The Valleys Of The Assassins

THE VALLEYS OF THE ASSASSINS

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11 Aec.

UKMilWW

No.

Class No.

V'uiUa. VTWJIrSi^i X •

/ 0?3 /

"he Valleys of the AssSssins

and

Other Persian Travels

by

FREYA STARK

LONDON

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W

First Edition .

Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Messrs . Wyman Sons, Ltd.>
Fakenbam , sup¬

plied by Messrs.
Grosvenor 9 Cbater
<& Co., Ltd .

/Of 3/

To W. P. KER.

In Loving Memory

Pre

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CONTENTS
PART I. LURISTAN

PAGE

Preface . •

Chapter I. A FORTNIGHT IN N.W. LURISTAN

..

Chapter II. THE HIDDEN TREASURE 1932 •

The Coolies of Baghdad
The Treasure ■

Crossing the Frontier
Waterless Hills •

The Law of Hospitality .

The Great Mountain
Night in Garau .

The Trihe at Home

The Defile of the Unbelievers .

The City of the Larti .

The Valley of the Hindimini .

The Graves of the Beni Parwar

Capture •

A Mild Affair with Bandits

Return to Garau

The Forests of Aftab

To the Capital of Pusht-i-Kuh

The Government of Pusht-i-Kuh

The Way to Mandali

The Gangir Valley

Finish in Baghdad

M

7

13

60

60

62

67

73

77

83

88

93

103

no

120

127

133

138

151

159

166

172

178

185

189

PART II. MAZANDERAN

Chapter III.

Chapter IV.
Chapter V.

Index

A JOURNEY TO THE VALLEY OF
THE ASSASSINS 1930 .

PAGE

197

THE ASSASSINS ’ CASTLE
LAMIASAR 1931

OF

234

Fre

THE THRONE OF SOLOMON 1931

252

F01

Sitt Zeinahars Tomh

252

Th

A Doctor in Alamut

258

Tl

Life in the Village

265

A

Three Weddings .

271

The Master of Flocks

280

The Watering Resort

Is)

CO

The Throne of Solomon .

294

A

Shepherds from the Jungle

303

Kalar Dasht ....

309

T

The Site of Kalar .

317

A

Lahu .....

325

Night in the Chains Valley

329

I .

The Squire of Bijeno

334

I

The Pass of Siolis into Talaghan

338

The Upper Shah Rud .

345

j

To the Teheran Road .

351

r

*

•

357

1

[»]

list of illustrations

Frey a Stark, from a pencil sketch by Dorothy Hawksley frontispiece

1 - Facing page

16

Fort Alishtar •

The Guard on the Varazan Pass ■

18

The Bride of Qal’a Kafrash •

A Lur in Khava wearing a costume now prohibited by the
Persian Government, and a headdress to be replaced by

the Pahlevi hat •

Printed in the “ London Illustrated News ”

A Lur Caravan at Arjine ■

3*5

The Mound at QaYa Kafrash •

36

A looted graveyard across the Kangevari

• 38

■Printed in the “ London Illustrated News

A bronze-age grave from Dilfan .

• 38

Keram Khan .

• 48

The farewell to Keram Khan above Harsin .

56

The Rock of Alamut from the South .

2x0

The Rock of Alamut • |

. 214

Elburz in the background . J

Ruins of Nevisar Shah ■

4 215

Ruins on the Alamut Rock, looking South .

. 3l8

Village of Garmrud in the Alamut Valley .

. 228

[ 3 ]

List of Illustrations

Facing page

Persians of Lamiasar .

238

Castle of Lamiasar. Drawing by H. W. Hawes from the

author s rough sketch .

243

Takht-i-Suleman from the Salamhar Pass (May)

252

At Garmrud in the Alamut Valley ....

272

iih

Hujjat Allah—The Refuge of Allah—The Guide from the

Assassin valley with my mule and saddle-hags .

278

Nc

Mount Elburz from the Salamhar Pass ^

280

Lti

Alamut Valley on the right . J

Mules on the Salamhar Pass .....

to

CO

4 ^

Sr

Dohtar QaVa—The Maidens Castle—Our lodging for the

night on the Sirhash Pass .

00

cq .

L

The way from Darijan to the great mountain of Solomons

h

Throne .

is>

CO

CO

The Shepherds' hut in the Valley of Barir, a days journey
from any other dwelling. The walls are underground

in protection against snow .....

00

0

CO

My camp on the slopes of Solomons Throne

0

00

The Jungalis wear thick felt coats hunched into dummy
sleeves or knohs at the shoulders , which they call

Shaulars ..

310

A Jungali Wood-cutter .

310

Village of Rudharek .......

320

4 Aziz buying provisions from a travelling merchant

320

[ 4 ]

LIST OF MAPS

Illustrated key map to Luristan and Mazanderan

drawn by H. W. Hawes . • • • ^d-papers

North-west Luristan with route . . • f aan S P a £ e 58

Luristan, with route to illustrate “ The Hidden

Treasure” .. ” 9

Surroundings of the Alamut Valley . ■ -P a & e 199

319

The Site of Kalar • •••'”

Mazanderan, with routes to illustrate Part II . facing page 354

[ 5 ]

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PREFACE

AN imaginative aunt who, for my ninth birthday, sent a
copy of the Arabian Nights, was, I suppose, the original cause

of trouble. c ,

Unfostered and unnoticed, the little flame so kindled fed
secretly on dreams. Chance, such as the existence of a
Syrian missionary near my home, nourished it; and Fate,
with long months of illness and leisure, blew xt , t0 a f bk “ f
bright enough to Hght my way through labyrmths of
Arabic, and eventually to land me on the coast o yna at t e

end of 1927.

Here, I thought, all difficulty was over: I had now but to
look around me, to learn, and to enjoy.

And so it would have been had not those twin Virtues so
fatal to the joie de vivre of our civilized West, thesenseo
responsibility and the illusion, dear to well-regulated minds,
that every action must have a purpose-had not these virtues
of Responsibility and Purpose met me at every step with t e
embarrassing enquiry: “ Why are you here alone, and.
“ What do you intend to dot'

I may confess at once that I had never thought of why I
came, far less of why I came alone: and as to what I was going
to do—I saw no cause to trouble about a thing so ne .
beforehand. My sense of responsibility was m effect deficient
and purpose non-existent. When excessively badgered, the
only explanation I could think of for being so unwantedly

[7]

Preface

in Asia was an interest in Arabic grammar—a statement joi

rarely accepted in that candid spirit in which I offered it to Iff

unconvinced enquirers. ar

I came to the conclusion that some more ascetic reason
than mere enjoyment should be found if one wishes to travel
in peace: to do things for fun smacks of levity, immorality
almost, in our utilitarian world. And though personally I
think the world is wrong, and I know in my heart of hearts
that it is a most excellent reason to do tilings merely because
one likes the doing of them, I would advise all those who
wish to see unwrinkled brows in passport offices to start out
ready labelled as entomologists, anthropologists, or whatever 1

other -ology they think suitable and propitious. ■

But as this book is intended for the Public, and is therefore
necessarily truthful, I must admit that for my own part I
travelled single-mindedly for fun. I learned my scanty
Arabic for fun, and a little Persian—and then went for
the same reason to look for the Assassin castles and the
Luristan bronzes in the manner here related. And here I
would like to thank the much-tried, frequently accused, and
not unreasonably perplexed officials who came across me, for
much indulgence, not always unmixed with disapproval, but
invariably kind.

I have given events and impressions as they occurred, as
accurately as I could. This I am particularly anxious to say
in regard to the Treasure Hunt in Luristan, which might
otherwise be suspected of fantasy by readers unacquainted
with lands so sensational: the only alteration made there is
to disguise the situation of the treasure map and cave.

I have many to remember who were good to me in my

[.«]

Prefc

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iournevins British, Arabic, and Persian, whose presence
lives l tS enchanted frame of days and whose kmdnesses
are beyond the possibility of recording. SlAK _

Villa Freia
Asolo
Italy

Anart from much help and encouragement I must also

rb-Xhe Royal Geographical Society for permrssron to use
"o7two maps' first pubfched by them, and to

reprint the article on Lamiasar.

[ 9 ]

PART I. LURISTAN

Oupm I • A Fortnight in N. W- luristm
Chapter II. The Hi Men Treasure

In

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Chapter I

A FORTNIGHT in n.w. luristan

I N THE WASTES OT 4*

“"^' fi ““ imMt “ oftast£ - 1,15
country for the explorer.

He finds out what he cannot do

And then he goes and does it.

I did not do it, for I penetrated only^very le$s

I spent a fortnight in that part o ^ ^ own medieval

frequently murdered, and saw hanging in

ga rb-the white tight-warsted coat ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

points from the Persian government is

hide their ears. As the am ^ a ’ s time, with

to toe <hem aU 1 J h on the lining,

?f'“rl'^e pti to gi ve a *» “ * “

possible before too “fSfag on very scraggy ponies

Behold then Hajji and m , § Q f Nihavend

up to the Varazan Pass. f^^re French archseologists
and the nearer moun nnvnl and ham into one s

give kind hospitality an P*- ess touc k e d, alas! because of
saddle-bags—the latter not o ^ pleasant conduct

religion, which is always ^terfemxrg P ^

of k Hajji looks gloomy. Fnend have to
going to be killed. Lessening under our ieet, *

g & [ 13 ]

A Fortnight in N.W. Luristan

slopes of Kuh Garu shut in Luristan as with a wall. This
climbing into a country which is not considered safe , is
exhilarating, though no sense of peril is possible m so bright
Sght, such radiant solitude, such breadth of mountain
ranges imder the pale October sky. As a matter of fact, it
Is only the other three passes over Kuh Garu winch are pre¬
sumed to be held by robbers at this moment: our Varazan
has been in the hands of government for the last six weeks
It is as well to know this beforehand; otherwise one might
take the garrison for bandits instead of policemen. They
come tumbling out of a round stone tower their guns poin ted
and clean among the dibris of the rest of then attire They
take a toll of eight krans (is. 5 A) for every pack animal across
the pass. "When the robbers held it, they took only seven-
pence more, and might have gone on making a regular
Lome for a long time if they had not lost their tempers one
day with two merchants who thought to bargain fivepencc
off the tariff and whose death caused a stoppage in the charcoal
trade which comes out of Luristan by Kuh Garu; whereupon
government dislodged the bandits, handed over ten guns to
some Lurs of Khava who are on the side of law and order
for the time being, and left the pass and its revenue in their

bands.

These volunteers were friendly people, delighted with con¬
versation and chivalrous enough to forgo their eight krans in
honour of their first Ferangi from the plain.

They brought little glasses of tea into the sunshine, spread
a felt rug, and began to talk about the present security of
Persia with the enthusiasm which is general there among the
poorer sort. One of them had a wounded leg which I doc¬
tored with brandy, while the chief of the post, pushing his
long hair out of his eyes and leaning on his gun, slowly read
the address on my letter of introduction to the Governor at

[ 14 ]

Keepers of the Varazan Pass

ishtar This letter was an “ Open Sesame . its quite
significant contents were luckily sealed up, but the name on
e envelope had already served to get me through the
itanelements of the Nihavend police: its mere production
tve the impression that I travelled with the authority of
,vemmentfbehind me and when I handed it to anyon ,
tried to cultivate a manner to correspond. I had another
tter to the brother of the Keeper of the Varazan, whic
roduced more friendliness and promise of a nights lodging
a theplain of Khava below. The Ten sat in a row looking
t me - so did two menials who, they explained, came to do
he sweeping, though there was nothing to show for such
lomestic efforts among the rocks. As the carava^nb^
nen climbed up to the pass, one of our group wou d stroU
icross to waylay them and exact the toll: die J'f
oxen, scarce visible between enormous sacks ^

filled with charcoal or grain, strayed on, surefooted, whi
the men stood counting out the money and brought news of
the jungle or the town according as they came from south
oif north. Their road lay like a ribbon ^ ™

the plain of Khava whose southern edge, fringed with sm
pointed hills and further wave-like ridges vzmshe& m
gentle distance. Very few Europeans travel in dm> countay-
Sir A. T. Wilson has been there, and perhapsh a
more: and in 1836 Sir Henry Rawhnson marched his Persian
regiment across it, locating in his mind as he went the vanished
nations whose horses grazed over these open downs.

We parted from the garrison and proceeded with difficulty
owing to the jagged steepness of the southern slope, which 1
SS practicable^ for horses. The way from the pass r^
down a stonv cleft. The whole range is Ucejijvave whos
gende slope we had been climbing from the NAavend plam,
and we now had the sheer side to negotiate: and as we slipped

[* 5 ]

in 1 \ . V V • X-JVH I'JlsVkir

j± ronmgm

and stumbled among the sliding surfaces of the limestone,
Hajji forgot that he had come to me pretending to know
every inch of the road, and complained in a pathetic voice
that this was no place for anyone but thieves.

It seemed right that the entrance to the forbidden country
should not be too easy. Our expectation had been rising ever
since Nihavend which, lying so close, yet speaks of Luristan
as a region unknown, governed by laws and standards in
which the peaceful townsmen have no part. Every day, from
far in the southern jungles, the caravans of black oxen bring
their loads of com or charcoal across the mountain wall.
The tribesmen, with uncombed hair and eyes frankly hostile,
squat in groups of their own under the rampart of the old
fortress and have no social dealings with the citizens. The
guard on the Varazan, with its ragged clothes and shining
gun-barrels, emphasized the point, as it were. 'When we came
to them we reached the gate of a new country. No one
travels here unless he has the freedom of the tribes or some
other protection: there were no peasants or merchants among
the climbers to the pass: only white-coated Lurs fixing us
with suspicious, fearless eyes. They gave no greeting, but
were ready enough, I found, to answer if one spoke to them.

And now, at a bend in our narrow gorge, the plain of Khava
opened out below us, washing like a yellow wave to the rocks
of Kuh Garu; dotted in an Arcadian way with black flocks
and tents, and intersected from east to west by a grass-banked
stream. Away on its southern side it was all pastoral solitude
running to small hills; but in its centre were harvested fields
of com, tribesmen tillin g, villages where the mountain sank
into the plain, and mounds of buried cities here and there.

These must once have been populous places, with a beaten
track winding over one of the easier passes from Nihavend or
Harsin through the villages of Khava to Alishtar—mentioned

[16]

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Looking jor Lurs oj iKajrasv

in the fourteenth century as an important city and so to
Khurramabad and the eastern plains. Somewhere in this
district the rebel Gautama is thought to have been vanquished
by Darius: here possibly were the Nisaian pasture lands visited
by Alexander on his way up into Persia, but famous for their
horses under the Achsemenians long before him. One finds
bronzes, flints, and earthenware in the lonely valleys. Wave
after wave of people unnamed and unnumbered lose themselves
here in unrecorded dimnesses of time.

This, however, was not what occupied our thoughts, but
rather the problem of how to find our particular Lurs in a
p lain about ten miles by twenty in which no one knew the
way. A weedy tall man with bushy eyebrows had come
with us from Nihavend as a guide. He also, I soon dis¬
covered, had never been up before—and he was furthermore
a wreck from opium, which takes people’s legs more com¬
pletely than beer: he would sit down at intervals looking
like a traveller in the early stages of a Channel crossing, and
refuse to take any interest in our hopes for lunch among
friends.

We reached tire area of cultivation, and, riding gently
through ploughed fields and melon patches, finally came upon
people who directed us to our Keram Ali Lurs at the mound
of Qal’a Kafrash in the west, where a few mud houses and a
row or two of black tents combine to make a village. The
mound, about eighty feet high by eighty broad, rises with
that artificial regularity of shape which shows the buried work
of man all over Persia and Mesopotamia; it gives the feeling
of a cemetery incredibly old to many a landscape there. The
Lurs of Kafrash, however, were not oppressed by their
antique surroundings: they were as cheerful a lot of villains
as you could wish to meet, and delighted with us for being,
as they said, brave enough to come among them. In the

I 1 ?]

B

/i ronmgbt in JN.w. Luristan

absence of the Khan, his wife ruled the house. She was a
lovely woman with a very narrow long face and arched
eyebrows—a beauty fierce and strange, but with the most
roguish smile imaginable. Her dark hair, with gleams of
henna in it, was curled in two long ringlets on each shoulder
and crowned with an immense sarhand or turban of coloured
silks aslant over one eye, which gave an absurd mixture of
rakishness and dignity to her appearance. She wore an old
red velvet coat full at the waist, with tinsel edges, over a
loose cotton gown of yellow printed flowers: and she walked
like a queen. She ruled her household also like a queen,
with none of the submissiveness of Persian women in general.
She seated me beside her, tried my hat and examined as
much of my clothing as she could get at, embraced me, told
me that I was her sister, and allowed me to hold the baby in
my arms. Cousins, uncles, brothers, and brothers-in-law
meanwhile sat in a half-circle on the opposite side of the
hearth, waiting for these female amenities to end. They
had furtive, long faces, with eyes rather near together, but
strong, big-boned and healthy. They thought nothing of
the people of the plain. “ We smoke no opium here,” said
they, glancing at my guide, who was just lifting a piece of
lighted charcoal to his second pipe. Hajji too, who cannot
conceal that he thinks a Persian town the only synonym for
civilization, was being left in the cold as an alien. But I
am a hill woman myself, and I travelled in Luristan for
pleasure: they accepted me kindly.

When evening came, and the last mouthfuls of rice had
been scooped off the round tray before us, they brought an
enormous camp bed for me to sleep in, looted from die
Russians My host and his beautiful wife arranged them¬
selves under a quilt in a corner of the room; and four brothers
or cousins disposed themselves at my feet. As a last after-

[18]

Mahmud becomes escort

thought, they picked my shoes off the floor and put them
under my mattress, for I had not yet learnt that one sleeps on
all one possesses in Luristan.

Next morning might have been an autumn day in Scotland.
A faint mist trailed in and out of the woollen roofs of the
tents and along the ground, among sparse willow trees that
followed the course of a little stream. While the women
lighted the fire indoors, the men stood to get warm against a
sheltered wall in the early sun. Mahmud, a shifty-eyed
brother of our host, offered to take me over the pass to
Alishtar. “ Your man from Nihavend will not be necessary,

said he. “ He can go home.”

Now I had been thinking this myself, but did not like the
idea so well when presented by someone who might be
planning unpleasantness. It meant risking a lonely pass in
unprepossessing company with one’s escort diminished by
half, and Hajji’s frightened looks, and the assembled tribesmen
coldly taking note of them, made matters worse. I thought,
however, that a man who smokes much opium is very litde
use in a crisis: and if the Lurs meant mischief they had every
facility for carrying it out whatever our arrangements. I
said I should be delighted, and tactfully added that I would
remember the tribe’s kindness to the Governor in Alishtar.
Hajji tried some half-strangled remonstrance, cowed by the
hostile eyes upon him. As for the guide from Nihavend, he
burst into tears. “ A man like that would bring bad luck to
anyone,” our new guide said as we watched him lope away
across the fields.

We followed our track of the day before, along the Badavar
River, by the village of Noah, through cultivated land, then
turned south, where there are no villages, but rolling downs
for miles, covered with thorny bushes of gum tragacanth
winch the Lurs collect and sell in the towns: every plant has

[ ]

si fortnight in JS.w. Lunstan

a small pit dug round it, the stem is incised thrice a year at
an interval of a week or so, and the gum oozes out ready to
be sold. These pits make the most irritating country to ride
over, as bad as a rabbity bit of Dartmoor.

As we were going along in pleasant loneliness, talking of
this and that, with only here and there a shepherd and & his
flocks to break the long lines of curving empty land, I began
to notice that we were not keeping to our intended direction

of the Gatchkah Pass, where a police post guards the track to
Alishtar.

“ Why are we going so far south?” I asked.

“ The Gatchkah is not safe to-day,” said Mahmud with
one of his furtive glances. “We are going round by a
different way.

(( ^ thought there were police up there,” said I.

“ So there are: but it is hilly country.” With which cryptic
remark we had to be contented, and rode on in meditative
silence, rather anxiously.

And now we came over a little ridge and saw before us a
new setdement of tents and a few houses, the hamlet of Deh

ZZa 1 j S “ r|>liSe J b V om1 -- for ^ absolute

SZmTT 2, ^ ,he mfkished mot ° r from

at mv W “ f r r V mpriSeJ ,' b “ we Were - He it more,

any rate and came spluttering up to ask if I knew that I

I 1 “4,*“ 1 n0t ^ was on

nrL \ C ?- ° n the Govemor: the famous letter was

produced, with its usual impressive effect. It took a little

on our vuido “ w/io ’ " , the P ollcem an, turning

on our guide. Why are you off the road?”

Law and the Pah lent hat

This question has never been solved. The man looked so
guilty that I felt my worst suspicions confirmed, and on y
later, when I noticed how every Lurlooks guilty when con¬
fronted with the Law, began to think that perhaps he was

innocent after all. ~ rr

Meanwhile we were not to be allowed to go on ; We
should have lunch first, said the policeman, anxious coute que
coute to make us do something we had not intended. It is
tempting to give a soft answer when one knows that it will
annoy, and we felt no great aversion to the idea of lunch.
But partly so as to go on in the game of contradicting, and
partly because it would be taken as a want of friendliness to
the villagers, I refused to sit in solitude with my escort under
a tree as arranged, and moved up into one of the tnbesmen s

tents instead. 1 ,

Here as we crouched over the fire and watched a chicken

turning like an heraldic animal on a spit, our feelings gradually
softened. Our chance of making Alishtar that night was
gone—but what is a day more or less on a journey? The
policeman for his part had made us sit still when we wanted
to go on, and could therefore feel authority safe m his hands.
He began to look with appraising eyes at my aluminium water-
botde and to soliloquize on the usefulness of such objects to
lonely guardians doomed to live far from their fellows in
the hills. As for the Lurs, they drew gradually near to the
one subject in which they are chiefly interested just now¬
and that is the subject of clothes. .

They were given a year long ago to obtain European

coat and trousers and a Pahlevi hat. No one ha t oug t
of doing so: fairy tales, which know human nature always
g i TC a year and a day, and the hero does not begin to
fhink about the matter till the last evening. Now a new

message had come through from Teheran, an ve ays

[21]

A Fortnight in N,W> Luristan

were to see Luristan dressed and shaved, long hair being
considered incompatible with a civilized appearance. To
procure a city suit in five days in the wilds of Luristan, is
a joke only fit for Punch or the Persian government: the
tribesmen gazed in unhappy perplexity while the policeman
expounded.

“ Do you think the Ferangi clothes keep rain and snow out
as thoroughly as these felt coats?” I asked at last.

“ Oh no,” said the policeman.

“ I should think the Pahlevi hat would not last long in this
climate either?”

“ No time at all,” the tribesmen said in chorus, with obvious

j°y-

The policeman put down my water-bottle.

“ It is an order from die Shah,” he observed with dignity;
and suggested that it might be time to move on. The passes,
he explained, were not so dangerous as before lunch: he did
not think I need be escorted. If I used the water-bottle myself
he would not dream of depriving me: he had not seriously
thought of suggesting it. And would I tell the Governor
how pleased I was with his services?

So we went on, keeping the Gatchkah and its hills well on
our left, and making for the motor road, trodden, as far as
one could see, only by the hooves of innumerable donkeys
and mules. It is not yet completely finished, and the last
and safest part of it, where cars do run between Kermenshah
and Harsin, is apt to be raided now and then, and was so five
days before I got there. Out here in the wilderness it seemed
to sun itself in perfect peace, winding out of a rolling green
country for sheep which rose to bolder hills and jungle patches
in the south-western little-known valleys of Dilfan. As we
rode through the quiet light of the afternoon, we saw no
trace of human beings except the heaps of stones by the road-

[22]

Descent on Allshtar

side and one white-clad shepherd, with his flock on the slope

of a hill. ,

This low, long ridge is called the Firuzabad Pass, and we
knew we had crossed the watershed when we came to a litde
stream welling out from rocks on our left hand. The water
was velvety and bright as a bird’s eye, and ran down towards
Alishtar; and we followed and came in the sunset to the open
ing of the plain and to a little colony of tents on its western

Here under the open awning of the chief tent we waited
while the Khan was told of our arrival. The Lurs, like the
little girl with the curl, are very nice when they are nice, but
when they are not they are horrid—and one rarely knows which
it is going to be. There is an anxious interval when one
comes to a strange tribe and waits to see. This anxiety is
not confined to the stranger: I noticed that all my native
guides shared it, and used to hasten to explain my presence
with an empressement that could only be described as apologetic.
On this occasion the explanation was accepted with reserve.
The cunning little green eyes of our host wandered from me
to my kit-bag with an obvious thought behind them, while

he made no effort at conversation.

Time is the great factor on these occasions. We sat in
silence and watched the twilight, while the smoke from its
many tents floated like mist over the plain. Goats and ewes
were coming to be milked; their shuffling feet and low half-
bleatings filled the air with a sense of evening peace. A tree
showed like lace against the distance, and the new roa ^, going
diagonally across to the gap of Khurramabad, lost itself m t .e
dusk. Our horses crunched chopped straw out of the mud-
built mangers close beside us—oats being most y tmo taina e
in the country: they tossed their heads with a litde jing e o
bells now and then. And in the eastern sky the mountain of

[ 23 ]

Alishtar and the range of Sefid ICuh were pencilled with sc
clear and pure an outline that the very sight of them fillec
the mind with quietness.

Whether it was the beauties of nature, or the more im¬
mediate prospect of supper, or just the fact that they were
getting used to the sight of us, the Lurs gradually began tc
setde down for conversation with a show of friendly interesl
here and there. Unlike those of Qal’a Kafrash, these were
real nomads who never live in houses. They are Mumivend.
In su mm er they inhabit the fringe of Alishtar, in winter they
move with all their tribe to their “ Garmsir,” the warm valleys
round Tarhan in the south-west. They were going to start
in about a month’s time, in November. The government is
trying hard to make them build houses so as to keep them in
one place, but they are unanimous in disliking the change,
and say that to winter in the north means losing a lot of their
stock: and as the government can penetrate only with an armed
force south of Alishtar or Khava, the nomad will probably
have his way for some little time yet.

I had a heap of straw put under my sleeping-sack that night
and lay beneath the tent awning with the flocks and herds
around me and Hajji by the horses close at hand.

Next morning we set off across the plain. On the far side,
the Fort of Alishtar showed in a patch of trees. It is now the
seat of law and order and the residence of the Governor of
Northern Luristan; but three years ago it would have been
impossible for a Persian policeman or indeed for any ordinary
traveller to get within miles of it. Mir Ali Khan ruled there
like a king. He held the whole of North Luristan, and
harried Nihavend on one side and Khurramabad on the other,
so that the plainsmen dared not sleep without their city walls.
The Lurs were devoted to him: the Salsile, to which his own
tribe of the Hasanavend belong, say even now that they

1 * 4 ]

number 20,000 fighting men, and many others joined forces
with them: he fed, so they say, 300 guests daily at his table,
and kept half a million tomans in gold together with his five
wives in the castle. I met his sister-in-law at Alishtar, a
young woman educated in Teheran with no sympathy for
the tribes, and she told me her despair when they brought
her to live up here, with no doctor to attend to her when she
fell ill, with no one but the wild tribeswomen to talk to, and
with no prospect of ever getting away.

The government finally decided to finish Mir Ali Khan. It
sent an Armenian friend of his, called Sangari Garkhan, to
join in some small expedition against a neighbouring potentate.
The campaign was successful, and the two were riding back
side by side over the Khurramabad Pass into Alishtar, when
the Armenian suddenly turned on his ally: the government
troops he had with him closed in and shackled Mir Ali Khan
and hurried him off, before his men could rally, to Khurrama¬
bad, where he was instantly hanged. Meanwhile the Armen¬
ian entered the fort as a friend, took possession in the Shah’s
name, and proceeded to overrun and disarm the plains of
Alishtar and Khava and to destroy any building that could
ever be turned into a fortress. These ruins are still visible
here and there. He was rewarded by being made Governor,
but has since come to a bad and suitable end.

So our guide told us, as we jingled leisurely over the wide
cultivated plain, crossing branches of the Kahman stream at
intervals and gradually drawing nearer to the hills of the
4 eastern edge and the range where the Kahman rises “ in a
grove of trees like Paradise,” they say.

It was a warmer climate than Khava, with rice and opium
poppies in the ground, and reeds in the water where a pale-
yellow water-snake darted its head at us. In the stubble-fields
grew quantities of small arum flowers, dark red and close to

[* 5 ]

A Fortnight in N.W. Luristm

the ground; and after we had ridden an hour or so we came
to the area of villages evidently very old, for there are tomb¬
stones here and there belonging to the early centuries of Islam
—rectangular blocks of stone with a carved knob at each comer
and a raised centre, covered and surrounded by script or
ornamental arabesques. There are mounds, too, and a
great mound and a village called Geraran, the largest in
Alishtar, near the opening of the Kahman gorge on our left.
Here, said our guide, the treasure of the Fire Worshippers
was buried, though no one has found it yet.

Our guide was very friendly now, and sang in the Kurdish
way, as they call it.

“ Baina, baina,

Nazaram baina;

Agar dust nam diri
Shau neilim tanha.”

Baina, baina,

Look on me, baina;

If thou too lovest it
I shall not sleep alone,
or

“ Kai Iowa, Iowa,

Murgakam Iowa;

Jerkam arraye
Dusakam kowa.”

Kai Iowa, Iowa,

My bird Iowa;

Because of my love
My liver is like a kabob.

At the end of each line the Ai, ai, ai, of the refrain, wild and
shrill with a high little sob at the end, was very like the

[26]

The Chieftain s Ladies

yodelling of the Alps but fiercer, as a purring tiger is like
a cat.

When we reached Alishtar Fort, we alighted in the court¬
yard of Kerim Khan, the brother of the Mir Ah who had been
hanged.

We felt we were in a metropolis, for though it is a small
hamlet, the presence of the casde, the government and pohce,
a school with twelve scholars, and die beginning of a garage
in view of the future road, all make it busy.

Kerim Khan was at home, an engaging young man with
his Pahlevi hat at a rakish angle: but the two ladies, his wife
and mother-in-law, were having a bath, and repeated messages
to ask for the key of the best room, and to say that we were
hungry, appeared to have no effect at all: an answer would
be sent that httle Iran’s face was just being soaped, or some¬
thing of die kind. It was getting on for two o’clock and
my host and I, both faint with hunger, sat opposite each other
on a carpet in the second-best room, too languid to speak.
Kerim would shake his head at intervals and ask me to observe
how husbands are treated in Luristan: I would try to comfort
him by remar king that such things are known also to happen
elsewhere: and another message would be sent to the recalci¬
trant ladies, with no effect at all.

They finally appeared, about four o’clock, very fresh from
their ablutions, and found us in a state of exhaustion disposed
to accept any apology so long as it were followed by food: and
the pilau was not long in coming. Kerim continued to
mutter to himself between the mouthfuls of rice, but it was
in the uncertain tones natural to one man when two deter¬
mined females present a united front. The mother-in-law
was really alarming: she looked like something between a
frog and a grenadier and her manner revealed an independent
income. She told me that her first husband used to beat her

[ 2 7 ]

A Fortnight in N.W. Luristan

on the head before she got rid of him; I could not help feeling
a secret admiration for anyone brave enough to do so. As
for Kerim, he was as wax in her hands. He retired after lunch
into the yard where the old Tartar had relegated his own
mother among the servants. The two ladies, sat on m the
best room, one on each side of me, and explained how they
were Christians in all but name. They hated Luristan, and
hoped to wean Kerim from his delight m living with Ins own
tribe on what was left of his land; they liked to live in a town,
and had friends among the missionaries. “ They taught me
that love is all that matters in the world,” said the mother-in-
law, with her two grandchildren on her knee; “ and you
cannot think how I love these children; all except that one
over there,” she added, nodding towards the eldest little girl
who sat neglected in one comer: I cannot bear her.

This peculiar interpretation of Christian precept roused me
to some mild protest; I think I said it was hard on the little
third girl. A glassy look appeared in the lady’s heavy-lidded
eyes. “ That is love,” she remarked shortly; “ it comes and
goes as it wills.” And that was that.

As a Christian convert, the mother-in-law must have been
distinctly embarrassing. I have never seen anyone with
quite her uncompromising brutality. She had a pretty young
stepdaughter of seventeen in the house, whom she had
snatched from the school in Hamadan where the American
Mission was educating her, and whom she now kept as a
servant, never allowing her to come into the best room, to
sit with us at meals, or to have any dealings at all with her own
sort: no husband was going to be found for her, so that the
child had nothing but a life of oppression and drudgery to
look forward to, with no escape. She spoke good English,
and told me her troubles that night when she took me down
into the stable to have a hot bath; but I was never able tc

[28]

Alishtar Society

speak to her again, for the jealous old lady s eye was on us, and
it would only have brought down more punishment upon her.

The mother-in-law had the virtues of her defects: I imagine
that she had never in her life been afraid of anyone or anything.
Some wild tribesmen murdered her factor on an estate near
the Asadabad Pass, and the police gave it up as a bad job: but
she herself crept out of her bedroom one night, left the light
burning so that the villagers might not notice her absence,
and went to search for the assassins in the hills. After five
days she found them, got her own people to round them up,
and handed them over to the authorities.

The two ladies were very kind to me, and it was restful to
feel oneself in a perfectly safe place for a while, with the
possibility too of getting a wash. By the evening, I knew
all the society of Alishtar Fort. Kerim took me to call on the
Governor in his castle, and I was received in a long audience
chamber and introduced to the Chief of Police, a pleasant
Nihavendi with delightful manners whom I was to get to
know better later on. The Governor is also a Lur, from
Dizful, with the good manners of the well-born Persian, but
made rather melancholy by malaria, which is rampant near
the rice-fields. He asked Kerim about me, in a sad and tired
voice, and Kerim’s sketch of my history, status, and future
intentions, all made up on the spur of the moment, was a
much more plausible affair than I could have managed for
myself.

The castle is a mud-brick square with round towers and filled
with buildings, where the Governor s apartments, the police
quarters and prisons, the clerk s offices and the school, are all
congregated. It looks neglected since the great days of Mir
Ah Khan. In the long audience room the paint is peeling off
the walls: they still have a dilapidated gaiety with hunting and
battle scenes, ladies in coaches marooned in rushing streams,

[ 29 ]

A Fortnight in N.W. Luristan

Persian officers in baggy trousers leaning on small cannon with
field-glasses in their hands—the Victorian Age m Luristan, m fact,
but with the sadness of decay about it all. Down below, in a
half-circle round a melancholy table, sat the Governor an
dozen visitors or so. It was a silent gathering: the Governor
was busy reading petitions, and only asked a question or two
between one document and the next: he enquired if I could
take his photograph: after another interval he got up, went
to the side of the room, and stood there while two valets
changed him into a pair of very elegant trousers: we all
continued to sit in silence, our eyes fixed delicately either upon
the floor or the ceiling. When the operation was completed,
and a suitable coat had been added to the other garments,
the Governor returned. With a noticeable increase of cheer¬
fulness he informed me that he was ready for his picture,
and we all removed to the courtyard, where I took him in
an official attitude beside his fountain.

The second day of my stay was pleasant but uneventful.

We walked a mile or two northwards to the site of the
vanished city which must have been the Alishtar mentioned
by the fourteenth-century geographer Mustawfi. No build¬
ings remain, but there are many of the stone tombstones which
we had seen before, and shards of thirteendi to fifteenth
century earthenware strewn about. All the people here
spoke of an old minaret which seems to have resembled the
one at Saveh, a round brick tower ornamented with raised
scrolls and geometric patterns: the government troops levelled
it to the ground three years ago when they feared a rising of
the Lurs. Of the more ancient graves, for which Luristan
is chiefly interesting, there was no trace so far east as Alishtar;
they were to be found, I was told, in Dilfan.

My idea was to travel ostensibly westward to Harsin, but
in reality to make a detour and look at these graves in Dilfan

[ 30 ]

An escort is imposed upon us

on my way. I had a shock therefore when Kerim told me
that the authorities could not let me risk the journey alone,
and that the Head of Police, the Sardari Naib Khan, would
himself escort me along the new road. This came, I felt, of
making myself too important: it is always a difficult matter
to strike the correct balance, for one wants to have one’s
wishes attended to and if possible not to be either deported
or interned as a vagrant, but on the other hand one also
wishes to remain insignificant enough to be left alone. I
thought, however, that if I waited till the Chief of PoHce were
separated from his colleagues, I might stand a better chance
with him, and perhaps even persuade him to help in the loot¬
ing of a grave or two: there was, anyway, nothing for it but
to accept their arrangement with as great an appearance of
pleasure as I could.

I said farewell to Kerim Khan and his ladies next mor nin g,
and made westward again for the nomad land. We started
alone: the Sardari Naib was to meet us at Deh Ram, an hour
or so on our way.

When we got to this village there was no sign of him either
there or on the plain behind us. I thought he could easily
overtake our baggage animals, and decided to push on to the
tents where we had lodged before, and so get across the flat
ground while the day was not yet too hot. Both Hajji and
the Lur had doubts about this plan and followed reluctandy:
they did not think the Sardari would like those particular
tents, whose loyalty appeared to be doubtful: but I was tired
of watching my escort crumple up whenever we met any¬
thing in the shape of a policeman, and remarked diat what
was good enough for me was good enough for the Sardari, a
monstrous heresy which reduced them to silence.

The day was fine: the light lay bright on the folds of the
hills: the plain of Alishtar, like a shallow bowl with crested

[3i]

A Fortnight in N.W. luristan

mountain rim on all but the western side, basked in suns
and peace. The apricot garden round the fort dwindled
small dark patch in the distance behind us. Villages j
scarce on either hand: the rice-fields changed to stretch
stubble or empty ground where sheep and black goats gn
We were drawing near to the gentle western rise of
plain when, looking back, we saw the Sardari and an ei
of five horsemen riding not in our direction at all but a
from us northward towards the Gatchkah Pass and Khav;

Presently one small figure detached itself and came gallo
towards us. It turned out to be a policeman almost incohc
with rage. He took no notice of me, women in Persia b
considered so insignificant that their families and not the]
responsible for any foolishness they manage to com
My family for the time being were Hajji and the Lur,
bowed under the torrent without thinking to blame me,
began to pour fulsome apologies into the ear of the 1
We retraced our steps, and came with ruffled feelings to w
the Chief of Police, with two more policemen, two s
tribal headmen, and his Mirza or secretary carrying an e
mous red account book, were all waiting for their lunch
for our truant selves in a colony of six or seven tents at
foot of the Gatchkah hills.

The Sardari Naib was not at all put out and welco
me with great friendliness. Nevertheless, when I mentic
that Dilfan and not Khava was my objective, and that I
no wish to travel in the direction in which he was going
was rather nonplussed. I spent the whole of lunch-
trying to convince him of the importance of prehisi
tombs, and felt more and more how prudent it had bee
get him away from the official atmosphere of Alishtar
before tackling so difficult a subject. His natural amiab:
however, was on my side. He was a pleasant middle-;

[32]

“This is civilization !”

man with fair features tanned by the sun and charming manners
even to the poorest shepherds we met. By the time lunch was
over, the aims of archaeology appeared to interest him, and
we had come to a compromise on both sides: I was to go
with him across the Gatchkah and spend the night under
police protection in Khava, and he would find someone to
take me into the southern country next day.

To visit a camp with the Chief of Police was like disturbing
an ant-hill, so great was the dislocation and agitation our
arrival always caused: it was as if our appearance made the
Lurs wonder which of their crimes had found them out.
We were not liked, for wherever we went this matter of
clothes was looked into, and someone would snatch the caps
off the people’s heads in honour of the new regulations: when
we halted, a policeman sat in a tent close by and had in one
Lur after another to cut off his hair. The poor people came
back to our circle round the fire with sheepish looks, com¬
plaining of the cold on their ears and saying: “ Wallah, this
is civilization ”—while the Sardari Naib, sitting cross-legged
with his curved sword in his hands, would talk to the head¬
man in the politest way, beginning: “ In the service of your
Exaltedness let me explain, oh my soul,” and going on to
specify how the Shah, like God on this earth, can order people
to go about even naked, and there is nothing for it but to obey.

With great bustling and pomp therefore we started off at
about two o’clock and rode up the stony way to the pass in
single file. One man with a gun went ahead as scout and
the rest of us followed in a body. The Mirza, his red account
book under his arm, black goggles over his eyes, and two
enormous pistols in his holsters, brought up the rear.

As we drew near the top, in a narrow defile, we met two
muleteers striding down in an opposite direction. I had
remained a hundred yards or so behind to take a compass

° [33]

A Fortnight in N.W. Luristan

baring, and saw mdt

4 ey ptd, muttering fiercely, one of the escort came riding

b ttArtotofSe^P^ a Kmb a small tower

At tne top r ^ ^ un d sm ks away m

®“‘ysw“o Khava and up again to the ridge of Kuh Gam.
Sis rf*e causeway are visible here and there and the rums

° f Th” upper 8 sto^ 1 of the little tower was roofed over with
wod Ifaa ten. Ind reached by a ladder, and here the snt
police of the garrison live as best they can. They
£ed at specific intervals, and may apparendy remam
indefinitely in the neighbourhood, although m winter the

pass is closed and they descend to one of thc

There are six such posts, each with six men, dotted between

Gatchkah and Tudaru in the west, and
plied once a month from Khurramabad. The Fort of All
fs their centre. Here they collect the prisoners, of whom
there is never any lack; on the morning we left, twenty were
brought in with chains round their necks and feet and wrists
The percentage of brigands captured, however appears tc
be very small: the country is fine for sniping and hiding, anc
the robber bands are usually made up of amateurs who tak<
to the sport for a week or two and then disperse each to t <
protection of his own tribe before they are discovered. Witi
all one’s natural feeling for the tribesman, die Lur is s<
treacherous and cruel, and so unchivalrous in his crimes, tha
one’s sympathy goes to the small handfuls of police who kee
the country in some sort of order with such very scant means 2
their disposal. It is not their fault if the effendis of Teheran mak
them enforce absurd regulations about the people s clothes.
We came down into Khava in the sunset when the clifts c

[ 34 ]

A night in tents

Kuh Garu shine like opals in a light of their own. Mist lay
in the hollows and the air was cold. In the village of Beira
where we lodged, in the north-eastern part of the plain beside
another ancient mound, the tribesmen had not yet moved from
their tents into the winter houses, so that we had another
evening in the open, roasting pleasantly round a fire of thorn
bushes in the middle of the headman’s tent, where his carpets
were spread in our honour. One side was open: a long line
of black oxen with felt rugs on their backs blocked it and
acted as a wind-screen: they chewed their feed gendy through
the night, while we slept as well as we could with rivulets of
cold air creeping down our spines: now and then some tribes¬
man, pirate-faced in the half-darkness, would rouse himself,
heap an armful of thorns on the embers, and fill the tent with
strange shadows and a fleeting warmth.

Here among the nomads even the universal Persian samovar
has not yet found its way, and the water for tea was boiled
in a beaked copper jug with the fire piled round so as almost
to bury it. W ater for washing one goes to look for in the
landscape around, and as it was very cold and very public
one washed rather litde. The Lurs had no soap, but they were
very particular to pour water over their hands before and
after a meal, and used to warm the second water, so that it
had some cleansing property: otherwise they neither wash
nor pray, and seem to get on without either of these virtues.
They are Shi’as. They give their money to any wandering
rogue with a green sash or headband who declares himself
to be of the Prophet’s family: but they have none of the
inhospitable bigotry of many Persian villagers, and are pleased
to share their dish with the traveller; in fact one of the griev¬
ances against Jewish and Armenian traders who venture up
here to deal in antiques, is that they refuse to eat or drink out
of the tribesmen’s bowls.

[35}

A Fortnight in N.W. Luristan

In the early morning we were very glad of our little glasse
of hot tea. Our hosts chipped sugar from the cone an<
heaped it in with real generosity, for tea and sugar are thn
two luxuries among the Lurs. They never expected to b<
paid in any way. They may contemplate a raid on thei:
guest’s luggage while he sleeps, but that is another matter
it is the country’s national pastime, with rules of its own
and who are we, after all, to demand consistency in morals!

As the sun climbed over Kuh Garu, I left Beira and the
Sardari Naib, and set off with my original escort of two, tc
visit the Nurali Lurs of ’Abdul Khan in Dilfan. Though he
was a friend of the Sardari’s, and to be trusted, we were noi
to stay away more than a day before rejoining our police on
the west of Khava in Chavari. As we left them all behind
us, the spirits of Mahmud, my Lur guide, rose, and he yodelled
in the freshness of the morning: but Hajji dragged behind with
returning gloom.

We skirted the southern edge of Khava south of the great
mound of Cheha Husein, and noticed for the first time the
rolling breadth of the beautiful plain. The track from Arjine
and the Jungle comes in here. Strings of black cattle were
creeping along it under their sacks of charcoal; the men’s white
coats showed here and there, not tampered with as yet by the
police. The men never gave a greeting of their own accord;
but they smiled when spoken to, and seemed friendly in spite
of their bad name. It takes them three days to make the char-
coal, and four more to bring it from their homes to Nihavend:
seven days in all, for which they get twelve krans, or 2s. sd.

We were now among the shallow hills we had seen from the
Varazan Pass, and we followed a trough among them between
two low ranges: it is called the Valley of Gatchenah, and
belongs to the Nurahs. At the entrance to the valley we
crossed the new road, and saw the deserted beginnings of

[ 36 ]

The Nurali Lurs of Dilfan

three or four hovels, representing what the Persian newspapers
describe as the “ Building of setded villages in Luristan.” We
soon left these feeble efforts, and rode from group to group of
black tents, busy with the winnowing of their corn. Stubble¬
fields covered the easy slopes: there were neither houses nor
trees; but a delightful openness, a sense of remoteness and
peace and the gaiety of harvest: the people were friendly on
the way: the name of ’Abdul Khan worked like a passport: and
as we went along, the women who carried flour to the tents,
balancing it on their heads in small goatskins instead of sacks,
would stop to exchange the frankest badinage with our guide,
who was well known in the district.

There were a few ruins of buildings in the valley, put up
they told me by ’Abdul Khan’s father in the days before the
Nuralis had been defeated by their enemy, the Emir Afshar from
the south. ’Abdul Khan himself had to fly from him, and
spent fifteen years in Nihavend, becoming civilized and
incidentally learning how to smoke opium; and he has only
been able to return to his own country last year with the
support of the government troops: hence his loyalty. His
splendour, however, is dimmed, and as we went along, our
acquaintances by the way would shake their heads and tell us
that we should have seen the Nuralis of Dilfan in the days of
their greatness.

’Abdul Khan was settled near the end of the little valley where
a willow tree or two break the line of the hills. The sun was
sloping down into the afternoon when we arrived. We found
him sitting on a mattress over a brazier in the dimness of his
tent, a skeleton of a man with yellow parchment face wrecked
by opium, but a pleasant and cordial host. In winter he
reads Firdausi, and Persian translations of French novels, and
he was immediately interested and sympathetic to my quest for
prehistoric Lurish skulls.

[37]

A Fortnight in N.W. Luristan

The Valley of Gatchenah is lined from end to end with
graveyards of every date and description, and one need only
explore a few hundred yards up either of its sides to find the
looted and open remains of ancient tombs.

He himself had never done so illegal a thing as to open a
grave, said 'Abdul Khan, picking at his opium pipe with a
bronze bodkin two or three thousand years old, and looking
at me with the calm innocence of a Persian telling lies. “ But
as it is the wish of my friend, the Sardari Naib, that you should
see one, I will set my tribe to hunt for you, and if God wills
we may find something to-day or to-morrow.”

I said I would give three tomans to anyone who found a
grave with the skull intact inside it. A wave of enthusiasm
swept over the Nuralis. They scattered up every hillside
within sight, in little parties led by men with long skewers,
which they dug into the earth in an expert way to feel for the
flat stones that roof the graves. It did not look as if it were
their first effort of this kind. The graves are not usually
more than two or three feet underground and seem to lie
on the sides of low foothills near springs of water.

The earliest go far back to times when flints and rough
earthenware alone were buried with the skeleton crouching
in its narrow bed lined with stones: later come graves with
flint and bronze together; and round graves where the dead
were seated, surrounded with potteries and bronzes; and the
Lihaqs, which really belong to central Luristan, in which,
they told me, twenty skeletons or more are found together.

I am not convinced whether this latter kind exist in Gatchenah
or no: two of the tribesmen offered to show me some if I
would ride back four miles, and we did so, trotting at a brisk
pace over the empty downs, for the sun was very low. But
when we reached the place, the Lihaqs had vanished: the
stones which had been their penthouse roofs, and which my

[3*1

•r-'j

Bargaining for Ironzes

friends told me they had seen in position about a fortnight
before, had been carried away, possibly for the new road and
the landscape showed nothing but about thirty shapeless holes
and some scattered boulders among which the sheep were
picking their evening way home. As we rode back, and the
valley lay shining before us with the mounds of its cemeteries,
or habitations perhaps, plainly visible under the folds of the
ground, the great age of the world seemed to be revealed
with a sudden poignancy: here men had wandered for thou¬
sands of years, their origin and their end unknown. Their
dead lie thicker than the living amid these hills.

The sun had set before we reached our tents, and we met
the digging parties returning in a subdued vein, with their
skewers and picks on their shoulders after an unsuccessful
afternoon. They were going to try again next morning, and
meanwhile scattered to their homes to collect bronzes to sell.

Sitting over ’Abdul Khan’s brazier with the Nuralis around
me, I now had a difficult time, for, with no experience to
guide me, I had to estimate every object as it came along and
strike a balance between my anxiety to secure it, the necessity
of not spoiling my own market, the advisability of not
showing that I had any money to speak of with me, and the
fact that in truth I had very litde. I knew nothing at all of
the market price, though of course it must have been well
known to the tribesmen themselves since the whole of Europe
is now flooded with antiques from Luristan (many of them
fakes). ’Abdul Khan, with most remarkable disinterestedness,
now and then told me I was giving too much, and tossed
me a dagger or a bowl for one shilling instead of two, to
the disgust of whichever of his clansmen it happened to belong:
no one, however, contradicted the chief, or would refuse to
sell when he told them to do so.

When the last of the bronzes had been produced and disposed

[ 39 ]

A Fortnight in N.W. Luristan

of, we made a circle round the fire by lantern-light, and
talked of progress, the old days how bad and how pleasant,
the new how good and how dull: and of the government,
which demands so many children from each tribe to be sent
to school in Khurramabad; and how the nephews of ’Abdul
Khan, two cheerful chubby little boys sitting beside me, had
wept" so bitterly when they were included among these
victims of education, that the tribe took pity on them and
sent two other less important little boys in their stead.

We had another guest with us in the circle, a Moslem trader
from Dizful, who was able to travel here by virtue of a Lurish
wife of the Ittivend tribe south-west of us; he was on his way
to see her and, I gathered, to collect bronzes, though he did
not say so: but he questioned me suspiciously and was evi¬
dently very little pleased to see a European in Ins preserves.
His oily manners made an unpleasing contrast with the
friendly outspokenness of the tribesmen, and he would have
done his best to prevent me from entering farther into the
country if he could.

That night I slept in the ladies’ tent, which was friendly,
but handicapped by the want of a language, since they spoke
no Persian and I no Lurish, or Laki, as the language is called
in the north-west of Luristan. They wore sarbands or turbans
even bigger than those of Alishtar and Khava, and as they
moved about s tiffl y in their loose gowns and enormous head¬
dresses, it looked as if the figures of a pack of cards had come
to life in the half-light of the tent.

These were far better tents than we had seen before, and
the people lived in them all the year round. They were
enclosed in a mud wall about five feet high which kept the
wind out: inside it ran a screen of reeds woven in patterns
with wool, and overlapping for five or six feet in the front
of the tent so as to make a narrow corridor by way of a door.

[ 40 ]

Discovery of a grave

Saddle-bags, and jajims from Khurramabad, and rugs woven
in central Luristan were stacked round the sides, and our
sleeping-quilts were laid out for us in rows round the central
hearth. I now took to these quilts without misgiving, for I
found Luristan remarkably free from insects, and the nights
were so cold that one was thankful for anything in the way of
covering.

Next morning as I sat at breakfast, shouts and breathless
messengers announced the discovery of my skull: we raced
up the hillside and found an excited cluster of tribesmen round
a grave. It was one of the earliest sort: die skeleton, nearly
complete, lay on its right side, with its head to the south and
its knees bent: there was nothing with it except a sharpened
flint and three shards of the roughest earthenware. Close
beside it, however, and in the same sort of grave, they had
found some weeks before a beautiful jar with a brown flame
pattern painted on it, exactly like the ware which was being
dug out of the mound of Gian near Nihavend. I bought the
jar, collected the skull—which broke into pieces in my hand
and required careful packing—and came away none too
pleased with the morning’s result, for I had hoped for a
grave of the Bronze Age, and it was now quite useless to expect
the tribe to dig again. Their misgivings as to the permissi¬
bility of carrying away people’s bones had been allayed by
the fact that the skeleton had obviously not been laid in the
direction of Mecca; but they were still nervous about the
Persian law of antiquities, which has brought punishment
for illicit dealing in bronzes on to several of the tribes. The
government occasionally send spies and then get the chiefs
to pay fines, and are really making praiseworthy efforts to
save what is left of the graves in Luristan.

I knew that what I was doing went directly against this
law: but there were some extenuating circumstances. The

[4i]

A Fortnight in N.W. Luristan

looting goes on all the time in a country which the police
cannot possibly keep under observation: by the time that an
organized expedition can face the risk of going there, very
little wih be left for anyone to find: I felt that one was justified
in trying to discover as much as possible while one was on
the spot As for my Persian friends whose kindness was of
such assistance, they had no responsibility in the matter, for
it never entered their heads that I had not come with full
powers from Teheran.

After lunch we took leave of Abdul Khan and started on our
way to Chavari to rejoin our escort. Our Lur guide from
Qal’a Kafrash had already left the day before: he took an
affectionate farewell of me, but he carried off Hajji s sheepskin
waistcoat as a souvenir without mentioning it.

Abdul Khan gave me a new guide, a young man with a
turban who rode his wild little pony like a centaur and dwelt
lovingly on the days when Luristan still echoed with bullets.
On the way down Gatchenah he asked me to turn aside to see
a sick cousin of his in the tents of the Nuralis of Jusuf Khan,
who lived a little way down die valley. This Jusuf had been
a young leader beloved by all the northern Lurs: he was taken
and executed in Hamadan; his followers, including my guide,
lifted his body from the cemetery and brought it to Kermen-
shah, and then carried it with high wailing dirges four days
journey to its burial-place at Hulailan. Jusuf s brother is
now chief of the clan.

He came forward to meet me, and led me into a tent where
a dying man lay. The people of his tribe sat and stood around
him, clamorous as soon as I came in: but the sick man was
already far on his journey, looking out on to another world
with the strange astonished glance of death. No crowd
could penetrate into his solitude, nor did he change his gaze
as I bathed his face and arms.

[ 42 ]

Night in a guardhouse

“ Is there hope?” they asked, pressing round with their
eager trustfulness which hurts so much because one cannot
fulfil it. I was glad to come away into the open sunshine
where the hills, in their slow steps of time, change more peace¬
fully and imperceptibly than we do.

Our direction was north, across the low range behind which
flows the Badavar River: but it is safer to keep in open
country here, and our guide led us back to the plain of Khava
near the mound of Cheha Husein. Thence, crossing the
river and the road, we made north-westerly over the downs
into Chavari, which is the north-west comer of the plain of
Khava and runs up with a few villages to the foot of Kuh
Garu. Deh Kabud, the largest and most westerly village, was
the headquarters of our Sardari Naib, and I found him seated
on the floor of an old circular guardhouse with holes on every
side for shooting through, which made it very draughty.
One climbed up by stone steps once evidently tombstones;
and there was a little platform outside where six policemen
waited in respectful attendance.

The Sardari made me very welcome: he had not expected
to see me so soon, and had not thought to provide a lodging
in the village. But he had a very good dinner cooking, and
offered me half the floor to sleep on. It was hard and cold
under my sheepskin sack; and what with the enthralled interest
which the six policemen took in what little I did in the way of
a toilette, and noises like rats running about and mingling with
the harmony of the Sardari’s snores—by the time morning
came—I had no wish to spend many nights in a guardhouse.

A worse shock met me as I came down into the courtyard.
The sergeant, on his face on a blue rug on the ground, was
being bastinadoed: one policeman sat on his ankles and
another on his shoulders, and two more were hitting him
alternately from either side with leather thongs. The Sardari

[43]

A. Fortnight in N.W- Lufistun

» t close by on an overturned saddle, and called to me m a

sat close Dy uu ^ salc j ^ b ee n

sSirs rwS^t

tiddfe Vienna himself rose a little stiffly, but cheerfuUy, and
sainted as if to suggest that bygones should be bygo .

We now prepared to separate again. I had, as 1 y,
fold foe tight sett of skullin Dilfan. What I was lookrng for
was one of foe graves in which men and horses are sard to be
tad toother? they belonged to foe Bronte Age and were
saTd to have produced foe beautiful bits and chariot trappings
which caused foe greatest interest in the Lunstan finds o

'"ETdate and origin are both unknown: and the very
civilization to which they belong was unsuspected till a few
odd bronzes were brought down by tribesmen to ermens a l
and roused the attention of archseologists. Perhaps they
may explain the appearance of the horse in Persia, and may
throw light on foe mystery of its arrival there: perhaps they
may prove a link between foe pre-Sumerians and foen
unknown home. Meanwhile no one can ®v«oga“
problems because no one can stay for any ..me invha par
of Luristan where foe graves are. I had been “Id 'hat
should find them in Alifotar or Khava, but this proved to b.
incorrect: they lie along foe valley of foe Saidmarreh and .
tributaries, in the country of the Ittivend, who have a pecuh
arly bad name among the tribes. The most northern centr
for them is a valley called Sar-i Kashti, on a little tnbutar
of the Giza Rud, and a long day’s ride from Chavan.

[44]

Fire-eaters of Chavari

Chavari touches the northern boundary of the Ittivends in
Duliskan, and the Lurs thought there might be a chance of
finding something there: it was easier also to present the
matter to the Sardari in two stages rather than in one, and it
is usually better not to worry people for permission to go
into a country until one is so near the frontier that volunteers
can be found to guide one across. So we arranged to go into
Duliskan and rejoin our escort that same evening at Tudaru,
the last garrison in the south-west. We would only risk the
adventure of Sar-i Kashti, which was beyond the policed area,
if nothing could be found to the north of it.

Chavari is the last of the settled country. The sites of its
villages are probably very old, and it is largely inhabited by
heretics, the unconscious remnant perhaps of a schism older
than their own. These are Ali-Ilahis, and are supposed to be
able to eat, or—according to the more scientifically minded—
at least to sit in fire. They are not considered Moslem at all
by the orthodox Lurs, who speak of them as unbelievers.

After leaving them, one still follows the southern slope of
Kuh Garu and appears to be in the upper comer of Khava
where it tilts away into shallow valleys that drain down into
the Giza Rud; but it is not Khava, or Chavari: it is Duliskan;
and these vague regions, enclosed in no visible boundary,
in a country where there is not a house except for a few
shanties built under government pressure by the Kadkhuda of
Tudaru, and only lived in when the police are looking—
these names which seem to merge into each other so that there
is hardly a fixed point in the landscape—are most difficult
to the tidy mind of the geographer.

Duliskan, as I had imagined, had none of the graves I
wanted; and its chief was away taking a holiday with his wife
and family at an imamzadeh just visible in a group of trees on
the bare red flank of Kuh Garu. As there seemed nothing to

[45]

A Fortnight in N.W. Luristan

be found here, I did not think it worth while to delay so as to
visit him, but pushed on towards Tudaru which lies at the
foot of a big mountain called Chia Dozdan, visible for many
miles on every side.

As we approached, still riding across open downs covered
with gum tragacanth, we gradually saw on our skyline the
outline of Tang-i-Charash, the defile of the Giza Rud down
which we were to venture on the morrow: the slopes of Sar-i
Kashti also appeared, faint blue in the distance of the south.

Tudaru belongs to the Kakavend Lurs, who insert them¬
selves here into the Ittivend country. They had their black
tents by the edge of a reedy stream, with the crests of Gulanor
and Chia Dozdan on either side of them. Their headman
was a pleasant friendly person, and entertained us in his new
mud-roofed house, very dank and obviously never used
except on these official occasions. A small son in a Pahlevi
hat sat beside him, watching with anxious eyes while his latest
toy, a beautiful bronze dagger dug up out of some grave, was
being offered to me; I had a pocket-knife, and we carried out
a solemn exchange. The tribesmen came in in twos and
threes, talking with quiet manners so different to the cringing
politeness of the towns. The question of my journey to
Sar-i Kashti was hanging in the balance. It was impossible to
escort me there, as the police only ventured south of Tudaru
in large bodies; ten of them had been killed in the defile a
month before, and the Sardari was naturally not very anxious
to let me go alone. On the other hand, I had all the tribesmen
to support me; they said they could find a perfectly safe guide
who knew the Ittivends; and presently brought along Keram
Khan, a mild-looking Kakavend with an agreeable twinkle
in his eye, and a nonchalant manner which made it seem
ridiculous to worry about anything anywhere. He was
dressed in a biscuit-coloured greatcoat of the 7 th Royal

[46]

We cross the Highland line

Engineers, of which he was proud but a little reticent when
I got him to let me examine the buttons and asked him how
he had procured it: it was a present, said he, to the amusement
of his friends: and added as an afterthought that it was only
the people who wore Russian army coats who had stolen
them.

After this we all took it for granted that I was going to
Sar-i Kashti, and the Sardari said no more. He made me
promise not to spend more than one night there: he would
wait to hear of our safe emergence on to the Harsin track,
which was to be our way back—and Keram was to send him
news of it at once. At eight-thirty next morning I took a
grateful farewell of him, waved to the assembled Kakavends
of Tudaru, and started off down the defile of the Giza Rud.

This is called Tang-i-Charash, and is a narrow cut between
Chia Dozdan (Hill of Thieves) on the west, and a group of
hills beginning with Pir-i-Dozd (The Old Thief) and ending
with Peri Kuh on the east. A green water runs through
willows and spiky grasses at the bottom, and the Badavar
River flows into it at the beginning of the defile.

Our path kept fairly high up on the slope of Chia Dozdan.
We had low bushes of holm oak and beech around us, first
signs of the jungle country in the south. Across the valley
we could see another group of Kakavend tents with t Vir
black cattle grazing round them. A little procession was
going down from them to the river, bearing a corpse which
they washed in the running water with shrill lamenting cries.
We were now in the place where the ten police had fought
the brigands a month before and been killed: it was a sinister

gate ” into the Highlands.

Keram, however, rode on ahead, careless and unarmed,
humming a litde tune to himself, as though it were Richmond
Park on a Sunday morning. The landscape looked peaceful,

[47]

A Fortnight in N.W. Luristan

with round hills one behind the other basking in the si
The valley opened to a broad green bottom of rice-fie
where men were ploughing. It was warmer here than Kha
or Duliskan: tamarisk bushes began to show among t
willows. As far as we could see down the river track, win
it ascends from the Saidmarreh in the south-west, caravans
charcoal-sellers were plodding up behind their small bla
oxen and enormous sacks: they rested in the shade of t
rocks, and ate wild pears gathered in the jungle: Keram tc
me that down the valley one soon comes to big trees,
thick that the sun never penetrates, where panthers are si
to be found: and after the forest one comes out again into t
open basins of Hulailan and Tarhan, where most of t
ancient graves and bronzes are.

Even here we were in a country of graves. We passed
rilled cemetery by the side of the path, and tombs have be
found all over the slopes of Chia Dozdan. Most of them
this region contain ajar with the skeleton inside; but there a
also round graves, with bones of men and horses, so they sa

After about two hours we forded the Giza Rud, and turn
south-eastward over grassy downs under the cliff of Peri Ku
and then followed a stream called Kangaveri, which leads
Sar-i Kashti. Here also were graveyards scattered on t
lower ledges of the hills, where the river flowed in loncline
A few tamarisk bushes grew among the white stones of
bed, and flocks and herds of the Ittivend were grazing about
with no human being in sight.

This is thoroughly risky country. A bullet may meet o
round any comer. Keram, to whom our expedition was
the nature of a lark, rode on murmuring to himself at interva
“ The hand of the Lady has shattered the Talisman of Lu
stan,” and assured me that no European woman had ever be
here before.

[48]

Story of Keram Khan and the seven pigs

“ Are there any police?” asked Hajji , who had been spoilt
again by travelling with an escort.

<£ There were two; they have been shot,” said Keram
carelessly, unconscious of the havoc he caused.

He was a charming man. I think he was never afraid,
though the country seemed to be thick with relatives of people
he had killed, and this was a serious drawback to his usefulness
as a guide outside his own tribe. On the other hand, there is
a certain advantage in travelling with someone who has a
reputation for shooting rather than being shot: as Keram
said, in a self-satisfied way, they might kill me, but they would
know that, if I was with him, there would be unpleasantness
afterwards.

He had a great sense of humour and was excellent at telling
a story. He told me how he had been deprived of his gun for
shooting the seven pet pigs of the Armenian Governor of
Alishtar, the same who had betrayed Mir Ah Khan. The pigs
were grazing near the castle, and Keram, like a good Moslem,
never imagined that anyone would go to the trouble of keeping
such animals; he amused himself by shooting six and laming the
seventh. It limped back to the castle just as the Governor
came out of the gate for his evening ride. What is this?
said the Governor. “ I shot six pigs in the wood,” Keram
explained innocently. Whereupon his gun was taken from
him, “ and since then,” said he, “ I have had to take to opium;
my heart is so sad for the long days in the hills.

It was the time for his pipe, and I offered to sit by the
roadside and wait while he smoked it—a suggestion which
evidently touched him, for he repeated it over and over again
to his friends as an illustration of the “ Akhlaq-i shirin or
sweetness of character of women in Europe.

During the fighting last year he took sides with the govern¬
ment against Mehmed Ali Khan of Tarhan, and had a bad

D [49]

A Fortnight in N.W. Luristan

time. His enemies held the springs of water, and the Kaka-
vend were also hard up for food. The Persians used aero¬
planes to drop provisions, but unfortunately hit the wrong
camps, so that Keram had the added annoyance of watching
his enemies eat his food.

Now he is prosperous under government employ as a
sort of liaison between the authorities and the tribesmen, but
he is not very happy with it all. “ They have turned us into
women: they have taken our guns,” says he.

“ If I had brought a rifle,” I asked, “ I suppose I should have
been robbed long ago?”

“ Why yes,” said he. “ I should have stolen it myself.”

Stealing is the national art. The Lurs appear to pride
themselves on it more than on anything else. In the days of
the Crusades it is recorded that they were so expert in escalad-
ing walls that Saladin, thinking them a dangerous people,
used to put them in the advance of his attacks so as to extermi¬
nate them if possible. When the Persian commander was up
in Duliskan a year or two with 1,800 men, the Ittivends got
through the lines at night and stole the clothes and weapons
from his tent. The next night the guard was doubled, but they
managed to get in and take the blanket off his bed and escape
as he woke up. “ There is no one like us for stealing in the
world,” said Keram.

I wondered how under these circumstances the Jewish
merchants, who come for antiques as far as Sar-i Kashti
and are known to carry money, manage to get over the
passes at all. It appears that they pay a regular blackmail to
the bandits in the shape of bullets and so buy their way through
at the expense of other travellers.

Meanwhile, after four hours’ ride from Tudaru, we were
in Sar-i Kashti itself.

It is as vague and undefined a region as any other round

[50]

We reach Sar-i Kashti

about, and covers the northern side of a round heap of a hill
called Bala Buzurg which fills up the landscape south of the
Kangaveri and which Sir A. T. Wilson saw and mentions
when he travelled from Khurramabad and had it on the west.
It has a very holy imamzadeh on its southern slope, and frequent
bandits on the top near the passes. It forms, as it were, the
boundary between the open downs and the jungle, though
the older Ittivends remember thick trees north of it, in all the
country of the Giza Rud up to Chia Dozdan, as recendy as
fifty years ago.

After nearly two hours’ riding up the Kangaveri in absolute
solitude, we came to a small mill built of boulders with no
mortar, down by the water’s edge: and here we saw the miller,
a ragged Ittivend with four wild children round him, who got
over his astonishment at the sight of us so far as to point out
the way to the tents of Amanulla Khan, whom we were look¬
ing for, along a little tributary to the south. All this part of
the valley is full of flint, pinkish and white in colour, cropping
out through what looks like limestone: the presence of so
much raw material for their instruments may have had
something to do with the thick population of the region in
the days before metals.

We climbed up the steep little stream towards the lower
shoulders of Bala Buzurg, and after about twenty minutes
came out into a green corrie full of stunted oak and beech-like
bushes, and with two settlements of Ittivend tents at a small
distance from each other.

Amanulla Khan was away; he had gone for five days to
Alishtar to pay his taxes. It was most unfortunate, for there
appeared to be no one left with any authority, and the tribes¬
men received us with far from welcoming looks. They
spread a rug in the open guest room of the tent and sat round
in a gloomv silence. Unlike my other guides, Keram made

[51]

A Fortnight in N.W. Luristan

no attempt to explain me, but devoted himself to his belated
opium, which I felt would make him quite useless if things
became difficult as they appeared rapidly to be doing. He
interrupted his puffing for a moment to tell me that they
thought I was a spy; I smiled as best I could and devoted my
attention to one of the fat Lurish babies who were always
charming. Luckily at this moment the uncle of Amanulla
Khan appeared from the next settlement; he looked a villain,
but at least a cheerful one; he had a short, thick, red beard,
and a roving eye which settled at frequent intervals on my
luggage. I had brought very little with me—and nothing in
the way of cloaks, bed, field-glasses, or weapons that might
tempt a Lun but even so I always felt there was a certain danger
in the few possessions I carried, for there was no mistaking the
looks that were cast upon them even among the friendly
tribes. My hat was always a great attraction, being made of
finer felt than any in Luristan, and I had several times to
explain that it was a woman’s hat and that men would be
ashamed to be seen in it; whereupon it would regretfully be
put down.

The uncle belonged to the Duliskan Ittivends and was in
Sar-i Kashti only on a visit. He knew the Sardari Naib, and
Keram showed himself less absorbed in opium than I had
supposed and immediately began to tell him how the police
of North Luristan were waiting anxiously for my reappear¬
ance on the safe side of the Giza Rud. The red-bearded uncle
listened carefully, nodding now and then and asking questions
in Laki which I could not follow. Tea appeared and the
atmosphere grew a trifle more friendly. I cautiously ap¬
proached the subject of graves. There were plenty of them,
they all said, and dealers still came to buy in spite of the new
laws. But they refused to dig for me in the absence of their
chief. No woman, said they, had ever travelled in Luristan:

[52]

The camp of the Ittiven&s

they did not think I was a woman at all: and they had heard
that the government sent spies who pretended to come for
antiques: they would not go against the law. This pedantry,
in a district which always shoots its policemen, seemed to me
extreme, but there was nothing to be done about it. I could
not wait five days for Amanulla Khan. After a great deal of
persuasion, and signing a document in which I took the
responsibility for whatever might happen, they said they would
see if they could find anything in the cemetery at the back
of the corrie, and we started off with picks and skewers and
began to push them here and there among the bushes: but
though we struck rock, and worked away with rising hopes,
we only came upon two miserable boulders: and nothing I
could say would make them try again. They told me that
in any case the graves in which horses are buried are rare and
not to be found in a day. The red-bearded uncle murmured
privately to Keram that he owned a camp down in the
Giza Rud where a new and unexplored cemetery was waiting
to be looted, and he would take us there to-morrow. If he
found me a grave of the kind I wanted, he should have my
old fur coat, said I: and having ratified this treaty of alliance
in low voices so that the other interested Powers might not
hear, we returned to the tents to think about supper.

We had an impressive view to look out on. Our corrie
formed a sort of ledge and the long red cliff of Peri Kuh
stood up against us at the bottom of our glen across the
Kangaveri: it shone like a church window in the sunset, framed
in the dark woollen walls of the tent in which we sat. The
other settlement showed on a lower spur, etched blackly
against that brilliant background. And the valley below was
filling with evening shadows.

It should have been a scene of peace. But though I could
understand very litde of what was being said around me, I

[53]

A Fortnight in N.W. Luristan

knew both Hajji and Keram well enough to realize that neither
of them was comfortable. Keram was smoking opium
again in a pensive way, but he leaped up very suddenly when
someone put a hand on his back; he sat down in a different
place and began to say something at great length in a quiet
voice like a speech in Parliament. The Ittivends listened
with their eyes on the ground: they looked peculiarly un¬
attractive, I thought; the red-bearded uncle also sat with his
eyes on the ground, plucking at his henna d hairs; he gave
Keram a bad, little, cunning glance now and then. An old
woman came to sit beside me: she looked out over the
valley with sad, tired eyes; she had a beautiful old profile:
her son was in prison in Khurramabad and she was waiting
to hear whether he was to be executed or no; continual
violence, continual bloodshed—no wonder the old look
tired and sad. Presently the man who had put his hand
on Keram’s back got up and strode away. Keram returned
in a nonchalant manner to his opium. The Ittivends
continued to sit in their depressing silence. But the feeling
of tension was somehow removed. A remark was made
here and there. The red-bearded uncle came up to me
and began to cross-examine me on the interesting but in¬
explicable problem of why I was not married: and by the time
supper was ready, we were far more friendly than we had been
through the course of the day.

I heard next morning what the trouble had been. The man
sitting next to Keram had once had a brother who had tried to
shoot Keram on a mountain pass, and killed his horse: Keram,
however, had got a shot in in time and killed the Ittivend.
When he felt the brother’s hand on his back, he thought he
was going to be knifed, and leaped up as fast as he could.
He then explained to his hosts that he did not like to dine
with a man by whom he expected to be murdered, and would

[54]

An anxious night

they kindly remove him. The Ittivends took no sides in the
matter and waited till the man departed of his own accord
and left us to eat our supper in peace.

All the same we spent an anxious night.

Keram did not think it advisable for me to sleep with the
ladies and out of his reach. He arranged my sack at the back
of the guest tent, with himself in a strategic position between
me and the open side. My luggage he piled carefully under
his own head and mine. The horses were tethered close by
and Hajji settled down beside them.

Distant fires of Ittivend camps twinkled in the shadows of
the valley and the lower slopes: the cliffs of Peri Kuh rose
flooded in moonlight from the darkness: there was an immense
and beautiful silence. Just as I was dozing off, Hajji crept up,
and whispered to me to sleep lightly, for there would be
trouble in the night: 1 opened one eye to watch him creep
back and sit, a wakeful and forlorn little figure, guarding
his horses in the moonlight: and I heard no more till, some¬
where about the middle of the night, the two men woke me
with shouts which frightened away a woman who was creep¬
ing from under the back of the tent towards the luggage I
was sleeping on.

I called on Amanulla Khan’s two wives next morning.
They lived in separate tents and had very little to do with
each other, and were both equally beautiful in an imperial
way; in the dim light they sat like idols, hung with many
necklaces and bracelets, under the weight of their great
turbans. The tents themselves were extremely bare. Aman-
ulla’s first wife apologized; their furnishings, said she, were
locked away in Khurramabad, since they could not have kept
them here “ in the land of thieves.” Robbery in Luristan
is as much the topic of conversation as horses and hounds in
a hunting county.

[55 ]

A Fortnight in N.W. Luristan

We took our leave, and were watched down the path with
not too friendly looks. The red-bearded Duliskani met us
at the lower tents, and walked on ahead with Keram, retracing
yesterday’s route along the KangaverL Keram was complain¬
ing of not having slept: Hajji had roused him at intervals all
through the night to look at brigands in the moonlight on
the opposite hill.

“ There were none there, I suppose? 5 said I.

<c There may have been some,”, said Keram in his indifferent
way. 44 They moved into Bala Buzurg yesterday, so that
they would have been ready for us to-day.* 4 But they were
not doing anything last night.”

We found the red-bearded man’s camp pitched in the broad
stony bed of the Giza Rud, and were welcomed by the kadkhudci
and a dozen tribesmen or so. They made us an omelette
while we sat and discussed the matter of bronzes: but even
their chief’s authority could not persuade them to dig. Like
the men at Sar-i Kashti, they refused to believe that I was a
woman: they preferred to find their own loot in private, and
sell to dealers at their leisure.

As we sat here at lunch two gipsy women passed by.
They looked like Indians, and came with their soft barefoot
walk up from the jungle. They are called Cauali, and
wander all over this country, treated with friendly contempt
by the Lurs, who number them among the unbelievers, and
say that they will eat pig though they will not touch a cock.
The Lurs complained—rather amusingly—that they are great
thieves.

We parted from the red-bearded uncle with mutual dis¬
appointment, for as he was unable to provide a grave, I
stuck to my fur coat. I gave him a silver pencil nevertheless,
in spite of Keram, who hated to see things wasted on an Itti-
vend, and did his best to intercept it. His spirits rose as we

[ 56 ]

Farewell to the tribesmen

left the rival country and rode up the Giza Rud towards the
confines of our own tribe. We had been in danger all the
time, he informed me: he did not mind, said he—I believe with
perfect truth—' but it was unpleasant not to have a gun.”

Before reaching the Tang-i-Charash defile, near sunset, we
turned westward and found a small settlement of Kakavend at
a place called Tarazak on the southern slope of Chia Dozdan.
Here we were among friends again; they gathered round
Keram, and said, Bah, bah! ya Abbas! ya Husein! to the
story of his adventures and the still stranger novelty he had
been introducing into the unviolated paths of Luristan.
Keram, between one pipe of opium and another, gave himself
the airs of a showman. We sat round a fixe of roots piled up
in our honour, and at last went to sleep with a pleasant feeling
of security, scarcely disturbed by the collapse of the tent in
the middle of the night when a horse pulled up some of
the pegs.

Next day was to be my last in Luristan, and I left the re¬
mainder of my stores, some tea and sugar and a few biscuits,
with the headman of Tarazak. Even among a quite unfriendly
tribe it was always difficult to make them accept anything of
this sort after the night’s lodging: hospitality is given free, and
it was never stinted. In spite of their bad reputation, I was
sorry to leave the tribesmen and their mountains. No doubt,
if they find a traveller on a pass, they will strip him and
not trouble to find out what happens afterwards: they have
an expressive way of sucking their forefinger and holding
it up to illustrate the complete destitution in which one is
left on these occasions: but in their tents they were mostly
agreeable and friendly, great lovers of a joke, and very good at
conversation: and it is pleasant now and then to go among
people who carry their fives lightly, who do not give too
much importance to this transitory world, and are not so

[ 57 ]

A . Fortnight in N.W. Luristan

taken up with the means of living that no thought and time
is left over for the enjoyment of life itself.

Our last ride took us about three and a half hours over the
south-west shoulder of Chia Dozdan to Harsin. It was easy
going, by rounded slopes and gende passes, with groups of
trees here and there beside the tents in the hollows: the land in
broad open lines rolled away into blue distances on the south.

It fell suddenly in a steep slope with sheer hill faces over¬
hanging the great hollow of Harsin. As we looked down
and saw the town and its gardens below us in the distance,
Keram asked to be excused from going any farther: he would
be shot if the Harsinis got him, said he. Already once he had
nearly been caught by a party of them out hunting, when he
was in a cave and they had seen the smoke of his fire: they
were coming in to see who it might be when one of the party
sneezed, and as no one will enter a strange place after so bad
an omen, Keram was saved.

I asked him to explain the origin of his feud with a whole
township.

“ It was a fight,” said he, “ two years ago. I used to five in
Harsin then, as I had married a Harsini woman and had a
house there. One evening in the Chaikhana there was an
argument, and I shot someone dead. I was right, but perhaps
I did not think before shooting. Anyway, when I had gone
home to bed, those accursed Harsinis came round to my
house and shouted out that they did not want tribesmen in
their town and I was to leave. I got up on to the roof and
said I would not leave. Then they began to shoot, and I
shot back and hit some of them. Then they all surrounded
the house, and I went into the upper room which had a Small
window good for firing from, and we kept at it till the morn¬
ing and all through that day. The house had high walls so
that the people could not get in anywhere; and I had a friend

[ 58 ]

•;it J/epffraphica! Society,

tmoi

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:he 1

500c

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buy

just ;

and

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Story of Keram and the people of Harsin

imong them outside, and in the dusk he crept up and spoke
o me, and I told him to go into the mountain and call the
ribe. Meanwhile the Harsinis knew that I always smoked
ny pipe of opium in the evening, and counted on getting into
he house when I had to stop firing. But my wife was a
3jood woman: I put her at the window with the gun, and she
continued to shoot while I smoked, and hit a man, she says.
Anyway, we kept it up all that night as well, and next morning
just at dawn, tik tak, we heard shots all around in the hills,
md we knew that the Kakavends were coming. Our tribe
numbered 8,000 fighting men then before these last year s
wars. Well, the Harsinis also knew that the tribe was coming
down upon them, and they scattered like rabbits. My wife
saddled my horse, and I rode out alone to meet the tribe,
and came back with them up here into the hills. And I
have never been into Harsin since.”

“ And what did you do with your wife;” said I. “ I hope
you took her with you. She seems to have been a useful sort
of person.”

“ I sent for her afterwards,” said Keram. “ I have her still,’
he added, as if it were a rather remarkable fact. “ I am fond
of her. She is as good as a man.”

After this we parted. I gave Keram the fur coat which the
Duliskan chief had not earned, besides what little spare cash
was left me, and went down into the land of motor-cars,
whence I telephoned for transport to Kermenshah. As for
Keram, he turned back to Tudaru, where no doubt he is still
regretting in his heart the amusing days when everyone had
a gun in Luristan.

[ 59 ]

Chapter II

THE HIDDEN TREASURE
The Coolies of Baghdad

The handsomest people in Baghdad are the Lurs of
Pusht-i-Kuh. They stride about among the sallow-faced
city Shi’as in sturdy nakedness, a sash round the waist keeping
their rags together, a thick felt padded affair on their backs to
carry loads, and their native felt cap surrounded by a wisp of
turban. They crouch in groups against a sunny wall in winter,
or sleep in the shade on the pavement, careless of the traffic
around them, and speaking their own language among them¬
selves: and you will think them the veriest beggars, until some
day you happen to see them shaved and washed and in their
holiday clothes, and hear that they belong to this tribe or that
tribe in the mountainous region that touches Iraq s eastern
border, and find that they are as proud, and have as much
influence in their own lonely districts as any member of a
county family in his.

They own three hostels, or manzils in Baghdad, and
they all come from the country which lies between the
Khanikin-Kermenshah road in the north and Dizful in the
south; they are nearly all coolies, and will carry incredible
weights, packing-cases, or iron girders, walking barefoot
and bent among the crowd.

Seven years ago these people were more or less independent
under their Vali, and lived in a happy chaos unsafe for the
casual traveller. The Vali had trouble and fled. Some of his

[60]

The Lurs of Pusht~i~Kuh

sons revolted against him, and he and part of his family are
now in exile in Iraq while the strong hand of Riza Shah is
stretched over their country. But though the Pusht-i-Kuh
is as safe as any so lonely region can be, and though it has
great attractions—mountains and forest so near the flatness
of the desert—it is not a summer resort for Baghdad citizens.
It is still, indeed, as primitive as it must have been ten centuries
ago or more.

Once a year the Lurs of Pusht-i-Kuh who work in the
Baghdad custom house give a theatrical performance and
show to a small audience the life and traditions of their
province. There are bandits in white, with faces bound up
as for the toothache all except the eyes (the correct costume
for a brigand in the East): there are songs on the high, sobbing
note like yodelling of the Alps: there are the full black velvet
coats with sash wrapped round them and a dagger in the
front, and tasselled turbans: there are white felt coats and
pointed caps, where the hair sticks out in half a circle below,
worn by the shepherds. And the charm of the performance is
that it is no mere tradition of the past, but is what anyone may
see who will take the trouble to climb from the Iraq desert over
the most desolate of mountain ranges, up into Pusht-i-Kuh.

Until a year ago this high and lonely region had no houses
at all except a small erection here and there belonging to the
Vali. Now the Persians are building up the capital of Husain-
abad, and four boulevards (unfinished), a group of government
offices, and the motor road from Kermenshah begin to cast
shadows of progress over the quite unwilling spirits of the
inhabitants. These live in groups of tribal tents scattered
thinly between steep ranges, and move from the central
heights east or west as the case may be to warmer winter
pastures. Travelling there, you would think that so they
must have lived from the beginnings of time. But as a

[6i]

The Hidden Treasure

matter of fact the land is covered with ruins of villages and
cities probably from days when Lurish Atabeks built on sites
laid out long before by their predecessors in the land, the
Kurdish Hasanwayds from Sarmaj near Harsm, and the

Sassanians before them. . . ,

Christians and Jews were settled m this country in very early
davs- and graves of far more ancient people lie beneath die
around that runs towards the rivers, graves marked with
boulders embedded in earth and thorns, but still visible to the
eve of the expert and of the tribesman.

The country is divided by the almost unbroken ridge of
Kebir (or Kabir) Kuh, and beyond, south-eastward, flows the
Saidmarreh River, which becomes, lower down m its better-
known reaches, the Kerkha. It is a fine stream, green and
deep It flows through desolate hills that lie in rust-coloured
ridges like the upturned hulls of ships, in parallel ranges east¬
ward.’ The eastern bank is Laldstan, a dangerous country,
whence Bairanwand and Sagwand raiders cross the stream m
summer ebb and pillage the tribesmen of the border.

I have been into the north of Lakistan, travelling into it
from the plain of Nihavend: but it was surrounded by so
careful a cordon of police, and was considered so undesirable
for the traveller, that I thought the best chance of reaching
the centre of the country would be through the solitudes of
Pusht-i-Kuh, if one could cross them unhindered and un¬
observed. This would have proved a perfectly sound and
successful theory if a buried treasure had not come to compli¬
cate my plans.

The Treasure

“ As you are thinking of Luristan, would you like to hunt
for a treasure?” said someone at a party one evening, a few
days before I was to leave.

[62]

The story of the treasure cave

“ I should love it,” said I, quite ignorant and reckless.

“ Very good. Ill bring you the accomplice to-morrow
morning.”

And so I got involved.

The accomplice was a young Lur of eighteen or so who had
been taken in early days from his own place and civilized.
The process, I thought, had not gone very deep; not much
beyond £ arak and cigarettes, a European shirt without the
collar, and a passionate desire for life in Ferangistan with a
Ferangi wife whose exact nationality was to be determined
later, when the treasure was found.

The treasure was in a cave in the hills.

Now no one has travelled at all in the Near East, especially
since the revival of archaeology, without hearing of buried
treasures at every other step. The finding of a single gold
coin, or a copper one for that matter if it looks like gold, will
fill a whole district with rumours. So I was sceptical about
the treasure. But as the tale unfolded itself and, like mummies
in their funeral bands, facts began to emerge from wrappings
of irrelevance, I began to see something more positive than
the usual report, and finally came to agree with my friend
at the party, and to think that “ there was something in it.”

The father of young Hasan, my accomplice, was the head,
or one of the heads, of a small tribe tucked away in the folds
of Kebir Kuh, in the country still marked on the maps as un¬
surveyed. Some years ago a tribesman had come to the boy
with a story: he had been caught by a storm on the slopes of
the mountain, had taken refuge in a cavern of which these
limestone hills are full, had seen a glitter in its depths, and
had found twenty cases of gold ornaments, daggers, coins
and idols. He had taken what he could conceal beneath his
abba, and handed half a dozen daggers and a handful of jewels
to his young master. Hasan had never been there, but he

[63 ]

The Hidden Treasure

knew the place: he had a map of it which he would show:
and being ignorant of the value of the things, and afraid of
the job of getting them out of Persia and Iraq all by himself,
he wanted some British person he could trust to help him.

So far so good: but now came the complications. When
the tribesman first brought his booty, Hasan had shown it,
together with his map, to his dearest friend and schoolfellow,
and had given it to him for safe keeping. Tlie friend showed
it to his father, an Arab of some position in the city of Mosul,
and an ex-vizier. This man seized it, and not only now refused
to give up what he had, but claimed a partnership in the
remaining booty of the hills. He would do all he could,
said Hasan, to intercept any effort to reach the place without
his acquiescence, and would probably play false even if his
acquiescence were obtained and a share promised him.

On the other hand, he could do nothing by himself, for
he had not the friendship of the tribes and would not dare to
venture into their country. His son was still Hasan’s friend,
and ready at any moment to steal the jewels from his own
father’s house so as to restore them to their rightful owner.
Meanwhile the fact of their being in enemy hands prevented
my seeing the things: the venture would be an absolute leap
in the dark as far as the ultimate value of the stuff was con¬
cerned; the difficulties were obviously great since not only
the Persian authorities but the tribesmen also were to be kept
in ignorance, and the stuff, even when conveyed in secret
across five days of solitary mountains, would then have to
run the gaundet of the wicked vizier in Iraq.

To counterbalance these perils there was, apart from the
fascination of a treasure hunt in itself, the certain fact that
much valuable stuff has been found in these regions; it gets
smuggled across the border and bought by dealers, the traces
of its origin are obliterated, and it loses all historic importance.

[64]

Planning the journey

The great treasure of Nihavend has been thus squandered in
very recent years. To find and record anything in its own
cave might be a matter of real value to the antiquarian.

I said I would do my best to reach the place, Hasan was to
meet me there a day or two after my arrival, and we would
carry off what we could, and then study the best way of
approaching a museum and the Persian government. He
was to provide a safe guide and a disguise in case it were
necessary.

As the various interviews with the young Lur developed,
my share in the undertaking appeared to grow larger and
larger and less and less reassuring. He could evidendy not
be trusted to keep silence. The secrecy of the East is, I believe,
a myth; far more typical is the case of that man who was so
proud of having murdered his innkeeper’s son that he could
not help talking about it and himself giving himself away.
So it would be, I felt convinced, with Hasan: and the enemy,
sure enough, suspected something even before I started, and
prevailed on the police to confiscate the boy’s passport.

I decided to go, notwithstanding, and to get off as soon as

possible. M-, who was responsible for suggesting the

escapade in the first place, was to do what he could to see,
first, that the boy actually started after me, and second, that
the vizier did nothing drastic to hinder us in my absence. We
told Hasan, who was twisting his knuckles in an agony ot
nervousness, that we would rescue his passport and help him
to start; he on his side was to stop intriguing and deal openly
if that were in him. He was not to travel with me—a fact
which relieved my mind, since he was wanted by the police
for having stirred up rebellion and was also of an age for
conscription. But he swore by all his gods that he would
meet me in five days. He brought the map, a dirty
litde piece of paper with a pencilled oval on it to mark the

The Hidden Treasure

gardens of the tribe: a path led into a valley and up again: it kept
west along a ridge and, after two gullies, came to a third where,
in a cave with five 4 wan’ trees before it, the treasure lay hid.

“ You cannot mistake it,” said Hasan: “ and if I am not
there, go and do what you can. But don’t let the tribe notice
that you are searching for anything in particular.”

This last condition, together with the sketchiness of die
map, seemed to make the affair quite hopeless. But it was
no bad thing to get an introduction to the tribe, and if nothing
came of it I still hoped to be able to go on along my own
projected way and discover ancient burial places in Tarhan.

The evening before I was to start, Hasan came once more
with a gaudy and engaging garment covered with flowers
which he said would make me inconspicuous in the Kurdish
hills. I had spent five rupees on a pale-brown abba with gold
at the neck, and a pair of cloth-soled giva shoes. I felt
equipped for any emergency. Our luggage was light: no
bed, but a sleeping-sack; a saddle-bag with clothes and medi¬
cines on one side and food, chiefly tea and sugar, on the other.
Next morning Shah Riza, the guide, arrived, in a long yellow
and white striped garment with a ragged grey jacket, and a
blue turban wound round his untidy old head. He had no
luggage at all.

Shah Riza is really a maker of quilts, but he looks like a
philosopher, which, in his way, he is. His philosophy is one
of passive resistance to the slings and arrows of fortune as
they hurtle round him: he sits among them looking as if he
thought of something else, but ready, in his quiet way, to
make the most of any lull in the general perversity of things.
As an attendant he left much to be desired—everything in
fact if an attendant is supposed, as I take it, to attend. But
he was a charming old man, and would sit for hours, while
all was busde around him, filling little tubes of paper with

[ 66 ]

The Philosopher without a passport

native tobacco* lost in what one might take to be the ultimate
perfection of resignation, but which was really a happy day¬
dream, far from the toilsome w r orld in which 1 w 7 as looking

for keys or dinner, or any of the other things he was supposed
to see to.

His first ineptitude was to appear on the morning of de¬
parture without a passport. The expedition was postponed
while I went to see if such a thing could be produced, by
the Persian legation. It would take a week, and then would
still be very doubtful; there was a hesitating look about die
Persian secretary, as he handled the Philosopher’s portrait;
passport or no passport, I thought the thing to do was to get
away as soon as possible.

We packed a car and crossed the desert from Kut to Bedrah
on the Persian border.

Crossing the Frontier

The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is

that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is
and no one is surprised. When, the police stopped our car
at Bedrah and enquired where we were staying, the chauffeur,
who did not know, told him to ask the lady.

« ^ a >/ S n ° § ooc t” sa U die policeman. “ She’s a woman.”

Yes, said the chauffeur, but she knows everything.
She knows Arabic.”

The policeman asked me.

I had not the vaguest idea of where we were staying, and
looked at him with a blank idiocy which he thought perfecdy
natural. The Philosopher thereupon roused himself, and
explained that I was lodging in the empty house of the son of
the Vali of Pusht-i-Kuh.

The police and I being both satisfied with this explanation,
we drove up the gravelly river bed of Bedrah to palm gardens

l 6 ?]

The Hidden Treasure

on the left, where the house and its little village are enclosed
in mud walls and surrounded by trees. The chauffeur, with
curiosity unsatisfied, left us, and rugs were spread and my
luggage deposited in a litde cobbled court with palm trees and
a tank of water, where a band of Persian exiles, mostly relations
of Shah Riza, soon gathered round us.

Here, owing to the fact that I had not yet discovered the
depths of my Philosopher’s incompetence, and still expected
him to do things, we spent three weary days, relieved only by
The Pilgrim’s Progress which I happened to have with me and
by visits from the village notables. Itwas a curious little society
of emigres , full of whispers and intrigues and illicit intercourse
with those of the old regime in Pusht-i-Kuh. I soon saw that
my friends, if ever I were discovered with them, would all
be most decidedly and justifiably “ suspect ” to any Persian
authority.

As for crossing the border, with or without a passport,
there seemed to be no difficulty. The thing was to be guided
by some family connection who could be trusted not to give
one away. The smuggling of cloth, tea and sugar is now so
extensive and continuous that all the secret ways were well
known and animals could easily be found. Shah Riza s
cousin Mahmud would walk across to some friends of his just
over the frontier line, and arrange it.

Meanwhile they sat plotting late into the night, plying poor
Shah Riza with conflicting advice, so that he looked more like
a philosopher than ever, bewildered among the diversities of
truth. They squatted near the tank in the light of a lantern,
Shah Riza in the middle with wild grey locks and a pained
expression, looking from one to the other, while they told
him that, whatever else he did without, a Pahlevi hat and a
pair of trousers must be procured and worn by anyone who
wanted to enter Persia.

[ 68 ]

man

A little company of exiles

On one side of him sat the Vali’s steward, a young
with Rudolf Valentino looks, white teeth, soft brilliant eyes,
a slim figure, and most untrustworthy expression, under a
large turban. On the other side was the Philosopher’s uncle,
the village headman, a shrewd and wrinkled peasant face,
benevolent while no one contradicted him. Mahmud the
cousin sat a little aloof, with heavy sleepy eyes and drooping
moustache, a regular Lur type, and with the air of one waiting
to act while others did the talking.

There was a great deal of talking, and I began to feel very
dubious about the whole adventure. Crime, I decided, is
not amusing. Danger is interesting and necessary to the
human spirit, but to do something that will be generally
disapproved of, if found out, must be humihating unless one
is so hardened that other people’s opinions can have no
influence at all. Only a fanatic can be happily a criminal.
I thought by contrast of the pleasant dangers of mountaineer¬
ing, or of exploring when there is no secret motive to weigh
upon you, and decided to leave hidden treasures alone for the
future.

The guests had gone away, the Philosopher was already
asleep, rolled in a quilt like a cocoon on the cobble stones, and
Mahmud was busy with his toilet for the night. The most
important part of this was the arrangement of his gun, which
he loaded and then laid under a flap of his rug at the foot of
a palm tree: another rug was put on top to serve him for a
pillow: he unwound his turban and wound it up again more
tightly but less ornamentally than for the day: took a drink
from the goatskin hanging on a tree, and lay down to sleep.

Thieves were around after dates, which hung in moonlit
clusters on the palm trees, and Mahmud would wake at the
slightest noise and go prowling round. But as a matter of
fact there was litde enough chance of sleep for anyone, for the

[69]

The Hidden Treasure

moon went into eclipse, and a beating of tins from every
roof, a wailing of women and frenzy of dogs, and occasional
high yelp of jackal made chaos of die night. I sat up at last
and tried to explain the solar system to Shah Riza, who was
smoking meditatively, squatting on his hams.

“ They say/ 5 said I non-committally, as befitted so unlikely
a theory, 44 that it is the shadow of our world which hides
the moon. 55

Even the Philosopher’s mild abstraction was roused.

44 That,” said he, 44 is quite impossible. Anyone can see from
here that it is an insect which eats the moon. It is alive. It
has a spirit. It means war and trouble coming. But it is
only a sign, and Allah will not allow it to go too far.”

As if in answer to his words, the moon, a red and sullen
ember, began to reappear: the blackness of sky dissolved
again slowly into luminous spaces: the rattle of tins subsided:
and, leaving the matter of the solar system unsetded, we
were able to sleep.

The fruit of the night’s plotting showed itself in time by
the arrival of a young smuggler from over the border. He
wore woollen givas, a white woollen tunic to the knees, and
a round felt cap on his head. He carried a stout stick with
iron-shod knob in his hand, and he treated the question of
policemen along the frontier as a matter of indifference.

44 But if you would rather have a passport,” said he, 44 1
have a friend who can easily buy one. It makes an easier
journey for the lady, if one is not afraid of the police.”

This seemed a reasonable suggestion, and cheap at the price.

44 Let us by all means buy a passport,” said I. 44 And let
us be ready to start to-morrow morning.”

The getting of the mules, and finding of a second man
called Alidad, a sinister-looking villain who kept his left eye
closed, and remarked that 44 to the British, money is like

[ 70 ]

Dressing the Philosopher

water/ 5 occupied the rest of die day. Shah Riza was left
free to attend to the matter of his costume, which he post¬
poned till we were just about to mount next morning, and
then he kept us while he went to the bazaar in Bedrah, and
returned after an hour or more with a small piece of black
alpaca, about the size of two large handkerchiefs, which he
thought hopefully might be turned into trousers en route.
Doubtful, but anxious to start at all costs, we acquiesced.
We made across the last strip of desert north-eastward for the
hills.

A dust storm was brewing, and the first frontier post,
square and desolate between two desert streams, had no sign
of life about it. We hurried by, keeping to the shelter of the
low banks of the Kunjan Cham, among tamarisk bushes, till
we emerged in Persian land, in a hollow screened from sight,
where our smuggler had his home in a small colony of leaf-
thatched tents through which the dust was blowing. His
father was chief of the tents, and welcomed us while the
whole community j oined in the plot.

“ A passport, 55 they said, “ is always better than none, and
so easy to get. But Shah Riza must have a Pahlevi hat and
trousers.”

Shah Riza evidently thought that his social status was
bound up in the long yellow gown, and looked melancholy
over the change. He produced his black alpaca with a reluc¬
tant air, whereupon the assembled elders, who had their doubts
but no expert knowledge, called upon the ladies of the tribe.
These advanced in a band from the back of the tent, and
contemplated the inadequate remnant with scorn. <c That
will only make half, 55 said they. They knelt upon it and
measured it out with the palms of their hands; they turned it
this way and that; when all had tried in turn, they gave it up
as hopeless, while Shah Riza sat on in sorrowful meditation.

[71 ]

The Hidden Treasure

I was beginning to wonder if we would ever get off at all,
when a young man appeared and cast a spare and quite
presentable pair of trousers down on the ground before us.

Even now the matter threatened shipwreck. The Philoso¬
pher was feeling the proffered object between finger and thumb
and murmuring something about its insufficient beauty.
But I had had enough of him and his clothes for die moment.
I got up from the seclusion of the best carpet on which I sat,
and advanced into the tribal circle, stooped over to examine
the garment with care, and declared that I had never seen a
better pair, nor one more suitable for Persian travel. The
young man’s supporters agreed in chorus. A Pahlevi hat
was found and placed on the Philosopher’s head, giving him
an air of unsuitable levity. With a sigh he stood up, pulled
a piece of stick out of the roof, wound a pink cord round it,
and began to run it like a bodkin through the waist of his new
costume. The passport alone remained to be setded.

How that was done I do not know. He and die smuggler
went off together and returned after many hours, having
bargained it down from twenty tomans to two (about 4s.).
It was written on yellow paper, with five stamps, and appeared
altogether an impressive document. The afternoon was late,
and questions in any case are rarely advisable. We departed
without more ado, and with die last sunlight upon us made
through low scrub for the custom house.

Here we met the Chief of Customs taking die air, with a
puppy on a long chain in his arms and his wife beside him.
He was a pleasant, elderly man with pince-nez, and an air
of setded comfort about him which looked strangely out of
place in so lonely and windswept a spot.

“ He is a great man. You had better get off the mule
before you come up to him,” said Alidad, and evidendy
expected remonstrance when I rode on unconcerned. But

[ 72 ]

A dust-storm

the great man did not look at passports: he waved us on to
his subordinates in the square building, who examined our
moderate luggage with favour and let us through as night

was falling.

We now had an hour and a half before us, and rode through
the flat lands of the Gawi Rud under a dusty moon, until in
the darkness we became aware of mounds covered with earth,
which turned out to be winter provisions of straw for the
cattle to feed on dotted in a row outside the camp. We rode
through a fury of dogs to dim shapes of tents, and dismounted
at the settlement of the Zardusht tribe at Mansurabad.

Waterless Hills

The dust-storm raged all through that night.

Tired out with the sound of talking, of which the day
seemed to have been more full than usual, I left the Zardushtis
early and took refuge in a mud-walled cubicle both from the
tribesmen, who sat on their carpets outside in the moonlight,
and from their women, of whom only two or three ventured
from their own part of the tent to watch my evening toilet.
When I had undressed and washed, and had tried, to their
rather fearful delight, the effect of cold cream on the faces of
two gay young brides, I was left in solitude and darkness,
while the dust swished in showers through the dry leaves of
the roof above my head. The slight mud wall, here in the
waste of open spaces, turned into the very emblem of solidity;
no comfortable safety of London houses, with shuttered cur¬
tained windows and draught-proof doors, has ever seemed to
me so sheltering as those six feet of upright earth buffeted by
the Arabian wind. Not the thing itself, but the sense of other
and contrary things, makes reality.

[73]

The Hidden Treasure

In the very early morning I looked out, and saw what
appeared to be three little mounds of reddish earth lying in
front of my hut. These, in the strengthening light, resolved
themselves into the sleeping forms of my retainers, obliterated
under desert sand. In the fullness of time they stirred, crawled
as from a chrysalis, shook out their turbans, and were ready
for tea, which the ladies soon provided.

The wind still swished along, a noise of fine falling particles
betraying its invisible presence. To wear a hat was out of
the question. I enveloped myself in the brown abba, tightly
pinned under the chin; climbed, and crouched with my
back to the gale on the pack-mule; and we started for the
Persian hills across another flat stretch of desert; Alidad,
with one sinister eye shut, led the way and held my animal
by a halter.

The weather, which hid the world from us, also hid us
from the police: if there were any about, they lurked some¬
where behind the curtain of dust which moved as we did.
On our right hand we passed Qal’a Seifi, a dim huddle of
dilapidated houses with a vague shadow of a man digging in a
ditch, seen for a moment and lost. The desert rose and fell
in small undulations imprisoned in mist, sprinkled with bushes
of aghul and camelthom, and the bitter colocynth along
the ground.

Beside the wide dry bed of the Gawi Rud the last police
post showed suddenly square and lonely: though we could
easily have skirted it in our misty privacy, Alidad and the
smuggler both righdy thought that a passport, when it
exists at all, should be used as much as possible, and walked
up boldly to a young man in blue uniform who was busy
in the cooking of the garrison dinner.

These little posts are inhabited by six policemen, but most
of them were out looking for smugglers with an a dmir able

[ 74 ]

We leave the desert

spirit of conscientious optimism. The young man with the
fowl in his hand, glancing up to me and seeing a respectable
brown abba draped over native saddle-bags, thought no more
of the matter. It is only the unexpected that ever makes a
customs officer think; avoid that and all is well. Passports,
though unintelligible, are not unexpected, and their subtle
international differences are not bothered about by the lower
grades of investigators. My appearance was normal; my
Frankish hat discreedy hidden on my lap; the policeman
invited us to lunch, heard our excuses with a good grace, and
waved us on. We went out into the loneliness again.

All that day we saw no other human being except, an hour
or so on, one tall man, wild and poor and contented, with
bushy eyebrows white with dust, and red rags held together
by a blue sash. His thighs were naked, and he strode down
with an air of strength and freedom through the inhospitable
weather, beating a litde donkey before him. After we left
him, our path began to climb.

The old Vali used to have a winter house on the banks of
the Gawi Rud, and we lunched amid its ruins and the ruins
of a village spread around it. The Philosopher woke sud¬
denly from the depths of his habitual meditations and informed
me that he had lived here many years, and skipped about
among the crumbled walls with an astonishing agility,
pointing out this and that, with an almost indecent liveliness,
as if an old stiff-jointed goat should gambol like a kid. The
nearness of his hills and long-unvisited home gave Shah Riza
these accesses of enthusiasm, when his eyes, slightly pulled
up at the comers into most engaging wrinkles, danced with
a smiling light so different from his own idea of correct be¬
haviour for a religious and respectable maker of quilts.

In the quiet hour after food which should be filled with
benevolence, he and Alidad fell upon some misunderstanding:

[75]

The Hiiden Treasure

Alidad came up to me as I dozed in the sun, and asked with
an alarming solemnity if I would condescend to shake hands
with him. This ceremony I performed in a mystified manner,
waiting for the sequel, when the disquieting statement was
made that Shah Riza was a bad man, but that he, Alidad,
would see to it that I came to no harm. Having accepted
this promise with a composure that had a rather eluding
effect on the emotional atmosphere, I waited while a sack
of straw for the horses’ supper was collected from the deserted
fields round about, and we then proceeded across a stony
river bed north-westward, with a ravine below us on either
hand, and high barren shapes of hills rising faintly out of the
desert dust.

This way into Persia is scarcely used except by smugglers
and is steep and impracticable for heavily laden animals.
At the top of the high rampart is the pass of Gildar,
between two rounded hills. Here towards evening we
climbed, and looked on an inhospitable land, a tumult of
strata and hollows. The level ridges, that had lain peacefully
beneath some sea, were tossed up and thrown in unexpected
angles, covered with black fossil shells that lay about the
ground, and scored into barren valleys by waters that rush
destructive in spring and die in summer, leaving here and
there salt and undrinkable springs.

This country belongs to the Malikshahi Lurs, who from
their colder heights descend on it in winter, when there is a
thin coat of pasture for their flocks. But now it was deserted:
only the smuggler, walking swiftly by night, crossed its
unfriendly paths. As we rode with the evening sky deepen¬
ing above us, looking round for a place to camp, I thought
that I had never seen a land so derelict, an empty husk, its
life long since departed. The slow death of the universe
was bom in upon me and made visible. Even the yellow

[76]

Night in the hills

grasses in the beds of dry gullies, that looked soft from far
away, changed, as we approached, into desiccated beds of
thorns.

As the darkness began to fall we turned aside into a fold of
the land, under a high cliff ridge called Zamiyah Kuh, out of
sight so as to leave the path clear dirough the night to the
Malikshahi smugglers.

A cold wind came creeping, not the fierce batterer of the
desert, but an insidious creature that chilled one to the bone.
The Philosopher, with great resourcefulness, seized my spare
Burberry and put it on. Alidad made a fire in a small gully.
Shah Riza answered my enquiries as to food by the remark
that we had lots of flour, and the muleteers, having unpacked
and setded down, began to mix a few handfuls of it with
water, to pat it into a disc about an inch thick, and put it
under the embers to cook. Shah Riza, whose dealings with
the Burberry had shown a touch of the Epicurean, must
belong to the Stoics after all, I reflected, and began to hunt
for sardines in my saddle-bags.

“ Another time,” said I, “ a chicken, alive or dead, is to be
carried with us into any desert.” The three men agreed that
female fragility might reasonably require such knick-knacks.
They cleared a small space near the fire for my sleeping-
sack to He evenly, setded themselves on the other side, and
we were soon engulfed in the high, thin, nighdy silence of the
hills.

The Law of Hospitality

The Philosopher had been rather perturbed by the fact that
his mare, a vicious grey with a blind eye, slipped over the
edge during our descent from Gildar. The edge was not
quite sheer, and she slid on her four hooves with the smuggler
Panging on behind, using the tail as a rudder: die operation

[ 77 ]

The Hidden Treasure

came to an end at the bottom of a small ravine with no injury
but some surprise to all concerned, and though the Philosopher
had not been riding at the moment, the incident disturbed
him: he started off next morning with a tinge of gloom in
his meditations.

As we left our sleeping-place, a fine ibex stood above us
on a crag, its horns lit by the rising sun.

We now rode easily, in a country where trees began to
appear. They showed at first on the high skylines on either
side of us, and gradually descended to where, through white
and crumbly limestone soil, our path went along with small
ups and downs. There was broom and tamarisk, thorn and
oak, a small-leaved tree called keikum, and the wan or tere¬
binth with broad leaves, aromatically scented, and peacock
blue berries good to eat. I looked on this tree with great
interest, for the treasure cave was to be recognized partly by
the wan trees at its entrance.

I made a mental note to know the wan again.

We began to meet people, Malikshahis dressed in felt, with
turbans round their caps, and sashes and daggers worn outside
their white abbas : their hair was long, unaffected as yet by the
Dalilah of government which shears the Persian tribesmen’s
locks. Policemen, our smuggler told me, practically never
take this road. After about three hours we came to a small
rise covered with cairns of stones, and knowing by these
symbols that a holy place must be in sight, looked forward
and saw the Imamzadeh of Pir Muhammad with four white
minarets and two blue domes ahead of us in a hollow filled
with rice-fields, brilliant green in the sun.

It was only nine in the morning, but Alidad had friends
here, and there was no other encampment to be met with for
the rest of the day. So we left the Imamzadeh on our right
hand and turned to dismount at a group of oak-bough huts

[ 78 ]

The country of the Malihhahi

in ploughed land by the stream, and rested here for many
hours while the chicken, now considered a necessary part of

my menu, was being caught, decapitated, plucked, speared
on a peeled stick, and finally roasted over the fire. Bread was
made for us, and a lengthy negotiation for a new mule was
started by Shah Riza, with an opening burst of eloquence on
the sufferings caused by his mare: the Seyids of the Imamzadeh,
who own the ground around, sat in a judicial circle: a brown
mule was finally produced with a new muleteer: and after
parting regretfully with our smuggler, we eventually got
away at one-thirty, wading up the limpid waters of the stream.

The whole country of Pusht-i-Kuh is divided by a long and
high range, running north-west and south-east like a wall:
its two chief peaks, called Walantar 1 and Warzarine, are a
little lower and a little higher than 9,000 feet respectively,
but it is not their height so much as the general unbroken
massiveness of the ridge, keeping to about 7,000 or 8,000 feet
for many miles with never a break worth speaking of, which
gives its prestige to the range. Its far snows are seen from
the desert of Iraq on a clear winter day, and for many months
when the snow lies, the Malikshahi on one side, and the Bedrei
on the other cannot meet—a difficulty which, judging from
what they say one of the other, cannot distress them.

For this great mountain we were making, winding now in
a corridor of rocks and shadows up the canyon of the Pir
Muhammad stream. Maidenhair grew in the clefts. Above,
high up, leaning into the sky, were trees. Two women
stood and called down from the edge, their heavy turbans and
loose sleeves etched and foreshortened against the blue like
some Venetian ceiling. And as we crossed at intervals among
the white boulders, we looked into clear water with fish in
it, whisking transparent tails.

1 or Waland Tar.

1 79 ]

The Hidden Treasure

The Pir Muhammad would have led us all the way to the
foot of the Great Mountain, but most of the defiles through
which these torrents wind are too difficult even for Lurish
paths, and we soon had to turn aside and climb on to the
shoulders of the hills. They were tumbled in strata wilder
than any we had seen before, but yet with a curious regularity,
as if titanic hands had laid the blocks of stone in even courses,
tilted and twisted for some incredible architecture. The
trees among the rocks gave them beauty: and presently we
left the lower chaos, and came to smooth hillsides, with oaks
not thickly planted, but each one separate in its own shadow
on the bare white gravel of the soil. Here was no habitation,
but a friendly peace: and woodcutters in white tunics driving
asses now and then upon the road: and in the fall of the evening
we came down by one shoulder after the other, till we saw
a plain below us and the Great Mountain like a curtain beyond
it in the dusk.

Black tents in groups of two and three, very small in their
loneliness, showed in cultivated patches down below. We
did not go so far, but coming by a small spring on the hillside,
found there three young and pretty women stooping over
goatskins to fill them with water, and eager, when they saw
we were travellers, to invite us to the poorness of their tents
close by.

It was a small colony of four tents, the first of the Arkwaz
land, and there was no chieftain to entertain us. The people
were so poor that they had neither meat nor fowl nor eggs,
milk, rice, tea, nor sugar: nothing in fact but the essential
bag of flour and a tiny patch of tomatoes and cucumbers,
of which they proceeded to pick every one with the noble
hospitality of their code.

There were three charming women. I left the men outside
and came to them by the fibre, out of the night wind. An

[80]

Two beautiful women

older woman, with a sweet and gay face, was mistress of the
tent; it was her daughter, and a daughter-in-law, and a
friend, who had brought us in, and showed us off as a delightful
find picked up by rare good fortune. I soon discovered that
I carried a kind of radiance about me, a magic not my own,
derived from the city of Baghdad from where I came. The
two young women had spent a few months there when their
husbands worked as coolies, and the memory lived with them
in a glorified vision. They stroked my city clothes with a
wistfulness pathetic to see.

44 Kahraba,” electricity ! I lit my torch and they murmured
the word as if it held a whole heartful of longings. The
worship of the East for mechanical things seems to us deplor¬
able and shallow; but seen here against so naked a background,
the glamour of the machine, of something that gives comfort
without effort in a place where bare necessities themselves are
precarious, and every moment of ease comes as a boon and
a miracle; seen here by the fire in the tent that swayed in the
cold night, the light diat sprang at will from the palm of my
hand did indeed hold a divinity about it—a Promethean
quality as of hghtning snatched from heaven and made gentle
and submissive to the uses of man. So their eyes saw it, more
truly, perhaps, than ours, who buy the thing as soulless glass
and wire.

I watched the beauty of the two girls—a fine beauty of an
old race, with small hands and thin lips and long oval faces.
On their heads they wore little skull caps embroidered with
beads round which they wound the voluminous dark turban.
There were beads round their ankles too, where the scarlet
trousers were fastened tightly and ended in a woollen fringe
over the little bare heels. This is a good and decent costume
for women who sit about on the ground all the time. Over
it they wore loose gowns of printed cotton, like the flowery
F [8i]

The Hidden Treasure

affair I carried in my saddle-bag. The daughter of the house
had a velvet coat too, full skirted and left open in the front
She had a turquoise and gold ring in her nose, over the tattoo
mark on her lip; her hands and feet were tattooed with thin
blue branches of palm leaf, not unbecoming; and on her wrists
she wore heavy silver bangles which flashed in the firelight
as she kneaded the dough for our supper.

I wondered if among their poets, who still sing in the old
manner about the things they know, there is not someone
who has told the splendour of his beloved’s hands with their
silver bracelets, as she tosses the bread from one to the other
with swift and lovely movement in this most beautiful of
household tasks. When the flour was kneaded, a sort of convex
shield of metal called the saj was laid above the flames, the
pancakes of dough were thrown upon it one at a time, and the
bread, warm and rather sodden, was ready in a minute or so.

But this was not all our supper. The tomatoes were
cooking in a pot while our hunger in the meanwhile was
being stayed with raw cucumbers. Our meal was evidendy
looked on in the nature of a banquet. Every now and then
the mother of the family gave it a stir, tasted it, and nodded
with an appreciation beyond mere powers of speech. Four
litde boys, subdued with expectation, sat in a silent row,
while a smaller infant amused himself with two lambs, tied
up in the tent near the fire out of the way of wolves! and
evidendy used to being treated as members of die family.
The little daughter, the prettiest woman’s eldest child, busied
herself with household jobs, knowing well that her chance of
the feast was remote.

And presendy the dinner was cooked: the tomatoes were
poured out steaming: they had dwindled, alas, and now only
just looked presentable on three small pewter plates, one for
me, one for the Philosopher, and one for the two muleteers.

[82]

Hospitality oj the poor

Such as they were, they were put before us, -while the family
looked on in admirable silence: only one boy, unable as yet
quite to control his feelings, followed the plates with his eyes:
his tears rose slowly, the comers of his little mouth turned
down. His mother, ashamed, gave him a small slap and then,
surreptitiously, offered him her fingers to lick, on which some
savour of tomato still lingered.

I myself was hungry" enough to have demolished all three
dishes at once with the greatest ease; but who could withstand
so heart-rending a spectacle: To say anything was impossible:
our hostess would have been humiliated beyond words: but
one could leave part of the dinner on one’s plate. 1 pretended
to be satisfied half-way through the microscopic meal, and
the four little boys lapped up what remained. As for the
daughter, she had learnt already what is what in this world.
She neither got nor expected a share.

The Great Mountain

The dawn crept dove-coloured over the solitary landscape,
subduing the high ridge before us to a uniform shadowy
gendeness; even as the mind of men, growing in wisdom,
may yet subdue and smooth away by very excess of light the
obstacles before it.

Our obstacle was also our goal, the high wall where he who
mapped for the Survey of India had stopped in 1923, beyond
which, unsurveyed, lay Shah Riza’s house and the treasure.
I looked at it across the plain still dun in morning shadow,
where the black tents in their small and even rows showed
no sign of rising smoke or life awakening. I wondered by
which of the litde nicks against the sky, all running a more or
less even line, our way would lie.

Even Shah Riza was ready to start, his prayers having
taken him less time than usual. He was wrapped in my

[83]

The Hidden Treasure

Burberry, to which he now clung day and night, inspiring
that respectable garment with an appearance of jauntiness
quite foreign to its nature. The sight of him and it together
roused in me an unreasonable silent fury. Why should Shah
Riza snatch my clothes without even asking by your leave?
When I made a feeble attempt to retrieve it, all he had said
was: “ And am I to die of cold?” Which is, I believe, known
technically as a rhetorical question.

The forces of communism show themselves in an uncon¬
trovertible manner when the forces of nature are with them.
Given a sufficiently cold night and two overcoats, one human
being obviously cannot claim more than one of these: the
laws of property go by the board. This I was prepared to
concede with a good grace; but it was a different matter to
see the Philosopher in the warm sunlight by day still dinging
to my favourite wrap with the obvious assumption that a
holy man ought to be well dressed. Shah Riza gave himself
great airs of holiness: he was always saying his prayers when
there was work to be done: it made him the most respectable
sort of chaperon one could possibly desire, and there his chief
usefulness ended.

I did not mind his prayers, though he chose the place nearest
the fire to say them in, and caused us all great inconvenience:
what I resented was the assumption that holiness is a virtue
that other people should be glad to pay for, instead of being a
private affair between yourself and you. In this opinion,
however, I was alone. Shah Riza’s holiness was an asset
recognized by all. He used it to domineer in a mild way at
every evening gathering, and when I asked him to arrange
my sleeping-sack, or find the medicine box, or tackle any mun¬
dane chore, he would announce that he was just about to say
his prayers, and relegate me and my importunities to an inferior
plane.

[84]

The Great Mountain

This morning, however, we started early. The ladies woke
up in darkness to bake our bread: the embers of the fire, which
had died down in the tent through the night, were piled with
fresh oak branches to fight the chill that comes before day¬
break: and at five-thirty, with the light increasing, as if it
were thrown in giant handfuls from behind the mountain
rim into the upper air, we set off downhill to the plain.

The sun came towards us and the long shadows shrank as
we advanced. Below, in small hollows on our right hand,
the infant waters of the Pir Muhammad stream, which we
met again above its skirted defile, shone with a peaceful early
morning brightness. Shepherds from the tents w r ere taking
out their flocks, that walked in long files before them, with
pattering feet like a summer shower.

The Great Mountain has, as it were, an outwork of low
foothills wooded with oak. These trees have bigger leaves
than ours, of a dull green without much life in it, and bigger
acorns, too, with large frilly cups and pointed fruit, just begin¬
ning to turn yellow. In a bad year, when want of rain has
killed the harvests, the Lurs make flour of these acorns, letting
them first soak in water for three days to “ take out the
heaviness.” They roast them in ashes also, and eat them whole
like chestnuts. But they say that many pains and illnesses
follow on this diet. The oak leaves, as well as roofing the
summer tents, are regularly used as fodder for the flocks in
the dry season. They clothed the foothills thickly, growing
to a good size on either side, while we kept out in the open
and followed a torrent bed of white stones that ran straight
and wide like an avenue towards the mountain.

The harmony of the morning hour, if such a thing really
exists, was shattered as far as we were concerned by the
discovery that, with an uninhabited day before us, no one had
remembered the chicken. Shah Riza, whose job it was,

[85]

The Hidden Treasure

allowed my reproaches to slide off him absent-mindedly
until Alidad gave some small opening for blame by not
producing an Arkwaz tent where one was promised; where¬
upon the whole weight of the probably foodless day was
shifted on to him with a promptitude creditable to the
Philosopher’s resourcefulness.

Alidad took the matter amiss: he walked along with his
one eye shut, boiling for a quarrel; while Shah Riza, enthroned
on the pack-mule some litde way behind, talked to his cigarette
in a voice of remonstrance, lamenting the hungry hours that
lay before the lady. The new muleteer meanwhile dashed
hither and thither among the little dells, looking for a last
habitation before the empty hills began, where a chicken
might be captured; and, as it happened, we came upon one
black tent round a comer, and finally carried off a raucous
cockerel with yellow eyes, and set him on our saddle-bow for
the sum of fivepence.

We now began to climb, attacking the mountain without
any sort of diplomacy, to where limestone needles took off
from beds of scree. The path zig-zagged with a scrunch of
loose stones among which shell fossils were still visible. Oak
trees grew rarer, interspersed more and more with keikum
which turns red in autumn, with wan trees and gigantic bushes
of gum tragacanth that spread like shallow Japanese umbrellas
close to the ground. The hard structure of the range grew
visible: it leaped up against the blue sky in rocky fluted ribs,
like the manifold sheaves of late Gothic pillars surrounding the
rounded high summit called Walantar with a palisade of spikes.

The path was so steep that even the lightly laden mules had
to be disburdened of our weight. In little over two hours
we climbed 2,000 feet.

“ This bitterness, this roughness, for the sons of A dam ,”
said the new muleteer, as he followed me.

[ 86 ]

The unmapped country

Below, untidy as a sea with cross currents, lay the lower
hills, vanishing into the western desert dust.

Except for the joyousness of height, the view had no
great beauty, for the distant oak trees give a spotty
look of smallpox to the whole, and take away the play
of light and shadow, and Kebir Kuh, alone in all this
region, has the true mountain structure. But when we
reached the round and stony backbone at 8,300 feet, we
looked out on a nobler view, over the unmapped country
whose even ridges ran like a shoal of swimming whales, all
in the same direction, through waves of woods in shadow that
sloped to the valley below. Steep clefts descended and no
habitation was visible. But Shah Riza, looking out with
eyes narrowed with excitement over his own land, said that
down in the main valley was a mill, where we could spend
the night, and reach his people (and the region of the treasure)
next day.

The tribes come every spring to pasture along this great
ridge of Kebir Kuh. It is then deep in grass; the arjine
bushes and stunted thorn and keikum trees give fuel; and
there is water a short way down the slope. They pitch their
tents and spend a month or two in the mountain air; and it
is a mistake to think that they do not know the beauty of their
landscapes and the delight of high places, for the mere mention
of the Great Mountain to any coolie in Baghdad will light
his eyes with pleasure.

Alidad was not of the mountain people, and when I
suggested lunch at the highest point, his feelings were out¬
raged. A Persian guide does not look on his employer as a
human being: he, like any other registered packet, is an object
to be delivered safe at the other end: when and how, the guide
considers his own affair. Alidad was a quarrelsome man -with
strong views on the proper place for women in the general

[87]

The Hidden Treasure

scheme of things. Had he not treated me with a respect
almost excessive; he asked. Had he not humbled himself so far
as to allow me to put my foot upon his shoulder in mounting
on my mule: what word of complaint could I find?

“ No complaint/’ said I, mildly but firm. “What I want
is lunch with a view over both sides of the landscape.”

Alidad had no language to meet this. But he opened both
hands and breathed hard at the listening hills and looked at
Shah Riza. The Philosopher, however, evidently knew a
determined woman when he saw one, and he himself liked
the look of his mountains. With my moral supremacy, as
I hoped, firmly established, I sat down in rather a cold wind
and pulled out my compass, and proceeded to disentangle,
with the help of the three tribesmen, the names of the unknown
hills.

Night in Garau

We made our way for hours down the northern slopes of
the Great Mountain before we reached the mills of Garau in
the valley.

The track was steep and bad, and litde used at tills time of
the year; it followed a spur divided by a deep cleft from the
precipices which buttress the eastern side of Walantar. Then
it descended, and dipped into the oak woods as into a petrified
sea. No wind stirred there, no undergrowth grew in the
shade, no small creatures scurried among the trunks and
branches. The leaves of these oaks look dark, as if some
black had got into the colour by mistake; a tone I remember
being distressed over in childish water-colours when the
foliage was started before the sepia that had been used for the
trunk had got well out of the paint-brush.

[88]

The mills of Garau

We came to a neck; the path mounted a little to push
through a cleft so narrow that the saddle-bags could not go
through together and had to be unloaded; and as I stood
waiting there, eight ibex, four young ones and four does,
leaped below our feet across the torrent boulders, and raced
up into the sunlight along a slanting ledge of strata that shot
peach-coloured into the sky. There was no water in the
stream, except a pool or two by some willows where we rested,
which dried up again lower down. The descent grew gender,
the trees spaced more openly; reddish stubble land appeared,
ploughed by the litde tribe of Ah Shirwan who own the
Garau stream: their tents, not more than three or four, were
hidden in a tributary valley out of sight. The Garau also
was dry, but a little clear watercourse, led down from
Walantar between damp earthy banks, fed the mill and the
maize and bean-fields below it.

I ruscelletti che dai verdi colli
Di Casentino scendon giuso in Arno,

Facendo i lor canali e fieddi e molli.

It was amusing, in this severe land, to think of the tilled
and tended Tuscan fields, and it was pleasant, in the mellow
light, to come upon signs of humanity, hemmed in by solitude,
for the mills of Garau and their tents have no neighbours but
woods and mountains for many hours on every side. Only
one mill can be seen: a small half-pyramid of stones put to¬
gether without mortar, and not large enough for me to sleep
in. The miller, with a curly beard, was digging in his field.
He had no flour for our supper, but he mounted an old mare
and galloped off to get some from the tents whose smoke rose
from behind the hill. We made our camp under an oak tree
in the open. The cockerel was sacrificed and neatly arranged

The Hidden Treasure

with all his limbs outspread on a peeled stick, sprinkled with
salt, roasted, and eaten in the name of Allah. The flour,
kneaded with water, hardened slowly under the ashes; while
the miller at his pipe sat contemplative, and explained how he
was the father of seven sons. They were all useful, scattered
within sight beside bonfires of their own that twinkled here
and there. They were watching to keep wild pig from root¬
ling in the crops.

The people of Pusht-i-Kuh have now been disarmed, and
have no means of defence; and all night long, from this side
or that, the boys would cry: ’Ware pig! Wei khek, wei
khek /”: the call would be taken up by each of the little out¬
posts; and it increased the feeling of remoteness, of surrounding
wildness in the valley hemmed in by cliff-sides, where even the
voice of water was silent under the travelling stars.

We had no way at all to go next morning, said Shah Riza,
who felt himself at home. But as it turned out, there was a
good four hours’ ride downstream to reach his tribe. The
Garau runs eastward, and follows more or less a line parallel
to that of the Great Mountain’s ridge which connects the two
highest peaks of Walantar and Warzarine. The latter, as we
approached it, revealed itself more and more as a beautiful
mountain, clothed in majestic slopes, and rising gently above
its precipices to peaks not needle-sharp, but pointed as a
wave is pointed where it breaks. These the sunlight struck,
facing us as we rode, until we entered the defile of Gavan
and threaded our way among light shadows and white
boulders.

Here the most unfortunate contretemps occurred. As we
rode eastward, we met five men and four guns riding west,
full and inevitable on our path. They came from the tents
of Saidmarreh lower down, and were at the beginning of the
second day of a three days’ ride to the capital, where, said

[90]

An unfortunate encounter

Alidad, after a heart-to-heart talk with an inferior servant
who marched on foot, they were going to fetch a bride and
all her trousseau for one of their chiefs. They were un¬
attractive men, and wore the Pahlevi hat with a European coat,
and rode on embroidered saddles with silver pommels. The
chief among them had murdered his father and was, Alidad
explained, “ not a good man,” even in a country where the
standard is not very high. He looked at me in a glowering
way, twisting himself round on his saddle to do so after he had
passed, and calling to Alidad to explain me: and as we rode on
I felt 'uncomfortably that my days of freedom would be
numbered as soon as these ill-omened ones reached the capital
with their story.

Shah Riza, too, looked flustered, his grey hair sticking out

in wild rebellion under the respectable superstructure of the
national headgear as he told me the unedifying details of the
o-reat one’s past. It took us half an hour’s riding or so down
die easy, tree-filled defile before we could capture again the
morning’s sense of peace.

A little narrow valley, coming down from, north-west,

opened up into ours at the end of the defile, and showed at
its head behind us a bit of the cliff table-top of Barazard, to
which we had looked across all day yesterday as we came down
from our pass. This meeting and meeting again, from
different points and in other lights, of the same landmarks,
is the charm of hilly travel. The mountain shape, first seen
as a dream in the distance, alarming as you approach, lost
perhaps altogether as you become involved in its outworks
and ramifying valleys, appears again suddenly, unexpected
as some swift fight upon a face beloved to which custom has
blunted our eyes. Like a human being, the mountain is a
composite creature, only to be known after many a view from
many a different point, and repaying this loving study,"if it

[91 ]

The Hidden Treasure

is anything of a mountain at all, by a gradual revelation of

personality, an increase of significance; until, having wandered hi

up in its most secret places, you will know it ever after from an

the plains, though from there it is but one small blue flame pc

among the sister ranges that press their delicate teeth into the ha

evening sky.

After the easy threading of the Gavan gorge, our dry river
lost its name of Garau, turned itself into the (equally non¬
existent) River Khirr, and became of so intractable and difficult
a temper in the cleft of a gorge called Suratai that our path

very sensibly left it and climbed on to a wide grassy shelf that is

runs, as it were, within the outer cliff rim of the valley along te

the greater part of its length. Here for some time we felt b

uplifted, looking across on an equal level to the similar and at

opposite shelf across the valley, where the treasure ofNushirvan e:

and a summer house of his are reported under the summits of c<

Warzarine at a place called Ganjeh, above another steep and n

inky gorge. tl

Our shelf was still cultivated here and there by the Ali d

Shirwan, though we saw none of them about. Most of it, si

however, was withered grass of summer, on ground gendy p

undulating, with oak trees here and there. Warzarine filled g

the sky behind them. After a while our shelf developed a i;

small rim of hill between us and the valley: the view was hid¬
den: the heat increased: Shah Riza, when interrupted in his c

meditations, said we had reached the lands of his tribe, but t

seemed vague as to how many hours were still required before i

an actual tribesman might be hoped for: the day unrolled 1

itself into the drowsy light of noon. i

We passed a sort of obelisk, a pointed affair on a <

pedestal, built of stone and mortar and plastered over,
which the Lurish tribesmen put up either as landmarks
or memorials.

[92]

The laws of hospitality

And then we came to red hills on our left, and lower red
hills on our right; we wound round a comer into a pocket,
and there in the bottom saw variegated green, apricot and
pomegranate trees, a few sheep and goats lying about, and
half a dozen tents or so belonging to the Philosopher s tribe.

The Tribe at Home

It is unlucky to reach a nomad’s tent in the master’s absence.
The laws ofhospitalitv are based on the axiom that a stranger
is an enemy until he has entered the sanctuary of somebody’s
tent: after that, his host is responsible, not only for his safety,
but for his general acceptability with the tribe. He is treated
at first with suspicion, and gradually with friendliness as he
explains himself—very much as if he were trying to enter a
county neighbourhood in England, for the undeveloped
mind is much the same in Lincolnshire or Luristan. From
the very first, however, once he is a guest, he is safe, in every
district I have ever been in except the wilder regions of Laki-
stan. This is the only arrangement which makes travel
possible in a tribal country: but it makes the adoption of a
guest a responsibility, and the master of the house or some
influential representative is alone willing to undertake it.

My young accomplice, Hasan, had given me two letters,
one to an uncle and one to a cousin: but both were out for
the day, and we were received by a cavalier and jaunty young
man with shining slanting eyes and thin lips, and a wavy
moustache he was proud of, dressed in a white coat quilted
in patterns, with a tobacco bag hanging at his sash, and a
coloured silk turban off the back of his head.

He was, I discovered later, the daughter’s fiance, and took
the leadership of affairs upon himself. He went swaggering
ahead to lead us to the chief tent with an air of: “ We’ll think

[ 93 ]

The Hidden Treasure

what to do with you later,” which distressed my Philosopher,
unprepared for so cool a welcome from his own people.
“ The young generation have no manners,” I almost thought
he was going to say; he was, however, wiser, and said nothing
at all, but squatted under the tent awning and concentrated
his mind on pouring loose tobacco into the little paper tubes
he smoked all day long.

A funeral had taken away our hosts, and no one of any
importance was left of the little tribe. A few retainers and
catde-men gathered around, while the women came out from
the seclusion of their screens and joined in the general curiosity.
Shah Riza, still looking down at his tobacco, and treating the
topic with the detached manner of diplomacy, explained
that I travelled for pleasure and learning, and that I was one
of the great ones of Baghdad. I had a passport, he added,
and the police had allowed it to pass too, apparently an unusual
distinction. I had letters to carry me anywhere. I wished to
find old cities, and cross the river to Lakistan.

The lady of the tent, still young but with a middle-aged,
disillusioned maimer, sat smoking a short clay pipe, and looked
sceptically at the ground. She had a nose tilted prettily under
her turban, and a smile that gave a charming gaiety to her
sulky litde face. She presendy undid a comer of her head¬
dress and produced tea, tied up there in a knot: she handed it
to the household with one hand while she held her pipe in
the other and began a Kurdish oration, telling Shah Riza, as
far as I could gather, that we were only on sufferance till the
master returned.

This female eloquence appeared to produce a certain uneasi¬
ness among the men, inclined to be more tolerant. Her
daughter, a shy and beautiful creature of fourteen, looked at
me with timid friendly smiles. The young man, in his off¬
hand manner, made our tea: the ladies retired: the humbler

[ 94 ]

J am asked to smuggle opium

visitors grew talkative and friendly. There would be no
difficulty for Lakistan, they said: men with relatives on the
other side could take us, and knew how to find out the day before
where the bandits might be, and how to avoid them. It was
constantly being done. All the routes are used by smugglers.
Did Shah Riza think I could be induced to smuggle across some
opium when I returned to Iraq’ I could not do that, said I
decidedly: Shah Riza had already made use of my saddle-bag
to get through twelve boxes of matches and innumerable
packets of cigarette paper without my knowing it. I had no
wish to find opium there; I hoped to have plenty of crimes of
my own to organize by that time. Opium, I observed, was
an immoral thing to sell or buy. The tribesmen, who are
not given to this vice, agreed with me, and grew more friendly
^11° But I was tired by this time: I took my abba, wrapped
myself in it from head to foot, and went to sleep with my
head on the saddle-bag.

The capacity for sleeping in public is one of the most useful
things one can acquire, and takes a certain amount of practice,
an abba is a help: in the midst of a crowded tent it will secure
you privacy; and after a time, the murmur of voices, discussing
you over the fire, becomes no more disturbing than the sound
of running water to dwellers by a stream.

When I woke in the late afternoon, a big man, dressed in
short loose black trousers and a striped black coat, was sitting
by the fire with three friends opposite in a row. He had a
stoop, from being so tall, and a big bony face with a fine
brow spoilt by a scar: it was handsome but for a look of un-
controEed violence about it, and the fact that one eye was
sightless. He was listening to Shah Riza expounding, and
Hasan’s letter of introduction lay open on the ground. This
was my host, Mahmud.

He welcomed me without effusion but politely when 1

[ 95 ]

The Hidden Treasure

woke up, and continued to discuss with the Philosopher. He
saw no difficulty, it appeared, in my travelling anywhere, so
long as the police did not interfere. The police, in Pusht-i-Kuh,
play the role of ogre in the fairy tale: every disaster is con¬
sidered to follow in their wake. They have stopped all the
traffic that used to travel over the mountain passes, and made
all trade illicit, and all that the tribesmen have gained in ex¬
change for the general stagnation is security along roads where
nothing worth securing is allowed to be carried.

In spite of the correctness of my passport, Mahmud and all
the tribe took it for granted that I was at one with them in the
desire to see as few policemen as possible. Perhaps Shah
Riza and his account of our diplomacy at Bedrah may have
had something to do with that. It was at any rate a friendly
bond.

In the late afternoon I wandered down with my host to
where a few bits of walls show the site of an old village; a
place of graves whence all I could glean was a Sassanian coin
found, they told me, in one of the round jars used for the
burial of the dead. But the actual ruins I saw were much
more recent, and probably belong to a time some few centuries
ago when this region must have been full of setded villages
along the courses of the streams.

We discussed these matters, skirting the garden hollow along
a slope of red hill cropped of all herbage by the goats and sheep.
We were passing the cousin’s tent, he of the second letter.
As we reached its neighbourhood, Mahmud left me, with a
chilly nuance that made me suspect a want of harmony in
the family, and the two brothers, who welcomed me widi
almost excessive cordiality, confirmed the suspicion. They
had not expected to be visited at all; it was only my insistence
which brought it about. They were more gende in looks than
my host. The brother had spent some years in Baghdad in

[ 96 ]

The snake hite

the government Survey Department as a porter; he knew a
word or two of English, and had a pleasant frank expression
one could trust. All they could do for me would be done,
said they. They were unmarried, and lived in a small tent
composed of two apartments only, one closed in by the
usual palisade of reeds woven together with wool, the other
open like a verandah where guests could squat for tea.

I had not been sitting very long under the awning when a
gentle old man with a grey beard and nothing on beyond a
very ragged shirt and short black trousers came up and
murmured timidly to the least and most distant members of
the circle that surrounded us, glancing at me with a hopeful
air which one leams to recognize as that of someone who is
asking for medicines. The poorer sort among such petitioners
are apt to be snubbed away before ever they get near enough
to explain their troubles unless one notices them and makes
enquiries.

Tills man turned out to have a small son of about ten or so,
who had been bitten by a snake two months before. He was a
stranger, belonging to a tribe four miles away, and without
relatives or natural allies among my hosts; and he lived in the
extremity of poverty on the opposite slope of the valley. I
climbed up there with him to a group of tents and found the
sick child on the ground in a noisy circle, bearing up with the
vitality of his age against what would long before have killed
an ordinary European man. The snake bite, they told me,
had been on one finger, as he pushed his hand under a rock.
The poison had spread upwards, and first his hand, and then
his forearm, had dropped off, the latter leaving the bone still
sticking out. The poison had now corrupted his upper arm
to the shoulder, leaving it a swollen mass of raw flesh which
the tribespeople covered with a mess of oak leaves and a
muddy bit of old shirt The boy s pulse was racing at 120

G [97]

The Hidden Treasure

beats to the minute, and the poison had evidently spread over
his system and was coming out in small sores on his back and
sides.

In spite of it all, and when he had got over his first fear of
being touched by me, die lad took a certain pathetic pride
in being so the centre of attention. In the high monotonous
voice of his fever he explained how it had all happened, while
the tribespeople, pressing round, called on the name of Allah.

I gave him not more than a day or two to live, but did what
I could by washing the arm in strong permanganate, clearing
away every trace of the oak leaf poultice.

By the time this was done, very little was left of my supply
of gauze and bandages, and I had to part with my face towel
as well, as the surface to be medicated was so large. The
child’s mother escorted me on my way home, weeping and
kissing my hand, but also improving the occasion by asking
for more clothing and anything I could spare horn about me.
In such poverty small wonder that when anything comes to
them they grasp it -with both hands and try to get more, but
it is a discouraging experience, and I came away feeling sick
at heart over the general misery of mankind.

But now there was friendly welcome in the porch of
Mahmud’s tent. My old Philosopher had evidently not
wasted his time, and, left to himself, had been exerting
eloquence on my behalf, explaining the mysteries of archaeol¬
ogy at second-hand. From inside the tent, where bread was
being baked, the ladies called to me in a cordial way. The
young Kaltuma, the daughter of the house, with beautiful
downcast eyes, very shyly brought water in a long-beaked
ewer to pour over my hands before the meal. There was
another cousin now, a handsome fair-skinned young man
who might have been English, but that he wore a long black
velvet coat tied in with a white sash round his waist and a

[ 98 ]

Disadvantages of being armed

carved dagger to finish it off in front. In his hand he played
with a stout stick, the knob sheathed with fluted iron at one
end, a substantial weapon fashionable in the Pusht-i-Kuh.
Tassels from a black, green, and purple turban dangled round
his head. Behind him was a gun, for he alone among the
tribe had a permit, and he promised partridges for supper
next day: it was a harmless little weapon not fit for bigger
game.

“Why do you not get a permit, too, Mahmud?” said I.

“ It has its disadvantages,” said my host, with one of the
rare and charming smiles that lit up his heavy dark face.
“ If a malefactor comes along, and I have a gun, I am supposed
to do something and questions are asked: and if I do something,

I get into trouble and feuds with his tribe, who take his part.
But if I am unarmed, the police cannot expect me to help
them, and anyone who is in trouble can come through my
territory without being arrested, and we all remain on friendly
terms after the police have come and gone. All we need
guns for are the wild pig.”

“ Do the police come often?”

“ About once a month, or once in two months. Not often
unless they hear of any trouble.”

“ And what about Lakistan across the river; do they ever
go there?”

“ Hardly ever. It is a bad country. But we can get you
across. My wife’s mother’s sister is setded there.”

Apart from the treasure, and the lands across the river,
I wished also to visit the idolaters’ country on the south, and
the lands of Shirwan on the north of me. I thought I would
make two preliminary expeditions in these directions so as to
pass the time unsuspected while waiting for my accomplice
from Baghdad.

We discussed the plan after supper, over glasses of tea in

[ 99 ]

The Hidden Treasure

the semi-darkness, while the tribesmen came in by ones and
twos after seeing to their animals for the night. The lady of
the house, her clay pipe in her hand after the labours of the
day, sat in the doorway, joining now and then in the conversa¬
tion, but still sufficiendy secluded for propriety. The men
knew all the paths, which are more used since smuggling has
become so common.

I decided to let them take me south-east to the lands of the
Larti and Hindimini, and to return to the tribe after a three days’
tour, by which time Hasan, if he were coming at all, should
have arrived.

The funeral, however, which was the subject of interest
at the moment, was to go on all next day, and the Philosopher
asked me to postpone my journey for so long while he went
to visit die tents of the dead. I agreed to this, and retired to
sleep under the porch. On one side it was open to darkness
and to the dim forms of the mares and kine and their herds¬
men. On the other, behind the screen of reeds, eyes of whis¬
pering unseen women watched my undressing. The roof
was of dry and dusty oak leaves, and cows came lumbering up
in the night to eat at it over my head. On the outskirts of
the camp, the dogs kept up a racket, chasing wolves and pig.
There is never silence in these small oases. And early in the
morning, before it was light, so that I might move undis¬
turbed and not outrage the herdsmen by the sight of satin
pyjamas, I woke and dressed and lay down to sleep again and
meditate till the sunlight should come and the fires be lit for
tea.

This was a lazy, pleasant day. The Philosopher left with
Mahmud, and I sat reclined on quilts under the tent aw nin g,
watching while the swaggering young fiance broke in a mule.
He and the mule seemed to me very much alike, and looked
each other in the eye with the same expression of untrust-

[ IOO ]

Wt

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A day in the tents

worthy and inflammable wildness. He would approach
softly along the taut halter, murmuring soothing Lurish noises
to which the mule listened with an obvious lack of con¬
viction, till he got quite near, and already his arm was nerved
to throw over the animal’s back its first burden, a gaudy piece
of green and orange weaving. But the mule saw with the
comer of one eye: reared, turned, and snorted, and put the
whole length of the halter between them again. And the
morning slipped by.

In the afternoon I had a bath. The women of the tribe
boiled a cauldron, and screened off a place in the middle of the
tent where they sat twisting black goat wool into ropes. They
put a copper tray for me to stand on, and a bowl beside it
with which to pour the hot water over me, and retired only
to return and gaze over the top of my screen when I was
defenceless, and murmur with praises to Allah how white and
soft I was, while they pulled up the sleeves of their gowns to
show me die contrast of their own darker skins.

In the tent we drank tea with the pleasant sense of leisure that
envelops harems when their masters are absent. My hostess
threw aside her turban, disclosing a fragile litde head plastered
over with flattened curls, with an ugly gash across the fore¬
head. She had tried to separate Mahmud and a cousin when
they were quarrelling, and Mahmud had inflicted this wound
by mistake. He was rather ashamed of it, and his wife
was quite ready to make the most of it, and often put
her hand up to her head and groaned; whereupon Mahmud
would appear to be interested in some distant part of the
landscape.

He and the Philosopher came back late and sat discussing
politics in the night. A stooping, hale old man joined them,
with eyes surrounded by wrinkles, and a paternal air of auth¬
ority, who turned out to be the tribal kadkhuda, or headman.

[ioi ]

The Hidden Treasure

Between them they arranged that I should have Mahmud’s
white mare next morning ; it had green leather reins and a
silver pommel to the saddle, and leather flaps embroidered
m mauve and green. The Philosopher on the other mare
was to carry what little luggage we needed, and Sa’id Ja’far,
the cousin, would guide us.

But the morning brought very little sign of movement.
Imperturbable and meditative, the Philosopher, after many
prayers and glasses of tea, continued to fill his little cigarette
cases. The mares were still unsaddled. The family sat chat¬
ting leisurely. A guide from the Dusan tribe, through whose
lands we were going, was ready to join us. The young man
with the velvet coat said he was coming too, because he had
a gun; but no one showed any sign of actually moving. I left
them and went over the hill to look at the boy with the snake
bite: his pulse was still racing, but the poisoned flesh looked
healthier. After what seemed a long time, the washing and
bandaging being accomplished, I returned to Sa’id Ja’far’s hut
only to find, things just as I had left them. We called and
shouted. Sa’id Ja’far was ready himself: he therefore said
that my impatience was only too justifiable. The Philosopher,
however, appearing at last with a grey lock bunched over
either ear and a bulging saddle-bag under either knee, screwed
up his eyes in cheerful and amused surprise and asked where
was the hurry.

“ There are tents everywhere,” said he. “We will not need
to sleep in the desert even if we do not start till the afternoon.”
A point of view unpromisingly non-progressive for someone
about to travel.

At this moment, however, the tables were turned, for it
was discovered that I was taking no passport.

“ A passport is always good,” said Shah Riza with convic¬
tion, and began slowly to make the movements which precede

[ 103 ]

Bitten by dogs

the actual preparations for dismounting; but I was not going
to let him go back to our tents: he was wound up, it would
be simply disastrous to let him unwind again.

“ Go on,” said I, “ I will overtake you.”

I set off to run back without remembering the dogs, who
seeing a swiftly moving object, flung themselves on me in a
body, and had my skirt in shreds in no time. The tribe
hurled clods of earth and curses, while I stood still among then
unpleasant fangs, and the men drew near, beating their
breasts, with horrified faces.

“That this should have happened in our tents,” they
repeated again and again. The dogs turned snarling away.

More annoyed than ever at this conspicuousness, I reached
the tent in a grim silence, applied iodine to a slight scratch on
mv leg, and took advantage of the general horror, which
kept even the women silent and petrified around me, to get
away as quickly as I could. To keep the dogs off their
visitors is one of the chief preoccupations of the tribal host.

I was always absent-minded, and not inclined to be afraid of
dogs, and gave constant uneasiness; and I would find that on
my most private walks a woman would silently rise and
follow me to keep the dogs away. Now I had actually been
bitten. It was my fault entirely, but that seemed to make
no difference to the feeling that it was a blot on their hospitality.
Only my Philosopher took that side of the question into
consideration when I returned and found him and Said Ja’far
waiting side by side, ready at last.

“ Why do you run?” said he, “ and get bitten by dogs, so

that I am made anxious?”

The Defile of the Unbelievers

We now rode, in pleasant and restored tranquillity, by the
pomegranate and apricot trees of the hollow, until we left the

[103 1

The Hidden Treasure

garden of the tribe and came again to rough pasture between
red sides of hills.

The lesser ridge that shut out the main valley of the Khirr,
(our Garau River of the days before) soon sank into nothingness
upon our right, and we came out into the openness of the
main valley, and saw again in the hot blues of the middle
morning the noble barricade of Kebir Kuh. On our left an
uncompromising red wall with splashes of white limestone
rose steep and near and treeless. Here was the road to the
treasure. I saw it, winding up through the crumbly powder
of the lime and asked the direction, which corroborated exactly
with what was written on my map.

Now, however, we were not attending to this part of the
adventure, and rode straight on until we left the Musi lands
and came into the boundaries of a small tribe of Arab origin,
who take the name and guard the shrine of one of the saints
from Medina, a certain Jaber, buried in this valley under a
white plastered obelisk. Indistinct remains of old buildings
and Moslem gravestones surrounded the obelisk in its lonely
place.

For some reason unknown it made me think of what I
imagine to be a Tibetan landscape: the round and ugly hills
behind, and the small tower rising in polygonal tiers about a
foot high, 'with dingy discoloured plaster above the half-
subterranean building of the tomb. There was no name and
no date, but the place is probably old; it has an air of secrets
about it, a life now long under the ground. The Dusan
guide and the young man in the velvet stooped down the steps
into the tomb to make their vows while Shah Riza gave him¬
self the airs of an archaeologist, wandering about and picking
up shards of pottery as he had seen me do.

After leaving this place of ancient piety our track went
down into the river bed, flat as a table between the long ridge

[104J

The story of Saint Jaher ■

of die limestone hill on our left and the first rise of Siah Pit
on our right, a hill which, as a far blue smear on the skyline,
we had seen on our ride down from Garau. Our non¬
existent river was now the Rua, having taken on the name of
a westerly stream which we could see descending by steep
black places and step-like defiles from the Maimah pass of
Kebir Kuh. It watered rice-fields, a little behind us and some
way off as we emerged into open ground : they shone in the
sun beside the black tents of their cultivators, the Dusan
tribe.

The wide river space was now all tamarisk and sand, but
in spring the water comes raging down in spate, and for a
few weeks carries all before it. In the middle of its alluvial
waste lies a strange round crater hole, with water called
Zem-Zem in its bottom, about three hundred feet wide, dirty
but holy. Saint jaber once, walking along here, with a goatskin
of water as they use to-day, met Shaddad the son ofNushirvan,
whose castle was downstream in the defile.

44 Have you any water in your goatskin?” asked the son of
the king.

“ Ah,” said the pious old man, anxious not to lie, but also
anxious not to give drink to an unbeliever.

44 Is it cold?” asked the king’s son.

“ Not cold, not warm,” answered the saint.

46 Is it sweet?” asked Shaddad.

44 Not sweet, not bitter,” was the reply.

The son of Nushirvan asked to drink, but the old man, as
he pushed a slip of reed into the goatskin for him to put his
mouth to, also placed there the obstruction of a pomegranate
seed, so that no water came to the heathen lips. Shaddad in
disgust threw the goatskin to the ground, and the water,
spreading around, made the pool of Zem-Zem in Luristan,
on whose banks ever since the tall reeds have been growing,

[ 105 ]

The Hidden Treasure

and also a pomegranate tree, though I cannot say that I saw it.
And the water is neither sweet nor bitter, nor cold nor warm,
and all the year the same. But it did not look very attractive.

A half-witted retainer of the Musi chieftain had added him¬
self to our party to look after the horses, and was supposed to
lead my animal by a halter over the rough ground. The real
necessity for such assistance lay in the fact that I did not under¬
stand the Lurish manner of talking to horses. To make the
creature go, one was supposed to give it a violent jerk in the
mouth, and to flick its back perpetually.with a long, plaited
thong which formed the prolongation of the rein. Three or
four energetic pulls were supposed to make it break into a
canter: my efforts in this direction—being possibly rather half¬
hearted—merely induced the tired grey mare to stop altogether.
An unwilling horse and a dragging child and a woman who
insists on explaining her motives are the three most wearying
objects in creation. I soon saw the advantage of someone in
front who would automatically give the jerk as he walked
along whenever my steed became meditative, while I could
write things about the landscape in my notebook. The half¬
wit was asked to do so. He smiled with gentle foolishness,
slouching along in the dislocated manner of his kind.

Such people are treated with tenderness by the tribesmen,
and life must be pleasanter for them than it is for many an
asylum inmate. This specimen had just had a wife found
for him, the young men told me with a delighted amusement
which might have made the founder of the Eugenic League
turn in his grave. With the halter held loosely in one hand,
and my sunshade, open and incongruous in the other, and
crooning his little songs, the half-wit went mooning on,
“ through brake, through brier,” regardless of the obstacles
presented to the surprised and outraged horse behind him.
We went more slowly than ever, considering each bush as

[106]

The ruined city of Shaddad

we came to it. Shah. Riza, who was behind, and liked to

go slowly because it allowed him to fill his cigarette papers
with tobacco between one jog and the other, looked at me in
surprise wdien I said something about it.

“ There is no hurry,” said he. 44 We can sleep anywhere in
this country. There is no danger.

It was only the fact that the Dusan tribesman wished to
reach his home this night, which made us improve our speed
at last, for that active lithe young man came striding back
impatiently, saying: 44 Shah Riza is like the accompaniment
to a funeral” ' Seizing the halter in his own hand, he walked
me and my charger at a rousing semi-trot across the flat lands
of the Rua to where the ruined city of Shaddad and a camp
of the Dusan tents lay near the entrance to the Unbelievers’
Defile.

A few sad rubble stones on the side of a naked hill was all
that was left of the traditional city of the king. The black
tents stood among them, showing their slovenly dinginess in
the noonday light. Dogs came snarling to meet us. Donkeys
and mules, resting among the tent ropes, rose with a sputter
of hooves and the dust upon their coats. Under their lop¬
sided houses which, scattered there, looked like so many black
boulders in shallow water with a little foam of children,
cooking-pots, kids and puppies breaking perpetually around
each of them, the various tribesmen of the Dusan looked out
at us as we rode to the chief tent.

I insisted on examining the defile and tne castle of Shaddad
immediately, leaving lunch to prepare for our return. The
opening cleft, a steep black natural gateway, was only a couple
of stones-throw below- us. At its entrance, out of a very
white bed, the Rua stream was reborn, rising from its under¬
ground journey in a deep pool which turned into a river,
blue and brown down the defile. It was banked off to work

1107]

The Hidden Treasure

a mill, the last small sign of human masonry, almost invisible
among the high works of nature around it.

Like most of the Pusht-i-Kuh gorges, the place looked as
if it might have been sliced through by a titanic knife. The
uncovered strata on either side ran almost horizontal, with
gentle curves, like galleries in a theatre; the corridor between,
not more than fifty feet or so, was filled with reeds and
oleanders and willows, and the half-hidden noise of the
stream.

The way was bad, though not impossible for horses, but
we went on foot, the Dusan guide wading with me on his
back through long river stretches, a proceeding which I always
dislike. In the very middle of the defile about fifteen minutes
downstream, the way went up, they told me, to the casde of
Shaddad on the height. A large boulder lying across the
track still showed the hollows where his two knees rested when
the Presence Ali beheaded him, whose sword dint was
visible, bitten into the rock. Ah’s sword marks are freely
scattered over Persia, and it does not do to take them too
seriously. What was more interesting was a remnant of
masonry sticking here and there to die solid rock of the
gorge; evidendy once a built-up way where probably a
derbend or gate closed the valley in this so obvious a position
for defence.

Nobody, they said, had climbed up to the casde at the top
except the brother of a young Dusani who accompanied us.
The brother w T as employed in Baghdad in a drapery store, but
still came to spend incongruous holidays in Luristan, and was
the best climber of his tribe. Up there he had found, they
told me, remains of rooms, a cooking hearth, a corridor and
w’alls, all of which he had demolished as having belonged to
the infidels. We climbed some way up, Shah Riza, like a
nervous and very scraggy hen, imploring me to stop at every

[ i°8 ]

The defile of the Unbelievers

step. The old way followed one of the ledges and was
very narrow; it finally melted altogether into the cliff-side,
but not before it had reached a spot where a few graves had
been opened, though nothing appeared to have been found
inside them. I gathered there was nothing very much left
to see of the Sassanian castle and relinquished the thought of
the precipice, though with some regret.

The Dusani promised to dig during our two days’ absence:
and when we returned he had unearthed a cornelian bead and
a bit of stucco work, a slender piece of column moulded in a
pattern of overlaid leaves, and probably once intended to be
covered with metal, for it was made of very fragile “ gatch.”
Two broken daggers and three light spear-heads of bronze
were produced as having been found some time ago close to
the site at the bottom of the defile. These meagre results,
such as they were, fortified the supposition of some Sassanian
post in the valley, as the old legends implied.

We climbed down and followed the defile to where it
opens on the banks of the Saidmarreh, where rusty flanks of
hills He one behind the other in the sun, like hippopotami
after drinking, ponderous in their folds. Opposite to where
we were sitting a little zig-zag showed the Sargatch Pass
and the way to Tarhan. The river wound between, a green
water, its sunken bed lined with tamarisk, kurj, and broom
and oleander. This is a warm valley, and the half-hour’s
walk through the Unbelievers’ Defile brings one from a
summer to a winter climate: in another month the Dusanis
from the west and the Tarhanis from the east would have their
black tents pitched in litde clumps for miles along these banks.
But now, except for the half-obliterated track and the opened
graves beside us, no sign of anything human was in all that
land. This country has been hardly explored and never
surveyed. The river banks are dangerous, open to raiders

[109]

The Hidden Treasure

from the south and east, Sagwand and the other tribes of
Lakistan. A little to our right across the Saidmarreh, black as
ink in the sunlight, on the way from Shirwan to Tarhan,
another defile came down to the water, Tang-i-Berinjan,
which wise travellers avoided, since robbers had ensconced
themselves in it for some time. These sleeping monstrous
hills, this inhuman emptiness and silence were full of awe: a
kingfisher down by the water, and the figures of my com¬
panions as they climbed about the rocks in their cotton shoes
and medieval tunics, seemed strangely peaceful in the lawless
land. And then we turned back again into the shadow of
the defile, and reached the Dusani tents for lunch.

The City of the Larti

The Dusanis, when we left them, promised to hunt for
antiques as busily as they could during our absence. We, on
our side, engaged ourselves to return that way, and started
in the afternoon heat, southward for the lands of the
Beni Parwar. This is an agricultural tribe which in¬
habits the broad trough, something between a valley and a
plain, north of the Kebir Kuh. The land was smiling and
prosperous, a rolling stretch of plough, then brown in autumn,
but with the pleasant homeliness of man’s labour printed
upon it. We dipped down to it gently, over a low col which
finishes the range of Siah Pir. The river and its fierce and
lonely banks were out of sight, flowing away from us south¬
eastward; all we saw were easy curves striped by fine lines of
ploughing, rolling up to the forested black outworks of the
Great Mountain, which continued against the skyline its long
unbroken wall.

The outwork was a separate range, parallel but lower, so
that in section the two would look like the descending graph

[no]

We camp with the Dusan

of a fever chart. It was called Kuh Siah, the Black Mountain,
and continued the formation we had already seen in the
valley below Garau: here, as there, it was broken at interva s
by black ravines. The Larti and Hindimini, die two tribes
we meant to visit, lived each in one of these ravines, under the
shadow of the mountain wall. Between us and them, across
the open stretch of plain, were white and red small salty hills,
untidily scattered in a straggling line. Our track, dotte
through the afternoon by wayfaring labourers, made straight
for them, passing in the open plain a little cemetery with
domed tombs, and the obelisk memorials of which the Lurs

are fond. _ .

The Dusani guide was near his own home, but the darkness

threatened us before he could hope to reach it, and no one is
willingly out in this country in the dark. As the sun sank, we
stopped to water our horses at the only spring in the neighbour¬
hood, the Eye of Bitterness, which slips into a green hollow
out of a cavern in the limestone hills. It is good plentiful
water, and cold, with a slight salty taste, not unpleasing.
After leaving it, we wound among the hillocks. The plough¬
land ceased; we came into a grassy downland; and on an emi¬
nence found a Dusani camp, just as the last women were
shouldering their goatskins at a water-hole below in the
dusk.

Here was no question of a doubtful welcome, for our
Dusani was among his own people, and Sa id Ja far was also
a man of consideration and well known, though of a different
tribe. The place was high and windswept: from the tent
door it looked out westward to Warzarine, and east to the
open valley spaces beyond whose horizon the invisible
Saidmarreh flowed. To the north we could see the day s
travel, and the hill where the treasure was, and ridges in

Lakistan beyond.

I in 1

The Hidden Treasure

A thin mountain wind, imperceptible in the pure and lumi¬
nous sky, moved the leaves of the roof as we sat on rugs in
the porch of the tent. Oak branches, heaped on the fire, made
a good warmth. Shah Riza, comfortable in my waterproof,
set about the saying of his prayers, while I tried to solve as
well as I could the various medical problems of the camp
with the help of an army medicine box which had been
given me as a most kind gift at my departure from Baghdad.

Our host was a middle-aged man with a round, sensible
face marked by the smallpox. He was ill with some internal
trouble. He had been to the hospital in Baghdad, where
they had kept him four days, and had sent him off with some
recommendation whose usefulness was destroyed by the fact
that he knew no word of the language in which it was given.
I wrote him a chit to take with him next time, and suggested
an Arab interpreter as advisable if he went to hospital again.
He was a man of the world with some property in sheep and
lands, which gave him an easy courtesy of manner. He owned
mattresses and bolsters, and had them spread out for me in a
partitioned space not far from the fire. There I slept, more
safely than in Chicago, a wanderer not only in space but in
time also, living a life that most of the world has now for¬
gotten.

We got up so early that we saw the first sun-shaft on the
peak of Warzarine. But we turned our backs upon it and
rode up and down the dry and treeless downs, till we came to
Kebir Kuh itself, advancing with oak trees here and there, and
to the place where the Larti torrent bed descended northward
at the bottom of a steep and wooded valley. Here we turned
and led our horses along its difficult side among boulders and
roots of trees, till the ravine below us divided, embracing
between two beds of tumbled rocks the mined city of the
Larti on a cliff.

The city of the Larti

An old barber at Bedrah first told us of the Larti and the
Hindi m ini, their sister tribe in antiquity. They were, said he,
the oldest tribes of Pusht-i-Kuh, the last descendants of idolaters
to whom once it all belonged. They fled before the invaders,
retreating ever higher into the fastnesses of their land, till
these two ravines were all that was left them under the un¬
compromising wall of the Great Mountain. This towered
3,000 feet and more above us, black, and unscalable to
all but genuine climbers, though they told us that there was a
way among its almost perpendicular slabs for men who went
on foot. A thin thread of water dispersed itself in spray on
the enormous flank, making it shine as if a strip were varnished.
The steepness came down a little above us, where loose stones
rolling made a gentler slope covered with trees. Here on a
cliff-encircled promontory the ruined city stood, with traces
of stone walls and ruins of houses jagged as an old crone’s
teeth against the mountain background.

We had to dip down into the ravine and up again, to go
either to the city or to the present metropolis of the Larti, a
company of seven tents or so on an opposite promontory.
The tribe had had misfortunes. What with feuds and wars
their numbers dwindled, and most of what remained had
fled and is settled in Kermenshah, while the Dusanis have taken
over the lands left empty. Such as there were, however, the
Larti were as - friendly as could be. Their two small mills
were down in the valley, fed by a runnel with soft muddy
banks. Traces of older and once prosperous gardens were
visible on what had been hillside terraces. And at the top,
the Larti families were grouped each round an oak tree whose
branches made a natural roof, whose boughs were used as
wardrobe and larder, while a palisade of woven reeds made
the walls. No more simple form of house can be thought
out, and they were simple people who lived there, dressed

h [113]

The Hidden Treasure

in rags that fluttered round the children with that complete
detachment one admires in the pictures of gods and goddesses,
wondering how the things stick on.

Like the Golden Age too, as the poet describes it, these
people fed on acorns. They expected to do so this winter
because of their rainless cornfields; but they still had some bread
left and a mess of pumpkin for our entertainment, and spread
it on the ground before us.

We were not the only visitors. A civilized Lur was here
on a holiday from Baghdad, where he lived in a shop and
thought he knew what Englishwomen were like until he
saw me. My contentment, so very ragged (after the en¬
counter with the dogs), was too much for his politeness. He
looked at me and slapped his knee at intervals, ejaculating
“Allah!”

“ Is this as good as Baghdad?” said he.

“ Better,” said I. “ There is cool air, and good water, and
wood for a fire, and shade.”

The inhabitants of the seven oak trees agreed. The towns¬
man, defeated, sank into silent bewilderment.

After our meal, we climbed down and up again into the
Larti city. As we crossed the valley head, we dipped into a
dark delightful shade, made by fruit trees and vines over a
stream cold as ice and black as velvet, that sprang here from
among stones out of the mountain, and probably first caused
this site to be chosen by prehistoric man.

An old peasant, who had lived all his life in the region,
came with us, saying that he knew the places of graves. He
had a short white beard and the kind of blue eyes that grow light
with excitement. He shouldered a concave tray on which
the bread is baked (saj), and a pickaxe for the digging; and he
walked along before us flapping his old shirt and cotton
trousers, a small felt cap on his head round which his grey

[114]

Date of the Larti city

locks curled. He hoped that I would use the magic glasses
that everyone knew I carried to look through the earth of the
ruined city and see its buried treasures. His was the arm, he
considered, mine the guiding brain—an embarrassing attitude
seeing that I had only one afternoon and no real knowledge
for the making of discoveries.

Where the promontory of the city is joined to the mountain¬
side, an upper road leads east and west from Ganjeh and Kulm
and the Puneh and Maimah passes along the flank of Kebir
Kuh to the Saidmarreh. These upper roads, all the world
over, nearly always follow the traces of very ancient sites:
either because they were usually safer for the inhabitants than
the lower, being less accessible, or because their very existence
in difficult mountainous country can only be caused by a
demand spread over a very long area of time.

Anyway I have often noticed that it is the older and upper
track which leads by the important places of antiquity. Here
it dipped down over a shoulder towards us, where sure enough,
the old man said, skeletons had been found in jars. We,
however, were taken on to the promontory itself, and found
there a Moslem cemetery of upright carvings round a white¬
washed altar of stone and mortar, beneath which is a tomb
whose present holiness was shown by a collection of large
pebbles and a few of the black fossils of the country, which
they call Peri stones, laid there as votive offerings.

We had no use for the Moslem cemetery, and left it piously
alone, descending by what was once a street among the ruins
of houses. I suppose the city is three or four acres in extent.
Its upper part is dotted with small squares where Moslem
tombstones lie half embedded, carved with a florid script which
show them to be not very old. A very few shards of pottery
picked up among the houses dated die place as thirteenth or
fourteenth century, or thereabouts. The line of the streets

[usj

The Hidden Treasure

was marked by boulders, which must once have formed the
first layer in the buildings. Wan and poplar trees as well as
oak grew over and among them, giving their green fugitive
beauty to die sense of the passage of time. Here and diere I
saw round holes, about eight inches in diameter, in flat stone
surfaces on the ground, and came to the conclusion that they
served possibly to hold the doorpost, as they still do in the
stone doorways of the Jebel Druse in Syria.

All round the northern side of the city, where it overhangs its
cliff, the walls are still plainly visible, and we followed them to
where the gate and gatehouse in the north-west lie open to a
stony track, that winds from under the cliff and the valley. Our
old man’s grave was below, in a dry place, sheltered by the
precipice as by the side of a ship. It was marked by a stone at
head and feet, and had been opened once and carefully covered
over again. The old man said the “ Things ” were inside it. He
worked with his pick, and then used his shirt and the bread-tray
to shovel out the earth. All he produced were bits of bones,
a shard of rough crockery, and a triangular stone cut like a
flint. His hopes, to tell the truth, were not in the objects
themselves but in what I might find in them—a belief which
I did nothing to strengthen, for I was disappointed.

As we sat there in the clouds of dust watching the work,
a noiseless figure suddenly appeared by the side of the grave.
It was a young man in an old green coat tight at the waist,
tied with a sash, and his dagger inside it. His brown naked
feet in cotton shoes made no sound. His light hair and
beard were almost the same colour as tire little felt pointed cap
on his head, bleached and tawny like the woods and rocks.
He seemed the genius of the place and smiled in a friendly
way, looking down into the shaft of die grave, which
now showed narrow sides of dry built masonry made just
to contain the outstretched figure of a mm We bent

[116]

Archaeology and the Philosopher

eagerly down to look, but found only a small stone and two
shards of reddish earthenware at the head: and when we stood
up again, our silent visitor had vanished among the sunlit
trees of the ravine.

“ Is it true,” said our digger as he shouldered his implement
to try for better luck with another grave he knew of, “ is it
true that the skeleton of a man has been found with horns
growing out of his forehead:”

Shah Riza, who loved fairy tales, and was delighted with
the discovery of archaeology, at which he gave himself expert
airs, pricked up his ears and joined us. He was in disgrace,
and had been loitering behind. He had taken my pointed
stone, the only find of the afternoon, and lighdy chipped off
the dp of it, saying airily: “ This is nothing.” The storm of
just indignation which had broken round his ears surprised
but did not disconcert him; women being in his eyes so inferior
that they could say what they liked without its mattering to
anybody. He merely continued to murmur at intervals:
“ It is nothing,” keeping, however, prudendy out of my way.

“ You had better ask Shah Riza,” said I, replying to the
matter of the horns. “ He seems to know more about every¬
thing than anybody else.”

The Philosopher smiled in a disarming manner, not however
denying the imputation of knowledge nor refraining, as we
pulled small bits of bone and pottery out of our next grave,
from giving his opinion in a decided manner as to their value.
We were no luckier. The grave was of the same kind,
also built under the lee of the cliff and city wall, and formed
of a narrow shaft where the skeleton lay on its back with head
turned to the right and feet pointing east-north-east. Under
its elbow was a sharpened stone, a piece of pottery at its
head, and that was all. It was already after four o’clock, and
some way lay before us to the valley of the Hindimim

[ JI 7]

The Hidden Treasure

eastward. I gave the blue-eyed old man sixpence, and told
him to prepare more digging for our return next day, and we
joined Sa’id Ja’far and the horses and our impatient Dusan
guide at the top of the ravine.

From here we rode across country eastward over an easy but
very stony shelf of Kebir Kuh, dipping into small combes and
out again, but keeping more or less to the level of the Larti
city, at about 4,500 feet. The great wall stretched out of sight
before and behind us, as near and overwhelming as a wave
about to break on the head of an insect swimming below.

Across the open lands beneath us on our left, we could see in
its full outline the small tree-dotted range of Siah Pir, divided
by clefts into separate hills. Blue enticing distances of
Lakistan lay before us. Sa’id Ja’far, one of the pleasantest
of companions, chatted about that country and its ways.

“ The women there are more cruel than our men,” said he.
“ Last year, while they were at war with the government,
one of them had a baby. When her husband asked to see it,
she said: This is no time for children,’ and took it by the feet
and dashed it against the rocks. Many of them use a gun
and ride like warriors with their tribes.”

Sa’id Ja’far told me about Saidmarreh, which is the name of
a camp and tribe as well as of the river. It is well watered
and lies surrounded by rice-fields in a wide p lain. It is more
or less a centre of government and an outpost against Lakistan,
though there are no houses other than the black nomad tents.

I asked him about the idolatrous worship of the two tribes
we were visiting, but this is a matter on which the people
feel, as Mrs. Langtry did about history in general, that bygones
had better be bygones; and probably very little is known about
it except among some of the very oldest men.

The sun sank and we were still high up on the mountain.
The Dusani guide, striding ahead, again observed that Shah

[118]

The Hindimini ravine

Riza, on horseback, was synonymous with a funeral, and
implored me to trot, which I did, rising in my silver inlaid
stirrups as on a platform with a flutter of tassels around me.
These stirrups, like most things invented for the country in
which they are used, are very sensible in their own place.
Their sharp comers, sticking well out beyond the rider’s
footwear, save him from innumerable knocks against the
rocky sides of narrow mountain paths.

In the dusk we descended to the Hindimini ravine. Sur¬
rounded by a chaos of enormous boulders, tumbling down to
a email amphitheatre, a clear spring of water is made to run
in wooden troughs where half a flock could drink at a time.
We took off our horses’ bridles and let them enjoy themselves.
Two other travellers, a brown black-bearded fellow and his
companion, were also on their way down. The Dusan guide,
who had observed one of my feet sticking out from the
dilapidated remains of my cotton giva shoe, remarked that
this was the man to make me a new pair before to-morrow
morning. The Hindimini, he said, are a famous tribe for the
making oigivas and for die beauty of their girls. The bargain
was on the point of being concluded when the Philosopher,
scenting danger from a distance, came trotting up, flapping
his elbows in his anxiety to inspire his horse with speed.

“ You will never get them,” he shouted when barely within
earshot. “ Why buy what we can make ourselves; Do I
not know how to sew givas from the time of my childhood;
By the Hand of God, why do you believe people when they
speak to you;”

The Dusan guide was a man of insight. He knew the
impossible when he saw it. Leaving the black-bearded
stranger without a word, he strode on down the steep hillside
which formed the ravine’s eastern border. I followed, also
on foot. The light was fading off the path as we descended.

[119]

The Hidden Treasure

Far down, the first of the Hindimini tents, some four or five, “

showed on a little spur. Their fires began to glow in the hon

darkening air as we approached. Their sheep were home 1

already from the pastures. As we entered through a circle mu

of snarling dogs, the shepherds were attending to them. wh

A hairy man with shining brass dagger in his sash looked up hoi

from among the woolly waves. He did not ask questions. one

“ Where is the tent;” said the Dusani. The man pointed wh;

and resumed his labours. livi

And we introduced ourselves to the Sheikh of the asi

Hindimini. for

Bn

The Valley of the Hindimini jj o i<

The Hindimini had received a lot of visitors that day. 'j

They were all sitting out in the open, round three sides of a her

square formed with strips of carpet. In the post of honour a Co

Dervish sat cross-legged. The Hand of Abbas cut out in for

brass at the end of a rod about four feet long was stuck into da\

the ground behind him and appeared over his shoulder. for

His companion was an Indian, with fat and pleasant face, who lan

had travelled with British and Americans in Iraq. say

I chose a place as far as I could from the Dervish, so as not ]

to inflict on him the unholiness of my sex at closer quarters loc

than necessary, and saluted him with becoming respect. A cai

dark, long-faced man sat next me, member of a family called foi

Malak, which he considered as equivalent to a tide of nobility, It •

and as showing some old tradition of supremacy in pre- oa

Islamic days. He was travelling with a small son from the fle

eastern lands, and took the lead in conversation. The Dervish Hi

had kind and wise eyes, used to the observation of things and he

men. I asked him why he travelled. is

“ To see,” said he.

[ 120 ]

Conversation with a Dervish

“ We ail travel,” I remarked, “ even though we stay at

home. 5 "

This philosophical contribution was received with a
murmur of approval, and I was accepted as someone with
whom rational conversation was not impossible. There were
holy places in the mountains, said the Dervish: he went from
one to the other. He was not a common man. I wondered
what had first so detached him from the roots of ordinary
living. Not religion: he spoke of that almost with indifference,
as might a Catholic in the worldly days of Rome: nor learning,
for he did not appear to be a student. He rested there like a
Buddha with voluminous draperies, the master of his com¬
pany, “ seeing 55 the world with a quiet superiority and
tolerant aloofness.

That night was even noisier than usual. The dogs rushed
here and there, chasing wolves or pig with unearthly yells.
Cocks crowed. In the darkness, the Dervish and his Indian set
forth, after a baking of bread for their journey: and before
dawn the women started with their goatskins down the hill
for water. When I woke up after all this, the Philosopher’s
lanky figure, with my Burberry loose upon it, was already
saying its prayers against the morning sky.

In this camp of the Hin dimini I saw for the first time the
loom which the tribespeople erect for the weaving of their
carpets. It stood outside one of the tents, tall enough almost
for a gallows and looking not unlike one in the half light.
It was an upright square made roughly out of the branches of
oak trees, at which on a high bench the young girls sat. ^ They
fled with assumed terror from my camera, but I think the
Hindimini still have some touch of the old paganism in their
hearts, and the women show it by a gayer ease of manner than
is usual in strict Islam.

There were graves

round about us under half-buried

The Hidden Treasure

boulders on the little spur on which our camp was tilted,
but the master of the tent thought them Muhammadan, and
was obviously unhappy at the risk of sacrilege. The infidel
town, said he, was down in the ravine.

The ravine narrowed below. It had a steep, wooded side
on the left, but on the right, where we descended, was a
precipice wall overhanging in horizontal strata above us,
at the top of which pastures began, such as we had ridden over
the day before. Under their eaves, as it were, the young men
of the tribe led us, leaped ahead by an invisible path along
flat ledges, and came to where houses had been built under a
hollow rock, like cells of a wild beehive, plastered to the side
of the ravine. They were very rough, of small stones thrown
together with mortar, and looked as if they had not been
either comfortable, beautiful, or strong. Nor were they
very old: probably the last places to be inhabited when the
city of the Hindi mini was falling to decay. Tombstones lay
about, carved with a running Persian script. The Larti valley,
besides its tombstones, has an inscription carved on the face
of a rock; so that anyone will easily decipher the dates of these
two cities, which probably flourished and decayed together.

The Atabeks of Luristan are known to have done much
building in this country, and probably these sites were in¬
habited in their day: but although I am no expert in script,
it seemed to me that what I saw belonged to a later date.
There is a sadness in coming on these once inhabited places,
built by prosperous and setded communities, where now, for
many days’ ride on every side, the nomad in his black tent
dwells alone.

Below the houses built into the rock, ruins of an older city-
go in terraces to the valley bottom. The remains of a good
causeway, still used, led up to it from the plain of Dusan,
and showed, better than the heaps of stones, that it had once

[122]

Graves of the Hindimini

been a place of some consideration. Below the slipshod late
work, the remains of a more massive and primitive style
appeared. As in the Larti, boulders as big as a man, or nearly
so, had been used for the ground work of the houses, and
showed, by their alignment, the old streets running horizon¬
tally above the valley bottom. Here, in a promising spot
that a druid might have chosen for his burial place, under an
oak tree with low branches, where three boulders, arranged
like a tripod, marked the tomb, we started operations. We
were embarrassed by too much help, having eleven young men
besides various advisers and onlookers, and I hastened to look
round for more tombs to distribute their energy. But even
so we were disappointed.

After digging down two feet or so, we came upon the hori¬
zontal boulders that cover in a grave. We dug carefully
until all was laid bare, then lifted the lid; with sticks and
fingers, so that no treasure might escape nor its position be
confused, we laid bare the skeleton, stretched out exactly like
those of the Larti, with head on one side and feet south-east,
but nothing further was there. A few shards of unglazed
pottery; a fragment of mortar that can obviously not have
belonged to prehistoric man; and nothing else between the
carefully built sides of the narrow resting-place. No graves
had ever been excavated, no bronzes had ever been round
here. The bronzes, I was becoming more and more con¬
vinced, belonged to people who followed the rivers and ever
clung to the neighbourhood of waterways. If these valleys
were indeed the refuge of the country’s first inhabitants, as is
likely enough, they probably remained in their rough and
primitive condition long after the river-lands were civilized.

The graves we discovered might have been early Moslem.
Our men had fears about it, owing to their lying in an
orthodox direction.

1123 ]

The Hidden Treasure

“ Are you sure,” they asked me, “ that these are un¬
believers’ ( Gabri ) graves, and not graves of the children of
Adam?”

They think of the pre-Islamic Zoroastrians as a race of giants,
not human; for they people the world, as most simple folk
have peopled it, with a primitive society of Titans destroyed
by the advent of Jove. And Shah Riza, squatting in the dust
of the labourers, and filling his paper cigarette tubes, peered
down at intervals at the strange shapes of the tree roots among
the bones to see if the horns which he expected were not really
there on the foreheads of the Gabri.

It was ten-thirty before the end of our labour and the
satisfactory disentanglement of those who had worked and
must be paid and those who had not, but hoped to be paid
likewise. We did not retrace our way, but climbed due
westward up the slope of the ravine on to the pasture-land at
a lower point than yesterday, and rode pleasandy with the
world spread round us. The flat lands of Dusan and Beni
Parwar were below us on our right, and Siah Pir beyond:
and over its shoulder we could see more plainly than ever
before the hills of Lakistan. Oak trees were dotted park-like
about us, and the sky so blue over our heads made their
leaves white against it, motionless as the wings of a kite in
the sun.

The Dusani guide knew of a Hindimini camp on these
uplands, conveniendy near us at noon. We turned aside and
found it scattered about a large enclosure fenced with boughs
where its flocks were kept. Children, even more naked in
their rags than usual, gathered in a shy crowd at a litde distance,
while the young master of the tent, which was so poor that
the branches of its central oak tree had not even been roofed,
came out to hold my stirrup as we dismounted.

Yet nothing, you might imagine, could have delighted him

[ 124 ]

On the fragility of civilization

more than to have to lay out all he possessed in the way of
food for our entertainment. He had a pleasant brown face
with eyes well apart, and quick, neat manners. He had been
for a good many years in Baghdad and Basra, and knew the
ways of civilized life. "When I had been accommodated on
a carpet, and water was brought me to wash my hands, he
knelt beside me, and out of his voluminous sash produced a
email piece of soap. He offered it with an air of modest
triumph. He evidently felt about it as an Englishman may
feel when he dresses for dinner in some outpost of the jungle.
It was the symbol of a different order of things, a little treasure
kept among the difficulties of nomad life as a reminder of
something better which might otherwise be forgotten. Even
so, perhaps, in the decline of Rome, some relic of imperial
opulence might be preserved amid the northern forests,
embodying in its dim way ideas long since shipwrecked and
submerged.

What a delicate plant is our civilization, I thought, as I sat
in the shade with the circle of the tribesmen around me, in
that short silence which is good manners in the East. You
would imagine that these people, who know the life of cities
and its comforts, would reproduce it in some measure when
they return to their own hills. Far from it. They return
and live just as they lived two thousand years ago or more.
The force of primitive circumstance is too great for them.
And these amenities are not, like freedom, or religion, authority
or leisure, among the indispensable necessities of mankind.

The father of our host was an old patriarch very nearly
blind and dressed in strips of rags so multitudinous that only
a principle of mutual attraction could, you would imagine,
induce them to remain all together on his person. He carried
them with a serene dignity, having reached an age when the
mere fact of being still alive at all entities one to indulgence

[125]

The Hidden Treasure

and. respect. His son, who was obviously a charming and
kind man, listened with great deference while the old sheikh
apologized for the poverty of our meal and begged us to use
all the tribe could afford as if it were our own. They brought
a mess of pumpkins and a small chicken floating in a syrup of
melted butter, a food which after a week or so of hard riding
in the Luristan air becomes more appetizing than one would
think. This winter, they said, there would be nothing but
acorns to eat, as the harvest was poor for want of rain.

We hurried our leave-taking so as to have time for more
digging among the Larti. I had promised the old man of
yesterday to return and see what he had been able to find
during my absence, and resisted all efforts of Shah Riza to
miss the rendezvous and take the more direct route home.
We accordingly hit the Larti ravine some little distance be¬
low the city, and made our way into it by a path among trees
and boulders. A foxy-faced old man came walking down
behind me. He was the headman of Larti, the kadkhuda.

“ You walk well in the hills,” said he after a greeting.

“ But I am a hill woman,” I explained.

“ You run as lightly as a partridge,” he said. Is not
England a city;”

Said Ja’far, who had left the horses and was also walking
down, interposed.

“Perhaps you come from Scodand;” he said. “When
I was in Baghdad, soldiers came marching through: I saw at
once that they were different from the others. I said to
myself: ‘ These people surely come from the hills. They walk
better and they are dressed like us of the Pusht-i-Kuh. Perhaps
they are our cousins.’ And when I asked, I was told that they
were Scotchmen of the mountains.”

1
dot
den
an '
bro
bot

dig
of
is 2
SOf
by
hw
of
use
cir

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bu

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lit

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US

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Ei

tb

St

[126]

A Malik shah i visitor

The Graves of the Beni Parwar

The old. Larti man lived in a little house of reeds and leaves
down by the mill in the valley. It was a semi-detached resi¬
dence in a row of three huts, each consisting of one room and
an open porch; and the animals—fowls, goats, and donkeys—
browsed about in open stubble-fields which filled the valley
bottom.

The old man was not there. Not only had he done no
digging* but he had been called away on business to the lands
of*the Beni Parwar. The keeping of appointments in Persia
is a one-sided affair, and requires time, patience, and a philo¬
sophic placid nature. Shah Riza added to the annoyance of it
by remarking that he knew all along that this would happen:
but his innate love of virtuous platitudes made him in spite
of all approve of my conscientiousness in the matter, which he
used as a Moral Theme for many evenings after in the fireside
circle.

Meanwhile we had to decide whether to wait or not for
our old man. His plans were unknown, but his family, a
buxom young bride about thirty years younger than himself,
pressed us to stay. The afternoon was late already, we could
not get far on our way home: we accepted the offer and setded

outside his hut for the night.

Our Dusani guide now left us. He was surprised and a
litde chagrined to find that I considered my compass as a
sufficient substitute for his presence, for he had hoped to hurry
us back with him to his own tribe; but he gave m with a good
grace, and took a friendly leave, looking upon me less as an
English stranger than as a woman endowed with sense m
the climbing of rocks, an altogether creditable distinction.

He had hardly gone when a pleasing jaunty figure came
striding down towards the door of our hut over the brow oi

[127]

The Hidden Treasure

the hill. He wore a quilted jacket woven in a little Cashmere
pattern, and had two knives in his sash. At the back of his
bald forehead was a turban all on one side. He was clean
shaven, with two bright dancing eyes very near together,
and an enormous nose. His mouth was as ready to smile as
his eyes. He moved with a keen decided air, and carried his
luggage in a small handkerchief at the end of a stick. He called
a greeting, took me in with one look, and came across the
brook to join us. He was, they told me, a Malikshahi from
the other side of Kebir Kuh. He would have made a very
good picture for “ A Soldier of Fortune.”

Though the Bedrei, on the east of Kebir Kuh, always
mention the Malikshahis on the west of it as lawless beings
of an inferior kind, this wandering tribesman seemed to be
on friendly terms with the Larti and with Sa’id Ja far too.
The country is so solitary that everyone in it is known who
is anyone at all, and it is the most absurd fallacy to imagine
that a lonely region is the one for inconspicuous secrecy.
One could indeed travel for months in the Pusht-i-Kuh
unknown to the authorities, but only by having all the tribes¬
men in the secret and in league.

The question of die moment, as we sat outside the hut on
its poor carpets drinking tea, was the matter of my givas.
I had bought an elegant pair in the Baghdad bazaar, but the
hill s had been too much for them, and my toes, innocent of
stockings, which I had been wearing out at the rate of a pair
a day, had nothing left between them and the stones. The
Larti are not giva makers like the Hindimini, but the small
boy of the neighbouring hut happened to be at work on a
pair for himself. Unlike the city things, these were stout
footwear, their uppers made with strong needle weaving of
cord-like wool, and the soles of strips of leather hard as wood,
arranged to be flexible on the same principle as the top of a

[ 128 ]

Another Larti grave

roll-top desk, and sticking out about half an inch all round in
proper mountaineering fashion. They were too big for
me, but Shah Riza in his emphatic way asked if it was not his
profession to fit clothes on to anyone at all, and pulled out of
his tobacco box an enormous packing needle which had
already served to mend my skirt when tom by the dogs.
With his Pahlevi hat tilted at an incredibly rakish angle over
one eye, he sat in the shadow of the porch of leaves, sewing
round and round the opening of the giva until it consented to
dangle more or less tenaciously round my ankle. It looked
something like a snowshoe when finished, and later on amused
the Governor of Pusht-i-Kuh when I called on him. Seven
krans, or is. 2d., was the price of this pair of shoes.

We were still occupied over this business, and hearing from
the Malikshahi about graves in the lands of the Beni Parwar,
when the old man returned, hospitable and cheerful, and
evidently with no idea that we might have expected to find
him true to his appointment.

“ You have been waiting;” said he. “ It does not matter.
To-morrow we will go and dig. And he was just sitting
down to a few glasses of tea and conversation when I ruffled
him by assuring him that we were going off to dig that very
moment, before the darkness fell.

He gave in with a good enough grace, and after looking
about among the tombstones of the old city, and coming to
the conclusion that they were certainly Moslem, and not to
be touched, we found another grave at the cliff s foot, on the
side opposite to that of the day before. The old man dug
hopefully. The results were identical. The same narrow
shaft, built rectangularly of flat stones: the skeleton lying with
head to the west: two sharp stones, not flint but pointed like
flints, under the head and at the knees, and nothing else at all.
The bones were intact, and I took the skull, and wrappe it

[ 129 ]

I

The Hidden Treasure

up in my Burberry, to the chagrin of the Philosopher, who felt
I was robbing him of his garment. And as the dusk was
falling, we stumbled back among the obliterated terraced
gardens of the city, to the hut by the mill.

This was a bad night, our host being so poor and his carpets
full of bugs. The barley crop had failed this year, and he
allowed me to give him two krans with which he wandered
off to buy our horses’ dinner from luckier neighbours who
still had some in store. Otherwise he would accept nothing.

“ What I have, I give you. What is not here, you cannot
have,” he said with the unconscious dignity that comes of true
courtesy. But I learnt the poverty of the litde family from
the wife, for she put my fourpence into a fold of her garment
whence it dropped out and was lost, and I found her sobbing
as she baked our bread as if her heart would break.

Poor as they were, these people had two guests poorer than
themselves, a widow woman and her daughter from Lakistan
across the river. “ The widow and the fatherless and the
stranger.” Among the nomads one realizes the Bible sorrow
of these words; the absolute want of protection, the bitter
coldness of charity when obligations of kinship or hospitality
have ceased to count. These two women worked about
the fields for their small share of the household bread, until
they must wander on, weak, helpless, and indifferent to their
own fate as driftwood.

They were not a likeable type; they had the narrow, foxy
faces and shifty eyes that I remembered in northern Luristan,
unpleasing in a successful robber, but ten times more so when
he has become a cringing victim of fate. Some war or raid
had driven them from their home: they fingered my belongings
with an eye to begging what they could, ready to steal if
possible. What litde I gave only made them ask for more.
The young mistress of the hut, who, with her old husband

[i3°]

Camps of the Bronze Age

behind her, could face poverty with a brave face, looked at
them tolerandy, understanding and despising.

Next morning we were late again in starting. We had
decided to dig among the graveyards of die Beni Parwar,
since our Malikshahi friend had a brother staying here who
knew of a site, and our host also told of places in the plain
where graves with jars had been found, and beads and bronzes.
At the last, however, there was great reluctance and an
hour’s delay before we could get off, and then the two men
came with nothing but their hands to dig with, and had to go
back for their ineffective tools. I started ahead down the valley,
keeping to our path of two days before, and coming out again
where the slope descended, free of trees to the plain.

A litde stream, the Ab-i-Makula, runs in spring through the
lands of the Beni Parwar and Dus an and into the Saidmarreh
out of sight, but it is nothing of a stream, and vanishes com¬
pletely in summer. The crops of all this tilled ground depend
on rain alone, and the far-spaced camps get their water from
muddy holes in the ground.

Here, however, the people of the Bronze Age lived, and
their camps or graves can be found everywhere on the slopes
of the small gatch hills that ripple the surface of the plain. We
tried two places and found chipped flints, evidendy brought
from a distance, splinters of bronze, rough red pottery and
mortar, and a squared stone, probably used for dressing
<kim or as a loofah. There were no bones, and dim lines of
dwellings appeared under the surface of the ground. But
my party was discouraged by the size of the boulders to be
dislodged. The morning was hot already in the open land;
and the men’s ridiculous pickaxe continued to separate itself
from its handle and to require longer and longer interludes
for its mending. Promise of pay had no charm for one who
had already sixpence in his pocket from the Lard digging.

[i3i]

The Hidden Treasure

in vain I talked of buried gold and silver to my old man,
who merely spat upon his hands and smiled.

Another old man came presently riding on a donkey over
the yellow plain. He had a long beard descending to his by

chest with a flattened silvery wave like that of a Sumerian
carving: he had an aquiline profile, and a pleasant wise keen- of

ness of old age in his eyes. When, as a matter of course, he ofi

dismounted to hear all about us, I knew that the morning’s rat

digging might just as well be relinquished, for he and Shah be.

Riza squatted side by side and began to smoke in that com- cai

panionable silence which is the prelude to a long, long chat. sac

The Malikshahi and our old host rested near-by with the to

pickaxe between them, ready to listen in. Our Odyssey was Q

entered upon by the Philosopher with such slow and casual m

monosyllables as might belie any indecent sense of hurry. G

The old stranger, puffing at a home-made clay pipe, very like
a small coffin in shape, gave me a glance now and then to see
if my appearance corroborated the peculiar story he was

hearing, and the sun climbed higher and higher in the sky. w

It was no use staying there, I thought. I made a note of the
place as a fertile hunting-ground for future archaeologists, and sa

announced myself ready to start.

Shah Riza was ready too. He must have been hungry for T

his lunch, for he soon beat his mare into a trot and deviated
from our path towards a litde group in a bare hollow. Sa’id oi

Ja’far and I meandered leisurely after. When we came up, fr

our welcome was waiting. The master of the tents held my ^

stirrup to descend: a carpeted space had been made for me
under a woollen awning: and we had just setded down to the tc

first friendly politenesses, when the sudden appearance of aa

three mounted policemen on the skyline gave us all a shock. tc

ai

li

1 132 ]

Capture

The seriousness of the shock to all concerned was shown
by our silence.

The policemen descended into the hollow, and the master
of the tents hastened out to salute one who appeared to be the
officer, a youngish man in a tidy khaki uniform. He had a
rather heavy chin not recendy shaved. His two followers
belonged to the nazmieh, in blue, with guns, pistols, and
cartridge-belts hanging all about them. They bent from their
saddles to make enquiries. The master of the tents pointed
to where I sat secluded. Shall Riza glanced at me uneasily.
Quite imperceptibly our friendly circle of tribesmen had
melted away: Ctesar’s enemy has no friends in Persia when
Ctesar is anywhere about.

I was feeling anxious myself, but determined not to show it.

“ Do the police often come here?” I asked casually.

“ Never,” said one of the tribesmen. “ You must know
why they have come.”

“ They may have heard of me and come to see my passport,

said I. ,

“ Have you got a passport?” said they, surprised and relieved.

Those two tomans at Bedrah had been well spent.

As we spoke, another surprise came fluttering over the brow
of the hollow. This was the old Kadkhuda of the Musi, our
friend, in a great state of agitation. He dismounted and
walked straight to my tent.

“ They made me follow you,” he burst out, scarce waiting
to greet us. “ They thought you had escaped across the river,
and they made me responsible for finding you. They refused
to believe me when I said you would return.” He also looked
at me with obviously great anxiety. I told him how much I
regretted the long day’s ride he had been made to undertake.

[ 133 ]

The Hidden Treasure

“That is nothing,” said he. Many worse tilings, he
seemed to say, might happen in the immediate future.

Meanwhile the police had finished their enquiries. The
lieutenant was striding up towards my tent with an official
air, arranging his curved sword at a military angle as he came,
prepared to exert in its full force the majesty of Law. It was
a delicate moment. I greeted him with as ceremonious a
composure as I knew how, and motioned him to a seat on the
far comer of my carpet: the tent, I meant to imply, was mine
for the time being, but he was a welcome guest: the lieutenant,
though he had other ideas on the subject, could not very well
express them. He bowed in a provisional manner and began
to ask questions.

Having tracked us for three days across the solitudes of
Pusht-i-Kuh from Husainabad, where, as I had feared at the
time, the ill-omened wedding guests spread the report of our
journey, the lieutenant of police felt certain that the very last
thing we should have in our possession would be a passport.
Else why were we here, unannounced and unknown; When,
of my own free will, I asked him whether it would not interest
him to see our papers, he began to be surprised.

He had obviously been pondering in his mind how to inform
anyone as polite as I was that he had come to take me into
custody. He accepted my passport with a beginning of
doubt in his manner. It was in perfect order, and had been
signed at the frontier by Persian officials. Shah Riza’s
document, rather more surprisingly, was in perfect order too.
Shah Riza, it is true, showed a deplorable nervousness over it,
but that might easily be attributed to the merely general effect
in Persia of anyone who is an official on anyone who is not.
The lieutenant studied the document from every angle: said
it was very peculiar: wondered that we had been allowed to
cross at so lonely and unusual a part of the frontier, and

[i34]

The Lieutenant of Police is puzzled

finally fell back on the method of direct questioning. I was
hunting for buried treasure, he decided. He gave a glance
towards my saddle-bag. Would he like to see what I had
found; I asked. We had been digging in three places, but
all I had carried away of any interest at all was a skull. The
lieutenant, more intrigued than ever, watched with a long face
while the object was extricated from my Burberry. I
presented it to him. I was taking it, I explained, to the Iraq
museum where people understood about such things.

The lieutenant was for the moment docile in my hands.
Having seen that his premises were wrong, he had none to
put in their place except such as I chose to suggest. And no
motives could be too eccentric for someone who travelled
about with a skull. He listened while I explained to him the
interesting problems of his country’s history, and asked what
were my plans. To travel round the cemeteries of Shirwan
and Tarhan, said I. I had been delighted, I added to see that
there appeared to be no danger on the roads of the Pusht-i-
Kuh: it was a safer country than Iraq. This pleased die police
lieutenant. The whole of Persia, he said, was safe from end
to end It had been the only point, I remarked, which had
made me a litde doubtful about journeying into Lunstan:
now that he reassured me, I felt there was nothing to prevent
my going on. The lieutenant told me, untruthfully, that I

was free as air to go anywhere.

It is a matter of regret that I did not take him at his word
and start right away to cross the Saidmarreh I knew at the
time that I was risking the whole journey by delay.

But I still expected my accomplice, and felt certain that n
chance would ever come again of visiting.thevaheymf the
treasure if once I left its neighbourhood. To ^ beutenmt
obvious relief, I told him diat I was returning to die Mtm
tribe that night. He and his party, he said, would follow

[US]

The Hidden Treasure

(to see that I really did so). They would rest a few hours
and catch us up on their faster horses.

The master of the tents now appeared with a chicken ready
roasted on its wooden spit: the lieutenant dismembered it
with delicate fingers and deposited half of it before me. I
sacrificed one of my three remaining boxes of sardines, and
shared them with my captor, who soon rode off, as I afterwards
discovered, to make further enquiries into our doings among
the tribes of the ravines. As for me, I slept for an hour while
the ponies finished their unappetizing meal of chopped straw,
and then, with a sobered retinue, and leaving a hush behind me,
set out again on a track that led towards the Unbelievers’
Defile.

We rode now in the late afternoon, and descended on the
valley of the Rua with level sun rays slanting from our left.
We were made welcome from far off by our friends of the
Dusan camp, who evidently expected to see me brought along
in shackles, having been strictly interrogated by the police
that morning. Now that our captors were out of sight, it
became obvious that to be in disgrace with the law was one
way of being really popular among the tribesmen. A feeling
of cordiality was noticeable everywhere. The women came
up to pat my knees and admire the new givas, and begged me
to stay the night. Our guide brought out the result of his
digging, a piece of carved stucco column and a cornelian bead
from die centre of the defile: three spear-heads found there
some while before, were added to the booty. We refused to
dismount, as it was late already, but turned our horses home¬
ward up the valley, at a brisk pace among the tamarisks of the
river bed.

We had hardly crossed to the northern side, when the
policemen and the old kadkhuda appeared in the distance, and
shouted to us to stop the night. I still did not realize that I was

[136]

Riding in the dark

virtually a prisoner, and, considering this mere unnecessary
politeness, waved light-heartedly and rode on, the mountains
now blue in dusk in front of us under a sunset sky. Nightfall
would see us home, said Shah Riza as he ambled leisurely.
Said Ja’far was uneasy, and begged us to hurry before the

“ This is desert,” said he; “ it is not safe like the city.”

But Shah Riza never hurried except for a meal, and I was
enjoying the cool peace of the evening air; and presently
another delay came to meet us in the shape of an old man
with a donkey, who looked at my Philosopher intently,
and then exclaimed by the Hand of God, that this must be
Shah Riza. And having recognized each other after years
of separation the two old men embraced and kissed many times,
with a charming tenderness, and ambled on together more

slowly than ever, talking of the past.

By the time we reached the shrine of Jaber, its thirteen
pagoda tiers were invisible altogether in the night. We
climbed along a cliff-edge, trusting to our pomes sagacity
not to walk over, for nothing could be seen. The donkey,
with flapping ears just visible in the shadows, wandered here
and there among our feet delaying us while its master and the
Philosopher still talked, and Said Jafar, anxious in theloneh-
ness, rode on silently ahead. The uninhabited valley seemed
endless. As we entered its narrowest part, a jing
clatter behind announced the policemen md the kadkhuda.
The lieutenant rode up bustling and annoyed. t<

“ why did you insist on coming on; he asked. U

^ ™ „ with reproaches. To be « «

night was, it appeared, a monstrous impropriety. As fast

[137]

The Hidden Treasure

we could, we hastened over the roughness of the ground, and
filled the little valley with the jingle of bits, and with sparks
when the horses’ hooves hit a stone. The policeman’s gun
in front of me, slung over his shoulder, just showed against
the dark blue of the sky. The horses in the dark gave a
pleasant sense of exhilaration and movement, which, however,
I was careful not to mention, as I felt I was in disgrace.

When at last the fires of the Musi tents showed on the hill¬
side, a general relaxation came over the party. The lieutenant
saw me home, bowed, and retired with the kadkhuda and his
policemen: and I was left to the sympathetic welcome of
Mahmud and his family, who evidently felt about the coming
of the Law much as I did.

A Mild Affair with Bandits

That night, while the cows came and nibbled at my roof in
the darkness, I tried to make my plans.

Hasan had not turned up from Baghdad. He was in prison,
put there by his enemy, the vizier, to prevent his leaving the
country, but I could not guess this at the time. It was clear
that I should have to do what I could without him.

The first thing was to go up into the treasure mountain
and see if the map was correct. The second was to shake off
the police, if possible, and get across the river to Lakistan.
I decided that the first was the more important of these
objectives and the second must, if necessary, be sacrificed to
it, since it is an axiom that one cannot be sure of getting more
than one thing at a time. The police would probably refuse
to be shaken off: already they had spoken of accompanying
me to Husainabad next day, and only the assurance that I was
far too tired to start on a two days’ journey had put an ex¬
tinguisher on the lieutenant’s plans.

[138]

No horses

By the morning my tactics were ready. When the kadkhuda
came, sent by the enemy to question me, I made, as it were, a
reconnaissance by saying that I had decided to cross the river,
to spend ten days or so in Lakistan, and then return by way of
Husainabad and call on the Governor on my way home. I
waited to see what would happen. There was an ominous
nodding of heads between the kadkhuda and the chiefs of the
Musi over this statement. Mahmud, his face very serious,
sat looking at the ground. A little later, when all had been
duly reported, the lieutenant came to call, sat on the carpeq
talked about religion in the most elevating way, and asked it
it was true that I meant to cross the river.

“ I had thought of it,” said I. “My plans are quite vague.
So long as I can visit interesting ruins in this country, I am
content wherever I go. What do you recommend: .

The lieutenant shrugged his shoulders. Anything you
please,” said he. “ I only desire to serve you. You can go
where you like best.”

My heart rose. For a few hours I hoped that after all I
might visit the treasure valley and cross the river too. I told
Shah Riza to have the horses ready next morning. After a
decent interval, Shah Riza came to tell me that there were no

horses left among the tribe.

“No horses?” said I, outraged at my old Philosophers
sanctimonious duplicity. “ What has happened to those

we were riding yesterday?” _ _ „

“ They had to be sent off early this morning.

I was on the way back from a visit to my small patient,
and caught up with Mahmud behind his tent.

“ What is this about the horses?” I asked.

“ What about the horses?” said he. , „

“ I have been telling her that there are no horses left here,

said Shah Riza in obvious discomfort.

[i39]

The Hidden Treasure

Mahmud looked down at me from his great height and
stooping shoulders. He seemed to be making up his
mind.

“ You shall have as many horses as you like,” said he.
“ They are my horses, after all. And we will take you to
Tarhan to-morrow if you wish, whatever anyone may say.”

This truly courageous offer touched me very much. I
thanked Mahmud.

“ I knew Shah Riza was lying,” I said. The Philosopher
looked unhappy.

“ I did it for the good of my people,” he explained. “ The
lieutenant tells you one thing, but he threatens us with punish¬
ment if we let you have a horse, or guide you where you want
to go. Mahmud is reckless: he will do anything: but it is he
who will have to pay, and you will be far away.”

This was true enough, and I gave up there and then any
thought of crossing the river that time. I decided not to
take risks that other people would have to pay for, and by
giving way gracefully to improve my chances of a day in the
treasure valley. When next we sat at tea round the fire, I said
that I had changed my mind: if the lieutenant would wait a
day for me, I would take advantage of die fortunate chance of
his company and guidance and go to Husainabad first, and
thence if possible to Tarhan, after having visited the Governor.
I only required one day more here, to look at some old ruins
I had heard of in the neighbourhood, and then I would be
ready to start. The lieutenant was charmed. No doubt he
was pleasandy surprised to find that his desires and mine
coincided so happily. The day’s delay was nothing to him;
he did not even take the trouble to insist on escorting me to
my ruins.

But now another difficulty threatened.

I sent a message to Sa’id Ja’far to ask if he would guide us

[140]

Preparing for the search

up next day, and Sa’id Ja’far, when he heard the direction
in which I intended to go, declared that he would not risk it,
not with five tribesmen behind him.

“ There is a track,” he said, “ which runs along the level
around up there. It is hidden from sight between two hills,
imd there are no tents for miles on any side. And always
there are brigands: they come up from the river and He in
ambush. Y ou know that we are disarmed. If I had a weapon,

I would not care.” sj s!

“ Providence has attended to this matter,” said I. We
will ask the lieutenant to lend us a policeman. Then we shall
be safe against anything.” „ , . ,

I wrote a little note and sent it to the kadkhuda s tent.

The reply came back in the hands of a young policeman who
was himself to accompany us. I begged Shah Riza to make
his prayers next morning short and early; and feeling that I
had done ah that circumstances allowed, I left the party and
went to think out in my sleeping-sack the details of the
adventure, of which the most difficult day lay before me.

Next morning I dressed as usual before it was light, and
made a few alterations to my costume. I emptied the map
case I carried round my waist, and substituted for its ordinary
contents an electric torch, a candle and box of matches, and a
strong knife, suitable for opening treasure chests if any such
were found. I pinned a small pillow-case, which happened
to be travelling with me, round my waist under my skirt.
And I looked again at the pencilled map, memorizing it
thoroughly. If fortune were kind and I managed to throw
off both the police escort and the tribesmen, and then to _
the cave, I would be ready to take away some speamens of
the treasure undetected. They would be sufficed_ to
any museum or connoisseur; and the next step mig ^

“I more orthodox way, with the help of proper antrquamns.

[I4l]

The Hidden Treasure

So, full of hope, and with the excitement of action upon me,

I went out to see my party.

Shah Riza, I decided, must stay at home. His sense of
responsibility was so great that I would never shake him off.
His ardour for archaeology had worn rather thinner during
the last days, and I had no difficulty in making him see that a
quiet rest was good for his health.

“ The Khanum, she thinks of everything: better than I
do for myself.” I let the undeserved praise pass, and waited
to see with some anxiety who else was coming with me.

Said Ja’far was there, with black cotton trousers reaching
half-way down his legs and givas on his bare feet, ready for
walking. He had the heavy metal-headed stick of the country
in his hand as a weapon. Husein and Ali, two of Mahmud’s
retainers, one dressed in black cotton, the other in white
felt, completed the party, together with the policeman, whom
we sent for as soon as we were ready. All were on foot, for
the road was said to be difficult. The grey mare was there
for me alone, with a water-skin looped over the pommel to
last us for the day.

I had prepared the tribesmen by saying that I expected to
find on the hill the ruins of a fortification of the time of
Nushirvan, so that even if I could not escape from them, they
would, I thought, be looking for ruins while I was looking for
the cave, and something might yet be accomplished. For the
rest, I left my tactics to time and circumstance, and watched,
as I went along, how the landscape fitted in with my map.

We went up the valley, retracing the steps of our coming
until, after half an hour, we came, as Hasan had said, to a path
which tilted itself up the slope of the mountain through patches
of white limestone like salt. The pony found difficulties
here; the white rock crumbled under its hooves like powder,
and the path had no thoughts for gradients. Under ordinary

[142]

a

The bandit

circumstances I should have walked. But I was making
plan, which involved fatiguing my escort while I myself kept
fresh, and so I remained seated, watching the men climbing
with easy mountaineering strides ahead. It was full morning
and the sun was hot: the white slope, dotted with broom
bushes and small shrubs, glistened in the sun: we were being
lifted up again into the joyful loneliness of hills. At the top
of the mountain’s long torpedo ridge runs an important
track from an Imamzadeh on the Saidmarreh banks, along the
level height, and down into the plain of Shirwan on the north¬
west. The track keeps a litde north of the ridge up to a point
where that dips and rises again to another ridge, parallel,
higher, and equally long; so that for a lonely stretch the road
lies, as it were, in a hammock elevated between the two hills,
out of sight of everything except their solitary summits.
This, Sa’id Ja’far said to me, was a place almost always infested
by thieves. As we emerged on to it, a man leaped out from
a small gully below us, and sped over the rocks. Our police¬
man swung his gun and shot at him.

This was the first time in my life that I saw, as I thought, a
brigand, and I cannot say that I felt anything except a pleasant
exhilaration. There was a little band of them down the road,
and our policeman, Sa’id Ja’far, and Ali were bearing down
upon them, fast but cautiously, as if they expected to be shot
at. Beyond, making downhill as fast as their legs would carry
them, were two men with some goats. It went through my
mind in a flash that this was curious impedimenta for a robber
band to be burdened with, but I was too much absorbed m
our own party to trouble with inferences. I stopped my horse
under a litde thorn tree, and watched the operauons, like the
damsel in a medieval romance, hoping for a batde.

The brigands, after wavering a moment or two, decided
not to wait for our advance, and turned downhill, leaping like

[143]

The Hidden Treasure

gazelles. Sa’id Ja’far and the policeman shouted to me: I
hurried up to them, dismounted, snatched the extra weight of
the water-skin off die saddle, while the policeman leaped into
it and pursued over the long grassy shoulder of the mountain.
Husein went running after: the other two stood by me,
watching them out of sight.

They were away for over forty minutes, and a beautiful
peace, an unbroken solitude, lay around us again. I began
to fear that our policeman had been killed. Sa id Ja far
thought not. The fugitives, he considered, were amateurs.
Professional bandits, he said, wore white, which made them
inconspicuous in the rocks: but quite a number of honest
tribesmen might turn to a bit of robbery on a track as lonely
and as notorious as this, especially now when they would
hardly ever meet an armed opponent. One need never fear a
sudden attack in force, Said Ja’far explained. What happens
is, that as you ascend towards the pass one man will step out
as this man did from some gully, and ask you to allow yourself
to be looted. If you comply, you can go on, denuded but
not molested. If you resist, the robber will turn and usually
get away in the rough ground. You and your caravan will
continue in apparent safety until you reach the pass, this is
usually a narrow passage between rocks: and here an enfilading
fire from either side will make an end of you and your
obstinacy.

Sa’id Ja’far had just finished his exposition of the technique
of the national pastime in Luristan, when two wayfarers
appeared, coming towards us along the lonely level of the
track. One was an oldish, the other a young, man, and both
had the heavy-headed metal stave in their hand. Sa id Ja far
and Ali went to meet them before they came too close to me.
It was amusing to watch the approach, for each side evidently
had the blackest suspicions of the other. From a safe distance

[i44]

Two travellers

they called a greeting; then gingerly drew near, sticks held
ready. They asked each other the names of their tribes,
and where they were travelling. As the explanations appeared
satisfactory, die grip on the sticks relaxed, the distance became
less carefully maintained, and I was allowed to draw into the
radius of conversation.

The two travellers said that they had seen the men who
caused all the commotion. They were not robbers at all.
They were Hindimini tribesmen.

“ Why did they leap out at us from the rocks?” said I.

The party seemed to think this quite natural.

“ Either they thought we were robbers,, and wanted to be
in the best position to begin with,” said Said Ja’far, ‘ or they
may have hoped that we were unarmed, and then of course
they might have robbed us whether they were robbers or no.

“ It just shows,” said I, “ that when one goes about with a
policeman one can always find somebody to shoot. How

lucky to have missed the man.

“ Well,” said Said Ja’far, “ it was his fault. He ought to
have stopped when he saw a policeman, and not made him

gallop like this for miles. Here they come back. _

The policeman was trotting towards us, with Huseinjogging
at his stirrup leather, and the old mare tossing her mane as if

she felt that it had been a holiday. . , , ,

He was very cross with the ^ Hindimini. They had made
him gallop half-way over the hill before he rode them down,
and then they bad turned out to be most disappointing y

'“Cffi'Jbteu.enan.), will think that I wasted .

cartridge for nothing,” he added. „

“ Newer nied," said I, “ it was an excellent tamasha.

On this we were all agreed, and set off again in the best of
spirits on our delayed expedition.
k [ X 4S ]

The Hidden Treasure

The summit of the ridge, when we came to it, was a de-
lightful place. Oak trees, well grown and round as cabbages,
spaced singly here and there, threw shady patterns on the
grass like splashes of Chinese embroidery on a tablecloth.
The yellow lawns spread more or less on a level with gende
ups and downs. From the edge on the right one had only a
monotonous ridge in sight across the dip we had skirted that
morning: but the other edge jutted on to space. It went
steeply down like a wave just gathering, and looked on the
Saidmarreh River, green as paint in the valley below. Be¬
hind us the wave continued, descending in tree-dotted slopes
to the plain of Shirwan, visible with cultivation: that part of
the mountain backbone was Waraq Husil; we had seen its
other face from the pass of Milawur. From north-west, along
the plain, the river came winding in a ribbon of flat land where
the wintering tribes sow their com: there it had eaten itself
a bed between low cliffs filled with thickets of tamarisk.

At present, but for a small cultivated patch of Rudbar Arabs
on our right, the land was empty. One beyond another,
long hills, cuirassed with flat slabs, lay behind the river like a
fleet at anchor, motionless and stripped for batde. Facing
us there, was a wall of a ridge called Barkus; not a blade of
grass appeared to grow upon it: its rusty boiler-plates of rocks
were cleft into shallow cracks for water, and its base was
decorated with a series of very regular pinky-white triangles,
where small streams, descending in parallel gullies, had laid
bare in so amusingly symmetrical a fashion the lower strata
of limestone in the soil. The foothills between Barkus and
the flat river-land, were all salty, and nothing, Said Ja’far said,
would grow upon them: but they had here and there traces
of low mud walls which serve to surround and protect the
tents of the Lurs in winter, for the tribes live on that higher
ground above their riverain fields. The track from Lakistan,

[146]

We look across the river

along which they would be migrating in a month or so,
ran over these foothills from the country of Tarhan. We
saw how it kept to the higher ground, avoidmg the dangerous
recess of the Berinjan defile, into which we could look straight
down. Another black cut in the landscape showed the Tang
Siah beyond, the Black Narrows, which, they told me, must
be negotiated before one can emerge into Tarhan, a far,

romantic landscape lost in mists of sunlight. .

We sat down where we could look at all this. I feared now
that I should never cross the river, but it was something to
craze at its unknown course, and see the way upon its farther
side No doubt was left in my mind that somewhere along
this water highroad the old civilizations must be looked
for; a natural law links its fertile plains together m a chain
which probably continues unbroken between Kermenshah

on the north and Susa in the south. . ,

I had brought lunch on my own account foreseeing; that
a folded piece of bread stowed away in their waistbands
was aH that my escort would think of in the way of food.
Said Ta’far, however, had been addinonally inspired by two
pomegranates. Apart from everything else, I was anaous
that my people should feel as happy and somnolent as possAl
for realm of my own. I fed them with sheep s-tongue in a
tin, jam, bread, and tea, to which the goatskin
rather a depressing taste. I had asked whether me sheep s-
tongue was^safe for Moslems when I bought it, and having
satisfied their religious doubts, I watched them takei to it vnth
enthusiasm. After we had eaten, an _ ° u ^ ’ ^

over a packet of cigarettes and remarked tha , L, lf

walked while I had ridden, I might perhaps
and look for ruins while they rested: they could follow when

tut "no one showed my mcliuaoon so move.

[ 147 ]

The Hidden Treasure

Husein offered to come if I felt any alarm, but was obviously
relieved when I remarked that, as the landscape would be
clear of brigands for a week after the morning’s doings, I
would go alone. I strolled away slowly till I was out of sight:
then I started to hurry as fast as I could, north-west to the wadi
of the treasure.

For twenty minutes the ridge continued its broad and park¬
like symmetry, in a solitude so great that six ibex, standing on
their hind legs to reach the lower branches of an oak tree,
were frightened away by my approach. It was two-thirty
when I left my party: two hours was the utmost I could
allow myself before our return, and the men might begin to
search for me sooner: and yet no wadi was in sight.

I was beginning to doubt the map after all, when a cleft
appeared descending on the northern side of the hill to the
river, and therefore invisible from the south as we came up.
Here, by rights, should be the treasure. A black rock should
overhang on the left side as one climbed down; four wan
trees and an oak should make a group before it; and between
the rock and the trees I ought to find the entrance to the cave.

Partly with the haste of my walk, and partly with excite¬
ment, my heart was now beating, my knees and hands shaking.
I began to descend in a great hurry, pausing at every group
of rocks to see if the cave could be there. The ravine, from
a shallow grassy basin, quickly turned into a sort of funnel
with, overhanging rocks, a series of small granite amphi¬
theatres descending in tiers, and every one of them capable
of containing half a dozen caves or more. And trees, wan
and oak, grew everywhere. In five minutes I had descended
what would take me four times as long to climb up again.
And the ravine grew more and more difficult. Black rocks
were all about it, mocking me with litde openings of possible

caves.

[MSI

The ravine of the treasure

I remembered a fairy story of my childhood. The Prince s
-Reloved had been carried off by a witch to Lapland and turned
into a plant of heather: she would be frozen by the winter
mVht if the word to disenchant her were not recalled, the
word was forgotten: alone on the moor in the dusk, with
the deadly night coming, the Pnnce could not distinguish,
^„»g Lmrny like Her, the Me plan, he loved: he tned
“/after word: only at die very las, the right one came,
and the figure of his love rose up in the twilight.

But my word did not come. Whether I had not descended
far enough, or whether I missed the nght place m that chaos
of rocks g I do not know. But the very last of my tune was
1 and I dared not seek further. Somehow or other I must
scramble back up the ravine and try not to arouse suspicion.
So much time had gone already, that even if I now found
% “ve I should not be able to explore it. I turned to hurry
Jain faster than ever I had climbed before, up the steep sides of

^ThJ^o hours were up before I reached the grass of the
hkhL: hollow. I saw Husein pass along the skylrne loohng

£1 STofIhicTl ^"c^uTI litdc sml

Evened with me, ^ ££

*£££« whoever I opmedmy
“ want of moisture iu

them in crowds. , . j j evote d five

When I reached the top of the ndge again,

[i49]

The Hidden Treasure

more minutes to a last survey. I reached a high point whence
I could see how the end of the mountain dipped down to the
Saidmarreh on one side and the plain of Shirwan on the other.
In the east was the northern wall of the Unbelievers’ Defile
where we had travelled: the upper edge of that precipice
was just visible. I made a careful note of the landscape and
position, and with a little breath again in my body, started
to race back along the ridge as I had come. A hare leaped
out and scuttered from under my feet. A jay screeched in
the trees. I could not think, but went counting my steps
mechanically to make myself keep on. And after hours as it
seemed, I saw the policeman and Sa’id Ja’far, still placidly rest¬
ing under the oak tree, and the grey mare browsing near-by.

That was the end of the treasure hunt. And what there
may be in the cave of the mountain still remains a mystery. .

Sa’id Ja’far and the policeman had been getting anxious.
Husein soon returned and showed great joy and surprise at
finding me: he could not think how he had missed me on the
ridge. As quickly as we could, for we had no time to lose,
we started homeward; and had descended, and reached again
the track to Shirwan, when we saw Ali and another man, a
policeman, coming to meet us, with the lieutenant’s fine bay
and a second water-skin, a thoughtful offering on his part.

The rest of die descent was a long affair, and the white
limestone as bad downhill as up for the horse s feet. Between
one skid and another, the day s adventure with the brigands
was recounted. Our own policeman, a pleasant healthy
peasant lad from Kermenshah, showed his cartridge-belt
with the cartridge missing: he was pleased and relieved
because the lieutenant had sent words of praise. I took litde
part in all this, for my heart still seemed to be pounding my
ribs after that hectic race. But presently I was roused by the
man who came with Ali, who asked if I had seen the cave.

[ 150 ]

Humiliation of the Philosopher

“ what caves” said I. “ I am interested in caves.,

“ Far on the other side, a big cave near the river.”

“ Some day,” said I, “ I will come again, and you shall
take me to see it. Have you been inside?”

“Yes, indeed,” said he. “It is a big cave, but with

nothing inside it.”

And that is the last I heard about the place of the treasure,
until I returned to Baghdad.

Return to Garau

The family of Mahmud was particularly friendly that
evening round the fire. My avowed dislike of travelling
about with an escort had, I think, something to do with it:
they hated the police with an intensity which no one could
guess at from their obsequious manners in the lieutenants

^ The lieutenant himself seemed to be a bombastic, empty-
headed, but not bad enough man to deserve such violent

“He is all words,” said Mahmud, with a virulence of scorn
refreshing in a country where the excess of words is not
usually looked upon as remarkable., “ He says all those
prayers, and they are worth nothing. The lieutenant was,
indeed always punctilious to turn the peak of his cap round
the back of his head and prostrate himself on a rug whichbus
police spread out for him. Shah Rfra, usually more timid
where Authority was concerned, whether human or divine,
agreed with his kinsman, in a deprecating way.

8 The matter of the horses hong heavy on hts soul. I
him with it in the evening circle, to the delrght of all dre
tribesmen, who were a litde restive now and then under

uncompromising smetimomo^ea

“ He comes with me as a guide, said 1,

[i5i]

The Hidden Treasure

easy in a strange land, and on the very first occasion on which
I really need him, when it is a choice between me and a
perfecdy strange police officer, he tells me lies so as to please
the policeman.”

“ Hear, hear,” said all die tribesmen, or words to that
effect, laughing and cheering me on.

The Philosopher smiled too, hut in a shamefaced way.
He was really unhappy.

“ Khartum ,” said he, “ you must forgive me. It was to
my people. I know hlahmud. He does not care what
he does to the police. He would have got into trouble, and
they have no scruples: they would come and take all he has
away from him.

“ That is what you should have told me,” I retorted.
“ Then, as you see I have done now, I would have given up
the thought of my journey. It is a dreadful thing to tell lies
to your own master because a strange policeman asks you to
do so.”

Shah Riza would have argued still, but the meeting was
against him.

“ Go for him,” said the lady of the house, with her clay
pipe in her hand. “ It is good for him to hear.” And the
men, as they passed out of the porch to attend to the flocks
just coming home, clapped him on the back with glee, telling
him that now he knew what the Khanum thought about him.

The day’s treasure hunt had left me rather exhausted, and
I thought I would have my supper before going over the hill
to see my patient of the snake bite: but the Persian is too
accustomed to human callousness not to make all provision
he can against it. As I sat resting in the porch, a pathetic little
procession came up: the old man, holding his son on the back
of a donkey, and the mother walking behind. I was annoyed
because they had moved the child instead of waiting.

[152]

Difficulty of helping the sick

“ To save you the trouble of walking, ’ they said, as they

laid him down on the ground.

Though his pulse still raced, the arm undoubtedly looked
better; it had turned to a colour of healthy flesh, and the boy
himself seemed no weaker. The lieutenant, who had first
been indifferent, was impressed when he saw that I put oft
rolling on him, so as to see the sick boy, and evidently took
it that philanthropy was the order of the day. He said that
a government doctor would cure him if he could be got to

“How can they get him there;” said the old kadkhufa.

“ It means two days for the going alone, and they have not a
penny in the world with which to hire a donkey or a horse.

“ Let that not stand in the way,” said the lieutenant,
they find an animal for transport, I will pay for it and give
them a letter to the doctor.

I thought this a generous offer, and expected to see die
animal appear. But nothing happened. When die evening
came, I asked whether anything was bemg done about it.

“ You don’t imagine that that man meant what he said,
the tribesmen asked me. “ If we found a horse, he would
not pay for it: and if the boy reached Husamabad the doctor
woifld not cure him for nothing. He only speaks to make

SStT^nk so evilly of the police.
But evidendy nothing was going to be done. ,

“ If the lieutenant does not pay, I will, said .
o-ive two tomans as soon as I see the boy actually setting out
diat will take him to Husainabad and leave something over
" MU myself will «that hegets thedoctor

“ Your heart is full of compassaon,” they and. If God

^y d- evening, noting had
[ 153 ]

The Hidden Treasure

yet been done about it. Since I was leaving the next morning,

I gave the two tomans, knowing well that they would never
be spent in die manner intended: but no doubt they would
buy food, and the boy seemed to stand a chance of recovering
with no doctor at all. After having the wound dressed, the
little famil y sat watching me at my dinner with humble envy.
The old man kept his quiet and admirable dignity, looking
without affectation, but only with a natural sadness into
space: the woman followed every mouthful I ate with her
eyes, until I could bear it no longer. My hosts gave her some
dinner at last: it was not for herself that she had broken the
tacit Eastern code of courteous aloofness. She watched the
boy feed with a sort of savage love, an animal ferocity,
choosing out for him the more succulent pieces of meat from
among the bits of bread in the bowl before him. It was by
no means an invalid’s diet: but I reflected that he was not to
be killed by such trifles, or he would long ago have been dead,
and probably a good meal was what he needed more than
anything else. He ate and ate. And finally licked the
last taste off his fingers with a sigh. I had handed him a litde
toy watch, which gave him great happiness. He began to
talk in a high feverish voice, with a strange mixture of boyish¬
ness and hard stoicism of the poor. He had two brothers,
porters in Baghdad, said he. He too would be a porter, if
he did not die.

“ I do not mind dying,” said he. “ But I do not like to
think that my body rots and smells before I am dead.

“ It will not do that,” we said. “ Do you not see how your
arm looks better since you have been washing it with the

red water;” ^

He looked at the poor stump with distaste. “ God knows,’
said he. “ But I shall never be able to shoot with a gun or cut
with a knife.”

We leave the tribe

It was late and dark already. The old man held the donkey,
and two tribesmen lifted the boy up. I said no more about
milk or eggs or such impossibilities, or even about the journey
to a doctor: but left it, vanquished, to Allah, in the manner of
the East.

Next morning by seven-thirty the lieutenant was ready,
and I parted from my friends. Mahmud had put all the best
trappings on the grey mare, and was sending Husein with me
to the capital in the hope that, having visited the Governor,

I might yet be able to return by Shirwan and carry out the
original plan of my journey. They would all wait and
be ready to guide me wherever I might wish to go. They all
came up for cordialleave-takings; not very welcome, I thought,
to the lieutenant, who stood by with only the kadkhuda m
a dutiful attitude beside him while these affectionate ceremonies
were taking place.

“ It is all lies,” he said to me as soon as we had got away.
“ Mahmud is a bad man. He is only pleasant to you because

of the presents you give him.”

We rode back by the way of our coming: the mills ot
Garau. I was not sorry to be going to Husainabad, for this
way is not marked in the map, and the upper Garau valley
was all new country to me, as it is to most other Europeans,
though it is probably by this route that the Russian cavalry
came from Kermenshah to Amara during the British advance

on Kut. . v

I rode with a leisureliness exasperating to the policemen

whose horses were much better than mine. The lieutenant
offered to change my mount at intervals: but I was anxious to
take some bearings later on, and had no objection to gorng
slowly, and soon to make him tired enough to leave me,
either to rest behind me or to trot on ahead.

The valley was as hot and waterless as before, but

[ 155 ]

The Hidden Treasure

uninhabited, for people were ploughing here and there. They
gave drinks from their water-skins to our police, who never
appeared to travel with so necessary an equipment as a water-
bottle in this arid land. As we came out mto Garau by the
defile where we had first met the ill-omened wedding guests,
an old man came down with his plough on his shoulder;
it was made all of wood with a blunted wooden blade, shiny
and smooth with use. He, smiling up with shrewd peasant
eyes under his matted hair and felt skull cap, looked as ancient
as the instrument he carried.

We met the first advance guards of the tribes moving to
winter quarters: a trail of tired people, donkeys and small
black oxen laden with cooking-pots, carpets and tents, and
a few chicken on the top of all. Women, their long gowns
catching them at every step, walked half bent with sma
children on their backs. The daily stage for a mbe on the
move must be a very slow one; and one can realize why, a
Year or two ago, when some Lurs, setded by force m eastern
Persia, wanted to break their way home across the hostile
land, they eliminated the worst of the impedimenta by
massacring their own families before the march. .

Shah Riza had of course forgotten the merely terrestrial
matter of lunch, though he had been reminded in good time.

“ How wicked,” said he, without a moment s hesitation
when I asked him; “ how wicked is the wife of Mahmud to
let a guest depart without food for the wilderness

“ She forgot,” said I, “ but it is only once, and you forget
every day. Now what are you going to do;

“ Khartum” said he, with an appearance of gende reason¬
ableness, “ by the Majesty of God, can I produce food in an

uninhabited land;’ ,

I gave up the effort to cope with my Philosopher and turnec

to the police. They were taking me where I had never plannee

1156 1

The tax-collectors

to come; the least they could do was to feed me. TBs, I
must say, they were more than willing to do, though I suspec^
them of very rarely paving for what we consumed. Wh
Te matter of lunch was broached, the lieutenant sent a man
on ahead to the upper mill of Garau, above our former
camping-place, while we followed slowly.

The lieutenant was waiting for news from Husainabad. H
had I guessed, sent a messenger as soon as he came upon me,
and was still waiting for instructions as to his next P r ° ceed f J
w Is we turned off the main track into a htde side vahey
where the mill lay low under the spikes of Walantar by a
clear diminutive stream, a party was sighted coming ^
valley The lieutenant rode to meet it, while
towards the mill, delighting in dre htde ^ercomse m the
shade- a built-out pier made of dry walling cam
■ hollow where the mill stood, like a truncated pyramid, about
fifteen^feet Bgh by ten square at the base, like all the mills of

Ll HerTiwo policemen spread carpets in a shady P^eandtke
inhabitants of three poor" tents gave us a timid, very doubtfB
Wco" And presendy the rest of the party, arriving, filled

the hollow with the noise of their cavalcade.

The head of the visiting party was a young customs o

falSik to eyes and »

stands on a rock ^ ^ ^ ^ ltse lf,

below, are stall to • conduits running

which is Shirwan, you can see tne ware

among the houses.

[ 157 1

The Hidden Treasure

He was now on his way to collect taxes, and was waiting
for an additional bodyguard to join him for this unpopular
sort of tour. He had five riflemen already, Delivand tribes¬
men from Saidmarreh, which is the headquarters of this
corps. They are volunteers, and get a small amount of
money and some land given to them in exchange for their
services when required: they were fine-looking men, with
bushy moustaches and good fighting faces, and they wore
white woollen abbas tied back over their shoulders, turbans,
sashes, two knives stuck in front of them, and their guns slung
behind them. Their chief was a weedy little city specimen
in a Pahlevi hat, very young, whose father got a lump sum
from government for providing a fixed number of these
people.

The Army and the Civil Service had lunch by themselves
beside another tent, discussing no doubt the matter of my
capture, for they threw glances in my direction now and then.
I slept, until roused by a message from the lieutenant who was
suddenly attacked by fever and dysentery and looked very ill
indeed. I sent him quinine and opium pills, and hoped he
might not die on my hands in this particularly lonely stretch
of our journey. When I woke again, the volunteers from
Saidmarreh were setting off as an advance guard: they were
going down by the way we had come up. They were as
friendly as could be when the officers were not about, and
rode away looking fine against the skyline and as unlike the
average figure of a tax-collector as can well be imagined.

I thought I too might be moving: I was anxious to have
some leisure at the Milleh Penjeh Pass at the valley head, so
as to take bearings and link up my map. I had had more
than enough of the lieutenant and the police in general; anc
Shah Riza had irritated me by declaring that his matche:
were packed among my clothes in the saddle-bag, where, a:

[us]

Through the forests

he said ingenuously, no one would look for contraband, and
whence he was now extracting them to the great disorder of
what was left of my wardrobe. I left him, therefore, sur¬
rounded by chaos and protesting, while I walked away. As
she saw me go, the old woman of the tent also protested.
The police, she said, had not paid for my chicken, nor would
ever do so. I handed over fourpence, the regular price, feeling
like a guest no longer, but an intruder.

The Forests of Aftah

I set off at two-thirty, and walked for an hour along a
delightful path that kept by ups and downs through open
fields and glades on the higher level of the valley, where the
sharp spires of Walantar run down in foothills. The vahey
bottom, with the stream and the main path fiom the Milleh
Penjeh, lay all in sight below. A yellow domed tomb and
the ploughed stubble-land was all the sign of humanity about,
for there are no tents between the mills of Garau and the first
Aftab camps, about six hours away. The upper part of the
valley gradually clothed itself in a thick garment of oak trees,
fair-sized and dappled with sunlight and the low pass rose
under them to a gende skyline ahead. The silence and
solitude lay pleasandy around in a delightful peace.

Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human
spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our
codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or a penance, bu
hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to
ordinary life, and fiom this want of recognmon come Mf
our domestic troubles. The fear of an unbroken < tete-a-tete
for the rest of Ms life should, you would think, prevent
any man fiom getting married. (Women are not so much
affected since they can usually be alone in their houses or
most of the day if they wish.) Modem education ignores the

[i59]

The Hidden Treasure

need for solitude: hence a decline in religion, in poetry, in all
the deeper affections of the spirit: a disease to be doing something
always, as if one could never sit quiedy and let the puppet show
unroll itself before one: an inability to lose oneself in mystery
and wonder while, like a wave lifting us into new seas, the
history of the world develops around us. I was thinking these
thoughts when Husein, out of breath and beating the grey
mare for all he was worth with the plaited rein, came up
behind me, and asked how I could bear to go on alone for
over an hour, with everyone anxious behind me.

Husein dismounted so that I might ride, and walked ahead
with the muscles rippling under his brown calves and the
ancient remains of a pair of givas sticking here and there to his
feet. The two valley paths met, and went over a low neck of
limestone which enjoys the significant name of Jelau Geringe,
or the “ advanced point where one is captured it used to
be well known for robbers before the present days of peace.
Here the Chu’bid, a small stream, meanders down a sunken
gully from Walantar, now hanging high above us. It runs
into Garau, which starts here as the Ab Barik and runs a
hidden course among trees from its low watershed. The
trees hid the landscape. Except for the absence of under¬
growth, we might have been riding through English woods:
but the clear spaces with only rocks to variegate them gave a
rather poor and barren look, and accounted, I imagine, for
the absence of animal life; only a jay here and there, or a wild
pigeon flew from tree to tree.

Two parties met us, riding the other way: the first, another
squad of riflemen, was going down to join the tax-gatherers,
and was evidently already aware of the fact of my existence
from gossip at Husainabad. The other were strangers, also
riding from the capital into these outer fastnesses, with an
air of fashion conferred by the Pahlevi hat: they looked at me,

[ 160 ]

An unworthy suspicion

astonished, while Husein lingered behind to explain. When
he caught up again, we were in the most solitary depth of
wood: a late golden light was slanting through. Husein
stopped my horse by seizing the bridle, and gazed up at me
with a smile which I thought most disquieting, so apt is one
to be demoralized by imagination.

“ I am tired,” said Husein. “ I am ‘ tinim.’ ”

Tinim must be a Lurish word. I had not the vaguest idea of
what it meant. He evidently expected me to do something
about it and came nearer, repeating it. He then seized my
water-bottle and drank.

Much relieved, I offered to rest for half an hour, or suggested
that he should wait behind and get a lift from Shah Riza.

“ It is not necessary,” said he, quite restored. “ If I had
new givas, I would walk for you over the whole earth.”

“ You dial! get new givas at Husainabad, and I will give them
to you as a present,” said I, full of remorse over my unworthy
suspicions. With this moral stimulus, Husein strode on again,
and we reached the top of the pass in time to take all necessary
bearings before the lieutenant and his police overtook us.

The Mill eh Penjeh Pass divides the Bedrei from the Mishkhas,
a large and rich tribe that owns the lands of Aftab, and usually
goes by the latter name. It grows tobacco chiefly, and is
famed for its ewes, whence, with their usual etymological
fatuity, they say the name Mishkhas (mish-ew T e) is derived!
The cultivated lands do not begin for two or three hours be¬
yond the pass, and we still rode through woodland, now flat
and running in glades with dry beds of the Ab-i-Baliaqin to
be crossed as they descended from our right, and ran along the
foot of Kebir Kuh, westward to join the Aftab water, and
finally make their way through defiles to Iraq under the name
of Kunjan Cham. Where the woods cleared here and there
we could look ahead and see how the long ndge of Kebir

[161]

Ii

The Hidden Treasure

Kuli came to an end: beyond it were isolated, less tidy hills,
spaced irregularly at varying distances: a little puddingy
range called Sardab Kuh ran alongside on our right, hiding
the long cliffs of Saiwan and Barazard behind them. It was
sunset. The lieutenant cantered on ahead and dismounted
to prostrate himself for the fourth prayer by the side of the
path, while the policeman held his horse. He then rejoined
me with a certain swagger, an air of virtue devoid of humility.

“ Prayer is good,” he remarked. “ We Moslems are bound
to pray.”

“ All people of the Book are taught to pray,” I observed.

The lieutenant agreed as if he were making a concession.
Would I mind, he asked, travelling all night so as to reach
Husainabad next morning before it got hot? He felt so ill
that he could not face another day.

We had been riding eight hours already, and die horses
had only had a feed of chopped straw. I offered, however,
to set out at 2 a.m. or so, if a proper feed of oats could be
procured. Meanwhile, we were still far from any sign of
human habitation.

We turned northward across the Baliaqin towards the little
hills, and in the last glimmer of daylight passed a very sweet
spring of water called Chashmeh QaTa Malik, the Spring of
the King’s Casde, which ran between banks of green turf,
where our horses drank. Husein remained behind to fill my
water-bottle. We thought he had followed, but when
darkness had fallen completely, and we were already involved
in the short slopes and sudden comers of the Sardab range,
Shah Riza from the rear suddenly asked where Husein might
be. He was not in the party.

We waited and called. No answer came. The night was
now like velvet round us, with only the MilkyWay above and
a dim streak of limestone track below showing vaguely.

[ 162 ]

The tents of Aftd

The lieutenant was for going on. But this could not be,
and on my protest he galloped back with an air of voluntary
gallantry, and we heard his voice and that of Shah Riza shout¬
ing in the woods.

Husein, however, had vanished, and only recovered us in
the morning. After a time the lieutenant returned: there was
nothing for it but to go on and hope that Husein might find
the way by himself. The night was so dark that we could
hardly see even the shapes of the hills against the sky. We
knew vaguely that we descended: a dampness of cultivated
earth presendy came to our nostrils pleasandy, and soon there
was running water, a sweet sound in the night. Scattered at
wide intervals in a great open basin filled with streams, the
Aftab fires flickered here and there. We stumbled down to
the first of them, and found that it belonged to travellers like
ourselves, a caravan camping in the open, without a handful
of food of any kind for horses.

The next tent was very small and poor: our party could
not have entered it: two people crouching inside pointed us
farther on into the hollow. We waded in water. My
horse, thoroughly nervous with the sound of streams flowing
on all sides, refused to cross a leat which we now came upon,
running along the slope. Shah Riza implored me to dismount:
he leaped off his own mare and fluttered before me like a
hen, or the ghost of one in the dimness, agitating my animal
and asking whether, by the Hand of God, my life was not
under his care. I dug in the comers of my enormous stirrups
and got across finally, leaping down the unseen darkness of
the farther bank with a heave which nearly gave a heart attack
to the Philosopher. I was never able to make him under¬
stand that it was my physical, and not my spiritual needs- which

he was there to attend to. ,

After the agitation of this crossing we came to what looked

[ 163 1

The Hidden Treasure

like a more promising tent, and found an old long-bearded
man in an abba surrounded by snarling dogs. The old man
had no room, said he. His words were disregarded, and I was
told to enter under the flap: a crone inside crouched beside a
new-bom calf over a smoky fire. It was poor enough, and
the lieutenant, when he followed me in, pronounced the place
impossible. Better tents, we knew, must be about somewhere
in so large a settlement: we went out again into the night and
told the old man to guide us. But this he refused to do. If
he brought the police to anyone in the tribe, they would be
his enemies for life, said he; and he could not make enemies
of people in whose neighbourhood he was living for us who
might never come again. The young policeman from
Kermenshah, the same who had pursued the brigand, seized
him by the collar of his abba and shook him like a wet paint¬
brush. The old man called on the names of all the prophets,
but still refused to guide.

“ Come on,” said the policeman, dragging him beside hi:
stirrup. “ Son of a burnt father, son of a dog, we will pa]
you for coming: will you leave us out in the open al
night?”

The old man stood his ground. He followed, because h
was being dragged, but his spirit was unconquered, and nothin;
would make him disclose which of the many fires twinklin;
about the landscape belonged to a tent suitable for the receptioi
of guests. We made for the nearest, and found there onl
two women and a small boy. They too would have avoide'
us if they could.

“ You cannot come here: we are women alone,” said the]
The excuse was one that a decent Moslem could not disregarc
But the little boy was at last induced to guide us: the old mat
muttering and dishevelled, was dropped with curses, and \s
foEowed through many more dogs to a large tent on the slop'

[ l6 4 ]

An English traveller

Here another white-bearded old man came out, but with a
different welcome.

“ Hosh ati, hosh ati, fair is your coming,” said he, and
covered first one eye and then the other with the fingers of
his hand in greeting.

His tent was roomy, but bare and cold, with no saddle-bags
or mattresses to furnish it. But his son bestirred himself to
build a fire in a new hearth hastily made by scraping a hole in
the middle of the floor: his old wife was smiling and friendly:
felt mats were found to sit on, and a handsome daughter sat
down with the flour-bag to bake the bread. The lieutenant
left us for another tent a little way up the slope, and an im¬
mediate increase of cordiality followed the departure of the
police. Although I never saw any act of actual oppression, I
found this unpopularity so general over the Pusht-i-Kuh
that it is impossible not to suspect some justification for it
when there is no foreigner looking on.

We were so late that there was litde talk in the manzil, and
I soon got into my sleeping-sack to get warm. Sheep or goats
were just outside, and the high lost cry of wolves came in the
night, with fearful raging and rushing of dogs. No one called
us, so I realized with some relief that the idea of night travel
had been abandoned. Next morning, indeed, there was no
sign of life from the tents above, and I decided to start on
ahead. We sat over our tea, our host drinking the first cup
as etiquette demands, and telling us at intervals how welcome
we were. He was charming and disinterested, for he would
take no money, but allowed me to give pocket-knives to his
two smaller sons. His tribe, he told me, follow the Kunjan
r.bam in winter to the barren lands we had come through,
east of Zurbatiyah. An Englishman came here to Aftab
to make maps, said he, about ten years ago: he travelled with
seven tents and a wife, and spent his days “measuring the

[ i6 5 1

The Hidden Treasure

hills.” At that time, he told me, there was more water, and
many of the streams marked on the map are now dry.

By this time our ponies had finished their breakfast of straw,
and we started, only pausing a minute when two beautiful
girls came running after us in long red gowns and velvet
coats and great turbans, and asked if I would mind stopping
a minute, to let them look at me.

To the Capital of Pusht-i-Kuh

The big basin of the Aftab is almost entirely filled with
tobacco plantations, and new hills, hitherto unseen, stood uf
around it. But we left it immediately, and entered an untidy
country of glaring limestone, amid whose unimportant valley:
and ridges we spent the morning, circling towards the nord
round the outworks of a table mountain called Shalam
These hills with cliff-like tops are a feature of the land, whicl
looks as if it had once been flat to the height of their summits
and then gradually been eaten away into small untidy chao
by die action of water and the soft backboneless structure o:
the hills, Kebir Kuh, alone, made of different and harder rock
looks as if Nature had intended it for a mountain from the first
On our left now as we turned gradually north, we had thi
hills of the Iraq border round Mandali, the same inhospitabl
belt as we had traversed lower down from Bedrah. In th
distance they looked pointed and wavelike; but the countr
ahead of us ran in long snouts level as moraines. The pat]
was white, and so were the rocks around it: the oak tree
parched and stunted: the watercourses mere empty gullie
made for the transitory floods of rains: and not a flower abot
except die autumn crocus, that pushed anaemic, leafless blossom
through the dust.

At eleven, we dismounted by a long-promised spring c

[166]

The lieutenant is ill

water, a black trickle like spilt ink among the blazing rocks,
with the dusty shadow of one oak tree thrown, across it.
But we had hardly begun to take the packs off, when the
lieutenant and his two policemen came up and begged us to
ride a litde farther, to some tents on higher ground.

The lieutenant was so ill that he could hardly ride at all:
he crouched on the saddle, holding my sunshade to protect
him from the sun, and murmuring dolefully at intervals that
he was dying, while his bodyguard rode solicitously before
and behind him.

They led the way, up a small rise, on to the edge of the
open plain of Husainabad, or Deh Bala as it is still more
generally known. Then for the first time since leaving Iraq,
we looked at a flat horizon to the north, where ran the
plateaux west of Kermenshah: long table hills enclosed us
right and left, though so far apart that the impression was
that of openness, given by the level land between. Only a
high massif to the north-west, the Manisht Kuh, still domin¬
ated the view. The plain was rich and filled with plough¬
land: well-grown oak trees grew there, widely spaced, so
that each tree had sun and earth around it; a warm breeze
came across the level space, driving clouds across a blue sky.
As soon as we topped the rise, our policeman led us from the
track towards the right, and we came to three tents near
together, small and poor under the trees.

The lieutenant collapsed beside one of them, while I with
my party settled down for lunch beside another; and whiie
the chicken was caught and massacred in the name of Allah
two cheerful litde orphan girls, dressed with all fineries of
beads and bangles, came to chat and experiment, in momen
tary awe, with the zip fastener of my travelling dress. They
had been adopted by the woman of the tent: she looked at
them smilingly, as if they were her own—but sadly too, for

The Hidden Treasure

it was a very poor family, and the brother had just gone off
as a soldier the day before: we had met him on the track
with the riflemen of Saidmarreh. I distributed safety-pins,
for their gowns had no fastening at the neck, and this gift
in itself would have been considered as an ample equivalent
for our luncheon.

Before leaving, I crossed to the lieutenant’s tent, and found
him so ill that I suggested riding on to send a doctor from
Husainabad; but he refused, and only consented to change
mounts with Shah Riza, so as to recline on the pack-saddle
and baggage, while I took his horse and set out as the leader
of the expedition, feeling sorry for my captor, but rather
amused at riding thus into the enemy’s stronghold. The
policeman from Kermenshah came with me to show the
way.

The capital of Pusht-i-Kuh was still a movable city of
tents three years ago, with only a fortified building or two
of the Vali’s to give it dignity. In 1931 the government
rebaptized it and started to build a town. When I arrived,
four or five straight boulevards were already laid out, from
the police barracks at one end, an old building with round
comer towers, to the new Governor s palace at the other.
There were about twenty shops, and a square at the bottom
of the hill, where a tall, unfinished pedestal in the middle of
an ornamental waterless moat was waiting for a statue of
the Shah. The whole place lies on a very gentle slope, on
the track that inserts itself between the masses of Manisht
Kuh and Shalam close behind. The houses along the
boulevard were one-storied and most of them unfinished;
the streets were dumping grounds for masons. The
original city of tents had not yet removed itself, but stood
in dingy compact rows, like seaside bungalows, outside and
around the newly erected splendours.

[168]

The Capital of PusbH-Kuh

The old summer residence of the Vali is four or five miles
away to the west, visible among trees and known for the
goodness of its water. Husainabad itself is arid and shadeless,
and the slopes behind it sparsely wooded. It had just been
linked to the rest of Persia by a motor road whose smooth
surface ended abruptly a few yards below the Place de la
Concorde, not used more than twice a week or so by cars,
which the small boys still pursued shouting.

We looked down on all this suddenly from a little neck
on the edge of the plain, where the policemen and I waited
for our demoralized lieutenant, guessing that he would not
like his captive to ride into the town ahead of him. When
he came, we all descended slowly down a stony path. Signs
of civilization, in the pleasant form of donkeys laden with
water-melons, met us on the way. We skirted the mam
boulevard, until we saw, through a screen of poplar leaves,
the light-blue uniform of a police sentry at the gate ot the
fort More police gathered in a small knot. A trim little
man in khaki, with blue aiguillettes, walked up. Everyone
saluted. He went to the lieutenant, faint surprise visible at
the unexpected sight of him on a pack animal: a few words
were exchanged: then he came up to me, greeted me very
courteously, and remarked that the Governor was expecting

Nothing, said I, could be more agreeable than to call on
the Governor. I had come all this way to do so. But I

must "Wiisli first. ^ - ii 11 •

The Commandant of Police, or Ajuzan as they called hrni,

giving a cursory look to my appearance, evidently saw that
I was right. He agreed without more ado, and took me
through a doorway in one of the new streets into the court
of his ownhouse. Three rooms in arow gave on to a portico
and a dismal litde yard with a dingy tank below. All was

[ l6 9 ]

The Hidden Treasure

new, however, and just whitewashed. A room with niches
round it was cleared of the Ajuzan’s things, except his cere¬
monial curved sword which they left hanging on a nail.
A camp bed was in one comer. In the fullness of time, a
boy called Iskandar appeared with hot water, a tray, and a
basin: I ensured a precarious privacy by draping cotton cur¬
tains over the doorless entrances; and for the first time since
leaving Iraq, found myself in the comfortable isolation of
four walls.

My saddle-bags disclosed in their depths a crumpled gown
and a powder-puff, of which I made the best use I could, and
finally emerged to meet my host more or less like a lady.

He was waiting under the portico with a friend, a soft
flabby young Persian of the worst kind. The Ajuzan himself,
however, was a man of the world, very much on his guard,
but pleasant, and evidendy determined to get my secrets
out of me by kindness. To this I had no objection. We
settled down to a general preliminary conversation, like
two fencers feeling each other’s blades.

There were four points which quite naturally caused the
authorities of Husainabad to look on my expedition with
suspicion and disfavour. I might be coming from Iraq as a
spy, to add to the intrigues which visibly enough were creep¬
ing about in favour of the Yali of Pusht-i-Kuh; the fact of
my being with Shah Riza, who had been brought up in the
old potentate’s household, caused a serious prejudice in this
direction. Secondly, I might be, as I declared, a student
of ancient histories, but possibly merely with the object of
digging up and smuggling away the country’s buried
treasures. Thirdly, I might be an innocent traveller, who
was learning far more about the general state of the country
and the troubles in Lakistan than the Persians like to have
known abroad. And fourthly, apart from all this, I might

[ 170 ]

The Ajuzan

get into trouble or be killed in the Ajuzan s district, and
cause international questions afterwards.

The Ajuzan’s difficulty was, that, of all these excellent
reasons, the first two could not be mentioned at all with
politeness, and the last two excluded each other. He asked
whether I was not afraid to travel so unprotected in the hills.

“You must have slept out at least two nights in the
wilderness,” he said.

“ Yes, indeed,” said I. “ One could not dream of doing
it in Iraq: but here I was told, and I have found it true, that
one can travel with complete safety anywhere*

“ Iraq,” said the Ajuzan, falling neatly, “ Iraq is a most
uncivilized country, but here the Shah has done such
wonders that robbery in our land is unknown.

“ So I was told,” said I. “ And it is delightful to come
here and be able to travel so freely. People spread such
alarming reports. The Iraqis talk of the Pusht-i-Kuh as it
there were only bandits; but I could see by the way your
police went round that you have the country in hand.

“ Absolutely,” said the Ajuzan. “ All the same, he added
rather lamely, noticing perhaps that he was not getting
where he meant to, “ all the same it is risky for a lady.

“ I have travelled in many countries,” I remarked truth¬
fully enough, “ and never found it risky. The study ol
history necessarily leads one into lonely places.

“Is it true,” he asked, “that you have a skull in your

saddle-bag as they told me?” , , ,

I admitted this peculiarity, and produced the object, wine
the Ajuzan examined with a puzzled interest. He had
been told, I afterwards heard, that I found bones of pure
gold in the graves, but he was an intelligent man, an was
evidently discounting a number of legends about me as

[171 ]

The Hidden Treasure

he turned the Luristan aborigine round and round in his
hands. He began to ask me questions about archaeology,
interrogating with perfect courtesy, but in a manner calcu¬
lated to discover any weak spot in the defence; and I must
say that I have never been questioned with so much acumen,
or with so expert a knowledge of how a witness is most
likely to give himself away. The Persian, living amid un¬
truth, naturally becomes versed in the sifting of information,
and I have noticed even among quite simple people that it
would not do to pretend to knowledge which one has not
got.

The interrogatory, disguised as conversation, lasted for
over two hours, and left me exhausted, but with the certain
and undeserved reputation of an archaeologist to carry me
through the difficulties of the coming days. The Ajuzan
and his friend went, and only returned in time for supper,
which they most courteously provided for me, together with
the unusual luxury of a camp table and chairs. Next morn¬
ing they escorted me to the Governor.

The Government of Pusht-i-Kuh

The Governor lived in the new palace, on whose Corin¬
thian fagade, at the end of a narrow outer court, a portrait
of the Shah was uplifted amid stucco ornaments. The
court had two long tanks in the usual Persian fashion, with
petunias, carnations, and small pomegranate trees which
made it cheerful and pleasant: a litde boudoir, raised some
four feet above its level and looking out on to it, was our
reception room. Here the Governor appeared.

He was a tall, thick-set, youngish man in khaki uniform,
with grey-green eyes and black eyebrows in a round, rather
highly coloured face. He had an expression of simplicity

[172]

The Governor

and good humour, and the refreshing air of being more a
man of action than of words. We sat in a symmetrical
circle of upholstered chairs, while biscuits were brought, and
tea in glasses with silver holders, agreeably civilized to the
sight of a wanderer.

The Governor was extremely amused. He tried not to
show it, but his eyes were dancing as he, also, asked me how
I had lived and lodged in the mountains.

“ No wonder, 5 ’ said he politely, 44 that yours is a powerful
nation. Your women do what our men are afraid to
attempt . 55

After a few moments he asked to see my guide. Shah
Riza, looking more than ever like a scarecrow, extremely
agitated, appeared at the window by which we sat, accom¬
panied by a policeman.

44 What is your trade ? 55 asked the Governor in a brusque
voice.

44 A maker of quilts , 55 the Philosopher replied, flustered,
but with dignity.

The Governor was almost overcome with laughter over
this incongruous answer. He cast an appealing glance of
merriment at his Ajuzan, who was, however, looking at the
floor with a serious expression calculated to increase die
anxious feelings of my guide.

44 And what does a maker of quilts do in the wilderness of
the Kebir Kuh ? 55 asked the Governor again, trying hard to
be official.

Shah Riza, with every appearance of guilt in his manner,
had nevertheless a straightforward story to relate, and a
passport whose lucky existence now saved him, no doubt,
from much unpleasantness. It was handed in through the
window and carefully examined: no flaw was found: the
two authorities were puzzled. “ They are mad, at the

[ I 73 1

The Hidden Treasure

frontier,” the Governor murmured, and asked us again to
specify by what police post we had entered. As far as the
past was concerned, our position, I could soon see, was
secure: the future appeared more problematical.

I told the Governor that I wished to examine the old
graveyards and cities of Tarhan across the Saidmarreh. If
a permit were needed I would write at once to Teheran,
where I was known by name, and whence I hoped for a reply
by return. “ Write, by all means,” said they politely, but
I saw that, whatever answer came, I was not going to get
across to Lakistan. The fact is that the country there was
so disordered at that time that the police themselves had no
dealings with the eastern bank: they could not send an escort
beyond the river, and without an escort, I soon saw, I was
not to travel any more. They meant, however, to keep
me in Husainabad till instructions came from Teheran, and
encouraged me to write and wait, taking care that my letters
were not posted, while I for my part took care that the
letters themselves should say exactly what I wished to have
known.

On this decendy artificial basis I spent the next four days
in Husainabad.

The Ajuzan was kindness itself: he provided me with a
small house, newly built, and furnished with his table and
two chairs. The owner of the house was a Lur, called
Mirza Farhad, who had been vizier to the Vali, and now
worked for the Governor. He had good memories of the
British: his wife sent mattress, pillow and quilt, a lantern and
such small oddments as were indispensable to housekeeping,
and in the evening, when I was more or less installed, she
came to call with her daughter, a beautiful olive-skinned
creature with brilliant slanting eyes under an enormous
ceremonial turban scattered with jewels.

[i74]

Life in the Capital

These were charming people, full of gay and genuine
friendliness, and evidendy pitying me as a captive in a
foreign land. The mother, fat, plain, and fresh-com-
plexioned, told me she came to me for love oi the Lady
Mary, 44 a woman to be honoured, 55 and begged me to
see much of her and her daughters.

44 If it were not that we are suspected of loving the British
too much, we would do more for you: it is not our hearts
that are unwilling, 55 said she, and invited me to the house
near-by.

44 1 have not a good room there, 55 she apologized. 4 * Every
time my husband marries a new ? wife, 1 am turned out into
an inferior room, and he has now three wives besides
myself. It is not very comfortable. 55

It was only a year, she explained, since they had a house
at all. They used to live in tents like everyone else, and
go down to Mansurabad on the edge of Iraq every winter:
but now they were settled, * 4 and it is not so good a life,
she sighed. The city people find it hard to reahze how
much the winter and summer change of home make up for
all the discomforts of the nomad’s housekeeping.

Twice a day, the Ajuzan came to call, and spent the time
chatting and smoking, while his servant followed with a
small decanter of eau-de-vie flavoured with lemon rind,
which he deposited on the table.

44 You do not take this, I know,” he remarked, assum¬
ing in the usual masculine way the negative virtues of
woman.

He had come to like it, said he, in Russia, where he had
travelled twice, and had learned to know European ladies,
and nearly married one who refused him at the last. Now
he had a Persian wife, but he never saw her. 44 She does not

count,” he remarked, as if he were talking of a mortgage.

[ ^75 1

The Hidden Treasure

In the intervals of these social distractions, I explored the
town, and found that it had little to recommend it, though
anyone who came here to excavate would probably find it
more exciting. The northern hillside looks, and indeed is
said, to have many ancient tombs, and the whole place is
filled with things found during the digging of foundations
of new houses, but which the people are far too nervous to
show. Two of them were in prison at the time for selling
antiques, all of which are claimed by government. Though
everyone told me of the numerous finds here, the Ajuzan
continued to deny them, and was evidently anxious that I
should hear of nothing of the kind.

I walked a little way into the pass that goes eastward
behind the town between the massifs of Shalam and Manisht
Kuh, and leads out by Hizil into the lands of Shirwan.
In the town itself I came on an old dome said to be that of
Mahdi b-Illah, a Moslem structure of no great interest.

I returned the call of Mirza Farhad’s wife, and found her
in a large and sunny house overlooking the plain from an
open terrace. Some of her rival wives and various friends
were with her and made me welcome. They showed me
seals and beads found round about here, and hidden in the
heavy folds of their garments: they begged me not to
tell the Ajuzan that I had seen such things. Though litde
was said, a feeling of great animosity appeared to exist
against the government and the “ Persians ” in general, and
if any reverse occurred elsewhere, I imagine it would go
hard with the officials and the shopkeepers from Kermenshah.
The town is an alien thing in this country: its people, mostly
imported from outside, look with contempt on the sur¬
rounding tents, whose people in their turn despise them.
Mirza Farhad apologized for living in a house.

“ I have to do so, because I now belong to the government,”

[176 ]

Departure with an escort

he explained. I have never seen that the genuine tribesman
has that respect for civilization which the effendi takes for
granted, except in the matter of education, which the
nomad looks upon with great reverence. The Mirza’s
family had a particular grievance too, for the beautiful
daughter was secretly married, but dared not let it be
said and was unable to get permission to travel to her
husband.

On the fourth day of my stay, instructions at last came
from Teheran. I was to be treated with the greatest con¬
sideration, to be given an escort of four men, and to be
accompanied the shortest way to the Iraq frontier. AM 1
could do, and that with some difficulty, was to persuade the
Ajuzan to let me take the new road along the Gangir River
to Mandali instead of the slightly shorter one to Zurbatiyah.
The morning was fixed for our departure.

The last arrangements were causing the usual delay, when,
the sergeant in charge of the escort turned up with his
three men: he was smart and red-headed, with thin legs and
gold teeth, and a reddish moustache brushed outwards from
his upper lip. He saluted with great curves of his arm
that seemed to include a whole horizon within their sweep.
Behind him the three policemen stood with a little less
soldier-like smartness, each holding his horse by the bridle.
One of them was the lad from Kermenshah who had
escorted us before. They were reviewed by the Ajuzan
with some solemnity. He described in a few well-turned
sentences the extreme consideration with which I was to
be treated. To be treated with consideration is, in the case
of female travellers, too often synonymous with being
prevented from doing what one w T ants.

“ Musi I have four men?” I asked the Ajuzan. ** I ’would
much rather have only one.”

f *77]

M

The Hidden Treasure

“ Three soldiers and a sergeant,” he replied, “ is the very
least we can consider adequate to do you honour.”

We shook hands with friendly feelings, bearing no malice.
I turned from the splendours of my escort to my own humble
mule, fastened by a woollen halter to the hand of a thin¬
faced Lur muleteer who had been commandeered by
authority at a price which left him very dejected. Shah
Riza, already enthroned on his pack-saddle, destroyed any
military air our cortege might have hoped to present. The
Ajuzan accompanied us to the outskirts of the town. There
he mounted his own handsome charger and watched us
depart, a pained amusement visible on his countenance.

The Way to Mandali

The new motor road to Kermenshah takes off from
Husainabad with a great sweep to the left through the plain
of Arkwazi (distinct from the Arkwaz of our coming).
But we went by a short and hilly track near the centre of the
circle of which Manisht Kuh is the pivot. It led up and
down over shaly spurs of detritus, white and grey in colour,
and so steep as to be impossible in wet weather. Oak
trees were scattered thinly, hiding shepherd lads who cut
the branches and threw them down to their waiting sheep
below. As we negotiated one little spur after another, our
horses on the descents almost slid down into the small
valleys, using their hind legs as brakes.

By dint of constant epithets and the use of a stick from
behind, my mule kept up with the escort, who rode one ahead
and three behind me. But Shah Riza, unprepared for this
rapid travel, dropped out of sight in no time. We did not

[ 178 ]

The military road

see him again till we had once more come upon the main
road, now running along the bottom of a thickly wooded
valley closed by Manisht Kuh, which spread out ridges,
long and thin as the tentacles of an octopus. One of these,
the Kuh Renu, runs to the north, hanging over the plain
with a cliff face worn to a lace-edge: the road climbed up
it and crossed it by a tunnel about 100 feet long. Gangs
of men were still working there, widening and blasting the
rock over all this hilly stretch, a rough lot of mountaineers,
less uncivilized to look at than the European navvy. Drink¬
ing water was being carried to them in sheepskins, quivering
on the bowed back of barefoot porters. A car full of
soldiers came up from the other side. It could hardly force
its way over the rough surface and through the gangs of
men; and Shah Riza and his mule made a terrified and lively
obstacle for some minutes: but it got by and moved along
slowly, a visible symbol of the military efficacy of roads in
a tribal land. The sergeant, as we jogged along, told me
how the tunnel had terrified the country people, and how
a chauffeur from Kermenshah had to be bribed to run his
car through it for the first time.

The land of Aiwan, a broad and shallow valley with
Manisht Kuh to close it at our back, lay in evening sunlight.
We travelled above it along the slope, under Renu, with
Bani Kuh, a rounded ridge, across the open valley ; and in
the distance our night’s objective, the police post of Sarab
Bazan. It stood, a small square box with a flag, on a gentle
rise in the middle of the open valley where, even from so
far away, grey debris of stones half buried showed that a
city lay under the ground. As we drew near, the sun sank:
the water that gives Sarab its name welled out of stones in
three quiet streams where light lay reflected. Flocks in
long procession were drawing towards it. Women were

f *79]

The Hidden Treasure

filling their goatskins. My four policemen in their light-
blue uniforms made no discord in the picture as they stood
to water their horses. The sentry from the square fort
had seen them. The small flag fluttered at the top of the
keep in a light breeze from the north. Always, from the
earliest days of built houses, such a chain of towers, spaced
at convenient day’s journeys, has probably linked these valleys
with government: it is the only way in which the country
can be held: and probably the same sort of sentry has watched
the flocks and the tribes from his evening doorstep in the
valley of Aiwan for longer than one would imagine, looking
at the treeless nomad comland now.

The tents of the Aiwan were arranged in two or three
rows in the stubble-fields, and the chief who owned the first
and best of them came out to greet and welcome us with
more cordiality than I had ever seen since travelling with
an escort. I began to notice here a great difference in the
tribes, and a far larger measure of subservience than among
the Bedrei and Malikshahi: and the sergeant explained it
next day by telling me that here they do not, as in the region
of Kebir Kuh, own their own land, but the landlord is the
Shah, who sends his overseers to take a third of their harvest
every year. Something of the tribesman has gone, some¬
thing of the peasant has crept into their manner. I regretted
it, though no doubt it makes them easier to govern.

It is not the turbulence of the tribesman that one admires:
but the virtues that go with his turbulence, so that the
two are associated together. His treasure is the freedom of
his spirit: when he loses that, he loses everything. And if
civilization is that state in which the unshackled mind bows
voluntarily to Law, freedom and discipline are the two
wheels on which it runs. The tribesman does bow to a
law of his own, but his apologists must admit that discipline

[ 180 ]

Psychology of the tribesman

is in him the less developed of the two fundamentals: .his
freedom is more lawless than it should be. It is, however,
genuine; it emancipates his being; through it

Metus oxnne et inexorabile fa turn

Subiecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari.

And the discipline which the semi-civilized invoke
against him is not genuine at all, a production not construc¬
tive but merely of fear. The tribesman in his heart knows
that freedom, his own virtue, comes first in the order of
things: it can at a pinch stand alone, while the beauty of
law is of a secondary order, dependent for its excellence
on the existence of the other as a basis. Even the worst
politician tacitly admits this, bolstering himselt up with
words. The tribesman feels the falsehood of the alien
code, and of the two complementary virtues, rightly prefers
his own.

In many cases he will refuse the greater comfort of the
settled lif e because he definitely prefers his spiritual heritage
to more material things. He is an aristocrat. In our com¬
plicated lives the advantage of aristocracy is that of being
able voluntarily to undergo those disciplines which are
forced without choice on men less fortunately circum¬
stanced: to eat bread and water from necessity has a depress¬
ing effect; to do so from choice is, in a reasonable measure,
■good for the soul: and the civilized use of riches is to become
voluntarily independent of them. The nomad does not
go so far: but he does prefer his lean emancipation to the
flesh-pots of setded behaviour; and this makes him an
insufferable neighbour but a gallant man.

The Aiwan, however, have gone some way already in
the selling of their souls. Their lands stretch over a great

[IS! 1

The Hidden Treasure

deal of country, along the Gangir stream from near the
Iraq border, to its source here at Bazan, and up to the spring
pastures of Manisht Kuh. And in the shallow valley they
have been induced by government to build small houses,
which, however, they never live in, but use to store their
grain. An older fashion of keeping it, which is still most
generally preferred, is to dig a hole in the ground, to line it
solidly with chopped straw, fill it with corn, and cover it
over with a layer first of straw, and then of earth. This is
done after harvest, before the tribe moves downstream to
its winter quarters, and die stored provision is found ready
when they return in spring. The Lurs of Pusht-i-Kuh
nearly all follow this fashion.

My escort, having enquired carefully for my comfort
and given orders for a chicken for supper, left me and went
to spend the night in their own police post, while I sat and
fraternized with the tribe, and Shah Riza slowly regained
his diminished prestige. I distributed medicines as usual,
and learnt about antiquities in the valley, which has several
large mounds and, they told me, many graves where bronzes
had been found. On the top of Bani Kuh, they said, were
the ruins of an old city, near to a place where a spring of water
leaped out of the ground: and there were ruins also among
the Asiman, who inhabit the next valley eastward, parallel
with ours.

I saw two mounds as we followed the new road next
morning: one was on our left, called Qal’a Nargisieh,
and another at Sameh, on the road itself, but farther on
than where we went, for we turned off to the west about
three hours after leaving Bazan, and lunched while a small
dust-storm with squalls of rain flew high about us, and
pattered on the dry oak leaves of a camp where we rested.

We now turned definitely west, and picked up the Gangir

[ 182 ]

Warrior ladies

stream, which gets its name only here where already it is a
good-sized river among reeds. Flocks of sheep and goats
were browsing, with Manisht Kuh, a fine background,

behind them.

The sergeant, as we went, told me about the Lurs of
Lakistan, to whom he was related—a better race and better
fighters than these, said he, and with most remarkable
women among them. He told me the story of Qadam
Kheir, a lady of the Kullvand of Tarhan, who fought
against the government five years ago. She was a beautiful
woman, and married to her cousin. Tixey used to go out
together to fight, and she could shoot from horseback like
a man. She finally submitted to government, and settled
in comfort amid her tribe.

There were three other heroines among the Lakistani
ladies, of whom only one, Naz Khanum, who now lives in
a castle near Harsin, has reached old age. Gazia of Alishtar,
sister of the rebel chief Mir Ali Khan whose brother I once
stayed with in the north, and who was kidnapped and
hanged a few years ago, killed herself -when her husband
divorced her: she was brought up just like a boy and used
to ride everywhere with her brother and the tribe, who
adored her. And Kak-Ali of the Kuli-Alis, after a long war
with government, was finally persuaded to submit, and was
to have married the former Shah’s son, but -when she saw
him she declared that 4 4 nothing would induce her to put
up with half a man,” and she remained unmarried till she
died.

44 The women of the Kakavend, my Wakkil-Bashi

concluded, 44 are not like these women here. Here they
are terrified if a guest comes to their tent at night: but a

Kakavend woman would welcome thirty riders and know
how to receive them.”

[183]

The Hidden Treasure

The Wakkil-Bashi seemed to be uncertain about the
way. We had reached, he thought, the last camp before a
long stretch of desert. It was a good-sized place with one
or two houses used as granaries: it was called Sar-i-Tang,
because it stood almost at the entrance to a defile into which
the Gangir plunges. And everyone in the camp was out
of doors, measuring the harvest. The Shah’s agent, together
with the master of each crop, superintended the division:
the government pile was put on one side; the peasant’s
share was carried back in sacks loaded on black oxen, to
be buried in the ground. Holes were being dug at a little
distance. Out of the peasant’s two-thirds, the seed com
for next season had to be found.

We enquired what lay before us, and the people of Sar-i-
Tang told us that we should reach Bani Chinar before night.
So we rode on, with the defile called Shamiran on our left,
over a small col where oak trees still grew, already stunted
in the warmer soil.

There was a ruined castle, we heard, on Shamiran: and
graves with bronzes are found along the valley. It must
have been a highway for traffic in every age, since nature
here provides a natural cleft from the Saidmarreh River
system to the plains of Iraq; and Moslem ruins are traceable
here and there at intervals along the valley. As we came to
the top of the shoulder through which the river cuts its way,
seven ranges spread before us, the red and barren ranges of
the waterless belt of the frontier. The smugglers know
them and slip in and out of the thirsty gullies. They are
caught, but not so very often.

“ Do I not always turn my face the other way?” my
lieutenant captor had asked the kadkhuda, when the latter
complained of the difficulty of getting tea and sugar now in
the Pusht-i-Kuh.

[i8 4 ]

An ambush avoided

Somewhere farther south in those hills, an ambush was
lying in wait for Shah Riza and me, if -we had only known
it. The buried treasure, acting according to precedent, had
inspired the wicked vizier to send six men after us to “ prevent
my return. 5 " They expected this to take place by the same
route of our going, so that the police interference, and
consequent change of plans, had something to be said
for it. Until I reached Baghdad, however, I was ignorant
of all these excitements, and rode on feeling neither more
nor less safe amid the four policemen, than I had felt with
Shah Riza and the muleteer alone.

The Gangir Valley

We came to Bani Chinar in the last light of the day, and
looked down into a bowl among the hills filled with maize-
and rice-fields, and the damp exhalations of the evening.
The river flowed there under tufted clumps of reeds taller
than a man on horseback, and the tents were above on bare
ground opposite. We had to get across. An old peasant,
pottering about with a spade, pointed vaguely towards a
ford, but refused to guide us. “ Father of a dog , 55 they
shouted to him , and all four policemen launched one argu¬
ment in turn, growing more emphatic as the effect seemed
to be less impressive. At last the old man moved. We
crossed the stream. It flowed nearly up to the horses 5 bellies
in a cool atmosphere of its own. Mint and Michaelmas
daisies grew among the willows and white-plumed reeds,
and a moorhen swam into the shadows of the branches,
leaving circles on the water behind her.

From the five tents of the camp one looked across the
bowl to the other rim of hills; the sky above was pale and
clear with one pink cloud: the evening cool and gende,
swimming softly into moonlight. This was our last stage

[185]

The Hidden Treasure

within reach of oak branches for a fire: the men piled them
high and lit up their handsome “ chits,” the reed screens
woven in patterns with bright wools like Caucasian carpets.
When the police were safely installed in a tent lower down,
our host brought out a few odd bits of bronze. He prom¬
ised to show me ruins next day, but they were not worth
looking at, and the sergeant was unwilling to linger.

In the evening over the fire the men spoke as usual of the
difficulties of life here without a gun. They told me of
one man whose gun was taken from him, who spent three
days and nights at the police post, eating no bread and
lamenting, until out of very weariness it was given back to
him.

Next morning the chief of the camp, who was no other
than our old guide of the night before, now full of friendli¬
ness and apologies, led us on our way down the valley.

We had a very long day before us, and made it longer by
trying to shoot fish. Tantalizingly near and fat, they
swam about in the clear waters of the Gangir and the leats
that took off from the main stream. The policemen
enjoyed letting off their guns, and finally one big creature,
about eighteen inches long, turned up his fat profiteer’s
tummy in the water and was gathered in for lunch. He had
been interrupted at his own breakfast, and half a small fish
was still sticking out of his mouth, a sight which made us
all exclaim that God is great. We then set off in earnest
downstream.

The whole of this day, through an indescribably desolate
land, we followed the Gangir River. We crossed and
recrossed it, losing it now and then in the chaos of red hills,
and coming upon it again, a green caterpillar in a cocoon of
reeds under which one could ride for short stretches in aisles
of shadow.

[186]

The Gangir valley

Small flats of rice-plots far apart had huts beside them:
at Sepa there was a wide fertile hollow: at Kainmaru (below
which place the track goes by a prehistoric graveyard,
partly looted) and at Gangir, were tiny patches riddled
with malaria. The huts here were no longer roofed with
branches, but roughly made of the reeds leaning towards
each other to a point, such as earliest man might have
inhabited.

Though no visible tributaries came in, the river widened.
It w T as a blue stream, as vivid in that thirsty solitude as a
platinum blonde in a monastery, but with no fertile lands
around it. The hills drew gradually apart, leaving a wide
flat bed. Here and there, by the side of the track, were bits
of masonry, old aqueducts or bridges: above Sar-i-Gatch,
an open space which looked as if there had once been a city.
The flora changed: we came to tamarisk, caper, and oleander.
At Sar-i-Gatch w T ere tents again and ploughed land, the last
camp of the Aiwan.

We reached this after sunset and meant to spend the night,
and the Aiwan gave us a friendly welcome. But the Gangir
waters, let loose among rice-fields just below, hummed
under a cloud of mosquitoes, and Saumar, the last Persian
tribe, was not more than two hours away. TheWakkil-
Bashi suggested a ride after supper to avoid that hot
expanse by day.

So we rested and set off again at eight-thirty, and rode
over the uneven ground in the moonlight while a police¬
man and my muleteer, trotting on ahead to scout, sang
Kurdish songs, sweet and plaintive in the night: after the
day, the air was soft and cool.

The land grew fiat: the hills withdrew on either side. The
plain of Iraq here runs a wedge into Persia along the stream,
intersected with small canals, invisible but evident from the

[187]

The Hidden Treasure

crops on either hand. Large animals were rootling among
the maize stalks on our left. “ Pig,” said the Kermenshah
policeman, and galloped in nonchalantly, turning out five
humped and clumsy silhouettes in procession at the other
end of the field. At ten-thirty we came upon the tents
of Saumar, dim in sleep. A man lying across the entrance
was roused, while a chaos of dogs sprang round us, guarding
the huddled flocks. The people there soon spread a bit of
“ chit ” to enclose a bedroom for me: mattress and pillow
were brought: without seeing the faces of our hosts, we
slept after ten and a half hours in the saddle.

I woke next morning in a windy dawn and saw that we
were in the desert. The huts of the Saumar were all around,
built and roofed with reeds, whose leafy fronds stuck up
like batdements. Some of these were real houses, with
three good rooms and a porch.

At a little distance, on a mound, was the police post:
the customs house and a rest-house for officials were below.
Here, too, was the Shah’s garden, a place of whose magnifi¬
cence I had been told in Iraq, which turned out to be about
two acres of untidy ground, just planted with young palms,
apricots and pomegranate trees, where I wandered while
passports were being attended to.

Four more police came on horseback to watch me: they
added themselves to the escort, and, more like a cavalry patrol
than ever, we rode along the Gangir bed to where, on a
low cliff, a round tower shows the last of Persian land.
Here we said good-bye. My presents, carefully prepared,
were rejected. We spoke of the splendour and charm of
the kingdom of Persia and our regret in leaving it instead.
I would have wished to do something more tangible for my
friends, for they had treated me with great kindness, and,
although their incorruptibility impressed me, I felt that

[ 188 ]

Return to Baghdad

o

perhaps it was my management that was at fault. And
there has been no safe way of sending a present to them
since: but I should like, contrary to most recent travellers, to
put on record grateful and friendly remembrance of the
Persian police—for, whether on the road or off it, I have
personally found them obliging, pleasant and honest, and
ready to stretch authority as far in my favour as they could.

So leaving them, Shah Riza and I and the muleteer con¬
tinued onwards to Mandali. "We were anxious, as ever, to
show our passports, but w r e missed the Iraq frontier post:
we wandered among palm gardens, oppressed by the lowland
air, until we reached the house of the Naqib, and the region
of motor-cars, and thence finally Baghdad.

Finish in Baghdad

I came to Baghdad, and the matter of the treasure, overlaid
by later experiences, had already faded from the foreground
of my mind. I spent a day in the delirious pleasure of decent
clothes and baths after a month’s starvation, and then rang
up M. to announce my return and to ask, without any great
curiosity, for what reason, if any, my accomplice Hasan the
Lur had failed to turn up at the rendezvous.

To my surprise I heard a sort of gasp at the other end of
the line. It was M.’s voice saying: “ Thank God you are
safe,” and declaring that he was coming round immediately
to tell me all about it. Of the absurd events which he
related, of most of which we were never able to disentangle
the truth or untruth, I will give a short summary as an epi¬
logue.

Hasan the Lur had not been able to join me because he
was in prison. Though I am privately convinced that he
never meant to do so in any case, the matter was taken

[189]

The Hidden Treasure

out of his hands by his enemy, the ex-vizier, who no sooner
heard vague rumours of our quest that were floating about
the bazaars, than he accused the lad of the theft of a jewel box
and had him clapped into jail. The jewel box appears to
have been stolen in fact: Hasan declared they were his things,
the first product of the treasure cave, which had been given
to the vizier for safe keeping, and which he refused to give
up. The accusation of theft at any rate could not be sub¬
stantiated, but was sufficient, combined with a good deal of
influence to back it, to ensure Hasan’s retention in Baghdad.

M. heard the news two days after my departure, instandy
bestirred himself, and succeeded in getting bail for Hasan.
Meanwhile, however, I was beyond reach of recall: Hasan
could not leave the town: and all that could be done was
to send a cousin of his after me with a letter, which I never
received since the bearer was seized near the frontier by the
Persian police and imprisoned as an agitator.

The next event was the arrival of Hasan one morning in
M.’s study in a state of great agitation. The vizier, he said,
had heard of my departure. Fearing that I might return
with die treasure, he had sent six men from among the
bazaar coolies, with orders to prevent it. Each coolie had
been given (or promised) 400 rupees—a flattering though
improbable price—with orders to spread themselves out
over the paths between Arkwaz and Zurbatiyah, the shortest
and most obvious way one would take for bringing back a
valuable load. In that completely uninhabited bit of country,
Hasan rightly thought that murder might be committed
without any chance of the criminal ever being discovered.
My fate seemed definitely settled unless I chose to come
back by some other way.

In spite of this awful conviction, M. could do nothing
about it. No news could now reach me in time, and the

[190]

Exit Hasan

Iraq or British authorities were powerless in any case to
interfere in Persian territory. The British to whom he
mentioned the matter, far from being able to help, merely
added to his gloom by saying that he might have foreseen
some such denouement from the beginning, and by remarking
that the British army would be well advised to discourage
rather than incite the female wanderer. You can never
imagine , 55 said my harassed friend, what agonies of mind
I have been in all these days . 55

To add to his trouble, my return was delayed more than
he had expected. If Hasan had gone as arranged, and we
had found the treasure, we had indeed planned to return
with it immediately, and ought to have been in Iraq within
a fortnight or so of leaving. But as the treasure had not
been found, I had no thought of hurrying in any case, and
it was only the interference of the police lieutenant 'which
prevented my crossing the river, and spending another
fortnight or so on its eastern shores. Even as it was, M. had
been thinking of me as murdered for the last ten days.

And his troubles were by no means over when once I was
in Baghdad again. A rumour soon spread that I had come
back with the treasure. The vizier thought Hasan had got
his share: Hasan thought I was keeping it all: and even Shah
Riza murmured that I had been seen staggering down a
mountain with a sack that I could barely lift. The report
that reached the Persian police, and thence gradually returned
to the tribe with whom I stayed, was that I opened graves
and found inside them skulls of unbelievers moulded in
solid gold. The result of all this whispering excitement
was that M. found himself one day sent for to a Baghdad
police court to answer questions, and was very nearly involved
in the inextricable tangle of Hasan’s affairs.

Hasan meanwhile went completely to pieces. He drank

[*9i]

The Hidden Treasure

arak, and tried to commit suicide in the Tigris. He attacked
the vizier’s sons as they walked down the High Street, and
suggested that twenty witnesses be bought and a counter
lawsuit started. I used to be told unkindly that my friends
were all in prison or likely to go there soon. And when
finally we heard that Hasan had been seized again and was
safe between four government walls, we accepted the news
with no little relief.

As for the treasure, whether it really exists or not is
still uncertain. And the mountain and the cave are still
to be explored.

Note .—The skull from the Larti grave reached Baghdad
safely, was presented to the museum there, and is described
as follows:

“ The specimen found by Miss Stark, and presented by
her to the Baghdad Museum, consists of a cranium and
mandible. It was found in a grave underneath an over¬
hanging cliff in the valley of the Larti, which lies in the eastern
part of the Pusht-i-Kuh in Luristan. Itds extremely brachy-
cephalic, with an index of 88*6. The face is entirely missing,
although the lower jaw is present, and the cranium is intact.
The principal cranial measurements and indices are as follows:

Maximum head length 167 mm
„ width 148 ,,

Basi-bragmatic height 137 „

Minim, frontal diam. 97 ,,

Basi-nasion length 102 ,,

Cephalic index (length
width) 88*6 ,,

Length-height index 80*3 ,,

[ 192 ]

oi

Vi

p;

01

he

be

or

th

th

m

th

lo

cc

w

a ;

a

th

P c

w

so

th

The skull from the Larti grave

“ This is an Armenoid type of head, with marked flattening
of the occiput. The post-auricular length, from rough obser¬
vation, is about one-third of the total length. There are wide
.parietal eminences, and several Wormian bones. The supra¬
orbital ridges are well developed, and the bone structure is
heavy, with thick, smooth orbital rims. Therefore this must
be a male skull, that of a man probably in the prime of life, for
only the sagittal suture is closed, and there is not much wear on
the teeth. The face is broken oft just at the nasion, and only
the ends of the molars are present. The age of the skull
must be told chiefly from archaeological evidence regarding
the manner and place of burial.”

The grave was one of many' found under the cliff. It was
long and narrow, lined with flat stones laid regularly, and
covered over with flat boulders. The skeleton was on its back
with the head turned to the right side. Under the elbow was
a stone (limestone like the cliff above it) worked roughly into
a point, and another triangular one lying above the head. In
the grave were also a few fragments of rough red pottery,
poorly baked, and with bits of straw in it. The long bones
were in good condition. The feet were pointing roughly
south-west. The other graves seemed to have been dug in
the same general direction. Each was marked by boulders.

PART II MAZANDERAN

Chapter III. A journey
Chapter IV. The Assm
Chapter V. The Thro

ne of Solomon

Chapter III

A JOURNEY TO THE
VALLEY OF THE ASSASSINS

The Assassins were a Persian sect. They were a branch
of the Isma’ili, who were a branch of the Shfa, who still
constitute practically the whole of Persia and give particular
veneration to Muhammad’s son-in-law ’Al: and the Imams
of his house. The Isma’ili broke away from them over the
succession to the seventh Imam Ja’far. But it is not their
theology which is interesting so much as their politics.
They were exploited by an able and unscrupulous Persian
family then settled in Palestine, who devoted themselves
to the undermining and gradual destruction of every kind
of faith by a system of initiation subtly graded for all stages
of superstition and belief till, in its highest ranks, it seems to
have culminated in absolute free thinking. They established
the principle of obedience to one of their own family as
the depositary of the Divine Wisdom, and having seated
themselves on the throne of Egypt, under the name of
Fatimite caliphs, they increased in wealth and power,
encouraged the love of learning for its own sake, and, alone
among the nations of their day, practised religious toleration.

Egypt truly became for a short time the centre of civiliza¬
tion; and the Isma’ilian propagandist could be met with
from Morocco to China. One such came into contact
with a young Persian Shi’ite of Rei called Hasan-i-Sabbah,
who joined the sect in the year A.D. 1071* He was to
become the first Grand Master of the Assassins.

Such adventurers have ever been numerous in Persia.

[197]

A Journey to the Valley of the Assassins

But the young Hasan did more than most of his kind for—
apparently out of his own inventiveness—he brought a new
idea into the political science of his day and treated murder
as the suffragette the hunger strike, turning it into an avowed
political weapon.

Even in his own lifetime it brought him power which
spread from north Persia to the Mediterranean. The secret
garden where he drugged and attached to himself his
followers became known through the Crusaders’ chronicles
in Europe, giving us our word of Assassin, or Hashishin.
He was the fear and execration of his neighbours. Unable
to touch him, they reacted against the whole family of the
Isma’ilians, who had further added to their crimes by develop¬
ing a bloodthirsty branch of Carmathians in east Arabia.
The perfunctory censure of the orthodox turned to denunci¬
ation as the movement became more dangerous. The parent
sect in Egypt, together with the Fatimite caliphs who repre¬
sented it, now a feeble crew, paid for the unpopularity of
their offspring and for their own degeneracy by going
down altogether before the Seljuks and the family of Saladin.

The Assassins themselves, however, continued to prosper.
They had taken over some Isma’ilian and other strongholds
in Syria, which they governed as semi-independent colonies
from Persia, and they there came into contact with the
crusading princes. It has never been made clear how much
the organization of the great Christian fighting orders owed
to this unchristian confraternity. It has been suggested
that the Order of the Templars was based in some degree
on that of their opponents: a comparison of the hierarchy
and general administration of the two shows them to be
curiously identical; and this may have lent a certain colour
to rumours and accusations which brought about the
Templars’ downfall when, later on, their riches tempted the

[198 ]

A Journey to the Valley of the Assassins

lawyers of Philippe le Bel. By then the Assassins had ceased
to be an active power.

Mo longer independent, the Syrian Fedawis degenerated
from martyrs into professional murderers. In the days of
Ibn Batuta their crimes used to be paid for in advance: if
they survived, they enjoyed their earnings, which otherwise
went to support their families. They are now quiet country
people, and talk freely of anything except their religion.

But in Persia the Mongol armies came from the east and
in 1256 under Hulagu Khan took the Assassin fortresses one
after the other. The central stronghold of Alamut might
and should have held out. It stands in an impregnable valley
south of the Caspian in the legendary mountain range of
the earliest fabulous Persian kings. Hasan had come there
when, nearing forty, a failure and an exile from both the
Turkish and the Egyptian courts, he decided to carve his
own way unaided, and had spread his propaganda for nine
years through Persia and Khorasan: and the tale has it that
after being the governor’s guest and seeing the matchless
strength of the position, he returned and obtained it in 1091,
seemingly by friendly means; and never left it until his
death thirty-four years later. He lived there with his secret
garden and his devoted Fedawis around him, and combined
assassination with the liberal arts in his efficient way. But
after nearly two hundred years, madness and weakness came
upon the sovereigns of Alamut. Rukneddin, a hostage
among the Mongols, ordered his unwilling garrisons to
surrender before Mangu the Great Khan caused him to be
murdered as he travelled, a prisoner, through the passes of
the hills; and his posterity, migrating southward to Qum
and thence to Sindh, continued in the spiritual headship of
the Isma’ilians who still exist scattered from India to Persia
and Zanzibar. H.H. the Agha Khan receives, as head of the

A picnic by the road

sect, the tithe instituted by Hasan-i-Saboah: ms tcmuy s ngn: to
it was investigated and confirmed during a law-suit cerore cue
High Court in Bombay in 1S66. wuerem tueir uncai bwwm
from the Old Alan ot the Ale untarns was proouit: r er^ r u*’ *
one now living, and remaps no on anting me - —^
families of the world, can boast so romantic and uuusu<u
an ancestry. But the Assassins vauey and tne Ro^k cu
Alamut no longer know tueir ancient lords.

I had long wished to go there. But mere \ver<

■ obstacles.

One of them was that I could not find it on my map.^ There
was Alamut district, but no Alamut village, nor indeed is there
such a village, as I discovered when I readme me valley.

Bv dint cf enquiries, I warned tnat Alamut nas been
visited eiidit or nine times at least by Europeans. One
starts from Qazvin: one crosses the Talaghan range and
reaches the Alamut River; and the castle is at a place called
Qasir Khan on the left. That was as much as I knew:
and with that I packed my bed and saddle-bags one May
morning and started from Hamadan for Qazvin in a car
with a Persian and two veiled ladies and a litde girl, who were
returning to Resht.

The day was fine; our party friendly. At noon we
lunched by the roadside among young poplars, and bought
eggs from an old man sitting in the dust. Mv fellow-
travellers had been to a brother’s funeral in Hamadan: they
were now taking his small child home to mam' their httle
boy later on: they would send her to school first, they said. .

“ In our country, if you marry them too young their
children die,” said I, trying to do the best I could for the
little bride. She was seven years old.

“We shall wait another five years, said they.

The old lady, the brother’s mother, dressed in the fashion

l 201 ]

A Journey to the Valley of the Assassins

of her youth, with enormous full black trousers gathered
and sewn into black socks so that she was encased altogether,
was on her first journey. So was Fatima, and as gay over
it as a sparrow. She and I amused ourselves by feeding a
family of hens in the speckled shade of the young trees: her
uncle gave us glasses of pale tea. Along the dusty road
cars sped by: two British officers in sun helmets: they would
be shocked if they noticed me sitting here like a gipsy.
Luckily I was beneath their notice: I was free of all that:
the empty Persian plains were around me, and crested
mountain ranges: the beautiful world, full of surprises, rush¬
ing through space we know not whither, was mine to do
what I liked with for a while.

That evening from the Grand Hotel in Qazvin I sent my
letters of introduction.

One of them produced the landlord himself, an old Parsee
with a business eye and the most discriminating taste in
Shiraz wine. The second produced Mr. Sookias, of the
■^■•P-O.C., who introduced me to Armenian society at his
wife’s house and devoted himself most kindly to my enter¬
prise. The third was from Bahai friends in Baghdad, and
gave me my most charming acquaintance in Persia, Dr.
Asad el Hukuma, to whom the very hand of Fortune herself
must have led me blindfold, for he and his brother are the
present owners of the Rock of Alamut.

Apart from these, the city leaders who run the local
politics and gesticulate over the daily papers in the dining¬
room of the Grand Hotel soon heard the news and
gathered round to discuss history and advice. For once
in a while, the explanations I could offer for my travels
wrere sufficient and reasonable. They knew about Hasan-
i-Sabbah: they thought it natural that one should journey
from England to see his castle. The Persian’s mind, like

Kerbelai ‘Aziz

his illuminated manuscripts, aces not
two thousand years, it he happens to I:
them, are as exciting as me cap :e::n,
country is tail er ocscure wcrsmppvtc c:
whom the rest ot me worm nas .ong eg
In the East, too. one may ye: mat
acquire wisdom one;, arm 1 nave erne;
Christians are not encouraged ey
as a u seeker atter mum. ' But it :s a r
worth ordering to tne pence, me Con
when rw came tor ms everung cp entv a:

and suwoorte

ov ir

1 own wo

nave been troucle.

Next morning, one cf the enthusiasts sent me a servant.

I did no; know wha; to do about it, for I did not want him.
He was small and cringing and cadaverous. Everything,
even his skin, hung loose about him. He was so apologetic
for existing at all that he seemed to be trying^ to shrink out
of his own body into some even more insignificant nothing¬
ness. If one had wished to hang him up on a peg^ and
forget him, ■which one would do very soon, there was nothing
stiff enough to do it by except his high starched collar.

The Doctor saved me. He alone had actually been in
the Alamut valley, and assured me—as I knew beiore that
a servant from the town could only cause vexation and
trouble among the hiilmen. He brougnt a man of his own,
Kerbelai ‘Aziz of Garmrud, a charvardar or muleteer who
spends his life between the Caspian passes and w as to answer
for my comfort and safety, a bit of a man, with a straight
nose and shrewd little eyes as good-humoured in expression
as I afterwards found him to be. He would be like my
mother,” he said, and twirled his ugly peaked cap in his

A Journey to the Valley of the Assassins

hands while the Doctor, portly, urbane, and slow, wrote
for me to his brother in Shutur Khan.

Next morning we started.

The caravan was larger than I had imagined. Not only
had ‘Aziz brought Ismail and The Refuge of Allah, two sub-
charvardars from Alamut, to do the work while he himself
rode like a gentleman: but his mother, an eagle-faced old
woman under a white cotton chadur, and his small sick son,
were also on their way back to Garmrud. It was not my
affair. I paid two tomans (4 s.) a day and was to be provided
with all I required, including food, for as long as I wished; and
I was pleased with the company of the old lady, who was
cheerful and friendly, would leap a torrent when necessary
as if she were seventeen instead of seventy, and after a day’s
riding over the hulls, would turn her attention to pilaus
full of almonds and raisins, of which, like Dr. Johnson with
his lemons in the Hebrides, I carried a store at my saddle-bow.

Little Muhammad seemed to be in the last stages of illness,
unfit for riding on mules, and for hard-boiled eggs and
chupattis, and I feared that we might have to bury him by
the way. I gave advice, which was agreed to sadly, and
disregarded: he took my biscuits, and proceeded to eat them
as well as all the rest: and strange to say, got better day by
day. His grandmother held him on her swaying high
perch above the corded baggage, and whenever I turned
round I saw his little peaked face against the receding land¬
scape of the Qazvin plain.

The city wall crumbles there amid vines and yellow roses.
We went north-east, and left the road, and made by a rough
track for Ashnistan in the foothills across the desert in
flower. The mountains were on our left. A far peak that
shone with melting snow just showed above the nearer
range whose long unbroken ridge ran brown and level from

[204]

The track from Qazvin

west to east. We approached It slowly, rising gen wy across

the plain.

Far-spaced villages under trees, like islands, stood w:tn
cornfields around them; and black oxen cosy at tine plougn-
ing: the peasants’ cries came to us as they turned a: me
furrow’s end. Between the villages, the desert crass a.reaay
withering into summer was thick witn dowers e: many
kinds, so that it was a joy to walk over, anc ‘Aziz, perspiring
beside me, for he was too polite to rice vnen I wanted,
begged me to mount in ram.

The track goes beyond Ashmstan to a place o: pilgrimage:
but we left it and stayed m the village iand among me
foothills to rest through me hot nours beside a mat or run-

I sent Ismail for <s mast ” or curds; the village headman
came back with him, carrying them in a blue bowl, not too
cordially: I was a Christian; he would not share my meal.
But his two wives by and by adventured their less important
souls with a little chicken, while the men smoked, and I lay
in the grass and wished I knew 7 the names of all the birds.
The peasants w r ere not unkind. My mountaineers despised
them, and apologized.

44 To-morrow,” they said, “ we shall be among our own
people in the hills.”

I thought of the Qadi of Qazvin, w r ho used to walk
abroad in the days of the Assassins dressed in a coat of mail
against the hill men: no doubt the mutual opinions of high¬
lander and lowlander are always much the same.

The rich land of Ashnistan ended with the suddenness

[205]

A Journey to the Valley of the Assassins

peculiar to the East, and we spent the afternoon climbing
easily through folds of small uncultivated valleys, very
barren. The sun shone in a pleasant loneliness. We met
no human beings save two men with sticks and loose cotton
trousers, travellers from the hills. An eagle on a rock turned
his flat head and yellow eyes upon us, but did not move till
Ismail, creeping up, frightened it with a stone, and came
leaping back amused at my reproaches.

I liked my escort. I was their first European. They
treated me with easy charming courtesy, as one of themselves,
and tried to please me with stories and slow melancholy
ballads and flowers brought with both hands outstretched
in the pretty Persian gesture, which must surely originally
be the same as the feudal giving of hands in homage.

When we reached some little trickle of water oozing out
of the hillside among kingcups, The Refuge of Allah filled
his black felt cap like a round bowl and offered it as the ballad
knight his helmet. Black hair fell about his ears and made a
wild frame for his high shaven forehead and brilliant eyes
and meeting eyebrows. The tight blue cotton jerkin, a dirty
old sash wrapped over it round the waist, a leather wallet
behind for a knife, and the quaint black caps like overgrown
skull caps, made these men look as if they belonged to some
fifteenth-century Italian picture.

They were wild and simple and peaceful. They had not
yet reached the point of sophistication "where the miraculous
is separated from everyday life, and were ready to believe
anything in the vast and strange world. So they must
have been when the philosopher of Rei tried his tricks upon
them and gave them the dream of Paradise in exchange for
their lives. They were faithful and devoted too. They
separated the universe into two parts of which one was the
Alamut valley; and by the third day I think they looked upon

[206]

First day to Dastgid

me as having acquired its freedom, and too.v ^

money and all that belonged to me tar more cmermy^mm
I could have done for myself, and :: we seep: m a strange
village of the plain, would group themselves reman nty
camp bed on me ground, with meir neads on me sand¬
bags, to guard mv s.eep—rather to my d;s_ om-er,.

'Aziz was superior to ::
of knowledge picked up
Khurramaeau on me cc
locally. Between these
a weaver's snutne to an
read and write, and na;
Hoiv Cities of Iran, w,

f titer two, w:

irins; ixis sop:
—cr Tanaka:

two cei

3Y ter ^

anxious saze oi all

par tv ana

several villagers, and with some nervousness of his own:
that one should be able to carry these hsh into the
mountains seemed to all something so miraculously verging
on magic that I had covert apprehensive glances from
some who were not as sure of my harmlessness as my own

charv ardors . , . 1 i c .

In the late afternoon we reached Dastgird^at rnt o t
our first ranee. The Qazvin plain reappeared on tne soutii,

below the rounded foothills. Our mules nad omy walked
for five hours, an easy first day s stage, but die sontuue <±-^
the slow dreamlike travelling in the sun alreaay made n
seem as if we were remote from the works business in

some little backwater of dine.

The village was small and poor, with a scanty supply ot
water which made its vines and apricots look stunted: and
the people were fanatical and begged ‘Aziz m whispers not

[207 1

A Journey to the Valley of the Assassins

to drink out of my cup—a piece of advice I was by no means
unwilling he should take.

The Imams of Kadhimain seem to have scattered their
families over this region: Musa’s son Jacob has a little mosque
here, with a tattered green shroud round the tomb and the
hand of Abbas cut out in tin, all very poor and dilapidated:
but the graveyard is grass-grown, surrounded by a low wall
with the blue distance beyond it and a sycamore above,
and this gives it an atmosphere of peace unusual to the bleak
and dingy Moslem tombs.

"Aziz took me back through the village, a placid hen
destined for pilau nestling in his arm, while the Elders, sitting
over their long pipes in the sun, looked at us glumly. They
did not come to call: they left us to the inferior company
of the women, who were stingy with the melted butter,
said the mother of ‘Aziz after what sounded like a fight.

“ They are people of the plain,” she explained witheringly,
the light of battle still in her eyes.

The highlands must have won again as usual, for when
the pilau came she poured the butter over it in a rich stream
amid a cowed but regretful silence. Sobs from a little girl
whose parent had just saved her from my toflee added
pathos to the scene. I was careful afterwards how I gave
things to children, though I never met this sort of bigotry
again.

Meanwhile it was depressing to sit in the midst of so
much disapproval. It froze to horror when they saw me
drinking tumblers of what ‘Aziz told them was arak out of
my water-botde: and though my small gift next morning
restored harmony, with embraces and protestations, I left
Dastgird as prejudiced as any of the party against lowlands
in general.

It was five-thirty, in the cool light before sunrise.

[ 208 ]

Men of Alanmt

We climbed northward up a steep, open ravine or gum;
towards the Chala pass. Tne air grew more cuoyant w::u
die height, and fold upon tom o: lower land gawerea between
us and the southern plain. On me shape si opes mere was
little sod; hard thorny grass and dowers, larnspur ana mven-
den mignonette, lousewcrt. dedcire irmea scaoious, ana
a pink cruciform blossom, aethicncma, wmen grew m tuns
on the rockv ledges so tmerny that it gave a ramt colour
to the snow- 0:1c son-bwacned valley. N'c p-ougn. ianct cr
human dwellings were here except c.acs ncntac tents in
a rar come, wnere tne wan no ring snepnera people tone care
of the village sheep through tne summer.

* c My dock is there/’ said 4 Aziz, pointing to a tar mn.
“ In the autumn tney ermg it cacn to me. He pan tea
behind me, for I was leaping on, deiignted wim tne mountain
steepness underfoot.

We began to meet the stream of traffic which carries the
Caspian rice across these passes. The rice is mentioned .in
a Chinese report of the second century, and is still carried
along its ancient ways. The men from Alamut came
striding down with their laden mules behind them. Their
white frieze coats, fastened on one side, were wrapped
tightly against the cold; the straight-stemmed Kurdish
pipe stuck in their sashes; their henna’d red beards were
trimmed short in the Moslem way. They had squarer
faces than the townsfolk, with open brows and longish
nose, straight or slightly curved, but not aquiline. They
greeted us with jovial friendly greetings; looked at me
wonderingly; and welcomed me to their country.

The small bells tied at the mules 9 hindquarters tinkled
pleasantly through the still morning air as the long trains
came down the zig-zag path. And after three and a half
hours we came by the source of the stream; and after that

A Journey to the Valley of the Assassins

to the long whale’s back of the ridge; and looked on the
Alamut country below.

This is a great moment, when you see, however distant,
the goal of your wandering. The thing which has been
living in your imagination suddenly becomes a part of the
tangible world. It matters not how many ranges, rivers
or parching dusty ways may lie between you: it is yours
now for ever. So did those old Barbarians feel who first
from the Alpine w T all looked down upon the Lombard
plain, and saw Verona and its towers and the white river
bed below them: so did Xenophon and Cortez, and every
adventurer and pilgrim, however humble, before them or
after: and so did I as I looked over that wide country,
intersected by red and black ranges, -while the group of
hdlmen around me, delighted with my delight, pointed
out the way to the Rock in a pale green cleft made small
by distance far below 7 .

There w 7 as the Assassins’ valley, tilted north-eastward:
before it, among lower ridges, the Shah Rud showed a
gleaming bend. Beyond and higher than all, uplifted as
an altar with black ridges rising to it through snowfields,
Takht-i-Suleiman, Solomon’s Throne, looked like a throne
indeed in the great circle of its lesser peers. Its white drapery
shone with the starched and flattened look of melting snow 7
in the distance. The black rock arms of the chair were
sharp against the sky 7 .

Below 7 it and nearer, but still above the snowline, were
the passes: the Salambar where we hoped to travel, and the
Syalan still blocked with snow. The Elburz summits were
hidden by their own range on which we stood, but one
could see the general trend of the land from the uninhabited
region of the north-east, descending on either side of the
Alamut valley 7 , which it enclosed in steep slopes, until it

[210]

Difficulty of verifying names

sank north of us into the smooth untidy hillsides of Rudbar,
beyond the Shah Rud below us, a region now green with
transient grass, but waterless and barren, where many easy
passes lead to the Caspian shore.

Hence descending, we left the Alpine air of the heights,
and dropped through flocks of black goats grazing, by steep
ploughed patches in hanging corries of the hills, and by
more numerous streams, through a small sacred grove of
junipers to Chala village, and decided to spend the night
there, for the Alamut bridge below Badasht was reported
washed away.

It was a steep hamlet hung over a ravine and small torrent
that tumbled down to the Shah Rud and wore itself a rocky
bed far below the tilted cornfields and walnut trees under
whose shade I spent a lazy afternoon.

Towards sunset I wandered above the village, into the
mud-built mosque where the children had finished school,
and up among sweet brier and narrow terraces of com and
beans, till I could see the deceptive green landscape of
Rudbar shining like Arcadia in the last light opposite, .and
a snowy peak behind.

Three boys came up and sat beside me while 1 asked them
names of hills. They talked to me with the pleasant eager¬
ness of youth.

44 That, 55 they said, 44 is Gavan Kuh behind Rudbar. The

others we do not know. 55

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Gavan Kuh and Takht-i-Suleiman were the only two
mountains marked on my map, which confined itself to a
few villages near blue and red lines of rivers and paths,
with shaded unnamed ranges in between.

Henceforth I made up my mind to collect my own names
and fill them in as I went along, and began gradually to

A Journey to the Valley of the Assassins

discover the joys and difficulties of a geographer, and the
general inaccuracy of human beings which, I believe I have
read in the History of European Morals, is the cause of half
the troubles of mankind. I came to endorse this. Six
people would each give me a different name for the selfsame
hill: when in doubt they invented or borrowed one from
somewhere else to please me. There was an economy to
begin with: people had not sat down like Adam and Eve,
who had nothing else to do, to look at objects and say.

44 What shall we call it?” They gave a name to a whole
region, and then made it do for whatever village, river,
mountain, or pass belonging to it they happened to wish
to define. This explained the difficulty of locating Alamut,
which is neither village nor castle but the main valley only,
and by courtesy the river whose proper name is Alamut
Rud.

By sifting and collating, by telling Ismail that he was a
liar and getting ‘Aziz to ask every likely man we met, I
gradually got the landmarks of my line of march; and also
acquired such a reputation for geographical curiosity that
strangers would come up and bring me names unasked.

In the villages in the evenings I would show my map to
the men squatting round the samovar , and explain how it is
gradually made by the report of travellers who give what
they can for the benefit of others after them, so that to offer
a wrong name is like wilfully misleading a stranger when
he asks the way. This they understood and became careful
to tell me what I wanted, and even Ismail, whom I accused
of being the father of every mistake printed between Alamut
and the Caspian, occasionally managed to say something
one could believe.

I returned to Chala to find him erecting my bed and
mosquito net on our host’s roof while all the young inhabi-

Night at Chala

o

cants sat in rows on the roofs opposite, like tne audience in
an amphitheatre. Europeans were seemingly not frequent
here, but ‘Aziz had been right, and die good mountain
hospitality did not tail us, enough tne people were so poor
that even the bride’s clotnes nung :n rags aoout ner, and. her
ornaments and jewels were but lead and glass.

Graves of Achxuneman or Sassanian kings, which provide
beads and talismans tor ladies as tar east as riamadan, are
' irdmown. The mud houses too were poor: an outer
ner coder:;?: where the women slept among the
inmost little storeroom, and a porch
hardened mud where the rugs were
spread for tea, was tne extent of our house and one or tne
in the village. Its furnishings were a tew rugs ioeany
a few copper, tinned or wooden vessels, some
guilts, a iua or two of the lovely Qazvin shape, and the
samovar and little glasses tor tea.

We sat over these while the pilau was cooking, and

ne:
room; an

root

w:tn

30U2|hs

oest
woven.

watched the oil wicks go out one by one in the Chala
houses while our host and his sons in their dark-blue rags
and old frieze coats talked to us with the grave good breed¬
ing of the hills and, between long pauses, while the pipes
glowed in the dusk, told us of the snowbound winter life,
when wolves in packs fight the village dogs; of bears and
foxes and hunting; and of the mountain streams that swell
in spring and wash away the small precipitous fields.

Next day we climbed down by the torrent, and by a steep
descending crest came to the Shah Rud and the road which
Hasan-i-Sabbah must have followed to reach his home.
The ruins of an old brick bridge still show the way. Here,
where the Alamut stream swirls out of a dark and narrow
canyon, and the Talaghan comes to meet it from the south¬
east, a great ridge and headland of rock stands between the

[ 2I 3 1

A Journey to the Valley of the Assassins

two and closes the valley of the Assassins as with a wall.
It is, I believe, one of the “ mountains ” which Marco Polo
mentions in his reference to the Assassins 5 home.

The entrance to the valley is so well hidden that Dr.
Eccles and his party who came before me, did not notice it
and had to wade upstream. But 'Aziz knew the ancient
way, and we climbed from boulder to boulder over the
face of the cliff tip a path evidendy used and neglected by
many generations, the sort of path that in the Alps makes
short cuts above and below the new road that has super¬
seded it, and still retains a sort of dilapidated solidity from
earlier days.

After an hour’s climb it brought us out across the ridge
into the sunlight.

Far below, flat and arid at our feet, gleaming with inter¬
laced streams, was the Alamut valley, and Badasht its first
oasis far ahead. Somewhere to the right a castle held the
entrance: but 'Aziz, whose education was only beginning,
said no thin g about it, and took me past its dead sentinels
unchallenged, downwards among steep slabs of granite
where roses and jasmine and fragrant shrubs of many kinds
gave us the same pleasure as to those earlier travellers who
reported to Marco Polo seven centuries ago.

There is no cultivation in this first part of the valley, and
the waterless gullies of Rudbar come down on the left
nearly to the water’s edge. Whatever ancient road there
may have been is long since washed away, and indeed the
valley road must always be carried down by floods here and
there. Even in its broader stony bed above the canyon,
the Alamut water lapped dangerously at the bridge below
Badasht in muddy waves and washed away the earth from
the flimsy poles which sagged in the middle.

The men got one mule over, but thought it safer to wade

[214]

The Rock of AlamuU

The legends of the Elburz

with the other two, and Ismail managed skilfully, taking
the current slantwise, up to his thighs in water, while the
old lady and I took the bridge as far as it went and paddled
through the rest of the stream.

It was stifling enough now: the round white stones of
the river bed and the red earth walls of Rudbar radiated
heat upon us. We were glad to reach the willows and
meadows of Badasht, where the water was channelled in
smooth streams, and the grey-leafed sanjid tree in flower
gave us delicate scent as we passed. Badasht—Bagh Dasht—
is Garden of the Desert, an attractive name for the historical
detective. But it is not nearly so much of a garden as
Shahrak farther along, where there are vines and com and
walnuts, and a green valley opens northward to villages and
poplar-fringed meadows. We had our lunch here by a
spring; the wayside travellers joined our circle, and white
and black magpies walked up and down before us.

In a barren country roads cannot alter much, for they
are ruled by the wells of water. This one was light and
clear, and no doubt Hasan himself and many travellers before
and after sat here in the shade: merchants from China and
India; messengers from Egypt or Syria; governors of
scattered strongholds from Isfahan to the Kurdish hills.
Not a memory of it all remained. The legends of the
valley belong to Moslem Shi’a or to the old native myths
of Persia; for this is the beginning of the Elburz country,
which borders on the demon province of Mazanderan,
where Rustum on his horse rode and fought and the early
Persian kings waged superhuman wars. The memories
of Hasan and his followers seemed to be non-existent except
in the villages nearest the Rock, where foreigners probably
have brought them back.

We left Shahrak and went again through burning reaches

[ 2I 5 ]

A Journey to the Valley of the Assassins

of red, hardened earth to Shutur Khan, where the Doctor’s
brother lives in summer and the Rock of the Assassins
stands out like a ship, broadside on, from a concave mountain¬
side that guards it on the north. It was two hours 5 walk
away up its own tributary, but it shone clearly distinct in
the evening light, an impressive sight to the pilgrim. I
contemplated it with the feelings due to an object that still
has the power to make one travel so far, and then followed
the mules to the low house of the laird beside a little terraced
orchard and waterfall a few yards above the level of the path.

The laird was elderly, wrinkled and rosy-cheeked, with
mild manners a little rusted over by the country, dressed
in a long frock-coat and the new peaked hat. His newest
wife from the city also came to me in the guest room,
a blue satin bow in her hair, and presently the young police¬
man who lives at Mahmudabad across the river also arrived
to look at me.

He was anxious to see my maps.

“ So these are the pictures you take in your black box and

show to no one? 55 said he, when he had examined them
with attention.

My feeble attempt to explain the difference between a
map and a snapshot was not believed for a moment. But
he was politeness itself, and glad of novelty, for in all the
district of Alamut and Rudbar, which is under his sole
control, he has no distractions except the conversation of
my host and the quarrels of the inhabitants, who keep him
riding from village to village throughout the year. He
knew no language except Persian, but he was intelligent,
and must have had some character to stand the lonely life
so contrary to his city tastes.

“ Do you have a permit from my colleague in Qazvin? 55
he asked.

With the Laird of Alamut Rock

I remembered the scowl of the Commandant in the
Grand Hotel, and lied boldly.

“ It was not needed; he told me that you yourself would
be able and kind enough to do all that may be necessary
for my assistance here/" said I rather unpardonably: but
Persia is bad for one’s morals.

Anyway, the speech had a soothing effect. The police¬
man, deciding to postpone suspicion till he had searched
through my luggage in private, devoted himself to pleasant
conversation for many hours, till the lamp and the pilau
were brought out to us and we ate supper under the stars.
When, after that, I went to give some last order to ‘Aziz
and Ismail, their obvious surprise at seeing me still able to
make plans of my own showed me that I had done rather
w r ell with the “ government ” of Shutur Khan.

The sun was shining next morning, for I slept late. The
waterfall made a pleasant noise outside my window, and
the poplar trees glittered in a blue sky. I woke up with
the delightful feeling of a pleasant day ahead, so near the
journey’s goal, and after tea and bread and honey on
the terrace, set off with our own mules but with Ibrahim
the major-domo to guide us, and Mahmud, the Arbab’s
twelve-year-old boy as company, across the sunken bed of
the Qasir Rud to flowering wild meadows above, and
northward towards the castle.

There the sentinel on the Rock might look down and
watch who came and went along the slope till the path turned
down into the ravine beyond a small white shrine, where I
stopped to leave a coin on the tomb while ‘Aziz kissed its
stones. As I had been to three of the four holy cities, he
and indeed all of the mountain people looked upon me as a
sort of hajji regardless of the fact of my being a Christian.
We were in the country of heresies.

[217]

A Journey to the Valley of the Assassins

I walked with the sun at my back through this open pastu
and thought of what strange destinies had climbed the p;
before.

Hasan himself must have glanced up at the mass of
castle and the cliffs behind it with an appraising eye wl
the Fates and his own fearless spirit were weaving his futt
The disciple strode down here unquestioning to murder
chieftain’s son. Rashid-ed-Din came penniless and on f
from Basra, stayed to spend his youth in study with his yoi
lords, and finally left to end as the equal of kings in Syri
That was in the days of the third Grand Master Muh;
mad, when Hasan, the young heir, drought to throw a\
the last vestige of Moslem tradition and to claim divinity
himself as so many like him had done before. Many a t:
the two friends must have walked along these hills
talking over their revolutionary plans and spreading tl
in the houses of the villagers, till the anger of the old c
put a stop to it all for a time and the reformers had to i
for his death. That was in 1162. Hasan then alio 1
wine to be drunk in the valley, and abolished the for
prayers, and renounced even the nominal allegiance
Egypt. The old books which he studied, written by
namesake and kept with many others in the library on
Rock, would throw much light on the ideas which gover
the valley at this time, what Manichean or Magian her
with possibly some pagan survival of philosophy lingei
as among the Sabasans of Harran.

Then the Mongols came, and their slant-eyed art
must have camped in these meadows through the wii
months till the Rock capitulated and the devastating he
went by, and the heretical library was burnt and lost for e
The castle fell to ruin till other obscure lords somewl
about the eighteenth century settled there again; of wh

[218]

The Rock of Alamut

no thin g but a few shards of broken pottery remain to tell
the story.

Meanwhile we had descended into the deep bed of the
stream, and climbing out upon the western side, came into
the lanes of Qasir Khan and to its village green under four
great sycamores.

The village turned out with greetings for the young laird
and Ibrahim.

People often came to see the castle, they said: someone
came every year. They would call the man who always
guided the strangers. This sounded rather like a tourist
resort, but our expert examination soon reduced the crowd
of visitors to two parties within the last two years and an
“ English Ambassador ” and his wife from Teheran some
years ago. The rules for the sightseeing were well estab¬
lished, however.

A red-bearded old Assassin appeared with a samovar
under his arm, and another, grey-bearded and less important,
with a pickaxe and shovel to make steps up the slope.
The women, grouped together under the trees, unveiled
and barelegged with short kilts, and white kerchiefs over
their heads, shouted good wishes: and our mules started
off again along the shaly hillside, across the Qasir Rud, now
a small brook, to the steep ascent of the Rock.

The particular name of the Rock is not Alamut, as
travellers ancient and modem seem to take for granted. It
is they and not the inhabitants of the valley who call it so,
and they have done it so effectually that now the people of
Qasir Khan also begin to talk of it as Alamut to strangers,
and only after questioning admit that this is not its proper
name. It is the “castle” of Qasir Khan, on the Qasir
Rud: and Alamut is the whole main valley with the Alamut
Rud flowing through it: and as the matter might have some

[ 2x9 ]

A Journey to the Valley of the Assassins

bearing on the old descriptions of the Assassins’ stronghold,
it is worth mentioning before the natural Persian amiability
makes the people of the Qasir Rud valley rechristen their
fortress to please the yearly visitor. Except for these, who
had learnt it from foreigners, I met no one in the whole
region who would know where to direct one if one asked
for Alamut. “You are in Alamut now,” they would
say, and sweep their arm over the long reach of the valley
in its mountain cradle.

Whatever its name, the great Rock looks a grim place.
Mount Haudegan behind it rises in shaly slopes with granite
precipices above. A green patch high up shows a small
spring whence, said the guide, with obliging inventiveness,
the castle’s water supply was drawn in conduits. East and
west of the rock, far below, run the two streams that form
the Qasir Rud; they eat their way through scored and naked
beds. There is no green of grass until, beyond a neck that
joins the castle to this desolate background, one climbs
under its eastern lee, reaches the level by old obliterated
steps, and from the southern end looks down nearly a
thousand feet of stone to the fields and trees of Qasir Khan,
the sunny shallow slopes of the northern bank, and beyond
the Alamut River, to the glaciers of Elburz in the south-east
and the heights of Chala beyond Shirkuh in the west.

Here from some buttress in the castle wall, Hasan-i-Sabbah
could watch for the return of his Fedawis. Here, no doubt,
he would look out for his messengers when the benefactor
and enemy of his youth, Nizam-ul-Mulk, the great minister,
sent his army against him; and from here perhaps saw the
emissary striding up by the Qasir Rud to say that the
Assassins’ work was done. Here as an old man he might
stroll in the last sunlight and look on his lands already in
shadow, peaceful below him with their crops. The place

[220 ]

The Squires Son

was now covered with, wild tulips, yellow and red, among
the stones and mortar. Patches of wall clung here and there
to the lip of the rock and showed the extent of the enclosure:
but nearly everything is ruined beyond the power of
imagination to reconstruct, and the lower part of the castle,
where rooms and a tank of water are dug out, were in¬
accessible without climbing-shoes which I had not brought
with me.

Down there, so they say at Shutur Khan, seven black
dogs guard the treasure and breathe fire, but fly—rather
inadequately—as one approaches. The vine of Hasan
spreads over the face of the Rock—perhaps of that second
Hasan who released the valley from teetotalism; and the
roses of Hasan grow on a narrow ledge whence my host
had brought slips for his garden and gave me an Assassins’
bouquet before I left.

We lit die samovar and sat round it in our coats, for a
cool wind was blowing. I had chocolate with me, and
persuaded the rather nervous party to share. Mahmud
was the boldest, a proper descendant of the valley, and a true
boy: our picnic was a joyful event to him. He had often
climbed up the southern face of the Rock, he said, and had
picked grapes from Hasan’s vine.

When, after hunting for shards of pottery which lay all
over the ground below, we returned to the village and went
into our guide’s house for tea, it was pleasant to see the
people with their master’s son, and his friendly young
air of authority among them. It was very much like the
squire’s son in some old-fashioned English village. The
men of Qasir Khan came one by one to sit in our circle,
while the women stood beyond, and the children scrambled
about on the wall; and they told us their stories of Hasan,
but I thought they sounded like echoes of other travellers;

[221 ]

A Journey to the Valley of the Assassins

the genuine note was only heard when they came to speak
of Kaiumars, their legendary king, who first built the Rock,
said they. No doubt in a winter’s evening one might collect
many an old tale, but I think that the lords of the castle
would scarcely figure in them.

Meanwhile the sunlight came to us from the west.
Through its level shafts we descended across the meadows,
and talked of hunting-eagles with Mahmud, while Ismail,
ahead of us with the mules, sang the melancholy ballads of
the charvardars . They seemed to be hendecasyllables, three
rhymes Eke the quatrains of FitzGerald, a long sad story of
Miriam of Tanakabun. Here as among the Arabs song
still springs naturally out of men’s daily life; the incidents
of the market, the gossip of the valley, are woven into
ballads as they come: ever retouched and readapted to
their modem background, they keep their original substance
perhaps through centuries, like the ballad of Rosmunda the
Gothic princess, which, in modem garb, is still sung by
Italian peasants in the hills of Piedmont.

I had promised the policeman a visit, so that after a talk
to the ladies of the house, and another futile effort for the
baby’s welfare, I went with the two boys across the river-
lands to the police house in Mahmudabad. My luggage
had been thoroughly gone through in my absence, and had
disclosed nothing more criminal than a Persian grammar,
so that I found both the police and the Arbab as cordial as
possible. The little office contained a table and chair, but
we sat independently of them on the floor, and were presendy
joined by an elderly unshaven man who proved to be not
only interested but also intelligent in old castles, and told
me so much of the one above Shirkuh and its reservoirs
and the ruins of ancient water channels that I made tentative
suggestions about a journey to investigate and was only

[22a]

Cuckoos

dissuaded by noticing the consternation of the young police¬
man, whose suspicions were evidently returning in full
force.

I had by this time decided to come back to Alamut some
time or other, and left it at that.

The policeman’s wife was not there; she could not bear
the country life; but he brought in his two little girls,
veiled in pink cotton chadurs. They were eight and nine
years old, with pretty demure manners, very solemn. In
spite of so much decorum, however, one of them had
managed to fall off a ladder and scrape her knee; I took them
home with me to dress the wound, and found that they
turned into natural little human girls as they trotted with
their hands in mine through the starlit valley now filled
with damp night smells of earth after the ploughing.

The unshaven man joined us on the way and we discussed
cuckoos, whose voices I had heard in Alamut for the first
time that day.

“ It is a useless wicked bird,” I said, and told him how it
grows in a strange nest.

“ Is that so?” said he. “ If your eye is diseased, and you
smear ointment made from the cuckoos’ eyes upon it, it
will heal. Allah makes all things useful. This is written
in a book called The Peculiarities of Beasts . It is true. You
can buy it in the bazaar.”

We were polite about it; but we neither of us believed the
other. Next morning we left Shutur Khan. We were to
follow the valley to its upper end, to ‘Aziz’s village of
Garmrud, over the pass northward, and through the
Caspian jungle to the sea.

It was another fine day. I found the Arbab dispensing
judgments at his door: he squatted on the carpet and wrote
on his knee in purple ink, while his villagers waited with a

[223 ]

A Journey to the Valley of the Assassins

look of confidence on their wrinkled peasant faces. It was
a rare and pleasant sight in Persia.

Something weighed on ‘Aziz’s mind. When we had
left Shutur Khan a few hundred yards behind us he came
up to me and asked whether I had given a present to the
Arbab’s servant.

“ Yes, indeed,” said I. “ I gave him half a toman.”

“ That was more than sufficient,” said ‘Aziz. “ But how
was it that we did not see it given?”

“ It is our custom,” said I, “ to give these gifts as quietly
as possible, lest the master of the house should feel ashamed.”

“ Indeed,” said ‘Aziz, “ that is a good custom, but not
for our country, for Ibrahim will not tell his master of your
noble generosity, and your face will be blackened. I will
make it all right.”

He hailed a passing hillman and spent a few moments
murmuring earnestly.

“ It will be well,” said he as he rejoined me. “ This
man will tell the Arbab, and you will be fairly spoken of
among them all.”

We were now hailed by a woman at the side of the path
who had evidendy been waiting for us.

“ My mother is ill near-by,” said she. “ Out of your
mercy come to see her. There is no doctor here.”

Which is true, for the nearest doctor or chemist is three
stages by mule from the Alamut valley, and there is no
track fit for a cart. Though I said I could do nothing, I
dismounted and followed to a small group of houses off the
road where a white-haired woman lay with a broken thigh.

Welcome,” she said, with little hope. Beyond a rough
splint to ease the pain, there was nothing to be done. I
came away sorrowful and helpless to my party under the
trees.

[224]

The Legend of Nevisar Shah

Our caravan was small now, for the Refuge of Allah
had gone home and ‘Aziz’s mother with the boy had gone
on to Garmrud the day before.

We rode for some time along the stony bed of the stream,
admiring the caper in flower which spreads there from
boulder to boulder along the ground, and which they call
the Unbelievers’ Flower, Kafir-gul. They use it in pilau.

“ Is it true,” I said to ‘Aziz, “ that the slope of Elburz is
so rich in minerals that the sheep browsing there grow golden
teeth when they happen to eat a certain herb;”

“ I have not heard of it,” said ‘Aziz. “ But Ismail belongs
to that country: I will ask him.”

Ismail, whose mule had strayed off the path, was busy
with a short but vivid sketch of its family history; he paused
with stick uplifted when ’Aziz questioned him, and thought
the matter over.

“ There are hot springs with healing waters up there,”
said he; “ and also in the region of Takht-i-Suleiman. But I
have never heard of the golden teeth. It may be true, but
I think not.”

“ I heard it from the Arbab’s daughter,” said I. “ Perhaps
she exaggerated.”

“ It does not do always to believe,” said ‘Aziz.

“ There is a true story about the Shah Nevisar here in the
valley,” he added after a while. “ You can see its truth for
yourself, for the landmarks all remain and his casde above
Garmrud is still known as the castle of Nevisar Shah.
He was an unbeliever, and our lord ’Ah blockaded him in
his castle. Now you will see if we go there to-morrow that
it is very steep, and there was only one gateway to pass in
or out by. Our lord ’Ah placed a sentry before it and told
him that no one was to be allowed to leave the casde, for
he meant to capture the Shah Nevisar. But the Shah’s
p [ 225 ]

A Journey to the Valley of the Assassins

mother was a witch, and she changed him and his son into
a ram and a black dog, and they trotted out through the
gate unsuspected by the sentry and fled. Down there across
the river is a great rock cleft in two: they call it Kafir Kuh,
and that is where our lord ’Ali overtook them and cut
them down.”

We had now left the bank, and, turning a corner, saw a
rich green basin before us where the villages lay among rice-
fields, overshadowed by the most beautiful walnut trees I
have ever seen. All here was fertile and fragrant: roses,
vines, and hawthorn grew in the tall hedges, and where the
rice-fields ended, the com began. Water ran everywhere
in little channels which flooded the shallow plantations:
and the shadows were full of birds’ voices.

But the people in these villages are sick with malaria, a
poor crowd compared with Qasir Khan or Garmrud
which stand too high for the rice to grow and are free of
mosquitoes. Quinine seemed to be unknown. Indeed,
except for sugar and tea and paraffin, and rice, of which the
home supply is inadequate, and which comes with the tea
from the Caspian, the Alamut valley seems to be sufficient
to itself.

In the next oasis, on which we descended from a narrow
and dangerous path of sloping shale above the river, we came
through the chief village of Zavarak, where there is a little
booth filled with European odds and ends, which are
gradually beginning to find their way among the home-made
things.

The valley was narrower now. A rocky wall, 3,000 feet
or more, ran along it on our left. On one of the pinnacles,
invisible to the naked eye, ‘Aziz pointed out the castle of
Nevisar in front of us. On our right were narrow wooded
glens with the snows of Elburz at their head. The lane

[ 226 ]

Conversation with a Bakhtiari

we rode along was almost over-arched by mulberries and
walnuts. Well might the old travellers speak of this as a
garden, when they came upon it from the bleak ranges on

either side. .

About half an hour’s ride beyond Zavarak we found a
meadow under trees, and had just spread the felt mule cloths,
with my cotton quilt as a pillow, when a woman came to
beg me to see her child and lured me back to Zavarak in
the sun with the promise that her house was round the
corner. By the time I had seen the invalid, uselessly as
usual, and then seen about a dozen more, and given ah
the quinine and castor oil I could spare, and refused their
poor offers of payment and left among blessings that I felt
I had not earned, I made my way back to the resting-place,
hot and exhausted, and promptly discouraged ‘Aziz wno was
just ready to start off for his home.

Here we sat at lunch, and the folk of the house near-by
joined us, together with a wayfarer or two as the custom is,
for your food is free to all who come; and this in itself is
an argument for not carrying more than is absolutely
necessary, for if you share them with all the country-side
your tins of biscuits last a very few days.

As we were sitting there in a circle, a stranger came up, a
Bakhtiari with a peaked modem cap, the only one I saw
worn in the valley except by ‘Aziz and the Arbab. This was
against the man to begin with, but he made matters worse by
beginning to talk of Europe and its politics and asked me
whether the British still consider Berlin as their capital, as
they have done, said he, since the war. ^

“We have given that up some time ago, said I, but
wished he would go and cease from troubling our less
intellectual peace.

Mig ht he have a pencil, he asked, to remember me bye

[227]

A Journey to the Valley of the Assassins

I gave him the pencil, and he went: we were all polite
to him: but two days after, when ‘Aziz happened to men¬
tion the people whom his religion commands him to curse,
he added after the names of Abu Bekr, Omar, and Yezid:
‘ And the man to whom you gave the pencil, him I curse
also.” I then realized his feelings in the matter.

“ He was a stranger in the valley,” said ‘Aziz. “ He had
no business to ask you for anything.”-

We came to Garmrud in the sunset. An immense
precipice which closes it in at the back and through which
the Alamut River finds a narrow cleft to enter, was shining
like a torch in the last sunlight. The flat houses on the slope
at its feet were also made rosy in the glow. No more
stupendous exit could be imagined for the Assassins’ home.
Here was the second mountain of which the travellers spoke
to Marco Polo: and there above it, “ that none without his
licence might find their way into this delicious valley,”
at the top of 3,000 feet of sheer rock, stood the castle of
Nevisar Shah to which no Frank, so they told me, had ever
climbed.

Anyone who wishes for scientific information about these
matters is referred to the classics on the subject of the
Assassins, Von Hammer Purgstall, Guyard, etc.; to Mr.
L. Lockhart’s article in Vol. XIV of the Bulletin of the School
of Oriental Studies', to Mr. Ivanow’s paper, and to my own
itinerary in The Royal Geographical Society’s Journal, of
January, 1931. What I write here is for pleasure, for other
people s, I hope, but, in any case for my own, for it is always
agreeable to go over the wandering days. History and
geography, arguments and statistics are left out: I mention
the things I like to remember as they come into my head.

My stay in Garmrud was among the best of them, for
the whole village received me as a friend and made me as

[ 228 ]

ha

vi;

‘A

he

w

A

g ;

A

v

ii

t:

I

A'

V'

thUQ

Stay in GarmruA

happy as they could. Not only was I their first European
visitor for years, but I belonged, as it were, particular y to
‘Aziz, and therefore to his village. His mother was on the
house-roof to welcome us: his pretty wife stood behind her
with the last baby tied into the shawl on her back as is the
Alamut fashion; his sisters and cousins and aunts came

greeting us one by one. . . ,

The house was at the lower end of the village with the

Alamut torrent in front of it and the cliff at the back. It
was a prosperous clean little place, with a tiny walled
garden full of lettuce and beans, two good rooms and a
few dark places below for stabling and stores. And the
inner room was well furnished with rugs woven by the
young wife, and bedding, and the baby’s cradle, and various
treasures pushed into niches in the white-washed wall.
Here Ismail set up my bed while the women squatted on
the roof (in Garmrud every front door gives on to some¬
body’s roof) and picked over the rice for the pilau, and gave
the news, and ‘Aziz showed bis friends, who soon came
dropping in in twos and threes, what he had brought from
Qazvin in his saddle-bags for his shop across the stream.
The chief treasure was a print of the Shah, and an oleograph
of a Victorian lady in a bustle, which the young wife looked
at with interest, bending over it in her black trousers and
frilled kilt and bright waistcoat, her twisted red kerchief
tied at a rakish angle at the very top of her head

She was furious with ‘Aziz for staying away so long. She
had to spend all her time in the shop. It was not fitting, s e
sa id_and should be his business. And what was he doing
all this time in Qazvin? It was not a woman s place to sit
in the shop. It was not that she cared particularly whether
he were here or no. She knew that whenever a friend said
“ Stay ” he stayed, and forgot about his wife. He cou,d

[ 229 ]

A Journey to the Valley of the Assassins

never say "" No 55 to anyone. It was a poor affair to be
a married woman, anyway. Perhaps if I did not mind I
would let her sleep in my room that night? This harangue,
delivered in a series of short attacks whenever the pilau in
the next room could be left for a moment, and addressed
in general to the circle on the floor, caused much amusement.
The final threat and climax was addressed to me with a
mischievous and engaging twinkle. "Aziz continued to
smile unperturbed.

We spent the evening discussing geography. When the
guest room was empty Ismail, now well trained to the
routine, gave instructions for hot water: the children were
tucked to sleep under a quilt on the floor; and the rest of
the family settled in the outer room.

"Aziz had never been to the castle of Nevisar Shah, nor
had Ismail. It is, indeed, unvisited except by shepherds
or hunters of ibex, and of these there are not many.

The only weapon I saw in Alamut was a muzzle-loading
gun immensely long, which appeared next morning slung
at the back of a tall long-faced man dressed in blue cotton
who was to take us up. He was the village dyer and his
hands were stained dark blue, but he was also a hunter, and
took the rocks on our path with the slow easy stride of the
hills while "Aziz and Ismail panted behind him and the
mules seemed to be standing on their hind legs. The path
wound up to a green col where the old people of the fort
were buried; their graves lay open, robbed long ago.
There we left Ismail with the mules and the samovar
and the water-jar, and climbed over shale and grass and
slabs of granite, round comers where hands and feet
were both required, where one could look down over
the cliff of Garmrud into country even wilder and more
desolate beyond, or eastward over spurs and pinnacles to

[230]

Castle of Nevisar Shah

the sunlit valley and Marco Polo's mountain of Skirkuh

fcUmbed, I saw a gleam of blue glaae among the
stones, and picked up a shard of the selfsameC P°" y
tad found at the Rock of Alamut two days before.

Thirteenth-century pottery in this deserted place, 3 ,
feet above the nearest habitation! I seized on it as a proo
requhed; for here without doubt must be Marco Pob
castle at the entrance of the valley as he describes 1.
hunted among the stones, and found more ^ b^

bits all corresponding to the early samples of QasirKk*
and blessed die destructiveness of Assassin housemaids lo. e

^There is nothing left of the buildings except a bit of wall
here and there; a piece of the keep still upright with a loop-
hSe on the highest point; and masses of dfns of masonry
over all the top of the crest, which is a good-sized place and
must have contained a little hamlet as well as the casde itself.
On every side the natural walls fall away m precipices; and
fboin'thJhighest point, ro.ooo feet at least fm my aneroid
could rise no further, one can see the great half-circle ot t
eastern mountains covered with snow, nameless on my map.

People who know nothing about these things wih te
you that there it no addition of pleasure “ ^

scape to yourself. But this is not true. It is a pleasure
exdusive, unreasoning, and real: it has some of the^uahty
Id som; of the intensity of love: it is a secret shared, a
communion which an intruder desecrates: and to go to the
lonely and majestic places of the world for poor motives,
to turn them to cheap advertisement or flashy pnmzksm,
iars like a spiritual form of prostitution on your true lover
J of the hills. The solitary rapture must be dismtereste . m
often it is stumbled upon unthinkingly by men whose

[231 1

A Journey to the Valley of the Assassins

business takes them along remoter ways: who suddenly find
enchantment on their path and carry it afterwards through
their lives with a secret sense of exile.

I did not think of this, however, nor of anything nor
anybody: the loveliness of the world being enough in itself.
I sat in the sun and rested my eyes in the sight of the hills.
How hillmen love them everywhere. ‘Aziz and the
guide, lazily contented, stretched among the wind-flattened
juniper, pointed to the mountains by their names.

“ There is pasture,” said ‘Aziz; or “ Here is water.”
“ There you will find ibex in winter,” or “ There is the
pass to Talaghan.”

The long saddles and sharp ridges, the black gorges and
far vaporous snows began to group themselves in friendly
lines.

We returned in the afternoon to Garmrud and rested,
and were treated like heroes by the village, who do not
often climb to Nevisar Shah.

Towards sunset I wandered out along the bank of the
stream, and looked back at the cliff and the climbing houses
against it, and wondered how the Mongols got into the
valley, which is north of and off the usual route from
Bokhara and Khorasan—the great route which saw the
flight and death of Darius and the march of Alexander’s
men. Until the sixteenth century, when Shah Abbas
built the causeway along the Caspian shore, the region
between the sea and the great road must have been almost
impossible for any army. Only a native and popular leader,
wishing to cross north Persia unperceived, might use it and
—like Bahrain Gur with theWhite Huns—fall like a thunder¬
bolt on the enemy from behind the screen of the Elburz.

This valley with its great walls should have been im¬
pregnable: north of it, over the passes, the country was so

[ 232 ]

Good-bye to Alamut

indeed. There, among forests and lagoons, the fleeing
remnants of Persia found refuge from the Tatar hordes.
When Hulagu’s armies came from the east, they may have
taken the Tundurkhan pass from Talaghan and forced their
way through the ravine or over the shoulder of Salambar.
It was not the first Mongol effort against Alamut, and there
must have been those there who knew the ways.

While I loitered, considering these matters, an old man
greeted me, who was cutting hay in his meadow by the
stream. He strolled up with his sickle in his hand, to talk
about the crops and the view. Then who should appear,
as it were out of the ground to disturb the evening quiet,
but the Bakhtiari of the pencil; insinuating as ever, with his
air of superior information, he began to tell me of the castle
in the hills, “ up there, impossible to reach”; he waved a
vague arm.

In the old man’s eyes, surrounded by innumerable folds
and wrinkles, there passed a little twinkle of a smile; it
never reached his lips; it was like a far flicker of faint summer
lightning scarcely seen; but it was extraordinarily friendly.

44 She has been to the castle this morning,” he said gravely.
The interfering stranger was put in his place; and feeling
it in some subtle way, took his departure and left us to stroll
home through the shadows and the twilight peace.

In the evening we sat once more over glasses of tea and
discussed the names and the passes of the hills. It was my
last night in the valley of Alamut. Next day, beneath its
high overhanging walls, we climbed out of the Assassins
country, over the pass, into the legendary forests of Mazan-
deran and down to the Caspian shore.

Chapter IV

THE ASSASSINS' CASTLE OF LAMIASAR

When Hulagu the Tartar devastated the Middle East
in a.d. 1256 he took and destroyed among others fifty or
more castles of the Assassins. Of all these strongholds,
which one hears of over the north of Persia from the borders
of Khorasan to those of Arabian Iraq, only two are mentioned
as having put up any long resistance. These are Girdkuh
and Lamiasar, of which the sites have hitherto been unknown.
They held out for six months, long after the last Lord of
Alamut had been taken away a captive and murdered m
the hills by his enemies, and long after the Rock of
Alamut itself had, against its will, been forced by its own
master to surrender. Lamiasar and Girdkuh held out, and
the story goes that, as far as Girdkuh is concerned, it could
have resisted even longer, but was forced to capitulate
owing to a shortage not of food or water, but of clothes.

The Mongols were not a mere horde without engines of
war. They carried out their sieges in a scientific manner,
with Chinese engineers, and every appliance, and with
special auxiliary troops familiar with countries unknown
to themselves. The places that could stand so long against
them must have been particularly formidable. There are
not many clues to their whereabouts, except that Girdkuh
is mentioned by both Yaqut and Mustawfi as being visible
and about a day’s journey from Damghan. Lamiasar is
only known before its final siege and fall as having been
captured for the Assassins in the year a.h. 495 (a.d. 1083)

[ 2 34 ]

Assassin conquest of Lamiasar

by Kiya Buzurg Umid, the vizier and successor of the
first Old Man of the Mountains. He was a native of
Rudbar, the mountain region north of and including the
Shah Rud valley from its junction with the Qizil Uzun
at Manjil to the beginning of the Alamut and Talaghan
valleys on the east. "When I was in Qazvin, and a Persian
friend, knowing my interest in castles, told me of an old
ruin called Lamiasar, in the district of Rudbar, I was there¬
fore very much interested, and though I had nothing but
the name to go by in a country of about 10,000 inhabitants,
and though it is very malarious there in summer, I decided
to cross the ridge from Qazvin and to explore.

I went north to Rashtegan and had lunch there in the
heat of the morning under plane trees and willows by a
shrivelled summer stream. It was the beginning of August.
The only flowers left were mint and willowherb, michaelmas
daisies, and a small pink stock growing round the water.
The corn was out on numerous threshing-floors terraced up
at one end of the village: its yellow heaps stood against the
mountain background, fine in a barren way, where the
northern passes climb across the ridge. In the foreground
in the sun old men and boys drove black oxen slowly round
in a circle, dragging clumsy rollers with wooden spikes
to tread out the com; while in another place the young
men were busy with the winnowing; the chopped straw,
as they tossed it up on forks, hung like dust in the air.

The party consisted of Ismail, myself, and two mules.
My own man, ‘Aziz, was kept in his village in the Alamut
valley by the illness of his small son, and when at last my
message penetrated to him, after I had been chafing in Qazvin
for a week, he hastened to send for his mules, who were
enjoying their yearly holiday of pasture somewhere a day’s
journey into the hills, and dispatched them to me

[ 3 35 ]

The Assassins' Castle of Lamiasar

together with his servant Ismail. Ismail looked like a
convict: he had one of those heads flattened at the back,
and his limbs, as they slouched along, seemed to keep
together by pure accident. His clothes had the same sort
of casual dilapidation; the sleeves of his tunic began half-way
down his arm and ended long before his wrist; his loose
blue cotton trousers were suspended by some inadequate
method which demanded constant hitching up; and he was
hung round with about six different straps and bags in which
his amulet, his money, his knife, packman’s needle, and
other objects were all separately housed. He wore a battered
cap with a peak. My field-glasses, slung across him jauntily,
gave a last incongruous tourist touch. He was terribly
stupid. His daily food, which consisted of an ancient
cheese in a furry bit of goatskin round his neck, made him
very trying at close quarters.

Into the hands of God may you be entrusted,” said the
waiter of the Grand Hotel, as we left Qazvin; and as I started
out for the h ills with Ismail as my sole companion, I felt
that some such pious wish was required.

At Rashtegan we had difficulties because the patch of
grass under the trees where I sat was the only village patch,
and too precious for mules to eat it up. Ismail was made
to tether them some way off, while a shrill woman, who had
argued the point, suddenly collapsed into friendliness and,
squatting down with her samovar, prepared to feed me with
tea and eggs. She had a quick, lively face, with dancing
eyes and a gaiety apparently accounted for- by the non¬
existence of her husband.

This,” I find noted in my diary, <£ often appears to be
the cause of cheerfulness among the Persian ladies.” With
her was a girl of thirteen or so, a bride of one year, who
told me that she spent the summer up here in a little

[* 36 ]

Lakh Chah pass

hut of boughs to enjoy the open air away from the village.
It is a charming trait in Persia that anyone you meet
understands the pleasures of a picnic and will make the
best of all the trees and brooks and grassy places that
they have.

We rested here till the worst of the heat was over, and
then climbed upward among fields where the corn was cut,
stacked in round heaps with the heads towards the centre,
and covered with leaves and stones against the birds. The
peasants were about, gathering it in to the threshing-floors,
and ready to pause and greet us as we passed. The little
stream, hidden in its sunken bed by a tunnel of trees, kept
on our right side, until we reached the level of Razigird,
and forded it, and began to climb in a bare dull landscape
streaked with strata of light-green rock and outcrops of
white limestone here and there. The stream, which they
had called Pile Rudkhaneh, the Big River, in the plain
below, now appeared on our other side, coming out of a
steep uninhabited valley with clumps of willow trees and
planes but no cultivation. Here it changes its name and
becomes Pas Duzd, the Track of Thieves.

A little parallel range of foothills with grassy lands behind
them runs between the main range and the Qazvin plain.
We looked down on these, and on the gardens of Qazvin
and its minarets beyond, nearly invisible In the distance.
The track to the Simiar Pass was on our right, hidden from
us by the round and shapeless contours of our range. Round
us were many flowers as we rose higher, dianthus and thistles
of various kinds, thyme, borage, a tiny forget-me-not on
a long stalk, and many others I did not know. And we
met company all the way—men from the Shah Rud valley
bringing loads of melons to the Qazvin market—for this is
one of the lesser passes for local traffic only, and the strong

[237]

The Assassins’ Castle of Lamiasar

mules of the more eastern tracks are here replaced by
donkeys, who do the journey in a day. Laleh Chak, the
name of the pass, is not marked on the map, though its
height is given.

We were three hours climbing up from Rashtegan, and
were disappointed at the top, for there was no forward view,
but only the one behind us to which we had become accus¬
tomed over the plain. But after walking twenty minutes
along the grassy level of the ridge, with its points rising in
low outcrops of rock from the rounded knolls, the Shah Rud
valley suddenly opens below. Its saw-edge of pinnacles
runs in a long eastward line to Alamut and the high massif
of Takht-i-Suleiman beyond, like lines of a fortress rising
to the keep. There was no snow, for we were looking
at the southern face, but a bitter wind blew down this great
funnel of the hills. Opposite, rising to a gentle blue peak
on the other side, lay the straight valley of Javanak, open
like a map. The slopes below us were squared in corn¬
fields; their green village patches and ravines of unseen rivers
were already melting into the dimness of evening. The
most noticeable thing in the landscape was its silence:
immense and grey, without a voice of any kind, it lay under
the falling night.

I told Ismail to make for a small wooden shanty far below
which we had been told of as an inn, and to order pilau
while I stayed to take some bearings. This took longer
than I expected, and when at last I started down in the dusk
I felt singularly lonely at the top of so wide a solitude.
Soon I came to the first cornfields, high up and still un¬
harvested. Ismail and his mules had long been invisible,
and my feeling of solitude was made rather more acute
than before by the sight of three men with reaping-hooks
leaping down the hillside to intercept me. A reaping-hook

[238 ]

1 meet three Kurds

looks unpleasant in the hands of someone whose intentions
one is not sure of, and the three were waiting for me in
silence as I came along the path. But a Druse guide long
ago taught me two things; that one should be careful to
keep behind people one is doubtful of, and that one should
call out one’s greetings from as great a distance as possible.

“ Peace be upon you,” said I. 44 Is the hotel a long way
off?”— or words to that effect.

44 Upon you be peace,’ they replied in chorus, and came
forward in the most friendly way. The hotel, they said,
only gave tea by day to the donkey men, and by night its
owner went to sleep in a village much lower down. But
they would take me to their own village.

44 Where is that?” I asked.

44 Just here,” said they, and pointed almost perpendicularly
downwards to where, on a spur of our mountain, a little
patch of houses and trees in a fringe of threshing-floors
pushed out between two ravines. This was Mirg.

44 Very well,” said I, 44 but you must call Ismail.

Ismail was now visible, a small figure far away on the
curve of the next hill. The tallest of the three men put his
hands to his mouth and shouted down into the dusky spaces:
44 Ya Ismail, ya Ismail, heh!”

A faint voice answered.

44 Take the path to the left, the left, heh.”

We waited, and a faint voice came back.

44 Above the stream, the stream, heh.

Again a reply.

44 To the village, village, village, heh.”

Ismail turned his mules round.

My new friends were Kurds. The Shah of that time had
settled them here about a century ago, and they had lived
in Mirg ever since, still keeping their own language, though

[ 239 ]

The Assassins' Castle of Lamiasar

they all seemed to speak Persian as well. Englishmen who
had mapped this country years ago had stayed in their
village.

“ And what are you looking for?” they then asked, having
answered my questions.

“ I am looking for a ruin called Lamiasar,” said I.

“ Lamiasar;” said an old man, who had just come ambling
on a donkey behind us with a load of grass under one arm.
“ Lamiasar is there,” and with the sickle in his other hand
he pointed far away across the Shah Rud to a fold in the
hills. “ You can get to it from here in one day.”

So kind is fortune if you trust her.

Rustum Khan, the owner of Mirg, was a long-faced Kurd
with pleasant manners. He sat in a whitewashed room furn¬
ished with carpets and quilts and three or four chests covered
with painted tin and gilt and nails studded in patterns. In
the niches in the walls were lamps with glass globes, two
p ink and two green. Little brass trays to hand glasses of
tea hung on the walls between the niches, two by two. The
brass samovar was in a central position. All these furnishings
belonged to the young wife, blonde and fresh and plump
as a German, who spoke a quite incomprehensible dialect
from Muhammadabad in the valley below.

It was a friendly village. There were only twenty houses.
The school, for such as wished to go, was several hours away
down by the river. The village itself, however, owned a
bath. In winter, they told me, it is so cold that even wolves
do not venture out much. Rustum Khan sits under his
kursi burning charcoal from the Caspian Jungle, which
takes four days to reach him. He was an educated man,
who had spent a year in Teheran, and had been a friend of
the Emir Sipahsalar at Tunakabun, the great man of these
parts whose financial difficulties with the Persian govern-

[240]

Night on the roof

ment caused him to commit suicide at the age of eighty.
Rustum spoke of him with affection. He also spoke pleas¬
antly of the British who had been his guests, and told me
how one of them had brought a Persian lady; but while
staying at Mirg, he received a cheque from his father
together with a demand for his prompt return without
her, and seems to have left her in Qazvin—a proceeding
which the Kurds thought amusing but very comprehensible.

They were under the impression that Arabic is the British
language, and surprised when I told them that we have a
language of our own.

About eleven I was able to go to bed—on the roof. All
the village laid itself to rest on the roofs around, so that we
lay, as it were, in one flat dormitory under the stars. Over
the hills of Rudbar, Cassiopeia and the Milky Way hung
below me as it seemed. I was troubled through the night
by incessant snuffling and grunting close by, and thought
indignandy, as I lay half awake, that there must be pigs,
and that my hosts must have thought that, as a Christian,
I would not mind sleeping beside them. Then I sat up to
trace one very loud grunt which seemed to come from just
under my head, and discovered its origin in the sleeping
form of either my host or hostess, who had arranged their
mattress close to my bed on the roof. The pigs in daylight
turned out to be nothing but a flock of sheep penned in
among the houses.

Next mor ning a Scotch mist hid everything. It hung in
drops on the cobwebs and the brambles, and the corns tacks in
the fields. It often covers the Shah Rud valley for days like a
ceiling, coming up from the Caspian; one can see it from
below, breaking like waves over the northern ridge. It made
the earth smell deliciously as we left Mirg. With Rustum
Khan as our guide, we followed a track tilted on the hillside

[241]

Q

The Assassins ' 1 Castle of Lamiasar

like a sailing vessel under canvas, so that it was hard not to slip
off it now and then. Rustum Khan was taking us to see the
castle of Qustinlar, which is on his land. It holds a command¬
ing position, and must have been built to guard or prevent
communication with the Qazvin plain over the passes; but
there is nothing left except the rudiments of an outer wall
badly built of rough stones embedded in mortar, and enclosing
a space about 800 by 50 feet. Having seen this, we left
Rustum Khan, and came down by the cornstacks and threshing-
floors of Qustin, and thence after four hours reached the rice-
fields in the lowlands of the Shah Rud at Siahdasht.

The bridge of Siahdasht and that of Shireh Kuh higher
up were said to be the only ones not yet washed away, and the
river was too full to ford so low down. The bridge was
therefore important. Rustum Khan, however, had been
giving us statistics of mules and muleteers drowned with the
bridges they happened to be crossing. The new one is never
built till the old one is swept away, which usually happens
under the weight of the last muleteer, so that the crossing
of bridges towards the end is rather like musical chairs when
the music may stop at any moment. When Ismail saw
what he had to get over, he was nervous, for the loose poles
were shaking even under my weight alone; the mules were led
after, separately and very reluctant; and Ismail wiped his fore¬
head and thanked several Imams when the strain was over.

We were now in the region of mosquitoes. They buzzed
about even by day, and it was impossible to escape. One
could only take quinine and hope for the best. We found a
garden, a little above the rice-fields and stagnant pools, and
rested there in the company of a wandering tortoise, some
village women, and an inquisitive, suspicious man. The garden
was dark with fruit trees and deep grass; from its shade one
looked down the glittering sunlit windings of the river whose

[ 2 42 ]

The Assassins' Castle of Lamiasar

enfolding mountains, high but far apart, sank into lower and
bluer distances in the west.

It is a beautiful valley, rich and open and remote, the ancient
kingdom of the Daylamites, who held Rudbar as a fortress
and hence descended on the townsmen of Qazvin. It now
grows cotton and rice, castor oil, tobacco, and much fruit and
vegetables. There is no road worth speaking of. As we rode
on again in the afternoon I had to dismount for long stretches
where the track, clinging to red cliffs steep to the river, and
nearly washed away, was almost too narrow for the mules’
feet. Then we would climb down to the water level, cross
the estuary of some tributary from the north, and go for a
long stretch through rice-fields or flat stony waste ground
flooded in spring.

Far ahead of us we saw Shahristan Bala, the capital of the
district, though only a large village in groves of walnut trees.
It seemed to get no nearer as the hours passed, and I began to
have difficulties with Ismail, who was tired and furious at
being made to come into this hot unhealthy country. Near
seven o’clock, in the sunset, we reached the Imamzadeh to
Muhammad, one of the sons of Musa of Kadhimain. It stood
on a river cliff with cornfields and half a dozen houses round it;
and we decided to stay for the night, and take such hospitality
as we could find.

The little Imamzadeh was whitewashed, and held a wide view
from its flat headland. It had seats all round it made out of
carved tombstones a century or two old, laid on mud ledges.
As I sat there taking bearings a black scorpion came crawling
from under one of them and walked off with malevolent
dignity.

Through my glasses I could examine the ruins of Lamiasar,
now clearly visible on a truncated hill to the north and at about
one and a half hours’ distance. The people knew the way

[ 244 ]

We climb to the castle

up, for the big sloping space within the walls is used, to feed
flocks of sheep. It and the villages around belong, the peasants
told me, to a Sardar who lives in Qazvin, but comes in summer
to look after his cattle. Next morning we passed by his house
above Shahristan, a smart country place on the way up to the
castle, with wooden colonnaded portico round its yard and a
decent track and avenue of poplars leading up to it.

Meanwhile we sat among the peasants in a circle round their
fire, hoping to keep mosquitoes away, and distributing quinine.

A fine old man, an old Aryan with the long face and short
beard of the Persepolis friezes, volunteered to lead us next
morning. We left our baggage in the care of the peasants,
and, taking only lunch and a samovar for tea, started off across
red stubbly hills and little dry valleys.

The castle of Lambesar, or Lamiasar, is about two miles
north of Shahristan, on the banks of the same stream, which is
called the Naina Rud. The easy way is to keep up on the side
of the western hill and to reach it by a neck which joins it on
the north to its mountain background. We, however, were
misled, and after getting involved in rice-fields of the Shahristan
villages, which spread a long way northwards from the estuary
of the Naina Rud, we struggled up towards the castle from a
precipitous ravine, until the smooth, steep ledges became too
much even for our unburdened mules, and leaving them,
with the battlements looming above us, we scrambled up
a slope of blackish rock where pomegranate bushes grew, to
the western gate of the fortress. The walls are no longer
intact on the summit of their mountain of rock; but their
ruins, and the fierce and gloomy valley, are impressive as ever.
Some such places Diirer etched, with no softness of vegetation
anywhere around them, but high buttresses and precipices
alone. The battlements of Lamiasar have crumbled, but they
still dominate the landscape at a litde distance as they Mow in

[ 245 ]

The Assassins Castle of Lamiasar

and out the contours of the truncated, cone of hill and enclose
a sloping surface about 1,500 feet long by 600 feet wide, where
the remains of buildings are scattered.

There is not much masonry on the long western side; the
natural precipice must always have been a sufficient defence in
itself, and a series of small towers stood here on every out-
jutting point, a bowshot one from the other. On the south
and east the ramparts still exist, built of rough stones taken
from the hillside apparently at different dates, for some parts
are made of much smaller stones than others. They go in
and out, following the natural line of the hill with the effect of
a Vauban fortification long before its time, and the attacking
forces must have had their flank exposed almost at every point.
On the north alone the approach is possible, for here is the
neck which joins the casde to the mountain-side behind it,
and here the water conduit once came down from the upper
village of Viar, visible dirough a narrow defile of the Naina
Rud. This must have been the most delicate part of the
defence, though I could see no trace of any ditch or outer
fortification to protect the northern gate; but the gate itself
and all this part is very much obliterated, and some strong
defence there must have been, since, once this height were
captured, the whole of the castle enclosure sloping away from
it downhill would He at the attackers’ mercy.

The southern gate, which is 500 feet lower than the other, is
much better preserved. Its outer entrance faces west, then
turns, with the ruins of a guardhouse on its left, north-west
into the enclosure. There is a difference of about twenty
feet in the level of the inner and outer gates, and dieir actual
doorways are built of big squared stones. In the enclosure
itself are the mins of a good many buildings, some quite
modem and probably left by shepherds in later times. It does
not look as if the castle had ever been used again after its cap-

[ ]

Buildings of Lamiasar

ture by Hulagu. There are shards of pottery by the thousand
lying about on the ground, all of an early kind such as are
found at Alamut also; but of the eighteenth-century ware
which witnesses to the later existence of the Rock of Alamut,
Lamiasar showed not a trace.

The chief building seems to have been right at the top, below

the north gate. It covered a space about 100 feet by 85 feet,
and there are twelve long narrow rooms facing to the east,
with a tower in the south-eastern comer. The southern part
of this building is the best preserved, and still has its doors with
pointed arches leading from either end into a passage, and doors
opening on each side into rooms 6 yards long by 2 yards wide,
vaulted, with very rough windows, and with places for bolts
visible in the stone. Tire thickness of these walls is 3 feet
10 inches. It is all very clumsy work, and part of it composed
of enormous stones or, rather, boulders.

Along the outer ramparts no buildings are left standing
except part of two small towers on the western side, built of
much smaller stones than the keep above, and with two
rounded niches and small pointed windows still left intact.
The windows have no keystone, but a tongue of mortar
instead, and looked to me more recent than the great blocks
higher up. The general level of the ground does not seem
to have altered much, for the drainage holes visible on the
outer face of the rampart are still in their proper places accord¬
ing to the present level.

Besides the more modem buildings, there are vaulted rooms
here and there half buried in the middle of the enclosure, and
doubtless a very little digging would restore the original plan
of the fortress. The most interesting part of it at present is
its arrangements for water, which can still be clearly traced.
The leat from Viar came down to the castle along the northern
neck and was received into rectangular cisterns, about 6 by 2

[ 247 ]

The Assassins' Castle of Lamiasar

by 2 yards deep, dug into the solid rock. I counted three of
these just outside the castle walls on the north and east. In
times of siege numerous other cisterns of the same kind, some
finished inside with mortar and vaulted over with masonry,
some merely cut into the stone, stored the water within the
walls. They are scattered everywhere, and probably each
dwelling had a tank of its own, like the Assassin castle of
Sahyun, in Syria. In the lower part of the enclosure a stone
belt which runs across from west to east contains a row of
these cisterns close together, the largest one being over forty
feet long. Here the rock still shows traces of a small conduit
cut to run water from one cistern to the other, so that the leat,
entering through the higher north wall of the castle, filled all
the reservoirs as it flowed down.

This was not the only water supply. From the eastern
rampart, about half-way down its length and close to where
two of the outer cisterns are scooped out of flat slabs of rock
beneath the wall, a covered way dropped about goo feet down
to the river. Part of it still exists: it is 3 feet wide, covered
in with arched masonry, very rough, about a foot thick, and
ends at the water’s edge in a tower ten feet square. Both
tower and passage are now filled in with earth, but no doubt
they were built in rough steps, as the gradient of the hill is
much too steep for a path. The people of Shahristan have a
curious tradition, and call this passage the Gurg-u-Mish, or
Wolf-and-Ram. The rams, diey told me, were put into the
tunnel with skins of water tied under their bellies; the wolves
were let in behind. Terrified by the pursuing wolves, and
with no escape from the narrow way, the flock rushed up the
slope and provided the castle with water. But it would need
the imagination of a folk-lore expert to find the origin of diis
remarkable tale.

A man from Shahristan, who had given us figs on the way

[ 248 ]

The DayUmites

up, came and joined us as we sat over our samovar in one of
the half—buried, vaulted rooms. "We could look out through
its arched door into the hot daylight to the defde of the Naina
Rud, and beyond and above to villages in two green islands
on the slope, and to the stony reaches of Gavan Kuh, which
lead to the Caspian.

Another man soon dropped in from nowhere at all, and,
sitting down in the friendly Eastern fashion, began to give at a
great rate more information than we wanted. He told us
that beyond those villages, in the lonely parts of the hills, is
the Imamzadeh of Nur-Rashid, to which people make pil¬
grimages. These solitary shrines, now far from any habitation,
usually point to localities once much more populous than now,
and they are useful guides to the wandering historian.

Very litde indeed is known about this country and there are
man y unidentified sites to be discovered in its recesses. The
Daylamites were as strange as the Highlanders in their day to
the more setded people of the plain. Their hostility, says
Mustawfi, who must have heard a good deal about them, dates
from those Sassanian days when Shapur had to bribe them to
keep away from his city of Qazvin, which he was then beauti¬
fying. In Ommeyad times, Muhammad, the son of Hajjaj, the
famous governor, marched into the hills against them. From
Daylam came the Buwayid princes who ruled the Moslem
East during the tenth century. Their capital was called Rudbar
and the residence of the governors was called the Shahnstan,
and it is a reasonable conjecture that the name of Shahristan in
the district of Rudbar may be the legacy of those times. I
leave it to experts like Professor Minorsky to judge of these
matters; but the modem Shahristan certainly holds a central
position in the fertile valley, two days’ journey from Qazvin,
and with a great feeling of age about it and its casde.

When the Isma’ili propaganda grew powerful and the

[249 ]

The Assassins' Castle of Lamiasar

Assassins established themselves in this country, they seem to
have collected the Buwayid heritage and to have carried on the
old feud against the Seljuks, making use no doubt of the
tenacious loyalty of the hills. While the whole of the East
was being devastated under the heel of the Mongols, while the
cities of Merv and Balkh, Tus and Ray and Nishapur were so
soaked in blood that they have never recovered, and the
desert now lies on their sown fields, the men of Rudbar
still held tins slanting hilltop, and looked out for months over
the heads of their enemies to the walnut trees of Shahristan
and the Shah Rud in its valley beyond.

We left it and rode back across the rice-fields and shallow
downs to our Imamzadeh, and there found the headman of
Shahristan and his Mirza waiting to call upon me. They were
an amusing pair: one, a jovial middle-aged man of tire world,
rather loud in manner, and made more so in his appearance by
two bright red curls sticking straight out over each ear, while
the hair on the top of his head retained its natural black; to¬
gether with his very up-to-date European suit and watch and
chain, this made him look more rakish than he intended. The
Mirza was an ascetic—one of those sad-faced Persians with
tired eyes and gende manners, pathetically thin, who spend
their lives meditating inaccurately on abstruse subjects, and are
roused to mild enthusiasm over beautiful and harmless things
like calligraphy. Seated on the poor carpet in the hut, with
the peasants at a respectful distance round, they cross-questioned
me, the Squire doing the talking, but the Mirza, the Man of
Learning, nodding his head over my answers and evidently
giving the verdict as to whether my historical pretexts for
travelling were to be taken as valid or not. The result was in

my favour, and I have promised to visit the Squire of Shahristan
again.

But I now had trouble with Ismail. He had taken my guide

[ 2 50 ]

Ismail interferes

aside and privately begged him to mention no more casdes,
even if he knew of them, in the district of the Shah Rud and
its mosquitoes. He would find me casdes higher up, said he.
I naturally resented this interference, but that night, lying out
in the field under my mosquito net, I began to feel very ill.
Providence was on the side of Ismail; it seemed wiser to travel
up towards Alamut and leave the river valley for a healthier
season.

Chapter V

THE THRONE OF SOLOMON
Sitt Zeinahar s Tomh

A STORY HAS IT THAT KlNG SOLOMON, HAYING MARRIED THE
Queen of Sheba, could in no wise make her love him. He
was old and she was young. He tried every inducement in
vain, and at last he sent out the birds of the air and charged
them to discover for him the coldest place in the world. Next
morning at dawn all returned except the hoopoe, who re¬
mained absent all day. As die dusk was falling he too flew
back and bowed before the king, and told him the cause of

v L del 7‘, ■ He had found a summit 50 cold that, when he
a ghted, his wings were frozen to the ground, and only the

midday sun had been able to thaw them: and he had hastened
to give the news to the king.

On the top of this mountain, Solomon built his bed, and
took Belkeis the queen, and when the cold of night descended,
she could not bear it, but crept into her husband’s tent. In
the morning, King Solomon touched the rocky slope, and a

7 oZ da“ S § ° Ut ^ ^ t0 bathe ^ nd * remains

This is the story, and the mountain is still called the Throne
^ Sdomon, Takht-i-Suleiman, and stands south of the
C^ptm and north-east of Elburz, the highest Persian summit

As I rode ^ mave r d ’ ^ ^ ^ ^est summit of Persia.
AssassW RoJ- Salambar to ^ sea, after visiting the
° amut, in 1930, I saw it glistening in the
[252]

First sight of King Solomon s Thfone

solitude of its snows at the head of an unmapped valley, and I
decided to climb again into these mountains and see it more
closely if I could on some later day.

In August, 1931 ,1 spent a week of discomfort among noise,
dust and mosquitoes in the Qazvin hotel, waiting for my old
muleteer ‘Aziz to emerge from that blue skyline which hides
the Assassin valleys from the plain. A message finally did
materialize, brought by Ismail his servant, the most loutish,
clumsy, incurably stupid type of stable-hand that Persia ever
produced, whose ancient bits of cotton clothes hung about
him with so accidental an air that one could not help wondering
what system of relativity kept them there together at all.
He, fumbling among amulets in small leather cases, produced
a scrap of paper to say that ‘Aziz could not leave his little sick
son, but would wait for me in Alamut, whose ways I knew
from the year before, and whither Ismail with his two mules
would take me.

I thought I would ride up the fortress valley of the Assassins,
and out at its eastern end, and make farther eastward still for
the Throne of Solomon: and after that L would either descend
north into the almost completely unvisited jungle country,
or keep along the watershed and examine at leisure the head¬
waters of the Shah Rud.

But a chance rumour postponed these plans. In the Qazvin
Grand Hotel, over glasses of “ dug,” or sour milk and water,
after dinner, the local notables told me of Lamiasar, and of
how it was one of the most important of the Assassin
fortresses, and one of the only two which stood ^long
sieges before their final destruction by the Mongol armies of
Hulagu Khan. It was there, said they, somewhere in the
mountains of Rudbar west of my route. Its site had never yet
been identified by historians. Though the data I had to go
upon was more than vague, and though the climate of the

[ 253 ]

The Throne of Solomon

lower Shall Rud was most unhealthy at this time of the year,
I then decided to search for the lost stronghold.

How, on our first evening, we opened up the mountains of
Rudbar and saw Lamiasar there in the last light, faintly visible
on a hill across the valley, a two days’ journey away; how we
reached and examined the castle, and how Ismail, terrified by
the heat and sickness, tried to persuade the people of the
country to conceal all further ruins so that my steps might be
turned as hastily as possible back to the hills: this is another
story which has nothing to do with the Throne of Solomon
and which has been told in the previous chapter. But
the fact that I fell ill in the valley did have an influence on
my subsequent journey, and so I will begin my tale when,
feeling sickness already upon me and hoping to stave it off by
the delayed ascent to Alamut, I fell in with Ismail’s perfidious
diplomacy, renounced all further ruins in Rudbar for the time
being, and started to ride eastward again along the banks of the
Shah Rud.

Ismail, delighted to have been so successful, rode on the
baggage mule behind me, indulging for my benefit in a sort
of rhapsody on all the delights that awaited us in the hills.
The path was narrow and red, eaten away at its riverside edge
by floods and rains, unless it broadened out into swampy rice-
fields, that quivered with mosquitoes and heat. Shut in by
its mountain range from the Qazvin plain, the fertile and beauti¬
ful valley lay like a world of its own. Blue hills, ever fainter,
setded to its shallow horizon on the west. Eastward, we were
penetrating into the salty stretches of Rudbar on our left hand,
a country uninhabited and lifeless as the moon. The Ma’dan
Rud, a stream bitter as Acheron, fell before us from salt
marshes through waste land. We crossed it, and came to a
part of the track so narrow that Ismail had to unload the
baggage and coax the mules one at a time round the comer ?

[254]

Illness

telling them the most distressing things about their paren¬
tage, punctuated with a stick from behind. I, meanwhile,
sat with my head in my hands, looked at the flooded river
below, and wondered at what was going on inside me to make
me feel so ill.

We saw ahead of us the first red pinnacles of the Alamut
gorge, naked rock piled in chaos and rounded by weather,
without a blade of grass upon it. Most of the bridges were
washed away, but we found one, sagging in the middle but
still fairly solid, and crossed to the south bank of the Shah Rud
below a village called Kandichal.

Here there was no salt in die ground, and a kinder nature
appeared; we rode along an overhanging cliti, high aoove the
brown snow-water. But here I felt too ill to continue. "We
came to a small solitary corrie where a whitewashed shrine or
Imamzadeh slept peacefully in front of a sloping field or
two of com. A brook and a few tangled fruit trees were
on one side of it in a hollow. A grey-bearded priest,
dressed in blue peasant garb and black skull cap, gave
permission to stay; and Ismail put up my bed in the open,
under a pear and sanjid tree overgrown with vines near
the brook.

For nearly a week I lay there, not expecting to recover, and
gazed through empty days at the barren Rudbar hills across
die river, where shadows of the clouds threw patterns, the
only moving things in that silent land. To look on its naked¬
ness was in itself a preparation for the greater nakedness of
death, so that gradually the mind was calmed of fear and filled
with austerity and peace.

I lived on white of egg and sour milk, and had barley cooked
in my water so that the taste might tell me if it were boiled,
since the litde stream running from the village on the hill was
probably not as pure as it looked. It was an incredible effort

[ 255 ]

The Throne of Solomon

to organize oneself for illness with only Ismail to rely on and
the women of Kandichal, whose dialect was incomprehensible.
One of them, called Zora, used to look after me for fourpence a
day. With her rags, which hung in strips about her, she had the
most beautiful and saddest face I have ever seen. She would
sit on the grass by my bedside with her knees drawn up, silent
by the hour, looking out with her heavy-lidded eyes to the
valley below and the far slopes where the shadows travelled,
like some saint whose Eternity is darkened by the remote
voice of sorrow in the world. I used to wonder what
she thought, but was too weak to ask, and slipped from
coma to coma, waking to see rows of women squatting
round my bed with their children in their arms, hopeful of
quinine.

The whole Shah Rud valley is riddled with malaria and
desperately poor, with no doctor. Even soap was an unknown
luxury. A man of Kandichal once brought a wife from Qaz-
vin, who remained a year before she fled back to civilization,
and left a memory of soap as one among the marvels of her
trousseau. But the women brought me eggs and curds in
blue bowls from Hamadan to pay for my doctoring, and
looked at me pityingly as they sat round in their long eastern
silences. Behind us rose the mountains which cut us off from
Qazvin and motor roads and posts: they were ten hours’ ride
away, as inaccessible as if they had been in another world, as
indeed they were.

A little way off, under another patch of trees, the two mules
browsed, and Ismail sat through the day smoking discontented
pipes and anxious to be off. There the old Seyid used to join
him, with his sickle under his arm, for it was harvest time. He
would pause as he passed my bed, and with his back carefully
turned out of a sense of propriety, would ask how I did and
tell me that Sitt Zeinabar, the patroness of the shrine, was good

[256]

Sitt Zeinabar s priest

for cures. He was a fine old man, descended from a venerable
Seyid Tahir, and evidendy much looked up to round about.
Sitt Zeinabar, he said, was a daughter of the Imam Musa of
Kadhimain in Iraq. I was pleased to have happened upon a
female saint—so rare in these lands—and I promised her Seyid
the sacrifice of a black kid if I recovered under her auspices.
Her litde well of water, which they called the Spring of
Healing, sounded clean and pure: I made a vow to use
none other for my food or drink or washing, and Zora,
favourably impressed, would toil every evening across
the fields with a two-handled jar, from which she poured
handfuls over my face and arms, murmuring blessings in her
unknown speech.

As the dusk fell, the old priest would come in from his har¬
vests, lay down his sickle, and sit and smoke a pipe beside
Ismail, while he told of his difficulties with his flock how they
had tried to take this land away from him, and Sitt Zeinabar had
punished them, sending the Shah Rud down in flood for two
successive years, so that dieir low-lying rice-fields were carried
away—until they repented and gave him back his land. As
it grew dark, he would get up to light his litde oil wick in the
shrine, which always burned the whole night through, and
would borrow my matches for the purpose in the place of his
flint.

By the third day I was no better, and my heart began to
give trouble. I decided to send Ismail and one of the mules
across the mountain range to get a prescription from some
doctor in Qazvin. This he did, and came back on the after¬
noon of the next day with a botde of digitalis and a letter in
good English from some unknown well-wisher who hoped
that I now realized the gravity of my situation and would
abandon this foolish idea of wandering unprotected over
Persia.” I had, as a matter of fact, very nearly abandoned any

R [257 ]

The Throne of Solomon

idea of wandering altogether, and was envisaging eternity
under the shadow of Sitt Zeinabar’s tomb. But on the fifth
day my temperature dropped, the pain ceased: I had long ago
abandoned the thought of King Solomon’s Throne; but I
thought I could now make shift to be carried over the moun¬
tain range and find a car next evening to take me to a Teheran
hospital.

In spite of myriads of mosquitoes I slept peacefully that
night, soothed by the fact of having been able to decide on
something. I woke now and then, and looked at Cassiopeia
between the pear leaves and the vine, and finally roused myself
in the gende light of the dawn because Ismail was already
packing the saddle-bags. He made a smoodi platform on the
mule’s back, and spread my quilt on top of the luggage so that
I could ride half reclining. A few early reapers and Zora and
the old Seyid came to wish us good-bye. And then in the
morning light I looked up at the mountains. I had not been
able to see them all the days of my illness: and now they ap¬
peared beyond Alamut in the east as a vision ethereal and
clean. If only I could get up among them, I thought, in the
good hill air away from these mosquitoes, I would get well.
Suddenly I decided not to make for hospital, but to trust my¬
self to the hills and try to reach Solomon’s Throne after all.
I was already mounted by this time; all Ismail had to do was to
turn the mules round and start in the opposite direction.

A Doctor in Alamut

When I reached Alamut the year before the stream was in
flood, and we penetrated into the valley by a mule track above
the cliff and defile of Shirkuh. This was now beyond my
strength and was luckily not necessary. It was August, and
the water low enough for fording, so that we could follow

[258 ]

The Alamut defile

zig-zagging from bank to bank the defile through which the
Alamut River pours itself into the Shah Rud.

Cliffs pile themselves on either hand and make a cool winding
passage hardly touched by the sun. On the left, red precipices
such as I had looked on through my illness; on the right, black
and grey granite where the mass of Shirkuh, or Bidalan, as this
part of the promontory is called, tumbles in stony ribs hundreds
of feet to the water. Somewhere at the top is the Assassin
castle of Durovon.

But I had enough to do widiout thinking of Assassins.
Even on the level ground it took us three hours to reach the
far side of the defile from Kandichal, and when we had done
so, I lay on my quilt, injected camphor to steady my trouble¬
some heart, and fed myself on white of egg and brandy, the
only food I dared risk. We were in the last of the shadow cast
j-jy defile, where it was filled with the pleasantness of run
ning water that travelled there like light. The boulders by the
river were covered with mauve flowers belonging to some
creeping plant, and in the damper crevices a scented, milky-
leaved shrub about five feet high, with bell clusters of pink
flowers veined with red, swayed in the breeze of the river, and
filled the place with a secret loveliness.

Having rested here, we rode for another two hours along
the first hot stretch of the Alamut valley until the open lands
of Shahrak appeared, green with walnuts and poplars and
meadows. Under the shadow of trees, people were harvest¬
ing. The black oxen trod in a slow circle round heaps of
com, pressing out the grain with heavy wooden rollers.

“ The years, like great black oxen, tread the world.”

At a little distance, where the young men worked with forks,
hillocks of chaff were rising, tossed and carried to one side by
the wind as the heavier grain dropped down.

[ 259 ]

The Throne of Solomon

We dismounted and I lay under the walnut trees in the grass.
Here, too, as at Sitt Zeinabar, I found myself under female
jurisdiction, for the squire of Shahrak is a woman, though
possibly not a saint. One of the villagers soon came to ask
me to call on her; but this I was unable to do, and lay with
closed eyes while the hill-women gathered round, their bright
clothes and air of prosperity noticeable in comparison to the
poverty outside the valley, a thing I remembered observing
the year before. They were full of pity, and sat farming the
flies from my face, while a young girl, seizing my head in her
two palms, pressed the temples gently and firmly, with a
slowly increasing pressure, amazingly restful, that seemed to
transfer her youthful strength to me.

We left again at three-thirty, hoping to reach the head of
the valley and ‘Aziz my guide before nightfall, in a district
free of mosquitoes. It was not to be, however. The hot
sandstone reaches were almost unbearable in the afternoon. I
was tortured with thirst. Water seemed to draw me as if I
were bewitched: I thought of Ulysses and the Sirens: it was all
I could do not to slide down and lie in the streams as we waded
through them. Towards five o’clock we saw the trees of the
village of Shutur Khan appearing round a bend, and I decided
to stop there with my friends of last year, and go no farther
that night.

The first man to greet us was the owner of a little melon
patch outside the village. From his small platform, a thing
perched on four poles to be out of reach of mosquitoes (a fond
idea), he came running to welcome us.

They were all expecting me, said he. We turned the corner,
and saw the Assassin fortress, the Rock of Alamut, in the sun¬
set, shining from its northern valley, and the Squire of Shutur
Khan, owner of the Rock, standing with all his family to greet
me on his doorstep.

[ 260 ]

Malaria

All were very kind, and nothing had changed from the year
before, except that the baby had died and a new one was
coming, and the pretty daughter whose husband had deserted
her was wasting away with a strange disease due, they said, to
her having swallowed the shell of a nut by mistake. The two
boys were as jolly as ever, and the wife had a new blue bow to
her hair. As I crept to my bed on the terrace, she, with that
Persian insight into beauty which redeems so many faults,
told one of the servants to turn the brook into the little garden
below, so that its murmur might soothe me through the night.

I was, as a matter of fact, too tired to sleep, and lay enjoying
the quiet noise of the poplar leaves that moved one against the
other in the moonlight. In spite of the long day, no pam or
fever had returned. I felt wonderfully happy to be out of the
deathly Shah Rud, and up again in the hills. The stillness of
the mountain valley lay like an empty theatre round our village
and its waters; the night was full of peace; when suddenly a new
and strange crisis seized me: every ounce of hfe seemed to be
sucked away; I was shrivelled up with a withering dryness, soon
succeeded by floods of perspiration; and I knew by a slight

unpleasant shiver that this must be malaria.

This added complication was the last straw, and made it
impossible to leave again next morning. I lay gloomily in
bed, while various village acquaintances came to greet me,
among them ‘Aziz, my good guide, with pleasure and concern
all over his face and with the surprising news that a Persian
doctor from the Caspian shore was spending a summer holiday
in a village only five hours’ ride away. . He had not brought
him because it would be so expensive, said Aziz. T e octor
refused to ride for ten hours during his holiday for less than
five tomans (ios.). But “ Health is more than gold, said I,
or words to that effect, and sent Ismail off at once to fetch mm.

He returned in the dusk with a young man neatly dressed m

[261]

The Throne of Solomon

European fashion, all but a collar and the shoes, which were
white cotton Persian givas. He had a pleasant, big-nosed face,
with one wall eye, over which a shock of hair continually came
drooping, and a mouth which seemed always on the edge of a
smile in some secret amusement of its own. He questioned
me capably, and diagnosed malaria and dysentery; “ diseases
we are used to,” he remarked.

“ To-morrow, I will take you to my village, and get you
well in a week,” said he, while injecting camphor, emetine,
and quinine in rapid succession, and in the most surprising
quantities. “ Now would you like a morphia injection to
make you sleep

His ideas on quinine ran to three times the maximum
marked in my medical guide, and I thought that a s imilar
experiment with morphia might have too permanent an effect
altogether. I refused, and turned my attention to a bowl of a
soup called harira, made of rice, almonds and milk.

“ Almonds,” said the doctor, who had specially ordered this
delicacy for me, “ are most excellent for dysentery. They
scrub one out like soap. Pepper is good also.”

He caught a dubious look, and begged me to have confidence.

“We know more than your doctors do about these diseases,”
he said again.

Supper was now brought and laid on a round mat on the
floor by the head of my bed, where my host and the doctor
sat down to it in the light of a small oil lamp. Having dis¬
patched it, they settled to the business of opium, handing the
pipe to and fro over a small charcoal brazier, a scene of dissi¬
pation in the flickering light that made me t hink of the “ Rake’s
Progress,” which I used to wonder over at Madame Tussaud’s
in my childhood. Here it was all in action, so to say, and I
myself, rather surprisingly, in the picture, with the opium
smokers squatting at my bedside in the Assassins’ valley.

[ 262 ]

The doctor smokes opium

“ I can see that you disapprove,” said the doctor, looking
up suddenly with one of his whimsical smiles. “ I disapprove
myself, but I do it all the same.”

“ It will make you die young,” said I.

He shrugged his shoulders with the melancholy fataHsm which
is all that the East promises to retain in the absence of religion.

I was so weak that next morning I could scarcely walk across
the terrace to my room, and did not think myself fit to go
away. To dress and pack my few things was difficult. I
fainted twice on to the saddle-bags, and finally emerged for the
five hours’ ride feeling anything but confident. But the doc¬
tor was cheerful if I was not. He hoisted me on to my mule,
my sunshade was put in my hand, the kind people of Shutur
Khan waved good-bye, and I was led, drooping and passive,
up the valley, which is barren and hot for some way above the
village.

We crossed and kept to the southern bank of the Alamut
stream, and looked at last year’s path on the other side,
wondering at its extreme narrowness as it clung to red, slanting
cliffs. But I was unable to notice much, and lay half reclined
on my jogging platform, seeing little except the doctor in the
immediate foreground who, with feet dangling below his
saddle and the Pahlevi hat at a rakish angle over a handkerchief
draped against the sun, was humming Persian love songs, and
swinging a stick, while the long ears of his mule bobbed up
and down before him.

After about three hours we came again to green parts of the
valley, and to Zavarak, its loveliest village, in the shade of
trees. It is the largest village of all Alamut, and the brother of
Nasir-ud-Din Shah seized on it as a royal gift, built a castle, and
held it for twenty-five years, in spite of protests from the
peasants who had never had an overlord since the days of the
Assassins. When the late Shah was dethroned, the men of

[263]

The Throne of Solomon

Zavarak took and razed the castle and returned to their inde¬
pendence. They are, as may be imagined, staunch supporters
of the new regime .

They were all out now in the meadows, threshing and
winnowing—a scene of prosperity in Arcadia.

Here they lifted me down and laid me on fel tMazanderani
mats in a small room. They gave me glasses of tea, injected
more camphor, and threw a cloth over me to keep away the
flies, while the doctor chatted to the family and heard the
village news. After three hours or so, we started again.

We climbed now southward, up the face of the Elburz
range, which here hangs out an immense terrace, running
parallel with the valley but about 1,000 feet above, and inter¬
sected at more or less regular intervals by wide, deep, and
nearly perpendicular gullies. On this terrace are three villages,
Painrud, Balarud, Verkh, each cut off from its neighbours
by these gullies, each with the shoulders of Elburz behind it,
and with Alamut and all the eastern hills, even to the Throne
of Solomon himself supreme on the skyline, spread in a semi¬
circle before it.

We climbed for one and a half hours, first zig-zagging up
the wall from the Alamut valley and then making at a gender
but still very steep gradient over the stubble-fields of the shelf,
till we reached Balarud, tilted towards the north among
fenced gardens, with a brook running through its scattered
houses, and every sort of fruit tree, walnut, cherry, apple, pear,
medlar, and poplars and willows, throwing shade upon it.

'Aziz, who had abandoned his affairs in his village of
Garmrud to attend to me, now spurred up his mule.

“ Which house would you like?” said he.

I selected a high cottage with two rooms on the roof and
open spaces on three sides of it. £ Aziz went to turn out the
inhabitants.

[264]

My bouse in the village

With the unquestioning hospitality of the East, they cleared
away most of their belongings in fifteen minutes, swept the
reed matting on the floor with an inadequate brush of leaves,
and allowed me to install myself while they settled in what
looked like a hen-house down below. And while Aziz
and Ismail busied themselves with the furnishing, I stood at
the window and looked at King Solomon’s Throne, its black
arms high and sharp in the distant sky, but nearer than I had
ever thought again to see it.

Life in the Village

Here I spent a week convalescing.

I had a good room, with two doors and a window, and litde
niches scooped all round it in the mud and straw walls. The
r pilin g was made of poplar trunks, with other logs crosswise
above them, and above these a layer of thorns to support the
mud of the roof. On the reed mats of the floor they laid felt
Mazanderani rugs in brown, red, blue and grey patterns.
The niches in the walls had garlands of dried roses hung above
them. They were also decorated with embroidered mats to
which the usual absence of soap in the village had long ago
given a dingy colour. There was a photograph on the wall.
These efforts at European elegance came from the fact that the
two sons-in-law keep an eating-house at Shahsavar on the
coast in winter, leaving their wives and an old mother at
Balarud. In one comer of all this luxury I erected my bed,
behind whose mosquito net I could withdraw when the village
circle squatting on the floor, or ‘Aziz and his litde son noisily
eating their midday meal near the door, became too much
for me.

The doctor visited me two or three times a day to inject
quinine. A hundred grains daily for three days definitely
frightened away the malaria. He would then sit and chat

[265 ]

The Throne of Solomon

over liis opium, holding a glowing charcoal delicately with a
pair of small brass tongs to the hole in the porcelain pipe where
the brown paste is pressed down to bubble and liquefy, with
the most nauseating smell. When the opium failed to console,
a pocket flask of arak was propped up in front of the doctor.
Loneliness, which strains all but the strongest natures, was
slowly demoralizing this amiable young man: he was going to
seed merely from the want of someone of his own kind to talk
to. He had taken a degree in Teheran, and now spent his life
on the Caspian shore, dividing himself between typhoid,
dysentery and malaria in a region so deadly that Lord Curzon
declared: “ There is not in the same parallel of latitude a more
unliealthy strip of country in the world,” and Sir John Chardin
relates that when a governor was sent there by Shah Abbas,
the courtiers would ask: “ Has he killed or robbed anybody,
that he is sent Governor of Gilan?”

The doctor s baby girl, who was teething, had begun to fade
away in that damp heat, and this was the cause that brought
him to his mother’s village in die mountains for the first time
since his student days, at so providential a moment.

I was not the first English citizen he had rescued. A young
man travelling to buy silks along the Caspian had been caught
by illness years ago and fled like me for refuge to die hills.
There in a village of the jungle my doctor found him, delirious
with typhoid, unable to say a word to his Persian servant, and
weeping quiedy into his pillow—a proceeding which under
the circumstances anyone who has ever been in such a predica¬
ment may understand. He was still strong enough to fight
violendy when put into a cold bath, and eventually recovered.

“ The truth is,” said the doctor, “ that we know more about
these illnesses than you do, for we deal with nothing else all
our lives.”

He had many difficulties to struggle against, the first being

[2 66]

The doctor's difficulties

the complication and cost of getting stores from Europe, and
the second the backwardness of the people. My friend, the
squire of Shutur Khan, who spends his winters in the enlighten-
ment of Qazvin city and ought to know better, refused the
chance of saving his dying daughter when the doctor came,
because she could on no account be seen by so improper a
creature as a man: all that he had been allowed to do was to
send her a dose of Epsom salts by her father. As for the village
people, they usually brought their cases in the last and hopeless
stages. And his rates were not exorbitant, even for these
poor folk. When I left, after a week of constant injections and
care of every kind, and—with strenuous protests from Aziz
offered him twenty shillings, he could hardly be prevailed
upon to accept so large a sum.

These days were very pleasant in the village of Balarud. It
was pleasant to think that we were not marked on any map;
that, so far as the great world went, we were non-existent;
and'yet here we were, harvesting our com, living and dying
and marrying as busily as elsewhere. We could look across
to right and left to the villages of Verkh and Painrud,
apparendy quite near, but in reality separated from us by the
deep canyons on either hand; and across the drop of the Alamut
valley we could look out to the Rock of the Assassins and the
hills of Haudegan and Syalan, and the fair uplifted line of the
Throne of Solomon, our eventual goal: and watch how on
their flanks and buttresses the hours of the day were marked
in sun and shadow.

At the end of the village, on a sort of terrace overhanging

the canyon, the business of the harvest was going on. The old
men sat in the sun, guiding the spiky wooden roller round over
the com. Great yellow heaps and humped black oxen stood
out against empty spaces of valley far below. Above us,
where the rocks of Siahsang already belong to Elburz, a litde

[267]

The Throne of Solomon

triangle of dirty snow showed the birthplace of the torrent in
the gully.

Looking down into the gully, I could see a kite flying sur¬
prisingly small in its deceptive depth. A very steep path
descended, and there was a little mill by a trickle of water in
the bottom, where the village ground its corn. An ibex
last spring, shot at the canyon’s Up, fell straight to the water’s
edge, so steep was the slope. Here at the top, when the rains
came and washed the earth away, graves had been laid bare
with ancient bronzes inside them. The place had probably
been inhabited for innumerable centuries, and still lives its life
very much as it always has done since the beginning. Its
little mosque has a wooden colonnade before it: the pillars,
roughly carved, are designed somewhat like the stone pillars of
Persepolis, with flattened double capitals one above the other,
and bear out the theory that the particular architecture of the
Achsemenian kings came to Persia from the wooden houses of
Mazanderan.

“ Why do you not plough more land’” I asked the villagers,
for about a third of the area of the shelf is never cultivated.

“ We have enough com as it is,” said they.

“ But you could sell what is left over.”

“ To whom could we sell’ All the villages of Alamut have
com enough for themselves.”

“ You could sell it in Qazvin or on the coast.”

“ We have never sold com,” said they.

They sell their surplus walnuts, and so buy tea, sugar, para¬
ffin, and the few oddments which the village is unable to
provide of itself. Three-quarters of all the produce belongs
to the Arbab, the owner of the village; the remaining quarter
goes to the peasant. On the hard ground in front of their
doors the women weave rugs, drawing the thread over two
poles, and using a kind of steel hand to bang the warp into

[ 268 ]

The owner of the village

place. They either keep them for furnishing, or sell them for
ten tomans or so after a month’s labour upon them. The felt
rugs, made of wool, soap, and water, kneaded together and
rolled over and over on the floor until it becomes the right
shape and consistency, are much cheaper: I bought one for six
shillings and used it for the rest of my journey.

On the second day of my stay the owner of the village came
with the doctor to see me. He was an officer stationed in
Tabriz, a very trim good-looking man in gaiters and khaki,
with a gold tooth and pleasant manners, and many apologies
for the simplicity of his village, together with a pride in it
which came out as soon as I told him how much I liked its
high air and quietness. We would shoot ibex as soon as I
was stronger, said he.

He was staying in the place to arrange his daughter s wed¬
ding, and as soon as I was able to negotiate the steep hillside,
I climbed to the other end of the village and called both on
him and on the doctor’s wife. The latter was a pretty woman
neatly dressed in the city fashion, with a white veil pinned
under her chin, and evidently on very good terms with her
young husband. Two ragged but healthy boys, Gustarz and
Darius, were running about, and the baby Raushana, or Rox¬
ana (after die Persian wife of Alexander), whose teething had
so providentially brought the party up here, was gurgling on
her father’s knee while, as best he could, he pounded medicines
for me in a mortar on the floor, and told me that Alexander
the Great had been a Persian.

The other household was not nearly so pleasant, for the
Arbab had no wish to show me his daughter, of whom he was
ashamed, and she herself shared the feeling so thoroughly that
she could hardly be induced to speak at all. Her father had
never seen her or troubled about her since he departed in her
infancy, collected another wife somewhere else, and left his

[269 ]

The Throne of Solomon

village menage to grow up among the peasants. He was now
going to settle her with some farmer, and that would be the
end of his responsibilities. Agreeable as his manners were,
he was no better than most of the absentee Persian landlords:
a thin smattering of civilization, sufficient to make them des¬
pise the country things from which they draw their income,
and a complete unconsciousness of the fact that some duties
might be attached to their position, make a type such as one
recognizes in French memoirs of the eighteenth century.
Meeting it in the flesh, one realizes what ideas could rouse a
revolution in 1789.

I found this state of things only where the head of the village
was “ civilized ” and lived in a city; in the more primitive
places, where he stayed on his land and was one among the
other farmers, there seemed to be complete contentment all
round.

Day by day I grew stronger in that good air. Day after
day I strolled out in the morning and looked across to die
mountains, where the Caspian sea cloud, drifting up to the
watershed from the north, poured itself like a wave over the
edge of our valley, to be dried away and melt in our hot sun.

My doctor’s doses of quinine were now reduced from 100
grains to fifty a day, and I could walk about widiout resting
at every other step. 4 Aziz was anxious to be off. I nearly
lost him, for he was wanted by government to answer for a
carpet which he was said to have bought in Qazvin: to buy a
carpet for someone else turns you into a merchant liable to
taxes—the charge must be disproved. But I was not going
to let ‘Aziz out of my sight, and I marooned in the Assassins’
valley. Government could wait; they could not get at us
anyway until we emerged into more accessible country; and
meanwhile I would pull myself together so as to make a start
from Garmrud. I was the more inspired to do this as a

[270 ]

Old route to the Caspian

colony of bugs tad invaded my mosquito net, almost the only
ones I came upon in Mazanderan.

So we left next morning. I sat in the porch of the litde
mosque and waited for my mules. The Throne of Solomon
shone fain tly, like a transparent flame in the white summer
sky. ‘Aziz and his small son had gone ahead to prepare the
welcome in Garmrud, and Ismail was to take me across the
valley to see an old castle on our way.

“ Do not forget me,” said the doctor, as he came to see us
off. “ We shall never meet again.” He waved his hand
with my clock in it, which I had left as a legacy, and watched
us as we jingled down over the stubble.

Three Weddings

We climbed from our shelf down to the Alamut by Zavarak,
rested a minute at the house under the trees, and then made
straight up the other side of the valley towards a little village
called Ilan, where an Assassin tower was said to guard the way
from Syalan and the Caspian.

The tracks from the old stronghold of Alamut go by Atun
and Ilan, over many Sialan passes, down on to the Do and Seh
Hizar Rivers in the north. It is natural that there should have
been fortifications to overlook them, and it is not the existence
so much as the character of the ruin of Ilan thatisunexpected.
The place is on the very top of an immense boulder about ioo
feet high, and steep on every side as a “ gendarme ” in the
Alps. It is made of a sort of pudding stone, and has rolled
down in a desolate wilderness of rocks of the same kind where,
as one descends, one may think of Dante climbing from one
infernal circle to the other. In the overhanging pock-marked
cliffs wild bees have made their nests; I tried some of their
honey at the end of a stick, and thought it sweeter than any
honey I had ever tasted.

The Throne of Solomon

An old man watching his goats on the hillside above con¬
sented to guide us, and we were soon joined by villagers from
flan, who showed us a narrow ledge which just gave foothold
to creep round the edge of the boulder and led to a crack where
we could lever ourselves up with both arms against the sides.
A last steep bit of pudding stone destroyed Ismail’s moral
completely. At the top of all this inaccessibility are die re¬
mains of five small compartments cut in the stone itself, with
a water-tank about 3 by 12 feet, evidently cut out by hand
below: no trace of mortar, no shards of pottery, nor any sign
ofhabitation. It must have been a look-out and nothing more,
and the village of Ilan, a poor place with but few scanty
trees, is visible in a triangle o'fihe'landscape to the north.

Disappointed and very exhausted; h came away and returned
down red ridges to Zavarak, and in fire late afternoon started
up the valley track of last year, through green glens with fruit
trees and misdetoe, the river on our right hand, and on our
left the precipitous sides of Nevi'sar Shah. In the dusk we
came to Garmrud, which leans against the cliffs that close
the valley.

‘Aziz’s wife was out to meet us with many of the village
women, dressed in reds and yellows, a pretty sight among the
poplar trees and boulders of the stream. She ran out to hold
the bridle rein, and led me in triumph, while the people on the
roofs of their houses bade me welcome. There was a general
air of holiday, for three weddings were to be celebrated on the
morrow, one being, so to say, an international affair between
our village and that of Pichiban on the way to the pass.

Under these circumstances, the Throne of Solomon must
again wait, for nothing would drag ‘Aziz away before the
festivities.

‘Aziz’s wife was as pretty as ever, but disunion now rent the
little household. ‘Aziz had married again, and spent most of

[272]

At Gannnul in the Ahvnnt valley

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‘Aziz and his two wives

his time with the new bride, who lived across the stream. I
will say in his defence that things were not made too pleasant
for him when he did come to his old home. The eagle-faced
old lady, his mother, stood up for him staunchly, but the
offended wife would not hear of compromise. Like Medea,
and many lesser ladies, she held up to him with tactless reitera¬
tion the mirror of the past with all his faults recorded ever
since their wedding sixteen years before, when she was four¬
teen and he sixteen. Even the best of men could not be
expected to enjoy this, but the poor woman s grief was so deep
that it was useless to point out how much worse she made the
matter by railing. Love, like broken porcelain should be
wept over and buried, for nothing but a miracle will resuscitate
it: but who in this world has not for some wild moments
thought to recall the irrecoverable with words?

‘Aziz enjoyed the situation in a shamefaced sort of way,
being teased for a gay dog by his friends, and being no little in
love with the new lady, a determined sort of beauty with
black hair and iron muscles who could crush the little man to
powder with one hand, and will no doubt be doing so one of

“ What do you feel about it?” he asked me in confidence, and
looked rather glum when I remarked that, in my opinion, a
man’s days of peace are over when he has married two wives

simultaneously. , ,

Everyone joined in bearing with my pretty finend in the old
house, list enin g to her outbursts with compassion, as to a
regrettable but natural disease—a sad episode to be expected
in woman’s life of sorrow in this world. But when she became
too violent in her remarks, her father, a mild old man who sat
in a comer over his long pipe, would pull her up, reminding
her that she had nothing out of the way to complain about, for
the general opinion naturally gave Aziz a perfect right to a
* [ 273 ]

The Throne of Solomon

second wife if he wanted one. At such times, the only com¬
fort one could think of was a mention of the little son, Muham¬
mad, whom she embraced with passionate sobs, to which he
submitted with an air of bored masculine condescension,
remarkable and alarming in one so young.

Muhammad, at the age of eight, was just engaged to a
litde playmate of five, a red-haired, blue-eyed minx whom
everyone spoiled, and who made the most of her short years
of sovereignty as if she knew how transitory they were. Little
Muhammad enjoyed the mention of his Namzadeh, and took
great pride in her, and it was pretty to see the two children
playing together, growing up in the village freedom which
Persian townswomen might envy.

The next day was that of the triple wedding, and the village
was already buzzing with it by the time I got up.

A visit to the bride was the first ceremony. My hostess
arranged a tray for me, with nuts, raisins, nuhud, and a cone of
sugar in the middle, to be borne ahead of us as an offering
when we went to call. We followed, in our best: my hostess
in a very starched chintz ballet skirt over black trousers, a
yellow damask shirt, striped velvet waistcoat, and white lace
coif fastened under the chin with a dangling ornament of
cowrie shells. She had four bracelets and an amber necklace
with silver coins, turquoises, and many litde odds and ends
attached to it: an amulet was fastened on her right arm. Her
mother-in-law was even gayer, with a yellow silk shirt, green
waistcoat with gold buttons, and one white kerchief with a
red one above it tied into a point over the forehead.

We climbed up among houses till we came into a room
crowded with women, in a confused twilight lighted from
the middle of the ceiling by a small round hole. The dower
chest was being filled: an affair of gilt and coloured tin with
three locks, and all the ladies were helping with the packing.

[ 2 74 ]

The wedding reception

The whole female part of the village was passing in and out,
bearing gifts, looking over the bride’s trousseau, rushing into
an inner room to give a hand with the pilau, and talking in

high excited voices. . ,

In one comer, apart from it all and completely hidden

under a pale blue chadur, or veil, stood the bade. She stan s
motionless for hour after hour, while the stream of guests
croes by, unable to sit down unless the chief guest asks her to. o
so, and taking no part in the general gaiety. I went up and
lifted the veil to greet her, and was horrified to see large tears
rolling down her painted cheeks. The palms of her hands
and her finger-nails were dyed with henna; her hair was
crimped with cheap green celluloid combs stuck into it: she
wore a pink machine-embroidered shirt in atrocious taste, and
a areen velvet waistcoat brought specially from Qazvin; and
alf this splendour, covered away under the blue chadur, was
weeping with fright and fatigue, thinking who knows what
thoughts while it stood there like a veiled image at the feast.
She was not to appear in public again for twenty-one days

after the wedding, they told me.

The male relatives of the bride sat round the guest room

floor in a quieter and more dignified maimer. They were
being provided with food, and I was soon taken in to join
them and given bowls of soup coloured with saffron, with
pieces of chicken floating about it. When this was cleared
away, and when the women had also eaten in their noisier
part of the establishment, we began to enjoy ourselves.^ Two
copper trays were brought to use as drums; the bride s aunt,
a ladv with as many chains and bangles as an Indian idol, sat
crosslegged to beat the time, and one after another the women
danced to the clapping of hands. They held up a ban ker¬
chief which, at intervals, they threw to one or another of the
company, who would wrap it round a piece of silver and toss

[ 275 ]

The Throne of Solomon

it back. They danced with remarkable abandon, cracking
their finger-joints and leaping into the air with both feet close
together.

In the corner the bride still stood, her face completely hidden.
But it was soon time for her to start: already various messengers
had come to say that the young men were on their way. The
friends of the bridegroom would come to fetch her: they would
be repulsed three or four times, to show that there was no
indecent eagerness about the affair: but finally they would
succeed and escort her to the new home.

When we stepped out into the village, the young men were
already galloping wildly up and down. Their mules, de¬
lighted to have no packs on their backs, and very gay under
household carpets that covered them, were kicking their heels
and tearing up and down the narrow beehive streets.

Two weddings were now in progress. The bride from
Pichiban was expected at any moment. She had a three
hours’ ride down the precipitous track from Salambar to
negotiate under her chadur. She was coming: a beating of
wooden sticks and drums announced her; “ Chub chini ham
Iaria. Chub chini ham lari a” the boys cried, dancing round her.
A vague and helpless look of discomfort made itself felt from
under the chadur which hid the lady on her mule, all except her
elastic-sided boots. Two uncles, one on each side, kept her
steady on the extremely bumpy path. So, in complete blind¬
ness, the modest female is expected to venture into matrimony.
The village seethed around, waiting. The lady approached,
riding her mule like a galleon in a labouring sea. At a few
yards from the door she was lifted down: a lighted candle was
put into either hand: in front of her on trays they carried her
mirror, her Quran and com and coloured rice in little saucers,
with lighted candles: these were all borne into her new home,
but she herself paused on the threshold with her two lights held

[276]

Entry of the hide

up in white cotton-gloved hands; and her bridegroom from
the roof above took small coins and com and coloured rice, and
flung it all over her as she stood. The little boys of Garmrud
were on the look out: a great scrum ensued for the pennies: the
bride, unable to see what was going on and with the ^Pos¬
sibility of the candles, which must not blow out, in her hands,
swayed about, pushed hither and thither, and only sustained
by the buttressing uncles: it is as well to have relatives at such

moments. ,

With a great heave the threshold was transcended: in the

shelter of her new home the lady unveiled, while the bride¬
groom, paying her not the slightest attention now he had got
her, devoted himself to our reception.

The bridegroom also has to stand at the end of the room till
one of the guests takes pity on him, and asks him to sit down.
This young man, however—he was just fifteen—bore it with
more cheerfulness than his fiancee. His new boots and orange
tie—for he was dressed as a Ferangi in honour of the occasion—
were sufficiendy glorious in themselves to make up for any
other discomforts of matrimony.

We had more dancing and a village idiot to come and tie
himself into knots on the floor for our amusement; a revolting
spectacle. And then, leaving the Pichiban bride to setde into
her new house, we returned to our own show, which was just
now reaching the dramatic moment of the meeting between
bride and groom at the outskirts of the village.

After three or four attempts, and as many gallops up and
down the open space by the torrent, the young men of her
family had induced the bride to leave the shelter of the paternal
home. Accompanied by seven female friends the little pro¬
cession encircled the village and was now coming back to it
across the cornfields on the west. The bridegroom, climbing
his roof, saw his bride in the distance, flung himself on to bis

[ 2 77 ]

The Throne of Solomon

mule, and with his friends behind him dashed to meet her.
The two little cavalcades came together just where the valley
slopes down into a peaceful distance of trees and river and
figures threshing their harvests far away: against this back¬
ground, the gay dresses of the little crowd, the coloured rugs
on the mules’ backs, the blue veiled figure of the bride on her
steed, looked right and significant, an old ceremonial that
expressed the meaning of life here where it is still so simply
lived.

The bride and groom now parted again after the meeting,
and came to his house by separate ways. The dower chest was
brought staggering after, and various treasures such as lamps
and samovars carried separately on people’s heads. From the
flat roofs under the cliff wall that closes in Garmrud from
north and east, the bride’s new neighbours gathered to welcome
her, and joined in the Hymen io-Hymenee, or its Persian
equivalent. Here she came to five her new life—to be a part
of the village in a sense which we who make so much to do
over the community and our share in it—but can leave it
whenever we wish—may hardly conceive.

The village in these remote mountains is the one unit by
which all else is measured, the censor from whom no one who
belongs to it will ever escape. It is the focus for all loyalty,
the standard for all judgment. You are happy or unhappy,
according to what the village thinks of you: and even your
virtue is practised chiefly because the village expects it. A
week or two later I came to one of these little communities
and enquired for some potatoes; the man I asked shrugged his
shoulders.

“ We do not grow potatoes,” said he. He pointed to the
next group of houses, scarce a mile away. “ They grow them
there,” he added: “ but our village has never grown them.
It is not our custom.”

[278]

1

Reappearance of Hujjat Allah

In the face of this innate conservative instinct of the human
animal, the force that yet makes us do new things in spite of all
is very amazing, an energy for exploration whose power must
truly be incalculable when we consider what a mass of inertia
it is always attacking. And let us not think too strangely of
the village where potatoes were not grown. Any civilized
British community would provide half a dozen things and
more that are either “ done ” or “ not done ” with just so
small a show 7 of reason.

The day after the wedding is devoted to a feast, and every
guest brings an offering of cash and presents it when he sits
down to the pilau. I, however, was growing more and more
impatient for my mountains. I presented my contribution on
the day of the wedding itself, and decided to start next morning
for the Salambar, in spite of Aziz s reluctance, tom from the
arms of his bride. I was afraid that, if once I allowed him to
settle down, he would never be induced to start at all.

He had now got his servant from the year before, Hujjat
Allah, The Refuge of Allah, a tall, handsome, simple creature
who would walk with the mule s halter in his hand from 3 a.in¬
to midnight, and still be ready to perform every sort of service.
4 Aziz gave bim eighty shillings a year .and his food, and treated
him like an equal, for he was a distant cousin. And during
nearly a month which I now spent with these two, I never
had a word of complaint to make to either of them.

We had decided—but we did not get away till eight-thirty
next morning, and then it was by a great etfcort, and half the
forgotten necessities for our journey were carried along after
us by panting relatives, and slung about the packs as we moved
along.

e£ Keep him away a long time , 55 Aziz’s wife murmured as
she said good-bye.' “ I do not want to see him back at that
house across the river . 55

[279]

The Throne of Solomon

The Master of Flocks

Through the eastern defile of the Assassins’ valley, under
the precipice of Nevisar Shall, we left the river track and began
to climb as we had done the year before for the Salambar Pass.
It is steeper than the way to the Hornli hut from Zermatt, a
wild granite country. There were fewer people than the year
before, for spring and autumn are the busy times over the
Caspian passes, and this was August 23. Fewer flowers too:
but we came, nevertheless, to borage and many sorts of dian-
thus, mallows, jasmine, mignonette, a scented pink thistle, and
a shrub covered with white and faint pink bracts like sunlit
snow, Atraphaxis spinosa. As I rode under a waterfall, about
8,000 feet up by my aneroid, I saw Gentiana septemfiia in
the damp earth, and felt a sudden gladness, as over a meeting
with friends in a strange land.

At a small chaikhana, a low hut with brushwood roof and
long earthen hearth on which one sat, we rested, and discovered
that in the agitation of good-byes someone had forgotten to
shoe the mules. The Refuge of Allah now proceeded to do
so with shoes which the chaikhana kept ready suspended from
the roof by a string and with a crooked nail or two which he
produced like a conjurer from somewhere in his shirt.

We sat in the hut and drank tea, and listened to the gipsy¬
eyed housewife, who had made the pilgrimage to Meshed in
Khorasan last year with "Aziz’s mother. Her husband was
still down at the wedding in Garmrud, so that we were first to
tell the news about it.

An hour after noon we came to the huts of Pichiban. We
were on the shelf which lies north of the upper Alamut valley,
and were climbing the watershed of which Solomon’s Throne
is the culminating point. Here was undulating pasture with
brooks tunnelling through it, and damp grass and gentians at

[ 280 ]

Mount Elburz from the Salamhar Pass.

Alamut valley on the right.

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A shepherd camp

their edge. The mass of Elburz across the valley seemed
smaller now than under its winter snows, but a tiny semi¬
glacier still hung in each of its two pockets. On Mount Sat,
to the east of it, snow still lay. A line of white strata running
in a jagged zig-zag across the uninhabited eastern landscape is
called Abraham’s Path, where, travelling quite unhistorically
with his ewes before him, their milky dripping udders are
said to have left this enduring sign.

Here the air was thin, the distances were clearer: we were

truly in the hills at last.

In a hollow strewn with boulders, where two or three
springs bubbled out of the ground, we found a master of
flocks and his people, living in summer huts whose low roofs
were made of poplars from Narmirud in the valley below,
covered with faggots and turf, and whose wall was the hillside
itself, which pushed thick shelves of rock into the rooms.
Three walls of stones loosely piled were built out to make each
dwelling: a boulder made the table, a bit of flat earth the
hearth: and little stone pens surrounded the huts, filled with
trodden sheep dung whose acrid smell, mingled with that of
smoke from household fires, comes not unpleasantly to the
nostril of a mountaineer.

These people lived at Verkh through the winter, and on the
slopes of Chala in the spring. Here to their summer pastures
they brought only the bare necessities of life, and chief among
them the tall four-handled jars of earthenware in which milk,
gently tilted from side to side, is turned with time and patience
flito butter. “ Dug,” or curds, were drying in sacks on the
roofs, which, being not more than about four feet off the
ground, were used as tables from the outside. Dogs and
children and cooking-pots surrounded the tittle camp, where
everyone stopped, their various activities suspended, to look
with suspicious surprise at our approach.

[ 281 ]

The Throne of Solomon

While ‘Aziz fulfilled one of Ms most important unofficial
duties, wMch was that of explaining me to the inhabitants as
we went along, I sat by the hearth in the cMef hut and enjoyed
the play of light from the door on four jars wMch nearly
filled the interior against a cavern-like background. A cradle
took up what space was left over, and in it a wizened baby
doomed to die was being fed on milk and chupattis, a sodden
diet wMch must account for tens of thousands of infantile deaths
every year. In the warmth of the fire the slabs of hillside
wMch formed the inner wall were completely blackened by
flies, petrified in an innocuous coma.

Only the Alpine air can make hght of these discomforts.
By five- thir ty I was glad of my coat; the sun rays had lost their
power and in the keen evening one seemed to breathe health
and strength with the mountain coldness. Out in the sunset
the homing flocks poured like honey down the Hllside with
t heir shepherds behind them; beyond the cries and greetings,
the barking and noises of the camp, lay the silence of un¬
inhabited mountains, a Mgh and lonely peace.

The master of flocks and ‘Aziz had a lot to say to each other,
being old friends. The former was a wealthy man, with a
habit of authority no doubt fostered by three wives, and he
apologized for the simplicity of Ms mountain life, passing it
over lightly, as a man of breeding.

I soon left them to their gossip, and found my way into one
of the litde pens, where my bed was put up in the moonlight.
Elburz, under the pale spaces of the sky, stood in majestic
folds, as if wrapped m some royal garment of hght: the moon
swam above, barely Mgher than our Mgh sleeping-place she
seemed. When I awoke, some hours later, she looked
scarcely to have moved in those distances of sky. I was roused
by a large black figure snuffimg close to my pillow, moving
about among my soap and toilet things; for a paralysed moment

[ 282 ]

The Abney level

I thought it human. I nerved myself to look, and saw a black
calf, very much interested in my belongings, and full oi indig¬
nant snortings when I shooed it out.

By eight-thirty next morning we reached the Salambar.
There, one and a half hours from Pichiban, one tops the
skyline, leaves the red southern world and looks on the
northern green. I walked up so as to pick flowers and
accustom my weakened muscles to exercise, but there were
few plants on this side, as the water comes to the surface lower
down near Pichiban, and the dryness produced little but
abundant spiky cushions with pink blossoms, dry and crackly
as paper. At 'the top of the pass, the chaikhana, still in use the
year before, was now deserted and ruined, the little domes o

its roof broken down by the winter’s weight of snow.

There in sunlit solitude, with the Seh Hizar valley below
winding to the Caspian jungle and with Elburz at our back, I
sat for three hours taking compass bearings and trying to make
out heights with an Abney level, which of ah small instruments
must be the most exasperating and captious. To propose to
a wayward beauty can be as nothing compared with the
difficulty of keeping the spirit-level for one second in the place
where it is wanted; the slightest suspicion of a quiver sends the
elusive one out of sight altogether or down with a bump
groundwards: and who can keep a steady hand on Persian
passes buffeted by winds?

“ Spite of the world, the flesh, the Devil,

He strove to keep his spirit level.”

Many, many times have I thought of this engineering epitaph,
and many, many curses have I lavished on the Abney level:
nor, when I pull out my small set of instruments, o I ever
regard its angular surfaces with that affection which my

[283]

The Throne of Solomon

compass receives, whose round face, placid and reliable, is
that of a friend.

While I wrote in my notebook, ‘Aziz and the Refuge of
Allah buried the aluminium water-bottle to the neck in lighted
tussocks of thorn and boiled tea. And then I took a last look
over the landscape: the Assassins’ valley westward to its
vaporous defile where, only ten days ago, I toiled up doubtful
of living; Balarud on its ledge, like a toy far below; and,
hiding the Rock of Alamut, Haudegan with a clean edge
against the sky. I wondered if I should ever see them again,
and did not much care: for were they not mine for evert And
then I ran down the northern slopes widi ‘Aziz behind me,
am ong little springs of water, lavender-like Nepeta, campanu¬
las, an aromatic sage-like plant they call generically Benj, and
flowerless plants of iris. I pulled one up for its roots.

“ Why do you want that?” said ‘Aziz, who was a snob in
flowers. “ It is not a narcissus.”

And I discovered the name of the iris, which they call Sirish.

Still three hours down our old route to Maran, along a
narrow valley walled by the Salambar, green on its northern
side. Steep fields appeared with cocks of hay made black by
constant mists. The river rolled below us in a bed made by
its own millenniums of effort; it dug itself a canyon, and wound
like a worm in its earth hole. As we crossed high over this
abyss by a tributary waterfall, I found Grass of Parnassus,
another Alpine friend. The flowers here were different from
those of the southern slope, and less Alpine; scabious white and
blue, wormwood, vetches, and white and yellow marguerites.

At Maran the pastoral upper valleys end, and thickets with
hawthorn and roses begin the Caspian jungle. The Seh Hizar
flows down between wooded mountains where I had followed
to the sea the year before. With the afternoon sun against us,
the flat roofs and poplar trees round the village were lit by a

[ 284 ]

Dohtar QaVa — The Maiden s Castle—Our lodging for the night
on the Sirbash Pass *

We enter the Darijan valley

kind of halo against dark silhouettes of promontories, tier
after tier beyond them and below.

Here we left our old route, descended steeply to the ford,
climbed a slope of sunlit fields facing west, and then among
thickets where violet leaves and a speckly thing like foxglove
brought English woods to mind, we turned a comer and saw
the Darijan valley running from east to west, flat like a map
in sunlight.

An old keep called Qal’a Marvan, now only a mound ot
stones, stands at the turn of the valley, with a view down the
Seh Hizar as well as into Darijan. From here our path
descended easily, and brought us in dusk across the stream to
Sern (about ten houses), and in fifteen minutes or so after to
Shahristan (twenty houses). Here one of the older villagers,
sitting over an evening pipe on his threshold as we came
riding up, asked us to halt for the night.

The Watering Resort

It does not do in this crowded world ever to suppose that
one is first anywhere, and the Emir Sipahsalar of Tunakabun,
who committed suicide at the age of eighty, owing to an in¬
convenient exhibition of royal curiosity in his financial affairs,
and who used to own a shooting box beyond Darijan, is said
once to have brought a party of Englishmen up this valley.
Apart from this we heard that a Hungarian engineer with a
Greek wife, one of twenty, who, as a direct consequence of the
suicide, were plotting out and preparing to develop the region
for its new master the Shah, was installed in the last village.

The people of Shahristan, however, might have been South
Sea Islanders before the days of Captain Cook so little were they
influenced by these contacts with civilization. They rushed
to me as if I were a circus. Twenty times or more I was asked

[285]

The Throne of Solomon

to stand up on a roof to show myself full length to new
audiences. Only the Elders, ardent Shi’as with a Dervish
among them, wididrew and cast self-conscious glances from a
distance, ashamed to show interest in so negligible an object.

It is a remarkable thing, when one comes to consider it, that
indifference should be so generally considered a sign of superi¬
ority the world over; dignity or age, it is implied, so fill the
mind with matter that other people’s indiscriminate affairs
glide unperceived off that profound abstraction: that at any
rate is the impression given not only by village mullas , but
by ministers, bishops, dowagers and well-bred people all
over the world, and the village of Shahristan was no excep¬
tion, except that the assembled dignitaries found it more
difficult to conceal the strain which a total absence of
curiosity entails.

'Aziz was never deterred by this sort of convention, and
used to come up bravely to attend to me and my wants with a
respectfulness which the villagers thought more peculiar than
anything else about me. He arrived presently thoroughly
disgruntled, and informed me that, diough chicken and eggs
were to be had, they were only to be given with the one
hand when money was seized with the other, a want of
hospitable feeling which, as he said emphatically several
times over, we had never encountered in his own valley of
Alamut.

I myself thought—rightly as it proved—that civilization
in the shape of the Greek wife of the Hungarian engineer must
be to blame and merely said to ‘Aziz with pain in my voice that
this village must be very different from any other we had ever
stayed in. This aspersion was received by the men in the
audience with obvious shame; they would evidently have
handed over hens and chickens and all if it were not for the
firmness of their womenfolk, who were not going to let

[286]

Inhospitality of Sbahristan

abstract convention endanger housekeeping. We bowed to
the more resolute sex. Indeed, we did not mind paying for
our food as we got it, but our nicer feelings were hurt at this
lowering into the realm of commerce of what should have
been left on the higher plane of gifts offered and returned.
When the ladies saw with what a ready grace we parted with
sixpence in exchange for a hen, they too began to feel remorse,
and murmured apologies on the score of poverty.

They were indeed poor, dressed in rags, half of the mountain
sort and half of the jungle. The men wore moccasins on
their feet, and sheepskin caps that gave them a Struwelpeter
appearance, and square capes of felt they call shaulars, tied in
two shoulder knots or with comic stumps of dummy sleeves.
In this tortoise-like casing, the Caspian rain is kept off for hours.

I longed for solitude and peace, and made the most of the
recent argument and my justifiable displeasure to obtain it.

“ Women,” I said, addressing the landscape in general during
a pause brought about by the payment of our sixpence,
“ women are ignorant creatures.”

The assembled men, delighted to see the argument shift from
household economics to the so much more obvious field of
masculine superiority, unanimously rushed at the ladies and
shooed them with insults off the roof into their proper kitchens
below.

The valley was now full of loveliness. A last faint sense of
daylight lingered in its lower reaches, beyond the v illag e houses
whose flat roofs, interspersed with trees, climb one above the
other up the slope. Behind the great mountain at our back
the moon was rising, not visible yet, but flooding the sky with
gentle waves of light ever increasing, far, far above our heads.
Here was more than beauty. We were remote, as in a place
closed by high barriers from the world. No map had yet
printed its name for the eyes of strangers. A sense of quiet

[287]

The Throne of Solomon

life, unchanging, centuries old and forgotten, held our pilgrim
souls in its peace.

Here in the moonlight shadow of the mountain itself, I
heard the legend of King Solomon and his Throne; and an
alternative version which has it that the prophet, burdened
with more wives than even he could stand, sent there for a
different one every night, and left her in the morning, frozen
to death by the mountain air. The men of Shahristan sat
round me in a circle, smoking their long straight pipes and
twinkling slowly over the thought of how King Solomon
managed his wives; bits of wood and iron nails from his bed
still lay scattered, they told me, on the mountain-top. But
when it came to a closer enquiry, none, it appeared, had ever
been up there except a hairy old mountaineer with wrinkled
face, the village shikari for ibex, who seemed loath to describe
the matter in detail, but said he would take us up either to
the summit or to the pass below it.

We decided first to go up the little valley where the warm
stream gushes out that was made for the Queen of Sheba, and
whither people still ride a three or four days’ journey from all
the lands around to be healed. And from there we would
climb the walls of the Throne, and perhaps its very summit,
but at any rate we would cross its great buttress and make our
way into an engagingly blank bit of country on its eastern side.

This great buttress wall runs unbroken and only dipping
slightly from the Throne itself to a pass above the Seh Hizar
which leads to Daku in the jungle, and between these two
points there is only one high col a little north of the mountain,
which is possible though difficult for mules. ‘Aziz and The
Refuge of Allah denied its existence, having no wish to go east
of their own country; but one is not bred in hills for nothing,
and the shikari disclosed the pass of Kalau just where I ex¬
pected to find it. Here, then, after our visit to the watering

[288]

The way from Darijan to-the great mountain oj Solomons Throne.

Wife of the Hungarian Engineer

resort, we would go and take die shikari to guide; and we set
out again at seven next morning. In fifteen minutes we
reached Darijan, the last village, which has forty houses and a
mulla , and a bath whose little domes of mud, enlivened by
flat green bottles inserted as skylights, were shining in the
morning sun.

I had spoken nothing but Persian for three weeks, and I felt
I could not let the chance go by of meeting another European
woman, whatever my forebodings might be as to-the Greco-
Hungarian. So I banged on a low door in Darijan behind
which they told me were the engineer and his wife: and sure
enough, after a long interval, an angular, dishevelled lady
appeared, so apologetic for not being up at seven in the
morning that my own apologies for so early a call had no
chance even to begin. She also, she said, was going to the
hot springs of Ab-i-Garm, the Queen of Sheba’s bath, and I
promised to wait for her there.

We now rode up the valley towards Mian Rud, or the Place
between Rivers, where two streams meet that encircle the
western and northern flanks of Takht-i-Suleiman, and to¬
gether descend as the Darijan water. Here, they say, was an
old town buried, and a vague look of human handiwork still
seems to lift the hollows of the ground. A little higher up,
above the meeting waters, the shooting box of the dead
Emir is also fallin g to decay, soon to add one more ruin to
this cemetery of a world on which we play: its garden outlines
are lost already, though a roofless line of buildings and man¬
gers for horses still stand on a grassy knoll under the morning
shadow of the mountain. An immense and solitary cherry
tree was waving its leaves near-by in the draught of the valley.
There was no village, but only a peasant’s house, and the two
streams meet below it, foaming at the foot of slopes of hay.
We followed the right-hand water up a long and narrow valley,

T [289]

The Throne of Solomon

uninhabited, but visited by haymakers and shepherds, and
with a hut of boughs where a hermit lives in its midst.

The water ran brown and white over rocks, and a strange
crimson poppy grew in the boulders of its bed. We crossed
and recrossed, while our valley, embracing the western peak of
Solomon as with an arm, held on in a single groove with only
one small tributary from the west. It was open and cheerful,
treeless and inclined to pasture where the mountain did not
press in buttresses and towers down to the water’s edge. The
western slope was gentler; a limestone ridge lay white against
the sky, and thorn trees, well grown and spaced as in a park,
showed on a nearer ridge against it. 'W'c left the torrent at
last, and looked down on it in a canyon below, where it
dropped in blue pools like a necklace of sapphires in the sun.
And turning a comer, two hours from Darijan, we saw our
watering resort before us.

Even at Balarud, and farther*off still in the Shah Rud valley,
I had heard of this place as a populous centre for people from
all parts ofthe country, a sort of Karlsbad of the mountain: and
though I have learned to doubt Persian description in general,
I had not expected quite such an Alpine solitude as we
now looked down upon. The river ran through its stony
valley with not a tree to shade it; and, close above it on the
slope, were two small caves fronted by a tiny enclosure of
loose stones, and showing by discoloured yellow streaks which
oozed from them down the face of the rock that here were the
mineral springs.

Perhaps a dozen people, men and women, were in the valley,
sitting on boulders while their mules wandered at will up the
hillside, a row of small bells arranged, most inconveniendy,
one would think, round their hindquarters, so that they can be
heard at night as they roam untethered near their sleeping
muleteers. On the flat ground near the river bed a few large

[290]

At the watering resort

rocks had. been surrounded, by stones to the height of a couple
of feet, as enclosures for the visitors to lodge in.

We made a tour of inspection, and having selected the most
promising of these abodes, with a big boulder to shelter it
from the south, we rigged up my litde tent for shade, spread
the quilt on the ground, and settled down to the making of
tea and the discussion with our fellow-pilgrims of what the
waters do to one’s inside, as it might have been Aix-les-Bains
or Baden.

On the whole it was a more cheerful place than these, made
so by the very simplicity of things: rock and grass and air
and water were all the ingredients of the landscape, so light
and pure that the very thought of sickness was hard to enter¬
tain. And the people were pleasant mountain folk from Tala-
ghan and Kalar Dasht, out for a holiday and ready to make
friends with all the world. I thought I had little enough
luggage with me, but when I saw how these travelled, riding
two davs from their houses into the mountain solitude with
nothing but a little bread and cheese in a handkerchief and a
samovar for tea, I felt ashamed of all the paraphernalia spread
about me on the ground.

Here I first saw the headdress the young women wear in
Kalar Dasht, a circlet made of small silver leaves sewn on to a
band, with perhaps a turquoise at the centre, worn at a rakish
angle over one temple under the kerchief. 1 bargained for
one of them and had almost got it, when The Refuge of Allah,
a silent but outraged witness of the negotiations, remarked
that two shillings was a monstrous price for such a bauble,
took it from my unwilling hands and flung it back to the lady,
telling her to our mutual chagrin that the matter was closed.

By this time the sun was straight overhead; not a cranny in
the valley was hidden from its rays except the small space
under my tent.

The Throne of Solomon

Up over the brow of the hill, sitting apparently on masses of
luggage and with a parasol to shade her, die Hungarian-Greek
lady appeared, giving the last touch of fashion to our gadiering.

“ Quelles horribles gens,” said she, as my assembly, having got
up to greet her, squatted down again at about two yards’ dis¬
tance. She shooed them away with her parasol. “Madame”
said she, “ I would never have thought it possible to live in
such a savage place. Every night I lie and weep.”

“Dear me,” I remarked. “They all seem harmless
enough.”

“ How can one tell?” said she. “ The houses are not safe.
There is a hole in every roof for light, and always I expect to
see a strange man letting himself down into my room. My
husband is away all day. All the time I diink he has faUen
over the edge. Not a path here but, if you fall off it, you are
dead.”

This seemed unreasonable. Why should anyone fall off a
Paths But the lady hardly paused: she had so many woes to
pour out.

Nearly all our luggage,” she said, “ we lost in a torrent in
the dark, coming up here through these forests. The bridge
gave way and all our cognac went.”

This was, indeed, a tragedy. But why come up through
the jungle in the dark?

It was because they made us late in starting.” I could
sympathize with the poor lady over that. “ You have no
idea, Madame, what a terrible life it is here. The people hate
us. I have grown old since I came three weeks ago.”

Her husband, it appeared, was away all day surveying. He
a gone in for commerce in gramophones and, having lost
his money there, now hoped to recover it by engineering for
the Shah: but the royal salaries, she said, were anything but
regular. The Shah intended to develop all his new estate,

[ 292 ]

Queen of Sheba’s bath

which stretches from the coast at Khurramabad and Shahsavar
up to the watershed, over all the Seh Hizar. Shahsavar is to
be the port, and the timber and mineral wealth of the moun¬
tains are all to be exploited. Rashly, as it proved, I said that I
was interested in maps and would like to see those of her
husband, to get some idea from him as to the heights, for
my own aneroid, which only reaches 10,000 feet, was going
to be useless above Mian Rud.

We now went to bathe in the green twilit cave, with ‘Aziz on
guard before it. The w T ater was warm and dim, with small
ferns at the edge, the cave just big enough for two people to
move in comfortably, about three feet in depth. It was so
pleasant, being the first real bath for three weeks, that I stayed
in much too long, and felt rather ill for the rest of the day, for
the water is evidently full of sulphur and iron.

The lady continued her woes through lunch and after; in
the light of her fears the peace of the little valley was shattered.
When the sun got low she mounted her mule and departed.
She felt towards me as a sister, said she, and pressed a sheep¬
skin waistcoat on me regardless of protest. She was going
south again next day and, Dieu merci , would need it no more.
Hardly had she rounded the comer of the valley, than the
despised inhabitants returned, pulled out their bags of tobacco,
filled their long pipes, and setded down for a comfortable chat.

It was getting dark much more quickly than in die open
mountains of the night before. A dank feeling fell upon the
air, and suddenly, noiseless and insidious, a white mist that
had crept up the valley lay with its snout pushed along the
river towards us. In another minute it had enveloped us,
drizzling gently.

My tent is an affair made of two pieces of canvas which
button together, but of which I had brought only one so as to
travel more lighdy. This, when erected, reached about half-

[ m 1

The Throne of Solomon

way down the poles and just covered my bed, keeping off
water though not dampness, and giving me a useful shelter
for dressing when no other was available.

'Aziz and the Refuge now arranged it as snugly as possible
for the night, while I sat with my collar turned up in the rain,
wondering why on earth I was there when I had a comfort¬
able home of my own. I remembered my godfather who,
being asked by some enthusiast what his thoughts were during
lonely nights in the beauty of the mountains answered: '' I
usually think: Why the devil did I come?”

Presently a fire was enticed into life in our enclosure.

There was no wind, only a gentle dropping of water which
fell harmlessly on the men’s shaulars, as they moved about
attending to the straying mules in the dusk. They looked
scarcely human in those stiff felt things in the gathering night.
Having warmed myself with hot tea I undressed quickly,
put my clothes under my pillow to keep them dry, slipped
into a loose fur lining and felt happy again. As for 'Aziz
and the Refuge, they wrapped themselves in a shaular and
a Mazanderani carpet respectively, and were asleep on the
ground in no time.

The Throne of Solomon

Next morning a rim of big drops hung from the suspended
edge of my tent like a fringe and, peering out from beneath it,
I looked on to a grey world apparently dead. A few motion¬
less heaps of greyness among die stones was all one saw of the
visitors to the watering resort. Presendy a faint stir began
among them. The women, their cotton rags and ballet skirts
very limp after the wet night, began to move about and seek
the stream of water. A slight morning breeze brought life
into the air. And when the sun rose over the mountain-side,
the Caspian sea mist broke and vanished. It comes up, they

[294 ]

We lose our guide

o

told me, nearly every evening, and leaves only the actual
mountain summits unsubmerged.

At seven-thirty we departed. After so many delays, we
were to climb the ramparts ot Solomon’s Throne at last. I
thought longingly, indeed, of the summit itself, and spoke o:
it to the shikari, who seemed much more reserved than he
had been in Shahristan. The matter was left for the time
being, and meanwhile we descended to Mian Rud by yester¬
day’s track, meeting haymakers on die way under loads ot
thyme-scented grasses. There we left the Darijan route and
turned up the other stream, which encircles the northern side
of the great Throne.

Here a first hitch became manifest.

Our shikari, elated by the fact that he was being given six¬
pence a day and a holiday as well, had volunteered at daybreak
to bring us an ibex from the hills. ‘Aziz, in an access of
generosity over which he did not consult me, lent him my
field-glasses for the occasion, with the result that we saw no
more of either him or them for the rest of the day, and soon
after Mian Rud discovered that we were guideless and lost.

At first this did not matter. All we had to do was to walk
up grassy slopes eastward, keeping the river in a narrow valley
below us on our right, where the central pyramid of the
Throne rose on the other side in massive ledges with string
courses of grass here and there, black as a dungeon keep in the
shadow. The difficulties began when the encircling stream
turned up into the centre of things, rising through a ruinous
and apparently unrideable valley towards the high summit
of the Throne itself. Our path, on the other hand, such as it
was, appeared to continue straight over a wall of rock some
thousands of feet high which, the peasants of Mian Rud told
us, formed the pass of Kalau, or Chertek as some prefer to call
it from the name of the pastures at its feet.

[ 2 95 ]

The Throne of Solomon

Before we readied, the point where this insoluble problem
would have to be tackled, our minds were distracted by the
arrival, panting behind us, of the Hungarian-Greek lady’s
deaf village maid, who handed me a note, evidently compiled
after a heart-to-heart scene with the engineer, asking apolo¬
getically for the sheepskin that had been forced upon me the
day before, and suggesting that her husband would like to see
my maps.

This was impossible, for our faces were turned eastward and
not to Darijan; and having signified as much to the deaf one
by signs, we watched and waited while she descended to a
spring near the river’s edge, and brought up her mistress’s
and our water-bottles filled with a sparkling delicious mineral
water which the Municipal Laboratoire in Paris declares in
printed French and Persian to contain the following ingredients
per litre:

Silice gr. 0-0275

Albuine „ 0-0002

Oxide ferr. „ 0-00628

Soude „ 0-184

Chaux „ 0-5064

Magnesie „ 0-985

Potasse „ 0-926

Chlore „ 0-1204

Acide sulf. „ 0-1201

This spring of water goes by the name of Shelef, and is
known at Khurramabad on the coast, but is at present too
inaccessible to be exploited.

We now stood on an edge and looked along the desolate
valley to the peak of the Throne of Solomon. The massif we
had been skirting ever since we left our camping-place at Ab-i-
Garm was the most western of the three summits of which

[296]

In sight of the Throne

the group is composed. 1 think it is called the Orfan’s moun¬
tain, latim Kuh, though I have only the shikari's word for it.
The central summit, with precipitous sides and flattened top
like a natural keep, recognizable from its peculiar shape far
away in the Shah Rud country, now appeared between the
other two over a long shoulder of snowfield, and justified by
contrasting blackness its name of Siah Kaman, the Black
Carder’s Bow. On the left and nearer to us, the Throne itself
rose to a gende point, a pyramid shape like the Weisshom,
most beautiful of mountains, only not detached as that is
from the landscape around it, since the great wall we had to
climb runs up and joins it by a north-eastern spur.

The desolate valley led towards this peak, and drew its
waters from the snowfield or glacier which fills the deep
corrie between the Throne and the Black Carder. Though
there appeared no difficulty for an able-bodied mountaineer
it was a depressing sight as far as I was concerned, still weak
from my illness.

It meant first a steep descent and long march up the valley,
where no path appeared for a mule to follow: and then, instead
of a crest, there was nothing to climb but the dreary black face
of the mountain, an endless grind of scree till one comes to
the actual rocky peak. Looking it over, I judged the thing
to be a ten hours’ effort. Mian Rud, the last place where my
aneroid could prove itself useful, was 9,300 feet: the valley
below us I judged to be anything over 10,000, and the Throne
itself, after much weighing of evidence and very doubtfully, I
estimated at about 15,300. Six thousand feet, mostly over
scree, was not a thing even the most optimistic of convalescents
could contemplate: I still hoped, however, that the shikari,
when tired of hunting with my field-glasses, might reveal a
wav for mules along the valley or an alternative way round
the mountain from the south-east. Meanwhile there was

[297]

The Throne of Solomon

nothing for it but to put up the tent in a grassy corrie where a
few cows wandered round an empty hut, and to admire the
beauties of Nature while waiting for the shikari and his ibex.

Here we sat for a good many hours, in a place with grey
boulders in long grass, and Nepeta flowers and iris roots about.
‘Aziz, stricken with remorse over the field-glasses, would
shout at intervals across the valley towards the unresponsive
mass of Iatim Kuh, amid whose black precipices the oblivious
shikari must, we presumed, be wandering.

As the afternoon advanced, action of some sort became im¬
perative. To go up towards Kalau seemed better than to
descend in the mere hope of an invisible path in the valley,
and it would be easier to retrieve a mistake by retracing our
way downhill rather than up. So we climbed the first step
in the ascent of the barrier; and after an hour’s struggle, so
steep that the mules took it in short scrambles, scattering
stones and pausing every few minutes in the obvious hope of
some mulish miracle to make us change our minds, we reached
another and larger corrie called Chertek, a great lap between
the knees of two hills, at the head of which our barrier still
towered higher than ever, red rock with a turret-like point
against the sky, deceptively near and clear in the high air.

At the far end of the corrie, showing its size by their small¬
ness, were flocks of sheep browsing on the scree or standing
with their heads together in the sun. The Refuge and I
went to find the shepherd, and scattered as we walked crowds
of partridges with their young families, who ran about the
rocks calling their liquid cry.

The shepherd was far up the hill-side, but the Refuge of
Allah had no thought of toiling after him. The wayfarer in
Persia has every privilege; to direct him is no mere act of easy
courtesy: you leave whatever you may be doing to come when
he calls and tell him what he wants to know, however far off

[ 298 ]

Night on the mountain

you may be at the time of asking. We were just within
hailing distance, but not near enough for conversation, and
the shepherd showed some natural .reluctance, which outraged
the Refuge of Allah. It would take him half an hour to get
back to his sheep again from where we stood: after several
shouted messages, however, he came towards us at last; he
stepped from boulder to boulder with the easy balance of the
hills. He was a young lad, in a khaki tunic and blue cotton
trousers, with a shock of henna’d hair under a curly black
sheepskin cap; his eyes were green, and he held a staff in his
hand. 44 No mule can go along the valley down there,'’ said
he. The only track in this region was that of Kalau, on which
we were. We returned to 4 Aziz, who had already unloaded
the mules in a sheep-pen of loose stones, close to the corrie s
edge.

It was cold after sundown with a delicious Alpine coldness,
and plenty of thorny stuff to bum grew T among the iris roots
in the corrie. And as the two men sat over the fire, and I had
already got into my sleeping-sack for warmth, 6 Aziz was
justified, a voice hailed in the dark, and the shikari, with field-
glasses and three eggs from the farm of Mian Rud, appeared in
our circle.

No ibex was slung over his shoulder, but he had been seeing
them all day through the glasses, said he, c 4 as if one could touch
them with the hand,” and appeared to think, that this delightful
occupation should be as much a cause of joyous excitement to
us as it was to him. Without wasting more words, he setded
down to bread and cheese. He was a shy and simple soul—
one of the few dwellers in the valley who spent the whole
year there or wintered on the coast: and so he had never spoken
to a European in his life, or seen one before the arrival of the
Hungarian engineer. But as he found that I liked to hear
about the paths and wildernesses of the hills, and saw 7 me eat

[299]

The Throne of Solotnon

and drink like any ordinary creature, and especially now being
exhilarated by the glorious day with the glasses, he became
less reserved and began to talk about his hunter’s stock of
knowledge, more familiar with the ways of animals and storms
and seasons than with those of men.

High in our corrie that night was full of peace. From
behind the peak of Solomon the moonlight spread, opening
like a fan, while we were held in shadow. The air was still,
with the warmth of a summer night untouched by wind,
cooled by the nearness of the snow and scented with hay.
From the valley, through rifts in a wind that blew there, a
sound of water came intermittent, puffing like a distant train.
And far away through distances of moonlight we looked out
upon Salambar and the Alamut mountains dissolving in dim¬
nesses of sky.

Next morning we started early to climb the great wall, and
found the sheep already out, browsing this time on the north¬
eastern slope, whence the shepherds shouted a greeting as we
passed.

Of that climb, which lasted four and a half hours, I have
only a vague distressing memory. The way soon became too
steep for riding and zig-zagged fly-like with scarce a respite.
The height of the pass I calculate to be about 14,000 feet,
judging pardy by my Abney level, partly by the lowness of
Salambar far away (which is 11,290 feet, and the only altitude
in this landscape marked on the Survey of India map), and
partly by the fatigue of my men, who found it hard to breathe.

I was not yet fit for any strenuous exertion under the best
of circumstances, and felt the height for the first time in my
life. It caused a cold clamminess at the back of my neck, and a
blackness over my eyes which laid the world at intervals. The
two men lifted me on to a mule whenever any slight easing of
the gradient made it possible: but this route is only practicable

f 300 1

On the ridge

for very lightly laden animals, and the latter part had to be
walked. I crawled along, resting every fifty paces or so with a
leaden feeling of nightmare upon me—and at last, after a final
unspeakable bit of scree to finish off with, emerged upon the
ridge.

This was the top of the great buttress, and here we stood on
the threshold of our desires: we could see its broad backbone
running north-westward, more or less evenly, with rounded
curves like smooth waves one hiding the other. It hems in the
Darijan valley and then, leaving a westward spur to run to the
Seh Hizar, a long main ridge encloses Daku and the Iza Rud
in unexplored jungle country to the north: this at least is what
the Refuge of Allah told me, who has once been to Daku.
On the south, the ridge rose to the very point of Solomon’s
Throne, now deceptively near, a lovely pyramid with snow
on its northern face. North-east of it between us, and not so
high, another peak showed, called Barir. The world lay
spread around. Small, as through the wrong end of a tele¬
scope behind us, Salambar with the Alamut hills, Rudbar and
Elburz; and Marghiz Kuh and Syalan, which I had looked up
to from Balarud—they stood high on their own range, but far
below us, washed to a gentle colour by distance. In front of
us, eastward, at right angles, ran a deep valley some way off,
hidden by intervening spurs of our own system: on the farther
side were saw-edged ridges with wooded slopes.

64 That,” said the shikari, 44 is the valley of the Sardab Rud.
It comes from the direction of Talaghan, out of sight there to
the south across the pass of the Thousand Hollows, the Hazar-
chal. And it flows to the plain of Kalar Dasht, of which you
see one comer there in the north-east.”

There the hills became lower and rounder, covered with
forest, until the Caspian sea mist hid them. Beyond them,
eastward, were other ranges, their names unknown to my

[301]

The Throne of Solomon

companions, the mountains of Kujur. And farthest of all,
incredibly high, among white cumuli of cloud, smooth and
serene above all earthly visible things, shone Demavend,
striped with snow, seen only for a moment.

But though there are few instants in themselves better than
those when, from an escaladed ridge, one looks upon new
country, the joy of complete achievement was not ours: and if
this were a story with a plot instead of being merely the
matter-of-fact diary it is, the Hungarian engineer would
certainly figure as the villain. It was he, though we did not
know it at the time, who robbed us of our triumph. He who,
in the Arcadian peace of Darijan, took our shikari apart and
told him that if the foreign lady climbed the Throne of
Solomon where no Ferangi had ever been before, the whole
of the government and Shah Riza himself would come along
with punishments on all who helped her: he himself had not
climbed—why should anyone else do so; No doubt he rea¬
soned thus in the blackness of his soul. And our shikari
said nothing, but instead of leading on from Ab-i-Garm, where
an easy mule track would have led us within possible distance
of the summit, he brought us here, a Peri’s jump from Paradise,
and showed us the obviously impossible with an air of regretful,
religious resignation. We learned nothing of all this till the
morning after. Takht-i-Suleiman still remains, so far as I
know, for a European climber to conquer: and I curse the
engineer in my heart, wishing him that his wife may never
cease from talking and his angles be perpetually inaccurate. 1

i Since -writing the above, Mr. Busk, of the British Legation in Teheran, has
climbed the central peak—Siah Karnan; and discovered that it is the highest oi
the three, and about 15,500 feet. See his account in the Alpine Journal, Novem-

The pass of Kalau

Shepherds from the Jungle

On the pass we sat and enjoyed the rewards of our toil, the
mules especially, whose packs were laid upon the ground.

4 Aziz and The Refuge had long ago resigned themselves to my
love for passes, places which they look upon as unreasonable,
waterless, windswept, unprovided with fodder for animals, and
unkind to human beings. They knew, however, that argu¬
ment was useless, and settled to sleep in the shelter of the packs
as best they could, while I straggled with the imaginations of
my map and, reality spread for comparison before me, tried
to spot out a route for my return.

The map (Survey of India, four miles to the inch) left much
to be desired. The Sardab Rud valley and Hazarchal Pass
were marked in a dotted red line; so was the Salambar and Seh
Hizar. But between these two parallels why was Takht-i-
Suleiman, the highest object west of Demavend, left out
entirely? The only mountains marked were in the wrong
place, and after trying over and over again to induce my
compass to bring them into harmony, I came sadly to the
conclusion that the Indian Survey had filled this bit of country
in by hearsay—a melancholy fact, since it made me uncertain
of my triangulation points at starting.

Where, too, was the blue dotted river which, said the map,
flowed eastward into the Sardab Rud? There was no visible
place for it in the landscape, and the shikari denied its existence
positively. I had hoped to introduce the name of this river
into the world of geography, so that it was extremely annoying
to find it non-existent.

The wind felt as I did about my map and nearly buffeted
it to pieces. It shook even the steady nerves of the compass
and caused the Abney level to behave like a lunatic. How
different from the sheltered peace of Mr. Reeves’s study in

[303 ]

The Throne of Solomon

Kensington: I sent him an affectionate thought across whatever
continents lay between us, and began to wonder which sum¬
mits he would recommend in the landscape before me as objects
for my amateur practices. As soon as one descends from a
pass all the peaks and heights which there seemed so conspicu¬
ous vanish behind unimportant foregrounds—even as the
Philosopher is obscured by the Politician—not to reappear
until, after miles and days or hours, they have altered their
shape and—like the above Philosopher’s principles—become
unrecognizable. From the valleys, also, one hardly ever sees
the actual top; some inferior hump or shoulder usurps the sky¬
line and puts out the geographer.

And here was a third difficulty. Nearly all that lay before
us—the sea-like forest country and the hills, the far horizon
ranges and nearer system descending with sharp crests to the
Sardab Rud—were nameless as far as we were concerned.
Except for the valley below and Kalar Dasht in the distance,
neither my map nor the shikari knew anything about any one
of them.

After three hours of struggle with all these problems I felt
excessively weary. But I made one more effort and climbed
about ioo feet higher, over a scrag heap of rust-coloured slabs,
to a small rise on the ridge, so as to look over its broad back
towards the jungle. There was little to see. That unknown
country wraps itself in a double mystery of trees and mists,
and is as difficult to look at as to visit. J. B. Fraser describes
its almost impenetrable tangles which, except for a small
strip along the coast, have remained unaltered since his day;
and Major Noel, in The Royal Geographical Society s Journal
of June, 1921, speaks of the “ virgin forests . . . where the
villagers are almost as wild as the forest itself; and where the
tigers lurk in the boxwood thickets in the daytime, and
stroll about openly on the beach in the night-time . . .

[ 304 ]

The Jungalis

though, this habit, no doubt, the new motor road has in¬
terrupted.

My idea had first been, after visiting the Throne of Solomon,
to descend into this obscure region and discover something
about the men who inhabit it—a primitive people, I had been
told, who live in houses built in trees and are unfriendly to
travellers. These were the men who gave much trouble to
the British towards the end of the war, stirred on by a local
leader called Kuchek Khan. Later they helped the Russian
revolutionaries, or rather undertook independent raiding and
looting in combination with them, and came to be known as
Bolsheviks by the quiet inhabitants of the land. Khurramabad
had been a kind of headquarters to Kuchek Khan, and the
Emir Sipahsalar—the man of the shooting box at Mian Rud—
had been friendly to him and alkwed him to set up a toll
station at Maran, to advance up into Darijan, and to charge
one toman for every load of rice that went over the Salambar.
About eight years ago, his “ Bolshevik ” successors tried the
same game. They penetrated into Alamut and looted as far
as Balarud, until government troops drove them out again
over Syalan while the Emir Sipahsalar, who had been friendly
at first, helped in their eviction. Darijan had been robbed,
but the more eastern lands of Kalar Dasht were never reached
by these troubles, though they too at that time were full of
robbers of a more ordinary kind, as were also the passes north
of Qazvin.

“ Nowhere,” said ‘Aziz, “ could we eharvardars go without
paying toll to this man and that man on every pass of the hills.
May Allah bless this Shah Riza, who has made the country
safe.”

This praise one hears everywhere from the poor in Persia,
and it may be set off against the complaints of the wealthier
landowners and merchants in the towns.

The Throne of Solomon

To return, however, to the dwellers in the jungle. As we
travelled along its mountain fringe, looking down upon it
from one height or another and hearing more about it, I began
to wonder if it is indeed inhabited by any particular and special
race, or if there is not rather a mixture of people from the
villages who become Jungalis only at certain seasons of the
year. Kuchek Khan himself was a jungle man, they told me,
from the neighbourhood of Resht, with long hair and beard
such as the Daylamites wore in the Middle Ages: and when
he was pursued they never caught him, but chased him up
into his fastnesses, where he died of cold in the hills.

But his two chief friends and lieutenants, Hala Qurban
and Hishmet, were not of the forest at all, the latter being a
man from Talaghan: the Refuge of Allah knew him, and saw
him at the last, handcuffed, and with his feet tied together under
a mule, being taken as a prisoner to Teheran. And as for the
later “ Bolsheviks,” they were practically all Alamutis, Tala-
o-hanis, and riff-raff from the coast, with a few “ foreigners ”
sprinkled among them.

It is useless, they told me, to travel in the jungle in summer,
for it is empty, deserted by its inhabitants for the hills; and the
higher forest villages such as Daku, which is a large place,
though not on the maps, are summer resorts for the coast-
dwellers. In that wide belt of forest between the mountains
and the sea there seemed to be no fixed population, but a
continual passing to and fro from the coastal to the Alpine
villages, who all have their appointed stations and grazing
grounds for the various seasons of the year. But what there
may be apart from these known villages I could not discover.
There are long uninhabited stretches, a day or two days march
at a time, and whether the shepherds and wood-cutters who
wander there are a race apart, or whether, as I think more
probable, they are the sort of people I was meeting and

The “Refuge of Allah 3

living with, only more shy because of their more solitary life
and rarer dwelling in the social village centre, I do not know.
Nor could I, on this occasion, hope to solve their mystery: the
high summits and the malarial lowlands were alike beyond
my powers. I decided to follow the summer custom of the
country and keep to the Alpine pastures; and as the map seemed
to say so litde about them, I thought I would examine at
leisure the rivers that descend from Solomon’s Throne, and
finally, after following the Shah Rud to the engaging blank¬
ness of its headwaters, drop over one of the passes on to the
Teheran road some hundred miles or so east of where I had
left it.

So I decided; and looked once more over the outspread
world from this, the highest point of my journey, before
turning regretfully back with The Refuge of Allah. He, too,
had climbed the litde height. However tired (and he always
walked when we rode) he felt himself bound never to let me
wander up a hill unprotected, but would follow silendy, carry¬
ing the camera and glasses, and keeping at a sufficient distance
to prevent his iron nails and odds and ends from interfering
with my compass. When told he need not come, he would
merely answer: “ To see the world is good,” and would then
sit with his pipe, gazing unblinkingly over new lands, wearing
an air of serenity which economists might find hard to recon¬
cile with an income of L.4 a year.

On the eastern side of the pass we found no iris but quantities
of Nepeta along the edge of a snowdrift down which we now
slid easily, and followed its muffled waters by a rocky valley
very different from the open face of our ascent. After two
hours the sun set. Far up his light still shone on yellowing
pastures above the cliffs which shut us in: a flock was grazing
there. The shikari, who knew this region, suddenly turned
left off the path, over rocks, to a semicircle of loose stones

[307]

The Throne of Solomon

laid against a perpendicular cliff—the home of the shepherds.
We were still far above the region of villages.

The shelter, if it can he called such, for the wall was barely
two feet high, contained four sacks of wool, a goatskin or two,
a rug, shearing scissors, and half the carcase of a goat or sheep,
which was evidently being eaten joint by joint by the shep¬
herds. Beside these things we camped, while in the gathering
darkness the flock returned, and filled the narrow couloir
above us, indistincdy bleating and pattering as the shepherds
milked it—a friendly sound in that austere place.

The night was very cold. My aneroid had not yet reached
a level low enough for its activities, so that we must have
slept at well over 10,000 feet. The gully was too narrow for
moonlight: it shone on the rocks above; in the darkness below
the flock slept wkh little shufflings now and then, and a cold
still wind crept over the ground.

Next morning we started at- seven and parted with our
shikari. He had apologized for asking as much as sixpence a
day, and was crushed with dumb gratitude when I paid him
his time back to Darijan and a small present over. And it was
after this moment of emotion that we heard of the iniquity of
Takht-i-Suleiman and the engineer.

As we now descended, streams began to come into our
valley from the right—foaming waters called Barir, which is
the name of all this region. One of die chief difficulties in
mountain geography is that peaks actually hardly ever have a
name: passes have names, and grazing grounds have a minute
variety of nam es, but the summits, being of no use to anyone,
are not bothered about unless they are as striking as the Matter¬
horn. The result is that a new mountain will be introduced in
three or four different ways, according to the side from which
it is approached, for the shepherds will refer to it everywhere
by the name of the last grazing ground on their own side.

[308 ]

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enquirer. f i , f irs t and onl\ Imt m (■

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wandering merchants who come up t >' _

purpose, and will give as much as (went \ T.

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the main valley and met the Sardah Rud, white ,m. .
sweeping round from the south-west. O.u- . * ml. i i ■
now, to my relief, for I felt ill after the stum ot dm ' ' /

and wondered if here, five days’ rule I mm 1 rhei.m. -w-
farthest point of my journey, I was going to.olt.ip. -
when the nearest road for anything on wheel-, w.i. i.e
away. I recovered, however, as the day wot.* on. m
soon came into country lovely enough in itwlt to m.o -
and body forget.

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Sardab Rud means the River of Cold Water. ! t po 11; .
from the south-east slope of Solomon’s Throne, .tin!

[309 ]

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Trap for stone-martens

This demands a great nicety of discrimination from the
enquirer.

Barir was also the name of the first and only hut in this wild
valley. It was merely a large stable for shelter, half buried
with slat roof almost level with the ground, and surrounded in
the pleasant morning sun by sheep and goats ready for their
pastures. They would soon leave the grazing, the shepherds
told us, and go to their winter lands on the coast.

Here walking down, for it was still too difficult to ride, I saw
a trap for stone-martens, of which there are quantities all o\er
these hills. It was a simple affair—a forked branch put with
the fork downwards in a hole in the ground, and with a few
sticks laid over: on top of these were three or four heavy stones.
The marten walks under the fork, catches in it with his shoul¬
ders, and pushing it along brings the sticks and stones on top
of him and is crushed in the debris. The skins are kept for
wandering merchants who come up these valleys for this
purpose, and will give as much as twenty shillings for a good

one.

At last, after about two and a half hours, we came out mto
the main valley and met the Sardab Rud, white and green,
sweeping round from the south-west. One could ride again
now, to my relief, for I felt ill after the strain of the day before
and wondered if here, five days’ ride from Teheran, and at the
farthest point of my journey, I was going to collapse after ail,
when the nearest road for anything on wheels was three days
away. I recovered, however, as the day wore on, and we
soon came into country lovely enough in itself to make mind
and body forget.

Kalar Dasht

Sardab Rud means the River of Cold Water. It pours down
from the south-east slope of Solomon’s Throne, and flows

[ 309 ]

The Throne of Solomon

beneath the pass of the Thousand Hollows, and has no villages
for a long day’s journey, nor buildings of any kind except one
chaikhana hut below its meeting with Barir in a grassy flat space
called Vanderaban. A track runs by the water’s edge, and as
many as a hundred people will pass along it from Kalar Dasht
or Talaghan in the day, for it is one of the thoroughfares of the
hills. We must have met about thirty, all in the morning
hours, who had slept in the woods and would make their
southern valley in the evening. They were mostly carrying
loads of charcoal, and greeted us, since Talaghan and Alamut
are neighbours and ‘Aziz knew many of their homes.

Our river soon turned due north and little glens came into
it with water from the right. On the left also a glen came in,
waterless except in winter. After that, there were no side
valleys for hours: the blue dotted river of my map, which, if
anywhere, should have appeared somewhere about here from
the left, proved to be a mere work of fancy, as we had con¬
cluded before.

This most beautiful of valleys is in die jungle. Through
glades and leafy waves, reddish mountains break into it like
hulls of ships, high in the sky. The trees—thorn, beech, ash,
sycamore, “ divar,” medlar, pear—spread there as in a park,
great in height and girth; and the river stumbles over their
roots in shining eddies. Over all is a virgin sense of freedom, a
solitary joyousness, a gende bustle made by stream and sun¬
light and the warm light wind, independent of the life of man.

Herds of humped black cattle inhabit the valley in summer.
The herdsman’s boy, a light-haired Gilaki lad with small
features, fair skin, and beautifully shaped Nordic head, ap¬
peared out of the seemingly uninhabited solitude to look at us
as we lunched under a thorn tree. In his hand he carried a
hatchet engraved with a running scroll from Khurramabad on
the coast. It is a remarkable fact that the people who do

[310]

tl

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Beauty of handiwork

things by hand still find time to add to their work some elabor¬
ation of mere beauty which makes it a joy to look on, while
our machine-made tools, which could do so at much less cost,
are too utilitarian to afford any ornament. It used to give me
daily pleasure in Teheran to see the sacks in which refuse is
carried off the streets woven with a blue and red decorative
pattern: but can one imagine a borough council in Leeds or
Birmingham expressing a delicate fancy of this kind; Beauty,
according to these, is what one buys for the museum: pots and
pans, taps and door-handles, though one has to look at them
twenty times a day, have no call to be beautiful. So we
impoverish our souls and keep our lovely things for rare
occasions, even as our lovely thoughts—wasting die most of
life in pondering domestic molehills or the Stock Exchange,
among objects as ugly as the less attractive forms of sin.

The Gilaki lad, like all the jungle dwellers I had met so far,
spent his winters on the coast, when the cold up here would
be so severe that “ not even a crow could fly.” I asked him
about Daku in the jungle, and he told me that it was a two
days’ journey by a valley opening out close to Kalar Dasht—
a streamless valley which led west to a pass called Mazigasar,
and dience on the second day to Daku, with not a village or
any inhabitants on the way. About 4 p.m. we came to the
opening of this valley, or rather to two of them, Kulud Qal a
and Rashak, one going west and the other north-west, both
without streams and both leading to Daku, and together
opening out into the plain of Kalar Dasht into which we now 1

emerged. ,

Captain L. S. Fortescue and Major J. B. L. Noel have both
visited this place, and mention that Kalar Dasht used to be the
favourite hunting-ground of Nasir-ud-Din Shah, who built a
mule track hither so that his harem and all his court could
follow him on his yearly holiday. It is a rich plain, about

[3ii ]

The Throne of Solomon

twenty miles across: our valley opened into it gently, with foot¬
hills to the right, ploughed on their lower slopes and wooded
above, while on die left along the river the mountain wall
continued, low but steep. Small hamlets folded in greenery,
Mujil and Ujabey, were visible in the comland, and Rudbarek
in front of us on the river. Before reaching it, I sat on a stone
and took bearings on Takht-i-Suleiman and the Black Carder
and the point of Barir west of them, all visible again and as
lovely, rising in distance from the forest valley, as they had ever
been. Villagers, coming along with herds, seemed friendly;
but we had all enjoyed our recent solitary nights of peace, and
decided not to ask for hospitality, but to camp outside the
village if we could.

This was the first and last time we tried to do anything so
impossible. We found a pleasant place with boulders to sup¬
port our fire where the River of Cold Water ran strong and
green in the twilight, our fellow-traveller of the day: but
scarcely had we spread our sacks on the ground and started a
flame, when a procession became visible, making like a black
caterpillar towards us from under the trees. The vanguard
was more or less plebeian, with so large a mixture of children
that one was inclined to sympathize with ‘Aziz who, when I
lamented over the mortality which had killed practically all
the babies I knew in Alamut the year before, answered that “ it
was as well most babies died the first year, or one could not
have any more the second.” In Rudbarek evidently they had
not died when they should, and came pressing round, friendly
but overwhelming. The parents followed: the circle widened:
another circle formed itself outside: still we resisted all invita¬
tions to the village. Presendy a wave of respectful agitation
swept over the gathering: everyone rose, and the Agha, a fat
blustering bully of a Kurd with three layers of neck and goggle
eyes, came and sat on the carpet opposite me.

[312]

A Kurdish bully

44 What papers have you to allow you to be here?” said he
truculently, without even the decency of a greeting.

I had half risen out of politeness, but hastily changed my
mind under this unusual attack. 44 My passport is in order,” I
said languidly. 44 My servant will find it.”

The Refuge of Allah obediently got up to hunt among the
saddle-bags: the way a Persian flattens out before a bully in
authority is always the most depressing sight. The fat man,
disregarding my existence and evidendy waiting for sensational
depths of imposture to disclose themselves in the passport, sat
as if every second of delay were adding guilt to a score already
almost beyond official patience. He had the sort of head w T hose
shape I dislike. I determined not to sit and be trampled upon
without an effort at some kind of an offensive.

44 Happy has been your coming,” I lied, with the litde half
inclination that accompanies the courtesy.

44 Your amiability is excessive,” he was bound to reply,
since one formula calls for another. The pass-?

44 The condition of your health, how is it?” I continued,
refusing to be checked. And if he did not know the things one
says to a stranger, I did, and he was going to get them all.

“ Thanks be to God,” he murmured, and finished the for¬
mula with an indistinctness which did not sound as cordial as
it might. 44 The pass-” he began again.

But there are about fifteen polite things one can say at meet¬
ing, each requiring a litde bow, each demanding their appro¬
priate answer, with an answering bow from the person
addressed. I knew about half, and the Kurdish Agha had the
full benefit of them. By the time we reached the end of my
repertoire I had him tamed. He did not ask for the passport
when I stopped. After a decent interval to let the rules of
politeness sink in, I took it from The Refuge and handed
it to my adversary, who was now fortified by the presence

[ 313 ]

The Throne of Solomon

of most of the magnates of Rudbarek, sitting in a crescent
shape over against me, with his fat bulk as centre.

The passport as a matter of fact was quite adequate, and if
it had not been, no one would have discovered the deficiency.

“ What is that;” they asked me, pointing to the Baghdad
consular signature.

“ That,” said I, now completely above any sort of scruple;

“ that is the signature of our king’s vizier. All peoples are
expected to help and befriend me when they have read this
paragraph,” and I proceeded to translate Lord Curzon s
remarks on the first page as to passing without let or hind¬
rance.”

The Agha, his Mirza, and the various Elders diere assembled
listened, visibly impressed.

“ Are we friends with the English? said the Agha at last,
making with laudable perspicacity for the centre of the
argument.

I satisfied them on this point, but as a matter of fact the
battle was won already. What we were now to suffer from
was excess of hospitality. There was no question of a night
of peaceful solitude: the Agha would entertain me.

Seeing that resistance was vain, I left my two men to pack
up, while I followed near the van of die procession, which
now made for its village in the dusk.

It is sad to relate that I spoilt the dignity of my victory by
falling into a stream. There are no bridges over anything less
important than the Sardab Rud, and as I jumped in the half
light a slippery boulder betrayed me. The procession behind
was delighted; the Agha himself, who preceded, barely turned
his head and, seeing me emerge safely though wet, continued
at a rapid pace until, through lanes that might have been in
Devonshire, we reached his house, a two-storied building
roofed like a chalet with wooden slats, with a fenced garden

[ 314 ]

Kurdish village of Rudbarek

foil of vegetables, scarlet runners, pumpkins, and sunflowers
in front of it.

Some of the Darijan houses, with wooden balconies, had
already been an improvement on those of Alamut and the
southern side of the watershed in general. But here .in Kalar
Dasht one really comes into the tradition of an old prosperity
and finds buildings designed for ornament as well as comfort,
as good as many a country cottage in the Alps. There are
balconies and outjutting eaves; ceilings fashioned in little
wooden squares reminiscent of Italy and the Renaissance;
open fireplaces, niches worked in stucco, and rough ornaments
in relief, cocks, flower-baskets and geometric figures, which
evidendy belonged to a day when Kalar was a flourishing city,
as I hope to show.

The Agha’s house was not the best in Rudbarek, being
eclipsed by that of his brother, a long-faced Kurd with gay,
easy, and irresponsible manners often found among the tribes¬
men. Passport or no passport, it did not trouble him: he
looked at me with frank admiration for having come so far,
and began to tell me, as we sat waiting for dinner in an upper
room, about an English captain who had stayed with him
twice, and whose Persian had impressed them all with its force¬
fulness if not with its variety, consisting, as he told me, chiefly
of the two sentences: “ The ibex has escaped,” and 44 Son of a
burnt father,” the most energetic of Persian epithets, which the
captain apparendy had frequent reason to employ.

Sport in this country must be excellent. The river has
trout, the hills have deer and ibex and pig; the climate is
perfect and the people are pleasant and peaceful.. Nothing
but its remoteness from any high road can have kept it so
long almost unvisited.

As we sat waiting for dinner and discussing religion, our
first hostile impressions were gradually smoothed away. I

[ 315 ]

The Throne of Solomon

recited the opening chapter of the Quran and proved myself
less ignorant than had been supposed: a translation of the Lord’s
Prayer established the essential unity of religion, to the satis¬
faction even of the thin litde Mirza from Medina: and a short
discussion on history produced out of the bottom of a chest a
Persian translation of Sir John Malcolm’s History of Persia,
which the Agha studies on winter evenings.

One will not come to a village in these mountains where the
old legends are not familiar to one or two at least of the
inhabitants, and a copy of Firdausi will usually be pulled down
from some shelf. Among the Kurds of Kalar Dasht these
classics seemed to nourish a rather aggressive spirit of patriot¬
ism, and die Agha was slightly ruffled when, having asked me
who would 'win in the event of a war between our nations, I
told him that we should, without any doubt at all.

“ If we fight, every one of us is a Rustum,” said he, swelling
his already portly form and placing both hands on the sash
where evidendy a dagger or two should be.

“ We have as many Rustums,” I remarked, “ and more
guns.” Whereupon the brother laughed, having a sense of
humour and a disposition to like me, and I guided the talk
into less delicate channels by reminding my host that, at
present, all the Rustums on both sides were at peace and
amity.

I found these Khwajavends, who were originally Kurds from
Ardalan and Garu setded by Agha Muhammad Khan Qajar
in many villages of Kalar Dasht, most useful and intelligent
with historical information. They were the first to tell me of
the Mound of Kalar, a few hours’ ride away, whose name alone
would rouse the interest of any historical student of the region.

Medieval Tabaristan

The Site of Kalar

Although a good, many references can be gleaned here and
there in history about Tabaristan, the mountain country of
Mazanderan, they are mostly so meagre and disconnected that
it is difficult to weave them into anything like a picture of what
the life of these highlands must have been before the armies of
Timur Leng sacked them in the fourteenth century.

The earliest Persian legends have their home here, and
probably represent a blurred outline of events long handed
down by word of mouth alone. The battle between Sohrab
and Rustum was said to have been fought, in spite of Matthew
Arnold, at a place called Likash in the country of Ruyan. The
land was full of magic and portents, a sort ofBroceliande where
the figures of heroes move, seeking adventure: on the coast,
the White Jinn, the Div-i-Safid, w~as supposed to have built the
casde of Ispi Rud: Minuchihr, the king, took refuge at Chalan-
dar. He found a marshy plain, drained it by removing some
boulders which are still pointed to at the mouth of the Chains
River, and built, they say, the town of Ruyan which later
became the capital of the mountain district. This town is
placed by Mr. Rabino, in his book on Mazanderan, in the
region of Kujur, which adjoins Kalar Dasht on the east.

The medieval geographers mention Ruyan as a flourishing
city with fine buildings and gardens. Close to it were the
region and city called Kalar. In Kalar Dasht I was told that a
mound, still known by the name of Kalar, existed, and I
hoped not only to identify it as the old city, but to con¬
firm by the help of its location a point in the medieval
history of this region—namely the eastern boundary of the
Daylamites, a robber people of the hills who inspired constant
terror and lived in more or less perpetual warfare with their

[ 317 ]

The Throne of Solomon

neighbours until the Assassins began to take over their lands
and much of their reputation in the twelfth century.

The connection between Kalar and the Daylamites is given
by the fact that the geographer Yaqut describes the town as
being at one day’s march from Chalus on the coast; two days
from Ray (near Teheran); three from Amul on the east; and
one day from the Daylamite frontier. From the plain of Kalar the
only probable dividing line to fulfil these conditions is that of
the Hazarchal Pass: Darijan—the other valley—could never be
considered a day’s ride, and all north of it—i.e. west or north¬
west of Kalar—is thick jungle until one reaches Daku, a two
days’ journey. The Hazarchal leads to the upper Talaghan
valley, which is mentioned in the tenth century as part of the
Daylam country, and Kalar would naturally be described as
being at one day’s distance from that fertile region: it would
be equally accurately described as being close to the Daylam¬
ite fastnesses of the western jungle: in either case die site of
Kalar fits the geographical requirements, and answers also to
numerous references made by the historians of those times.

Yaqut also mentions the litde town of Sa’idabad as
close to Kalar, on the way between Hasankeif and Laktar,
which latter village still exists in Kujur. Hasankeif, though
not marked on the maps, is now the capital of Kalar Dasht,
almost in sight of Rudbarek. The track from Kalar to Ruyan
would also be the track from Hasankeif to Laktar, along the
Pul Rud valley, where Sa’idabad must be looked for.

I have gone into these references because they form the basis
for the geography of Kalar. 1 But at the time, I had no books
packed in my saddle-bags. All I remembered was the impor¬
tance of Kalar in connection with the Daylamites, for if this
were really the site of the old city, then we had probably

1 For a more detailed study see my article ; “ The Site of Kalar ” in the
Royal Geographical Society Journal for March, 1934.

[318]

Scale J. 835,000 approximate
? Region but not exact location known

— General direction of mediaeval track from Amut to Kalar (only approximate)

The Throne of Solomon

crossed the Daylam border on our way down from Barir
along the Sardab Rud.

I spent a happy night in Rudbarek in an upper room with
three windows, in which a cooking-pot full of hot water and
the unusual luxury of privacy to wash in made me feel at
peace with the world. The morning looked out on gentle
slopes of stubble. Humped oxen were ploughing against a
wooded background and a brook beyond the fenced kitchen
garden ran with murmurs in the early sun. After the mountain
solitude here was a sense of relaxation and ease. How delight¬
ful these villages would be, if only they did not so constantly
entertain one! To eat, rest, write, read or meditate with fifty
or even a hundred people watching, though it became almost
habitual by the end of my journey, never ceased to be a strain.

The Khwajavends had all the free and gay conviviality of the
Luristan tribesmen to whom they belong, and came after break¬
fast in a body to lead me across the Sardab Rud, which runs
through the village under high walnut trees, to a handsome
two-storied house with overhanging eaves and wooden
balconies, approached through a courtyard from the back.
This was the brother’s house, and had sheltered Captain
Fortescue on both his visits, and I was brought here to see the
loot of an ancient grave laid bare by floods ten years before.
The brother was a charming host, with manners something
between those of a cavalier and a highwayman: he was a
bachelor, and ready at a moment’s notice to offer his hand and
heart—temporarily I rather suspect and, like an Elizabethan
hero, without attaching too great importance to the proceed¬
ing. He showed me all his treasures, including five champagne
glasses and a gilt fruit dish, with an air of:

“ if these delights your heart may move,”

and sat contemplating me in a meditative manner through his

[320]

Village of Rudb

Pottery from a grave

long eyelashes while I turned over in my hands two pots and a
bronze spear-head from the grave.

These were obviously very ancient, and people who are good
at dating such objects have since told me that they probably
belonged to somewhere about 1500 b.c., and that they are
similar to other objects found near the south-west corner of the
Caspian. The two pots were made of grey earthenware,
with a decoration of lines and small circles scratched upon them,
and very good in shape. The spear-head was bronze, the tip
broken off, probably for ritualistic purposes: it had been found
lying on the breast of the skeleton, while the pottery stood at
its head. Other graves, they said, might probably be found
in the same place—the valley of Rashak we had passed the day
before, some way from where it opens into the plain. There
was no getting them to dig, however, as the laws on this point
have become very stringent in Persia.

An hour or so went over the bargaining, interspersed with
glasses of tea. ^Vhen the two principals appeared to reach a
deadlock, friends and retainers took up the controversy and
set the negotiations going again. I finally parted with two
tomans (45.), and a procession formed to carry the objects in
triumph to my room.

After this I managed to escape and was allowed to wander
through that most delightful of villages whose houses are all
embowered in walnut and fruit trees, and whose main street
is but a narrow earth track beside the rippling loveliness of
the river. Blotches of sunlight filtered through shade almost as
green as the leafy canopies that caused it; a green luxuriance flung
itself over the fences of the little gardens; and the bright colours
and many beads and bangles which the Kurdish women love
made them to look as gay as butterflies against their whitewashed
walls, where they sat spinning on benches built to run along the
outside of the houses, in the manner of old Italian palaces.
s [321 ]

The Throne of Solomon

At about three-thirty, I decided to move east across the plain
so as to be nearer the Mound of Kalar, which I meant to
examine next day. I took leave of the Agha’s two wives,
both friendly to me, but frank enough to mention in each
other’s presence how very little use they had for each other.
This the Agha himself corroborated, declaring that a wife at a
time is as much as a man can deal with comfortably.

I think one is enough,” said the younger bride, whose
position was secure, with something as near a toss of her head
as her voluminous head-dress would allow. But a look of great
anxiety crept into the eyes of the older and less beloved one.

“ I am thinking of divorcing her soon,” the Agha remarked
to die party in general.

And I felt it was not the moment to stand up for monogamy.

Two young women, visiting in Rudbarek, now offered to
escort us across the plain to their home at Laliu for the night.
We set off with them in the pleasant afternoon and, emerging
from the last low undulations of the hills, stepped out into the
openness of Kalar Dasht.

Hasankeif on the river, the same that Yaqut mentions in the
tenth century, is the capital of the plain, where the police stay
whenever any happen to be up here. But Kurdichal on the
eastern hill and Lahu in the south-east are the two biggest
villages, counting about 200 houses each, and inhabited by the
Khwajavend, mixed-in Lahu at any rate—with a number of
Ali Ilahis who live at daggers drawn with the Kurds.

As we approached this village we were in rich country out
of the mountains. Com and hemp were grown. Ricks
stood on platforms raised above the ground, dark against the
distance of the western valley, where the peaks of Solomon and
Barir and Qabran floated like smoke above the forest green.
A litde stream, the Dakulad, came out from the south-west,
where a forest-clad ridge ends this part of the Sardab Rud

[ 322 ]

Reckoning distance

valley and holds in its recesses the Imamzadeh of Shahre Zamin,
a place of pilgrimage.

South of the ridge, eastward, is a lower rim of hills, dividing
Kalar Dasht from the Chains, and called Bashm (or Bash). The
city of Kalar probably lay near that low, easy col. It is still, as
when Yaqut wrote about it, a three days’ ride from Qazvin.
In sight below lies the Pul Rud valley, which led to the
neighbouring city of Ruyan, known also as Shahnstan, and
mentioned as being sixteen leagues from Qazvin on a pass.

In verifying the old geographers, it is a great advantage to
be using the same methods of transport as they did, and I was
able to gauge fairly accurately what the league ox far salt meant
to a medieval traveller; it is roughly supposed to be four
miles, but when travelling with local guides I usually found it
to be more. 'Aziz, for instance, always told me that eight
farsahs were a full day’s travel: but even our longest stretch,
six and a half hours along a more or less level valley track, not
counting halts, only covered three farsahs by local estimates.
When the distances are reckoned in daily stages, they are far
more accurate, and Yaqut’s one day from Chains and three
from Amul are perfectly reasonable for the col of Bashm to¬
day: a modem traveller would probably do the latter in only
two days, but there is now a good coast road, whereas at that
time the track turned inland at Natil, climbed the watershed
by Ruyan, and came west along the Pul Rud valley.

The weak point in Yaqut’s distances, as far as the col of
Bashm is concerned, are the two days to Ray (Teheran).
This route can have altered litde during the centuries. I have
never been over it myself, and it may be possible, though not
easy, to do it in two days; and Mr. Rabino, who is the best
authority for this country, mentions it as feasible. There axe
two watersheds to cross, and a day’s journey in mountain
country is very often determined by the -watershed: people will

[ 323 ]

The Throne of Solomon

get up early and do a long day to get over a pass: or conversely
will limit themselves to a short day if two passes are near to¬
gether, so as to avoid a night out of range of the villages: and a
traveller in Yaqut’s time would have the less cause to dally on
this bit of his journey if the lawless Daylamites held the upper
Talaghan valley, as we have inferred from the position of Kalar.
That city and Chalus were bodi fortresses against the Daylam¬
ites, and the neighbourhood of this robber people in itself
would probably cause the western routes across the mountains
to be less used than others by tourists of the time, so that accu¬
rate information might have been more difficult to obtain: the
wildness, difficulty, and natural dangers of the Mazanderan
tracks are commented on in every century from their earliest
mention to the present day. The fact remains, however, that
two days is little to allow between Bashm and Ray.

The site of Bashm, however, fulfils all the other conditions
left by the old geographers for Kalar, and the probability of the
locality is furdier strengthened by the fact that traces of old
extensive habitation spread all down the slope towards the
Chalus valley. Here next day I was to find carved tombstones
evidently of a very early date; to be told of traces of walls and
masonry discovered here and there when the fields are tilled:
and to learn that the rumour of a great vanished city still clings
to this hill-side. The Mound of Kalar itself, below the col of
Bas in the plain, was possibly, as Mr. Rabino suggests,
once the palace of the governor. And another point further
supports the general identification of these sites. The great
causeway of Shah Abbas, built by that monarch in the six¬
teenth century to open up the Caspian shore, turns inland only
once, and that is precisely in this region of the Chalus valley: a
piece of it about twenty miles long was reported to Mr.
Rabino as being still in existence near Pishembur, which is a
village on the northern edge of Kalar Dasht where cross tracks

[ 324 ]

Antiquity of Kalar

still take off for Daku and the jungle. Owing to my having
no books of reference with me I neglected Pishembur, and
merely looked at it across the plain instead of going to investi¬
gate: but the fact remains that, if the king’s causeway came
so far inland over hilly country instead of sticking to the easy
coastline, there must have been something of sufficient import¬
ance in the plain of Kalar to justify the extra trouble. Shah
Abbas probably built his causeway on the line of the old track
which ran from Amul (the capital of the plain) to Ruyan (the
mountain capital), and thence by Banafshe (which still exists
under the name of Banafshade just below Bashni), to Kalar and
on into Daylam.

Apart from statistics, however, there is a remarkable feeling
of old and prosperous civilization in the plain of Kalar Dasht.
The buildings especially make one think that the people there
are still doing in an incomplete way what once they knew how
to do much better. The stucco ornaments and careful ceil¬
ings and pleasant wooden porticoes all speak of a decayed
gentility and before I left Lahu, a woman brought me
a piece" of blue lustre tile, thirteenth century or so, which
she had found by the mound, but which—as she thought it
worth its weight in gold—I was unable to buy.

Lahu

Our hosts were of the poorer sort, and our coming to their
house was no end of an event. No sooner had we reached it
than the yo ung er woman volunteered to show me the view
south of the village, where the Dakulad comes out of a forest
bay, as it were, into the plain: this was merely so as to show me
off to the inha bitants, as I soon discovered, for after wandering
a long way through the ups and downs of Lahu which is
another lovely community half buried in dim shade when w e
finally reached the last house and looked over open country

[ 325 ]

The Throne of Solomon

with no one to observe us, she lost interest and began to entice
me back again as fast as she could to call on various important
people she thought I ought to know—just as the distinguished
visitor m an English village may be taken to call on people who
will be “ so interested to meet him,” regardless of his feelings

There was in all this a lot of drama which I missed. I
noticed that while I was induced to linger in some places with
an obvious effort to make me show off nicely, I was hurried
past others inhabited, as I learnt that evening, by Ah Ilahis,
whom the Kurds consider unbelievers. One would think that
in a prosperous district full of villages, it would be possible so
to arrange things that one would not have to live door to
door with one’s enemies; the mere discomfort of lifelong hatred
would be too much for our weaker European nerves. The
East does not feel this, or perhaps looks on the excitement of a
next-door enemy as something to enliven life: you will find
people in one place for generations and centuries, closely
ranted as oil and vinegar in one cruet, and as incapable of
mixing.

When we got back to the house, I found that a cloud had
fallen over the geniality of die party. It was the fascination of
either Aziz or The Refuge of Allah that was to blame. The
master of the house had been asking his wife what she meant by
inviting strange men. He would have nothing to do with us,
and my escort, with very black brows, were preparing to camp
m the courtyard. The blot of inhospitality was threatening our
host, and through him the whole village, and perturbed Elders
went to and fro between the parties, trying to save the name of
Laim in the mouths of strangers.

I sat aloof, on a sort of raised dais in the living-room, count¬
ing die family belongings hung from rafters in the ceiling and
watching the women, now thoroughly cowed and flustered, as
they held up bits of chicken for my supper against the flame of

[ 326 ]

Pleasure of travel

an open fire. At the other end of the room, where there was
another dais for the men, the peace overtures were being made.
‘Aziz was accepting them with a haughty condescension quite
remarkable in the mild little good-natured man. The room
had no windows, but round holes about a foot in diameter
here and there: glass is not known in these hills. The inner
room, into which the family retire when the winter cold really
begins, had no window at all, but an earthenware oven let
down below the level of the floor, which they fill with embers
and cover with a quilt and sit there with their legs tucked into
the warmth and nothing to do but talk the winter through.

In spite of various dark sayings about the danger from Ah
Ilahis, I refused to sleep indoors, and had my bed put up near
the cows and mules in the moonlight. There I retired, after
an evening of conversation with an old man called Said
Ibrahim, who came to distract my attention from the dis¬
courtesy of our host and to discuss Persian history. He told
me that the plain of Kalar still belongs to its peasant owners,
and is more contented than the lands of Kujur and Khurram-
abad east and west, whose lord is the Shah. He was a charming
old man, with that interest in life and affairs which distinguishes
the Pillman or tribesman from the peasant, and learning was to
Pim a real divinity, however small may have been the crumbs
thereof which could be gathered in Kalar Dasht. If I were
asked to enumerate the pleasures of travel, this would be one of
the greatest among them—that so often and so unexpectedly
youmeet the best in human nature, and seeing it so by surprise
and often with a most improbable background, you come, with
a sense of pleasant thankfulness, to realize how -widely spattered
in the world are goodness and courtesy and the love of im¬
material things, fair blossoms found in every climate, on even-

soil. ,

We were made late next morning by my anxiety to buy

[ 327 ]

The Throne of Solomon

golapish, one of the silver coronets the young women wear and
some st ver buttons in the bazaar. The ladies of Kalar wear
also little silver pendants all round the edges of their short
coatees, but there were none in stock, and the bazaar—a row
of nine or ten huts-was not properly open, reserving its
activities for two days in the week. To have a bazaar and four
baths turned Lahu almost into a town, although its grass-grown
Mly lane, with a water and ducks meandering down it, and the
houses dotted about accidentally, some whitewashed, some
neatly caulked of wood and mud, and some just logs one on
the other, made it look more than ever like a Devonshire
village diat had got itself mixed up with Swiss chalets, and
been Med with inhabitants whose taste in dress was not vet
spoilt by the industrial age. 7

Here too however, as at Rudbarek, the feeling of an old
and civilized prosperity still lingered. It must have had many
centuries of unbroken tradition behind it from very early times
The town of Kalar was destroyed by the Mongols in die early
nrteenth century, but rebuilt and walled in a.d. 1346, and
continued under its native rulers—a family called Padhusban—
trom the end of die seventh century until a.d. 1595, when Shah
Abbas finally did away with them. Islam came here slowly
with no shock of war, spread by the proselytizing of ’Alid
refugees. The Arab governors could only rule in harmony
and conjunction with the native lords; and as late as the tenth
century these mountain people were still “ partly idolaters and
partly Magians. In the bazaar of Lahu I bought a silver coin

belonging to one of these native princes of the eighth century
with a Zoroastnan fire-altar on the reverse side
We now visited the Mound of Kalar, which is barely half an
hour from Lahu in a north-easterly direction. It stands in the
open plain with nothing near it except another small mound
called Golegombe, and is about thirty feet high and 550 or so

[328I

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.

Night 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
Karaj 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 Itnatnzadeh 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 glade grew within
a low wall of boulders, round a whitewashed chapel mellowed
by ages of sunlight, with door of wooden lattice v?ork.
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
hea d and feet and two long ones or sometimes more down the
sides, with earth in the middle; there was no Arabic or script of

[ 329 ]

The Throne of Solomon

any kind on any one of them, but a running or <mometrir
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 gram
too were here, for the place is still used, and a bon of Q„J“
for the congregation stood in the porch of the chapel: but we
found no inhabitants except the birds, who felt themselves at
iome, and three Kurdish lads who presently materialized out
nowhere to look through my glasses, and took me a few
hundred yards over the stubble to where another carved tomb
lay out m the open. The hillside is covered with them over a
great area including Shahn 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
y em > ^ ie lads told me, had any script upon it.

The elder of these boys could read and write: there was a

v m ifroVi Vlter taUS m IT’ ^ he had been for a short

visit to Teheran. He would like to learn English, he said: did
think he could do so m six months ? This keen adventurous
Kurdish mind is a pleasure to meet, so different from the

s: e f y pW Truiy the woru bei ° n § s

Rather late in the afternoon, though die 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
vdley: then crossmg a little ravine full of acacia thickets we

mbed 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, tosshig

[330 ]

The deserted villages

untended shoots of scarlet runners and pumpkin out across our
path. We called and called without answer. A cat came at
last, and rubbed itself against the wooden uninhabited colon¬
nade. Grape vines nailed everywhere, and unripe figs hung
over the path. A solitary donkey, round and sleek, with
evidendy no arriere-pensee of toil, came browsing about, pick¬
ing out a green morsel from the gardens here and there. And
round the village, fields of arzan, which seems to be a sort of
millet, stood waving almost ready for the harvest, with not a
soul to gather them.

We abandoned Baude and went on southward by a wide
track almost good enough for cars, with die river running
against us in a cliff bed far below. Its voice grew' louder as the
darkness fell; everywhere else the same inhuman stillness lay.

Mosquitoes began to hum in the twilight, explaining the
valley’s solitude, for these unhealthy lowlands are left in sum¬
mer, while the population fives in mountain yailaghs a few
hours’ climb above.

Down by the water, a half-dozen houses and a bridge, reached
by a steep path, is Barazan. We looked at it intendy from
the top of the cliff, and seeing no movement there, conducted
that it, too, must be deserted, and walked on—the Milky Way
in a straight fine above us in the narrow valley. The darkness
grew so thick that gradually even the mules’ ears were lost to
sight. ‘Aziz sang. He sang of the young tribesman who,
with gun slung on his shoulder, went to the fair of Tunakabun
and there saw Zerengis.

“ Thou hast a tent in the summer, ai Zerengis. .

Thy short coatee is made of velvet, ai Zerengis.

My breast is full of trouble, ai Zerengis.

Fearing that thou hast loved another, ai Zerengis.

Thy love turns towards me, ai Zerengis.

[33i ]

The Throne of Solomon

The refrain came with a lowering of the voice to great depth
at the end of each verse, giving the ballad a strange poignancy

But the parents of Zerengis would not hear of her marriage
with the young man with the gun, and how it all ended I never
heard, for now in the darkness and silence of the valley a light
appeared shining dimly from what turned out to be the ruins
of the burnt chaikhana of Masai. We rode up hopefully, in¬
trigued by the total absence of sound: not even a barking dog
to meet us. And as we turned into the court of the chaikhana
we saw that the light came from a lantern standing on the
ground, at the head of a man wrapped in a shaular, apparendy
sleeping. There was no other human being anywhere about.

The man neither rose nor answered our greeting. ‘Aziz
and The Refuge went up to him and spoke in low' voices,
dragging monosyllables out of him as he lay. They came
back after a minute or two, said briefly that this was no place
for us that night, and turned the mules round; it was only after
we had ridden on again some way that I thought of asking
why the master of the chaikhana had received us so strangely &
He was not the master,” said‘Aziz. “ The chaikhana was
burned down the day before yesterday, and that was just a
traveller walking to Teheran, too sick to continue on his road.”

What? said I. “ Do you mean to say he was lying there
ill and we gave him no help?”

“ One cannot help everyone one meets,” said ‘Aziz, who
gives his pennies to any rogue of a beggar whenever he sees
one. He was probably dying. He is too poor to have even

a donkey to nde. He does not come from our part of the
country. r

I was for turning the mules round again, but the suggestion
roused a protest even in the silent submissive Refhge of Allah.

I realized that it would be difficult to make the two tired men
retrace their steps, and my own fatigue no doubt took a good

[ 332 ]

A deathlike valley

deal out of the active spirit of charity. We compromised, and
decided to send help from the next chaikhana, or to return down
the road after our own supper if no chaikhana appeared; and I
rode on sadly in the darkness, weighed down by the cruelty
of Asia in its vast spaces of solitude, where the name of enemy
and stranger are almost synonymous.

How friendly are the Alps, their villages and small church
towers climbing to the very lips of the glaciers: no one, lying
there by the side of the path, would want some helping hand
stretched out. But here was ‘Aziz, the kindest and gendest
litde man, thinking me a fool for being concerned about
someone “ who does not come from our part of the country.”
The great religious leaders have all come from Asia: it is the
more spiritual continent, we are fond of saying. But perhaps
it is also because the woes of mankind are here so much more
evident; the need for reliance on something more universal
than human charity is so much greater; and the deep and
tender hearts of the prophets are more inevitably awakened by
the sight of human suffering. The Ages of Darkness produced
saints: perhaps their relative scarcity at the present day is the
result of a higher standard in ordinary comfort and kindness.

The next chaikhana, when it did appear as a dim silhouette in
the night, turned out also to have been burned down. We
seemed, indeed, to be in a valley of Death. Its little stream of
water could be heard, however, dripping across the path in the
night, and we decided to stay there and put up my bed by
the light of the lantern. ‘Aziz and The Refuge were happy
anywhere because they lived on nothing but cheese and chu-
pattis; it was always necessary to bring to their minds that I
needed something more varied. We had eggs, however, and
the last tin of sardines, and as we sat finishing them up, steps
were heard striding down the road, and it turned out to be the
companion of the sick traveller, who was not quite alone in the

[ 333 ]

The Throne of Solomon

world after all: the man had gone to look for food along the
road. We provided him with what we could, including
quinine, and retired to sleep with, a more cheerful feeling aboui
the world in general. The Milky Way, the “ Road of God,”
lay kke a lid to our box of a valley, with stars thick as a field oi
daisies round it. Mosquitoes hummed in the sticky warmth.
I decided to leave die Chalus as soon as I could next morning,
and find a healthier and less depressing way home across higher
ground. °

The Squire of Bijeno

We found the first sign of habitation at Tuvir next morning,
after one hour’s ride in the dawn.

A roadside chaikhana was giving breakfast to travellers, our
o wn sick friend of the night before having passed along there in
the earliest hours. We took in a new store of bread and turned
westward uphill towards Tuvir village, which is well above
the road in groves of trees. We climbed up by a rough path
where steps had been laid here and there, made of carved slabs
from graves such as those seen round the Imamzadeh the day
before. 1

The Chalus here is one of those steep sunken valleys which
open to comparatively flat ledges high up, where villages and
fields spread themselves out of sight of the world below. The
path we now took led us from one to the other of these villages
along the western side, through woody lanes of beech and oak
and thorn, with hidden brooks that might have been in Eng¬
land; and a trailing wet mist came down upon us, hiding the
distance, but giving more than ever a pleasant homelike feeling

mu e .^ rarEL ^ es drooping wet grasses among the boulders.
The villages that we passed were inhabited almost exclusively
y women, the men having gone higher up with the flocks.
Tuvir, Qutir, Meres, we passed: from here there is Kandichal,

[334]

Family life at Bijeno

the way over the ridge, westward, into the Sardab Rud valley.
We next came to Pishkur, a large village, with one well-built
stone house among its 'wooden chalets, where 1 was un¬
expectedly greeted by a Bahai from Tunakabun whom I had
met the year before. We refused to stop, however; trusting to
the map and the probabilities of the landscape, we were making
for Delir, which must have been visited by Europeans since
it was more or less correcdy placed, but which neither of my
men had ever heard of; they could not get over their surprise at
finding these villages really in existence w 7 hen we came to them.

After Pishkur the rain came down and the landscape was
blotted out completely. ‘Aziz paused beside some men who
were winnowing in the downpour, and enquired the name of
the owner of Bijeno village which we were coming to. We
soon turned down a steep and slippery sheet of mud between
houses, came to a chalet with carved wooden pillars, removed a
sheep that was blocking the entrance to the squire’s reception
room, and found the owner of Bijeno, a young man, sitting on
the floor with a pocket mirror and comb beside him, smoking
his pipe of opium.

The Squire of Bijeno was more than cordial, he was delighted
to see new arrivals on a wet day. He had a fire in the hearth
in no time, while I sat on the carpet and dried myself. The
mist came trailing in wisps at the open doorway; the black
sheep settled down again among our shoes; the squire s wife,
a handsome lady, imperious and benevolent, who had been
called in from the next room, sat cross-legged before the samo¬
var, while four daughters, ranging upwards from seven years,
crouched round in a circle and caressed a "white cat called
Mahmal, decorated with streaks of henna.

In a far comer of the room an ascetic, long-faced servant
with two curls sticking out over the ears under his black felt
cap, cut up a newly flayed sheep with a pocket-knife borrowed

[ 335 ]

The Throne of Solomon

from one of the daughters, and managed die operation wit

remarkable nearness, in a manner suitable to the drawino
room. t

I spent the day in this family atmosphere while the squir
told me about the Bolsheviks who came up as far as Bhen
m 1920, and murdered his brother and carried off 150 sheet
These were really the local marauders we had been hearin,
°t before, but the name covers a multitude of sins and
m all this country, Bolsheviks are still spoken of wit]
intense hatred; much propaganda will be necessary befori
they are looked upon with any kindness. These raids wer,
die last events of any importance in the district apart from th<
Sipahsalars suicide, and they have remained fixed in the

“T P eo P le ’ for now Aat the country is at peace

village life has become complete stagnation as far as the smal
seigneurs are concerned. They have not yet learned to take
any real trouble over their estates; the habit of opium saps their
energy and prevents even the elfort of hunting in the moun¬
tains; ah they do is to sit in their rooms receiving visitors,
talking endlessly, and hearing bits of news from far around.
In the next room, their female household also sits in idleness
waiting upon any stray command: and when the winter closes
down, they retire to the windowless refuge of the interior,
bring out the kursi over the central sunken fireplace, and
continue to talk till the snow melts again.

The squire ofByeno was a reader. We spent the evening
over e story of Alexander and over Memoirs of the Boxer
Rssmg, translated into Persian from the French—a strange waif

• °° -l ^ Caj ~ tie U P 011 again in a wild part of Luristan,
amusmg the We hours of a tribal chief. But the history of
exander is appropriate enough anywhere between die Nile
and die Indus, where that unique and undefeated conqueror
passed in a trail of splendour that has not yet abandoned his

[ 336 ]

Attempt at a bath

memory. His legend, together with that of Firdausi's heroes,
are familiar to most of the village lords. One is sorry in a way
that they can now only read about war while its practice is
abandoned, since that alone might keep them, it seems, from
going to pieces altogether under their village boredom.

The squire and his family did not tire of telling me about the
comfort and splendour of the bath of Bijeno. A clear stream,
said they, renewed every day, ran from a mountain spring into
a tank where, being heated, it received the ablutions of the
squire’s lady and her friends before any villagers were allowed
in: I should have it all to myself if I liked.

The mist was still creeping in at our door in a dark and
cheerless way; the rain dripped outside: the prospect of a hot
bath in limpid water sounded alluring; against my better
judgment I consented. I went out in a dressing-gown into
the mist; two daughters and a maid preceded me with a lantern
down a narrow muddy lane, out into fields, in again among
houses, and finally down steps to a subterranean catacomb
littered with debris and egg-shells, where five or six elderly
Maenads with nothing on to hide the repulsiveness of their
bodies welcomed me with exclamations of joy. I felt as if I
were to be initiated among witches into worlds of darkness.
Through two low doorways of stone 1 saw the water, a torpid
brew which looked many weeks old already: the toothless
naked ones saw me hesitate, and invited me with shrieks ot
delight. But my courage failed. Though I knew that it
meant an insult to Bijeno and all its inhabitants, I could not
face it: I gathered up my dressing-gown and fled. ^

When I returned to the family circle, the squire s musician
was with him, a wizened little man in a felt suit much too big
for him, gathered into a tight belt which made him look like
musical comedy. He was playing on a pipe that Theocritus
might have handled, made of the Chains reeds and decorated

Y [337 ]

The Throne of Solomon

with patterns burnt into it, fish, camel, ibex, and geometric;
designs among them, all done in delicate primitive lines T 1
pipe was about two feet long, with four stops close together an
one separate. The piper sat playing the folding tune for sheet
which the animals know and, hearing it, will gather from th
hill-side of their own accord: and as I listened, I thought of th
Italian mountains in my childhood, when an old man wouL
walk through the village every morning with a horn; and as h
blew on his instrument, all the goats stepped out from the lov
doorways of their stables and followed him. We sat a Ions
time over the music, the squire joining now and then with sac
monotonous tones, while I discovered an unsuspected talen
and sang German songs remembered from the nursery.

The whole of next day was swathed in mist, and spent ovei
maps in the squire’s drawing-room, where I also slept witl
the family, six in the same room, but luckily with the dooi
open. It was a good room, with niches all round in the usual
fashion, but a touch of originality was added by a narrow
channel filled with running water, built round the base of the
wall for bugs to drop into and get drowned: not many seemed
to get across, for they are not among the most adventurous
insects and have none of the elan of the common flea.

The Pass of Siolis into Talaghan

On the third day a gleam of sunlight suddenly revealed an
unsuspected hillside opposite, and we started off immediately,
for we were anxious now to reach the Talaghan valley, our
last bit of exploring on the way home.

The mist still hung on our flanks like Cossacks round a
retreating army: out of its softness, as we rode up along the
banks of die Halis stream which waters Bijeno, came a sound
of drums. It was a column of pilgrims, some fifty souls, as it

[ 338 ]

Pilgrims

might have been in the days of Chaucer, setting out on their
way to Meshed in Khorasan. The most of them were old
people, some few on donkeys, others walking along with
staffs; a good many women among them, and no one appar-
endy with more luggage than would be tied up in a striped
handkerchief. The two large shallow drums that made the
noise were carried by a couple of young men in the rear. They
all greeted us. “ God give you strength,” said we as we passed,
which is the correct thing to say; and they were lost again in
the mist.

The clouds lifted a moment to show us Natil, a large village
on a grass slope, and a young Kurdish merchant from Kurdichal
in Kalar Dasht strolling down it behind his two donkeys laden
with wares. Out of one of his saddle-bags he produced tea,
and weighed it out in a pair of scales with two stones in the
other, while ‘Aziz haggled for the price. He came here to buy-
marten skins off the mountain people in winter, and now
travelled over the region with these few wares in his pack which
the villagers could not supply out of their own resources.

Beyond Natil the mist sank round us again as we climbed
over grass to the Michilisera Pass, with high hidden rocks on
our right hand. A gleam of crest would appear now and then
like some goddess shoulder turned in flight: a wayfarer or two
loomed out of the whiteness and vanished—one man, a fine
sight, in red trousers patched with blue. The bells of our
mules seemed to tinkle in a wadded silence; and in the absence
of all else, our attention was concentrated on the small flora at
our feet, gentians, linum, wild snapdragon, iris plants and
sempervivum and violet leaves in the cracks of the boulders.
The gentians seem widespread at anything over 8,000 feet;
they had a starry brilliance, with drops of moisture in the hairy
rim of their chalices.

South of the Michilisera is Delir, a big place of about 150

[ 339 ]

The Throne of Solomon

houses at the head of a shallow plain suspended, as it were, h
tween two passes, the Michilisera by which we came and tl
Anguran out of sight to the south, the most frequented of d
ways between Chalus and Talaghan. Behind it the mountaii
rise ever higher and rockier to the Throne of Solomon, fc
wild and barren valleys: but eastward is a flat stretch of cultiv;
don for some miles, where a river meanders to another sma
village called flat, and then drops off the plateau as off a ledgi
into the unseen Chalus far below.

The sun came out, and we strode down on this landscap
with great strides, inflicting a shock on the children of Deli
who were playing by the roadside. They gave me a long lool
burst into tears, and fled screaming: this was the effect of m
krai, which invariably demoralizes all Mazanderani babie:
The grown-up population of Delir were not much more self
restrained than its children, and far more troublesome, fo
about two hundred women turned out, crowding the roofs
surging round me in the narrow streets, venturing close up t(
touch my garments to see if I was real, and very nearh
suffocating me among them. They were brightly dressed
with their silver coronets saucily tilted over one eye, and man]
silver ornaments hanging round the edge of their short jackets
Men, just as interested, but with their dignity to consider
were interspersed here and there, and to this more reasonable
portion of humanity Aziz turned in despair, and procured me
a litde momentary breathing space by shooing the women
away, and likening them to wild beasts of the forest.

Our idea of lunch in a cottage here was soon abandoned:
one might as well have lunched in a tornado. But presendy,
questions and answers having been exchanged, a man from
Talaghan emerged and took matters in hand. Talaghan is
next door to Alamut and therefore, in ‘Aziz’s estimation,
capable of containing a few good men: the two fraternized over

[ 340 ]

Camp above Delir

the wickedness of everywhere else, shepherded me, with a
tumultuous crowd behind, out of the village streets, and
walked along for half an hour or so up the valley, till only the
stronger-minded pursuers followed. The Refuge of Allah
stayed behind to collect food.

The ridge behind Delir rises up gradually to the Hazarchal,
the Pass of the Thousand Hollows and its peaks, which lead
like lesser notes of music to the grand chord of Solomon’s
Throne, out of sight. We sat at the opening of the valley,
enjoying tranquillity, and looking at the new peaks behind
shifting clouds through my glasses, until The Refuge appeared
with five eggs in his hand and a crowing cock under his arm
whose throat he proceeded to cut with a pocket-knife, in a
silent spasm of viciousness evidently intended for the un¬
civilized population of Delir. Little trailing processions of
inhabitants, visible far away across the fields, disturbed the end
of our meal, and drove me farther up the valley, not before a
Mirza’s daughter, a tiresome girl who would have been a blue¬
stocking in a town, cross-questioned me in religion amid a
circle of her female fiiends. There are no Kurds or Turks in
this part of the country. The people are dark-eyed and
fanatical; the name of Armenian, indiscriminately^applied to
any Christian, rouses dislike. But I found that what knowl¬
edge I had of the Quran, and the ordinary politeness of men¬
tioning the Moslem saints and prophets with the titles of respect
to which the people are accustomed, would make them

friendly very soon. , , ,

The river of Delir is considered locally to be the Chalus
River, and we followed it to where it swirls round a comer
from its source in the valley of Seven Springs. Here we
decided to camp for the night. Shepherds had bmlt a semi¬
circular enclosure against a cliff by die stream, and there we
made our fire: there were two small plots of arzan behin

[34i I

The Throne of Solomon

walls across the river, and otherwise nothing but rock and she
grass and grey water, with thorny bushes higher up for &<
A man with a long-handled axe, and black hair, lank at the ba<
on his neck, turned up from nowhere to be a guide: we ke
him because of his pleasant smile, and he reappeared after t
mterval with a cooking-pot and gun. An old trapper the
joined us, a shepherd from Kujur, a cousin, said he, of Ri :
Shah, who came from that country. With a jolly manner an
a staff over his shoulder, and the smallest of skull caps on h
head, he sat and asked me for medicines which would give hit
children, and talked about the trapping of animals in the hill;

The evening cleared to a limpid sky with small clouc
floating: swallows flew under the cliff. The water made it
pleasant noise, and so did our pilau, sizzling in the pot. An.
as we sat there on the boulders, little groups of visitors cam
walking up to see us from Delir, talked of this and that it
their good-mannered way, and slowly worked round to tb
subject of medicines, for which Teheran, a three days’ ride
was their nearest source of supply. They had fine faces, mucl
lined and wrinkled, framed like fourteenth-century portrait;
in their long hair: and die medieval likeness went furthet
than the mere external-it was the same life that created ;
recognizable type.

A touching couple came—two middle-aged people with £
small sick baby, dying obviously of starvation. The womar
carried the child, while the father had six eggs in a handkerchiei
as a fee, which he put down on the ground beside me with a
pathetic humility. All their children had died, and if this one
also died, said the woman, she would be too old to have an-
° er * e y kad no doubt as to my being able to cure it, but
only as to my willingness in view of the insignificance of the

S1X j e f m’ * & ave t ^ em a dn of Ovaltine, hoping for the best,
and filling them with a joy which wrung one’s heart.

[1343 ]

The Pass of Siolis

The Pass of Siolis is not so difficult as the Kalau, though it is
nearly as high, and only open for the summer months of the
year. It is chiefly used for the transport of salt from the south,
while charcoal and heavier merchandise go round by the lower
and easier Anguran. From our camp at 8,000 feet it took us
five and a half hours to get up to the top, climbing steadily,
first through oak scrub, then in and out of rock with patches of
snow. I was still incapable of bearing the height, and rode
nearly all the way, with twinges of remorse on behalf of the

mules. „ t . .

“ The perfume of the hills seizes one s heart, said Aziz,

who also hoisted himself on to a mule whenever I did so, with
no similar excuse. The Refhge of Allah had been bulked out
of his breakfast because I insisted on an early start, but walked
on without a sign of weakness, as steadfast as the landscape
around him: no work was ever too much for him. But as for
‘Aziz, he carried my field-glasses and my stick trying to look as
if they belonged to him, and limited himself in the matter of
work to a general amiability with passers-by.

This Siolis track was more beautiful than that of Kalau, for
below us on our right we had a wild, uninhabited valley mi¬
ning up to Lashkarek, a conical peak near the Thoasmd Hd-
E iL, and the black rocks of a mountain calW
faced os like a castle rampart across the fosse ^

And on our left were green tiers of comes of the galley
Seven Springs, where the Chains River begms m waterfalls

We were refreshed on the way up by meeting mules wi
panniers of small apples from Talaghan: but it
pull, and the pass itself a wearisome sand-coloured inter* ,
leading one on and on towards an elusive skyline one of those
„asses § that have a world of their own of small bumps _ ^

hollows at the top. From the little height of Saraban, which
makes one of the horns of the pass, as it were, a beautiful high

[343 ]

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 ColdWater, 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, comma
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 Harness 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
oun 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

[ 344 ]

Joistan

small watercourses that ran through the tilled earth, a com¬
fortable sound after the mountain silence.

The Upper Shah Kud

I now meant to make straight for Teheran, sketching out the
more or less unmapped eastern Shah Rud as I went but the
problem of the Daylamite frontier made me decide first on a
western detour by Joistan in case any medieval traces might be
visible at the southern opening of the Hazarchal track.

Joistan, however, which we reached through a dreary land
of red earth by Dizan and Mehran, turned out to be a large,
prosperous village with some of the old humped tombstones
(called shutur —or camel), and with carved stuccos and lattice
work in the houses—but no trace of fortifications. West of it,
the Shah Rud runs in an open populous valley filled with
villages, with the chief place and centre of government visible in
green groves at Shahrak, some hours’ ride away. North-west
of it is Elburz, not impressive from this its gentler side, masked
from the lower ground by a world of folds and outworks.

On the opposite side of the valley, the slope rises gradually
to the passes on the skyline, with a fair number of villages,
and many tracks over the edge to the Qazyin plam One
comes here into reddish earth like that of Alamut, and this,
and the softer lines of the landscape, give to the lower Talaghan
a mild and smiling aspect after the dark granite and high
severity of Takht-i-Suleiman.

I did not rest long at Joistan, which is at the opening into
this milder land, for I heard of a fortress some hours nde away'
on this side of the Hazarchal Pass near Parachan. In spite of
the heat, in spite of the extra fatigue involved by the moral
effort of retracing one’s steps, in spite of‘Azizs
and The Refhge of Allah’s eloquent silent resignation, I decided

[345 ]

The Throne of Solomon

to go to Parachan and return; the mules’ loads and ‘Aziz were
left behind; and in the very hottest hour of the afternoon, The
Refuge and I started off again up the Hazarchal valley.

Our ride had no incident except that turning a corner above
Dizan, we met a young lad walking carefully with an egg in
each hand; irrelevant curiosity prompted me to ask what the
eggs were for, since the place seemed inappropriate for ome¬
lettes.

“ They are to cure a sick mule,” said the lad. Verses of the
Quran had been written on them by the village mulia, and
now they were to be broken over the mule’s forehead as it
lay in convulsions down below in a meadow.

If God wills, it will be cured, said we, in the best manner
of the Delphic oracle, and hurrying on, for twilight was falling,
crossed another bridge into Parachan. Here we were again
in the mountains: the stream was narrow, with bushes of brier
at its edge; the village climbed beside it.

The first thing that met our sight was a street of hayricks
far bigger than the houses. They stood close together, rough
grass with thistle tangled in it: it was all winter fodder, since
Parachan, the last village before the pass, is under snow for
four months of the year. During all that time, the people
told me, the only paths made are those which lead from the
water or the ricks to stables and house: a village down the
valley is as inaccessible as a foreign land, and if anyone is sick,
he must carry on as best he can till the snow melts, or die. (In
any case there is no doctor in all the Talaghan valley, so it
makes litde odds.) The winter’s food supply for humans is
stacked in large grain sacks in their inner room, together with a
sufficient quantity of tea, sugar, and paraffin to last through the
snow. Sometimes the young men venture out after ibex,
which they encompass in a circle made by ten or twelve of
their number and, converging upon it, seize it on themountain-

[.346 ]

The Philosopher of Parachan

side where the snow impedes its flight. One would have
thought that, with so many idle winters behind them, the
people of these mountain villages might have invented some
means of locomotion like skis or snowshoes to break their
prison; but nothing of the kind has been done, and I spent the
evening trying, in very inadequate Persian, to descnbe the
elements of winter sports.

The Philosopher who runs Parachan was an old man with a
venerable dignity and an ample dark blue turban, which he
wore as a member of the sect of Huserni, an ultra-Shi a con¬
fraternity fairly widespread in all this country. He hved m a
tiny house raised high on a mud floor off the steep street, and
littered about with female objects, cradles distaff, and white
flocks of wool for the spinning. His daughter-in-law, called
Flowering Bud, ran the house for him, a firesh and buxom bride
pleasant to look on and very friendly, though her as

of no use for conversation, being a local dialect. ThePhiloso
pher too was cordial, as much so and a little more so Am he
felt he should be to anyone so dangerous to religious presGg
as a member of the female sex. The disabilities of my position
were brought home to me, for having come with hardly any
Wage I relied on my host for things like bowls and basins,
and^found that though he would stretch a point and let me
drink out of the household vessels, he did not feel he coul

risk his salvation by letting me wash.

I Shed myself to dirtiness with a good grace and an

undlSng of these nicer pomts
rained his heart, for he soon minted me tan the rntenor
sodX of the harem to a seat on the tea-carpet among tite
Eld 2 where we discussed the politics of Parachan whtle the
whole village population passed in queues before e P
lom ratog a look in rums. They had never seen a European
t makSy told me, nor did they remember a man, though

[ 347 ]

The Throne of Solomon

Captain Fortescue must have passed through here on his way to
the pass above us. The Philosopher, as headman, had the onus
of gathering taxes: he was expected to pay so much to govern¬
ment, and to collect it as he thought best. I have never seen any
dissatisfaction with this arrangement, and the leaving of the
matter entirely in the hands of a local Elder, who has his own
popularity among his people to think of, is probably much more
satisfactory than direct collection by a Persian government
official. The Parachan headman had the added advantage of
holiness to endear him to his folk; he did, indeed, seem a kind
and just man, and his voice in the darkness as he said the last
prayer of the day floated over the heads of his sleeping flock
dim, shroudedforms on the flat roofs under the stars. Through
the night, Orion swung above the village street; and still in
starlit darkness, the young men of the village rose, gathered
their sickles, and started off to cut hay in the hills. We left
when daylight came and, with the headman beside us, climbed
to the so-called tower, known as Ahmad Raje, about an
hour s walk above us on a western spur.

Nothing at all was left above ground except a few nonde-
script potsherds, and there can never have been anything here
but a small look-out or guard tower to dominate the way from
die pass. But a storm was sweeping across the Hazarchal;
Solomon s Throne towered among the clouds, and I was glad
to have almost encircled that Unattained One, and to see it in
magnificence from the south as well as from the other three
points of the compass. When rain and hail came pouring from
the ndge towards us, we descended hastily tojoistan by a shorter
way down barren hillsides for sheep along the Shirbash stream,
which burrows down the valley through a canyon. There is a
trackhere to Ab-i-Garm, our hot springs of the Darijan valley,
which can be reached in a day; and a venerated Imamzadeh
shows high above it, white among the rocks of Mounts Sat and

[ 348 ]

Head of the Shah R.ud

Avater. We were seeing all our familiar landmarks from the

° 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 tag er
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 Gaddeh, and to grassy
slopes that run by Garab, the last village, to the gentle Asalek

JPclSS.

We, however, camped on the open slope, and next morning,
following the early trains of mules that carry charcoa to e
treeless southern plain, climbed up to where, on the northem
side of the Sirbash Pass between two smooth hiiJs,
Maiden’s Casde-Dohtar Qal’a-stands m a sweep of solitude
a small irregular pentagon with round buttress at one corn .
It is a rather disappointing place, being comparaavdy modern
built of small stones, more tidilyolder
ruins I had seen in Alamut and the lower Shah Rud. it dad

walls three feet thick and a sort of shaft m e “ ue ^
building now filled with earth and stones. At one tune
ISkge must have scrambled below its walls down tc^uphke

hollow, and a graveyard on the °PP OS5 f n ^ ^ was
suseested with its modem tombstones that the place w
of e recendy inhabited. One or two of the graveston s
so back to the seventeenth century: they were cut in a pa
sreen limestone which does not exist in the neighbourhood,
Ld which puzzled me until next day, when I cameuponAe
boulders which produced it far down m the soudie '

S-Bs&ttSSS

[ 349 ]

The Throne of Solomon

along the hillside, built, they say, by Malik Shah, the Seljuk
We were on the line of the higher track, which runs alone these
solitudes from the Asalek Pass east of us, through empw Das
tures to Kochire at the head of the valley of that name, and
probably much farther along, from village to v illag e.

Such as it was, the Maiden’s Castle had the inestimable ad¬
vantage over many antiquities of being above and not undei
the ground. Only the real expert has eyes to see as in a vision
what is buried: for the rest of us, the dust of great persons’
graves is speechless.

King Pandion, he is dead,

All his friends are lapped in lead.”

One likes to have a visible peg or two on which to hang
one s imagining. And Dohtar Qal’a provided this in an emi¬
nent degree, as journalists say, whatever that may mean. The
Shah Rud valley lay below it, far below, and the mass of
Takht-i-Suleiman rose on the other side across six ranges
borne as a hero on the shoulders of the crowd, with spurs
and lesser ridges radiating outwards like spider’s legs. He
alone had snow upon his sides. Around him, in diminishing
galaxies, were mountains. We saw the long cleft of the Hard
Rud water outlined in a spiky fin of rock, and Zarine Kuh
behind it opposite us, above the grassy shoulders of die
Anguran Pass, where the caravan route runs by Dehdar.

No human building was visible in tins solitude except die old
fort and a tea hut buried nearly to its roof in the hillside against
wind and snow. Here I slept shivering at a height of nearly
10,000 feet until The Refuge crept up in the coldest of

k s P reac * llls own ca rpet over my unconscious

o y, while he lay on the hillside thorns in his shaular.

[ 350 ]

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

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 le
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 an
village, with mulberry trees to shade it, hot at its lower leve

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 axe used also in thisway for flavouring.
But besides this sort of preserve, they had some excellent real
jam which they eat together with the shire or sweet mul-

High limestone cliffs

encompassed it, built in fantastic battlements regular as

masotjy. Here the green boulders of the tombstones 'g
scattered, washed by the jade-green stream. At Pulab, tiie
Laura River comes in fom the left, and we *»»““? **
survey pegs for the Shah’s road, now built and finished, but

[35l]

The Throne of Solomon

then looking still like a titanic impossible labour O
carved tombstones here and there show that this was an ancier
well-trodden way; they were being used for tire new road ar
tncrc are probably none left in sight by now

We got tired of rocks upon rocks; they rose in duos fro,
he very waters ltp where our path cut its way on narro,
ledges, only here and there, in some widening amphitheati
o die river bed, small villages crowded with their tree
I heir ripe white mulberries were sweet for the picking as ™
passed, not pausing. 5

This barren landscape grew wilder as the daylight faded
piled up like a discordant orchestra in fierce confusion, it ha,
none of the mighty serenity of the higher hills. But at last
with dusk falling we opened out on a wide bend, and sav
Vanan m groves of trees and orchards through which the rive:
iiowed unconstncted, catching last sunset gleams.

fr ,r? asked f° r lod ?“S’ and were ^ken to a garden full oJ
fruit trees and a small house with three good rooms raised or
a terrace, where carpets were soon spread. A dish of grape<
and pears was brought me, first fruits of the warmer plains, and
we were told that our last stage next day would be made along
the level surface of the new motor road

Some way up the: valley, at a village fiunous for its weavers,
we had stopped to bargain for one of the woollen covers they
Aziz had shouted casually over a garden wall, and
thrng was produced, its many-coloured stripes and close
texture approved of after expert handling by the men, and the

refmmt°T °U ^ f ° Varkn ’ widl various

refusings, handings back and re-takings of the object, and

OWner b . ac \ to Hs Vllk ge and down again after us.
Now the cover, of which I was very proud, was produced for
die approval of the assembled ladies of Yarian, who had
g thered to call on me. They instandy rose and departed, and

[ 352 ]

The Shah’s new road

soon brought along a far more engaging jh/tm, with all sortsof
geometric fancies woven on its stripes. Another series of
negotiations started.

If I had paid ten shillings for the plainer one, how much more
must I not give for this superior specimen, said they.

If I had paid too much for one, how much the more reason
for not doing so with another also, said I.

The lady who had woven it, a merry black-eyed bride, was
not anxious to sell, said she. The jajim had taken her a long
time to make; its wools were spun, its colours dyed, and its
pattern invented, all by herself.

True, said I, and I would not wish to deprive her of anything
so valued: but why should I get another jajim when I had one
already, except as an unnecessary extra if the price were truly
reasonable? and I handed it back to her for the nignt, while e
friends of both sides took up. the chorus, ‘Aziz and The Refuge
with a strict eye upon me, knowing my weakness towards the
latter stages of such long-drawn-out battles.

They were quite right. Next morning, after the night s
meditation, the jajim was handed to us from a doorway as

we passed. , a

This was the last night of my adventure, and in the stuffy
lower air by the splashing fountain of the little garden, over¬
arched by unfamiliar branches of trees after the open hills, I
could not sleep. I roused ‘Aziz early, but failed to make him
move: and when at last we started down the valley, two
thousand workmen were already on the road, and we had to

pass by nearly all of them. „ —,

“God give you strength, God give you strength The
Refhge continued to say politely as we passed each shift.
They were sturdy, pleasant-looking countrymen with little of
the navvy look of such people in Europe. They got, I was
told, three krans [ 6 l] a day, and came from the villages around,
a [ 353 ]

The Throne of Solomon

They had already done all the level bits as far as Varian an<
were now tackling the rocky intervals, which had been lef
lie islands; where we came upon such places, we had tc
abandon the new smooth surface and take to the old track
which appeared more precipitous than ever by contrast anc
had all sorts of surprises in the way of dynamite and men witl
instruments along it.

One of these nearly cost me and my mule our lives as we
rode near an edge of cliff above the river. A navvy came
along with two iron bars under his arm, and as they were long
and not well under control, the point of one of them prodded
my animal as we passed. Shikar the mule had already been
showing a doubtful attitude towards the blessings of civilization
as exhibited m modern road-making; this unprovoked attack
demoralized him altogether; he turned at a gallop down the
small strip of scree which separated us and the river, three
hundred feet or so below. No one is more helpless than a
nder on a pack-saddle: seated as on a platform, without either
rein or stirrup, suicidal mania in his mount is a contingency
not provided for. But luckily The Refuge of Allah happened
at the moment to be walking ahead with the halter in his hand
He pulled with all his might and said soothing tilings at the
same time: the mule paused; I slipped off, and rescued my

Ca ™ ^ kch § ot cau gkt at the very lip of the abyss.

Thank God it is not broken,” said I, with the single-
mindedness of the photographer. The Refuge of Allah said
nothing for a long time.

If you had got killed,” he remarked at last in a reproachful

tone, what should we have said when we got to Teheran
without you?

After this, Shikar the mule showed a natural dislike for any¬
one who was carrying anything, and tried to shy on every
narrow place we came to, so that we were glad when finally

[ 354 ]

we

alor

bed

A

and

Kar;

mul

whi

Pen

ven

and

goo

Teheran

we saw the last of the two thousand workmen, and trudged
along a level surface where red flat reaches of the plain run up
between the hills.

A mud-walled obsolete fort holds the opening of the valley,
and beyond this, in the hottest of the afternoon, we came to
Karaj on the main road. Here we left The Refuge and the
mules to trudge on through the day and night to Teheran,
while ‘Aziz and I took to the miseries and discomforts of
Persian cars. Many delays there were and breakdowns in
very sight of the capital, but finally we did arrive that evening,
and in a flowering garden amid the refinements of life, said
good-bye to each other with hands upon our breasts.

INDEX

Ab Barik, R. (see also Garau R.)>
160.

Abbas, Shah, and causeway of, 208,
232, 266, 324, 325, 328.

’Abdul Khan, 36-42.

Abraham’s Path, 281.

Abu Bekr, 228.

Achaemenians, The, 17, 213, 268.
Afshar, Emir, 37.

Aftab, Forests and Valley of, 159 “
166.

Agha Khan, H.H. the, 201.

Ahmad Raje, Tower of, 348.

Aiwan (orAivan), 179-181, 187.
Ajuzan, The, at Husainabad, 169-
178.

Alamut, Sovereigns and owners of,
200-202, 234, 260.

Alamut, Rock and Castle of, 201,
210, 212, 215, 222, 231, 233, 234,
238,247,252,254,255,258,260,
267,271,284,340,349.

Alamut, R. and valley of, 201, 207,
209, 210, 212, 2x4, 2x6, 219, 220,
223, 224, 226-228, 230, 233, 235,
258, 259, 263, 264, 267, 268, 271,
280, 286, 301, 305, 306, 310, 345.
Alexander the Great, 17, 232, 269,
336 , 337 *

Ali, Mahmud’s retainer, 142, H 3 >
150.

Ali (son-in-law of the Prophet
Muhammad), 108, 197, 226.
Vklid refugees, 328.

Alidad, Guide, 70-72.

Ali-llahis tribe, 45, 322, 326, 327.
Ali-Shirwan tribe, 89, 9 2
Alishtar, Fort and the Governor of,
15,, 16, 19, 20, 23-32, 34, 44, 51.
Amanulla Khan, 51, 55.

Amara, 155.

American Mission, The, 28,

Amul, 318, 323, 325.

Anguran Pass, 340, 343, 344 > 349 *
350 -

Arabia, 198.

Ardalan, Kurds of, 3x6.

Arenge district, 351.

Arian, 351.

Arjini, 87.

Arjine, 36.

Arkwaz district, 80.

Arkwazi, Plain of, 178.

Armenians, 35, 202, 341.

Arnold, Matthew, 317.

Arzan , 331.

Asadabad Pass, 29.

As’ad el Hukuma, Dr., 202.

Asalek Pass, 349, 35 °*

Ashnistan, 204-206.

Asiman tribe, 182.

Aspi, R. (see Ispi), 3 * 7 * t

Assassins, The, The valley and rock
of, 197-200, 205, 2x0, 2x4? 2X0,
220,228,234,248,250,259,263,
284, 3x8 (see also Alamut).
Atabek tribe, 62,122.

Atrafhaxis sfin&m, 280.

[357]

The Valleys of the Assassins

Atun, 271.

Avatar, Mt., 349.

‘Aziz, Kerbelai, Guide from Garm-
rud, Chapters III., IV. and V.
Badasht (Bagh Dasht) ( Garden of
the Desert), 211, 214.

Badavar, R., 19, 43, 47.

Baghdad, 60, 61, 81, 112, 189-192.
Bahai, 202, 335.

Bahrain Gur, 232.

Bairanwand raiders, 62.

Bakhtiari tribe, 227, 233.

Bala Buzurg, Hill of, 51, 56.

Balarud, 264-267, 284, 301, 305.
Baliaqin, Ab-i-, R., 161, 162.

Balkh, 250.

Bani Parwar (see Beni Parwar).
Banafshade, or Banafshe, 32c, 320.
Bani Chinar, 184, 185.

Bani Kuh, 179, 182.

Barazan, 331.

Barazard, Kuh-i-, 91, 162.

Barir Kuh, 301, 312, 322.

Barir Kuh, Waters and district of,
308-310, 318.

Barkus, Ridge of, 146.

Bashm (Pashm orBash), 323-325,329,
Basra, 218.

Baude, 330, 331.

Bedrah, 67, 166.

Bedrei tribe, 79, 128, 161, 180.

Beira, 35, 36.

Belkeis (see Sheba, Queen of).

Beni (or Bani) Parwar, Tribe
and district of, no, 124, 127-
132. '

Benj , 284.

Berinjan, Tang-i-, no, 147.

Bidalan (see also Shirkuh), 259.

Bijeno, 335 " 338 .

Bokhara, 232.

Bolsheviks, The, 336.

Bombay, The High Court of, 201
Boxer Rising, The memoirs of, 336.

Bronze Age, 44, 131.

Bronzes and Pottery, 39-4!, 44 , 6

109,115, 123, Ig2 , 184, 231^268
320. 1
Buwayid Princes, 249, 250.

Carder’s Bow, The Black (see Siah
Kaman).

Carmathians, 198.

Caspian Sea and Passes, 211, 226
2 32, 233, 270, 271, 280, 321, 32/
34 i 5 349 -

Caspian Jungle, 283, 284.

Cauali gypsies, 56.

Chala and Pass of, 209, 211-213
220,281.

Chalandar, 317.

Chdus Rud, 317, 324, 329-334, 337>

Chains, 318, 323, 324, 340.

Chains pipes, 337, 338.

Charash, Tang-i-, 46, 47, c 7 .
Charcoal Traders, 36, 48.

Chardin, Sir John, 266.

Chashmeh Qal’a Malik ( The Spring
of the King’s Castle ), 162.

Chavari, 36, 43-45.

Cheha Husein, Mound of, 36, 43.
Chertei (see also Kalau), 295, 298.
Chia. Dozdan, Mt. of (Hill of
Thieves), 46-48, 51, 57, 58.
Christians, 28, 62, 198, 203, 341.
Chu’bid, R., 160.

Cold Water, River of (see Sardab R.)„
Crusaders, 198.

Curzon, Lord, 266.

[ 358 ]

301 • 3 ° 6 ’ 3 U > 318, 325.

Dakulad, R., 322, 325.

Damghan, 234.

Darijan and valley of, 28c, 280-200*
*?5,30i, 305, 3iS,3rt.

Harms, 17, 232.

Darius of Balarud, 269.

Dastgird, 207, 208.

Index

Daylam and DayUmitoi, 244, 2 49 > » 5 .

;ayiaiu <uiu. -? .

306, 317, 3 i8 > 3 2 4 > 3 2 5 . 345 *

Deh Bala, 167.

Dehdar, 350.

Deli Kabud, 43.

Deh Ram, 31.

Delir and R., 335 ? 339 " 34 2 *

Delivand tribe, 158*

Demavend, Mt., 252, 3 ° 2 > 3 ° 3 *
Dilfan, 22, 30, 36, 37.

Div-i-Safid, The, 317*

Dizan, 345, 34 ^*

Dizful, 29, 60.

Do Hizar, R., 271.

Dohtar Qal’a (Maiden s Castle ), 349 ?

350.

Duliskan, 45, 5 °*

Dnrovon, Castle of, 259*

Dusan and tribe of, 102, 105-113*
124, 131, 1 3 6 *

Garm, AD-i-, 209,

Garmrud, 203, 204, 223, 225, 22O,
228-230, 232, 264, 270-280.

Garu, Kuh, 14,16, 34 . 35 . 43 . 45 -
Garu, Kurds of, 316.

Gatchenah, Valley of, 36, 38, 42.
Gatchkah, Pass of, 20, 22, 3 2 ~ 34 *-
Gatideh, 349.

Gautama, The rebel, 17*

Gavan Kuh, 211, 249.

Gavan, Tang-i-, Defile of, 90, 92.
Gawi Rud, R., 73 - 75 *

Gazia of Alishtar, 183.

Geniiam septemfida i 280, 339.
Geraran, 26.

Gian, Mound of, 13 ? 4 1 *

Gilaki, 310.

Gilan and Governor of, 200.

Gildar Pass, 76.

Girdkuh, Castle of, 234.

Giva, 66, 70, 1195 1284
Giza Rud, 44-48, 5 I " 53 . 5 ^ 57 *

i ^ tv yr_,3 y%-P -5 -tR 320

_ Lyiza js.uu, a* -> -*

Eccles, Capt., 214. Golesombe, Mound of, 328, 329.

Elburz, M». *»J >», «S, . T „ h) .

»*°. f S ’ 53 I»r,MUb-

281-283, 3 0I > a 44 , 345 - Gurg-u-Mish, 248.

0/ Bitterness, The f g ’ Q ustarz 0 f Balarud.

III.

Fatimite Caliphs, 197,19 s -

Fedawis, 200, 220. ,

Firdausi, Works of, 37, 3 i6 > 337 -
Fire worshippers (see also /,oroas-
trians), 26.

Firuzabad, Pass of, 23.

Flowering Bud of Parachan, 347 *

Fortescue, Capt. L. S., 3 11 . S 2 > ^4

Fraser, J. B., 3 ° 4 *

Gangir, R. and Cham, 177 ,

Ganjeh, 92, 1I 5 -
Garab, 349 -

(jurg-u-iv-uou,

Gustarz of Balarud, 269.

Guyard, 228.

Hajji, Guide, Chapter I.

Hala Qurban, 306.

Halis, R., S 3 8 - ,

Hamadan, 28, 42, 201,

Hammer Purgstall, Von, 228.

Hard, R., 349 > 3 S°- ,

Harsin, x6, 20, 22, 47, n 8 , 59, 0 ,

Hasan-i-Sabbah, 197 ,I9 S > 201 ’ 202 ’

213,215,218,220,221.

Hasan-i-Sabbah, The vine o^ .

Vjanjeu, **a* Hasan-i-oaDDau, > .

Garab, 349. . {( Hasan, The young Lur, 63-60, 93,

Garau, R., Distnctandmmsoi (ee n ,
also Khlrr R.), 88-92, I5 > 55 > Hasanaven d tribe, 24.

156, iS 7 . J S 9 » l6o ‘ j. ,

The Valleys of the Assassins

Hasankeif, 318, 322.

Hasanwayds, Kurds, 62.

Hashishin (see also Assassins), 198.

Haudegan Kuh, 220, 267, 284.

Hazarchal (Pass of the Thousand
Hollows), 3or, 303, 310, 318, 34.1,
343 - 34 ^*

Hindimini ravine, 119.

Hindimini tribe, 100, in, 113,
117,119-125, 128, 145.

Hishmet, 306.

Hujjat Allah, Guide from Alamut,
204, 206, 225, and Chapter V.

Hulagu Khan the Tartar, 200, 233,
234, 247.

Hulailan, 42, 48.

Huns, The White, 232.

Husainabad, 61, 155, 166-178.

Hasainabad Plain of (see Deh Bala).

Husein, Mahmud’s retainer, 142-
x 4 5 , 148-150, 155, 160-162.

Huseini sect, 347.

Islam, 26, 328.

Ispi (Aspi) Rud, Castle of, 317.
Ittivend (or Ittiwand) district and
tribe, 44-46,48,50-55.

Ivanow, Mr., 228.

Iza, R., 301.

Jaber of Medina and district of
104, 105, 137-
Javanak, Valley of, 258.

Jebel Druse (Syria), i 16.

Jelau Geringe, 160.

J ews , 35 ? 5°? 62.

Joistan, 330, 345, 348, 349.

Jungalis, The, 306, 310, 311.

Jungle, The, 36, 51', 240, 288, 304,
306, 310, 3 r 1, 318, 325.
jusuf Khan, 42.

latim Kuh, 297.

Ibn Batuta, 200.

Ibrahim of Shutur Khan, 217, 218,
224.

Ikane ridge, 330.

Han, 271, 272.

Imam Ja’far, 197.

Imamzadeh (shrines), 45, 51, 78,
143, 244, 249, 255, 323, 329, 348!
India, Survey of , Map, 83, 300, 303
344 -

Iran, daughter of Kerim Khan, 27*
Iraq, 61, 166, 170, 171, 177, 182,
184,187,234,

Iraq, The Holy Cities of, 207.
Isfahan, Stronghold of, 215.
Iskandar, 170.

Ismail, Guide from Alamut,

Kabir Kuh (see Kebir Kuh).
Kadhimain, Jacob of, 208.
Kadhimain, The Imams and Musa
of, 208, 244, 257.

JLafir-gul, Unbelievers’ flower, 22c.
Kafir Kuh, 226.

Kafiri, Tang-i- (see Unbelievers %
Defile of).

Kafrash, Lurs of, 17.

Kahman Gorge, 26.

Kahman, R., 25.

Kainmaru, 187.

Kaiumars, Legendary builder of
Rock of Alamut, 222.

Kak-Ali, 183.

Kakavend (or Kakawand) and district
of, 46,47, 50, 57, 59,183.

Kalar Dasht district, 291, 301, 304,
305 , 310 , 311 ? 315 - 317 ; 322-325,
327, 328.

Kalar and mound of, 315-318,
322-325, 328, 329.

rxxaxnui, 322-32C 77n

Chapters III., IV. and V., up to 1^^1,288,295,298,299,343

Isma’ili, 197,198, 201, 249.

jf : ? 343.

ivaituma, Daughter of Mahmud of
Pusht-i-Kuh, 98.

Index

Kandichal, 255-259, 33+.

Kangaveri, R., 48, 51, 53.

Karaj, 329, 355.

Kebir Kuh (or Kabir), 62, 79-90,
104,105, no, 112, 113, iis, 118,
161,166, 180.

Keikum trees, 86, 87.

Keram Ali Lurs, 17.

Keram Khan, The Kakavend guide,
46-59.

Keram Khan and his family, 18, 23.
Kerim Khan of Alishtar, 27-31.
Kerkha, R. (see also Saidmarreh R.),
62.

Kermenshah (or Kermanshah), 22,

59, 60, 113, 147, 155* i6 7 > i 7 6 >
. 178; .

Khanikin, 60.

Khava and Plain and Lurs of, 15?

16, 24, 25, 33-36, 40, 43 - 45 *
Khirr, R. (see also Garau and Rua

R.), 92, i°4

Khorasan, 200, 232, 234, 280, 339.
Khurramabad and Pass of, 17,
23-25, 34, 40, 207, 293, 305, 327
Khwajavends, 316, 320, 322.
Kiviter, 329, 330,

Kiya Buzurg Umid, 235.

Kochire valley, 350.

Kuchek Khan, 305, 306.

Kujur, 302, 342.

Kujur Kuh, 302, 317, 327-
Kuli-Alis tribe, 183.

Kulivand tribe, 183.

Kulm, 115.

Kulud QaPa valley, 311.

Kunjan Cham, R., 7 L *6i> 165*
Kurdichal, 322, 339 * .

Kurds (and see respective districts),
239, 321, 322, 326,330,341.
Kurf, 109.

Kut, 67,155*

Lakistan and Lurs of, 62, 93, 95,
99, no, in, 11S, 146, 170, 174,

183.

Laktar, 318.

Laleh Chak, 238.

Lamiasar (or Lambesar), Castle of,
234, 235, 240, 244-247,. 25 3._
Larti, Tribe and rained city of, 100,
110-120, 122,123, 126, 128, 192.
Lashkarek Kuh, 343.

Laura, R., 351*

Lihaqs , 38.

Likash, 317.

Lockhart, L., 228.

Luristan (see respective districts and
tribes).

Ma’dan, R., 254, 255.

Magians, 328.

Mahdi b-Illah, 176.

Mahmal, The Bijeno cat, 335.
Mahmudabad, 216, 222.

Mahmud, Cousin of Shah Riza, 68,
69.

Mahmud, Guide, 19, 20, 36.
Mahmud, Host of Shah Riza’s
tribe, 95, 96, 98-102, 138, 139,
151, 152, 155.

Mahmud, Son of the Arbab of
Shutur Khan, 217, 221, 222.
Maiden? s Castle (see Dohtar Qal a)..
Maimah Pass, 105, 115*

Makula, Ab-i-, 131. ^

Malak and the Dervish, 120,121.
Malcolm, Sir John (History of
Persia), 316.

Malikshahi tribe and smugglers,
76-79,128-131, 180.

Malik Shah, 35 0 -
Mandali, 166, 177-185,189*

Mangu the Great Khan, 200.
Manisht Kuh, iSj, x 68 , 178* L 9 *
182, 183.

Manjil, 235.

[361]

Lahu, 322. 325 - 329 -

The Valleys of the Assassins

Mansurabad, 73.

Maran, 284, 305.

Marco Polo, 214, 228, 231.

Martens, Stone-, The trapping of,

309 . 339 *

Masai, 332.

Mazanderan, 215, 233, 268, 271,
3 J 7, 324 (Part II.).

Mazigasar valley, 311.

MehmedAli Khan of Tarhan, 49,50.
Mehran, 345.

Meres, 334.

Merv, 250.

Meshed, 280, 339.

Mian, R., 289, 293, 295, 297.
Michilisera Pass, 339.

Milawur Pass, 146.

Milleh Penjeh Pass, 158, 159, 161.
Minorsky, Professor V., 249.
Minuchihr, King, 317.

Mir Ali Khan, 24, 25, 27, 29, 183.

M | r g> 2 39 “ 34 1 -

Miriam of Tanakabun, 222.

Mirza Farhad of Husainabad, 174-
177.

Mishkhas tribe (see Aftab), 161.
Mongols, 200, 218, 233, 234, 250,
328.

Moslem, 45, 49, 104, 115, 123, 129,
176, 184, 208, 209, 249, 341.
Mosul, Ex-vizier of, 64, 65.
Mountain, The Black (see Siah,
Kuh-i-).

Mountain , The Great (see Kebir
Kuh).

Muhammadabad, 240.

Muhammad of Garmrud, 274.
Muhammad, Son of Hajjaj, 249.
Muhammad, Son of Musa of Kad-
himain, 244.

Muhammad, Third Grand Master
of Assassins, 218.

Mujil, 312,

Mumivend tribe, 24.

Musi, District of, 104,106, 133, ^

Mustawfi the geographer, 30, 234
249.

Naina, R., 245, 246, 249.

Narghiz Kuh, 301.

Narian, R., 344.

Narmirud, 281.

Nasir-ud-Din Shah, 263, 311, 329.
Natil, 323, 339.

Naz Khanum, 183.

Nevisar, Shah, 225, 226.

Nevisar Shah, Castle of, 225, 226*
232, 272, 280.

Nihavend and plain of, 13, 16, iy >
2 4? 36, 37? 62, 65.

Nihavend, The guide from, 17-19,
Nisaian pastures, 17.

Nishapur, 250.

Nizam-ul-Mulk, 220.

Noah, Village of, 19.

Noel, Major J. B. L., 304, 311.
Nurali Lurs, 36-39, 42.

Nur-Rashid, Th elmamzadeh of, 249.
Nushirvan, Treasure and summer
house of, 92, 105, 142, 157.

Old Man of the Mountains, The, 201,

2 35 *

Omar, 228.

Ommeyad, 249.

Opium, 17, 18, 25, 37, 52, 54, 57,
95, 262, 266, 336.

Orfan’s mountain (see Iatim Kuh).

Padhusban, The, of Rudbarek, 328.
Pahlevi hat, 21, 22, 68, 160.
Painrud, 264, 267.

Parachan, 345-348.

Pas Duzd, R. (or Pile Rudkhaneh),

2 37 -

Peri Kuh, 47, 48, 53, 55.

Peri Stones, 115.

Index

Persia, Early rulers of, 215.

Persian Government, 13, 22, 24, 25,
40,41,49,50,61,68,78,168,176,
182,184,239-241,270, 348.

Persia, Shah of, 22, 25, 33,168,172,
180, 183, 188, 263, 285, 292, 293,
302, 305, 327.

Philippe le Bel, The lawyers of, 200.
Pichiban, 272, 277, 280, 283.

Pile Rudkhaneh, R. (or Pas Duzd),
237.

Pir-i-Dozd Kuh {The Old Thief), 47.
Pir Muhammad, The Imamzadeb
of, 78-80, 85.

Pishembur, 324, 325.

Pishkur, 335.

Pulab, 351.

Pul, R., 3*8, 3 2 3 *

Puneh Pass, 115*

Pusht-i-Kuh and the Lurs of, 60,
61, 68, 79, 90,165,182.
Pusht-i-Kuh, The Government of,
170-178.

Qadam Kheir of Tarhan, 183.
Qabran, 322.

Qadi of Qazvin, 205.

Qajar, Agha Muhammad Khan, 316.
QaPa Kafrash, Mound of, 17, 24.
Q’ala Marvan, 285.

QaPa Nargisieh mound, 182.

QaPa Seifi, 74.

Qasir Khan (see also Alamut Rock),
201,219-221,231.

Qasir, R., 217, 219, 220.

Qazvin and plain of, 201, 202, 204,
207, 213, 235-237, 242, 244, 249,
253,254,305,323,344, 345 -

Qazvin, The Commandant of, 203.
Qizil Uzun, R., 235.

Qum, 200.

Qustin, 242.

Qustinlar, Castle of, 242.

Qutir, 334 -

Rabino, Mr., 317, 323.

Rashak valley, 311, 321.
Rashid-ed-Din, 218.

Rashtegan, 235, 236, 238.

Raushana of Balarud, 269.
Rawlinson, Sir Henry, 15.

Ray, 250,318,323, 324.

Razigird, 237.

Reeves, E. A., 303, 304..

Refuge of Allah (see Hujjat Allah).
Reiand the philosopher of, 197,206.
Renu (Ranu) Kuh, 179.

Resht, 201, 306.

Riza Shah, The “ Philosopher 55 and
guide, Chapter IL, from pp. 66
and 342.

Riza, Shah (see Persia, Shah of).
Riza Shah, 6x.

Rosmunda, Ballad of, 222. ^

Royal Geographical Society journal ,
The , 228, 304, 318.

Rua, R. (see also Khirr R.), 105, xoy,
136.

Rudbar and Arabs of, 146, 211,
214-216, 235, 241, 244, 249, 250,

254, 255, 301.

Rudbarek, and the Agha of, 312-310,
318, 320-322, 328.

Rukneddin, 200.

Rustum, 215, 317*

Rustum Khan of Mirg, 240-242.
Rnyae and district of, 317, 3 2 3 » 3 2 5 -

Sabaeans of Harran, 218.

Sagwand tribe and raiders, 62, no.
Sahyun (Syria), Castle of, 248.
Sa’idabad, 31S.

Said Ibrahim of Lain, 327.^

Sa’id Ja’far, Cousin of Mahmud of
Pusht-i-Kuk, 102, 103, ill,

126, 132,136, 137, 140-15°*

Saidmarreh, R. (see also KerHia R.),
44,48,62, 90,109, in, US, IS 1 .
143, 146,150,158,1S4.

[ 363 ]

The Valleys of the Assassins

Shahrak, 215, 259, 260, 345.
Shahri, 329, 330.

Saidmarreh, Tribe and camp of, 118.
Saiwan, Kuh-i-, 162.

Saj, 82, 114.

Saladin, 50, 198.

Salambar and Pass, 210, 233, 252,
276, 280, 283, 284, 300, 301, 303,
305 -

Salsile, Tribe, 24.

Samovar, 35.

Sangari Garkhan the Armenian,
25, 49.

Sangesarek, 329.

Saraban, 343.

Sarab Bazan Police Post, 179-182.
Sarbands, 40.

Sardab Kuh, 162.

Sardab, R. (River of Cold Water),
301, 303, 304, 309, 312, 314,318,
320,^22,329,335, 344.

Sardari Naib Khan, Chief of Police
at Alishtar, 29, 31-36, 43-47.
Sargatch Pass, 109.

Sar-i-Gatch, 187.

Sar-i Kashti, Valley of, 44-48, 50.
Sar-i-Tang, 184.

Sarmaj, 62.

Sarneh, 182.

Sassanians, 62, 96, 213, 249.
Sassanians castle (see Shaddad).

Sat Kuh, 281, 348.

Saumar tribe, 187, 188.

Saveh, 30.

School of Oriental Studies , Bulletin of
228.

Sefid Kuh, 24.

Seh Hizar, R., 271, 283-285, 288,
301 , 303 *

Seijuks, The, 198, 250, 350.

Sepa, 187.

Sern, 285.

Seven Springs, The valley of, 341, 343.
Seyids, The, of Pir Muhammad, 79.
Seyid Tahir, 256-258.

Shaddad, Son of Nushirvan, 105,107

S' v

Shahristan (Bala), 244, 245, 248-250.
Shahristan (in Darijan valley) 28c-
288. 3

Shahristan (on Pul Rud), 323 (see
also Ruyan).

Shah Rud, 210, 211, 213, 235, 237,
238, 240-242, 250, 251, 253-257,
259, 261, 297, 307, 344-351.
Shahsavar, 265, 293.

Shalam, Kuh-i-, 166, 168.

Shamiran defile, 184.

Shapur, 249.

Sheba, Queen of, 252, 288, 289.
Shelef spring, 296.

Shi’a sect, 35, 60, 197, 215, 286,
347 -

Shikar, The Mule, 354.

Shirbash, R., 348.

Shireh Kuh, 242.

Shirkuh and castle of, 220, 2223r

258,259.

Shirwan (see Ali-, tribe), 89,
Shirwan (or Shirvan) and plain of,
no, 135, 143, 146, I 5 o, 157.
Shirwan, Castle of, 157.

Shutur Khan and the Arbab of, 204,
216, 217, 221-225, 227, 260-263,

2 67.

Siahdasht, 242.

Siah Kaman ( Black Carder), 297,
.302, 312.

Siah, Kuh-i- (The Black Mountain ),

ill.

Siahkulu Kuh, 343.

Siah Pir, Range of, 105,110,118,124.
Siahsang, Rocks of, 267.

Siah,Tang (TheBlack Narrows), 147.
Simiar Pass, 237.

Sindh, 200, 201.

Siolis, Pass of, 343.

Sipahsalar, Emir of Tunakabun, 240,
28 5 > 3 ° 5 > 336 .

[364]

Index

Sirbash Pass, 349.

Sirishy 284.

Sitt Zeinabar, 256-258.

Sobrab, 317.

Solomon, 252, 288.

Solomon's Throne (see Takht-i-Su-
leiman).

Sookias of the A.P.O.C., 202.
Sumerians, The Pre-, 44.

Suratai, Tang-i, 92.

Susa, 147.

Syalan and Pass of, 210, 267, 271,
301,305.

Tabaristan, 317.

Tabriz, 269.

Takht-i-Suleiman or Solomon's
Throne , 210, 211, 225, 238, 252,
253, 264, 265, 267, 280, 288-290,
294-303, 309, 312, 322, 340, 341,

345 > 348 > 35 °* .

Talaghan and Mts. and river oi,
201, 232, 233, 235, 291, 306, 310,
318, 324, 330, 338, 340, 343 “ 346 *
Tarazak, 57.

Tarhan, 24, 48, 49, 66, 109, no,

135 . r 4 °) H 7 > r 74 > i8 3 -

Tartars (see also Hulagu Khan), 233.

Teheran, 21, 34 . r 74 > 3 o6 > 3 ° 9 > 3 11 .
3 2 9 > 34 2 > 344> 355 -

Templars, The Order of the, 198.
Thousand Hollows, The Pass of (see

Hazarchal).

Timur Leng, Armies of, 317 -
Tombs, 38,41, 44> 45> 4 8 > S 2 > 53 ) a >
62, 96, 104, 109, in, n 5 -“ 7 >
j2 3 ,129, 131, 176,182, l8 4> *87, .
193, 2I 3 j 3 20 j 3 2I > 3 2 4> 3 2 9’ 33°>

35 1 -

Tudaru Pass, 34, 45 * 47 ,

Tunakabun (for Emir of, see Si-
pahsalar), 207, 331, 335-
Tundurkhan Pass, 233.

Turks* 341.

Tus, 250.

Tuvir, 334.

Ujabey, 312.

Unbelievers , Defile of (Kanra,
Tang-i-), 103-110, 136, 150.

Vali of Pusht-i-Kuh, 60, 61, 67,
75, 168-170, 174.

Yanderaban, 310.

Yarazan Pass, 13-16, 36.

Varian, 35 2 “ 354 *

Verkh, 264, 267, 281.

Viar, 246, 247.

Walantar (or Waland Tar), Mt., 79,
86 , 88-90, 157,159*

Waraq Husil, Mt., 146.

Warzarine, Mt., 79,9c, 92,1 x 1, 11 2.
Wilson, Sir A. T., 15, 5 1 *

Tailaghs, 331.

Yaqut, Geographer, 234, 3 Ib , 3 22 ~
324.

Yezid, 228.

Zamin, Shahre, Imamzadeh of, 323.
Zamiyah Kuh, 77.

Zardusht tribe, 73.

Zarine Kuh, 35 °*

Zavarak, 226, 227, 263, 264, 271.
Zexn-zem, Pool of, 105.

Zerengis, Song of, 331, 33 2 «

Zora of Kandichal, 256, 257*
Zdroastrians, or fire worshippers,

- 124, 328.

Zurbatiyah, 165,177*