180 EXCURSIONS FROM DAMOHAN TO FRAT AND TAK
that I noticed were passed some distance south of Damghan, shortly before reaching the populous village of Khurzan. The natives count these remains as having formed a part of the old city of Kumis, though all that is now visible is a mass of crum- bling clay walls, sometimes covered several feet deep with dust, or with drifts of sand piled yards high against them. I could find no signs of an actual citadel nor of any kind of stone struc- ture, the whole having been built of clay or sun-dried bricks ; but a few tenanted huts in the interior showed that it was still possible to maintain life, even amidst this nonpareil of desolation.
Such was the first of a number of dust-shrouded ruins, the oldest of which was said to be Allan, a short distance to the southwest of Frat. All of these settlements combined to make up Shahr-i Kumis, the natives asserted; and they stated that large bricks, evidently of Gabr size, synonymous with age, were often dug up in the vicinity and applied for building purposes at Frat.^ The presence of such bricks, together with other remains that have been unearthed, as well as traces of sunken aqueducts, have similarly been instanced by Houtum- Schindler as furnishing data to be used in support of the view that the site of ancient Hecatompylos was identical with the old town of Kumis.2 Yet Shahr-i Kumis today is nothing but a field of dust -mounds, a grave of the dead past — dead as the graves by which I stood while taking photographs of the sand- covered site. Some day the spade of the archaeologist may have busy work to do in unearthing chapters of history that may well be hidden here.
The desolation of Shahr-i Kumis had been wrought, the villagers said, when a river that had previously flowed from the mountains on the north, past Amravan, was diverted from its course long ago. The story is that Shah Abbas the Great
1 On ' Gabr ' bricks see my Persia ghan, in JRAS. 1876, p. 427, and cf. Past and Present^ p. 435. the same author's Routen in Choras-
2 See Houtum-Schindler, Notes on sdn, in Zt. Gesellsch. f. Urdkunde, 12. Some Antiquities found near Dam- 216-217.
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