Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/239

 heran, we arrived near Aivan-i Kaif, which probably occupies the site of the place where Alexander pitched his camp at the end of the first day before entering the Caspian Gates, although that may have been near some ruins still seen two or three miles to the south. ^ These latter remains I took occasion to visit on my second journey by making a slight detour from the road before proceeding to Aivan-i Kaif.^ The ruins form two groups, lying near each other, and are called respectively Kal'ah-Mdri^ 'Serpent Fortress,' and KaVah-i Kis (or Q-ls}, 'Maiden Fortress.' Hoary antiquity is ascribed to both these crumbling piles, for the native whom we picked up as a guide said that popular tradition ascribed them to Kai Kaus, a monarch who ruled over Iran nearly a millennium before the Christian era. Eastwick understood them to be a part of the palace of the Achaemenian king Cambyses (d. 522 B.C.), but I think he must have heard the name Kai Kaus, as I did, and supposed it to mean Cambyses, particularly as the name of the town Aivan-i Kaif is often taken to be Aivan-i Kai^ * Pavilion of the Kaianians,' the ancient Iranian dynasty that corresponds in part to the Achaemenians.

The Kalah Mari fort probably owes its reptilian designation to its having been infested with snakes. It lies near the former bed of the local river, which has undergone a change of course. It is about two hundred yards square and has walls about eight feet thick, built of large sun-dried bricks whose size be- speaks their antiquity.^ Remnants of two gates were to be seen, one in the northern rampart, the other in the southern wall ; and the whole ruined fortifications reminded me much of the ruins at Merv, to be described in a later volume. The smaller fortress, Kalah-i Kis, or 'Maiden Fort,' which lies a

1 See Eastwick, Journal of a Diplo- antiquity, and is called KaVah-i Kuh maters Besidence, 2. 137, London, 1864. Bus, 'Fortress of the Russian Moun-

2 I may add that there is a modern tain.'

fortified place about five miles north ^ On the subject of large sun-dried

of the road and to the west of Aivan-i bricks in Persia, see Jackson, Persia, Kaif, but it seems to have no claim to pp. 92, 127, 162, 253, 255, 435.

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