Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/319

 This superstition is certainly a thousand years old, as shown by a quotation given from a still earlier writer by the Arab geographer, Ibn Fakih of Hamadan, in 903 a.d.^

Legend and superstition fill the air around Damghan. Even the wind that here blows ceaselessly has been talked about by the Orientals who have visited the town for a thousand years past. One of them has already been cited.^ Nor shall I forget the first night we spent in the place. In the late watches — restless, perhaps, because I could not rid my memory of the graveyard beneath our window, where I had seen a wooden box waiting to convey its earthly tenant to that final resting-place of all — I was startled by a strange sigh. It grew into a moan; then into a deep sepulchral wail. It was the wind — the wind told about by Mis'ar Muhalhil and the rest — and to my dreamy senses it seemed a requiem chant intoned in memory of the dead Darius, yet changing, as it rose, into a paean of victory for Alexander's triumph over ancient Iran.

istan, in the time of Sabuktagin about * See the quotation above, p. 171,

950 A. D., see Elliot, ^is^ory o/ /ndi'a, from Mis'ar Muhalhil, and compare

2. 20, 437. the memorandum about others in Le

1 See Ibn Fakih, ed. De Goeje, Bihl. Strange, Eastern Caliphate., p. 365.

Oeog. Arab. 6. 310; and, for a trans- The wind is mentioned by Clavijo

lation of the passage, compare Mar- (1406), Narrative, tr. Markham, p.

quart, Untersuchungen^ 2. 55. 182 (Hakluyt Society).

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