Wife of the Hungarian Engineer
resort, we would go and take the shikari to guide; and wre set
out again at seven next morning. In fifteen minutes we
reached Darijan, the last village, which has forty houses and a
mulla, and a bath whose little domes of mud, enlivened by
flat green bottles inserted as skylights, were shining in the
morning sun.
I had spoken nothing but Persian for three weeks, and I felt
I could not let the chance go by of meeting another European
woman, whatever my forebodings might be as to-the Greco-
Hungarian. So I banged on a low door in Darijan behind
which they told me were the engineer and his wife: and sure
enough, after a long interval, an angular, dishevelled lady
appeared, so apologetic for not being up at seven in the
morning that my own apologies for so early a call had no
chance even to begin. She also, she said, was going to the
hot springs of Ab-i-Garm, the Queen of ShebaS bath, and I
promised to wait for her there.
We now rode up the valley towards Mian Rud, or the Place
between Rivers, where two streams meet that encircle the
western and northern flanks of Takht-i-Suleiman, and to-
gether descend as the Darijan water. Here, they say, was an
old town buried, and a vague look of human handiwork still
seems to lift the hollows of the ground. A little higher up,
above the meeting waters, the shooting box of the dead
Emir is also falling to decay, soon to add one more ruin to
this cemetery of a world on which we play: its garden outlines
are lost already, though a roofless line of buildings and man-
gers for horses still stand on a grassy knoll under the morning
shadow of the mountain. An immense and solitary cherry
tree was waving its leaves near-by in the draught of the valley-
There was no village, but only a peasant's house, and the two
streams meet below it, foaming at the foot of slopes of hay.
We followed the right-hand water up a long and narrow valley,
T [289]