holy of holies. On the wall I noticed a rough colour print of the Kaaba, and named it to our guide. He was greatly interested, and asked if I had ever been to Mecca, and I fancy reckoned me at once one of the faithful. We were shown the great Koran, a gigantic volume to suit the size of the lectern in Bibi Khanum’s madressah. The famous original was carried to St. Petersburg after the taking of Samarkand by the Russians, but this is said to be a fine sixteenth-century copy of it. There were relics of the saint pointed out to us behind a screen, but we could not make out what they were, and we were shown the beautiful carpet, a fine specimen of those made in Turkestan. Banners of red, blue, and green hang over these treasures, and under them the guardian of the shrine sat down, intimating that he was now prepared to receive a gift. To judge by his attitude he thought it would be a lordly one, but there is always a strange discrepancy in the East between the magnitude of the gift and the air with which it is received. In various nooks and corners people lay curled up asleep, or were drowsily repeating their prayers. While I sketched our two guides were evidently discussing our merits, and at last one inquired if we were Russians, and on hearing that we were not they wanted to know whether we liked the Russians, making it abundantly plain that they did _not_. Nevertheless they acquiesce without much apparent feeling to the yoke of the foreigner, no doubt accepting it as “Fate.” One of the interesting points to visit outside Samarkand is the tomb of the prophet Daniel, whom the people insist on considering to be the hero of Scripture history. We drove to it through the town, passing out of the market up a steep dusty road. A mosque dominates the city from the brow of the hill, and around it is a large cemetery of dreary, neglected graves. It was from this point that I sketched the city, and while doing so was somewhat startled by finding a large tortoise at my side, which had crawled out of the grass. The road is primitive, but no one expects anything else, and constant carriage exercise no doubt is good for the inhabitants in lieu of any other kind. The way leads through sandy, hillocky ground (suggestive of dunes by the seashore) for about a couple of miles, and then the road abruptly ends. We got out of the carriage and the driver led us on foot down a ravine to the tomb. It is the longest tomb one would suppose that could be found anywhere, being about 25 yards in length (Edouard Blanc says), and is finely situated on a rock terrace, with crags rising above it and plenty of trees below it down to the edge of a river. The legend which accounts for the extraordinary length of the tomb is that, owing to some miraculous quality, it grows a few inches every year, and that by the time it has stretched round the earth Islamism will dominate the whole world.[7] However, the Russian governor