296       IN RUSSIAN TURKESTAN
ruins of ancient Merv, about which Gibbon wrote:
"The Antiochia founded by the Greeks in Hyr-
cania still existed in the days of Timour under
the name of Merve." ' To-day there are still forty
miles of ruins that have never been properly ex-
plored  by  archoologists.    The tombs of the two
standard-bearers of Ali are still in fairly good
preservation, so also is the mosque of Sultan
Sanjar, the hero of the Seljuks.        Unhappily the
Turkomans, who have a practice of making pil-
grimages to these holy ruins, think it right that
each pilgrim should pull out a couple of bricks
from their lower walls, that he may lean them up
against each other in memory of his visit to these
monuments of Islam, so they are not likely to
remain standing many years longer. The beauti-
fully sculptured tomb of one of the standard-
bearers has had a great piece hacked out of it;
this recent act of vandalism was, I am told, the
work of an English tourist.        It is thought that
1 " Its glories and sieges and sacks excited the eloquence of
chroniclers and the wonderment of pilgrims.  Successively a
satrapy of Darius . . . a city and colony of Alexander ; a province
of the Parthians whither Orodes transported the Io,ooo Roman
soldiers whom he took prisoners in his famous victory over Crassus;
the site of a Christian bishopric ; an Arabian capital (where at the
end of the eighth century, Mokannah, the veiled prophet of Khor-
asan, kindled the flame of schism), the seat of power of a Seljuk
dynasty, and the residence and last resting-place of Alp Arslan and
Sultan Sanjar; a prey to the awful scourge of the Mongol, and an
altar for the human hecatombs of Jenghiz Khan; a frontier outpost
of Persia; a bone of armed contention between Bokhara and
Khiva; a Turkoman encampment; and a Russian town."-Curzon's
" Russia in Central Asia."