The winegrowers of Hamadan have many difficulties to contend with; among others, the severe cold.  In winter the wine is kept in huge jars, containing six or seven hundred bottles.  These are buried in the ground, their necks being surrounded by hot beds of fermenting horse-dung, to keep the wine from freezing.  But even this plan sometimes fails, and it has to be chopped out in solid blocks and melted for drinking.

Kharzan has a population of about a thousand inhabitants.  It was here that Baker Pasha was brought some years ago in a dying condition, after being caught in a wind-storm on the Kharzan Pass, and lay for three days in the house we were lodging at.  Our old friend showed us a clasp-knife presented him by the colonel, who on that occasion nearly lost both his feet from frost-bite.  Captains Gill and Clayton, [A] of the Royal Engineers and Ninth Lancers, were with him, but escaped unharmed.

Stiff and worn out with the events of the day, we soon stretched ourselves in front of the blazing fire in anticipation of a good night’s rest; but sleep was not for us.  In the next room were a party of Persian merchants from Astrakhan on their way to Bagdad via Teheran, who had been prisoners here for five days, and were now carousing on the strength of getting away on the morrow.  A woman was with them—­a brazen-faced, shrill-voiced Armenian, who made more noise than all the rest put together.  Singing, dancing, quarrelling, and drinking went on without intermission till long past midnight, our neighbours raising such a din that the good people of Kharzan, a quarter of a mile away, must have turned uneasily in their slumbers, and wondered whether an army of fiends had not broken loose.  Towards 1 a.m. the noise ceased, and we were just dropping to sleep, when, at about half-past two in the morning, our drunken friends, headed by the lady, burst into our apartment, with the information, in bad Russian, that a gang of fifty men sent that morning to clear a path through the deep snow had just returned, and the road to Mazreh was now practicable.  The caravans would be starting in an hour, they added.  “And you’d better travel with them,” joined in the lady, contemptuously, “or you will be sure to get into trouble by yourselves.”  A reply more forcible than polite from Gerome then cleared the apartment; and, rekindling the now expiring embers, we prepared for the road.

We set out at dawn for the gate of the village, where the caravans were to assemble.  It was still freezing hard, and the narrow streets like sheets of solid ice, so that our horses kept their legs with difficulty.  We must have numbered fifty or sixty camels, and as many mules and horses, all heavily laden.