The Hidden Treasure
boulders on the little spur on which our camp was tilted,
but the master of the tent thought them Muhammadan, and
was obviously unhappy at the risk of sacrilege. The infidel
town, said he, was down in the ravine.
The ravine narrowed below. It had a steep, wooded side
on the left, but on the right, where we descended, was a
precipice wall overhanging in horizontal strata above us,
at the top of which pastures began, such as we had ridden over
the day before. Under their eaves, as it were, the young men
of the tribe led us, leaped ahead by an invisible path along
flat ledges, and came to where houses had been built under a
hollow rock, like cells of a wild beehive, plastered to the side
of the ravine. They were very rough, of small stones thrown
together with mortar, and looked as if they had not been
either comfortable, beautiful, or strong. Nor were they
very old: probably the last places to be inhabited when the
city of the Hindimini was falling to decay. Tombstones lay
about, carved with a running Persian script. The Larti valley,
besides its tombstones, has an inscription carved on the face
of a rock; so that anyone will easily decipher the dates of these
two cities, which probably flourished and decayed together.
The Atabeks of Luristan are known to have done much
building in this country, and probably these sites were in-
habited in their day: but although I am no expert in script,
it seemed to me that what I saw belonged to a later date.
There is a sadness in coming on these once inhabited places,
built by prosperous and settled communities, where now, for
many days* ride on every side, the nomad in his black tent
dwells alone.
Below the houses built into the rock, ruins of an older city
go in terraces to the valley bottom. The remains of a good
causeway, still used, led up to it from the plain of Dusan,
and showed, better than the heaps of stones, that it had once
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