We climb to the castle
up, for the big sloping space within the walls is used to feed
flocks of sheep. It and the villages around belong, the peasants
told me, to a Sardar who lives in Qazvin, but comes in summer
to look after his cattle. Next morning we passed by his house
above Shahristan, a smart country place on the way up to the
castle, with wooden colonnaded portico round its yard and a
decent track and avenue of poplars leading up to it.
Meanwhile we sat among the peasants in a circle round their
fire, hoping to keep mosquitoes away, and distributing quinine.
A fine old man, an old Aryan with the long face and short
beard of the Persepolis friezes, volunteered to lead us next
morning. We left our baggage in the care of the peasants,
and, taking only lunch and a samovar for tea, started off across
red stubbly hills and little dry valleys.
The castle of Lambesar, or Lamiasar, is about two miles
north of Shahristan, on the banks of the same stream, which is
called the Naina Rud. The easy way is to keep up on the side
of the western hill and to reach it by a neck which joins it on
the north to its mountain background. We, however, were
misled, and after getting involved in rice-fields of the Shahristan
villages, which spread a long way northwards from the estuary
of the Naina Rud, we struggled up towards the castle from a
precipitous ravine, until the smooth, steep ledges became too
much even for our unburdened mules, and leaving them,
with the battlements looming above us, we scrambled up
a slope of blackish rock where pomegranate bushes grew, to
the western gate of the fortress. The walls are no longer
intact on the summit of their mountain of rock; but their
ruins, and the fierce and gloomy valley, are impressive as ever.
Some such places Diirer etched, with no softness of vegetation
anywhere around them, but high buttresses and precipices
alone. The battlements of Lamiasar have crumbled, but they
still dominate the landscape at a little distance as they follow in