Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/378

 CHAPTER XVI ON THE ROAD TO NISHAPUR

'And his spirit leaps within him to be gone before him then/

— Tennyson, Locksley Hall, 115.

Only a day's journey now separated us from Nishapur, the home of Omar Khayyam, and my heart bounded faster than the speed of the hurrying horses that were carrying us towards our goal, though there were points of interest to halt at on the way, and the changes of relays gave opportunities for study as well as for rest.

The first feature to command attention on the hill-bordered plain, which was treeless, but rich and green with cultivation, was found two hours east of our former station, or about four miles this side of the city of Sabzavar, at a short distance north of the highway, in the midst of a well-sown field of grain. It was the handsome Minar (or minaret) of Khusrugird, standing as a lonely monument of a vanished town that once occupied a considerable area and whose name still lives in the simple vil- lage of Khusrugird, a mile farther north, with its ancient for- tress and traces of long-abandoned settlements in the environs.^

This striking column, about a hundred and twenty feet high, closely resembles those already described at Damghan and Seranan ;2 and, like them, it might serve our builders in the West as an artistic model of construction in brick. Every de- tail of the graceful shaft, whose top, however, is somewhat

1 On the subject of the old fort at Yate describes this citadel as * an old

the village of Khusrugird and the sexagonal fort on an artificial mound,

traces of former habitations in the about eighty yards in diameter, with

vicinity of the minaret itself, see high thick walls, surrounded by an

Fraser, p. 381 ; Ferrier, p. 100; and outer wall and ditch.' especially Yate, Khurasan, p. 398. » See above, pp. 149, 167-168.

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