Head of the Sbab
Avater. We were seeing all our familiar landmarks from the
other side.
Next day we travelled from Joistan to the last of the Shah
Rud villages, riding between uncultivated and uninhabited
valley walls into which defiles opened at intervals from higher
tracks, invisible on right and left. There was plenty of traffic
—chiefly charcoal, coming by the Hard Rud tributary from
the Anguran Pass into our valley—and in. the afternoon we
came again into pastoral meadows by Gatideh, and to grassy
slopes that run by Garab, the last village, to the gentle Asdek
Pass.
We, however, camped on the open slope, and next morning,
following the early trains of mules that carry charcoal to the
treeless southern plain, climbed up to where, on the northern
side of the Sirbash Pass between two smooth hills, the
Maiden's Castle—Dohtar Qal'a—stands in a sweep of solitude,
a small irregular pentagon with round buttress at one corner.
It is a rather disappointing place, being comparatively modern,
built of small stones, more tidily constructed than the older
ruins I had seen in Alamut and the lower Shah Rud: it had
walls three feet thick and a sort of shaft in the middle of die
building, now filled with earth and stones. At one time a
village must have scrambled below its walls down to a cuplike
hollow, and a graveyard on the opposite run of the cup
suggested with its modern tombstones that the pkce was
quite recently inhabited. One or two of the gravestones
go back to the seventeenth century: they were cut in a pale
green limestone which does not exist in the neighbourhood,
and which puzzled me until next day, when I came upon the
boulders which produced it far down in the southern valley:
to have carried it up so toilsomely meant a good deal of traffic
and a fair standard of well-being on the upland; it was probably
once far more inhabited than now, for an old conduit still runs
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