Across Persia on a Pony

Aboard ship Martyn had allowed his beard and moustache to grow.  When he landed at Bushire he bought and wore the clothes of a Persian gentleman, so that he should escape from attracting everybody’s notice by wearing clothes such as the people had never seen before.

No one who had seen the pale, clean-shaven clergyman in black silk coat and trousers in Cawnpore would have recognised the Henry Martyn who rode out that night on his pony with an Armenian servant, Zechariah of Isfahan, on his long one hundred and seventy mile journey from Bushire to Shiraz.  He wore a conical cap of black Astrakhan fur, great baggy trousers of blue, bright red leather boots, a light tunic of chintz, and over that a flowing cloak.

They went out through the gates of Bushire on to the great plain of burning sand that stretched away for ninety miles ahead of them.  They travelled by night, because the day was intolerably hot, but even at midnight the heat was over 100 degrees.  It was a fine moonlight night; the stars sparkled over the plain.  The bells tinkled on the mules’ necks as they walked across the sand.  All else was silent.

At last dawn broke.  Martyn pitched his little tent under a tree, the only shelter he could get.  Gradually the heat grew more and more intense.  He was already so ill that it was difficult to travel.

“When the thermometer was above 112 degrees—­fever heat,” says Martyn, “I began to lose my strength fast.  It became intolerable.  I wrapped myself up in a blanket and all the covering I could get to defend myself from the air.  By this means the moisture was kept a little longer upon the body.  I thought I should have lost my senses.  The thermometer at last stood at 126 degrees.  I concluded that death was inevitable.”

At last the sun went down:  the thermometer crept lower:  it was night and time to start again.  But Martyn had not slept or eaten.  He could hardly sit upright on his pony.  Yet he set out and travelled on through the night.

Next morning he had a little shelter of leaves and branches made, and an Arab poured water on the leaves and on Martyn all day to try to keep some of the frightful heat from him.  But even then the heat almost slew him.  So they marched on through another night and then camped under a grove of date palms.

“I threw myself on the burning ground and slept,” Martyn wrote.  “When the tent came up I awoke in a burning fever.  All day I had recourse to the wet towel, which kept me alive, but would allow of no sleep.”

At nine that night they struck camp.  The ground threw up the heat that it had taken from the sun during the day.  So frightfully hot was the air that even at midnight Martyn could not travel without a wet towel round his face and neck.