The Throne of Solomon
to organize oneself for illness with only Ismail to rely on and
the women of Kandichal, whose dialect was incomprehensible.
One of them, called Zora, used to look after me for fourpence a
day. With her rags, which hung in strips about her, she had the
most beautiful and saddest face I have ever seen. She would
sit on the grass by my bedside with her knees drawn up, silent
by the hour, looking out with her heavy-lidded eyes to the
valley below and the far slopes where the shadows travelled,
like some saint whose Eternity is darkened by the remote
voice of sorrow in the world. I used to wonder what
she thought, but was too weak to ask, and slipped from
coma to coma, waking to see rows of women squatting
round my bed with their children in their arms, hopeful of
quinine.
The whole Shah Rud valley is riddled with malaria and
desperately poor, with no doctor. Even soap was an unknown
luxury. A man of Kandichal once brought a wife from Qaz-
vin, who remained a year before she fled back to civilization,
and left a memory of soap as one among the marvels of her
trousseau. But the women brought me eggs and curds in
blue bowls from Hamadan to pay for my doctoring, and
looked at me pityingly as they sat round in their long eastern
silences. Behind us rose the mountains which cut us off from
Qazvin and motor roads and posts: they were ten hours' ride
away, as inaccessible as if they had been in another world, as
indeed they were.
A little way off, under another patch of trees, the two mules
browsed, and Ismail sat through the day smoking discontented
pipes and anxious to be off. There the old Seyid used to join
him, with his sickle under his arm, for it was harvest time. He
would pause as he passed my bed, and with his back carefully
turned out of a sense of propriety, would ask how I did and
tell me that Sitt Zeinabar, the patroness of the shrine, was good
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