in any other part of Western Asia, here lurks in the thickets, ready to
spring at any moment on the unwary traveller; inundations are frequent,
and carry desolation far and wide; the waters, which thus escape from
the river beds, stagnate in marshes, and during the summer and autumn
heats pestilential exhalations arise, which destroy the stranger,
and bring even the acclimatized native to the brink of the grave. The
Persian monarch chooses the southern rather than the northern side of
the mountains for the site of his capital, preferring the keen winter
cold and dry summer heat of the high and almost waterless plateau to the
damp and stifling air of the low Caspian region.

The narrow tract of which this is a description can at no time have
sheltered a very numerous or powerful people. During the Median period,
and for many ages afterwards, it seems to have been inhabited by various
petty tribes of predatory habits--Cadusians, Mardi, Tapyri, etc.,--who
passed their time in petty quarrels among themselves, and in plundering
raids upon their great southern neighbor. Of these tribes the Cadusians
alone enjoyed any considerable reputation. They were celebrated for
their skill with the javelin--a skill probably represented by the modern
Persian use of the _djereed_. According to Diodorus, they were engaged
in frequent wars with the Median kings, and were able to bring into the
field a force of 200,000 men! Under the Persians they seem to have been
considered good soldiers, and to have sometimes made a struggle for
independence. But there is no real reason to believe that they were
of such strength as to have formed at any time a danger to the Median
kingdom, to which it is more probable that they generally acknowledged a
qualified subjection.

The great country of Armenia, which lay north-west and partly north of
Media, has been generally described in the first volume; but a few