Unlike the Bakhtiaris, they neglect agriculture, but they breed and export mules, and trade in carpets, charcoal, horse-furniture, and sheep.
In faith they are Ali Ilahis, but are grossly ignorant and religiously indifferent; they show scarcely any respect to Mohammed and the Koran, and combine a number of ancient superstitions and curious sacrificial rites with a deep reverence for Sultan Ibrahim, who under the name of Bābā Buzurg (the great father) is worshipped throughout Luri-Kushak.
For the tribute payable to Persia no single individual is responsible. The sum to be levied is distributed among the tribes by a general council, after which each subdivision apportions the amount to be paid by the different camps, and the Rish-Sefid (lit. gray-beard) or head of each encampment collects from the different families according to their means.
The task of the Persian tax-collector is a difficult one, for the tribes are in a state of chronic turbulence, and fail even in obedience to their own general council, and the collection frequently ends in an incursion of Persian soldiers and a Government raid on the flocks and herds. Many of these people are miserably poor, and they are annually growing poorer under Persian maladministration.
The Feili Lurs are important to England commercially, because the cart-road from Ahwaz to Tihran, to be completed within two years, passes partly through their country,[47] and its success as the future trade route from the Gulf depends upon their good-will, or rather upon their successful coercion by the Persian Government.
LETTER XIV
Kahva Rukh, Chahar Mahals, May 4.
I left Julfa on the afternoon of April 30, with Miss Bruce as my guest and Mr. Douglas as our escort for the first three or four days. The caravan was sent forward early, that my inexperienced servants might have time to pitch the tents before our arrival.
Green and pleasant looked the narrow streets and walled gardens of Julfa under a blue sky, on which black clouds were heavily massed here and there; but greenery was soon exchanged for long lines of mud ruins, and the great gravelly slopes in which the mountains descend upon the vast expanse of plain which surrounds Isfahan, on which the villages of low mud houses are marked by dark belts of poplars, willows, fruit-trees, and great patches of irrigated and cultivated land, shortly to take on the yellow hue of the surrounding waste, but now beautifully green.