silhouette of kuh-i-kwajah.
Major Sykes, in the Royal Geographical Society's Journal, describes this mountain as resembling in shape "an apple," but surely if there ever was anything in the world that had no resemblance whatever to "an apple" it was this mountain. It would be curious to know what Major Sykes calls "an apple."
The diagram here appended of the outline of the mountain, and indeed the photograph given by Major Sykes in the Royal Geographical Society's Journal, February, 1902, page 143, will, I think, be sufficient to convince the least observant on this point. Major Sykes is also no less than 500 feet out in his estimate of the height of the hill. The summit is 900 feet above the plain—not 400 feet as stated by him.
The altitude at the base is 2,050 feet, and at the summit 2,950 feet. As we rounded the mountain to the southward to find a place at which we could climb to the top, we saw a very ancient fort perched on the summit of the mountain commanding the ruins of Kala-i-Kakaha, or the "city of roars of laughter,"—a quaint and picturesque city built on the steep slope of the south escarpment of the mountain.
Sketch Map
of Summit of Kuh-i-Kwajah
by A. Henry Savage Landor.
In the centre of this city was a large and high quadrangular wall like a citadel, and it had houses all round it, as can be seen by the bird's-eye view photograph I took of it from the fort above, a view from which high point of vantage will be described at the end of this chapter.