at and enjoy
anything not seen every day; on the other hand, the occupants of the
house regard their misfortune as kismet.

Returning to the chapar-ktiana, I get the shayird to pilot me into and
round about the fortress. It is rapidly falling to decay, but is still in
a sufficiently good state of preservation to show thoroughly its former
strength and conformation. The fortress is a decidedly massive building,
constructed entirely of mud and adobe bricks, a hundred feet high, of
circular form, and some two hundred yards in circumference. The
disintegrated walls and debris of former towers form a sloping mound or
foundation about fifty feet in height, and from this the perpendicular
walls of the castle rise up, huge and ugly, for another hundred feet.
Following a foot-trail up the mound-like base, we come to a low, gloomy
passage-way leading into the interior of the fort. A door, composed of
one massive stone slab, that nothing less than a cannon-shot would
shatter, guards the entrance to this passage, which is the only
accessible entrance to the place. Following it along for perhaps thirty
yards, we emerge upon a scene of almost indescribable squalor--a scene
that instantly suggests an overcrowded "rookery" in the tenement-house
slums of New York. The place is simply swarming with people, who, like
rabbits in an old warren, seem to be moving about among the tumble-down
mud huts, anywhere and everywhere, as though the old ruined fortress were
burrowed through and through, or that the people now moved through, over,
under, and around the remnants of what was once a more orderly collection
of dwellings, having long forsaken regular foot-ways.

The inhabitants are ragged and picturesque, and meandering about among
them, on the most familiar terms, are hundreds of goats. Although
everything is in a more or less dilapidated condition, huts or cells
still rise above each other in tiers, and the people clamber about from
tier to tier, as if in emulation of their venturesome four-footed
associates, who are here, we may well imagine, in as perfect a paradise
as vagrom goatish nature would care for or expect. At a low estimate, I
should place the present population of the old fortress at a thousand
people, and about the same number of goats. In the days when the bold
Turkoman raiders were wont to make their dreaded damans almost up to the
walls of Teheran, and such strongholds as this were the only safeguard of
out-lying village