The road continues level but somewhat loose and sandy; the scenery around becomes strikingly beautiful, calling up thoughts of “Arabian Nights " entertainments, and the genii and troubadours of Persian song.  The bright, blue waters of Lake Ooroomiah stretch away southward to where the dim outlines of mountains, a hundred miles away, mark the southern shore; rocky islets at a lesser distance, and consequently more pronounced in character and contour, rear their jagged and picturesque forms sheer from the azure surface of the liquid mirror, the face of which is unruffled by a single ripple and unspecked by a single animate or inanimate object; the beach is thickly incrusted with salt, white and glistening in the sunshine; the shore land is mingled sand and clay of a deep-red color, thus presenting the striking and beautiful phenomena of a lake shore painted red, white, and blue by the inimitable hand of nature.  A range of rugged gray mountains run parallel with the shore but a few miles away; crystal streams come bubbling lake-ward over pebble-bedded channels from sources high up the mountain slopes; villages, hidden amid groves of spreading jujubes and graceful chenars, nestle here and there in the rocky gateways of ravines; orchards and vineyards are scattered about the plain.  They are imprisoned within gloomy mud walls, but, like living creatures struggling for their liberty, the fruit-laden branches extend beyond their prison-walls, and the graceful tendrils of the vines find their way through the sun-cracks and fissures of decay, and trail over the top as though trying to cover with nature’s charitable veil the unsightly works of man; and all is arched over with the cloudless Persian sky.

Beaming the roads of this picturesque region in search of victims is a most persistent and pugnacious species of fly; rollicking as the blue-bottle, and the veritable double of the green-head horsefly of the Western prairies, he combines the dash and impetuosity of the one with the ferocity and persistency of the other; but he is happily possessed of one redeeming feature not possessed by either of the above-mentioned and well-known insects of the Western world.  When either of these settles himself affectionately on the end of a person’s nose, and the person, smarting under the indignity, hits himself viciously on that helpless and unoffending portion of his person, as a general thing it doesn’t hurt the fly, simply because the fly doesn’t wait long enough to be hurt; but the Lake Ooroomiah fly is a comparatively guileless insect, and quietly remains where he alights until it suits one’s convenience to forcibly remove him; for this redeeming quality I bespeak for him the warmest encomiums of fly-harassed humans everywhere.  Dusk is settling down over the broad expanse of lake, plain, and mountain when I encounter a number of villagers taking donkey-loads of fruit and almonds from an orchard to their village.  They cordially invite me to