The Throne of Solomon
triangle of dirty snow showed the birthplace of the torrent in
the gully.
Looking down into the gully, I could see a kite flying sur-
prisingly small in its deceptive depth. A very steep path
descended, and there was a litde mill by a trickle of water in
the bottom, where the village ground its corn. An ibex
last spring, shot at the canyon's lip, fell straight to the water's
edge, so steep was the slope. Here at the top, when the rains
came and washed the earth away, graves had been laid bare
with ancient bronzes inside them. The place had probably
been inhabited for innumerable centuries, and still lives its life
very much as it always has done since the beginning. Its
little mosque has a wooden colonnade before it: the pillars,
roughly carved, are designed somewhat like the stone pillars of
Persepolis, with flattened double capitals one above die other,
and bear out the theory that the particular architecture of the
Achsemenian kings came to Persia from the wooden houses of
Mazanderan.
" Why do you not plough more land?" I asked the villagers,
for about a third of the area of the shelf is never cultivated.
" We have enough corn as it is," said they.
" But you could sell what is left over."
" To whom could we sell? All the villages of Alamut have
corn enough for themselves."
" You could sell it in Qazvin or on the coast."
" We have never sold corn," said they.
They sell their surplus walnuts, and so buy tea, sugar, para-
ffin, and the few oddments which the village is unable to
provide of itself. Three-quarters of all the produce belongs
to the Arbab, the owner of the village; the remaining quarter
goes to the peasant. On the hard ground in front of their
doors the women weave rugs, drawing the thread over two
poles, and using a kind of steel hand to bang the warp into
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