'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎276] (317/714)

PERSIA
dashed down in headlong foray upon the helpless bands of travellers
making their way to or from Meshed. Sweeping up whatever
they could get, driving off the animals, and chaining a few score
of captives to their saddle-bows, they galloped off into their
mountain-fastnesses with as much precipitation as that with which
they had come. Already, along the route which I have described
from Meshed to Mazinan, I had seen frequent proofs of their
dreaded presence, in the shape of those small circular towers,
dotted all over the plain like chessmen on a chessboard, which,
from Ashkabad to Meshed, from Sarakhs to Farrah, and from
Shahrud almost to Kum, marked the chosen hunting-grounds of
these terrible moss-troopers of the border. In parts almost every
field had one of these structures, into which, as soon as a rolling
cloud of dust revealed the apparition of the enemy, the husband
man crept by a small hole at the bottom, and, rolling two big stones
against the aperture, waited till the scourge had swept past.
Similar evidence of the terror they inspired, and of the state of
siege which self-preservation imposed upon their possible victims,
is forthcoming along the entire belt of country above named, in
the rude forts erected in every village as a refuge for the in
habitants. Once behind a mud wall the miserable peasants were
safe ; but woe betide them if caught in the open country—death or
the slave-markets of Khiva and Bokhara were then the certain issue.
What the luckless peasant faced every day the timid pilgrim
looked to encounter on this fateful stretch of road which I am
Military about to describe. The most elaborate precautions were
escort taken against the danger. An escort used to leave
Shahrud and Mazinan twice a month, consisting of a number of
so-called foot-soldiers armed with matchlocks, and a mounted
detachment accompanying an old gun. At Miandasht the two
escorts met and relieved each other. The support of the Mazinan
detachment, consisting of 150 matchlock men and twelve artillery
men with their horses, was imposed, in lieu of the ordinary taxes,
upon the villagers of that place; and even so late as 1872, when
the Seistan Boundary Commissioners passed this way on their
return to Teheran, they had to travel with an escort of eighty match
locks, a 4^-pounder dragged by six horses, and 150 to 200 mounted
sowars, between Mazinan and Shahrud.
Conolly, Fraser, Eastwick, O'Donovan, and other writers who
journeyed with the pilgrim caravans have left inimitable accounts