The Daylamites
up, came and joined us as we sat over our samovar in one of
the half-buried, vaulted rooms. We could look out through
its arched door into the hot daylight to the defile of the Naina
Rud, and beyond and above to villages in two green islands
on the slope, and to the stony reaches of Gavan Kuh, which
lead to the Caspian.
Another man soon dropped in from nowhere at all, and,
sitting down in the friendly Eastern fashion, began to give at a
great rate more information than we wanted. He told us
that beyond those villages, in the lonely parts of the hills, is
the Imamzadeh of Nur-Rashid, to which people make pil-
grimages. These solitary shrines, now far from any habitation,
usually point to localities once much more populous than now,
and they are useful guides to the wandering historian.
Very little indeed is known about this country and there are
many unidentified sites to be discovered in its recesses. The
Daylamites were as strange as the Highlanders in their day to
the more settled people of the plain. Their hostility, says
Mustawfi, who must have heard a good deal about them, dates
from those Sassanian days when Shapur had to bribe them to
keep away from his city of Qazvin, which he was then beauti-
fying. In Ommeyad times, Muhammad, the son of Hajjaj, the
famous governor, marched into the hills against them. From
Daylam came the Buwayid princes who ruled the Moslem
East during the tenth century. Their capital was called Rudbar
and the residence of the governors was called the Shahristan,
and it is a reasonable conjecture that the name of Shahristan in
the district of Rudbar may be the legacy of those times. I
leave it to experts like Professor Minorsky to judge of these
matters; but the modern Shahristan certainly holds a central
position in the fertile valley, two days' journey from Qazvin,
and with a great feeling of age about it and its castle.
When the Isma'ili propaganda grew powerful and the
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