Apart from the interest attached to
the place, I have never received a kinder or more hospitable welcome
than from the little band of Englishmen who watch over the safety, and
work the wires, of the Indo-European telegraph. They are under a dozen
in number. With cheap horseflesh, capital shooting, the latest books
and papers from India, a good billiard-room and lawn-tennis ground,
time never hangs very heavily. Living is absurdly cheap. A bachelor
can do well on L6 a month, including servants. He has, of course, no
house-rent to pay.
A number of square stone towers about thirty feet high, loopholed and
crenelated, are visible from the caravan-track between Shiraz and
Khaneh Zinian, where we rested the first night. The towers are
apparently of great antiquity, and must formerly have served for
purposes of defence. We lunched at the foot of one on a breezy upland,
with pink and white heather growing freely around, and a brawling,
tumbling mountain stream at our feet. It was like a bit of Scotland
or North Wales. The tower was in a state of decay and roofless, but a
wandering tribe of ragged Eeliauts had taken up their quarters
inside, and watched us suspiciously through the grey smoke of a damp,
spluttering peat fire. They are a queer race, these Eeliauts, [B] and
have little or nothing in common with the other natives. The sight of
a well-filled lunch-basket and flasks of wine (which our kind hosts
had insisted on our taking) would have brought ordinary gipsies out
like flies round a honey-pot, if recollections of Epsom or Henley go
for anything. Not so the Eeliauts, who, stranger still, never even
begged for a sheis - a self-control I rewarded by presenting the
chief, a swarthy handsome fellow, in picturesque rags of bright
colour, with a couple of kerans. But he never even thanked me!
It seemed, next morning, as if we had jumped, in a night, from early
spring into midsummer. Although at daybreak the ice was thick on a
pool outside the caravanserai, the sun by midday was so strong, and
the heat so excessive, that we could scarcely get the mules along.
The road lies through splendid scenery. Passing Dashti Arjin, or "The
Plain of Wild Almonds," a kind of plateau to which the ascent is
steep and difficult, one might have been in Switzerland or the Tyrol.
Undulating, densely wooded hills, with a background of steep limestone
cliffs, their sharp peaks, just tipped with snow, standing out crisp
and clear against the cloudless sky, formed a fitting frame to the
lovely picture before us; the pretty village, trees blossoming on all
sides, fresh green pastures overgrown in places by masses of fern and
wild flowers, and the white foaming waterfall dashing down the side of
the mountain, to lose itself in the blue waters of a huge lake just
visible in the plains below.
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