"بلاد فارس والشأن الفارسي من إعداد السيد المحترم جورج ناثانييل كورزون، عضو البرلمان." [‎٢‎٥‎٩] (٧١٤/٢٩٨)

FROM MESHED TO TEHERAN 259
Wolff, travelling for the first time to Meshed, so narrowly escaped
being taken a prisoner by a band of wild Hazaras. There is a
small village round the caravanserai, and the chapar-hhaneh stands
hard by.
There was no sun in the early morning, and a cold white mist
ran shivering along the mountains. Two hours after starting we
Corpse- passed the village and caravanserai of Sultanabad, where
caravans ^ my baggage horse, seeing his opportunity, bolted down
the intricate alleys of the village, and we had quite a game of hide
and seek before we could drive him out again. There were many
hundreds of travellers upon the road, chiefly going Meshed-way,
and all or nearly all on horseback, a sign of greater affluence than
the employment of a donkey. I was on the look-out for coffins of
defunct Shiahs on their way to the great necropolis of Meshed;
and from the descriptions of previous travellers recognised the
ghastly burden as soon as I saw it. Some that I passed were
wrapped m black felt, and slung on either side of donkeys.
One man, however, was carrying a very long coffin in front of him on
his saddle-bow, and must have had moments of strange emotion.
Sometimes a regular corpse-caravan is met, which has been
chartered to convey so many score of departed Shiahs to their
final resting-place. But as frequently an amateur carrier is
encountered, who, to pay the expenses of his own journey and leave
a little for amusement at the end, contracts to carry the corpse of
some wealthier fellow-citizen or friend. It was a long and stony
and fatiguing ride to the next post-house at Kadamgah.
At Kadamgah the Dehrud route from Meshed descends from
the mountains on to the plain and joins that upon which I
Kadamgah travelled - name means ' the place of the step,' the
tiadition being that the Imam Reza halted here on his
way to Tus, and, in order to convince the local fire -worshippers of
his superiority, left the imprint of his foot upon a black stone,
which became a ziarat gah, or place of pilgrimage, ever afterwards. 1
Over the sacred spot a mosque was raised, not, as Eastwick says,
by Shah Abbas, but by Shah Suleiman, and the sanctity of the
site has led to its being peopled by a colony of seyids, who are as
1 There is another Kadamgah near Persepolis, in the province of Fars, so
called from the alleged footprint of Ali's horse on a slab of rock. Captain Wells
Proceedings of the R.G.S. (New Series), vol. v. (1883). Some Sassanian sculp-
tures near Shiraz were also called Kadamgah by the seventeenth century writers.