Little Did I Know What Was In Store For Us; For The Glass At Midday
Was Falling-Fast, And At 2 P.M., When We Anchored Off Lenkoran, It
Was Snowing Hard And Blowing Half A Gale.
The western coasts of the Caspian are flat and monotonous.
There are
two ports of call between Baku and Enzelli - Lenkoran, a dismal-looking
fishing-village of mud huts, backed by stunted poplars and a range of
low hills; and Astara, the Russo-Persian frontier. Trade did not seem
very brisk at either port. We neither landed nor took in cargo at
either. A few small boats came out to the ship with fish to sell. The
latter is bad and tasteless in the Caspian, with the exception of
the sturgeon, which abounds during certain seasons of the year. The
fisheries are nearly all leased by Russians, who extract and export
the caviar. There is good shooting in the forests around Lenkoran, and
tigers are occasionally met with. The large one in the possession of
Prince Dondoukoff Korsakoff, mentioned in the first chapter, was shot
within a few miles of the place.
We arrived off Astara about 6.30 that evening. It was too dark to see
anything of the place, but I had, unfortunately for myself, plenty
of opportunities of examining it minutely a couple of days later. We
weighed anchor again at nine o'clock, hoping, all being well, to reach
Enzelli at daybreak. The sea had now gone down, and things looked more
promising.
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