The Assassins' Castle of Lamiasar
together with his servant Ismail. Ismail looked like a
convict: he had one of those heads flattened at the back,
and his limbs, as they slouched along, seemed to keep
together by pure accident. His clothes had the same sort
of casual dilapidation; the sleeves of his tunic began half-way
down his arm and ended long before his wrist; his loose
blue cotton trousers were suspended by some inadequate
method which demanded constant hitching up; and he was
hung round with about six different straps and bags in which
his amulet, his money, his knife, packman's needle, and
other objects were all separately housed. He wore a battered
cap with a peak. My field-glasses, slung across him jauntily,
gave a last incongruous tourist touch. He was terribly
stupid. His daily food, which consisted of an ancient
cheese in a furry bit of goatskin round his neck, made him
very trying at close quarters.
" Into the hands of God may you be entrusted," said the
waiter of the Grand Hotel, as we left Qazvin; and as I started
out for the hills with Ismail as my sole companion, I felt
that some such pious wish was required.
At Rashtegan we had difficulties because the patch of
grass under the trees where I sat was the only village patch,
and too precious for mules to eat it up. Ismail was made
to tether them some way off, while a shrill woman, who had
argued the point, suddenly collapsed into friendliness and,
squatting down with her samovar, prepared to feed me with
tea and eggs. She had a quick, lively face, with dancing
eyes and a gaiety apparently accounted for- by the non-
existence of her husband.
" This," I find noted in my diary, " often appears to be
the cause of cheerfulness among the Persian ladies." With
her was a girl of thirteen or so, a bride of one year, who
told me that she spent the summer up here in a little
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