1837.] condition of Oujein or TJ j jay ani. 85 1 



and whom you convinced in spite of his teeth by a reference to his 

 own establishment. Do you remember that scene ? The indignation 

 of your friend at the number of 52 assigned to his family, his boast 

 that it contained three times 52, and the difficulty he found at last 

 in eking out even your tale, by two old beggar women who slept at 

 his gate ? If the more enlightened Benares folks were so incredulous 

 and ignorant, you could not expect much assistance in such calcula- 

 tions from the Goths of Oujein. The number of residents I would 

 roughly estimate at 70,000. The theories which account for the change 

 of site of Oujein appear to me all equally unsatisfactory — I neither 

 believe with Hunter that a shower of earth, nor with Malcolm that 

 a flood, overwhelmed the old city, nor with the natives that it was 

 turned topsy turvy. The tales of old bricks and of wood of surprising 

 hardness, &c. dug up at depths of fifteen feet seem to smack of the 

 Oujein failing of exaggeration. Several people were interrogated who 

 had been twenty and thirty years at the place, none of them had ever 

 positively seen such things, though all believed most religiously both 

 these and much more wonderful curiosities to be found. It is currently 

 told, that a chamber was discovered in which was seated the skin of 

 a beautiful lady, just, explained my informant, like the shape of a 

 grasshopper which you see trembling on a stalk of grass in the dry 

 weather. Some incautious visitor approached too near the delicate 

 shell, it vanished into air — like the fish found in the pyramids,-— 

 ** comme de la poussiere qui s'envole quand au souffle dessus." Bricks 

 found at any depth would prove little, for they might have belonged 

 to walls which stood on the slope of a hollow, filled up by time; 

 many of the houses of the present town being built in this fashion to 

 save the trouble of making a back wall, or they might have belonged to 

 under ground granaries, tahkhanehs, or wells. A shower not ex- 

 actly like the famed one of bricks and tiles*, but one equally composed 

 of building materials, such as rained, says Asskmani, in 769, " Une 

 pluie de pierres noires," seems as likely to have fallen, here, as earth or 

 sand. 



The surface of the hills (of the old city) where it has not been plough- 

 ed and picked is strewed with fragments of stone, just as you would 

 expect in a place which had once been covered with houses : these 

 broken pieces of trap being parts of walls of which the larger compa- 

 nions have been taken away as material for other buildings. 



The theory of an inundation is principally supported by a tradition 

 that the river has changed its bed. This belief seems to me a native 

 * Pliny, where the date is gravely given. 



