Ab-dul said it was more.  From the well-known Persian characteristic of exaggerating things, we concluded from this that perhaps it might be fifteen miles; and on this basis Mr. Meyrick, of the Indo-European Telegraph staff, agreed to bear me company.  The ramparts consist of the earth excavated from a ditch some forty feet wide by twenty deep, banked up on the inner side of the ditch; and on top of this bank it is our purpose to encompass the city.

Eight o’clock on the appointed morning finds us on the ramparts at the Gulaek Gate, on the north side of the city.  A cold breeze is blowing off the snowy mountains to the northeast, and we decide to commence our novel walk toward the west.  Following the zigzag configuration of the ramparts, we find it at first somewhat rough and stony to the feet; on our right we look down into the broad ditch, and beyond, over the sloping plain, our eyes follow the long, even rows of kanaat mounds stretching away to the rolling foothills; towering skyward in the background, but eight miles away, are the snowy masses of the Elburz Range.  Forty miles away, at our back, the conical peak of Demavend peeps, white, spectral, and cold, above a bank of snow-clouds that are piled motionless against its giant sides, as though walling it completely off from the lower world.  On our left lies the city, a curious conglomeration of dead mud-walls, flat-roofed houses, and poplar-peopled gardens.  A thin haze of smoke hovers immediately above the streets, through which are visible the minarets and domes of the mosques, the square, illumined towers of the Shah’s anderoon, the monster skeleton dome of the canvas theatre, beneath which the Shah gives once a year the royal tazzia (representation of the tragedy of “Hussein and Hassan"), and the tall chimney of the arsenal, from which a column of black smoke is issuing.  Away in the distance, far beyond the confines of the city, to the southward, glittering like a mirror in the morning sun, is seen the dome of the great mosque at Shahabdullahzeen, said to be roofed with plates of pure gold.  As we pass by we can see inside the walls of the English Legation grounds; a magnificent garden of shady avenues, asphalt walks, and dark-green banks of English ivy that trail over the ground and climb half-way up the trunks of the trees.  A square-turreted clock-tower and a building that resembles some old ancestral manor, imparts to “the finest piece of property in Teheran” a home-like appearance; the representative of Her Majesty’s Government, separated from the outer world by a twenty-four-foot brick wall, might well imagine himself within an hour’s ride of London.