the grave good breed-
ing of the hills and, between long pauses, while the pipes
glowed in the dusk, told us of the snowbound winter life,
when wolves in packs fight the village dogs; of bears and
foxes and hunting; and of the mountain streams that swell
in spring and wash away the small precipitous fields.
Next day we climbed down by the torrent, and by a steep
descending crest came to the Shah Rud and the road which
Hasan-i-Sabbah must have followed to reach his home.
The ruins of an old brick bridge still show the way. Here,
where the Alamut stream swirls out of a dark and narrow
canyon, and the Talaghan comes to meet it from the south-
east, a great ridge and headland of rock stands between the