and stumbled among the sliding surfaces of the limestone,
Hajji forgot that he had come to me pretending to know
every inch of the road, and complained in a pathetic voice
that this was no place for anyone but thieves.
It seemed right that the entrance to the forbidden country
should not be too easy. Our expectation had been rising ever
since Nihavend which, lying so close, yet speaks of Luristan
as a region unknown, governed by laws and standards in
which the peaceful townsmen have no part. Every day, from
far in the southern jungles, the caravans of black oxen bring
their loads of corn or charcoal across the mountain wall
The tribesmen, with uncombed hair and eyes frankly hostile,
squat in groups of their own under the rampart of the old
fortress and have no social dealings with the citizens. The
guard on the Varazan, with its ragged clothes and shining
gun-barrels, emphasized the point, as it were. When we came
to them we reached the gate of a new country. No one
travels here unless he has the freedom of the tribes or some
other protection: there were no peasants or merchants among
the climbers to the pass: only white-coated Lurs fixing us
with suspicious, fearless eyes. They gave no greeting, but
were ready enough, I found, to answer if one spoke to them.
And now, at a bend in our narrow gorge, the plain of Khava
opened out below us, washing like a yellow wave to the rocks
of Kuh Garu; dotted in an Arcadian way with black flocks
and tents, and intersected from east to west by a grass-banked
stream. Away on its southern side it was all pastoral solitude
running to small hills; but in its centre were harvested fields
of corn, tribesmen tilling, villages where the mountain sank
into the plain, and mounds of buried cities here and there.
These must once have been populous places, with a beaten
track winding over one of the easier passes from Nihavend or
Harsin through the villages of Khava to Alishtar—mentioned
[16]