WE had been told that the Kelat of the Emperor Nadir Shah was a very marvellous place. When we actually set eyes on it, the most extravagant descriptions seemed less than the truth.

The Persians, who, like the Chinese, attach an overwhelming importance to fortresses, shroud it in the greatest mystery, and use every effort to prevent strangers approaching it. Even travellers with an immense influence behind them had failed to get inside. How ever, in 1919 we were by way of being self-invited allies of the Persians, and as our task was then the defence of Khurasan against the Bolsheviks, they could not very well refuse our commander's entry into Kelati-Nadiri when he asked for it. All the same, they made a great to-do about it, and politely rubbed in the fact that they were conferring a very great honour not accorded to every

one.

To save time, we sent our horses and spare kit, escorted by a few men of the Guides, under Havildar Aslam, a much-scarred Yusafzai veteran of Artois and Africa, a day's march ahead. Next day the Colonel and I set out in the one and only "tin-Lizzie " that the force owned, across the

The

past the blue-tiled dome of Khwaja Rabbi's shrine that glinted in the morning sun, to Razan. The Ford clanked back to Meshed, and mounting our horses we rode on by a rough track into the mountains. month was April, and it had begun to get hot in the middle of the day in that latitude (36° N.), so we pushed along. The several ranges that here compose the Kara Dagh run athwart the trail, and this scrambles laboriously up the gorges of the streams that burst their way abruptly through the iron cliffs. Almost at once we found ourselves in the first of these grey-walled defiles.

The stream-bed was dry, and though the track was strewn with boulders and rough rocks, our horses could trot. We soon climbed over the little ridge at the head of the gorge, past the tall thin headstones of a Persian graveyard to the shallow valley full of smiling corn and barley in the midst of which lay Kardeh, the last Persian village. As we halted a few minutes to renew the clenches on a loose shoe, the pleasant-spoken Katkhuda brought us a tray of melons. Feroz, my young orderly, smiled his engaging Punjabi smile. He liked melons, though he remarked that they had the

ears so wet. My dear old mare, too, was passionately addicted to melons on a hot day. She had a different method of dealing with them. Gripping the tip of a lengthy slice in her pearl-like teeth, she would flap the other end upwards against her velvet nose. She found it delightfully cool, and so in her case this pastime took the place of the powder-puff to which the biped fair is so devoted. With little sighs of regret, Feroz and Marushka tore themselves away from their third water-melon to scramble into the next defile. This extraordinary wall sided gully, the Tang-i-Shikasteh, took us eventually right on to the uplands of the main range. The way led up a succession of rough gorges in between vertically scarped cliffs. Here and there we passed a hamlet, such as Al, embowered in leafy green plane-trees; and once, where the defile widened out a little to fill with vegetation, perched on the very summit of a hill just to the west, there was an immense rock, with sides so absolutely perpendicular that at first sight it seemed like a building of Cyclopean masonry. On our own side of the valley, deep on a great rock-face, in flowing Persian script, was carved a legend. It described how a monarch of the old times, riding up this fair valley, perhaps on his way to Merv, the "Queen of the World," laid a wager with his retinue as to

The

of the immense stone. Shah won. Kings commanded respect in those days, and the stone was dubbed "the rock of thirty pounds' weight,” doubtless to commemorate the estimate of the Court fool.

More gorges followed, flanked now with yellow cliffs several hundred feet high, and filled with low scrub and rank weeds. At last, late in the afternoon, we came to the stones of a ruin where two valleys joined. The right held the bridle-track to the Kelat, but up the valley to the left lay the little hamlet where we proposed to spend the night. The map was vague, to say the least of it: the omission of a 6000-foot mountain range and the misplacement of a village by six or eight miles were as nothing to it. So we had to plod several miles up the unmapped side valley of Balghur before we found the wind-swept hamlet of that name, perched in tiers on a steep-ridged spur several hundred feet above the valley bottom. As we climbed in the dusk up the narrow goattrack several figures loomed past in tall black sheep-skin bonnets like the bearskins of the Foot Guards, and in long wide-sleeved robes of wadded cotton and crimson silk. It was a jolt to our Occidental ideas to find that this village and its surrounding valley were inhabited by Turks. Very soon our horses were tethered, and champing good dry lucerne under the bala-khaneh of a

in a cheery samovar was a-boil and supper a-cooking under Feroz's able management and Transatlantic hustle.

We found that these Turks took no interest in the wars waged by their Osmanli cousins, and we were quite sorry to say good-bye to them next morning. A short cut over a granite ridge took us back to the main valley, and almost at once we were plunged in the most gloomy and forbidding gorge of all, the Zao-i-Pirzan (the gorge of the old woman). At one place the black cliff walls are so close together that a loaded mule has only just room to pass.

The path, beset with thorny scrub, began to be much steeper, and in due course we came on to a pleasant grassy upland like the South Downs, but of some 9000 feet in altitude. An easy little pass led to the great chasm of an open valley running sharply down towards the plains of Turkistan, and draining towards the Murghab, the river of Merv. The path sidled along the flank of the range, a few hundred feet below the steeply scarped crest, and several hundred feet above the stream-bed, down to which the grassy hillsides swept in giddy slopes. A rocky razor-backed col, with the Turkish name of Diveh Boiun, the camel's neck, took us abruptly into the next valley to the north-west, and from its knifeedge we looked down on great open rolling downs, in the midst

nestled the tiny Turkish village of Bardeh. In company with a great number of little bedfellows, we billeted ourselves here, and looked forward to the unfolding of the great mystery on the morrow, which should see us in the secret fastness.

A few miles more of downs, in a clayey soil, soon gave way to a pass very easy of ascent. Then to the north, the track plunged down into an extraordinary valley, an almost perfect V, of which the sides are formed by flat rock faces, tectonic strata all tipped askew by some ancient upheaval. To this succeeded a torrent-crossing, and the passage of another rocky sheer-walled gorge, the Tang-i-Jaour (the gully of the unbeliever). It might well have been the Valley of the Roc. Suddenly across the cramped skyline, and the fantastic silhouette of the craggy sides, as it opened to our view, there sprang a straight-crested toothed line of stark cliffs-the 1000-foot rampart of the Kelat. Mute with astonishment, we rode on past the tiny poplarbowered mountain hamlet of Hammam Kala, to meet a black-bonneted cavalcade, cross bandoliered, with Trokh-Linie, Berdanka, and Osmanli Mauser across their backs, that had ridden out from the stronghold. The Khan had sent his eldest son to welcome us, with the escort that this rugged Alsatia demands. In the unending skirmishes of Turk, Kurd, and

He gave us his father's hospitable message with the natural courtesy of a boy of good family, and we cantered along, ahead of the wild squealing stallions, leaping the stone walls of tiny boulder-littered fields, under the shale slopes that ran down from that amazing line of cliffs.

Not the least wonderful was that it ran for a good many miles in either direction in a perfectly straight grey line, as if planned by a draftsman, to spring sheer up, ignoring the green folds and valleys and hills of the natural lie of the country, which seemed to surge, like wintry breakers against a sea-wall, about its flank. Here and there a watch-tower, outlining itself high up against the sky, showed the hand of man.

Round a corner, past a clump of infrequent hardy trees, we rode over a shingly stream into a frowning black gorge. Across its gloomy forbidding midst there stretched a mighty arched wall of ancient ashlar, and in this in some bygone decade the imprisoned stream had burst a gap.

Through the gorge at last we came into the legendary cliff-girt hold.

granite-speckled hills and bleak wind-swept spurs outside gave place in a twinkling to smiling little sunny fields bowered in trees, some of them bearing fruit, as we rode in through the "Gate of Argavan Shah," past the village at its mouth, where stood a couple of brass field - guns. Rounded, easysloped downs covered with good grazing came into our purview as we trotted along the narrow stone-walled lanes that divided the fields from the sheep-dotted slopes of herbage. But always in the background there frowned above the pleasant pastures the harsh crenelated line of the outer walls. Now and then some sheep-skinned man, or a woman in the local tartanplaid that is so astonishingly Scottish, would salute the young Khan or stare wonderingly at the British officers or at the half dozen spick - and - span Guides that rode behind them, their gleaming saddles, burnished bits, and meticulously kept arms somewhat in contrast to the raffishness of the middle-East cavalier. The tartan plaids that this tribe of Turks share with their Kurdish neighbours caused Colonel Macgregor to speculate. He was the first, and very nearly the last, European ever to enter Kelat-i-Nadiri back in the early 'seventies. Though when one reflects that the Kurd is of the same Nordic clan that inhabits the East of Scotland, it is not difficult to comprehend that the same tradition has

the two far-sundered mountain regions.

In just over a couple of miles from the entrance, we came to Ja-i-Gumbaz, the main village of the whole district, that holds the ancient palace of the Kurdish Emperor Nadir where lives the Khan of to-day. A cobbled street led through a massive gateway to a sort of outer bailey, with a stableyard on its right, and brought us face to face with a great circular stone tower. Its base formed a sort of arcade, before which stood another ancient field-piece, whilst the cylindrical shaft of the tower ran up in cabled fluting like a Greek pillar to a height of some scores of feet.

The Khan, whose name we learned was Fatteh-ul-Mulk, led us to the guest-chambers, through a garden filled with dense foliage of Europe and tufted poplars of Asia, to the rear of the great shaft; and soon over deep china bowls of tea we forgot the asperities of the journey in listening to the legends of this wonderful fortress.

Asia, ruling from aristocratic Georgian Tiflis to thick-lipped Dravidian Delhi. Perhaps some of his progeny charged for the Frankish emperor under the December sun on that great day of Austerlitz, or perished on the Bérésina ice.

The Persian likes to think that Nadir was himself a Persian, and so to boast about the Persian conquest of Hindustan. Sir Percy Sykes tells us that in Shiraz in 1916 the Persians vaunted that "a hundred Kashgai could chase a thousand Indians." A little practical experience forced them ruefully to admit that “a hundred dred sepoys could chase a thousand Kashgais," and they might well have made it "ten thousand." For, in common with a great many people who might be expected to know better, they had not the gumption to realise that the Indians, whose faces Nadir ground into the dust, were of a very different race and fibre to the Aryan Punjabi, whom the war, following up the good work of the Mutiny, has made the backbone of the army. To-day, of course, no one with any practical experience has the least doubt that a single company of Punjabi mounted infantry could overrun Persia, Bolsheviks or no Bolsheviks.

Nadir, on his return from the ravishing of India, came back to his native heath with loot worth, worth, even in those days, seven millions sterling. He must have remembered the