They look like real little chieftains now, both in dress and deportment. Scarlet roundabouts, trimmed with a profusion of gold braid, bedeck their consequential bodies; red slippers embroidered with gold thread cover their feet, and their snowy turbans end in a gold-flecked tuft of transparent muslin that imparts a bantam-like air of superiority. Their father comes and squats down beside me, and, as we sip tea together, he bestows a fond, parental smile upon the three scarlet poppies sitting motionless, with heads slightly bent and eyes downcast, before us, and inquires by an eloquent sweep of his chin what I think of them as specimens of simon-pure nobility.
All through Persia the word “ob” has heretofore been used for water; but linguistic changes are naturally to be expected near the frontier, and the Darmian people use the term “ow.” Upon my calling for ob, the khan’s attendant stares blankly in reply; but an animated individual in the front ranks of the crowd about the doors and windows enlightens him and me at the same time by shouting out, “Ow! ow! ow!”
The muezzin, calling the faithful to their evening prayers, likewise utters the summons here at Darmian quite differently from anything of the kind heard elsewhere.
The cry is difficult to describe; but without meaning to cast reflections on the worthy muezzin’s voice, I may perhaps be permitted to mention that the people are twice admonished, and twice a listening katir (donkey) awakens the echoing voices of the rock-ribbed gulch in vociferous response.
The mother-in-law of the mirza lives at Darmian, and, like a dutiful son, he lingers in her society until nine o’clock next morning. At that hour he turns his horse’s footsteps down the bed of the stream, while his comrade guides me for a couple of miles over a most abominable mountain-trail, rejoining the river and the dutiful son-in-law at Foorg. Foorg is situated at the extremity of the gulch, and is distinguished by a frowning old castle or fort, that occupies the crest of a precipitous hill overtopping the village and commanding a very comprehensive view of the country toward the Afghan frontier.
The villages of Darmian and Foorg, looking out upon wild frontier territory, inhabited chiefly by turbulent and lawless tribes-people whose hereditary instincts are diametrically opposed to the sublime ethics of the decalogue have no doubt often found the grim stronghold towering so picturesquely above them an extremely convenient thing.
The escort points it out and explains that it belongs to the “Padishah at Teheran,” and not to his own master, the Ameer—a national, as distinct from a provincial, fortification. The cultivated environs of Foorg present a most discouraging front to a wheelman; walled gardens, rocks, orchards, and ruins, with hundreds of water-ditches winding and twisting among them, the water escaping through broken banks and creating new confusion where confusion already reigns supreme. Among this indescribable jumble of mud, water, rocks, ruins, and cultivation, pitched almost at an angle of forty-five degrees, the natives climb about bare-legged, impressing one very forcibly as so many human goats as they scale the walls, clamber over rocks, or wade through mud and water.