Another of the sergeants, a really skilled workman, and fired by the actual boat having been floated, in conjunction with the builder of the first one, resolved to make a real wherry. This they did from various drawings, and they succeeded in building a very handsome boat, having curved planks, which were bent with great trouble with hot water. This boat was also fastened with copper rivets, and really handsomely finished; but though so light that three men could carry it, it held two comfortably, and would probably have been speedy, but it was so terribly crank that no one would venture in it; and though it was ballasted till the gunwale was almost level with the water, it turned over on the slightest movement. This, the second and last boat built by the English in Shiraz, is also at the bottom of one of the tanks. At Ispahan an extraordinary barge was made afterwards by two of the staff for the Zil-es-Sultan, and this could be rowed; but it was a barge, and had no pretensions to be called a boat.
I now started a dog-cart, which I received from Kurrachee, intending it for Ispahan, where there are good roads; as fate would have it, when the thing arrived I had been stationed at Shiraz, where there were next to no roads. I put my trap together with some difficulty, for the wood had warped in the long land journey, and found it to be a big dog-cart of the largest, heaviest, and (luckily) strongest type. Its weight appalled us all.
Followed by a crowd, our servants dragged it outside the city gates, and I put my chestnut horse in. Of course, he had never been in the shafts before. On attempting to urge him forward he sat down, as a dog sits, and declined to stir; this manœuvre he constantly repeated. I now in despair tried an old and valueless grey horse. He walked off with the machine at once, and, barring the want of roads, I had no difficulty. Luckily, the trap was built of a solidity I have never seen, save in railway carriages, and so, regardless of roads, I was able to go about. The stony bed of the river, with an occasional bit of hard road, and thence to the sandy plain of Jaffir-a-bad, was about the only drive.
Here, and here only in the neighbourhood of Shiraz, one sees enormous tarantulas. These beasts, some with bodies as large as a pigeon’s egg and legs in proportion, are very brave; when attacked with a stick, instead of taking flight, they advance threateningly at the person who molests them, and attempt to bite the stick; they are really formidable-looking brutes, covered with brown hair.
A story was told me by the late Dr. Fagergren, a Swede in Persian employ, who had been twenty-five years in Shiraz, to the effect that scorpions, when they see no chance of escape, commit suicide; and he told me, that when one was surrounded by a circle of live coals, it ran round three times and then stung itself to death. I did not credit this, supposing that the insect was probably scorched, and so died. I happened one day to catch an enormous scorpion of the black variety. In Persia they are of two kinds: black; and light green, or greenish yellow; the black variety being supposed to be much the more venomous. The full-grown scorpions generally are from two to three inches long; I have seen one five inches when extended from the tip of the claws to the sting, but he was phenomenal. The one I caught was very large, and to try the accuracy of what I supposed to be a popular superstition, I prepared in my courtyard a circle of live charcoal a yard in diameter. I cooled the bricks with water, so that the scorpion could not be scorched, and tilted him from the finger-glass in which he was imprisoned unhurt into the centre of the open space; he stood still for a moment, then, to my astonishment, ran rapidly round the circle three times, came back to the centre, turned up his tail (where the sting is), and deliberately by three blows stabbed or stung himself in the head; he was dead in an instant. Of this curious scene I was an eye-witness, and I have seen it repeated by a friend in exactly the same way since, on my telling the thing, and with exactly the same result. For the truth of this statement I am prepared to vouch.
Of the effects of the sting of the scorpion (generally only the lower orders are bitten, as they are barefooted, and their work may take them to cool and damp places where the insects love to lie) I have had much experience: I consider it is never fatal, save in the case of infants stung in the throat, but it is very painful, the only remedy being liquid ammonia to the wound, which gives speedy relief.
I have never seen a case of serpent-bite in Persia, and hydrophobia is very uncommon, though it is said to exist. The only case of rabies I have seen is that of Pierson’s dogs, narrated previously. Hornets and wasps sting badly, and frequently I have known death occur in a child much stung. The sting is worse than that of the British wasp. As to the Persian tarantula, it merely bites.
A curious custom in Persia is the “nishan,” or token. The token is some secret conveyed by a third party, as a token or sign of the consent of the giver of the token to the request. Thus a man will say, if away from home, and one wishes to borrow his horse, “Tell my steward to give you my horse, by the ‘nishan’ (or token), that I gave him a present this morning.” As the steward knows that the giving of the present was only known to his master and himself, he hands over the horse at once.