About eleven o’clock, when we were well on the way towards Darband-i-Bazian, some alarm was caused by the sight of a small band of horsemen coming from behind us, along our road, and some were for getting their arms ready. But the general run of the passengers shared the opinion that if the approaching riders were Turkish irregular soldiery, there would be nothing to fear, and if they were Hamavands it would be useless to resist, so that our pace did not alter and we proceeded in the jogging way of caravans, apparently unconcerned. Nevertheless the relief was general when the riders were seen to be two irregular Turkish “mule-cavalry” and a handful of shaikhs’ men. These, on coming up with the caravan, proceeded to scrutinise all very carefully, as if in search of someone, and one more officious than the others gave me a fright by holding the bridle of my steed the while he called his comrades, shouting: “Amma niyya? piaeki bash nabi am kabra.” (“Is this not he? this fellow appears not to be a good man.”) But my muleteer affirmed so loudly and strenuously that I was a trader, a friend of the Mosul traders, that they raised a laugh at the horseman’s expense; so, changing his tone, he asked for a cigarette, and having obtained it, rode on with the others, and they passed ahead bound for Chemchemal. It is a long stretch from Baba Murda to Darband-i-Bazian, or it seemed so, for it was already noon--we had started at four in the morning--when we veered to the left, where the hills receded in a kind of bay, and crossed a large patch of cultivated land, where we threw the loads to give the beasts a rest. This was where Rich, the East India Company’s gifted resident at Bagdad in the early part of the 19th century, passed, and noticed in passing, that in 1808 there had been a Turkoman village named Derghezeen. There is nothing now but a little cultivation belonging to Bazian village; nor is there any sign of the ruins Rich mentions, and which he opined to be of Sasanian times; though, in view of the fact that this district was upon the borders of a province which in Sasanian times enjoyed great importance (Holwan), and in which there are still many relics of the Persian occupation of that period, there is every probability that Rich was perfectly right in his surmise. The flanking wall of the valley here broadened greatly in depth from east to west, and became broken into spurs. This affords a passage westwards to get out of Bazian valley, and a long rising approach ends by passing through a neck, not twenty yards wide, whence one emerges as from a door, the hills finishing abruptly at the ridge in which the neck occurs, and which is left, as a wall, by the westwards bound passenger.