Some of the sights of the road were painful. For instance, just as I passed a caravan of the dead bound for Kûm a mule collided with another and fell, and the loosely-put-together boxes on its back gave way and corpses fell out in an advanced stage of decomposition. A camel just dead lay in a gully. On a ledge of rock above it seven gorged vultures (not the bald-headed) sat in a row. They had already feasted on him to repletion. I passed several dead camels, and one with a pleading pathetic face giving up the ghost on the road.
Yesterday I rode in here from the magnificent caravanserai of Shashgird, sixteen miles in three hours before lunch, and straight through the crowded bazars to the telegraph office unmolested, an Afghan camel-driver's coat, with the wool outside, having proved so good a disguise that the gholam who was sent to meet me returned to his master saying that he had not seen a lady, but that a foreign soldier and sahib had come into Kûm.
When my visit was over and I had received from Mr. Lyne the route to Isfahan, and such full information about rooms, water, and supplies as will enable me to give my own orders, and escape from the tyranny of the charvadars, having sent the horses to the caravanserai I disguised myself as a Persian woman of the middle class in the dress which Mrs. Lyne wears in the city, a thick white crêpe veil with open stitch in front of the eyes, a black sheet covering me from head to foot, the ends hanging from the neck by long loops, and held with the left hand just below the eyes, and so, though I failed to imitate the totter and shuffle of a Persian lady's walk, I passed unnoticed through the long and crowded streets of this fanatical city, attended only by a gholam, and at the door of my own room was prevented from entering by the servants till my voice revealed my identity.
Twice to-day I have passed safely through the city in the same disguise, and have even lingered in front of shops without being detected. Mr. and Mrs. Lyne have made the two days here very pleasant, by introducing me to Persians in whose houses I have seen various phases of Persian life. On reaching one house, where Mrs. Lyne arrived an hour later, I was a little surprised to be received by the host in uniform, speaking excellent French, but without a lady with him.
He had been very kind to Hadji, who, he says, is rich and has three wives. The poor fellow's lungs have been affected for two years, and the affection was for the time aggravated by the terrible journey. He talked a good deal about Persian social customs, especially polygamy.
He explained that he has only one wife, but that this is because he has been fortunate. He said that he regards polygamy as the most fruitful source of domestic unhappiness, but that so long as marriages are made for men by their mothers and sisters, a large sum being paid to the bride's father, a marriage is really buying "a pig in a poke," and constantly when the bride comes home she is ugly or bad-tempered or unpleasing and cannot manage the house. "This," he said, "makes men polygamists who would not otherwise be so.
"Then a man takes another wife, and perhaps this is repeated, and then he tries again, and so on, and the house becomes full of turmoil. There are always quarrels in a polygamous household," he said, "and the children dispute about the property after the father's death." Had he not been fortunate, and had not his wife been capable of managing the house, he said that he must have taken another wife, "for," he added, "no man can bear a badly-managed house."
I thought of the number of men in England who have to bear it without the Moslem resource.
A lady of "position" must never go out except on Fridays to the mosque, or with her husband's permission and scrupulously veiled and guarded, to visit her female friends. Girl-children begin to wear the chadar between two and three years old, and are as secluded as their mothers, nor must any man but father or brother see their faces. Some marry at twelve years old.
"La vie des femmes dans la Perse est très triste," he said. The absence of anything like education for girls, except in Tihran, and the want of any reading-book but the Koran for boys and girls, he regards as a calamity. He may be a pessimist by nature: he certainly has no hope for the future of Persia, and contemplates a Russian occupation as a certainty in the next twenty years.