164 THE PULSE OF ASIA
must have been inhabited a long time, for the people keep a donkey-road in repair for the sake of carrying away the soil enriched during the abode of man. The marked similarity of location and plan between Choka and Karaki suggests that they were contemporary. If this is so, the probability that the population was formerly more dense in this region is increased.
Before finally leaving the mountains, I made a détour eastward to Imamla, a terrace village, and Polu in the pasture zone, returning again to Choka. Imamla is the seat of a famous shrine, and I was anxious to visit it because I had heard that the sheikhs had a "tezgireh," or chronicle, relating the history of Choka. I went to the house of the chief sheikh, a most unpriestly young man, with a merry boyish air and two or three wives. As befitted so religious a house, the call to prayer or some one of the five daily prayers seemed to be in progress most of the time. Even the beggars attached to the shrine would pray for five minutes if one gave them a penny. Whenever one of the other five sheikhs came to call, he said, "Salaam," and at once opened his hands in prayer; and of course there were long prayers at meals. One might have thought himself in a monastery, if women had not passed through the courtyard now and again.
The chronicle, which was owned by the sheikh, is said to have been written by one of the scribes of Yusup Khadir Khan Khazi, king of Kashgar in 1000 A. D., at the time of the death of the Four "Imams," or "Saints," from whom the shrine takes its name. The Imams, so the chronicle says, came with the other Mohammedan invaders to convert
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