The Assassins' Castle of Lamiasar
they all seemed to speak Persian as well. Englishmen who
had mapped this country years ago had stayed in their
village.
" And what are you looking for;" they then asked, having
answered my questions.
" I am looking for a ruin called Lamiasar/* said I.
" Lamiasar?" said an old man, who had just come ambling
on a donkey behind us with a load of grass under one arm.
" Lamiasar is there," and with the sickle in his other hand
he pointed far away across the Shah Rud to a fold in the
hills. " You can get to it from here in one day."
So kind is fortune if you trust her.
Rustum Khan, the owner of Mirg, was a long-faced Kurd
with pleasant manners. He sat in a whitewashed room furn-
ished with carpets and quilts and three or four chests covered
with painted tin and gilt and nails studded in patterns. In
the niches in the walls were lamps with glass globes, two
pink and two green. Little brass trays to hand glasses of
tea hung on the walls between the niches, two by two. The
brass samovar was in a central position. All these furnishings
belonged to the young wife, blonde and fresh and plump
as a German, who spoke a quite incomprehensible dialect
from Muhammadabad in the valley below.
It was a friendly village. There were only twenty houses.
The school, for such as wished to go, was several hours away
down by the river. The village itself, however, owned a
bath. In winter, they told me, it is so cold that even wolves
do not venture out much. Rustum Khan sits under his
kursi burning charcoal from the Caspian Jungle, which
takes four days to reach him. He was an educated man,
who had spent a year in Teheran, and had been a friend of
the Emir Sipahsalar at Tunakabun, the great man of these
parts whose financial difficulties with the Persian govern-
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