Soon after midnight the mules were silently loaded, and we "stole silently away," to ride through the territory of the powerful Sagwands, a robber tribe, and reached this place in eight hours, having done twenty-two and a half miles. It was a march full of risk, through valleys crowded with camps, and the guide who rode in front was very much frightened whenever the tremendous barking of the camp dogs threatened to bring robbers down on us in the uncertain light. The caravan was kept in steady order, and the rearguard was frequently hailed by the leader. Nothing happened, and when day broke we were in open russet country, among low, formless gravelly hills, with the striking range of rocky mountains which hems in Khuramabad in front, under a hazy sky.
Later, fording the Kashgan, I got upon the Burujird caravan road, along which are telegraph poles, and on which there was much caravan traffic. Recrossing the Kashgan, but this time by a good two-arched bridge of brick on stone piers, the Yafta Kuh came in sight, and Khuramabad with its green gardens, its walls of precipitous mountains, and its ruined fort on an isolated and most picturesque rock in the centre of the town—a very striking view.
Khuramabad, before the fourteenth century, was called Diz Siyah, or the black fort, and was the capital of the Atabegs, the powerful kings who reigned in Luri-Kushuk from a.d. 1155 to about a.d. 1600. Sir H. Rawlinson does not regard any of its remains as earlier than the eleventh or twelfth century.
The camps are outside the town, on a stretch of burning gravel, with some scorched pasture beyond it, on which are Ilyat camps, then there are divers ranges of blackish and reddish mountains, with pale splashes of scorched herbage when there is any at all. Behind my tent are a clump of willows, an irrigating stream, large gardens full of fruit trees and melons, and legions of mosquitos.
Circumstances have changed, and the surroundings now belong to the showy civilisation of Persia. As I was lying under the trees, quite "knocked up" by the long and fatiguing night march and the great heat, I heard fluent French being spoken with a good accent. The Hakīm of the Governor had called. Cavalcades of Persians on showy horses gaily caparisoned dashed past frequently. Ten infantrymen arrived as a guard and stacked their arms under the willows, and four obsequious servants brought me trays of fruit and sweetmeats put up in vine leaves from the Governor. Melons are a drug. The servants are amusing themselves in the bazars. It is a bewildering transition.
The altitude is only 4050 feet, and the heat is awful—the heat of the Indian plains without Indian appliances. When the men took up stones with which to hammer the tent pegs they dropped them "like hot potatoes." The paraffin candles melt. Milk turns sour in one hour. Even night brings little coolness. It is only heat and darkness instead of heat and light.
I was too much exhausted by heat and fatigue to march last night, and rested to-day as far as was possible, merely going to pay my respects to the Governor of Luristan, the Nizam-ul-Khilwar, and the ladies of his haram. The characteristics of this official's face are anxiety and unhappiness. There was the usual Persian etiquette—attendants in the rear, scribes and mollahs bowing and kneeling in front, and tea and cigarettes in the pretty garden of the palace, of which cypresses, pomegranates, and roses are the chief features. Mirza was not allowed to attend me in the andarun, but a munshi who spoke a little very bad French and understood less stood behind a curtain and attempted to interpret, but failed so signally that after one or two compliments I was obliged to leave, after ascertaining that a really beautiful girl of fourteen is the "reigning favourite." The women's rooms were pretty, and the women themselves were richly but elegantly dressed, and graceful in manner, though under difficulties. After a visit to the ruined fort, an interesting and picturesque piece of masonry, I rode unmolested through the town and bazars.
Khuramabad, the importance of which lies in its situation on what is regarded as the best commercial route from Shuster to Tihran, etc., is the capital of the Feili Lurs and the residence of the Governor of Luristan. Picturesque at a distance beyond any Persian town that I have seen, with its citadel rising in the midst of a precipitous pass, its houses grouped round the base, its fine bridge, its wooded gardens, its greenery, and the rich valley to the south of the gorge in which it stands, it successfully rivals any Persian town in its squalor, dirt, evil odours, and ruinous condition. Two-thirds of what was "the once famous capital of the Atabegs" are now "ruinous heaps." The bazars are small, badly supplied, dark, and rude; and the roads are nothing but foul alleys, possibly once paved, but now full of ridges, holes, ruins, rubbish, lean and mangy dogs, beggarly-looking men, and broken channels of water, which, dribbling over the soil in the bazars and everywhere else in green and black slime, gives forth pestiferous odours in the hot sun.
The people slouch about slowly. They are evidently very poor, and the merchants have the melancholy apathetic look which tells that "trade is bad." The Feili Lurs, who render the caravan route to Dizful incessantly insecure, paralyse the trade of what should and might be a prosperous "distributing point," and the Persian Government, though it keeps a regiment of soldiers here, is unsuccessful in checking, far less in curing the chronic disorder which has produced a nearly complete stagnation in trade.
I am all the more disappointed with the wretched condition of Khuramabad because the decayed state of its walls is concealed by trees, and it is entered by a handsome bridge 18 feet wide and 900 long, with twenty-eight pointed arches of solid masonry, with a fine caravanserai with a tiled entrance on its left side. The Bala Hissar is a really striking object, its pile of ancient buildings crowning the steep mass of naked rock which rises out of the dark greenery and lofty poplars and cypresses of the irrigated gardens. This fort, which is in ruins, encloses within its double walls the Wali's palace and other official buildings, and a fine reservoir, 178 feet by 118, fed by a vigorous spring. In the gardens by the river, north of the fort, are some remains of the walls and towers of the ancient Atabeg capital, and there are also ruins of an aqueduct and of an ancient bridge, of which ten arches are still standing. The most interesting relic, however, is a round tower sixty feet high in fairly good preservation, with a Kufic inscription round the top.