First sight of King Solomon's Throne
solitude of its snows at the head of an unmapped valley, and I
decided to climb again into these mountains and see it more
closely if I could on some later day.
In August, 1931,1 spent a week of discomfort among noise,
dust and mosquitoes in the Qazvin hotel, waiting for my old
muleteer 'Aziz to emerge from that blue skyline which hides
the Assassin valleys from the plain. A message finally did
materialize, brought by Ismail his servant, the most loutish,
clumsy, incurably stupid type of stable-hand that Persia ever
produced, whose ancient bits of cotton clothes hung about
him with so accidental an air that one could not help wondering
what system of relativity kept them there together at all.
He, fumbling among amulets in small leather cases, produced
a scrap of paper to say that 'Aziz could not leave his little sick
son, but would wait for me in Alamut, whose ways I knew
from the year before, and whither Ismail with his two mules
would take me. • ...
I thought I would ride up the fortress valley of the Assassins,
and out at its eastern end, and make farther eastward 'still for
the Throne of Solomon: and after that I would either descend
north into the almost completely unvisited jungle country,
or keep along the watershed and examine at leisure the head-
waters of the Shah Rud.
But a chance rumour postponed these plans. In the Qazvin
Grand Hotel, over glasses of " dug,3* or sour milk and water,
after dinner, the local notables told me of Lamiasar, and of
how it was one of the most important of the Assassin
fortresses, and one of the only two which stood long
sieges before their final destruction by the Mongol armies of
Hulagu Khan. It was there, said they, somewhere in the
mountains of Rudbar west of my route. Its site had never yet
been identified by historians. Though the data I had to go
upon was more than vague, and though the climate of the