On a portion of road that is unridable from sand I am captured by a rowdyish company of donkey-drivers, returning with empty fruit-baskets from Tabreez.  They will not be convinced that the road is unsuitable, and absolutely refuse to let me go without seeing the bicycle ridden.  After detaining me until patience on my part ceases to be a virtue, and apparently as determined for their purpose as ever, I am finally compelled to produce the convincing argument with five chambers and rifled barrel.  These crowds of donkey-men seem inclined to be rather lawless, and scarcely a day passes lately but what this same eloquent argument has to be advanced in the interest of individual liberty.  Fortunately the mere sight of a revolver in the hands of a Ferenghi has the magical effect of transforming the roughest and most overbearing gang of ryots into peaceful, retiring citizens.  The plain I am now traversing is a broad, gray-looking area surrounded by mountains, and stretching away eastward from Lake Ooroomiah for seventy-five miles.  It presents the same peculiar aspect of Persian scenery nearly everywhere-a general verdureless and unproductive country, with the barren surface here and there relieved by small oases of cultivated fields and orchards.  The villages being built solely of mud, and consequently of the same color as the general surface, are undistinguishable from a distance, unless rendered conspicuous by trees.  Laboring under a slightly mistaken impression concerning the distance to Tabreez, I push ahead in the expectation of reaching there to-night; the plain becomes more generally cultivated; the caravan routes from different directions come to a focus on broad trails leading into the largest city in Persia, and which is the great centre of distribution for European goods arriving by caravan to Trebizond.  Coming to a large, scattering village, some time in the afternoon, I trundle leisurely through the lanes inclosed between lofty and unsightly mud walls thinking I have reached the suburbs of Tabreez; finding my mistake upon emerging on the open plain again, I am yet again deceived by another spreading village, and about six o’clock find myself wheeling eastward across an uncultivated stretch of uncertain dimensions.  The broad caravan trail is worn by the traffic of centuries considerably below the level of the general surface, and consists of a number of narrow, parallel trails, along which swarms of donkeys laden with produce from tributary villages daily plod, besides the mule and camel caravans from a greater distance.  These narrow beaten paths afford excellent wheeling, and I bowl along quite briskly.  As one approaches Tabreez, the country is found traversed by an intricate network of irrigating ditches, some of them works of considerable magnitude; the embankments on either side of the road are frequently high enough to obscure a horseman.  These works are almost as old as the hills themselves, for the cultivation of the Tabreez plain has remained practically an unchanged system for three thousand years, as though, like the ancient laws of the Medes and Persians, it also were made unchangeable.