Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/792

772 in Devonshire, where they are known as a "good pair of shoes," because they protect the feet, or lower part of the wall. In the remains of the Temple of Viracocha in Peru the mud walls have a stone base eight feet in height. With these examples before us, and understanding the necessary purposes they served, we may assume that such protective substructures were generally employed wherever this particular manner of building was in use. It is highly probable that in this rude constructive detail we have the first origin of that part of the architecture in the palaces of Assyria to which the great winged bulls in the British Museum belonged. It seems now to be accepted that these palaces were constructed of crude brick, or at least this material was the principal one employed; baked or perhaps glazed brick may have been used in the exterior of the walls, but the interior was of sun-dried brick, and covered with stucco. This latter part is exactly what I saw in Persia. Along the base of these walls slabs of marble were placed, varying from three to about eight feet in height. These were generally sculptured, and the great bulls were represented on the portions of the slabs on each side of the doors. The development of this highly ornamental dado in the palace, from the base of the mud wall, is not a difficult problem to solve. The foundations I saw in the villages were formed of stones, halfbricks, or rubbish of any kind. In the better class of houses a more regular construction would be followed; and in palaces the covering of this with marble is what might be expected. I accompanied a visit of ceremony to the palace of one of the Shah's sons in Tehran, and I noticed that, in the room where we were received, slabs of alabaster, about three feet in height, went all round the base of the walls. These alabaster slabs in Persia are the counterpart of the marbles in the palaces of Assyria. In both cases they served the same purpose—they protected the lower part of the walls.

It was a source of some surprise to me to find that the Persian villages were, as a rule, exactly similar to those I had seen in the Khyber Pass and other parts of Afghanistan. They are square, formed with four high crenelated walls, and a round tower at each corner. The gateway is in the center of one of the walls, and the mud houses are huddled together inside, one might say, "anyhow." Larger villages may have six or eight towers; small towns or large ones have more wall and a larger number of towers. One of the first things that drew my attention to mud as a building material in Persia was, when in passing a small town one morning on the march, I saw some men either building or repairing the walls and towers of the place. It then struck me that these defensive walls were, with only some trifling details of difference, almost identical with the walls