My house in the village
With the unquestioning hospitality of the East, they cleared
away most of their belongings in fifteen minutes, swept the
reed matting on the floor with an inadequate brush of leaves,
and allowed me to install myself while they settled in what
looked like a hen-house down below. And while 'Aziz
and Ismail busied themselves with the furnishing, I stood at
the window and looked at King Solomon's Throne, its black
arms high and sharp in the distant sky, but nearer than I had
ever thought again to see it.
Life in the Village
Here I spent a week convalescing.
I had a good room, with two doors and a window, and litde
niches scooped all round it in the mud and straw walls. The
ceiling was made of poplar trunks, with other logs crosswise
above them, and above these a layer of thorns to support the
mud of the roof. On the reed mats of the floor they laid felt
Mazanderani rugs in brown, red, blue and grey patterns.
The niches in the walls had garlands of dried roses hung above
them. They were also decorated with embroidered mats to
which the usual absence of soap in the village had long ago
given a dingy colour. There was a photograph on the wall.
These efforts at European elegance came from the fact that the
two sons-in-law keep an eating-house at Shahsavar on the
coast in winter, leaving their wives and an old mother at
Balarud. In one corner of all this luxury I erected my bed,
behind whose mosquito net I could withdraw when the village
circle squatting on the floor, or 'Aziz and his litde son noisily
eating their midday meal near the door, became too much
for me.
The doctor visited me two or three times a day to inject
quinine. A hundred grains daily for three days definitely
frightened away the malaria. He would then sit and chat
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