'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎136] (171/714)

136
PERSIA
good water by excavating large tanks and bringing in fresh supplies
by an aqueduct from the exterior.
I have only come across one description of Kelat as it was in
the days of Nadir Shah, by a traveller who had evidently been there
Basil himself and had not trusted merely to hearsay. This
Batatzes occurs in the narrative of one Basil Batatzes, a Greek
merchant who travelled far and wide in Persia and Central Asia
at the beginning of the eighteenth century, penetrating to Khiva
and Bokhara and visiting Nadir Shah at Meshed. His diarv,
written in quaint but very intelligible Greek, 1 appears to have been
quite unknown to the historians who from oral evidence compiled
such erroneous descriptions of Kelat in the early part of the present
century, 2 and diffused an altogether false impression of the place
that remained uncorrected till the visit of Baker and Gill in 1873.
Returning from Bokhara to Meshed in 1728, Batatzes came byway
of Kelat, to which he devotes forty lines of his diary (780-822). The
mountains here rise, he says, to a great and inaccessible height,
and the place is surrounded, as it were, by a mighty wall, which is
not only barren and treeless but is like as though made of marble
or of brass. The circuit thereof is forty or fifty stadia [this is one
of his few mistakes]. and there are two entrances only, and those by
means of zigzag approaches. One might say that the mountains
had been rent asunder by an earthquake to form these entrances,
where there is barely space for three horsemen or footmen to pass.
Of the interior of Kelat (which was then under Nadir's fostering
care, very different from what it is now) he will only say that it con
tains all that a man can want in the way of natural delights, and
that it is self-sufficing and could sustain itself without ever bring
ing in aught from the outside. He also speaks of it as the intended
treasure house of Nadir Shah.
1 It has been edited by M. Ch. Schefer in Nouveanx Melanges Orientaux (one
of the Publications de VFcole des Laiujues Orient ales T ir antes'), Paris, 1886.
Basil Batatzes, or Basile Vatace, as his French editor calls him, also wrote a
biography of Nadir Shah, which has disappeared.
2 For instance, Malcolm, using Kinneir as his authority, thus describes the
place : ' The fort of Killaat is situated about thirty miles north-east of Meshed.
It is upon a very high hill, only accessible by two narrow paths. An ascent of
six or seven miles terminates in a plain about twelve miles in circumference,
watered by several fine streams, and covered with verdure and cultivation. A
second ascent by a route of ten or eleven miles leads to another plain of greater
elevation but of equal richness.'— History of Persia, vol. i. cap. iii., vol. ii. cap.
xv.