The female costume is also different. The women, unveiled, bold-faced, and handsome in the Meg Merrilees style, wear black sleeveless jackets vandyked and tasselled, red skirts, and black handkerchiefs rolled round their heads. Little Persian is spoken or even understood, and everything indicates that the limit of Persia proper, i.e. the Persia of Persians, has been passed. Gaukhaud is a village of 350 houses, grows wheat, barley, grapes, and melons; and though a once splendid caravanserai on a height is roofless and ruined, and the village has no better water than an irrigation ditch, it is said to be fairly prosperous.
The march to Babarashan is for twenty miles along a featureless irrigated valley about a mile wide, with grass and stubble, several beehive villages, and mud hills never over 150 feet high on either side. Crossing a brick bridge over a trifling stream, and passing through the large village of Tulwar, where men who were burying a corpse politely laid fried funeral-cakes flavoured with sesamum on my saddle-bow, we ascended over low scorched hills, much ploughed for winter sowing, to the beehive village of Babarashan, of 180 houses, abundantly supplied with water, where we camped close to some tents of the Kara Tepe and a large caravan. The dust blown across the camp from the threshing-floors was obnoxious but inevitable. The "sharp threshing instruments having teeth" are not used in this region, but mobs of animals, up to a dozen, tied together, oxen, cows, horses, and asses, are driven over the wheat.
I am finding the disadvantages of having an untrained servant. Johannes that evening ran hither and thither without method, never finished anything, spent an hour in bargaining for a fowl, failed to get his fire to burn, consequently could not cook or make tea, and I went supperless to bed. The same confusion prevailed the next morning, but things have been better since. No life is so charming as camp life, but incompetent servants are a great drawback.
Another uninteresting march of twenty miles over high table-lands and through a valley surrounded by mud hills, with quaint outcrops of broken rock on their summits, and a pass through some picturesque rocky hills brought us into a basin among mountains, in which stands the rather important town of Bijar in the midst of poplars, willows, apricots, and vines. Bijar is said to have 5000 inhabitants. It has a Governor for itself and the surrounding district, and a garrison of a regiment of infantry and 100 sowars to keep the turbulent frontier Kurds in order. It has ruinous mud walls, no regular bazars, only shops at intervals; fully a third is in ruins, and most of the houses and even the Governor's palace are falling into decay. It is, however, accounted a thriving place, and is noted for gelims and carpenters' work. It has four caravanserais, hardly habitable, however, seven hammams, and a few mosques and mollahs' schools. It has an air of being quite out of the world. I have been here two days, and as foreigners are very rarely seen, the greater part of the population has strolled past my tent.
I camped as usual outside the walls, near a small spring, and soon a farash-bashi came from the Governor, with a message expressive of much annoyance at my having "camped in the wilderness when I was their guest, and they would have given me a safe camping-ground in the palace garden." Mirza took my introduction to him, and he sent a second message saying that the next three marches were "very dangerous," and appointed an hour for an interview. Soon eight infantrymen, well uniformed and set up, with rifles and fixed bayonets, arrived and mounted guard round my tent, changing every six hours. This completed Sharban's discomfiture.
Various difficulties arose on Sunday, and much against my will I had to call on the Governor. He received me in a sort of durbar. A great number of men, litigants and others, crowded the corridors and reception-rooms. He looked bloated and dissipated, and seemed scarcely sober. He sat on cushions on the floor, with a row of scribes and mollahs on his right, and many farashes and soldiers stood about the door. Seyyids, handsome and haughty, glanced at me contemptuously, and the drunken giggle of the Khan and the fixed scowl of the motionless row of scribes were really overpowering. Tea was produced, but the circumstances were so disagreeable that I did not wait for the conventional third cup. The Khan said that the ladies are in the country a few miles off, and hoped I would visit them, that some marches on the road are unsafe, and that he would give me a letter which would be useful in procuring escorts after I left his jurisdiction, and he has since sent it. He was quite courteous, as indeed all Persians of the upper classes are, but I hope never again to pass through the ordeal of calling upon a Moslem without a European escort.
Later, the principal wife of the military commander of the district called with a train of shrouded women, followed by servants bringing an abundant dinner, with much fruit. She came to ask me to take up my quarters in the very handsome house which is her husband's, very near my tent. After a good deal of intelligent conversation she asked if I had a husband and children, and on my replying in the negative she expressed very kindly sympathy, but added, "There are things far worse, things which can never be where, as among you, there is only one wife. One may have a husband and children, and yet, God knows, be made nearly mad by troubles," and she looked as if indeed her sorrows were great. Doubtless a young wife has been installed as favourite, or there is a divorce impending.
Takautapa, September 24.—This is a great grain-growing region, and by no means unprosperous, but it only yields one crop a year, the land is ploughed immediately after harvest, and the irrigation is cut off until sowing-time. Consequently nothing can exceed the ugliness of the aspect of the country at this time. There is not one redeeming feature, and on the long marches there is rarely anything to please or interest the eye. On the march from Bijar there was not a green thing except some poplars and willows by a stream, not a blade of grass, not a green "weed,"—nothing but low mud hills, with their sides much ploughed and the furrows baked hard, and unploughed gravelly stretches covered sparsely with scorched thistles.
Eight miles of an easy descent of 1500 feet brought us to the Kizil Uzen, a broad but fordable stream, on the other side of which is Salamatabad, a village consisting chiefly of the large walled gardens and houses of the Governor of Bijar. A little higher up there is a solid eight-arched stone bridge, over 300 feet long. This Kizil Uzen is one of the most important streams in north Persia. It drains a very large area, and after a long and devious course enters the Caspian Sea under the name of the Sefid Rud. Eleven miles from this place I crossed the lofty crest of the ridge which divides the drainage basins of the Kizil Uzen and Urmi. A number of sowars came out and escorted me through a gateway down a road with high walls and buildings on both sides to an inner gateway leading to the Khan's andarun. Here we all dismounted, but the next step was not obvious, for the heavy wooden gate which secludes the andarun was strongly barred, and showed no symptoms of welcome. An aged eunuch put his melancholy head out of a hole at the side, and said that the ladies were expecting me and that food was ready for the animals and the servants, but still the gate moved not. I asked if Mirza could go with me to interpret, the sowars suggesting that he could be screened behind a curtain, quite a usual mode of disposing of such a difficulty. The eunuch returned, and with him the Khan's mother, a fiendish-looking middle-aged woman, who looked through the peep-hole, but on seeing a good-looking young man drew back, and said very definitely that no man could be admitted, especially in the absence of the Khan. All the men were warned off, and the door was opened so as just to allow of my entrance and no more.
The principal wife received me in a fine lofty room with fretwork windows opening on a courtyard with a fountain in it and a few pomegranates, and a crowd of Persian, Kurdish, and negro women, with all manner of babies. The lady is from Tihran, and her manners have some of the ease and polish of the capital. It is still the Moharrem, and she was enveloped in a black chadar, and wore as her sole ornament a small diamond-studded watch as a locket. Her mother-in-law, who, like many mothers-in-law in Persia, fills the post of duenna to the establishment, frightened me by the expression of her handsome face and her sneering, fiendish laugh. It must be admitted that there was much to amuse her, for my slender stock of badly-pronounced Persian is the Persian of muleteers rather than of polite circles, and she mimicked every word I uttered, looking all the time like one of Michael Angelo's "Fates."