"This space of time is estimated in a very ancient fashion by floating a copper bowl with a needle hole in the bottom in a large vessel of water. The tasht comes to an end as the bowl sinks. The distribution is regulated by the number of tashts that each man has a right to. If he has a right to twenty he will receive water for three and three-quarter hours of the day or night every tenth day." Land without water in Persia is about as valuable as the "south lands" were which were given to Caleb's daughter.
So far as I can learn, the Persian peasant enjoys a tolerable security of tenure so long as he pays his rent. A common rate of rent is two-thirds of the produce, but on lands where the snow lies for many months, even when they are "wet lands," it is only one-third; but this system is subject to many modifications specially arising out of the finding or non-finding of the seed by the owner, and there is no uniformity in the manner of holding land or in assessing the taxes or in anything else, though the system established 1400 years ago is still the basis of the whole.[48]
The line between the oasis and the desert is always strongly marked and definite. There is no shading away between the deep green of the growing wheat and the yellow or red gravel beyond. The general impression is one of complete nakedness. The flowers which in this month bloom on the slopes are mostly stiff, leathery, and thorny. The mountains themselves viewed from below are without any indication of green. The usual colouring is grayish-yellow or a feeble red, intensifying at sunset, but rarely glorified owing to the absence of "atmosphere."
It is a very solitary route from Pul-i-Kala, without villages, and we met neither caravans nor foot passengers. The others rode on, and I followed with two of the Bakhtiari escort, who with Rustem Khan, a minor chief, had accompanied us from Julfa. These men were most inconsequent in their proceedings, wheeling round me at a gallop, singing, or rather howling, firing their long guns, throwing themselves into one stirrup and nearly off their horses, and one who rides without a bridle came up behind me with his horse bolting and nearly knocked me out of the saddle with the long barrel of his gun. When the village of Charmi came in sight I signed to them to go on, and we all rode at a gallop, the horsemen uttering wild cries and going through the pantomime of firing over the left shoulders and right flanks of their horses.
The camps were pitched on what might be called the village green. Charmi, like many Persian villages, is walled, the wall, which is much jagged by rain and frost, having round towers at intervals, and a large gateway. Such walls are no real protection, but serve to keep the flocks and herds from nocturnal depredators. Within the gate is a house called the Fort, with a very fine room fully thirty feet long by fifteen high, decorated with a mingled splendour and simplicity surprising in a rural district. The wall next the courtyard is entirely of very beautiful fretwork, filled in with amber and pale blue glass. The six doors are the same, and the walls and the elaborate roof and cornices are pure white, the projections being "picked out" in a pale shade of brown, hardly darker than amber.
The following morning Miss Bruce left on her return home, and Mr. Douglas and I rode fourteen miles to the large village of Kahva Rukh, where we parted company. It is an uninteresting march over formless gravelly hills and small plains thinly grassed, until the Gardan-i-Rukh, one of the high passes on the Isfahan and Shuster route, is reached, with its extensive view of brown mountains and yellow wastes. This pass, 7960 feet in altitude, crossing the unshapely Kuh-i-Rukh, is the watershed of the country, all the streams on its southern side falling into the Karun. It is also the entrance to the Chahar Mahals or four districts, Lar, Khya, Mizak, and Gandaman, which consist chiefly of great plains surrounded by mountains, and somewhat broken up by their gravelly spurs.
Beyond, and usually in sight, is the snow-slashed Kuh-i-Sukhta range, which runs south-east, and throws out a spur to Chigakhor, the summer resort of the Bakhtiari chiefs. The Chahar Mahals, for Persia, are populous, and in some parts large villages, many of which are Armenian and Georgian, occur at frequent intervals, most of them treeless, but all surrounded by cultivated lands. The Armenian villages possess so-called relics and ancient copies of the Gospels, which are credited with the power of working miracles.[49]
The Chahar Mahals have been farmed to the Ilkhani of the Bakhtiaris for about 20,000 tumans (£6000) a year, and his brother, Reza Kuli Khan, has been appointed their governor. Thus on crossing the Kahva Rukh pass we entered upon the sway of the feudal head of the great Bakhtiari tribes.
We camped outside the village, my tents being pitched in a ruinous enclosure. The servants are in the habit of calling me the Hakīm, and the report of a Frank Hakīm having arrived soon brought a crowd of sick people, who were introduced and their ailments described by a blue horseman, one of the escort.
His own child was so dangerously ill of pneumonia that I went with him to his house, put on a mustard poultice, and administered some Dover's powder. The house was crammed and the little suffering creature had hardly air to breathe. The courtyard was also crowded, so that one could scarcely move, all the people being quite pleasant and friendly. I saw several sick people, and was surprised to find the village houses so roomy and comfortable, and so full of "plenishings." It was in vain that I explained to them that I am not a doctor, scarcely even a nurse. The fame of Burroughes and Wellcome's medicine chest has spread far and wide, and they think its possessor must be a Hakīm. The horseman said that medicine out of that chest would certainly cure his child.[50] I was unable to go back to the tea which had been prepared in the horseman's house, on which he expressed great dismay, and said I must be "enraged with him."