tea, he quietly beckons me to the fire, removes the
cover and reveals a savory dish of stewed chicken and
onions: this he generously shares with me a few
minutes later, refusing to accept any payment.
As there are exceptions to every rule, so it seems
there are individuals, even among the Persian commercial
classes, capable of generous and worthy impulses;
true the khan-jee obtained more than the value of
the supper in the handful of coppers — but gratitude
is generally understood to be an unknown commodity
among the subjects of the Shah. Soon the obstreperous
cries of “All Akbar, la-al-lah-il-allah”
from the throats of numbers of the faithful perched
upon the caravanserai steps, stable-roof, and other
conspicuous soul-inspiring places, announces the approach
of bedtime. My room is actually found to contain
a towel and an old tooth-brush; the towel has evidently
not been laundried for some time and a public toothbrush
is hardly a joy-inspiring object to contemplate; nevertheless
they are evidences that the proprietor of the caravanserai
is possessed of vague, shadowy ideas of a Ferenghi’s
requirements. After a person has dried his face
with the slanting sunbeams of early morning, or with
his pocket-handkerchief for weeks, the bare possibility
of soap, towels, etc., awakens agreeable reflections
of coming comforts. At seven o’clock on
the following morning I pull out toward Teheran, now
but six chopar-stations distant. Running parallel
with the road is the Elburz range of mountains, a lofty
chain, separating the elevated plateau of Central
Persia from the moist and wooded slopes of the Caspian
Sea; south of this great dividing ridge the country
is an arid and barren waste, a desert, in fact, save
where irrigation redeems here and there a circumscribed
area, and the mountain slopes are gray and rocky.
Crossing over to the northern side of the divide,
one immediately finds himself in a moist climate,
and a country green almost as the British Isles, with
dense boxwood forests covering the slopes of the mountains
and hiding the foot-hills beneath an impenetrable mantle
of green. The Elburz Mountains are a portion
of the great water-shed of Central Asia, extending
from the Himalayas up through Afghanistan and Persia
into the Caucasus, and they perform very much the same
office for the Caspian slope of Persia, as the Sierra
Nevadas do for the Pacific slope of California, inasmuch
as they cause the moisture-laden clouds rolling in
from the sea to empty their burthens on the seaward,
slopes instead of penetrating farther into the interior.
The road continues fair wheeling, but nothing compared with the road between Zendjan and Kasveen; it is more of an artificial highway; the Persian government has been tinkering with it, improving it considerably in some respects, but leaving it somewhat lumpy and unfinished generally, and in places it is unridable from sand and loose material on the surface; it has the appreciable merit of levelness, however, and, for