Date of the Larti city
locks curled. He hoped that I would use the magic glasses
that everyone knew I carried to look through the earth of the
ruined city and see its buried treasures. His was the arm, he
considered, mine the guiding brain—an embarrassing attitude
seeing that I had only one afternoon and no real knowledge
for the making of discoveries.
Where the promontory of the city is joined to the mountain-
side, an upper road leads east and west from Ganjeh and Kulm
and the Puneh and Maimah passes along the flank of Kebir
Kuh to the Saidmarreh. These upper roads, all the world
over, nearly always follow the traces of very ancient sites:
either because they were usually safer for the inhabitants than
the lower, being less accessible, or because their very existence
in difficult mountainous country can only be caused by a
demand spread over a very long area of time.
Anyway I have often noticed that it is the older and upper
track which leads by the important places of antiquity. Here
it dipped down over a shoulder towards us, where sure enough,
the old man said, skeletons had been found in jars. We,
however, were taken on to the promontory itself, and found
there a Moslem cemetery of upright carvings round a white-
washed altar of stone and mortar, beneath which is a tomb
whose present holiness was shown by a collection of large
pebbles and a few of the black fossils of the country, which
they call Peri stones, laid there as votive offerings.
We had no use for the Moslem cemetery, and left it piously
alone, descending by what was once a street among the ruins
of houses. I suppose the city is three or four acres in extent.
Its upper part is dotted with small squares where Moslem
tombstones lie half embedded, carved with a florid script which
show them to be not very old. A very few shards of pottery
picked up among the houses dated the place as thirteenth or
fourteenth century, or thereabouts. The line of the streets