Identifier: travelsingeorgia02port (find matches)
Title: Travels in Georgia, Persia, Armenia, ancient Babylonia, &c. &c. : during the years 1817, 1818, 1819, and 1820
Year: 1821 (1820s)
Authors: Porter, Robert Ker, Sir, 1777-1842
Subjects: Porter, Robert Ker, Sir, 1777-1842
Publisher: London : Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown
Contributing Library: Tisch Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Boston Library Consortium Member Libraries

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but tlie revered corse within, having been not only the favourite queen of their great caliph Haroun-al-Raschid, but in many respects the benefactress of the city,...ng, to break the dreary expanse to the farthest horizon, till the eye, in wandering round, met a lonely and huge dark mass, rising from the verge of the waste to the north-west, like an enormous rock, and which the natives call AkarkoufF. Withdrawing the sight from that black pile, and along; the intervening; stretch of desert, to the immediate scene around me, I looked on the city on both sides of the river ; its sombre and irregularly roofed dwellings, varied l^re and thereby a dome or a minaret; its embattled walls, dark towers, andgardens at intervals breaking the dun line of the streets. These cultivated spaces yield a variety of excellent fruits; pomegranates, grapes, figs, and olives, with the abundant date-tree ; and min-fflin<r their verdant tracts with the animated current of the Tigris, partially shaded by the palm-groves which grow on its steep banks, they presented a cheering object in the dismal waste. But beyond, not an habitable spot appeared for countless * See plate LXVII. in
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TOMB OF ZOBIEDE. page 257 ... miles. When looking down on these delightful gardens, amidst a country thus lying under the curse of nature, they seemed like the last parting smile, on a face haggard with famine, and stiffening into death. The interior of the mausoleum consists of a single chamber, vaulted to the very top of the cone. Some fragments of its originally fine plaistering, coloured, and gilded decorations, still adhere to its sides. Two sarcophagi, of the most simple forms,but now in the saddest neglect, stand on the floor directly under the center of the cone. They do not appear of quite uchancient workmanship, as the spiral shell which shields them from the changes of the elements. The one which contains the relics of Zobiede, was pointed out to me ; the other, I was told, holds the body of a lady equally royally favoured, having been the beloved spouse of one of Haroun-al-Raschids immediate successors; and, not improbably, of Caliph Ameen, the only son of the celebrated queen by whose

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