INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. 541
are named so far as I know by no other traveller or geographer. Some remarks regarding them will however be found in the notes
on the narrative.
From Talikhan also to the high land of Pamir we have a similar difficulty in identifying names except that descriptive one Tanga-i-Badaklzsham (" the Straits of Badakshan") which sufficiently indicates the character of the country. But I think there can be little doubt that the route of Gods was substantially the same as that followed by Captain John Wood of the Indian Navy on his famous journey to the source of the Oxus. Badakhshan and the adjoining districts of Tokharestan, inhabited by a race of Tajik lineage and Persian speech, would seem in the middle ages not merely to have enjoyed that fame for mineral productions (especially rubies and lapis lazuli) of which a shadow still remains, but at least in their lower valleys to have been vastly more populous and productive than they now are. The " Oriental Geography" of the tenth century translated by Ouseley, and Edrisi in the twelfth century, both speak of these as fruitful and well-peopled regions flourishing with trade and wealth. Marco Polo in the thirteenth century speaks of Talikhan and the adjoining districts in similar terms. Not long before his time the chief fortress of Talikhan held Chinghiz and his Tartar host at bay for six months.' The savage conqueror left not a living soul of the garrison, nor one stone upon another. And the present town of Talikhan, the representative of the place defended by this strong and valiant garrison, is a paltry village of some four hundred clay hovels.2 Fyzabad, the chief city of Badakhshan, once famous over the east, was, when Wood passed through the country, to be traced only by the withered trees that had once adorned its gardens, and the present capital of the country (Jerm) was but a cluster of
1 D'Ohsson, i, 273. There was another Talikhan in Khorasan, between Balkh and Merw (see tables of Nasiruddin in Hudson, iii, 107). And the authors of the Modern Universal History appear to have taken this for the city besieged by Chinghiz (French Trans., iii, 356). But the narrative shows that it was Talikhan in Tokharestan, on the border of Baclakhshan. Edrisi describes both cities, but curiously his French translator, M. Jaubert, takes both for the same (i, 468, 476).
2 Tiro od, p. 241.
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