The doctor's difficulties
the complication and cost of getting stores from Europe, and
the second the backwardness of the people. My friend, the
squire of Shutur Khan, who spends his winters in the enlighten-
ment of Qazvin city and ought to know better, refused the
chance of saving his dying daughter when the doctor came,
because she could on no account be seen by so improper a
creature as a man: all that he had been allowed to do was to
send her a dose of Epsom salts by her father. As for the village
people, they usually brought their cases in the last and hopeless
stages. And his rates were not exorbitant, even for these
poor folk. When I left, after a week of constant injections and
care of every kind, and—with strenuous protests from 'Aziz—
offered him twenty shillings, he could hardly be prevailed
upon to accept so large a sum.
These days were very pleasant in the village of Balarud. It
was pleasant to think that we were not marked on any map;
that, so far as the great world went, we were non-existent;
and yet here we were, harvesting our corn, living and dying
and marrying as busily as elsewhere. We could look across
to right and left to the villages of Verkh and Painrud,
apparendy quite near, but in reality separated from us by the
deep canyons on either hand; and across the drop of the Alamut
valley we could look out to the Rock of the Assassins and the
hills of Haudegan and Syalan, and the fair uplifted line of the
Throne of Solomon, our eventual goal: and watch how on
their flanks and buttresses the hours of the day were marked
in sun and shadow.
At the end of the village, on a sort of terrace overhanging
the canyon, the business of the harvest was going on. The old
men sat in the sun, guiding the spiky wooden roller round over
the corn. Great yellow heaps and humped black oxen stood
out against empty spaces of valley far below. Above us,
where the rocks of Siahsang already belong to Elburz, a little
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