When Henry Rawlinson sailed for Bombay to enter the service of the East India Company in 1827, he was only seventeen years old. Blessed with an uncanny knack for learning languages, he found this ability stood him in good stead upon his arrival in India. Where other men were beaten by native dialects, he took to them as a duck takes to water. Before he was twenty, he was one of the interpreters for the army of the East India Company, and long before he was thirty he could speak Persian like a native. His remarkable abilities stamped him as a man who would go far, as one destined to play many parts in the ever-changing East. For a time he concentrated his energies on reorganizing the Persian army; at other periods he was frequenting the courts of the Shah and the Amir of Afghanistan, filling the intervals with hard fighting, a good deal of administration, and the pleasure that lay nearest his heart—the study of dialects. The Orient cast a spell over him, and the legends of Persia particularly appealed to his imagination. He was in the land where history began. The past called to him. Little bits of burnt brick with strange marks on them intrigued him. It was as though a robin had hopped all over them while they were wet, and had left behind impressions something like a bird leaves in the snow. He knew these fragments were the old writings, though they were like no known writings on earth, and at last he made up his mind to see if he could find the key to the cuneiform characters. In 1835 Rawlinson, then a young man of twenty-five, took up his residence at Kermanshah, as commander of all the troops in the province. Behistun was no more than 20 miles away, and something must have told the soldier that here was the key to the riddle he sought. So, when opportunity served, he jogged along the old road to the rock of Behistun, and began to copy the inscription. He had no rope, no ladder to assist him. All he had to rely upon were his own sure feet and strong hands. A slip meant certain death, yet the risk sat so lightly on his shoulders that he made his dangerous way up and down the precipice three and four times a day. There came a time when ladders were absolutely essential to secure the copies he needed. So narrow was the ledge at the foot of the sculptures that Rawlinson was forced to place his ladder almost perpendicularly against the face of the rock. For long periods he perched in a most precarious position at the top of the ladder and glued himself to the rock. The least little movement outwards on his part and the ladder would have overbalanced and plunged with him to destruction. He knew it, yet he continued his work as calmly as though he were at a desk instead of standing on a crazy ladder at the edge of a precipice.