Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/496

 302 AU RE VOIR TO PERSIA

his own Persian soldiers. ^ We had no time, however, to visit the spot next morning, nor to inspect the chief mosque of the town, or to see the tomb of an Imamzadah, in which Eraser, in 1822, saw some leaves that had been taken from a magnificent copy of the Kuran in the mausoleum of Timur Lang at Samar- kand. These fragments, if preserved, would have been the more interesting to me after having thrice visited the tomb of Tamerlane, and having also seen the huge reading-desk, eight feet square, which served as the stand for an enormous Kuran once placed in front of the mosque of his favorite wife at

The crimson hand of dawn was in the sky as we left Kuchan to cross the river Atrak and pass over the mighty mountain ridges that shut off Russian Turkistan. The Kuchan- Askhabad road is about seventy-five miles in extent, and today it can be traveled with fair comfort in a wagon. ^ Soon after leaving the town we began a series of lofty ascents and deep descents which did not cease till the plain of Askhabad was reached on the other side.* The views, whenever a height was reached, and where our aneroid more than once measured nearly seven thousand feet, with crests still above, were magnificent, and the air was exhilarating in the extreme ; but after the ascents came descents in which we had to wind our serpentine course down into extensive valleys.^

In one of these gorges, which was cut by the swift stream that waters the little settlement of Durbadam and tumbles its whirling rapids under a bridge, was a narrow defile, which some day may prove a strategic point hard to be fought for in the

1 Compare Fraser, p. 576 ; Curzon, * The territory around Zobaran, be- 1. 109 ; Durand, Nadir Shah, in yond Kuchan, was well cultivated. JBAS. 1908, p. 294. & The view was particularly fine from

2 I hope to describe this desk more the height overlooking the distant ter- fully in a later volume, Beyond the ritory of Daragez towards the east Caspian. and the equally remote district around

3 On the condition of this road in Shirvan towards the west. So again 1889 see Curzon, 1. 87-92. in the zigzag ciimb past Mount Sal.

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