'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎288] (329/714)

288
PERSIA
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Dismissing, however, tlie identity of Damghan with Hekatompylos
as a question of purely speculative interest, we may find enough of
romance in the history of the town under its modern name. 1 It
is needless to say that Jenghiz Khan destroyed it once, or to add
that Timur destroyed it again. That was a compliment invariably
paid by those rival scourges of humanity to urban magnificence.
Don Ruy di Clavijo, passing through Northern Persia on his embassy
from the Castilian King to the Court of the Great Tartar in 1404,
found still standing at Damghan two towers of human heads set in
mud, which, but a few years before, the latter had erected as atrophy.
Shah Abbas rebuilt the town and constructed its citadel. Here, in
October 1729, Nadir Shah gained his great victory over the Afghan
Ashraf, which heralded the final expulsion of the aliens in the
following year. Here, in 1763, Zeki Khan, the savage half-brother
of Kerim Khan Zend, being despatched to quell a revolt of the
Kajar tribe, planted a garden with his prisoners, head downwards,
at even distances; and here, in 1796, perished the miserable
grandson of Nadir, Shah llukh, from the effects of the inhuman
torture inflicted upon him at Meshed by Agha Mohammed Shah.
In the present century Damghan is said to have been finally ruined
by a friend, instead of a foe, having never recovered from the en
campment here, for three months, in 1832, of the army of Abbas
M irza on its way to Herat. No flight of locusts could have in
flicted a more wholesale devastation. The population is reported
now to be 13,000. I cannot credit it.
After leaving Damghan the road strikes due west, and traverses
first a gravelly, and afterwards a richly-cultivated, plain to Gliushah,
Dowleta- a P^ ice consisting only of two buildings—a caravanserai A roadside inn providing accommodation for caravans (groups of travellers).
ba(i and a posthouse, which the exigencies of travel have
conjured up in an otherwise untenanted expanse. The only in
teresting spot passed on the way is the deserted fort of Dowletabad,
with a triple wall of enclosure, surrounded by a deep fosse. Sixty
years ago Sergeant Gibbons, an Englishman serving in the army of
Abbas Mirza, said it was ' one of the best little forts he had seen
in Persia.' 2 Its chief, who had held out for some time against the
exactions of the provincial Governor, offered Abbas Mirza a bribe
1 For early notices of Damghan, ride Istakhri, Vi/e Regnorvm, p. 211; M u '
kadessi, Detcnptio I viper ii Moslemici, p. 256 ; Yakut, Dictionnaire Geographiqve,
p. 233.
2 Journal of the R.G.S., vol. xi. p. 136 (1841).