The Throne of Solomon
To return, however, to the dwellers in the jungle. As we
travelled along its mountain fringe, looking down upon it
from one height or another and hearing more about it, I began
to wonder if it is indeed inhabited by any particular and special
race, or if there is not rather a mixture of people from the
villages who become Jungalis only at certain seasons of the
year. Kuchek Khan himself was a jungle man, they told me,
from die neighbourhood of Resht, with long hair and beard
such as the Daylamites wore in the Middle Ages: and when
he was pursued they never caught him, but chased him up
into his fastnesses, where he died of cold in the hills.
But his two chief friends and lieutenants, Hala Qurban
and Hishmet, were not of the forest at all, the latter being a
man from Talaghan: the Refuge of Allah knew him, and saw
him at the last, handcuffed, and with his feet tied together under
a mule, being taken as a prisoner to Teheran. And as for the
later " Bolsheviks," they were practically all Alamutis, Tala-
ghanis, and riff-raff from the coast, with a few " foreigners "
sprinkled among them.
It is useless, they told me, to travel in the jungle in summer,
for it is empty, deserted by its inhabitants for the hills; and the
higher forest villages such as Daku, which is a large place,
though not on the maps, are summer resorts for the coast-
dwellers. In that wide belt of forest between the mountains
and the sea there seemed to be no fixed population, but a
continual passing to and fro from the coastal to the Alpine
villages, who all have their appointed stations and grazing
grounds for the various seasons of the year. But what there
may be apart from diese known villages I could not discover.
There are long uninhabited stretches, a day or two days' march
at a time, and whether the shepherds and wood-cutters who
wander there are a race apart, or whether, as I think more
probable, they are the sort of people I was meeting and