'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎141] (176/714)

FROM KUCHAN TO KELAT-I-NADIRI
]41
we threaded this intricate and precipitous defile, clambering over
the boulders in the river-bed, now confined in a narrow chasm
now emerging upon a neat little valley. MacGregor, who was a
good judge of country from the soldier's point of view, paid no
ordinary, though a well-deserved, tribute to this section of the
Meshed-Kelat road when, in his graphic way, he said :
I certainly have never seen a stronger bit of country than the
twenty-seven miles between Kardeh and Vardeh, it being one continual
succession of impregnable defiles, any one of which would make the
road celebrated. ... Ihe country is more like what one would see in
a nightmare than anything one has ever beheld awake. 1
On the way we pass a mighty lump of sheer rock, perched
upon the top of a 1,000-feet slope, and known as the Kuh-i-
Panjmana or Five-mcm (= about 32 lbs.) Mountain, from a
story about a facetious monarch who invited one of his courtiers
to weigh the airy trifle. A little further, on the left hand, is an
Arabic and Persian inscription upon the smoothed surface of a big
limestone block, some twenty feet above the path, which records a
victory of Sheibani Mohammed I\han, the XJzbeg conqueror of
Bokhara, over the Persian unbelievers in the year of the Hejira
916. We then came to a little village, the name of which was
pronounced to me as Hark (or AV hark), where I found an agreeable
shade in an orchard sloping down to the stream. After another
six miles through the same defile, the valley widened into an open
plain, at the head of which, surrounded by trees, was situated the
larger village of Kardeh. It is an insignificant place, but is the
residence of the chief of a petty district.
October 21.—After skirting the eastern slope of the hills that
enclose the valley of Kardeh, the track to Meshed plunges into a
Road to narrow gorge, called the Derbend-i-Kardeh, through
Meshed which the stream, coursing in rapid zigzags between the
walls, occupied the whole of the slender space between. Above
the lower slopes the cliffs rose in craggy magnificence to a sheer
height of 1,000 or 1,500 feet. This ravine equalled in savage
splendour anything that I had seen even during the past week of
astonishing scenery ; and I could not help thinking that if those
who rave about the Alpine passes, set though they be in the
incomparable framework of snow and ice, could travel to this
unvisited corner of Asia, even their senses would be bewildered by
1 Journey through Khorasan, vol. ii. pp. 44, 49.