The next twenty miles involved repeated crossings of a river in a ravine, whose gradients, or rather the absence of them, showed that a motor can be as good as a mule if driven with enterprise. At half-past three we stopped for the night. A shrine stood near the road, screened by a grove of umbrella-pines, whose sweet smell has reminded me of the Pinetum at Ravenna. How vivid those memories of Italy remain! I might have been a dentist, or a public man, but for that first sight of a larger world. The inner court is planted with the same trees; horhju they are called. At the top of the avenue stands a demure arch, whose tin cupolas flashed us welcome from a distance. This marks the tomb of a Sheikh-al-Islam who was killed—beheaded they say—while fighting the Persians in 1807. His son Abul Kasim erected the shrine, and planted the trees, to his memory.
