The Throne of Solomon
lower Shall Rud was most unhealthy at this time of the year,
I then decided to search for the lost stronghold.
How, on our first evening, we opened up the mountains of
Rudbar and saw Lamiasar there in the last light, faintly visible
on a hill across the valley, a two days' journey away; how we
reached and examined the castle, and how Ismail, terrified by
the heat and sickness, tried to persuade the people of the
country to conceal all further ruins so that my steps might be
turned as hastily as possible back to the hills: this is another
story which has nothing to do with the Throne of Solomon
and which has been told in the previous chapter. But
the fact that I fell ill in the valley did have an influence on
my subsequent journey, and so I will begin my tale when,
feeling sickness already upon me and hoping to stave it off by
the delayed ascent to Alamut, I fell in with Ismail's perfidious
diplomacy, renounced all further ruins in Rudbar for the time
being, and started to ride eastward again along the banks of the
Shah Rud.
Ismail, delighted to have been so successful, rode on the
baggage mule behind me, indulging for my benefit in a sort
of rhapsody on all the delights that awaited us in the hills.
The path was narrow and red, eaten away at its riverside edge
by floods and rains, unless it broadened out into swampy rice-
fields, that quivered with mosquitoes and heat. Shut in by
its mountain range from the Qazvin plain, the fertile and beauti-
ful valley lay like a world of its own. Blue hills, ever fainter,
settled to its shallow horizon on the west. Eastward, we were
penetrating into the salty stretches of Rudbar on our left hand,
a country uninhabited and lifeless as the moon. The Ma'dan
Rud, a stream bitter as Acheron, fell before us from salt
marshes through waste land. We crossed it, and came to a
part of the track so narrow that Ismail had to unload the
baggage and coax the mules one at a time round the corner?