Assassin conquest of Lamiasar
by Kiya Buzurg Umid, the vizier and successor of the
first Old Man of the Mountains. He was a native of
Rudbar, the mountain region north of and including the
Shah Rud valley from its junction with the Qizil Uzun
at Manjil to the beginning of the Alamut and Talaghan
valleys on the east. When I was in Qazvin, and a Persian
friend, knowing my interest in castles, told me of an old
ruin called Lamiasar, in the district of Rudbar, I was there-
fore very much interested, and though I had nothing but
the name to go by in a country of about 10,000 inhabitants,
and though it is very malarious there in summer, I decided
to cross the ridge from Qazvin and to explore.
I went north to Rashtegan and had lunch there in the
heat of the morning under plane trees and willows by a
shrivelled summer stream. It was the beginning of August.
The only flowers left were mint and willowherb, michaelmas
daisies, and a small pink stock growing round the water.
The corn was out on numerous threshing-floors terraced up
at one end of the village: its yellow heaps stood against the
mountain background, fine in a barren way, where the
northern passes climb across the ridge. In the foreground
in the sun old men and boys drove black oxen slowly round
in a circle, dragging clumsy rollers with wooden spikes
to tread out the corn; while in another place the young
men were busy with the winnowing; the chopped straw,
as they tossed it up on forks, hung like dust in the air.
The party consisted of Ismail, myself, and two mules.
My own man, 'Aziz, was kept in his village in the Alamut
valley by the illness of his small son, and when at last my
message penetrated to him, after I had been chafing in Qazvin
for a week, he hastened to send for his mules, who were
enjoying their yearly holiday of pasture somewhere a day's
journey into the hills, and dispatched them to me
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