"Where trees are generally scarce, the votary," says Ousley, "must not be fastidious in selection; _Dirakht-i-fazels_ are found near tombs containing the bodies of supposed saints, or Imámzádehs, but I have as frequently observed them in desert places where it could not be imagined that they derived any virtue from such sacred relics. "As the Persian villagers in their rustic dialect give the name of _fázel_ (still perhaps retaining its sense as the epithet excellent) to certain preternatural beings, so _Dirakht-i-fazel_ would express 'the tree of the genii.' This circumstance I learn from a note written at my request, after some conversation on the subject, by Mirza Mohammed Saleh, of Shiraz, a very ingenious and well-informed young man of letters. And that preternatural beings were supposed to frequent a certain tree, I learn from an author of the twelfth century, quoted by Hamdallah Cozvini. He relates that among the wonders of Azerbaijan (or Media) there is at the foot of Mount _Sabalan_, a tree, about which grows much herbage; but neither is this nor the fruit of that tree ever eaten by beasts or birds, as they dislike it, and to eat of it is to die. This, as tradition reports, is the residence of jinn or genii."[16] The MS. Diet of Berhan Kattea, contains a long passage concerning two cypress trees of high celebrity among the Magians, the young plants of which had been brought, it is said, from Paradise, by Zeratusht or Zoroaster himself, who in an auspicious hour planted one at _Kashmúr_ and the other at _Fármad_. After they had flourished one thousand four hundred and fifty years, the Arabian _Khalifah_, Motawakel (who reigned in the ninth century), commanded Taher Ben Abdallah, the governor of Khorásán, to cut them down and send both their trunks and branches to Baghdád, near which city he was constructing a palace. With such veneration were these ancient cypresses regarded by the Magians, that they offered, but in vain, fifty thousand _dinars_ or pieces of gold coin, to save them from the fatal axe. At the moment of their fall, an earthquake spread consternation through the surrounding territory. Such was their immense size, that they afforded shade at once to above two thousand cows or oxen and sheep; with the branches alone, thirteen hundred camels were loaded, and in transporting the huge trunks on rollers to Baghdad, five hundred thousand _direms_ (pieces of silver coin) were expended. On the very night that they reached the stage next to Motawakel's new edifice, this Khálifah was assassinated by his servants. Ousley says--"The assassination of Motawakel happened on the tenth of December, in the year of our era 861; and not without a strong suspicion that his own son concurred in the atrocious deed."