An ancient graveyard
in diameter. On it I found a few shards of shiny black earthen-
ware and much of the common red ware—but nothing like the
woman's bit of glazed tile or the coloured pottery of the
Assassin castles. It is a fine mound, waiting for the excavator.
The view from it was full of a prosperous peace, with corn-
lands and their platformed ricks in the foreground, long
woodland spurs rising westward to the mountains of Solomon
at the far valley head, and lower wooded ridges on the north
where, through a defile, the Sardab Rud leaves Kalar and
travels a day's journey through jungle to the sea.
Niglt in the Chalus Valley
The Chalus is a big narrow valley, with Nasir-ud-Din's easy
level track along it, now arranged for motors to meet the new
Kara] road from Teheran, but still untouched when we
travelled there. We made for it down easy slopes across the
col of Bashm, passing Banafshade on our left, Sangesarek,
Shahri, and Kiviter. Leaving Kiviter with protests from
'Aziz, who hated to reject villages offered by Providence at
lunch-time, I rode off the track down to the left across cornfields
to a small Imamzadeh of Muhammad, hidden in a grove of
beech trees.
This was a solitary place; by some obscure message it must
have called across the cornfields, for there was nothing from far
off to promise so much beauty. The beech gkde grew within
a low wall of boulders, round a whitewashed chapel mellowed
by ages of sunlight, with door of wooden lattice work.
Around it lay the carved tombs of the city on the pass. There
were numbers of them, crooked and half sunken in the ground;
moss and lichen had eaten into their scrolls and ornaments of
stone. Each grave was made of four slabs, two short ones at
head and feet and two long ones or sometimes more down the
sides, with earth in the middle; there was no Arabic or script of
[3*1