Fortunately the road improves rapidly, developing beyond the Nishapoor Valley into smooth, upland camel-trails that afford quite excellent wheeling.  The Nishapoor Valley impresses me as about the finest area of cultivation seen in Persia, except, perhaps, the Tabreez Plain; and toward Gadamgah the country gets positively beautiful—­at least, beautiful in comparison.  Crystal streamlets come purling and gurgling across the road over pebbly beds; and, looking northward for their source, one finds that the usually gray and uninteresting foot-hills have changed into bright, green slopes, on whose cheerful brows are seen an occasional pine or cedar.  Overtopping these green, grassy slopes are dark, rugged rocks, and higher still the grim white region of—­winter.  Somewhere behind these emerald foot-hills, near Gadamgah, are the famous turquoise mines alluded to in the “Veiled Prophet of Khorassan.”  The mines are worked at the present time, but only in a desultory and unenterprising manner.

Favored with good roads, I succeed in reaching Gadamgah before dark, where, besides a comfortable and commodious caravanserai, and the pleasure of seeing around a number of fine-spreading cedars, one can obtain the rare luxury of pine-wood to build a fire.

Immediately upon my arrival a knowing and respectable-looking old pilgrim, who calls himself a hadji and a dervish from Mazan-deran, rescues me from the annoying importunities of the people and invites me to share the accommodation of his menzil.  Augmenting his scanty stock of firewood and obtaining eggs and bread, quite a comfortable evening is spent in reclining beside the blazing pine-wood fire, which is itself no trifling luxury in a country of scanty camel-thorn and tezek.  Whenever the prying curiosity of the occupants of neighboring menzils impels them to visit our quarters, to stand and stare at me, my friend the hadji waxes indignant, and, waving a stick of firewood threateningly toward them, he pours forth a torrent of withering and sarcastic remarks.  Once, in his wrath, he hops lightly off the menzil floor, seizes an individual twice his own size by the kammerbund, jerks him violently forward, bids him stare until he gets ashamed of staring, and then, turning him round, shoves him unceremoniously away again, pursuing him as he retreats to his own quarters with vengeful shouts of “y-a-h!”

To a few eminently respectable travellers, however, the hadji graciously accords the coveted privilege of squatting around our fire and chatting.  Being himself a person who dearly loves the music of his own voice, he holds forth at great length on the subject of himself in particular, dervishes in general, and the Province of Mazanderaii.  Like a good many other people conscious of their own garrulousness, the hadji evidently suspects his auditors of receiving his statements with a good deal of allowance; consequently, when impressing upon them the circumstance of his hailing from Mazanderan—­a fact that he seems to think creditable in some way to himself—­he produces from the depths of his capacious saddlebags several dried fish of a variety for which that province is celebrated, and exhibits them in confirmation of his statements.