There is a great dash of the gambling element in the oil-well business at Baku.  Large sums are spent in boring operations, and success so often stands off that all available capital is sunk in the ground and swallowed up.  Even with good signs, it is impossible to foresee the results or the extent of production, and there is also an extraordinary irregularity in the outcome of the separate naphtha-bearing plots.  An instance was mentioned to me of a peasant proprietor who had made enough money on which to live sumptuously, but he hungered for more, and engaged in further boring operations.  He was on the verge of losing everything, when oil was suddenly struck, and he made a fortune.  He laboured hard himself, and literally went to sleep a poor working man, and awoke to find his dream of riches realized.

Baku has been immensely improved in every way of late, and now has good streets, hotels, and shops.  Water, which was a great want before, is well supplied from condensers which belong to the town.  The rise in the value of house property and building sites within the last ten years has been enormous, and great part of the money thus made has gone to native owners, Persians (or Tartars, as all Mohammedans are called here), and I was told of a plot of building ground with a small house on it, which had been originally bought for 600 roubles, being lately sold for 30,000.  The town is growing in size, and new buildings are rising, which give an appearance of prosperity and increasing trade.  The harbour is crowded with steamers and sailing vessels, and the wharfs present a busy sight.  The loading and unloading is quickly done by steam-cranes and powerful porters, who come in numbers from the Persian districts of Khalkhal and Ardabil.  I watched with much interest a gang of these men at work.  They were wonderfully quick, quiet, and methodical in their ways, and showed great capacity for handling and carrying heavy weights.

Baku swarms with Persians, resident and migratory.  They are seen everywhere—­as shopkeepers, mechanics, masons, carpenters, coachmen, carters, and labourers, all in a bustle of business, so different from Persians, at home.  Climate or want of confidence produces indolence there, but here and elsewhere out of Persia they show themselves to be active, energetic, and very intelligent.  They are in great numbers at all the censes of trade in the adjoining countries—­at Constantinople, Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, Tiflis, Askhabad, and other towns.  Most of the new buildings in Tiflis were built by Persians, and thousands were engaged in the construction of the Trans-Caspian Railway.  The permanent workmen now employed on it are largely Persians, and Askhabad has a resident population of over twelve thousand.  There were said to be twenty thousand Persians, from the provinces of Azerbaijan and Hamadan, working last summer on the new railway from Tiflis to Alexandropol and Kars, now being built, and doubtless many of them will permanently settle on the line.