The Throne of Solomon
any kind on any one of them, but a running or geometric
pattern, and often the slabs at head and feet rose in their centre
to a stone hump, evidently typical of this region, since I came
across the same thing later at Joistan in Talaghan. New graves
too were here, for the place is still used, and a box of Qurans
for the congregation stood in the porch of the chapel: but we
found no inhabitants except the birds, who felt themselves at
home, and three Kurdish lads who presently materialized out
of nowhere to look through my glasses, and took me a few
hundred yards over the stubble to where another carved tomb
lay out in the open. The hillside is covered with them over a
great area, including Shahri and Kiviter, and the ridge north
of it which they call Ikane; and there are remains of walls, now
indistinguishable heaps, but once, the village people say, a
great city rising up towards the ridge. Not a single tomb
seen by them, the lads told me, had any script upon it.
The elder of these boys could read and write: there was a
mulla in Kiviter who taught him, and he had been for a short
visit to Teheran. He would like to leam English, he said: did
I think he could do so in six months? This keen adventurous
Kurdish mind is a pleasure to meet, so different from the
peasant's apathy of the plains. Truly the world belongs to
the hillmen.
Rather late in the afternoon, though the exact time is un-
certain since my watch now went on strike altogether, we left
our sanctuary and continued downhill over wide natural
terraces scattered with thorny bushes till we came into the
valley: then crossing a little ravine full of acacia thickets we
climbed in dusk to the village of Baude, where we hoped to
spend the night.
Silence met us even before we entered among its dozen or so
of houses. Not a soul was to be seen. In the last daylight
the fenced gardens shone with a careless luxuriance, tossing
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