Among others there was one very powerful, named Mahmoud d'Utmich, who took the title of sultan, and had the courage to attack the czar's troops, by which he was totally defeated, and the story says, that his whole country was made a bonfire on the occasion. Sept. 14, 1722.] In a short time afterwards Peter arrived at the city of Derbent, by the Persians and Turks called Demir Capi, that is, the Iron Gate, and so named from having formerly had an iron gate at the south entrance. The city is long and narrow, its upper part joins to a rocky branch of Mount Caucasus, and the walls of the lower part are washed by the sea, which in violent storms make a breach over them. These walls might pass for one of the wonders of antiquity, being forty feet in height, and six in breadth, defended with square towers at the distance of every fifty feet. The whole work seems one uniform piece, and is built of a sort of brown free-stone mixed with pounded shells, which served as mortar, so that the whole forms a mass harder than marble. The city lies open from the sea, but part of it next the land appears impregnable. There are still some ruins of an old wall like that of China, which must have been built in the earliest times of antiquity, and stretched from the borders of the Caspian Sea to the Pontus Euxinus; and this was probably a rampart raised by the ancient kings of Persia against those swarms of barbarians which dwelt between those two seas. According to the Persian tradition, the city of Derbent was partly repaired and fortified by Alexander the Great. Arrian and Quintus Curtius tell us, that Alexander absolutely rebuilt this city. They say indeed that it was on the banks of the Tanais or Don, but then in their time the Greeks gave the name of Tanais to the river Cyrus, which runs by the city. It would be a contradiction to suppose that Alexander should build a harbour in the Caspian Sea, on a river that opens into the Black Sea. There were formerly three or four other ports in different parts of the Caspian Sea, all which were probably built with the same view; for the several nations inhabiting to the west, east, and north of that sea, have in all times been barbarians, who had rendered themselves formidable to the rest of the world, and from hence principally issued those swarms of conquerors who subjugated Asia and Europe.