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NARRATIVE. 
which was about two feet long, and armed with rough- 
headed nails stuck all over it. 
The execution scaffold, which formed one of the 
most prominent objects near this gate when Mr. Shaw 
was here before, was now conspicuous by its absence, 
and was said to have been temporarily taken down in 
honour of our arrival. We passed through many 
winding streets, most of them clean and wide, and in 
man}^ places roofed over with trellis-work and vines, as 
at Kargallik. The shops and houses were precisely 
like those in every Oriental town ; but from the 
scarcity of timber, and the absence of stone and kiln- 
burned brick, all the houses are limited to one story 
in height. A number of buildings more imposing in 
appearance than the others were pointed out as being 
colleges, where, it is said, the Koran only is taught. 
At the further end of the city we passed through a 
gate guarded similarly to the one by which we had 
entered, and a quarter of a mile beyond saw before 
us the fort called Yangi Shahr {i. e., new town). This 
fort was built by the Chinese to command the city, 
between which and the fort there is a wide street with 
ruined houses on either side. Near the gate of the 
fort we passed a mound on which was a human head 
stuck on the end of a tall pole, the long hair streaming 
in the wind, and probably therefore not the head of a 
Maliomedan, for all true believers here shave the head. 
The fort was surrounded by a wall and ditch of pre- 
cisely the same sort as those of the city. 
There is only one entrance gate to the fort, and 
this was guarded by a much more military-looking 
detachment than that at the gates of the city, all being 
dressed in neat scarlet uniforms and armed with 
