The Hidden Treasure
garden of the tribe and came again to rough pasture between
red sides of hills.
The lesser ridge that shut out the main valley of the Khirr,
(our Garau River of the days before) soon sank into nothingness
upon our right, and we came out into the openness of the
main valley, and saw again in the hot blues of the middle
morning the noble barricade of Kebir Kuh. On our left an
uncompromising red wall with splashes of white limestone
rose steep and near and treeless. Here was the road to the
treasure. I saw it, winding up through the crumbly powder
of the lime and asked the direction, which corroborated exactly
with what was written on my map.
Now, however, we were not attending to this part of the
adventure, and rode straight on until we left the Musi lands
and came into the boundaries of a small tribe of Arab origin,
who take the name and guard the shrine of one of the saints
from Medina, a certain Jaber, buried in this valley under a
white plastered obelisk. Indistinct remains of old buildings
and Moslem gravestones surrounded the obelisk in its lonely
place.
For some reason unknown it made me think of what I
imagine to be a Tibetan landscape: the round and ugly hills
behind, and the small tower rising in polygonal tiers about a
foot high, with dingy discoloured plaster above the half-
subterranean building of the tomb. There was no name and
no date, but the place is probably old; it has an air of secrets
about it, a life now long under the ground. The Dusan
guide and the young man in the velvet stooped down the steps
into the tomb to make their vows while Shah Riza gave him-
self the airs of an archaeologist, wandering about and picking
up shards of pottery as he had seen me do.
After leaving this place of ancient piety our track went
down into the river bed, flat as a table between the long ridge
[104]