'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎292] (333/714)

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292
PERSIA
Lasgird
circular mound to a total height of perhaps eighty feet from the
plain. The citadel has fallen into ruin, and the buildings in its
interior are a litter of rubbish and bricks. But the vil
lagers have established themselves in the deserted enceinte,
and, on the very top of the outer walls, have built a double storey of
mud houses, which are only accessible by flights of crazy steps
from the interior, and the most remarkable feature of which is a
ledge or balcony built out from each storey with rude logs of wood
plastered over with mud. Upon this rickety platform, which has
nothing in the shape of a railing to prevent anyone from falling
off, and which is full of holes, the inhabitants appear to live their
outdoor life. The place, from a little distance, looks as if a gigantic
colony of birds had settled there and built out their nests from the
walls, the outer shape of the entire mound resembling a huge cask.
It is entered by a steep stairway from the ground, mounting to a
small postern, the door of which is a single block of stone swung
on a pivot. I entered, and scrambled up the rude flights of steps
in the interior, and poked my nose into some of the nests—I cannot
call them cottages—in the upper storeys. The women were un
veiled and steeped in squalor. The general condition of the
tenements was very much like what the domestic economy of a
rookery might be expected to be. Here the same dialect is spoken
as at Semnan. The citadel is surrounded by a deep, broad fosse,
converted into garden-plots, the revenues of which go to swell the
endowment of the Imam Reza at Meshed.
After leaving Lasgird the route conducts through a hilly
region which has been furrowed by winter torrents into deep gullies
and ravines crossed by bridges. Upon descending again
into the plain, the village of Deh Netnek (Salt Village)
can be seen, at least twelve miles away, in the middle of an un
utterably barren and repulsive desert. Few things are more
treacherous in Persian travel than the false expectation induced by
the sight of one's destination at the apparent distance of a few
miles only, or more wearying than the disappointment that follows
as the miles lengthen out into farsakhs, and the end never seems
to come. What, in the distance, had appeared a settlement of two
buildings only, turned out to be a village with a good many houses,
hidden in a little semi-fertile depression of ' the level waste, the
rounding grey.' In the succeeding strip of country—which is not
less desolate—we pass, at the villages of Padeh and Aradan, 1 further
1 Fraser calls this place Heratoo.
Road to
Kishlak