While my tent was being pitched, the Governor's aide-de-camp, attended by a cavalry escort, called, and with much courtesy offered me the balakhana, arranged, he said, in European fashion. The Governor was absent, but this officer said that it would be his wish to offer me hospitality. As I felt quite unable to move he sent a skin of good water, some fruit, and a guard of four soldiers.
It was only 11 a.m. when the tents were pitched, and the long day which followed was barely endurable. The mercury reached 124° inside my tent. The servants lay in a dry ditch under a tree in the Governor's garden. Boy several times came into the shade of my verandah. The black flies swarmed over everything, and at sunset covered the whole roof of the tent so thickly that no part of it could be seen. The sun, a white scintillating ball, blazed from a steely sky, over which no cloud ever passed. The heated atmosphere quivered over the burning earth. I was at last ill of fever, and my recipe for fighting the heat by ceaseless occupation failed. It was a miserable day, and at one time a scorching wind, which seemed hot enough to singe one's hair, added to the discomfort. "As the hireling earnestly desireth the shadow," so I longed for evening, but truly the hours of that day were "long drawn out." The silence was singular. Even the buzzing of a blue-bottle fly would have been cheerful. The sun, reddening the atmosphere as he sank, disappeared in a fiery haze, and then the world of Daulatabad awoke. Parties of Persian gentlemen on fiery horses passed by, dervishes honoured me by asking alms, the Governor's major-domo called to offer sundry kindnesses, and great flocks of sheep and goats, indicated by long lines of dust clouds, moved citywards from the hills. Sand-flies in legions now beset me, and the earth, which had been imbibing heat all day, radiated it far into the morning. I moved my bed outside the tent and gave orders for an early start, but the charvadar who was in the city over-slept himself, and it was eight the next day before I got away, taking Mirza with me.
The heat culminated on that day. Since then, having attained a higher altitude, it has diminished.[15] The road to Jamilabad ascends pretty steadily through undulating country with small valleys among low hills, but with hardly any villages, owing to the paucity of water. The fever still continuing, I found it difficult to bear the movement of the horse, and dismounted two or three times and lay under an umbrella by the roadside. On one of these halts I heard Mirza's voice saying in cheerful tones, "Madam, your horse is gone!" "Gone!" I exclaimed, "I told you always to hold or tether him." "I trusted him," he replied sententiously. "Never trust any one or any horse, and least of all yourself," I replied unadvisedly. I sent him back with his horse to look for Boy, telling him when he saw him to dismount and go towards him with the nose-bag, and that though the horse would approach it and throw up his heels and trot away at first, he would eventually come near enough to be caught. After half an hour he came back without him. I asked him what he had done. He said he saw Boy, rode near him twice, did not dismount, held out to him not the nose-bag with barley but my "courier bag," and that Boy cantered out of sight! For the moment I shared Aziz Khan's contempt for the "desk-bred" man.
Mirza is so good that one cannot be angry with him, but it was very annoying to hear him preach about "fate" and "destiny" while he was allowing his horse to grind my one pair of smoked spectacles into bits under his hoofs. I only told him that it would be time to fall back on fate and destiny when, under any given circumstances, such as these, he had exhausted all the resources of forethought and intelligence. My plight was a sore one, for by that time I was really ill, and had lost, as well as my horse and saddle, my food, quinine, writing materials, and needle-work. I got on the top of the baggage and rode for five hours, twice falling off from exhaustion. The march instead of being thirteen miles turned out twenty-two, there was no water, poor Mirza was so "knocked up" that he stumbled blindly along, and it was just sunset when, after a series of gentle ascents, we reached the village of Jamilabad, prettily situated on the crest of a hill in a narrow valley above a small stream.
To acquaint the ketchuda with my misfortune, and get him to send a capable man in search of the horse, promising a large reward, and to despatch Hassan with a guide in another direction, were the first considerations, and so it fell out that it was 10 p.m. before I was at rest in my tent, where I was obliged to remain for some days, ill of fever. The next morning a gentle thump, a low snuffle, and a theft of some grapes by my bedside announced that Boy was found, and by the headman's messenger, who said he met a Seyyid riding him to Hamadan. The saddle-cloth was missing, and all the things from the holsters, but after the emissary had been arrested for some crime the latter were found in his large pockets. Hassan returned late in the afternoon, having been surrounded by four sowars, who, under the threat of giving him a severe beating, deprived him of his watch.
When I was so far better as to be able to move, I went on to Mongawi, a large walled village at an elevation of 7100 feet, camped for two days on an adjacent slope, and from thence rode to Yalpand by a road on a height on the east side of a very wild valley on the west of which is Elwend, a noble mountain, for long an object of interest on the march from Kirmanshah to Tihran. A great number of the mountains of Persia are ridges or peaks of nearly naked rock, with precipices on which nothing can cling, and with bases small in proportion to their elevation. Others are "monstrous protuberances" of mud and gravel. Mount Elwend, however, has many of the characteristics of a mountain,—a huge base broken up into glens and spurs, among which innumerable villages with their surroundings of woods and crops are scattered, with streams dashing through rifts and lingering among pasture lands, vine-clothed slopes below and tawny grain above, high summits, snow-slashed even now, clouds caught and falling in vivifying showers, indigo colouring in the shadows, and rocky heights for which purple-madder would be the fittest expression.
In one of the loveliest of the valleys on the skirts of Elwend lies the large walled village of Yalpand on a vigorous stream. For two miles before reaching it the rugged road passes through a glen which might be at home, a water-worn ledgy track, over-arched by trees, with steep small fields among them in the fresh green of grass springing up after the hay has been carried. Trees, ruddy with premature autumnal tints and festooned with roses and brambles, bend over the river, of which little is visible but here and there a flash of foam or a sea-green pool. The village, on a height above the stream, has banks of orchards below and miles of grain above, and vineyards, and material plenty of all sorts. It was revelling in the dust storm which winnowing produces, and the ketchuda suggested to me to camp at some distance beyond it, on a small triangular meadow below a large irrigation stream. Hardly were the tents pitched when, nearly without warning, Elwend blackened, clouds gathered round his crest and boiled up out of his corries, and for the first time since the middle of January there were six hours of heavy rain, with hail and thunder, and a fall of the mercury within one hour from 78° to 59°. The coolness was most delicious.
Hadji Hussein's prophecy that after I left him I should "know what charvadars are" was not fulfilled on this journey. I had one young man with me who from having performed the pilgrimage to Kerbela bears the name of "Kerbelai" for the rest of his life. He owns the fine and frisky animals he drives, and goes along at a good pace, his long gun over his shoulder, singing as he goes. Blithe, active, jolly, obliging, honest, kind-hearted, he loads as fast as three ordinary men, and besides grooming and feeding his animals well, he "ran messages," got the water and wood, and helped to pitch and strike the tents, and was as ready to halt as to march. Hassan and Mirza are most deliberate in their movements; nothing can hurry them, not even the risk of being flooded out of their tents; and when the storm came on Kerbelai snatched the spade from them and in no time trenched my tent and dug a channel to let the water out of the meadow.
The next day was cloudless, and the sky, instead of having a whitish or steely blue, had the deep pure tint so often seen on a June day in England. The heat returned, and it was a fatiguing and dusty march into Hamadan, still mainly on the skirts of Elwend, among villages surrounded by vineyards. After pursuing a by-road from Jamilabad I joined the main road, two miles from Hamadan, and the number of men on good horses, of foot passengers, and of asses laden with fruit and vegetables, indicated the approach to a capital as plainly as the wide road, trenched on both sides and planted with young willows.
The wall as is usual is of crumbling, rain-eaten, sun-dried bricks, and a very poor gateway admits the traveller into a network of narrow alleys, very ruinous, with infamous roadways, full of lumps, holes, slimy black channels, stout mangy dogs, some of them earless, tailless, and one-eyed, sleeping in heaps in the hot sun, the whole overwhelmingly malodorous.[16]