June 12.—I attended the Vizier’s levée, where there was a most intemperate and clamorous controversy kept up for an hour or two; eight or ten on one side, and I on the other. Amongst them were two moollas, the most ignorant of any I have yet met with in either Persia or India. It would be impossible to enumerate all the absurd things they said. Their vulgarity in interrupting me in the middle of a speech; their utter ignorance of the nature of an argument; their impudent assertions about the law and the Gospel, neither of which they had ever seen in their lives, moved my indignation a little. I wished, and I said it would have been well, if Mirza Abdoolwahab had been there; I should then have had a man of sense to argue with. The Vizier, who set us going at first, joined in it latterly, and said, ‘You had better say God is God, and Muhammad is the prophet of God.’ I said, ‘God is God,’ but added, instead of ‘Muhammad is the prophet of God,’ ‘and Jesus is the Son of God.’ They had no sooner heard this, which I had avoided bringing forward till then, than they all exclaimed, in contempt and anger, ‘He is neither born nor begets,’ and rose up, as if they would have torn me in pieces. One of them said, ‘What will you say when your tongue is burnt out for this blasphemy?’
One of them felt for me a little, and tried to soften the severity of this speech. My book, which I had brought expecting to present it to the king, lay before Mirza Shufi. As they all rose up after him to go, some to the king and some away, I was afraid they would trample on the book; so I went in among them to take it up, and wrapped it in a towel before them, while they looked at it and me with supreme contempt. Thus I walked away alone in my tent, to pass the rest of the day in heat and dirt. What have I done, thought I, to merit all this scorn? Nothing, I trust, but bearing testimony to Jesus. I thought over these things in prayer, and my troubled heart found that peace which Christ hath promised to His disciples.
To complete the trials of the day, a message came from the Vizier in the evening, to say that it was the custom of the king not to see any Englishman, unless presented by the ambassador, or accredited by a letter from him, and that I must, therefore, wait till the king reached Sultania, where the ambassador would be.
June 13.—Disappointed of my object in coming to the camp, I lost no time in leaving it, and proceeded in company with Mr. Canning, who had just joined me from Teheran, towards Kasbin, intending there to wait the result of an application to the ambassador. Started at eleven, and travelled till eleven next morning, having gone ten parasangs or forty miles, to Quishlang. The country all along was well watered and cultivated. The mules being too much tired to proceed, we passed the day at the village; indeed, we all wanted rest. As I sat down in the dust, on the shady side of a walled village by which we passed, and surveyed the plains over which our road lay, I sighed at the thought of my dear friends in India and England, of the vast regions I must traverse before I can get to either, and of the various and unexpected hindrances which present themselves to my going forward. I comfort myself with the hope that my God has something for me to do, by thus delaying my exit.
June 22.—We met with the usual insulting treatment at the caravanserai, where the king’s servants had got possession of a good room, built for the reception of the better order of guests; they seemed to delight in the opportunity of humbling an European. Sultania is still but a village, yet the Zengan prince has quartered himself and all his attendants, with their horses, on this poor little village. All along the road, where the king is expected, the people are patiently waiting, as for some dreadful disaster; plague, pestilence, or famine is nothing to the misery of being subject to the violence and extortion of this rabble soldiery.
June 25. (Zengan.)—After a restless night, rose so ill with the fever that I could not go on. My companion, Mr. Canning, was nearly in the same state. We touched nothing all day.
June 26.—After such another night I had determined to go on, but Mr. Canning declared himself unable to stir, so here we dragged through another miserable day. What added to our distress was that we were in danger, if detained here another day or two, of being absolutely in want of the necessaries of life before reaching Tabreez. We made repeated applications to the moneyed people, but none would advance a piastre. Where are the people who flew forth to meet General Malcolm with their purses and their lives? Another generation is risen up, ‘who know not Joseph.’ Providentially a poor muleteer, arriving from Tabreez, became security for us, and thus we obtained five tomans. This was a heaven-send; and we lay down quietly, free from apprehensions of being obliged to go a fatiguing journey of eight or ten hours, without a house or village in the way, in our present weak and reduced state. We had now eaten nothing for two days. My mind was much disordered from head-ache and giddiness, from which I was seldom free; but my heart, I trust, was with Christ and His saints. To live much longer in this world of sickness and pain seemed no way desirable; the most favourite prospects of my heart seemed very poor and childish; and cheerfully would I have exchanged them all for the unfading inheritance.
June 27.—My Armenian servant was attacked in the same way. The rest did not get me the things that I wanted, so that I passed the third day in the same exhausted state; my head, too, was tortured with shocking pains, such as, together with the horror I felt at being exposed to the sun, showed me plainly to what to ascribe my sickness. Towards evening, two more of our servants were attacked in the same way, and lay groaning from pains in the head.
June 28.—All were much recovered, but in the afternoon I again relapsed. During a high fever Mr. Canning read to me in bed the Epistle to the Ephesians, and I never felt the consolations of that Divine revelation of mysteries more sensibly and solemnly. Rain in the night prevented our setting off.
June 29.—My ague and fever returned, with such a head-ache that I was almost frantic. Again and again I said to myself, ‘Let patience have her perfect work,’ and kept pleading the promises, ‘When thou passest through the waters I will be with thee,’ etc.; and the Lord did not withhold His presence. I endeavoured to repel all the disordered thoughts that the fever occasioned, and to keep in mind that all was friendly; a friendly Lord presiding; and nothing exercising me but what would show itself at last friendly. A violent perspiration at last relieved the acute pain in my head, and my heart rejoiced; but as soon as that was over, the exhaustion it occasioned, added to the fatigue from the pain, left me in as low a state of depression as ever I was in. I seemed about to sink into a long fainting fit, and I almost wished it; but at this moment, a little after midnight, I was summoned to mount my horse, and set out, rather dead than alive. We moved on six parasangs. We had a thunder-storm with hail.