South of the watershed
To the Teheran Road
By seven o'clock next morning we were up on the neck of
the pass, and even then the wind was so bitter that the two
men made a big fire of thorns to sit by while I took my bearings
with, numbed fingers. This was an important point, as this
southern watershed of the Shah Rud is properly mapped, and
I hoped that these last bearings on Takht-i-Suleiman and Elburz
would help me to get an approximately correct result for all
the rest.
We now descended southward, with that melancholy feeling
of turning one's back to the hills, down a narrow gully of a
valley with only one waterfall to enliven it, towards the
district of Arenge. After a while our path rose again and led
us along heights over the river that wound in rocks below, so
that one's feet seemed to hang over it as they stuck out beyond
the pack-saddle. And then we came down to the first small
village, with mulberry trees to shade it, hot at its lower level
of only 5,600 feet.
At Arian, the second village, we lunched. The women were
busy making jam out of small red and yellow plums and apples
of the woods. They cook them without sugar and leave them
in the sun to dry to powder, and use them to flavour soup.
Ground grape-stones are used also in this way for flavouring.
But besides this sort of preserve, they had some excellent real
jam which they eat together with the " shire " or sweet mul-
berry syrup known all over Persia.
Our valley grew wild and beautiful. High limestone cliffs
encompassed it, built in fantastic battlements, regular as
masonry. Here the green boulders of the tombstones lay
scattered, washed by the jade-green stream. At Pulab, the
Laura River comes in from the left, and we found the first
survey pegs for the Shah's road, now built and finished, but
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