The Throne of Solomon
The Master of Flocks
Through the eastern defile of the Assassins' valley, under
the precipice of Nevisar Shall, we left the river track and began
to climb as we had done the year before for the Salambar Pass.
It is steeper than the way to the Hornli hut from Zermatt, a
wild granite country. There were fewer people than the year
before, for spring and autumn are the busy times over the
Caspian passes, and this was August 23. Fewer flowers too:
but we came, nevertheless, to borage and many sorts of dian-
thus, mallows, jasmine, mignonette, a scented pink thistle, and
a shrub covered with white and faint pink bracts like sunlit
snow, Atraphaxis spinosa. As I rode under a waterfall, about
8,000 feet up by my aneroid, I saw Gentiana septemfida in
the damp earth, and felt a sudden gladness, as over a meeting
with friends in a strange land.
At a small chaikhana, a low hut with brushwood roof and
long earthen hearth on which one sat, we rested, and discovered
that in the agitation of good-byes someone had forgotten to
shoe the mules. The Refuge of Allah now proceeded to do
so with shoes which the chaikhana kept ready suspended from
the roof by a string and with a crooked nail or two which he
produced like a conjurer from somewhere in his shirt.
We sat in the hut and drank tea, and listened to the gipsy-
eyed housewife, who had made the pilgrimage to Meshed in
Khorasan last year with 'Aziz's mother. Her husband was
still down at the wedding in Garmrud, so that we were first to
tell the news about it.
An hour after noon we came to the huts of Pichiban. We
were on the shelf which lies north of the upper Alamut valley,
and were climbing the watershed of which Solomon's Throne
is the culminating point. Here was undulating pasture with
brooks tunnelling through it, and damp grass and gentians at
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