'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎13] (44/714)

INTRODUCTORY 13
the unhampered choice both of means of progression and of pace,
there is a joyous revulsion from the sterile conventionality of life
and locomotion at home. Something, too, must be set down to
the gratified spirit of self-dependence, which legions of domestics
have not availed to subdue, and to the love of adventure, which not
even the nineteenth century can extinguish. Or is it that in the
East, and amid scenes where life and its environment have not
varied for thousands of years, where nomad Abrahams still wander
with their flocks and herds, where Eebecca still dips her water
skin at the well, where savage forays perpetuate the homeless
miseries of Job, western man casts off the slough of an artificial
civilisation, and feels that he is mixing again with his ancestral
stock, and breathing the atmosphere that nurtured his kind ?
Upon the vivid and never failing contrast between the picture
and the furniture of existence in the East and West, as an element
Contrast of attraction, it is needless to enlarge. The most casual
between visitor to the true East is no stranger to its strange in-
the East . • -i i
and West tensity. Countries which have no ports or quays, no
railways or stations, no high-roads or streets (in our sense of the
term), no inns or hotels, no bedsteads or tables or chairs, but where
a traveller is sufficiently equipped so long as he is provided with
a saddle and some soap, are severed by a sufficiently wide gap
from our own to appeal to the most glutted thirst for novelty. Do
we ever escape from the fascination of a turban, or the mystery of
the shrouded apparitions that pass for women in the dusty alleys r*
How new to us is a landscape where there are no hedgerows or
timber, no meadows or fields; where in the brilliant atmosphere
minute objects can be distinguished for many miles, 1 where the
cities are not swathed in smoke, and the level roofs are not broken
by shafts or chimneys. How mute and overpowering the silence
that prevails over the lone expanse, so different from the innumer
able rural sounds that strike upon the ear at home. And how
grateful a climate where fogs and vapours never strangle, but
where the sun strikes with straight lance from the zenith.
In no Oriental country that I have seen is the chasm of ex
terior divergence between Oriental and European sceneiy moie
abrupt than in Persia. It is difficult to bring home to English
1 I have seen a small object, such as a single hut or building 1 , foi at least
twenty miles before reaching it; and every traveller in 1 ersia will confess to the
frequent exasperation of hope thus baffled and delayed.