Looking jor Juurs oj i\ajraw
in the fourteenth century as an important city—and so to
Khurramabad and the eastern plains. Somewhere in this
district the rebel Gautama is thought to have been vanquished
by Darius: here possibly were the Nisaian pasture lands visited
by Alexander on his way up into Persia, but famous for their
horses under the Achsemenians long before him. One finds
bronzes, flints, and earthenware in the lonely valleys. "Wave
after wave of people unnamed and unnumbered lose themselves
here in unrecorded dimnesses of time.
This, however, was not what occupied our thoughts, but
rather the problem of how to find our particular Lurs in a
plain about ten miles by twenty in which no one knew the
way. A weedy tall man with bushy eyebrows had come
with us from Nihavend as a guide. He also, I soon dis-
covered, had never been up before—and he was furthermore
a wreck from opium, which takes people's legs more com-
pletely than beer: he would sit down at intervals looking
like a traveller in the early stages of a Channel crossing, and
refuse to take any interest in our hopes for lunch among
friends.
"We reached the area of cultivation, and, riding gently
through ploughed fields and melon patches, finally came upon
people who directed us to our Keram Ali Lurs at the mound
of Qal'a Kafrash in the west, where a few mud houses and a
row or two of black tents combine to make a village. The
mound, about eighty feet high by eighty broad, rises with
that artificial regularity of shape which shows the buried work
of man all over Persia and Mesopotamia; it gives the feeling
of a cemetery incredibly old to many a landscape there. The
Lurs of Kafrash, however, were not oppressed by their
antique surroundings: they were as cheerful a lot of villains
as you could wish to meet, and delighted with us for being,
as they said, brave enough to come among them. In the