The Throne of Solomon
world spread itself around us. There, led up to by the ridge oi
the Thousand Hollows, whose nearer peaks rose at our feet
we saw again the Throne of Solomon and all its sisters, with a
snow wreath curling round it in a semicircle, from which the
River of Cold Water, our Sardab Rud, takes birth. Round
it and lower, the hills lay like tumbled folds of blanket. The
gradual southern slopes of Elburz and his peers, hitherto in-
visible, showed in the farther west, and below them, coming
eastward towards us, a broad, populous valley, the bed of the
Shah Rud of Talaghan. A blue serrated edge of hills with
many passes, all more or less on a level, bounded its farther
side; beyond it, out of sight, was the Qazvin-Teheran plain,
the world of motor-cars; the Survey of India had looked up
from that civilized flatness and reached the skyline from the
southern side, locating the points and giving me at last, after
my weeks of travel, an identifiable object to use as a base.
We descended by a rough way towards the Narian stream,
meeting tributaries as they poured in, for the ridges spread like
fishbones, making many little uninhabited valleys before they
break in precipices and defiles on to the Shah Rud below.
Above the defiles are villages, situated in the middle parts of
these side valleys, on a line more or less parallel to the main
stream but much higher, with a track connecting them which
leads straight from the Anguran Pass in the east.
As we came down in the evening towards the water, the
hillsides grew more steep and stony; we looked around for a
sheltered place, with grass for our animals, to eat and sleep.
Just as we came upon it, a little rocky semicircle by the stream,
'Aziz sneezed. Nothing would induce him to stop after so
sinister an omen: reluctant but docile, we followed him, and
found no other space to camp in until, in darkness, we reached
the meadows of Narian and unloaded the packs in a stubble-
field surrounded by willows, filled with chirping crickets and
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