Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/363

 been enhanced by their having to play the role of a buffer colony, although their little town is rather agreeably situated on an elevation defended by a small fort which overlooks the caravansarai, and is to them a home that has made them all but forget their Caucasus birthplace of three hundred years ago. Evidences of a still earlier settlement, ages before their time, are visible in the dilapidated walls of an old Gabr fortress in the hills close by, to the northeast, its name implying that it dates back at least to the Sasanian period of Zoroastrianism ; and in the nearer foreground is an old reservoir, the square top of which can easily be seen from the caravansarai.

Water in this region is a precious commodity, if one may judge from the aridity manifested by the tremendous storms of sand that are whirled up from the edges of the distant desert of the Lut on the south. The wind, all that afternoon, was incessant, and was filled with granules of powdery dust as dry as the clay-built relay -station where our next change of horses was made, while little broader than a thread was the salt stream beyond, spanned by the 'Bridge of Silk' QPul-i Ahrasham), whose brick arches once formed the boundary line between Irak and Khurasan.^

The whole region wore an air of antiquity, so far as one could see amid gusts of blinding sand, augmented by occa- sional blasts of straw and chaff swept by the wind when passing the threshing-floor of some hamlet. The village of Kakah,2 with its old reservoir (^dbddr') and its dome-roofed houses of mud, looked peculiarly Sasanian, while the hamlet of Bahmanabad near by bore a name that goes back to Zoro- astrian times, Bahman being the grandson of the prophet's patron, Vishtasp, and a zealous champion of the faith.^

1 Eraser, p. 372 ; Eastwick, 2. 175. of Persia) to illustrate this chapter.

2 The location of this village and of ^ xhe population of Bahmanabad the other places along the route may in 1807 was given by Truilhier, p. 254. be seen in the sketch-map which my as '30 maisons,' and in 1877 by pupil and assistant, Dr. George C. O. Houtum-Schindler, Zt. Ges. f. Erdr Haas, has drawn (after Holdich's Map kunde, 12 (map), as ' 150 Hauser.'

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