Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/240

 124 ON THE TRACK OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT

hundred yards to the south, is built of bricks smaller in size and gives an impression of belonging to a much later date.^ Its single dilapidated gateway is in the northern wall.

In addition to these two groups of ruins there is, about a quarter of a mile to the east, a large mound, or tapah^ about forty feet high, that has some remains which are certainly much older than either of the other two. Its walls (like those of the Gaur Kalah at Merv) have been reduced to mounds of clay, out of which its bricks had originally been formed, and the sand has now swept over these crumbled ramparts, so that it was not possible to recognize more than its general outlines. In my note-book I added a query as to whether the debris might not go back to Sasanian times, and I have since found that Eastwick (1862) speaks of the elevation as *a Fire- worshippers' mound' and says ; 'On the top are the remains of a temple.' It would be hard to recognize these traces as such today. Fragments of pottery were all that told of a dead past, and a fox ran out of its burrow in the middle of the enclosure — a living proof of the desolation that reigned supreme.

After this excursion of an hour and a half we found our- selves drawing near to Aivan-i Kaif. To enter the town, how- ever, we had to drive through the bed of the muddy river that traverses it. For a moment I had forgotten that on my first journey to Iran I had approached other Persian towns by the course of the river-bed. I thought only of the story, which Herodotus tells, of how the army of Cyrus took Babylon by entering the city through the bed of the river, whose course had been deflected for that purpose.^ It was certain that our own advance, though not martial, was difficult enough to call for

1 Eastwick (2.138) calls this smaller 2 Herodotus, History, 1. 191. The

fort by its more Persian title Chihal second and third time when I was in

Dukhtar, ' Forty Daughters,' and says Aivan-i Kaif (June 3 and 8, 1910) the

that according to legend ' a princess river-bed was quite dry, as shown in

lived there, who with thirty-nine other my photograph, maidens dressed as men and went forth so attired to the chase and to war.'

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