From this account it will be easy to understand how Persia Proper acquired and maintained the character of “a scant land and a rugged,” which we find attaching to it in ancient authors.  The entire area, as has been already observed was about 100,000 square miles—­little more than half that of Spain, and about one fifth of the area of modern Persia.  Even of this space nearly one half was uninhabitable, consisting either of barren stony mountain or of scorching sandy plain, ill supplied with water, and often impregnated with salt, the habitable portion consisted of the valleys and plains among the mountains and along their skirts, together with certain favored spots upon the banks of streams in the flat regions.  These flat regions themselves were traversed in many places by rocky ridges of a singularly forbidding aspect.  The whole appearance of the country was dry, stony, sterile.  As a modern writer observes, “the livery of the land is constantly brown or gray; water is scanty; plains and mountains are equally destitute of wood.  When the traveller, after toiling over the rocky mountains that separate the plains looks down from the pass he has won with toil and difficulty upon the country below, his eye wanders unchecked and unrested over an uniform brown expanse losing itself in distance.”

Still this character, though predominant, is not universal.  Wherever there is water, vegetation springs up.  The whole of the mountain region is intersected by valleys and plains which are more or less fertile.  The line of country between Bebahan and Shiraz is for above sixty miles “covered with wood and verdure,” in East of Shiraz, on the route between that city and Kerman the country is said to be in parts “picturesque and romantic,” consisting of “low luxuriant valleys or; plains separated by ranges of low mountains, green to their very summits with beautiful turf.”  The plains of Khubbes, Merdasht, Ujan, Shiraz, Kazerun, and others, produce abundantly under a very inefficient system of cultivation.  Even in the most arid tracts there is generally a time of greenness immediately after the spring rains, when the whole country smiles with verdure.

It has been already remarked that the Empire, which, commencing from Persia Proper, spread itself towards the close of the sixth century before Christ, over the surrounding tracts, included a number of countries not yet described in these volumes, since they formed no part of any of the four Empires which preceded the Persian.  To complete, therefore, the geographical survey proper to our subject, it will be necessary to give a sketch of the tracts in question.  They will fall naturally into three groups, an eastern, a north-western, and a southwestern—­the eastern extending from the skirts of Mount Zagros to the Indian Desert, the north-western from the Caspian to the Propontis, and the south-western from the borders of Palestine to the shores of the Greater Syrtis.