1 78 By Mountain, Lake, and Plain 



the road : the ruins of Tous, the capital of Khor- 

 assan in the days of the Caliph Harun-al-Easchid 

 of Arabian Nights fame : the Ulang-i-shahi, or 

 royal pasture, the most celebrated grazing-ground 

 in this part of Asia : the mound that is reputed 

 to be the scene of the murder of Nadir Shah. 1 

 Then by the ruins of old Kuchan that lie now as 

 they fell when the town was flattened by an 

 earthquake a few years ago, and the new town 

 with its surrounding greenery of orchards and 

 vineyards. Here we are in the country of the 

 Kurds, a race of hill men, and like all hill men 

 good fighters, that were brought from their own 

 Kurdistan in the west by Shah Abbas in the 

 days of our Queen Elizabeth. Wholesale deporta- 

 tions of this sort were common in those days, the 

 object of this one being to establish a fighting 

 people on the border of Khorassan to prevent 

 the inroads of the Turkoman. In the present 

 day the " man-stealing " Turkoman, that were the 

 terror of the countryside in Persia right down 

 to Seistan, are mostly peaceable Kussian subjects. 

 Only a remnant, the Yamut and Goklan sections, 

 that live in Persian territory between the Caspian 

 Sea and the Kurdish chiefship of Bujnurd, still 

 carry on the hereditary occupation. 



1 Vividly described in Sir M. Durand's fascinating novel, ' Nadir 

 Shah.' 



