SALUTE TO THE SUN. 117 



any atrocity. My host, while reposing on his balcony, 

 had witnessed a man deprived of his ears and nose and 

 then led round the bazaar as a beauty show only a 

 short time before. 



The town is the seat of a royal governor, a fact of 

 which I was constantly reminded, for my room was 

 immediately under the nakarreh Jchaneh, or drum- 

 tower, and every evening at sunset my ears were 

 deafened by a wild fanfaronade, while 



" For leagues and leagues around, 

 The brazen sound 

 Eolled through the stillness of departing day, 

 Like thunder far away." ^ 



To leave Kermanshah without saying something 

 about the famous rock-sculptures of Bostan would be 

 as unnatural as to leave Moscow without seeing the 

 Kremlin. Four miles from the city rises the perpen- 

 dicular rock face in which are hewn the arched recesses 

 known as the Tak-i-Bostan. Writers have laboured to 

 show that the name is Tak-i-Bostan or arch of the 

 garden ; but I believe this conclusion, though ingenious, 

 is wrong, and that the place is not necessarily named 

 after the gardens in the vicinity, but is in reality Tak- 

 i-Vastam, which is the reading found in the Persian 

 manuscripts. Immediately in front of the rock are 

 two tanks of water surrounded by trees, and to the 

 right as you face it an ingeniously constructed villa, 

 the property of the late Yekil-i-Dowleh, who held the 

 office of British agent. The largest and most modern 

 of the two arches — the third set of sculptures consists 

 of a panel and is not surmounted by an arch — has a 

 height of 30 feet, and a breadth and depth of 24 and 

 22 feet respectively. On the right-hand side there is 



^ Robert Southey. 



