ROOM, OR KOM. 
375 
places, to be called an inhabited city, that imagination could 
have pictured. It lies in latitude 34° 15', longitude 50° 29". 
Some authors suppose it to have been the Choama of Ptolemy, 
but Mr. Macdonald Kinnier says, it was built in the year of the 
Hegira 203, out of the ruins of seven former towns, which had been 
destroyed by war. Its present appearance is little better than a 
ruin of itself; both within and without the walls, the most 
conspicuous objects are old houses fallen into rubbish, crumbling 
mosques, and other edifices, all tumbled into heaps, or gradually 
mouldering down to that last stage of decay. In fact, this once 
populous city, renowned for the sanctity both of its living and 
its dead, is now little more than a large straggling wilderness 
of ruins, with here and there a few inhabited dwellings; amidst 
gardens and corn-fields, shut up, even within the old ram¬ 
parts. The huts, which grew up at the foot of the hoary 
structures of Sultania, humble in their appearance, and few in 
number, were lost in the stately grandeur of the towers which 
surrounded them ; and neither the awful harmony of the ruins, 
nor the solemn stillness of their repose, were broken by the few 
human beings which sheltered themselves within their moulder¬ 
ing aisles. But every thing at Koom, was anomalous. It was 
to be considered as still a city; and buildings of every period, 
and of every description, noble and mean, half repaired or 
falling into squalid neglect, mingled with the modern dwellings 
of the Persian gentlemen or the artizan. And a common every¬ 
day bustle, going on in the streets, though without the promising- 
appearance of any sort of trade, by divesting the ruinous city of 
the usual solitariness and silence found in such places, deprived 
its mouldering remains of that solemnity which gives dignity to 
fallen greatness; and left nothing in their stead, but a disagreeable 
