He was next shown over the Bank of England, his remarks on which are devoid of interest, and he visited the Paddington terminus of the Great Western Railway, in the hope of gaining a more accurate idea of the nature of the locomotive machinery, the astonishing powers of which he had witnessed in his journey to Southampton.  But mechanics were not the Khan’s forte; and, dismissing the subject with the remark, that “it is so extremely complicated and difficult that a stranger cannot possibly understand it,"[6] he returns at once to the haunts of fashion, Hyde Park and the Opera.  Hitherto the khan had been unaccountably silent on the subject of the “Frank moons, brilliant as the sun,” (as the English ladies are called by the Persian princes, who, from the first, lose no opportunity of commemorating their beauty in the most rapturous strains of Oriental hyperbole;) but his enthusiasm is effectually kindled by the blaze of charms which meets his eye in the “bazar of beauty and garden of pleasure,” as he terms the Park, his account of which he sums up by declaring, that, “were the inhabitants of the celestial regions to descend, they would at one glance forget the wonders of the heavens at the sight of so many bright eyes and beautiful faces! what, therefore, remains for mortals to do?” The Opera is, he says, “the principal tomashagah” (place of show or entertainment) in London, and best decorated and lighted;” though he does not go the length of affirming, as stated in the account given by the Persian princes, that “before each box are forty chandeliers of cut glass, and each has fifty lights!”—­“I could not,” continues the khan, “understand the subject of the performances—­it was all singing, accompanied with various action, as if some story were meant to be related; but I was also told that the language was different from English, and that the majority of those present understood it no more than myself.”  The scanty drapery and liberal displays of the figurantes at first startled him a little; but “the beauty of those peris was such as might have enslaved the heart of Ferhad himself;” and he soon learned to view all their pirouettes and tours-de-force with the well-bred nonchalance of a man who had witnessed in his own country exhibitions nearly as singular in their way “though the style of dancing here was of course entirely different from what we see in India.”  The impression made by the sight of the ballet on the Parsees, who invariably reduce every thing to pounds, shillings, and pence, took a different form; and they express unbounded astonishment, on being told that Taglioni was paid a hundred and fifty guineas a-night, “that such a sum should be paid to a woman to stand a long time like a goose on one leg, then to throw one leg straight out, twirl round three or four times with the leg thus extended, curtsy so low as nearly to seat herself on the stage, and spring from one side of the stage to another, all which jumping about did not occupy an hour!”