I think that Hadji, though in great pain, poor fellow, is partly shamming. He professed this evening to have violent fever, and the thermometer shows that he has none. Even the few things which I thought he had done for me, such as making chapatties, I find have been done by others. It is a pity for himself as well as for me that he should be so incorrigibly lazy.
Taj Khatan, Feb. 18.—Yesterday we had a severe march, and owing first to the depth of the snow, and then to the depth of the mud, we were seven hours in doing twenty-one miles. The wind was still intensely cold—bitter indeed. There are few remarks to be made about a country buried in snow. The early miles were across the fag end of the dazzling plain of Feraghan, which instead of being covered with villages is an uninhabited desert with a salt lake. Then the road winds among mountains of an altitude of 8000 and 9000 feet and more, its highest point being 8350 feet, where we began a descent which will land us at Tihran at a level under 4000 feet. Snowy mountains and snowy plains were behind—bare brown earth was to come all too soon.
Winding wearily round low hills, meeting caravans of camels to which we had to give way, and of asses floundering in the snow, we came in the evening to a broad slope with villages, poplars, walnuts, and irrigated lands, then to the large and picturesquely situated village of Givr on a steep bank above a rapid stream, and just at dusk to the important village of Jairud, also on high ground above the same river, and surrounded by gardens and an extraordinary number of fruit trees. The altitude is 6900 feet.[21] I had a balakhana, very cold, and was fairly benumbed for some time after the long cold march.
A great many people applied for medicine, and some of the maladies, specially when they affect children, make one sick at heart. Hadji is affecting to be stone deaf, so he no longer interprets for sick people, which creates an additional difficulty. We left this morning at ten, descended 2000 feet, and suddenly left the snow behind. Vast, gray, and grim the snow-covered mountains looked as they receded into indigo gloom, with snow clouds drifting round their ghastly heads and across the dazzling snow plains in which we had been floundering for thirty days. It is strange to see mother earth once more—rocky, or rather stony hills, mud hills, mud plains, mud slopes, a brown world, with a snow world above. Two pink hills rise above the brown plain, and some toothed peaks, but the rest of the view is simply hills and slopes of mud and gravel, bearing thorns, and the relics of last year's thistles and wormwood. The atmospheric colouring is, however, very fine.
PERSIAN BREAD-MAKING.
This is a large village with beehive roofs in, and of, mud. A quagmire surrounds it and is in the centre of it, and the crumbling houses are thrown promiscuously down upon it. It is nearly the roughest place I have seen, and the worst accommodation, though Abbas Khan says it is the best house in the village. My room has an oven in the floor, neatly lined with clay, and as I write the women are making bread by a very simple process. The oven is well heated by the live embers of animal fuel. They work the flour and water dough, to which a piece of leaven from the last baking has been added, into a flat round cake, about eighteen inches in diameter and half an inch thick, place it quickly on a very dirty cushion, and clap it against the concave interior of the oven, withdrawing the cushion. In one minute it is baked and removed.
A sloping hole in the floor leads to the fowl-house. The skin of a newly-killed sheep hangs up. A pack saddle and gear take up one corner, my bed another, and the owner's miscellaneous property fills up the rest of the blackened, cracked mud hovel, thick with the sooty cobwebs and dust of generations. The door, which can only be shut by means of a wooden bolt outside, is six inches from the ground, so that fowls and cats run in and out with impunity. Behind my bed there is a doorless entrance to a dark den, full of goat's hair, bones, and other stores. In front there is a round hole for letting in light, which I persistently fill up with a blanket which is as persistently withdrawn. There is no privacy, for though the people are glad to let their rooms, they only partially vacate them, and are in and out all the time. Outside there is mud a foot deep, then a steep slope, and a disgusting green pool, and the drinking water is nauseous and brackish. The village people here and everywhere seem of a very harmless sort.
Kûm, Ash Wednesday, 1890.—It was really very difficult to get away from Taj Khatan. The charvadar came on here, leaving only two men to load twelve mules. M—— practically had to load them himself, and to reload them when the tackle broke and the loads turned. Hadji and the cook were quite incapable, the Afghan orderly, who seemed like a dying man, was left behind; in fact there were no servants and no interpreters, and the groom was so ill he could hardly sit on a horse.