Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/372

 ��OrHR THE ANCIENT BATTLE-GROUND

��We reached the village of Mihr shortly before sunset, and made this our resting-place for the night ; ^ but I slept an im- patient sleep, eager to start by daylight for our visit to Mount Mihr, about five miles to the north. The horses were duly saddled ; our guide rode a fine white donkey ; and we started betimes over the rough and stony road to the mountains.

Kuh-i Mihr lies in the midst of a group of rugged mountains which surround it on every side. A characteristic feature in their composition is a conglomerate mixture of a reddish sand- stone and clay, mingled with stony rubble. The crest of Mount Mihr looks like a volcanic plug, thrust up from the shoulders of the hill, and the whole rises to an elevation of four or five

��the phrase introducing the Burzin Mitro Fire. If, on the other hand, as I have done in my translation, we accept the fuller text of the Iranian Bunda- hishn, we must allow for the presence of the word Rivand (which, by the way, has no appellation before it to determine whether the mountain or a town be intended). Therefore, in the second place, if the settlement or dis- trict of Rivand (northwest of Nisha- pur on the Isfarain road, as already explained) be the point chosen, then the location might fall considerably farther west. But there still remains the alluring possibility that in the present village of Rivad, or Rivand, and Mount Mihr we have actual sur- vivals of the sites referred to. The entire distance, however, between Rivad-Rivand and the ruins on Mount Mihr is not over fifteen or twenty miles, though we might be inclined to argue that the nine farsakhs were short ones ('wohl kleine,' cf. Justi, Beitrdge, 2. 16). This attractive pos- sibility seemed to me almost an assur- ance of the identity of the two when I visited the places in May, 1907. Major Sykes, with whom I stayed at

��Mashad a fortnight later, visited the ruins at Mount Mihr the next year (Nov., 1908), and in his Sixth Jour- ney (Geog. Journ. 37. 151-152) defi- nitely calls Mihr ' the site of the third sacred fire, known as Atur Burzhin Mitro ^ or "the Fire of the Labouring Classes," ' as I had maintained. If this be so, the photographs in my present chapter have a special value to any one interested in the history of Zoroastrianism ; on the other hand, I do not hesitate to emphasize the fact that there are difficulties which another visit might perhaps help to solve. It must not be overlooked, for example, that Hoffmann (Auszuge, pp. 290-291) and Tomaschek (Zur hist. Topog. Fers. 1. 272), like Houtum-Schindler (cited above), are inclined to locate the Burzin Mihr Fire in the district of Rivand northwest of Nishapur.

1 Fraser, pp. 378-379, in 1822 called Mihr ' a poor village of forty or fifty houses ' ; but speaks of the industry in cotton-stuffs and in mulberries. Euan Smith (in Goldsmid, Eastern Persia, 1. 375), in 1871, mentions 'sixty fami- lies ' there, but suffering from famine. The place seems since to have grown.

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