must be said of him, however, that he showed no impatience to see the
neighboring ruins of Susa. He was not one, this young man who was out
for a bit of a lark, to sentimentalize about antiquity or the charm of
the unspoiled. Yet even such young men are capable of finding the
rumness of strange towns a passable enough lark, to say nothing of the
general unexpectedness of life. And Dizful turned out to be quite as
unexpected, in its way, as Bala Bala. Matthews found that out before he
had been three days in the place, when a sudden roar set all the loose
little panes tinkling in Shir Ali Khan's garden windows.

Abbas explained that this was merely a cannon shot, announcing the new
moon of Ramazan. That loud call of the faith evidently made Dizful a
rummer place than it normally was. Matthews soon got used to the daily
repetitions of the sound, rumbling off at sunset and before dawn into
the silence of the plains. But the recurring explosion became for him
the voice of the particular rumness of the fanatical old border
town--of fierce sun, terrific smells, snapping dogs, and scowling
people. When the stranger without the gate crossed his bridge of a
morning for a stroll in the town, he felt like a discoverer of some lost
desert city. He threaded alleys of blinding light, he explored dim
thatched bazaars, he studied tiled doorways in blank mud walls, he
investigated quaint water-mills by the river, and scarce a soul did he
see, unless a stork in its nest on top of a tall badgir or a naked
dervish lying in a scrap of shade asleep under a lion skin. It was as if
Dizful drowsed sullenly in that July blaze brewing something, like a
geyser, and burst out with it at the end of the unendurable day.

The brew of the night, however, was a different mixture, quite the
rummiest compound of its kind Matthews had ever tasted. The bang of the
sunset gun instantly brought the deserted city back to life. Lights
began to twinkle--in tea houses, along the river, among the indigo
plantations--streets filled with ghostly costumes and jostling camels,
and everywhere voices would celebrate the happy return of dusk so
strangely and piercingly that they made Matthews think of "battles far
away." This was most so when he listened to them, out of sight of
unfriendly eyes, from his own garden. Above the extraordinary rumor that
drifted to him through the arches of the bridge he heard the wailing of
pipes, raucous blasts of cow horns, the thumping of